In 2013, we published a 40-week series of true stories of unemployment. When it concluded, I still had dozens of unpublished stories. Here are a few.

The University of Memphis has given adjunct professors their first raise in three decades. Now, an adjunct teaching a full load could earn up to $12,600 a year. Yay.

For hundreds of millions of people in the U.S. and Europe, the past decade has been absolutely without any advance in incomes. This could be the start of an entire generation that never sees its living standards progress.

Despite a tourism boom, Cuba’s economy is struggling so much that some are warning of a brewing “perfect storm” of social unrest. Thank god these communists can look to America as an example of social and political stability.

Some of America’s biggest corporations are (very publicly) raising the minimum wages of their employees. This is better than nothing, but not as good as, say, dangling a CEO by his ankles and shaking him until all of his billions fall out.

If we ever want to address poverty and inequality in America, we need to start with housing—most people’s greatest expense. A new report quantifies just how devastating our affordable housing shortage has become.

This will be the eighth and final installment of our series highlighting true stories from adjunct professors, the best-educated low-wage workers in America.

A new White House report shows a staggering drop in the portion of working-age men who are actually working. It also reveals deeper problems with American society.

Since the end of the Great Recession in 2009, incomes in America have, on average, gone up. But in 15 of the states in our country, all of those gains have gone to the top 1%.

“Bank tellers, the single largest occupation within [the retail banking] category, have a median hourly wage of $12.44.” A 2014 report found that “nearly one-third of tellers’ families” were enrolled in public assistance programs.

This is the big story that all the little stories come from:

Watching Republicans try to come up with a plan to fight poverty is like watching a rock plan to learn how to swim. The entire enterprise is doomed from the start.

A new proposed rule that would ever so slightly curb the excesses of the payday loan industry is an exciting thing: the government, which represents us, acting against awful exploitative money vampires. The system works, a little bit!

America’s colleges and universities are out for the summer. For students, it’s a time to party. For the low-paid adjunct professors who make higher education function, it is a time to wonder whether they made a terrible mistake.

American universities spend half a trillion dollars a year. Very little of that money goes to the people who do a huge part of the teaching: the adjunct professors, academia’s hidden underclass. They are telling us their stories. They’re not pretty.

America’s well-manicured universities are supported by an entire academic underclass of very smart and very poorly paid people: the adjunct professors. They would like to tell you about the “insanely bleak” job that keeps academia chugging along.

America’s bloated higher education industry is supported by the work of an immense pool of well-educated and very poorly paid workers: the adjunct professors. They are telling us all about it. And they have a few ideas.

Adjunct professors are the most highly educated low-wage workers in America. And they told us all about it.

In New York City, the average income and the average rent seem to have both just flown in from very different planets. They have no idea how to communicate with one another.

In Manhattan, the NYPD will no longer throw you in jail for asking a fellow citizen for a little help. Wow—civilized!