Two jobs and two degrees – and still not making enough to cover the necessities. Mary Keck asks Ron Paul and other critics of the modern poor’s “luxuries”: is she undeserving of life’s small pleasures? Keck is a professor of English and Gender Studies as well as an associate editor of Southern Indiana Review. As a freelance journalist and fiction writer, she explores issues of class, labor, and gender in contemporary American life.

The literary thriller is the kind of book PI editor Heather Tirado Gilligan hungers after, can never find enough of, a narrative that pulls you in with the feeling of a yank behind the navel – touch it and you are in another place and perhaps another time. But this kind of book is more than a diversion, she argues in this intellectual defense of the plot.

Married women who decide to keep their own names don’t really push social buttons anymore. But there’s a limit to society’s tolerance for new conventions for family names, as sociologist Anne Nurse found. Anne is an associate professor of sociology at the College of Wooster in Ohio. When not thinking about her last name, she researches and writes about juvenile incarceration. Anne is the author of Locked Up, Locked Out: Young Men in the Juvenile Justice System.

Sara Mason is an assistant professor of sociology at Gainsville State College in Georgia. She spent a year working as a docent and conducting ethnographic research for her Ph.D. at a Georgia plantation.

The oral history of a British law breaker and Quaker, as transcribed by a fellow 1960s radical and biographer, Geoff Wall. Wall is a literary biographer, a translator, a freelance travel writer and an editor of The Cambridge Quarterly. His biography of Flaubert was shortlisted for the Whitbread Prize and for the James Tait Black Memorial Prize.

Public Intellectual editor Heather Tirado Gilligan talks gang policy with criminal justice expert Barry Krisberg. Krisberg is a Distinguished Senior Fellow and Lecturer in Residence at the Berkeley Center for Criminal Justice. He was president of the National Council on Crime and Delinquency from 1983-2009, and is an adviser to the California Cities Gang Prevention Network.