Urbana, Ohio, is a small city of 11,000, where nearly three out of four voters went for Donald Trump in the 2020 presidential election. The journalist Beth Macy, who in her previous books chronicled the widening fissures in American society by examining the opioid crisis and the aftereffects of globalization, grew up there. In Paper Girl, she returns to Urbana'a place beset by economic decline, dwindling public resources, failing schools, and the disappearance of local journalism. These descriptions might feel familiar, like an update of J. D. Vance's Hillbilly Elegy. Vance, as it turns out, grew up just an hour down the road. But unlike Vance, who blamed much of his hometown's misfortune on its residents, Macy approaches the Urbana of 2023 with an open mind. She wants to understand what happened. Her focus is less on the reason for the decline than on the question of why people'even close family members'stopped talking with one another. How is it that Americans with disagreements are unable even to find the language to converse' With that in mind, Macy seeks to do something seemingly simple but actually profound: talk with people she knows, even if they seem to live in a different reality, and try to find a common humanity....

The world economy is like a supercomputer that churns through trillions of calculations of prices and quantities, and spits out information on incomes, wealth, profits, and jobs. This is effectively how capitalism works'as a highly efficient information-processing system. To do that job, like any computer, capitalism runs on both hardware and software. The hardware is the markets, institutions, and regulatory regimes that make up the economy. The software is the governing economic ideas of the day'in essence, what society has decided the economy is for. Most of the time, the computer works quite well. But now and then, it crashes. Usually when that happens, the world economy just needs a software update'new ideas to address new problems. But sometimes it needs a major hardware modification as well. We are in one of those Control-Alt-Delete moments. Against the background of tariff wars, market angst about U.S. debt, tumbling consumer confidence, and a weakening dollar watched over by a heedless administration, globalization's American-led era of free trade and open societies is coming to a close....

When President Donald Trump won a second term, the question wasn't whether his economic policy would be different from the first-term version, but how. Two factions have vied to steer the administration's agenda: Conservative populists came with a plan to roll back globalization and empower the working class. And the tech right brought a vision of an accelerated future driven by innovation and disruption. Vice President J. D. Vance announced in March that 'as a proud member of both tribes,' he believed that 'this idea that tech-forward people and the populists are somehow inevitably going to come to loggerheads is wrong.' Trump would blend the two visions into a new synthesis that would simultaneously lift up his downscale voting base and unleash technological progress. Three months later, the product that has emerged is not a better iteration of the original Trumponomics, which consisted largely of conventional Republican policy, but a worse one, much worse. It has managed, amazingly, to abandon the two tribes' most attractive proposals while retaining the least-appealing elements of each. It discards the futuristic ambition of the tech right while preserving its social Darwinism. It leans into the closed-off nostalgia of the populist right while ignoring populists' impulse to help workers....

In 1989, New York City opened a new jail. But not on dry land. The city leased a barge, then called the 'Bibby Resolution,' which had been topped with five stories of containers made into housing, and anchored it in the East River. For five years, the vessel lodged inmates. A floating detention center is a curiosity. But then, the entire history of this barge is curious. Built in 1979 in Sweden, it housed British troops during the Falkland Islands war with Argentina, became worker housing for Volkswagen employees in West Germany, got sent to New York, also became a detention center off the coast of England, then finally was deployed as oil worker housing off the coast of Nigeria. The barge has had nine names, several owners, and flown the flags of five countries. In this one vessel, then, we can see many currents: globalization, the transience of economic activity, and the hazy world of transactions many analysts and observers call 'the offshore,' the lightly regulated sphere of economic activity that encourages short-term actions....