How did America cease to be the land of opportunity? LONGLISTED FOR THE PORCHLIGHT BUSINESS BOOK AWARD We take it for granted that good neighborhoods—with good schools and good housing—are only accessible to the wealthy. But in America, this wasn’t always the case. Though for most of world history, your prospects were tied to where you were born, Americans came up with a revolutionary idea: If you didn’t like your lot in life, you could find a better location and reinvent yourself there. Americans moved to new places with unprecedented frequency, and, for two hundred years, that remarkable mobility was the linchpin of American economic and social opportunity. In this illuminating debut, Yoni Appelbaum, historian and journalist for The Atlantic , shows us that this idea has been under attack since reformers first developed zoning laws to ghettoize Chinese Americans in nineteenth-century Modesto, California. The century of legal segregation that ensued—from the zoning laws enacted to force Jewish workers back into New York’s Lower East Side to the private-sector discrimination and racist public policy that trapped Black families in Flint, Michigan to Jane Jacobs’ efforts to protect her vision of the West Village—has raised housing prices, deepened political divides, emboldened bigots, and trapped generations of people in poverty. Appelbaum shows us that these problems have a common explanation: people can’t move as readily as they used to. They are, in a word, stuck. Cutting through more than a century of mythmaking, Stuck tells a vivid, surprising story of the people and ideas that caused our economic and social sclerosis and lays out common-sense ways to get Americans moving again.

Recommended on 1 episode:

What We Got Right — and Wrong — in ‘Abundance’

“Abundance” came out a little over a year ago. It’s been exciting — and a little disorienting — seeing how it’s rippled out into the world, and the ways it’s been embraced and debated and critiqued. So I wanted to take a moment to talk through what’s really happened in the last year – with Derek Thompson, my “Abundance” co-author, and Marc Dunkelman, whose book “Why Nothing Works” came out around the same time, and circles the same ideas. What has the abundance movement actually achieved in the last year? Where has it fallen short? And what have the three of us learned from our critics?

Books recommended:

• 📕  Mere Christianity by C. S. Lewis, Kathleen Norris
• 📘  The Secret History (Vintage Contemporaries) by Donna Tartt
• 📗  Stuck: How the Privileged and the Propertied Broke the Engine of American Opportunity by Yoni Appelbaum
• 📙  Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water, Revised Edition by Marc Reisner

Derek Thompson , Marc Dunkelman April 28, 2026 4 books recommended

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