Bad with Money by Gaby Dunn
I am a huge fan of Gaby Dunn’s podcast, Bad with Money. I’ve also been following Dunn’s work since, um, her 100 Interviews project, which she did in 2010-2011 and appears to be removed from the internet, which makes me feel old. Bad with Money was a book I was eager to read, and it was a quick, entertaining read. Much of the book covers the same kind of topics covered in the podcast: how individuals are bad with money, how they can get better with money, and how the whole system causes all of us to be in pretty terrible positions with money, especially for people with marginalized identities. Bad with Money is not a book that is about cutting out your daily latte to save ten grand a year, and it’s also not a book about making the right investment moves and becoming a millionaire. It’s very human personal finance.
The Teacher Wars
This book was really dense, to be honest. The first third of the book could be trimmed down considerably, and I was sort of weirded out by how much TFA was mentioned throughout the book. Everything seemed, somehow, to connect to TFA, which was weird for a book that wasn’t supposed to be about TFA. It was interesting to learn more about the different roles that politics have played in teaching over time, and the weird ways that the was society has shaped the role of teachers has changed over time.