The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity is one of those books that demands constant pauses for underlining and (in my case) exclamation points in the margins. There are so many lessons to draw from the book, but one provocative thread is around our assumption about how much work our ancestors performed.

"Americans have a kind of insane relationship with time, in which we are in a sense being used by time and trapped by it."

There are two big areas of need in our recovery efforts: subsidized employment and opportunities to serve.

Martha Ross at the Brookings Institution and I proposed a federal Education and Employment Promise for the 2020s, a set of policies that would articulate a shared national vision for how young people find their way in today’s America.