Spence can be regularly heard, his next book, knocking the hustle, will be out at the end of october. Please welcome all of our esteemed panelists. [applause] so what im going to do is start with letting the panelists, beginning with lester spence, kind of describe what their individual books are about. Lester . Oh, wow. Thank you very much. Thank you to the baltimore book festival. I knew i was in the right place when i saw that they had a book festival, because that meant that baltimore was actual literate, and i kind of wanted to be in a place where people liked to read and reading mattered. Im really interested in kind of the reproduction of inequality within black spaces, right . If you look at inequality across time from, say, 1929 or so to the present, it takes the shape of a u. Really, really high levels in 1929, low levels in 1950 or so, and there are really high levels now. In fact, we have higher levels of inequality now than we did in the great depression. It takes the shap