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I’m not up on the Internet, but I hear that is a democratic possibility People can connect with each other I think people are ready for something, but there is no leadership to offer it to them People are ready to say, ‘Yes, we are part of a world’— Studs Terkel   Studs was an inspiring historian The child of Russian immigrants living in Chicago, he spent his life talking to people — famous people from Dr King to C P Ellis and pretty much everyone in between — but mainly to normal people, working people (and, all too often, unemployed people) The classic oral historian, he was an obsessive archivist who told us about economics and politics as felt in our everyday lives He catalogued the daily routines of communities; the small niggles of wage labour that collected over a lifetime grind us into the floor, as well as the little acts of humanity that we build our relationships on Studs mapped personal stories of working-class solidarity, and, all told together, he mapped the political changes of almost half a century Culture drove Studs He started his career as a screenwriter and actor, starring in his own sitcom Studs’ Place, until his outspoken political allegiances got him blacklisted by that indignant little senator, Joe McCarthy In 1952 he got an hour-a-week spot on 987 WFMT Chicago, a small local arts station, and soon was broadcasting five days a week He continued to do so for the next forty-five years The majority of those broadcasts were interviews and, combined with a number of books of collected memories, they formed his life’s work In them he talked to the people mass-culture sees only as ‘audience’, and asked them what constituted their own culture of daily life   Studs died at the dawn of a global financial crisis (his epitaph: ‘Curiosity didn’t kill this cat’) he might half recognise from his youth; capital, unregulated, crashing like a wall of water through people’s daily experience, tearing apart the fragile homes we’ve made for ourselves But the way the working class constitutes itself within capital