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The popular ride hailing service Uber is valued at a staggering $40 billion — even though it's besieged by lawsuits, bad PR, and outright bans in some cities.

On Monday, Uber was roundly criticized for raising fares in Sydney during a hostage crisis. It's been banned in New Delhi, there's a restraining order on its services in Nevada, and France has nixed a low-cost Uber service over licensing rules.

Nonetheless, Uber and other ride hailing apps like Lyft and Sidecar continue to expand. Uber alone says it has hundreds of thousands of freelance drivers around the world and claims it will add a million more in 2015. These services offer a new independent career for some, a way to make extra money for the underemployed, or a way to stay afloat after a layoff.

That's the case for Karl Theobald. For a decade, he played saxophone for Teatro ZinZanni — a dinner circus along San Francisco's waterfront — until redevelopment plans shut it down.

So a year and a half ago Theobald signed up to be an Uber driver. He picked me up in his Volkswagen Passat one day at 5 p.m., right at the start of the afternoon rush hour.

Theobald shows me the app that he and other drivers use. One of its features is that it tells them where demand for rides is high, and so there is surge pricing.

"When a zone is in surge it lights up in red on our map, and you want to be in surge because that's where the prices are higher," Theobald says.

Theobald splits his day, so he can catch the surge pricing during the evening and morning rush. He says driving for Uber is a much bigger hustle than working for the circus.

"I was making about the same amount of money doing that, that I am doing Uber, but working four hours a day ... ," Theobald says.

He works 10 hours a day now, during which Theobald says he averages $25 to $30 an hour. He says he likes the work.

"I'd much rather play saxophone, but I enjoy this," he says. "It's fun driving around the city talking to people all day."

For some drivers working for Uber and other new car services is a career they want.

Isaac Alfandary used to be a salesman, and he's still got the outgoing energy of a self-starter. In 2011, he was laid off.

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The Two-Way

From Australia To France, Another Bad Day For Uber

"I was one of those guys in the Great Recession that lost my job," he says. "Right then and there I decided I don't want to go back and do what I was doing, which was selling stuff and having a sales manager over me."

At first Alfandary tried driving a regular taxicab.

Goats and Soda

Alleged Rape Of Passenger Raises Concerns About How Uber Runs Abroad

"I had to work a 12-hour shift six days a week in order to have the job," he says. "That's kind of indicative of a lot of the cab driving world. The bosses make you do things that really, most people wouldn't do."

Alfandary is still hustling. He started driving for Uber, Lyft and Sidecar. He says he is making more money than driving a taxi — though drivers in other cities such as New York say driving a cab can be more lucrative.

He invested money in a higher end car — a Ford Explorer SUV — and started a website called theblackcarguy.com where he gives advice and coaching for other drivers.

"I work for me," Alfandary says. "Uber's a client. Lyft is a client. My coaching students are clients. Because I'm out here to do an awesome job for myself and the companies that I work for and this allows me the freedom to do that."

But Uber also has the freedom to change its prices. That's exactly what has upset Theobald. Earlier this year, Uber began taking an extra dollar off the top of the fare as part of what the company calls a "driver safety fee."

"Which doesn't seem like a lot," Theobald says. "But when you're doing 150 fares per week that's $150 that's taken off the top."

Both he and Alfandary have been told by Uber they are among the company's top earning drivers in the Bay Area.

But other drivers say they don't do as well.

Claire Callahan Goodman worked part time as a software programmer when her daughter was young, but more recently she thought driving part time for Uber might bring in some extra money.

"In the beginning they give you these bonuses, like there's a signing bonus," she says. "They start paying you before you've even driven, and you think, 'Well this can't be all bad.' "

But eventually Callahan Goodman stopped driving. She was working in Berkeley and Oakland, which aren't as busy as San Francisco. She says with the upkeep of her car and Uber's fees it wasn't worth it. But ride companies like Uber expect turnover, and they will be continuing to recruit drivers aggressively over the next year.

Drivers like Theobald say they have mixed feelings about more people coming into the system because it has the potential to shift the market and drive prices down. That will make consumers happy, but it's going to make being a driver even more of a hustle.

Uber

As The Conversation About Serial reaches a fever pitch in certain circles, those of us behind Code Switch and Monkey See have been talking quite a bit about the show. You can read Matt Thompson's initial entry in this conversation here.

Below is the second part of our exchange, from Code Switch blogger Gene Demby.

Matt, Linda and Kat,

I agree with Matt's takeaway that Serial "is a story about our system of justice working pretty much as it should, and failing miserably at providing anything that looks like justice." I think your theory inches veeeeery close to the Big Takeaway that Mike Pesca was hoping the show would avoid, but it's a landing that the show arrives at pretty convincingly. I also think it's because folks might be primed to hear that argument right now. (More on that in a sec.)

“ Let's say you wanted to listen to 'Serial' simply as a whodunnit or a drama full of WTF — wouldn't you have to contort around everything else happening in our particular cultural moment to do so?

Over the course of the series, we learn that the state's case against Adnan Syed rests mostly on testimony from his friend Jay — a witness with a shifting story and a bunch of incentives to lie — and some janky cellphone records that we now know probably aren't worth much. There's no physical evidence linking him to the crime. But even though the case against Syed is never that convincingly prosecuted (or defended, for that matter), it still ended in Syed's conviction. All of that messiness and baggage that inform its many human inputs — the police, the lawyers, the jurors, the judges, the defendants — got mashed into a definitive judgment: Adnan Syed is guilty of murdering Hae Min Lee.

We got some glaring examples of this messiness in Episode 10, "The Best Defense Is a Good Defense," when a juror in Syed's trial named William Owen said this to producer Sarah Koenig:

"I don't feel religion was why he did what he did. It may have been culture, but I don't think it was religion. I'm not sure how the culture is over there, how they treat their women. But I know in some cultures women are second-class citizens and maybe that's what it was, I don't know. He just wanted control and she wouldn't give it to him."

And another juror named Stella Armstrong said this:

"[The deliberating jurors] were trying to talk about his culture, and [in] Arabic culture men rule, not women. I remembered hearing that. ... So he had put his whole life on the line for her and she didn't want no part of it anymore."

Again, given the lack of physical evidence, it seems a lot like these suspicions about Syed — this sense that he was some violently misogynistic Muslim foreigner — did an awful lot of the heavy lifting for the prosecution in this case. And the prosecution certainly wasn't above playing to those suspicions: In a pretrial bail hearing, the district attorney argued that Syed was a flight risk because there was a pattern of young Pakistani men murdering their girlfriends in a fit of rage before they then fled to Pakistan. (She apologized to the trial judge some weeks later, because that statement was entirely untrue.)

“ Still, we start with the polite fiction that 'reasonableness' as determined by our police and in our courts is objective and walled off from the wider world.

Of course, none of this means that Syed didn't kill Lee! He might have! That nagging question is the engine for the story. But let's say you wanted to listen to Serial simply as a whodunnit or a drama full of WTF — wouldn't you have to contort around everything else happening in our particular cultural moment to do so? For months, our news media have been dominated by stories of people who have found themselves on the business end of our criminal justice machinery, only to have their lives upended or obliterated. Serial isn't about Ferguson, of course, but, oh, the resonances.

Can you remember the last time so many people were asking questions about the mechanics of all this? About who or what constitutes "reasonableness" — as in guilt proven "beyond a reasonable doubt" or "the officer reasonably believed his life or someone else's was in danger"? There's a moment in one episode where a lawyer Koenig spoke with explained just how stacked the deck is against a defendant who has progressed to the trial stage; jurors tend to think the defendant must have done something to be standing trial and facing so many charges in the first place. In other words, jurors see the simple fact that the defendant is on trial as evidence of that defendant's guilt.

On the flip side, police are unlikely to ever stand trial for killing someone and very, very unlikely to be convicted if they are. In our criminal justice system, our broad suspicions about some segments of people are necessarily "reasonable," as is our default credulity of others. Still, we start with the polite fiction that "reasonableness" as determined by our police and in our courts is objective and walled off from the wider world — a wider world in which reasonable people disagree. A whole lot, in fact.

Ambivalence about or active distrust for the criminal justice system ain't exactly a fringe position — a Gallup poll from this summer shows that fewer than a quarter of Americans express a "great deal" or "quite a lot" of confidence in it. As Vikrant Reddy of the conservative policy group Right on Crime told me a few months ago, the plummeting rate of violent crime has changed our politics. As punishing lawbreakers has receded as a pressing national anxiety, there's now much more space for people of all ideological stripes to ask hard questions about zero-tolerance policing or harsh sentencing, and whether they're worth the attendant fiscal and social costs.

There remains a huge racial gap in confidence in the police, but the shifting center of gravity in our media and some very different generational orthodoxies mean that the distrust that people of color feel toward law enforcement has gotten a much broader airing in our mainstream media. Twitter, especially, has played a huge role in making aggressive policing and fatal encounters a priority in coverage in mainstream news outlets. (It's probably not a coincidence that the groundswell and organizing happened on Twitter, which also much blacker than the Internet more broadly.)

As everyone keeps reminding us, we're in the golden age of podcasts, and Serial is often held up as that medium's gold standard. It's well-produced and it's really well-told. It probably would have been a hit even if the country wasn't in the middle of a contentious national debate about cops and courts — fighting over the reliability of prosecutors and witness testimony and grand juries, and rethinking who qualifies as suspicious and why. As it stands, Serial, by a fluke of its timing, is more pointed and incisive than its creators probably intended.

Following the lead of other Republican governors, Tennessee's Gov. Bill Haslam is moving to expand Medicaid in his state, using federal funds from the Affordable Care Act. Haslam announced the plan Monday morning; it'll be debated by the legislature next month.

From Nashville, Bobby Allyn of member station WPLN reports:

"Gov. Bill Haslam said expanding Medicaid under the president's terms didn't make sense for Tennessee, a deeply red state. Instead, he sought a waiver from the president's program —- going after the same goals but giving it a different name.

"Haslam said he's no fan of furthering a system he described as 'broken.' At the same time, he defended the Tennessee plan much the same way Democrats have pushed for expanding coverage, saying, 'A plan that would leverage those federal dollars to really begin the work of fixing what is wrong with our healthcare system to better align incentives for providers and consumers.'

"Tennessee's expansion plan is expected to cover an additional 200,000 low-income residents."

With the move, Haslam becomes the third Republican governor to push for a Medicaid expansion since last month's midterm elections, The Washington Post reports.

The roots of those decisions dates to 2012, when the Supreme Court declared two things: that the Affordable Care Act was constitutional – and that states were free to choose whether or not to expand their Medicaid programs.

Many conservative governors opted against expansion, complicating the health care law's goal of having Medicaid cover more people with lower incomes – according to this year's guidelines, it would apply to single people making up to around $16,000 a year and families of four with an income around $32,000.

This morning, WPLN reported on a push by volunteers to help Tennessee residents enroll in "Obamacare," saying that more than 2,870 people had signed up in just one zip code. The initiative focused on "areas with high numbers of uninsured people," the station says.

In North Carolina, the push to expand Medicaid led a town's mayor to walk to Washington, D.C., this summer, seeking support for the only hospital that serves his rural town of Belhaven and neighboring counties.

In at least 20 states, the question of Medicaid expansion is either up for debate or the state's leaders have decided against it. You can see a map showing where states stand on the issue at the Kaiser Family Foundation.

Affordable Care Act

Medicaid

For this year's Best Books of the Year list, I reject the tyranny of the decimal system. Some years it's simply more than 10. Here, then, are my top 12 books of 2014. All of the disparate books on my list contain characters, scenes or voices that linger long past the last page of their stories.

Dept. Of Speculation

by Jenny Offill

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Paperback, 179 pages, Random House Inc, $15, published October 7 2014 | purchase

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The Dept. of Speculation by Jenny Offill is a slim novel whose lingering emotional aftereffects belie its size. It follows a young woman as she haltingly moves through marriage and motherhood in a Brooklyn apartment raddled by the urban blight of bedbugs and the maternal torment of colic. Her husband's infidelity, however, is what slams our heroine to a full stop. Offill's departures from traditional narrative form make this age-old story feel painfully fresh again: Fragmented chapters and looping monologues accord with our heroine's shell-shocked frame of mind. For instance, a chapter titled "How Are You?" is followed by these two words hauntingly repeated by our betrayed heroine for a page and a half: "soscared soscared soscared soscared ... "

News and Reviews

In Fragments Of A Marriage, Familiar Themes Get Experimental

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Literary Fiction

Fiction

Florence Gordon

by Brian Morton

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Hardcover, 306 pages, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $25, published September 23 2014 | purchase

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Brian Morton's superb novel Florence Gordon features a 75-year-old woman — an icon of the second wave women's movement — as its heroine. She's a self-described "difficult woman," in the intimidating Lillian Hellman, Susan Sontag, "Lioness in Winter" mode. When a glowing review of Florence's latest book appears in the Sunday New York Times, she's showered with the popular acclaim that has eluded her most of her life. Suddenly, Florence is embarking on her first-ever book tour, dealing brusquely with fawning female fans of a certain age, parrying with some patronizing younger feminists and, along the way, sensing the chill of mortality on her skin.

News and Reviews

A Feisty Writer Spars With Her Young Protege

'Florence Gordon' Isn't Friend Material, But You'll Appreciate Her

Literary Fiction

Fiction

Dear Committee Members

by Julie Schumacher

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Hardcover, 180 pages, Random House Inc, $22.95, published August 19 2014 | purchase

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One of the reasons Dear Committee Members is such a mordant minor masterpiece is that Julie Schumacher had the brainstorm to structure it as an epistolary novel. This book of letters is composed of a year's worth of recommendations that our antihero — a weary professor of creative writing and literature — is called upon to write for junior colleagues, lackluster students and even former lovers. The gem of a law school recommendation letter professor Jason Fitger writes for a cutthroat undergrad whom he's known for all of "eleven minutes" is alone worth the price of Schumacher's book.

Schumacher has a sharp ear for the self-pitying eloquence peculiar to academics like the fictional Fitger, who feel that their genius has never gotten its due. His resentment seeps out between the lines of the recommendation letters he relentlessly writes — or ineptly fills out on computerized questionnaires — urging RV parks and paintball emporiums to hire his graduating English majors for entry-level management positions. Dear Committee Members serves up the traditional satisfactions of classic academic farces like David Lodge's Small World and Kingsley Amis' immortal Lucky Jim, but it also updates the genre to include newer forms of indignity within the halls of academe.

News and Reviews

A Frustrated Professor Sounds Off To 'Committee Members'

In A Funny New Novel, A Weary Professor Writes To 'Dear Committee Members'

Literary Fiction

Fiction

10:04

by Ben Lerner

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Hardcover, 244 pages, Farrar Straus & Giroux, $25, published September 2 2014 | purchase

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Ben Lerner (Leaving the Atocha Station) is known for writing fiction that defies categories; he continues to defy — and fascinate — in this latest novel, 10:04. Bookended by two historic hurricanes that threatened New York City (Hurricane Irene and Hurricane Sandy) 10:04 projects our narrator into plotlines that feature a dire medical diagnosis as well as the joy of impending fatherhood with a woman who's a close friend. Lerner's dazzling writing connects and collapses these and other storylines into a rich and strange novel of ideas.

News and Reviews

'10:04': A Strange, Spectacular Novel Connecting Several Plotlines Sept. 3, 2014

Literary Fiction

Fiction

Let Me Be Frank With You

by Richard Ford

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Hardcover, 240 pages, HarperCollins, $27.99, published November 4 2014 | purchase

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It's been eight years since The Lay of the Land was published — the novel Richard Ford said would be the last in his Frank Bascombe trilogy. Luckily, Ford had second thoughts. Frank is now a 68-year-old retired real estate broker. The four stories herein all take place in the early winter of 2012, soon after Superstorm Sandy slammed into the Jersey Shore. The cover of Let Me Be Frank With You features a photo of the Seaside Heights roller coaster that was washed out into the Atlantic Ocean. It's the most iconic image of Sandy's wrath, and it's also an iconic image for Ford's achievement throughout his Frank Bascombe books — books that chart the whole wild roller coaster ride of life.

News and Reviews

Author Richard Ford Says 'Let Me Be Frank' About Aging And Dying

Superstorm Sandy Inspires Bleak, Poetic Landscapes In 'Let Me Be Frank'

Literary Fiction

Fiction

Something Rich And Strange

Selected Stories

by Ron Rash

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Hardcover, 434 pages, HarperCollins, $27.99, published November 4 2014 | purchase

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Ron Rash's writing is powerful, stripped down and very still: It takes you to a land apart, psychologically and geographically, since his fiction is set in Appalachia. Thirty-four of Rash's best short stories from the past 20 years have just been published in a collection called Something Rich and Strange. They are that, indeed. Some of these stories are cold to the bone; others are empathetic and even funny. A few are set during the Great Depression and the Civil War; most, though, take place in the present — an era when illegal ginseng plots and meth labs have supplanted the moonshine stills of an earlier generation, and family farms have given way to vacation home developments. Rash, however, is no nostalgic mountain minstrel bemoaning the loss of the good old days. If it's wood smoke and sylvan sentimentality you're yearning for, you'd be better off watching reruns of The Waltons. Rash's spectacular stories may originate in the peculiar soil of Appalachia, but their reach and their rewards are vast.

News and Reviews

These Tales Of Transformation Are Both 'Rich And Strange'

Set In Appalachia, This Rewarding Story Collection Is 'Rich And Strange'

Literary Fiction

Fiction

The Paying Guests

by Sarah Waters

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Hardcover, 566 pages, Penguin Group USA, $28.95, published September 16 2014 | purchase

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Sarah Waters' The Paying Guests is a knockout, which isn't a word any of her characters would use. Waters' novel opens in 1922: The Edwardian Age with its high collars and long skirts is dead; the Jazz Age is waiting to be born. At least, that's the case in the suburban backwater of London where Waters' main character, a 26-year-old spinster named Frances Wray, lives with her mother. The Wray women have decidedly come down in the world: Frances' two brothers were killed in World War I and her recently deceased papa made some bad investments. When the novel opens, the Wray women are awaiting the arrival of a necessary evil — lodgers — to help them cover the costs of keeping up their dark and drafty suburban villa. Shortly thereafter, an even more shocking intruder — sexual passion — steals into that house, and chaos erupts. The Paying Guests is one of those big novels you hate to see end — especially since you sense the end might be a very nasty one, indeed.

News and Reviews

After WWI, A Mother And Daughter Must Take In 'Paying Guests'

'Guests' Is A Story Of Mystery, Manners And Dramatic Love

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A Historic Backdrop Frames Forbidden Love In 'The Paying Guests'

Historical Fiction

Literary Fiction

Fiction

All The Light We Cannot See

by Anthony Doerr

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Hardcover, 531 pages, Simon & Schuster, $27, published May 6 2014 | purchase

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Anthony Doerr's magical adventure novel All The Light We Cannot See takes place in France and Germany in the years leading up to and during World War II. A blind French girl and her father become the hapless custodians of "The Sea of Flames," a rare (and accursed) diamond that Hitler desires for his personal treasure-trove. Meanwhile, a German orphan boy proves himself to be so ingenious at mastering higher-level mechanics that he is selected for an elite Nazi training program. Toward the end of the war, these two tempest-tossed adolescents are thrown together in a climactic twist of fate that no reader could possibly anticipate. Doerr refers to the work of Jules Verne and Alexandre Dumas, and his own sweeping plot and sumptuous language place Doerr in the same category as those master storytellers.

News and Reviews

World War II In A New 'Light': Empathy Found In Surprising Places

A Fractured Tale Of Time, War And A Really Big Diamond

Historical Fiction

Literary Fiction

Fiction

The Secret Place: A Novel

by Tana French

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Hardcover, 452 pages, Penguin Group USA, $27.95, published September 2 2014 | purchase

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The Secret Place, Tana French's fifth Dublin Murder Squad novel, pries open the world of teenagers at a girls' prep school, and the homicidal stew of hormones that lurks within could chill the toughest detective's blood. Detective Stephen Moran turns up at St. Kilda's School outside Dublin in search of answers to a cold case. One of the students has contacted Moran with teasing information about the death of Chris Harper, a Casanova from a nearby boys' school whose corpse was discovered on the grounds of St. Kilda's the previous year. French is sensitive to the look and manner of mean girls and the subtle tortures they so deftly inflict on their victims.

Mysteries, Thrillers & Crime

Fiction

Deep Down Dark

The Untold Stories of 33 Men Buried in a Chilean Mine, and the Miracle That Set Them Free

by Hector Tobar

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Hardcover, 309 pages, Farrar Straus & Giroux, $26, published October 7 2014 | purchase

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TitleDeep Down DarkSubtitleThe Untold Stories of 33 Men Buried in a Chilean Mine, and the Miracle That Set Them FreeAuthorHector Tobar

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It was a miracle watched around the world on live TV. On Oct. 13, 2010, 33 Chilean miners trapped for 69 days inside the San Jose mine were raised to the surface of the earth — resurrected — through a freshly drilled escape tunnel into which a capsule was lowered and raised by a giant crane. Before they escaped, all 33 men agreed to share the proceeds of any book or movie made about them. The movie is in the works. The book, written by Hctor Tobar and which came out in October, is called Deep Down Dark. As extreme adventure tales go, this one is a doozy — the equal, if the geographical inverse, of Into Thin Air, Jon Krakauer's 1997 blockbuster about the Mount Everest climbing disaster.

News and Reviews

The Incredible Story Of Chilean Miners Rescued From The 'Deep Down Dark'

Nonfiction

History & Society

Can't We Talk About Something More Pleasant?

A Memoir

by Roz Chast

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Hardcover, 228 pages, St Martins Pr, $28, published May 6 2014 | purchase

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Who would have expected that the most profound meditation yet written on the trials of caring for aging parents would arrive in the form of a graphic book? Chast's memoir is a masterpiece, describing the exhaustion and absurdity, the anger and heartbreak of this cosmic Life Switcheroo that so many of us boomer-generation readers are experiencing. From the sad looniness of having to clean out her failing parents' Brooklyn apartment (whose closets are stuffed with toasters — still in their boxes! — and old bank books) to the desperate anxieties over the astronomical costs of end-of-life care, Chast captures the totality of the "adult child of elderly parents" experience. Brava!

News and Reviews

Why Bring Up Death When We Could Talk About 'Something More Pleasant'?

A Cartoonist's Funny, Heartbreaking Take On Caring For Aging Parents

Nonfiction

Biography & Memoir

The Empire Of Necessity

Slavery, Freedom, and Deception in the New World

by Greg Grandin

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Hardcover, 360 pages, Henry Holt & Co, $30, published January 14 2014 | purchase

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In Fordlandia, historian Greg Grandin chronicled Henry Ford's attempt to establish a utopian version of small-town America in the middle of the Brazilian rain forest. In The Empire of Necessity, Grandin shows readers the hell of the slave trade. His touchstone is the true-life slave revolt in 1805 on a ship called the Tryal. (Herman Melville drew almost exclusively upon the story of the Tryal to write his own floating Gothic masterpiece of a short novel, Benito Cereno, in 1855.) Grandin tells the harrowing story of the 72 desperate slaves aboard the Tryal to fan out and explore the explosion of the slave trade in the Americas in the early 19th century. The Empire of Necessity is a wonder of power, precision and sheer reading pleasure about human horror and degradation.

News and Reviews

On This Spanish Slave Ship, Nothing Was As It Seemed

Nonfiction

History & Society

Maureen Corrigan's Favorite Books From Years Past

Book Reviews

Need A Read? Here Are Maureen Corrigan's Favorite Books Of 2013

Best Books Of 2012

10 Books To Help You Recover From A Tense 2012