American dream

The Norman Rockwell Museum has a new exhibition exploring the business and cultural context of Rockwell’s art. "Norman Rockwell: The Business of Illustrating the American Dream" examines how Rockwell navigated relationships with publishers, advertising clients, and other business entities to create work that shaped and reflected American culture and influenced notions of the American Dream.

Alissa Quart is the executive director of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project. Her new book is "Bootstrapped: Liberating Ourselves from the American Dream." The book is an unsparing, incisive, yet ultimately hopeful look at how we can shed the American obsession with self-reliance that has made us less healthy, less secure, and less fulfilled.

In the summer of 2020, as America underwent a reckoning with racism that was centuries in the making, Tiffanie Drayton wrote a provocative, personal, and widely shared New York Times essay called “I’m A Black American. I Had to Get Out.” In it, she reflects on her choice to leave the U.S. to return to her home island of Tobago, right before the pandemic and the murder of George Floyd—and how she felt grieving and raging for Black Americans from across an ocean. Now, in her powerful new memoir, "Black American Refugee: Escaping the Narcissism of the American Dream" (Viking), Drayton is telling her story – that of a woman coming to terms with how systemic racism has poisoned America, and ultimately deciding she has to leave the “land of the free” to be truly emancipated.

In the summer of 2020, as America underwent a reckoning with racism that was centuries in the making, Tiffanie Drayton wrote a provocative, personal, and widely shared New York Times essay called “I’m A Black American. I Had to Get Out.” In it, she reflects on her choice to leave the U.S. to return to her home island of Tobago, right before the pandemic and the murder of George Floyd—and how she felt grieving and raging for Black Americans from across an ocean. Now, in her powerful new memoir, "Black American Refugee: Escaping the Narcissism of the American Dream" (Viking), Drayton is telling her story – that of a woman coming to terms with how systemic racism has poisoned America, and ultimately deciding she has to leave the “land of the free” to be truly emancipated.

BCC reporter Nick Bryant joins us this morning to discuss his new book, "When America Stopped Being Great."Sifting through almost four decades of American…

Roya Hakakian is a lauded Persian poet turned television producer with programs like "60 Minutes." She became well known for her memoir, "Journey from the…

Mychal Denzel Smith’s last book, "Invisible Man, Got the Whole World Watching," was a powerful account of what it means being a young black man in…

The economy has been brutal to American workers for several decades. The promise at the heart of the American Dream is withering away. While onlookers…

For more than four decades, enormous advertisements displayed in New York City’s Grand Central Terminal affirmed a picturesque notion of everyday American…

In fewer than three hundred words, Khizr Khan electrified viewers around the world when he took the stage at the 2016 Democratic National Convention. And…