After abandoning his twenty year Wall Street career, Chris Arnade decided to document poverty and addiction in the Bronx. He began interviewing, photographing, and becoming close friends with homeless addicts, and spent hours in drug dens and McDonald’s. Then he started driving across America to see how the rest of the country compared. He found the same types of stories everywhere, across lines of race, ethnicity, religion, and geography.

Chris Arnade is the author of Dignity: Seeking Respect in Back Row America (Sentinel, 2019). His work has appeared in the New York Times, Atlantic, Guardian, Washington Post, Financial Times, and Wall Street Journal, among many others. He has a PhD in physics from Johns Hopkins University.