The Specialist
Casey Miner’s The Specialist is a lively, eye-opening podcast that focuses on unusual occupations.
Tom Jones’s sense of purpose
Tom Jones, Sir Tom Jones, on having underwear thrown at him on stage: “That’s not why I was there. I was there to sing.”
Robert Walser: thinking while working
“Good God, how little is being asked of me.”
Peter Drucker on integrity in leadership
“No one should ever be appointed to a senior position unless top management is willing to have his or her character serve as the model for subordinates.”
Labor Day
A Jack Delano photograph.
Life at Gravity Payments
In April, Dan Price announced that he would be raising his company’s minimum salary to $70,000. But things aren’t working out well.
Recently updated
An aerial view of my desk.
2015 workspaces
App by app, the machine subsumes everything. All your desk are belong to us!
What you mean “we,” Terry Gross?
“This is Fresh Air. I’m Terry Gross. Remember when you first saw a self-checkout aisle at a grocery store? We use them all the time now without giving much thought to the fact that they're doing work real people used to do.”
David Letterman on his show’s end
“There will be reasonable, adult acceptance of transition. Or I will turn to a life of crime.”
An adjunct instructor’s student becomes an adjunct instructor
Carmen Maria Machado writes about learning from an adjunct instructor and becoming an adjunct instructor.
Erik Spiekermann on “obsessive attention to detail”
“Unless you are obsessed by what you’re doing, you will not be doing it well enough.”
A postcard from my future self
Writing to one’s future self may seem to you (as it does to me) awfully corny. Getting a note from one’s future self is another story.
Sharpening yourself
I like these words of a Mitsubishi executive.
Labor Day
At the Library of Congress, a restorer at work.
Here’s just one reason why someone might reconsider adjunct teaching
“‘Adjunct’ is a strange term: what’s adjunct is supplemental, not essential. Yet so-called adjunct faculty are now a substantial majority of college faculty.”
Reinvention and wheels
“Never met a wheel I didn't want to reinvent”: designer and developer Shaun Inman.
Zinsser on work
“It may seem perverse that I compare my writing to plumbing, an occupation not regarded as high-end. But to me all work is equally honorable, all crafts an astonishment when they are performed with skill and self-respect.”
Labor Day
A Margaret Bourke-White photograph.
Aaron Draplin on “good enough”
“I’m not gonna let it go knowing that I could’ve made it better.”
Study = hard work
“There are many royal roads, but there is no royal road to learning.”
Sad sight of the day
Paying employees to get customers to do the work that those same employees could do.
“An eccentric, if not a subversive”
A wise observation from Bill Watterson, from a 1990 commencement address.
The front end
It is still called “the front end.”
Creeping credentialism
Here’s a law firm that won’t hire anyone, for any position, who doesn’t have a college degree.
An on-screen desk
Matt Thomas writes about the on-screen representation of “what is often referred to as knowledge work.”
College and the trades
A philosopher and mechanic and college and the trades,
Matthew Crawford on making judgments
“The tacit dimension of knowledge puts limits on the reduction of jobs to rule following.”
Matthew Crawford on problems
A philosopher and mechanic on finding problems.
“No job is overwhelming if”
Good advice from Helen and Scott Nearing