Newt's WorldRob Henderson, author of Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class, discusses his life journey from being born to a drug-addicted mother and never knowing his father, to being shuffled between seven foster homes, and finally being adopted into a loving family. Despite the stability of his adoptive family, Henderson faced challenges such as divorce, poverty, and violence during his adolescence. At 17, he joined the U.S. Air Force and later pursued his undergraduate education at Yale and a PhD from Cambridge. Henderson argues that stability at home is more important than external accomplishments and highlights the social disparities that exist in society. He also discusses the importance of role models and the impact of cultural beliefs on the lower classes.
On this episode of the news World. In his raw coming of age memoir, Rob Henderson describes how he was born to a drug addicted mother and a father he never met. He shuttled between seven different foster homes in Los Angeles. When he was adopted into a loving family, he hoped that life would finally be stable and safe. Divorce, tragedy, poverty, and violence marked his adolescent and teen years, and he joined the US Air Force at the age of seventeen as soon as he completed high school. He then went on to get his undergraduate education from Yale and a PhD from Cambridge. He argues that stability at home is more important than external accomplishments, and illustrates the ways the most privileged among this benefit from a set of social standards that actively harm the most vulnerable. Here to discuss his new book, Troubled, a memoir of foster care, family and social class I'm really pleased to welcome my guest, Rob Henderson. Rob, welcome, and thank you for joining me on Newts Group.
Thank you, speaker. It's great to be here.
You know. It's a remarkable story in the sense that we're going to explore to have gone through what you did as a child and then end up at Yale and Cambridge is truly a remarkable transition. Can we start, though, by having you describe your earliest memories. As I understand it, you entered the foster care system in Los Angeles at the age of three.
That's correct. I was born in Los Angeles. As you mentioned, my mother was heavily addicted to drugs. I had never known my father, and so my mother and I initially we were homeless for a time. Shortly after I was born. We lived in a car. We finally settled into this slum apartment in Westlake, this rundown part of Los Angeles, and my mother was neglectful.
She would indulge in her drug habit.
Eventually some neighbors overheard a small child in this apartment screaming for help.
It was me.
She would tie me to a chair with a bathrobe belt while she would get high. I have this thick file of documents from the social workers who were responsible.
For my case.
My mother would have visitors coming in and out of the apartment at all hours of the day and night. She was unable to care for me. She was not in the right condition, and so I was placed into foster care at the age of three and spent the next five years or so in seven different foster homes all around Los Angeles, and I describe these experiences.
When you live in seven different foster home Were they about the same length at time or were some really short some really long?
So I was really young.
I entered the system when I was three and left just before my eighth birthday, and so the recollections are fuzzy. I mean, it's interesting how time can play tricks on your memory, because now I mentioned that document, the files that I have that actually have the dates of how long I.
Was in each specific home. And it's funny.
I used to think that I only lived in four different homes in total. That was my memory, and I write about those experiences in the book.
But it actually turns out I lived.
In seven homes, and some of those placements were essentially never encoded in my memory, probably because they were too stressful or upsetting. Some of them I was only in for about three weeks, less than a month. Some of these placements. There was one home, the final home I stayed in, I was there for nearly a year. That's the home that I have the strongest and most vivid memories, and I describe that length in the book, But it varies. It depends on the foster parents, it depends on the placements, it depends on how overburdened the system happens to be at any given moment. And so some of these homes I lived in, they had upwards of eight to ten kids living in them. There was one home I lived in where there were four kids to a room. It was two bunk beds, so two kids in each the top bunk and then two kids on the bottom bunks, and it was.
Just a lot of sort of filth and squalor.
And of course, even if you have two parents with the best of intentions, when you have ten kids living in a home and you have no idea how long each one of those kids are going to remain with you, there's only so much attention you can give to any individual child.
And so there was just a lot of neglect. A lot of us would go unnoticed in the home.
And there was one home I lived in where I was the only foster kid, and I did get a bit more attention, but this foster mother had her own agenda, and I describe in the book how she would typically take one young foster boy at any given time and essentially use this child as a kind of person that could be a laborer around the house. I would break the leaves and clean the gutters. A period where she had a pet bird, this giant parrot that I had to feed on a daily basis. And I remember as I was about to exit this home right before I was adopted, I overheard her adult daughter on the phone speaking with someone saying, Oh, yeah, she's about to have another young boy show up. You know, Yeah, this kid, Robert's about to leave. We got another boy on the way, And that was her kind of agenda.
It's fascinating to me you say that the one word that best described your personal feeling during this early childhood period of foster care is the word dread. I mean, dread's a really strong word. What did you mean by that? And then what different ways did you feel dread?
Yes, Well, early on, the dread came because I knew that any placement that I was in in the foster system was not permanent, and so there was this feeling of dread of oh, is this the day that I'm going to be taken to another home.
Is this the day that I have to start class at a new school.
Is this the day that my foster brother, who I've grown attached to and who I like, is going to be taken from me and play somewhere else. That's something that a lot of people don't think about with the foster system, that yes, there's a lot of instability for you as an individual as a kid in these homes, but there's also this other added instability where you know, naturally, if you place a bunch of children together, some of them are going to become friends. But then you as an individual will never know if one of your foster siblings is going to be taken from you and maybe returned to their family of origin or maybe placed into a different foster home.
And so that was another source of dread for me. And you know, I'd see.
An unfamiliar car parked outside and I would think, oh, this is you know, one of those social workers is going to take my sibling, or you know, maybe someone's coming to take me away. Or it was just a lot of this feeling of enduring anxiety. And initially the feeling would be very sharp and acute, but then gradually it became blunted and pervasive, ever present, that I would always feel this underlying uneasiness no.
Matter where I was, and that burns.
A lot of physiological and inner resources as a young child to feel that constantly.
Even as an adult.
I mean, you know, a lot of adults have that sort of generalized anxiety, that feeling of nervousness in daily situations, But as a kid, it's that much more potent, and it was difficult for me to manage those feelings. And I describe in the book how I would act out and find ways to manage that affect those feelings by getting into mischief, thrill seeking, adrenaline seeking fighting, ways to get outside of myself and seek misadventures with my friends, and find ways to distract myself from the turmoil that I was mired in.
Do you think that an orphanage system would be more stable than the foster cares?
Well, So, I've read a little bit about the history of foster care and orphanages and so forth, and foster homes. My understanding is that they initially arose in reaction to the orphanage system, that they were supposed to be a superior way to care for children. I mean orphanages. Today there are sort of modern group homes full of squalor. There are very few people who monitor what's going on with the children in adolescents of these kinds of homes, and at least with foster homes, the idea being that you have a foster mother and a foster father and you have something resembling a home and a family unit, whereas orphanages are a completely different sort of.
Category of child rearing.
And my understanding is at least for measurable outcomes things like intelligence, educational aptitude, those kinds of things that kids who go through the foster system don't have quite as severe detrimental outcomes as kids from orphanages.
So I would have to.
Say, at least with that, you know, with respect to those kinds of measurable outcomes, foster homes are probably better. But I do highlight in the book that they are far from optimal, and that I mean, the ideal situation for any child is to be with two parents in a stable home from birth to age eighteen till adulthood and not live the kind of life where you're constantly changing homes all the time. That's something else that I highlight in the book as well is that the foster system is imperfect. One possible way to improve it would be to extend placements and not move the child around every several months or every several weeks, such that the child would feel such extreme dread the way that I did.
When you dealt with the various foster parents who dealt with how would you characterize them as a.
Group, Well, it's hard to characterize as a group. Every family was a little different. Broadly, there seemed to be maybe two or three different categories. I mean, I would say most foster parents they do the best they can. They start out with the best of intentions. But foster parents are humans like anyone else. And so when you initially start caring for a child and you take on this role, you do want to invest in each child and care for them the best you can. But then you know you can become jaded and a bit calloused because you know this kid is not going to stay with you for very long, and so there's only so much you're willing to invest, in part because you want to protect yourself. If you become very attached to a small child and you fully emotionally commit to that child, you know, and they're taken from.
You a month later or six months later.
You know, eventually, after enough of those experiences, you yourself are going to become a bit more distant in order to prevent that feeling of separation and loss.
But I think most parents are the best they can.
There are other parents, of course, who have more kind of sinister agendas where they would like to.
Just profit off of each child.
So each child, at least in California where I grew up, each child comes with a certain stipend.
The parents receive a certain amount of money.
And so if you can supply care for ten children and you receive a certain amount of money for each of those two, you can, and if you don't channel those resources properly to those children, you can make a profit. You know, one of the homes I lived in, you know, all of my clothes were hand me downs from older foster siblings.
Never had any toys.
It was a very kind of austere environment, and this foster family just made sure that it could pocket as much of the profits as they could. So those families do exist, but I would say sort of buy and large. They do the best they can, but the system itself is imperfect.
So how old were you when you left the foster care system and finally got adopted.
I was seven, It was just before my eighth birthday. And this was when I was living in that home. In the book, I described my experiences with my foster mother there, Missus Martinez, in Los Angeles. It was a unique experience for me because I remember Missus Martinez. She was a very kind of cold woman. She and I would never do things together. She'd never read to me, we wouldn't watch television together, anything like that. But one day she pulled out this video cassette and said, hey, I'm going to show you something. And she showed me this videotape of this family and I asked her, well, who is this and she said, this is the Henderson family and they want to adopt you, and so on and so forth. And this was the first time I'd ever seen a video of a family before I went to live with them. She explained to me that this is going to be your mother and father. I met with them, and remember I called the woman who became my adoptive mother. I called her Missus Henderson, and she said, oh, honey, if you want you can just call me mom. And that was kind of when I knew that this was a different kind of family and that, you know, I was truly sort of exiting the foster system.
You're being adopted, you're moving into a family. But then, as I understand it, after about a year, that breaks up.
That's right.
So from La my adoptive family, it was a mother, father, and their biological daughter who became my adoptive sister, and we settled into this working class, kind of blue collar town in northern California called Red Bluff, really run down area. It was located in one of the poorest counties in the state, and my adoptive father was a truck driver, my adoptive mother was an assistant social worker, very kind of working class, lower middle class, and the town was just a lot of single parents, divorced parents, children being raised by grandmothers or aunts or people other than their mother and father because families were just breaking down.
And we had a temporarily intact family.
But my adoptive parents divorced, and as a consequence, my adoptive father he was very angry at my adoptive mother for leaving him, and he retaliated by severing ties with me. He stopped communicating with me as a way to get back at her, And this was really difficult for me. After never knowing my birth father living in all of the foster homes, and then losing contact with this man who I thought would be my father, this was just a really upsetting experience. My adoptive mother and I we settled into this gloomy duplex in town, and for a while she raised me as a single mom, and by this point she was working full time and there just wasn't a lot of time for her to sort of monitor what I was up to. I was nine years old by this point, and I started to find other kids in the neighborhood, also from similarly broken families, and had a bunch of nine ten year old boys going around smoking cigarettes and picking fights and vandalizing buildings and doing the kinds of things that mischievous little boys do when there's not a lot of oversight and there's no father figure at home.
You go through that process. But apparently you did well enough in high school despite all this that you make the decision to join the Air Force at seventeen years of age. How did that happen?
Why?
Did you decide that you rode out was through the air Force?
Yeah, well, I didn't know for sure it was the right decision, but I knew that the path I was on was definitely the wrong one, you know. I describe in Troubled how my academic performance and focus would wax and wane depending on how stable my home life was. So in the foster homes, my grades were poor. I was a very unfocused student. After I was adopted and thinks stabilized, I became better and my grades improved. And then after the divorce, my grades dropped again. And there were a lot of reversals in my life that I described in this book. And this kind of instability and unpredictability is characteristic now of a lot of neighborhoods in the US, a lot of families in the US. And I described some of the situations of my friends in the book as well. And so by the time I graduated high school, there were so many ups and downs.
I barely graduated.
I had a two point two GPA C minus average, barely passed my classes. My high school transcript wouldn't have impressed any colleges, that's for sure. And so I knew the military was a strong an appealing possibility for me. And it's interesting the way that happened was I spoke with one of my high school teachers. It was a male teacher actually, and this is one reason why it may be good to get more men involved in education professions. So male teacher who took an interest in me. He noticed that I was a smart kid. I was unfocused. I wouldn't do my homework, but he and I would talk after class. We just kind of talk about sports or you know, about whatever was on our minds. And he would ask me, you know, what are your plans after you graduate? And I told him I didn't know. He showed me a picture on his computer of himself in an Air Force uniform and said, hey, you know, this is what I did before I started teaching. Maybe an option for you. And I thought, hey, that looks pretty cool. And then I lived with my friend and his father my senior year of high school. I actually moved out of home when I was sixteen, moved in with them, and my friend's father was also in the Air Force. So it was just a coincidence that it happened to be that branch and between those conversations, it seemed like the way to go was the Air Force.
So once you signed up and went to basic, how did being in the Air Force change your life and change your attitudes?
Well, I joined when I was really young. I was still maturing.
I mentioned I was seventeen, I think, and my adoptive mother actually had to sign a permission slip essentially for me to go because I was still legally a child, and I convinced her to let me go even though I was still underage and at that age my habits hadn't fully cemented, my outlook hadn't fully developed, and so being in the military. I was in for eight years from seventeen to twenty five. I signed up for four years, re enlisted for four more, and I needed all eight of those years to get my head on straight after living in the homes and all of the instability and squalor that I was in the structure of the military was extremely helpful. It taught me discipline, camaraderie, mentorship, being around especially older male figures who had my best interest in mind and who I knew had my best interest in mind. And it wasn't just you know, short term fleeting interaction.
So suddenly you have a stability where it'd had instability.
That's correct.
Yeah, it was such a strong contrast from the way that I grew up. I mean, it's interesting, right, I think a lot of people they think the military is unstable because the purpose is defense and combat operations and all those kinds of things, and it's a very high ops tempo. Especially when I was in from twenty seven to twenty fifteen, we were still fighting two wars and there was a lot going on then.
And yet the military itself.
Has created this apparatus, this structure of predictability each unit. Everything is streamlined and so you know who to talk to, who to communicate with. Everything is relatively seamless. And that was really helpful for me. And so by the time I was in my early mid twenties, I felt that I was mature enough. You know, the military had equipped me with the ability to be a sort of self sufficient adult the way that I wasn't when I was seventeen.
I'm fascinated though, because you indicate that the Sopranos had a big impact.
And you know, to explain that, Yeah, well, so I watched.
A lot of TV when I was a kid and grew up in the late nineties early two thousands, and of course The Sopranos, that's when it was on the air. I didn't really get to see it until later as an adult, downloaded on my computer and watched episodes when I was deployed, you know, whenever I was off duty or had some spare time. I'd watched an episode here and there and realized that even for this crime family, Tony Soprano and his wife Carmela, they were involved in organized crime, but they wanted their kids to succeed. They wanted their kids to reach the American dream, and so they did everything they could to set their daughter, Meadow Soprano, up for success. There's a scene where Carmelo Soprano, you know, not so subtly threatens a neighbor in order to get a letter of recommendation for Georgetown for her daughter. There's a scene where Tony cuts a check to Columbia, and eventually they do secure their daughter's seat at university. You know, I'm watching this and I'm thinking, like you know, this is a prime family. They're making money, but there was something else going on here where college was as an essential ingredient to achieve success, to reach middle class or above. And you know, I'm sitting there, barely graduated high school, in the middle of a military enlistment, and I'm thinking, maybe college is the way to go. And It's funny how television can put these ideas in your mind, and in this sense in a positive way.
Right, it planted the idea that college was something that was important.
You obviously must be very bright because given all the background you've described, when you decide to go to college, you end up at Yale. I mean, how does that happen?
Well, sometimes I still asked myself that it was a roundabout and lengthy path to get there. About a year out from my enlistment, I attended this program called the Warrior Scholar Project. It was started by two students at Yale. One of them was an ROTC and essentially they created this boot camp for veterans and they called it an academic food camp, a two week program. It was just a two week workshop where they did invite veterans from the branches of the military and come in and you know, set them up for two weeks and teach them how to write an essay, walk them through what the admissions process is like, kind of equipping them with knowledge that a lot of continuing generation students know. If you have one or two parents who graduated from college, a lot of this is second nature to you. You know what the common app is, you know how to get a letter of recommendation, you know what a personal statement is. But for a lot of guys in the military, a lot of people who didn't have parents who went to college, useful to know.
How the whole process works.
And so after those two weeks, I walked away thinking, Okay, maybe I have a chance, Maybe I can get into.
A good school. And those two guys who started this.
Program, they were at Yale, and you know, I thought, okay, maybe you know that's a good school and applied there, and I remember it during the interview. Somehow I got an interview. One reason why was because I took the SAT and did very well on it. And this is why I think standardized testing is so important, because my grades were very unimpressive. I'd taken some night classes at a community college while I was enlisted, but nothing special.
But I took the SAT and did well, and during the.
Interview process for Yale, you know, I remember the admissions officer saying, you know, I'm looking at your high school grades, and this is very unlike what we typically see for an applicant for Yale.
So can you walk us through what happened here?
And I explained my very tumultuous life and how it did suppress I think a lot of my academic potential that I think was illuminated more accurately in my test score. And I explained I was a little bit older, a bit more disciplined, and I had on my shoulders the way that I didn't when I was a teenager, and somehow they took a chance on me and let me in, and for a period of time at Yale it was a really sort of magical experience. I couldn't believe that they had sent me that acceptance letter.
In one of your classes, you learned that eighteen out of the twenty students were raised by both of their birth parents. Compared to your experience, I mean, how disorienting did you find that to be?
It was extremely disorienting.
So I had some sense that Yale was going to be different than the places that I had known before in the military and the foster homes, and so on, it's a one known university. I knew there were going to be students from more well off backgrounds economically speaking, but I wasn't prepared for the culture shock with regard to differences in families in opinions and attitudes and outlooks. And yeah, I discovered this in class that eighteen out of the twenty students.
It was this anonymous poll that a professor.
Administered and put up the anonymized results on this PowerPoint, and ninety percent of the students in.
This class were raised by both of their birth parents.
Later on, I looked into the statistics of Ivy League students and that's roughly what it is. Ninety percent of students raised by two of their birth parents married intact families. And then I saw those results and I thought back to my own experiences in Red Bluff, California, where I had five close friends in high school. None of the six of us were raised by two parents. There was me raised in foster homes. I had friends raised by single moms. I had a friend raised by a single dad, another friend raised by his grandmother because his mom was on drugs and his dad was in prison. And that is a very sort of common picture of what working class and poor areas of the country look like now, whereas more and more in the sort of upper and upper middle class enclaves people who are bound for places like Yale, families look the same as they've always looked. I cited a statistic in the book from this excellent resource, this book called Coming Apart by Charles Murray, where he documents that in nineteen sixty, ninety five percent of children in the US were raised by both of their birth parents, regardless of social class, and by two thousand and five for the upper class, for people with college educated parents comfortable white collar occupations and went from ninety five percent in nineteen sixty to eighty five percent by two thousand and five, so a slight drop, but still the vast majority raised by both parents. But for the working class and blue collar people who didn't go to college and have more blue collar occupations, it went from ninety five percent in nineteen sixty to thirty percent by two thousand and five. And that statistic perfectly mirrors my own experiences that families looked very different.
It wasn't just an income issue.
I noticed, you know, people think, oh, you know, you just got to be rich and you know, get good grades to go to a place like Yale. But in those later chapters of the book, I say that it's not a coincidence that if you're raised by both parents. A lot of these kids who go to these kinds of schools, they have parents who are married, who put the children's priorities and interests and education first. They're on the college track, and it takes more than just an income to ensure that that happens.
What do you think happened? How did we suddenly go off a cliff?
Well, you know, I know there's a popular line, especially more so on the political left, that this is an income issue or poverty issue, inequality. But the reason why I think that statistic that I cited earlier was so important is because there were poor people in nineteen sixty. I mean, arguably they were even poorer than the poor.
Now.
In nineteen sixty, if you were poor, you might have to go a few days without food.
But now, if you're poor.
You'll get some assistance, You'll get some government assistance, and you won't necessarily go hungry for several days. I mean, it happens, but it's much more rare now than it was sixty years ago, and so it's not a matter just of poverty.
I think there's also a values component here.
There's a cultural element absence of role models, something as simple as who the people around you are and the behavior that they exhibit. We can talk about the luxury beliefs idea that I coined, ideas and opinions that confer status on the upper class while inflicting costs on the lower classes. A core feature of a luxury belief is that the believer is sheltered from the consequences of his or her belief.
One way this manifests.
Is a lot of upper middle class people, people who graduate from places like Yale, Ivy League students and so on.
They will say that families.
Unimportant, or that it's really just an income issue and so on. But they have gone their whole lives seeing married parents and people make relationships work, and people in committed marriages, because that is the norm in upper middle class neighborhoods. So even if they turn on the television or open a magazine or watch a music video and they see people promoting open marriages or polyamory or supporting divorce or all of these kinds of things that can undermine families. They themselves have gone their whole lives exposed to sort of bourgeois conventional marital norms. But now, if you think about someone like me or someone like my friends and the way that we grew up, not only did we not get those role models in our personal lives, we were raised by single parents, foster parents, divorced parents all around us. We never really saw what a functional, long term, committed marriage looks like. And then we turn on the television, and then we listen to music and the pop cultural around us, and there's just no source of role model around us to show us how to be in a marriage. And I think that's a huge part of it too. You know, where social creatures, we imitate those around us, and naturally, if you grow up without it, it's going to carry on forward in our own relationships. And I talk in the book about how you know, now, the guys I grew up with, you know, some of them have children with multiple women and they don't speak to any of them.
And that's how they grew up.
They grew up never knowing their fathers, and now they're raising kids who don't know them, and the cycle can carry forward, and it's not just an economic issue.
I mean, doesn't that sort of describe a culture that's disintegrating.
Yeah, I think so, and it's subsidized to some extent.
I mean, you know, again, like very few people in these neighborhoods are truly starving to death. None of them are impoverished and destitute in that kind of sense. But there is a lot of emotional poverty, a lot of spiritual poverty, kind of squalor of people making self defeating decisions and not seeking ways to improve their situations. Yeah, you can see this kind of atomization, this disintegration, and more and more, you just see people who are comfortable isolating themselves from all of it. They're blinded to it because they are in safe areas, gated communities.
Everyone they've ever known is just like them.
I just had this conversation with the mutual acquaintance of a friend of mine and he was telling me. He was like, you know, I read that the national divorce rate is forty percent. You know, it used to be fifty percent. It's actually dropped somewhat to forty percent. And he was telling me, He's like, you know, I spoke with five of my friends, and you know, all of them have college degrees, most of them postgraduate degrees. And he said, you know, if the national divorce rate is forty percent, how come none of us are divorced. And I was explaining to him that there's a huge class disparity educational disparity here where most of the divorce is concentrated among people who don't have degrees. Most single parenthood is concentrated among people who are working class. And so you see these aggregate snapshot statistics, so forty percent or forty four percent of children are raised out of wedlock in the country, and so on and so forth. But if you look just at people with bachelor's degrees out of WEDLOFE birth rates are something like nine percent. It's very rare to meet someone like that.
You've mentioned at one point one of the most important studies of recent time, which is Scott Rasmussen looking at the one percent elite people who are from the elite universities, got an actual graduate degree, didn't just go to graduate school, but got the degree, earned one hundred and fifty thousand, and actually live in big cities. And he asserts, based on his polling that those folks who run the networks, they run the New York Times, they run judge ships, they run the bureaucracies, they are radically different from the rest of us. I mean, does that fit your experience?
Yes, I mean I thought those results from Rasmus and were spot on. None of it was necessarily surprising, and yet somehow it was. I mean, just the magnitude of the difference was shocking. If I recall correctly, something on the order of eighty percent of this rarefied one percent of society, eighty percent of this one percent say that meat and electricity should be strictly rationed to battle climate change. And that's all well and good for them. I mean, if those were implementing into policy, they're not going to be short of protein or electricity.
There were results in.
There about how the majority of the elites say the government provides too much freedom to US citizens. He also collected data from a representative sample of ordinary Americans, and the vast majority of Americans say freedom is a good thing. We want freedom, it's something that we enjoy. It's our right as Americans. But the elites say, the masses, the plebeians, they have too much freedom. And it should be more restricted, electricity should be tightly controlled everything.
And I think in their minds, they just believe.
Themselves to be these special shepherds who believe that they know better than the rest of us. They're rich and they're educated, and they know better, and they're not really thinking about the downstream consequences of what happens when these misguided policies are implemented to defund the police movement. In the book, I cite data from Yugov which found that when this representative survey broke down the results by income category, the richest Americans were the most in favor of defunding the police, and the poorest Americans were the least in favor. And that was something that was implemented into policy in certain cities, and it cultivated an attitude of suspicion and hostility around law enforcement. And as a result, murder and homicides and violent crime spiked across the country. And it wasn't the one percent that were being targeted and victimized by the crime. These were people who were poor, people who live in working class areas, people who have to commute on a day to day basis and work in dangerous parts of the city.
Maybe they work a.
Graveyard shift and they're the ones who are being targeted. But it makes the one percent look good to say, oh, we need a battle climate change and defund the police.
The work you're doing in the way you're thinking. You have now developed a weekly newsletter. If people sign up for your newsletter, what are they getting well?
I send out two to three posts per week on Substack, which is this new online newsletter platform. It's been out for a few years, but over the last couple of years it's really risen in prominence.
Most of my essays and posts are free.
These are things that I've been thinking about for a while, related to social class, cultural criticism analysis.
I do sort of movie and book reviews and things like that as well.
But you know, for someone like me, I received degrees from Yale and Cambridge, and there was a period where I thought I wanted to be a professor. But academia is gone off the rails, you know, many people are aware of what's happening in higher education right now. And then there was a period where I thought, well, maybe I'll become a columnist at some media outlet and I can sort of write about my interests, but journalism is also going in a negative direction as well, and so now I just decided to become an independent writer and write about these topics on my substack newsletter. And I'm really pleased with how things are going, and it gives me an opportunity to express some of my views and also to spotlight interesting research findings like the what we've been discussing from Rasmussen.
So people can go to Robkhanderson dot com and sign up for newsletter, and I understand you're already at something like fifty thousand subscribers.
I launched the newsletter when I was still in grad school at Cambridge a few years ago.
It was just a sort of a side project.
And yeah, it's grown to fifty thousand plus subscribers, and people seem to appreciate some of the thoughts and some of the things that I share that they wouldn't necessarily get when they open a publication from one of the legacy media outlets.
Listen, Robert, I want to thank you for joining me. Your new book, Troubled, a Memoir of foster care, family and social class, is a great contribution to helping us understand the profound influence of education and social class in this country. Troubled is available now on Amazon and in bookstores everywhere, and you can sign up to receive Rob's weekly newsletter at Robkhnderson dot com. And I want to thank you for taking the time to share with us.
Thank you, Spiger.
Thank you to my guest Rob Henderson. You can get a link to buy his book, Troubled, a memoir of foster care, family and social class on our show page at newtsworld dot com. News World is produced by Ginglish three sixty and iHeartMedia. Our executive producer is Guarnsey Sloan. Our researcher is Rachel Peterson. The artwork for the show was created by Steve Penley. Special thanks to the team at Gingrich three sixty. If you've been enjoying Newsworld, I hope you'll go to Apple Podcast and both rate us with five stars and give us a review so others can learn what it's all about. Right now, listeners of newts World can sign up for my three free weekly columns at ginglistree sixty dot com. Slash newsletter I'm new Land, which this is nutual
