Virginia Eubanks

Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor - Kindle edition by Eubanks, Virginia. Download it once and read it on your Kindle device, PC, phones or tablets. Use features like bookmarks, note taking and highlighting while reading Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor.

The Kindle version of Automating Inequality as available at a deep discount currently! It's definitely worth $2.99. 🤣

a.co/d/bPaqACH

The skills I learned in the woods and on the water were surprisingly transferable to surviving violence and traumatic care.

What unexpected survival skill do you possess? Comment below, and follow me here on Bluesky, and I’ll DM you an excerpt from the memoir!

The happiest surprise of writing the book was how much I learned about staying alive in the wilderness: I studied kayak self-rescue, winter survival, map and compass navigation, bushwhacking, monastic discernment, lifeguarding, wilderness first aid.

The lesson: Nobody survives the wilderness alone. In love with hazard orange and tranquil blue, the humor and danger all caught up together. Thanks @corraldesign.bsky.social (design) and Giacomo Girardi (art), and everyone at @fsgbooks.bsky.social, for promoting beautiful, true caregiver stories.

Hi Brian! Amazing to see you. Invite me back to Idaho!!

A mysterious image, in tones of hazard orange and blue. The letters "al" appear on the left. A puzzling image that might be a rock of a turtle, appears in the center.

I’m excited to share that I have a reported memoir, *A Guide to Open Water Lifesaving: Lessons on Love and Survival,* arriving in the world on August 11, 2026.

Tomorrow, Oct 30, @fsgbooks.bsky.social will reveal the book’s extraordinary cover. Follow FSG (or me) to get the first glimpse.

@brianmannadk.bsky.social explains why this series? Why now? (Hint: It's not to encourage women to have a bunch more babies) www.instagram.com/reel/DQZfk-k...

Population Shift Examining what happens when families have fewer kids

Excited to be digging into this fascinating new series on worldwide population shifts.

www.npr.org/series/g-s1-...

Even, meticulous, ambitious reporting has me rethinking so many things that I thought I knew.

Kudos to @brianmannadk.bsky.social @sarahmccammon.bsky.social & everyone at @npr.org

‘Medicaid Cut Me Off’: A Rural Health Center Faces New Pressures

"The Trump administration’s tax and domestic policy bill... is projected to cost the country’s 1,512 community health centers roughly $7.3 billion annually in increased uncompensated care costs as they take on the treatment of new, and newly uninsured, patients." www.nytimes.com/2025/10/22/h...

Opinion | The Rise of the Inflatable Chicken Resistance

Shteyngart brilliant as always. "Frivolity and absurdity are kryptonite to authoritarians who project the stern-father archetype to their followers. Once the pants are lowered and the undies of the despot are glimpsed, there is no point of return." www.nytimes.com/2025/10/20/o...

@fsgbooks.bsky.social @goldinagency.bsky.social @msjennajohnson.bsky.social

A Guide to Open Water Lifesaving A spirited, wise, often hilarious, profoundly moving story of one woman's efforts to survive caregiving, trauma, love, and the systems seemingly set up to fa...

(8/8) Built from cataclysmic loss and tenacious love, A Guide to Open Water Lifesaving challenges readers to reconsider the networks of care that sustain our lives, reminding us that no one survives the wilderness alone.

(us.macmillan.com/books/978037...)

(7/8) ...her research, and interviews with everyone from neuroscientists to forest rangers. The result is a genuinely moving, hopeful, darkly funny story of two people caught in their own kind of wilderness, trying not just to survive but to truly care for each other.

(6/8) Inspired by these lessons, she signed up for a series of classes: kayak self-rescue, winter survival 101, map and compass, bushwhacking, wilderness first aid, lifeguarding. In a memoir as disarmingly funny as it is quietly wise, Eubanks draws lessons in kinship from these experiences...

(5/8) A reporter and an activist, Eubanks turned to reliable sources to figure out how to heal: scientists, therapists, trauma theorists, social movements. But it wasn’t until she happened on an old lifesaving manual that she found practical advice that actually helped.

(4/8) ...inadequate medical care, lost income, lost friends, endless paperwork, and a serious case of post-traumatic stress disorder. Then, a second case. In her time tending to him, Eubanks had developed what is known as “collateral” PTSD, common among caregivers but rarely discussed.

(3/8) One night, Virginia Eubanks received the kind of news we all fear. Her beloved partner had been attacked, brutally beaten just steps from their house. In the weeks, then months and years that followed, they faced a cascade of setbacks: police disinterest, suspended health insurance...

(2/8) Only if you are a very able swimmer trained in open-water rescue should you approach drowning victims . . . Reach with a rope or branch, row out and offer the drowning person an oar. Do not get in the water.

But also:
No one survives the wilderness alone.

(1/8) A Guide to Open Water Lifesaving
Lessons in Love and Survival: A Memoir

A spirited, wise, often hilarious, profoundly moving story of one woman's efforts to survive caregiving, trauma, love, and the systems seemingly set up to fail us.

Author photo options by the extraordinary William C. Gill. What do you all think? Favorites?

For context, the cover copy for the book is below. So as you vote, think vibez. 😉

I'm gonna report this every month.

Preach.

Adopt A Station - Rescue Public Media Help preserve independent journalism and community programming across America by adopting a public media station. Congress has voted to rescind public media's funding.

4/4: Please, if you're able, help keep the public in public media right now.

adoptastation.org

It is especially crucial to support rural public media, as it often provides communities with their only local news and provide life-saving weather and emergency alerts.
ruralpublic.org

3/4: In many ways, it's the model I've been trying to live up to ever since. I see lots of quotes if Timothy Snyder's first rule of defeating tyranny ("Don't obey in advance."), fewer of the second ("Defend institutions.") Public media in the United States is an institution worth defending.

2/4: Watching college students and local community members rise to the occasion, sleeping on studio couches, caravaning down to LA to cover the aftermath firsthand, and getting information out to a community hungry for factual, accurate, humane stories made an indelible impression on me.

1/4: I got my start in public media. I still remember when the Rodney King verdict came down my first year at KZSC. We had a remarkably good public affairs department.

In Sickness and in Health An urgent and deeply affecting account of America's failure to provide meaningful support to its chronically ill and disabled citizens and our resulting...

I feel both joyful & terrified: My book is actually on the @eccobooks.bsky.social @harpercollins.bsky.social website now! IN SICKNESS AND IN HEALTH: Love Stories from the Frontlines of America’s Caregiving Crisis will be out Feb 2026 ✨ eeeeek! www.harpercollins.com/products/in-...

On a white background, black text reports no results for a DuckDuckGo search of "tyrannical lifestyle maintenance."

I think I just coined the phrase "tyrannical lifestyle maintenance," and I'm very proud.

One Nation, Underprivileged: Why American Poverty Affects Us All Abstract. Despite its enormous wealth, the United States leads the industrialized world in poverty. One Nation, Underprivileged unravels this disturbing pa

I learned it from Mark Rank's great lifecycle research on poverty.... 20 years old now, but absolutely still worth reading. academic.oup.com/book/2883

Also, Medicaid isn't just poor-people health insurance. It's the main payer for long-term care. Middle-class people can't afford nursing homes either at ~125k/yr. The typical outcome is that they "pay down" (go broke paying for care) to become eligible for Medicaid.