{"id":20642,"date":"2025-07-19T04:24:14","date_gmt":"2025-07-19T04:24:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/20642\/"},"modified":"2025-07-19T04:24:14","modified_gmt":"2025-07-19T04:24:14","slug":"the-debt-police-mother-jones","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/20642\/","title":{"rendered":"The Debt Police \u2013 Mother Jones"},"content":{"rendered":"

\t\t\t\tGet your news from a source that\u2019s not owned and controlled by oligarchs. Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily.<\/a><\/p>\n

After Kashana Cauley earned her first television writing gig on the Hulu animated series The Great North,\u00a0her media friends in New York were thrilled, in a jealous kind of way. \u201cYou did it!\u201d they told her. \u201cYou made it out\u2014you\u2019re in a stable profession!\u201d Cauley began her professional career in antitrust law, then built a following on Twitter that caught the attention of editors and producers who liked her pithy observations about race and gender. She grabbed bylines in The Atlantic, the New Yorker, and Esquire before landing a staff writing gig on the Daily Show With Trevor Noah. But Great North, a sitcom job, seemed like the start of a more stable career in Hollywood. And it was: The show ran for five seasons. Networks and streamers all wanted content\u2014until they didn\u2019t. \u201cThere is so much less TV on the air than there was, say, five or six years ago,\u201d she told me.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Professional instability isn\u2019t new for Cauley, and it\u2019s at the heart of her second novel, The Payback,<\/a> which published this week. The book\u2019s main character is Jada, who is very good at her retail job that doesn\u2019t pay her enough to make ends meet. Like Jada, Cauley worked a retail job too: six years at JCPenney. She was the first person in her family to go to college and wanted to pay her way through. She knew that going back to Madison, Wisconsin, where she was raised, to work on the General Motors assembly line like her dad was no longer an option. The closest plant closed in 2009. The money she earned at JCPenney was nowhere near what she really needed, and without anyone to help navigate the maze of college majors and white collar career prep, she landed in law school. She graduated with her law degree\u2014and six figures of student loan debt.<\/p>\n

As Hollywood pulled back on TV production, war broke out in Ukraine. Cauley watched it all.\u00a0 She was fascinated with ethical hacking, the idea that small bands of Robinhood-minded techies could help even life\u2019s uneven playing fields.\u00a0She looked into zero-day hacks, which exploit gaps in software security systems, often of large private or government institutions. She thought about the people she had met across her many careers: the wardrobe folks at the Daily Show, the costume designers in late night television, the interns at Kenneth Cole. What might a revolution look like if it were led by the fashionable creatives of the world?<\/p>\n

\u201cIn America, if you have financial problems, there isn\u2019t a ton of infrastructure to help you solve them. You are forced to come up with your own solutions to these big societal issues.\u201d<\/p>\n

In The Payback, Jada leads a trio of down-on-their-luck retail workers in a fight against the fictitious Debt Police. It\u2019s Cauley\u2019s second work of speculative fiction; her first book, The Survivalists<\/a>, followed another woman\u2019s perilous journey up the corporate ladder. Her new book is an action-packed thriller for everyone who\u2019s fed up with our current political situation. \u201cWhat if we looked beyond the realm of what\u2019s happening and toward the future of possibilities?\u201d she asks. \u201cIn this era, that\u2019s a good place to put your head.\u201d<\/p>\n

I recently talked with Cauley about living with debt, leaving Twitter, and finding humor in dark times. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.<\/p>\n

What inspired The Payback\u2018s Debt Police?<\/p>\n

I compare it to the Department of Education, which has been really enforce-y lately. All of a sudden, they can garnish wages, they can yank your driver\u2019s license if you\u2019re not paying back your student loans. In America, if you have financial problems, there isn\u2019t a ton of infrastructure to help you solve them. You are forced to come up with your own individualistic solutions to these big societal issues. I drew up three girls who were just like, \u201cWe are all we have.\u201d<\/p>\n

On top of that, it was important for me to include some Debt Police who were Black, because there are plenty of Black people who have bought into ideas of policing and enforcement\u2014it\u2019s an American value.<\/p>\n

\"Book<\/p>\n

You fought those battles yourself, working for at JCPenney to help pay for college and law school. These days, how do you actually afford to be a writer?\u00a0<\/p>\n

I have a very financially and emotionally supportive husband. I ended up paying off my loans with TV money, but I don\u2019t think you should have to win the lottery\u2014which is basically what I did\u2014to better yourself.\u00a0<\/p>\n

My husband is my support, along with my book advances, but I have definitely had periods where I\u2019ve been the top earner in my house. It\u2019s hard to think of a stable industry in American culture right now. We\u2019ve all got to learn how to roll and take the punches.<\/p>\n

A lot of folks first encountered your work via your hilarious social media presence. Why did you decide to leave Twitter and embrace Bluesky?\u00a0<\/p>\n

I was cutting down on my time there for most of 2023 after they changed the algorithm and I stopped getting responses and seeing my friends. We had an unsatisfying group of social media sites that rose up in the interim. Bluesky is the first that really feels like a place where a lot of people have joined and stayed. They post and they hang out, and I see a lot of the people I used to see on Twitter.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cI am the only person in America who is not on Pete Hegseth\u2019s group chat. I feel left out.\u201d<\/p>\n

I\u2019m sad about that transition. Twitter was a great place to hang out. Every once in a while, there were, like, missing Black people, and we found them! I don\u2019t know if we\u2019re gonna be able to find missing Black people again.<\/p>\n

Who are the funniest Black women who inspire your writing?\u00a0<\/p>\n

I am an enormous Danzy Senna fan. She is so funny and is a really good observer of contemporary Black life. She wrote a book called New People, where one of her characters works on a dissertation about Jonestown. I didn\u2019t know it was a thing where older Black women from the South, largely, were trying to find their way to equality through singing and alternative religion. All these people born in, like, 1915 in Alabama and they end up with Jim Jones drinking the Kool-Aid in Guyana. I was crushed.\u00a0<\/p>\n

I also got to work with Dulc\u00e9 Sloan on The Great North, and she\u2019s just fabulous\u2014great energy, great vibe. And then everybody cites Fran Ross, who wrote Oreo. She tears your chest open and goes right to the heart of the joke. I love her for that. She was basically the only woman in the Richard Pryor Show writers\u2019 room. Comedy is still trying to work out its relationship with women. She was not afraid of swinging. I love Black women like that. They are my idols.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s the importance of humor in this political moment?<\/p>\n

Sometimes I cannot listen to things being told seriously. I need a new angle. Humor shakes me out of the constant depression that is the news and our politics. I live in LA, where we\u2019ve had the National Guard in town for a few weeks, and it\u2019s terrifying. You can\u2019t live life on sheer terror. You will have a panic attack and die.\u00a0<\/p>\n

I mean, the Defense Department is taking the Blackness out of Jackie Robinson\u2019s biography.\u00a0The fact that he broke the color barrier was why he is on the dod\u2019s history page. It\u2019s important to be able to make fun of some of these folks in our public life. There\u2019s a lot of incompetence there. I am the only person in America who is not on Pete Hegseth\u2019s group chat. I feel left out.<\/p>\n

Back in the day, I volunteered for Howard Dean and then the Obama campaign. I called swing voters in Ohio back when that was less terrifying. I did Kamala [Harris] stuff, too. I understand that things are sad and they\u2019re bad, but humor is how I get people to listen to me. I\u2019m tricking folks.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Get your news from a source that\u2019s not owned and controlled by oligarchs. Sign up for the free…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":20643,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[223,88],"class_list":{"0":"post-20642","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-books","8":"tag-books","9":"tag-entertainment"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20642","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20642"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20642\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/20643"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20642"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20642"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20642"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}