What It’s Like to Be ...
Smart, respectful, not a moment wasted. It’s one of the best podcasts I’ve heard.
Smart, respectful, not a moment wasted. It’s one of the best podcasts I’ve heard.
In the can
In today’s Beetle Bailey, art imitates life.
Labor Day
“Commuters, who have just come off the train, waiting for the bus to go home, Lowell, Mass.” Photograph by Jack Delano. January 1941.
Obsolete jobs now obsolete
“For decades, the Social Security Administration has denied thousands of people disability benefits by claiming they could find jobs that have all but vanished from the U.S. economy — such occupations as nut sorter, pneumatic tube operator and microfilm processor. “On Monday, the agency will eliminate all but a handful of those unskilled jobs from a long-outdated database used to decide who gets benefits and who is denied, ending a practice that advocates have long decried as unfair and inaccurate.”
Your work age
A quiz from The Washington Post: “How to tell your real work age.”
Desk reboot
I traded in my old desk (a kitchen table) for an inexpensive standing desk, which meant that I needed to think about a new horizontal plane. Almost three weeks later, it’s still devoid of clutter.
Labor Day
A Jack Delano photograph.
A plumbing story
John Jeremiah Sullivan’s “Man Called Fran.”
Einstein Plumbing
“If I would be a young man again and had to decide how to make my living, I would not try to become a scientist or scholar or teacher. I would rather choose to be a plumber or a peddler.”
“All-In”
A look at the conditions of teaching and striking at a regional university in Illinois: “All-In.” It’s a point of view, of course, but it’s one that grounded in fact.
Nut sorter, dowel inspector, egg processor
The Washington Post reports that the Social Security Administration evaluates disability claims by using a Dictionary of Occupational Titles, last updated in 1977, to determine what kinds of work a person with a disability might be able to do. But many kinds of work described in the dictionary would be difficult or impossible for anyone, with or without a disability — because the work itself is obsolete or nearly so. See the first six words of the post.
Reality-distortion fields
The difference between Steve Jobs’s reality-distortion field and Elizabeth Holmes’s: Jobs made people believe they could do hard things; Holmes made people believe she was doing hard things.
Labor Day
“Masses of women workers”: a Life magazine photograph.
Barbara Ehrenreich (1941–2022)
I can recommend Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America (2001) and Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream (2005).
A place for everything . . .
A cluttered desk.
A waitress speaks
The diner scene in Five Easy Pieces made me think of Dolores Dante, from Studs Terkel’s Working.
Studs Terkel and DFW
Terkel’s observations about the waitress in Five East Pieces remind me of David Foster Wallace’s imagining of the life of a shopper waiting on line in a supermarket.
224 205
Jen Psaki held more formal press briefings during her fifteen months as White House press secretary (224) than the defeated former president’s press secretaries held in four years (205).
Not lonely, not a bird
A ploughman speaks. From Ronald Blythe’s Akenfield.
“I began in a world without time”
From Akenfield.
“The blue rode well in the corn”
From Akenfield: Jubal Merton, sixty, wheelwright and blacksmith.
“Caught in the old ways”
From Akenfield: Christopher Falconer, thirty-nine, gardener.
Rubbish
From Akenfield: Leonard Thompson, seventy-one, farm-worker.
From Akenfield
Davie, born in 1887, “who cannot read or write a word and who insists that he has nothing to say.”
Teaching for free
Prompted by the now-infamous listing for an unpaid teaching position at UCLA, The New York Times looks at the realities of academic labor: “The unspoken secret had been fleetingly exposed: Free labor is a fact of academic life.”
Telephone FTW?
James Surowiecki suggests that the world of work bring back the telephone.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (1934–2021)
I heartily recommend Csikszentmihalyi’s Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (1990).
New directions in academia
“Faculty and staff from around campus are invited to sign up to assist in the dining halls!”
Labor Day
A poster thanking healthcare workers.
Labor Day
A welder wearing Rabin gloves.