The robots might be coming for your job. But even with the historically low unemployment numbers, many working class Americans (especially in some regions) have plenty of other things to worry about in the meantime. “Across America, obscure clusters of misery are growing in number and concentration—as people get sicker, poorer, and more isolated than they were just a few decades ago. Thus untangling the knotty problems of central Appalachia holds lessons for the rest of the country about how imbalances of wealth and power, created generations ago, can trap places and their people in the past.” Gwynn Guilford in Quartz: The 100-year capitalist experiment that keeps Appalachia poor, sick, and stuck on coal.

+ Having a job doesn’t mean what it used to. In Politico Magazine, Danny Vinik looks at the real future of work. “Workplace protections like the minimum wage and overtime, as well as key benefits like health insurance and pensions, are built on the basic assumption of a full-time job with an employer. As that relationship crumbles, millions of hardworking Americans find themselves ejected from that implicit pact.”