A timely work of reportage & a damning indictment of the private equity industry told through the stories of four American workers
About this Event
**Join us for an exciting night with Megan Greenwell
, as she discusses her new book,
Bad Company
,
with The Ringer's Joel Anderson
This in-person event will be held at Solid State Books on H St. NE. Don't miss out!
*Private equity runs our country, yet few Americans have any idea how ingrained it is in their lives.*
Private equity controls our hospitals, daycare centers, supermarket chains, voting machine manufacturers, local newspapers, nursing home operators, fertility clinics, and prisons. The industry even manages highways, municipal water systems, fire departments, emergency medical services, and owns a growing swath of commercial and residential real estate.
Private equity executives, meanwhile, are not only among the wealthiest people in American society, but have grown to become modern-day barons with outsized influence on our politics and legislation. CEOs of firms like Blackstone, Carlyle, KKR, and Apollo are rewarded with seats in the Senate and on the boards of the country’s most august institutions; meanwhile, entire communities are hollowed out as a result of their buyouts. Workers lose their jobs. Communities lose their institutions. Only private equity wins.
Acclaimed journalist Megan Greenwell’s
Bad Company
unearths the hidden story of private equity by examining the lives of four American workers that were devastated as private equity upended their employers and communities: a Toys R Us floor supervisor, a rural doctor, a local newspaper journalist, and an affordable housing organizer. Taken together, their individual experiences also pull back the curtain on a much larger project: how private equity reshaped the American economy to serve its own interests, creating a new class of billionaires while stripping ordinary people of their livelihoods, their health care, their homes, and their sense of security.
In the tradition of deeply human reportage like Matthew Desmond’s
Evicted
, Megan Greenwell pulls back the curtain on shadowy multibillion dollar private equity firms, telling a larger story about how private equity is reshaping the economy, disrupting communities, and hollowing out the very idea of the American dream itself. Timely and masterfully told,
Bad Company
is a forceful rebuke of America’s most consequential, yet least understood economic forces.
*Megan
Greenwell*
is a journalist who has written or edited for publications including
The Washington Post
,
The New York Times
,
New York
Magazine,
WIRED
, and ESPN. She is also the deputy director of the Princeton Summer Journalism Program, a workshop and college access initiative for students from low-income backgrounds. A California native, she lives in Brooklyn with her husband and their pug.
*Joel Anderson*
is a senior staff writer at The Ringer and a cohost of ‘The Press Box.’ He most recently worked at Slate, where he was host of Seasons 3, 6, and 8 of the award-winning ‘Slow Burn’ narrative podcast series. He’s also worked at ESPN and BuzzFeed News, among several other outlets. He lives with his family in Silver Spring.
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