Union Strong

Eyal Press’s piece about the political shift among blue-collar workers reminded me of my own experience (“The Worker Revolt,” October 7th). I grew up in a union household, and, when both my parents got sick, we became poor. Despite this, with the help of Social Security, Medicare, and union benefits, we were lifted up by a strong social safety net. I received a good education and became a lawyer and then a judge. It helped that my youth and my early professional life occurred from the nineteen-forties to the eighties, a period when income inequality and wealth inequality were actually decreasing. Then came the Reagan revolution, and those inequalities began a steep rise, which continues to this day.

It amazes me how little the Republican Party in general, and Donald Trump in particular, has to do to earn the support of working-class Americans. It also amazes me how those same Americans take for granted the benefits gained for them by unions and Democrats.

James M. Cronin
Westport, Mass.

Embarrassment of Riches

Hannah Goldfield nailed the nuances of Southern California’s wellness culture (On and Off the Menu, October 7th). I live in SoCal and refer to this community, with its health-food zealotry and proximity to the film industry, cults, and pseudo-science, as the wellness industrial complex. What I find most disconcerting about the W.I.C. and its orbit of capitalist enterprises (see Goldfield’s description of a twenty-five-dollar bottle of water at Erewhon) is how utterly navel-gazing it is. We Californians seem unable to tear our attention away from the micro-fluctuations in our glycemic index after a keto smoothie, despite everything that is going on in the world.

Californian eaters might be better represented by the late Pulitzer Prize-winning Los Angeles Times columnist Jonathan Gold; the 2015 film made about him, “City of Gold,” captures a rebel humanist food writer showing that L.A. is a democratic place made up of diverse diners, and that food can be a matter of community, not just of ego.

Olivia Joffrey
Santa Barbara, Calif.

Reading With Ved

I was interested to learn from Sage Mehta’s essay about her father, the New Yorker writer Ved Mehta, that I’m a member of a group I didn’t even know existed: the Vedettes (“The Sighted World,” October 14th). Living in New York City in my twenties and trying to scrape together rent, I answered an ad in Craigslist that intrigued me: an unnamed New Yorker writer needed an amanuensis. The mysterious word alone was enough to make me read on. After showing up at an Upper East Side apartment, I was hired instead as one of Ved’s readers, and soon spent many a weekend morning reading to him. I remember how he induced me to read “faster, faster!” and how I came to enjoy the challenge of keeping his desired speed—that is, until one day when I arrived still stoned from the night before and felt as if I were hurtling off some kind of word cliff.

I found Ved to be bold, confident, amiably teasing, and generous. A few sessions in, he asked if I was a writer, and offered to read a short story I’d written. He read it, and by way of feedback he said simply: Keep writing. It was the best advice about writing I have ever gotten.

Jackie Delamatre
Providence, R.I.

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