Hibaq Mohamed demonstrating outside of Amazon's MSP1 facility in Shakopee, Minnesota. PHOTOGRAPH: JENN ACKERMAN
Meet the Immigrants
Who Took On Amazon
How a group of Somalis became leaders in the fight to change a tech behemoth.
JESSICA BRUDER 11.12.2019 06:00 AM
IT WAS 11 days before Christmas in 2018, and Amazon’s warehouse in Shakopee, Minnesota, was operating at full tilt. At the rear of the facility, waves of semi trucks backed up to a long row of loading docks, some disgorging crates of new merchandise and others filling up with outbound packages. Inside the warehouse, within dark, cyclone-fenced enclosures, thousands of shelf-toting robots performed a mute ballet, ferrying towers of merchandise from one place to another. And throughout the cavernous interior, yellow bins brimming with customers’ orders zipped along more than 10 miles of conveyor belts, which clattered with a thunderous din.
On Thanksgiving Day of 2010, Linda May sat alone in a trailer in New River, Arizona. At sixty, the silver-haired grandmother lacked electricity and running water. She couldn’t find work. Her unemployment benefits had run out, and her daughter’s family, with whom she had lived for many years while holding a series of low-wage jobs, had recently downsized to a smaller apartment. There wasn’t enough room to move back in with them.
‘Nomadland’ author Jessica Bruder’s best piece of writing advice didn’t come from a writer
Courtney Vinopal
CANVAS
March 30, 2021
Our March/April 2021 pick for Now Read This, the PBS NewsHour’s book club with The New York Times, is Jessica Bruder’s “Nomadland,” which chronicles the lives of older workers on the road. It served as inspiration for the Oscar-nominated film starring Frances McDormand, which was directed by Chloé Zhao. Become a member of the Now Read This book club by joining our Facebook group, or by signing up to our newsletter.
Journalist Jessica Bruder says she’s seen a lot of great writers’ advice over the years, but one trick that she particularly likes “wasn’t devised for writers.”
A Conversation with Jessica Bruder, Author of “Nomadland”
By Judith Freeman
April 23, 2021
THREE YEARS AGO, when Jessica Bruder, the author of the Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century, published her nonfiction account of the growing tribe of nomads roaming the American West, people who live in their vans or cars or RVs and work seasonal jobs to get by, she couldn’t have known that her book would end up as a movie, directed by Chloé Zhao and starring Frances McDormand, one that is not only sweeping up awards but has also been embraced by a great cross-section of viewers who are enthralled by its generous and moving portrait of humanity. Not that Bruder’s book didn’t get a lot of attention when it first came out: it ended up on half a dozen of the best book lists of 2017. At the time, Rebecca Solnit said of Nomadland, “People who thought the 2008 financial collapse was over a long time ago need to meet the people Jessica Bruder got to know in this scorching, beautifully written, vivid, disturbing (and occasionally wryly funny) book.”
Living in cars, working for Amazon: meet America's new nomads
Rising rents are leading Americans to live in cars and other vehicles, writes Jessica Bruder, the author of Nomadland
Jessica Bruder Saturday 2 December 2017
Millions of Americans are wrestling with the impossibility of a traditional middle-class existence. In homes across the country, kitchen tables are strewn with unpaid bills. Lights burn late into the night. The same calculations get performed again and again, through exhaustion and sometimes tears.