Acknowledgments

I THANK LEO AND PETER KRAPP for putting up with my rants about the meritocracy. They helped me have courage. Thank you, Leo, for being such a great coauthor and son. Francois Cusset, Thierry Labica, and Wang Chaohua invited me to Université de Paris Ouest and Tsinghua University, respectively, to give talks that formed the basis of these chapters. Finally, I want to thank Ara Merjian for inviting me to talk about 1968 at NYU in Berlin. For all those conversations, I am very grateful. Thank you, Megan Kilpatrick, for publishing me on the topic of socialism, childhood, and care in Jacobin and helping me think through ideas about psychoanalysis and the collective social well-being. Melissa Naschek helped me with the critical discussions about the 1619 Project. Alex Hochuli, George Hoare, and Phillip Cunliffe were critical in helping me formulate many of the ideas in the book. Thank you, Connor Kilpatrick, for our conversations about sex panics. Tyrus Miller, Thomas Williams, and Kelly Donahey kept me thinking about critical theory in ways that were invigorating. In addition, this book simply would not have been possible without the comradeship of Amber Frost, John-Baptiste Oduor, and Jarek Ervin, who kept me focused during dark times and made me feel part of a bigger collective project. Our book with Doctrinaire Press will be out soon. The encouragement and support I received from Leah Pennywark, Jason Weidemann, Anne Carter, and Douglas Armato at the University of Minnesota Press allowed me to complete a project that I fully expected to be canceled. Finally, I have to acknowledge the neighborhood in which this book was written: University Hills in Irvine and its active Listserv are hot spots of professional managerial class sensibilities and politics. I learned so much from you. In the eternal words of my late Latin teacher at the City of University of New York, “Disco Inferno” or “I learn in Hell.” He taught me while he was very ill with complications from AIDS in the early 1990s. I dedicate this book to everyone with whom I shared the dance floor in that other time, in that other pandemic.