Experts have words to describe this economic moment. They call it a job-less or job-loss recovery. Three years ago, the story was quite different. All kinds of workers were finding jobs., including those considered the chronically unemployed, mainly black men in the inner city.

Unemployment for blacks was the lowest it had been in 30 years. Jobs were so plentiful that employers were willing to hire people with low skills, or no skills, and train them. At the time, the sociologist William Julius Wilson talked of a shift in America’s racial inequality. But today, the recovery is leaving the inner city far behind. Many of the people who had finally found jobs are back on the street, out of work and out of hope. Our series on work continues with a look at unskilled workers in America.

Guests:

William Julius Wilson, University Professor, Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University

Barry Bluestone, Professor of Political Economy, and Director, Center for Urban and Regional Policy, Northeastern University

Curtis Mozie, videotaping life today in the Tally’s Corner neighborhood of Washington, DC.

What can we find in common between the last words of Oscar Wilde, the complete list of knitting abbreviations, and the signs of the Chinese Zodiac? Nothing, except they can all be organized into a list. And that’s just what Benjamin Schott did in his new book Schott’s Original Miscellany.

From the causes of death for the various Burmese kings, to the complete guide to the Bronte siblings, Schott’s book evokes an era of dimly-lit libraries and leather armchairs, when fields of knowledge were small enough for so-called Renaissance men to master them. It challenges our sense of natural categories by imposing order on the randomness of things, from an explanation of medical shorthand terms to the color of Miss America’s hair.

Guests:

Ben Schott, author of “Schott’s Original Miscellany.”

Whenever a child is sick, parents instinctively search out medicine or a cure. The task has been an unusually daunting one for John and Aileen Crowley. Two of their three children were diagnosed with a rare muscle-wasting disorder called Pompe disease. The affliction is so rare, that not only was there no medicine to treat it, but the big pharmaceutical companies weren’t even thinking about developing drugs for it.

So John Crowley did the only thing he could. He rounded up some scientists, hit up venture capitalists, and started a company to develop a drug to save his children’s lives. It’s been a draining five year odyssey, but earlier this year the Crowley children started their treatment.

Guests:

John and Aileen Crowley, parents of two children with Pompe disease. John launched a company to develop a cure.

The pantheon of jazz instrumentalists is home to scores of sax players, pianists, trumpeters, but not many violinists. Classical music maintains a fierce grip on the violin, and its country cousin, the fiddle, lives in bluegrass and folk.

But at least one musician is trying to change all that. Regina Carter, steeped in the musical tradition of her native Detroit, took up the violin at age four and did her time in orchestras and conservatories. Ultimately, though, Regina Carter chose the path less traveled for a violinist; jazz. Since releasing her first album in 1995, she has floored audiences, critics and fellow musicians with her outright mastery of the violin. Regina Carter, fiddling with the conventions of jazz, and playing a remarkable instrument.

Guests:

Regina Carter, violinist

You can thank Samuel Gompers, Peter McGuire and other early union leaders for Labor Day. In between bites at the backyard BBQ, we’re all supposed to celebrate the achievements of those leaders, advances like the 40 hour work week and the radical idea of paid vacation.

But this Labor Day, many Americans are not celebrating anything. The United States has lost 2.7 million jobs since February of 2001, when the economy began its slide. And even today, as the stock market continues its halting climb and people talk of a recovery, unemployment hangs like a dark cloud over the fortunes, and futures of many citizens.

Guests:

Barry Bluestone, Professor of Political Economy at Northeastern University and Director of the Center for Urban and Regional Policy

Stuart Adkins, unemployed lawyer