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McMillan Cottom was born in Harlem and raised in Winston-Salem and Charlotte, North Carolina. North Carolina Central University, where McMillan Cottom earned her BA In 2020, McMillan Cottom was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in recognition of her work "at the confluence of race, gender, education, and digital technology." She is frequently quoted in print and television media as an academic expert in inequality and American higher education. McMillan Cottom is the author of Lower Ed: The Troubling Rise of For-Profit Colleges in the New Economy and Thick: And Other Essays, a co-editor of For-Profit Universities and Digital Sociologies, an essayist whose work has appeared in The Atlantic, Slate, The New York Times, and The Washington Post, and co-host of the podcast Hear to Slay with author Roxane Gay.
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She was formerly an associate professor of sociology at Virginia Commonwealth University and a faculty associate of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society. She is also an opinion columnist at The New York Times.
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She is currently an associate professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Information and Library Science (SILS), and is also an affiliate of the Center for Information, Technology, and Public Life (CITAP) at UNC-Chapel Hill. Tressie McMillan Cottom is an American writer, sociologist, and professor. Lower Ed: The Troubling Rise of For-Profit Colleges in the New Economy, Thick: And Other Essays Berkman Klein Center for Internet & SocietyĪmerican higher education, race, inequality, work, technology.University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.Recommended for fans of: Tressie McMillan Cottom, Roxane Gay, Samantha Irby. The book was published in 2021 and seems to have been mostly written in 2020, so there is definitely a pandemic lens to many of the essays, so if you’re trying to escape from that for a while this might not be the best choice. Overall I really enjoyed the book, although it was not as comedic in tone as I was expecting (not the book’s fault so much as me diving into the book not really knowing anything about it). Throughout the essays, Robinson does a good job of bringing the reader into her life while acknowledging that many aspects of that life are not very relatable to the average person (she has the money and flexibility to travel internationally on short notice, she knows Bono and Michelle Obama, and so on). The essays in the book cover a wide range of topics, and the structure of the book generally alternates between more serious subjects (racism, mental health, her decision not to have children) and lighter ones (trying to maintain romance in a relationship while quarantining together, cultural differences between the US and UK, having famous friends).
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She has been busy! (As evidenced by the fact that the book is published by her own publishing imprint, among many other things.) Robinson is a comedian, writer, and actress, and I was familiar with her podcast 2 Dope Queens (which she co-hosted with Jessica Williams, formerly of The Daily Show), but I hadn’t really kept up with her work after 2 Dope Queens ended in 2018. A friend gave me a copy of Phoebe Robinson’s Please Don’t Sit on My Bed in Your Outside Clothes: Essays as a Christmas gift, and I was excited to dig into it shortly after the new year.