Joker Carving His Own Freedom: Foucault, Hawk Tuah, The Panopticon

Arthur Fleck's laughter in the film Joker (2019) was disturbing because it feels forced from him by a world that cannot contain or understand his pain (1). He confesses at one point, "I just don't want to feel so bad anymore," as if trying to explain an emotional burden no one can see much like so many of us who suffers from anxiety, depression, or with neurodivergent minds. From the outset, this involuntary laughter marks him as someone who does not fit the categories that doctors and social workers want to impose on him. He laughs at inappropriate times, in inappropriate places, and for reasons that he himself seems unable to articulate. Yet this inability to conform, to align his affect with socially approved emotions, is part of what makes his character resonate. It recalls what Michel Foucault diagnosed in the modern era: the ways in which power operates through careful observation, classification, and normalization (2). In Joker, the audience witnesses how easily an individual who cannot be disciplined into normality becomes an object of pity, confusion, and eventually, fear.

In a crowded bus, Arthur Fleck's laughter fills the cramped space, reverberating off the metal walls and blending with the ambient noise of the city.

The world Fleck plays in resembles a broken stage. By around the 7:50 mark in the film, he has already expressed his desperation and has been laughed at while trying to entertain a child on a bus (3). His involuntary laughter creates a bridge between tragedy and mockery. By the time his mother casually dismisses his dream of being a comedian ("Don't you have to be funny to be a comedian?"), the viewer sees how every attempt to craft a stable identity falls apart. The hospital scene at 29:00, where he inadvertently drops a gun, or Thomas Wayne's contempt for the struggling population at around the 39:00 mark, illustrate how oppressive social structures refuse him a coherent role (4). The environment is saturated with despair and humiliation.

The imposing structure of the panopticon loomed above, its circular design allowing a solitary guard to observe the prisoners within, their faces marked by a mix of resignation and defiance.

Foucault's Discipline and Punish describes the shift from overt violence to subtler, internalized mechanisms of discipline. In modern society, power functions like a panopticon, maintaining a state of conscious and permanent visibility (5). Social media and digital platforms now amplify this surveillance. Each piece of content: every video, post, meme - becomes an examination, a data point. The algorithm's unseen eye watches, classifies, and determines what is worthy of attention and what should be buried. Fleck's laughter, had it occurred in our current digital zeitgeist, might appear on someone's feed as an oddity for a moment before being categorized, tagged, and eventually monetized or discarded (6). This parallels the way all forms of resistance risk being converted into a commodity.

We see this dynamic today in online spaces, where absurd humor--especially among younger generations--resists clear interpretation. Consider the Dadaists in post-World War I Europe, artists who rejected the rationality and order that had failed so spectacularly (7). They produced nonsense poetry, collage, and performance art that refused to convey stable meaning. In their refusal to "make sense," the Dadaists exposed the absurdity of the larger system. Today's TikTok creators and meme-makers channel a similar logic (8). The nonsense they produce--jump cuts, random audio overlays, unpredictable juxtapositions--mirrors that earlier anti-rational impulse. By doing so, they create micro-spheres of resistance, moments that slip out of neat categorization. In these fleeting bursts, we find echoes of the Joker's laughter: a refusal of coherent narrative that cannot be easily harnessed for profit.

Shown here are a set of Dadaism images from Post War Germany/Weimar Republic that are aburdist features are similar to what short form videos produce today on Tiktok

But modern capitalism is agile. As soon as something appears truly resistant, it risks being integrated into the cycle of production, marketing, and consumption. This process is evident in what has come to be called the Hawk Tuah phenomenon (9). Hawk Tuah began as an online sensation, someone seemingly authentic and outside the polished norms of influencer culture. She built a brand that felt raw, even rebellious. Yet before long, she turned her sudden fame into a crypto scheme, "rugging" millions from her followers and then disappearing. The disappointment and rage that followed reveal a pattern: what starts as a break in the system's logic can quickly become a product to sell. Authenticity is commodified, marketed, and eventually exploited (10).

Commentators like emily.anne.g on Threads have noted that the Hawk Tuah brand became a form of merchandise--something that began as a voice of authenticity was reduced to products and endorsements (11). Once trust was established, the pivot to fraud was both shocking and strangely predictable. In an environment saturated with surveillance and exploitation, what people crave is something real. But this craving itself becomes valuable. Some have argued that we live in a cultural moment that is particularly permissive of scams, perhaps because so many feel desperate for quick relief in a precarious economy. Post-COVID inflation, rising costs of essentials, and general despair mirror historical conditions such as those in post-WWII Germany (12). In both cases, systemic breakdowns create fertile ground for scams and deception. If Fleck's laughter is the sound of a system failing to heal its wounded, then Hawk Tuah's scam is that same system's logic turned inward--an opportunistic strike that plays on collective vulnerability.

Inflationary data from 2016 to 2024

Foucault argued that power is not just repressive but productive. It creates norms, truths, and even objects of resistance. The Hawk Tuah phenomenon shows how the system can produce the conditions for its own critique and then reabsorb that critique for profit. When resistance becomes "trendy," it loses its capacity to unsettle. It is no longer a laughter that baffles and disturbs. It's a branded slogan on a T-shirt or a memecoin. As soon as people "get it," it ceases to threaten. This is why the Joker's final declaration : "You wouldn't get it", resonates. Once the system understands and categorizes a form of resistance, it can neutralize it.

TikTok's absurd content tries to avoid this fate. Users embrace incomprehensibility as a strategic maneuver. When everything serious and meaningful can be packaged and sold, the only way to resist might be to refuse meaning altogether. The more nonsensical the performance, the harder it is to monetize. Yet this is a delicate dance. Absurdity can be momentarily liberating, just as Fleck's laughter can momentarily unsettle. But the algorithm continuously learns. Absurdities become genres, genres become marketing niches, and soon we have companies selling "authentic chaos" as a brand. The cycle repeats, each time pushing content creators to find new forms of illegibility that resist interpretation.

In Discipline and Punish, Foucault notes that "where there is power, there is resistance." Resistance is embedded in the networks of power themselves. This suggests that no matter how efficiently the algorithm tries to categorize us, some expressions will still exceed its grasp. Arthur Fleck's transformation into the Joker represents a trajectory from victim to an agent of chaos. By the film's end, he discovers that his life is not a tragedy but a comedy. This twist acknowledges that what truly unsettles the system is not a coherent, rational protest, but a form of defiance that defies understanding. Chaos eludes neat storylines.

Post war Germany inflationary data

This tension is historically grounded. Consider the legacy of artists like Otto Dix or Hannah Höch in the Weimar Republic. They produced unsettling and challenging works that reflected the trauma and fragmentation of post-war society. Their art resisted easy interpretation, revealing the cracks in the Enlightenment's faith in rationality and progress. Today's meme culture, shaped by the pressures of late capitalism, echoes this legacy. Just as Dadaists confronted a Europe devastated by war and disillusion, Gen Z and others grapple with ecological crises, wealth disparities, and endless streams of digital surveillance. The result is a culture that often responds with layers of irony, nonsense, and forms of expression that deliberately resist stable meaning.

The economic pressures that have recently fueled scams and frauds are part of a larger tapestry of discontent. After the COVID-19 pandemic, hyperinflation and corporate-driven price hikes have left many struggling. Instability, as in the Weimar era, makes people vulnerable to simplistic promises and short-term solutions. Scammers exploit this vulnerability. Hawk Tuah's crypto rug pull can be viewed as the dark mirror of the same forces that push some creators into nonsensical art: both are responses to a system that leaves individuals feeling powerless. One reaction is to exploit, the other is to evade classification through chaos.

FTC Data on investment scams in the last 3 years.

The Joker film reminds us that empathy and horror can coexist. At about 1:15:00 into the movie, we learn that Fleck's entire sense of love and support was a hallucination. Medication withdrawal leaves him with nothing but raw emotion. "I haven't been happy my entire fucking life," he confesses. He can produce laughter, but no conventional jokes. His humor is pure affect, stripped of the social contract that makes jokes intelligible to others. The laughter he offers is not a product, not a performance meant to please. It's an exhalation of psychic pain. In digital spaces, people sometimes produce similarly raw content: screams into the void, nonsensical rants that algorithmic logic cannot fully parse. These are not coherent critiques of neoliberalism, but desperate attempts to exist outside its grasp.

The Joker's chaos inspires imitators, but his final understanding that others "wouldn't get it" highlights how resistance is neutralized once it is understood. In a digital world where everything can be monitored and commodified, the challenge is to remain uncategorizable, to constantly shift and disrupt attempts at classification. Neither Fleck's unsettling laughter nor TikTok's absurd memes offer a coherent ideology; they defy easy interpretation and thus resist being neatly packaged as products. Even phenomena like Hawk Tuah's brief authenticity can be swiftly turned into scams, showing how easily subversion becomes merchandise. Yet by embracing confusion, nonsense, and the refusal to "make sense," we carve out small spaces of freedom, scrambling the signals the system relies upon. This strategy--living in the gap between understanding and confusion--lets us hold on to a form of human expression the system "wouldn't get."

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References

Reference: Power/Knowledge, Quote

1a. In contrast to the great knowledge of the inquiry organized in the middle of the Middle Ages through the appropriation of the judicial system by the state—consisting in assembling the means to reactualize events through testimony—a new knowledge of a completely different type emerged. It is characterized by supervision and examination, organized around the norm, through the supervisory control of individuals throughout their existence. This examination was the basis of the power, the form of knowledge-power, that gave rise not to the great sciences of observation, but to what we call the "human sciences": psychiatry, psychology, sociology.

Source Essay

Ref. No., Source

1. Arthur Fleck's laughter in the film Joker (2019)
   Cambridge BJPsych Bulletin - Analysing Joker

2. Foucault diagnosed in the modern era
   Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison

3. Fleck being laughed at on the bus
   Psychiatry & Psychotherapy Podcast - Joker Analysis

4. Thomas Wayne's contempt for the struggling population
   Clue Chronicles - Joker's Psychological Transformation

5. Power functions like a panopticon
   Foucault, Discipline and Punish

6. Fleck's laughter in our digital zeitgeist
   Stanford Philosophy on Foucault and Benthan's Panopticon

7. Dadaists rejecting rationality
   Art Now Thus - Gen Z and Dadaism

8. TikTok creators channel a similar logic
   New Yorker - Dada Era of Internet Memes

9. Hawk Tuah phenomenon
   BBC - Hawk Tuah Crypto Fraud

10. Authenticity is commodified
    Screen Rant - Mental Illness in Joker

11. Commentators on Hawk Tuah's pivot
    Emily Ann's Critique of Hawk Tuah

12. Economic pressures post-COVID
    AdventHealth - Joker's Mental Health Depiction

Recommended Books

1. Michel Foucault - Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison

2. Mark Fisher - Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?

3. Sianne Ngai - Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting

4. Hans Fallada - Alone in Berlin

5. Hannah Arendt - Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil

The Scattered Mind of Loss: Joan Didion's Grief Architecture

I first read "The Year of Magical Thinking" while sitting in hospital waiting triage, that liminal space where time refuses to behave normally. It seemed fitting. But this re-reflection was inspired by the death of my great uncle last week. When my father called with the news, my mind immediately jumped to a memory from when I was five: my uncle taking me writing on a small boat in China, the gentle rock of the water, the scratch of pencil on paper. It made me re-anchor my notions of grief, the way Joan Didion's masterwork about grief moves the way the mind moves in crisis: in spirals, in fragments, in sudden sharp moments of clarity followed by fog.

What strikes me now, returning to the text months later, is how precisely Didion captures not just grief's emotional landscape but its cognitive one. The way loss literally changes how we think. Her narrative mirrors what neuroscience tells us about the ADHD brain—that tendency toward fractured attention, unexpected connections, time-blindness. But in Didion's hands, these aren't symptoms to be managed. They're literary devices that capture something essential about how loss reconstructs consciousness itself.

Watch how she moves: One moment she's examining a medical study about grief's somatic symptoms, the next she's fixated on the symbolic weight of her husband John's shoes left by their bed. A phone message becomes a portal to panic. A medical form transforms into an existential crisis about the word "widow." This isn't disorganization—it's an exact replication of how loss disrupts our mental architecture.

"Grief has no distance," Didion writes. "Grief comes in waves, paroxysms, sudden apprehensions that weaken the knees and blind the eyes and obliterate the dailiness of life." The structure of her sentences mirrors these very waves. The way each thought triggers another, each memory opens a door to ten more rooms of remembering.

Consider how she handles time itself. In one moment, she's wondering about Pacific time zones: "Was there time to go back? Could we have a different ending on Pacific time?" The next, she's lost in memories of "planning meetings" that were really just excuses for lunch at Michael's in Santa Monica. Then suddenly she's citing psychiatric studies about bereavement. The effect is dizzying yet precise—exactly how grief feels.

Her journalist's mind tries to create order through research, through quotations, through medical terminology. Yet these attempts at intellectualization only highlight grief's resistance to rationality. "They live by symbols," she writes of the bereaved, immediately including herself. "They read meaning into the barrage of spam on the unused computer, the delete key that stops working, the imagined abandonment in the decision to replace it." The repetition matters. Everything becomes both mundane and sacred: phone numbers taped by telephones, shoes left by doorways, coffee cups half-finished.

One of the book's most haunting passages comes when Didion discovers she's been mindlessly turning pages in John's dictionary: "When I realized what I had done I was stricken: what word had he last looked up, what had he been thinking?" The moment captures perfectly how grief transforms ordinary objects into relics, how it makes both everything and nothing significant.

This is what makes Didion's fractured narrative so powerful—it's not just telling us about grief, it's showing us how grief actually works in the mind. Not as a clean progression through famous five stages, but as a chaotic reconstruction of reality itself. The answering machine still plays his voice. The dictionary still holds his last query. The shoes still wait by the door. Time refuses to move forward in straight lines.

What's remarkable is how Didion achieves this effect not through experimental typography or avant-garde techniques, but through the careful documentation of how grief actually unfolds in the mind. Her background as a journalist serves not as a shield against emotion but as a lens that magnifies grief's absurdities. The more precisely she observes, the more surreal everything becomes.

"Marriage is memory, marriage is time," she writes. And then immediately complicates it: "Marriage is not only time: it is also, paradoxically, the denial of time." For forty years, she saw herself through John's eyes. She didn't age. This year, for the first time since she was twenty-nine, she saw herself through the eyes of others. The observation is both painfully personal and universally true—how we construct ourselves through the gaze of those we love, how their absence forces a kind of second loss: the loss of the self they helped create.

The rational mind grasps at symbols, at signs, at patterns that might make sense of the senseless. "Survivors look back and see omens, messages they missed," she observes. "They remember the tree that died, the gull that splattered onto the hood of the car." Even this observation becomes part of the pattern-seeking, the desperate retroactive attempt to create meaning where there may be none.

I find myself thinking about how we talk about attention disorders—that tendency to notice everything, to be unable to filter signal from noise. In grief, Didion suggests, we all become this way. Every detail takes on potential significance. The mind refuses to perform its usual task of sorting relevant from irrelevant information. A receipt from a shared meal becomes a holy text. A casual comment transforms into prophecy.

"Not only did I not believe that 'bad luck' had killed John and struck Quintana but in fact I believed precisely the opposite: I believed that I should have been able to prevent whatever happened." The sentence itself mirrors the mind's desperate attempt to maintain control through logic, even as it reveals the ultimate futility of such attempts.

This is where Didion's genius lies—in her ability to document not just the facts of grief but its actual cognitive process. When she checks her work for publication, she finds "simple errors of transcription, names and dates wrong." Even her professional competence, her ability to verify facts—the very foundation of her journalistic identity—becomes unreliable.

"Would I ever be right again?" she asks. "Could I ever again trust myself not to be wrong?"

The questions hang in the air, unanswerable.

Writers are supposed to impose order on chaos. Instead, Didion lets the chaos speak. Her scattered narrative ultimately coheres into something more true than any linear telling could achieve. Through her ADHD-like style—the way she follows each thought down its rabbit hole, the way she moves between microscopic focus and vast emptiness, between the weight of a left-behind dictionary and the weightlessness of absence—she captures something essential about loss: how it forces us to live in multiple timeframes simultaneously, how it makes both everything and nothing significant, how it destroys our normal filtering systems while creating new, stranger ones.

Loss fractures language itself. Didion's attention skips across time like a stone across water, each touch point creating ripples that spread and intersect until the surface of memory becomes so disturbed that it's impossible to see what lies beneath. Yet still she tries to map these disturbances with the precision of a scientist and the obsession of a grieving wife who believes that if she can just understand the pattern, just decode the meaning, just organize the chaos into something comprehensible, she might find her way back to the moment before everything changed.

The answering machine still plays his voice.

This detail haunts me most. Not just the fact of it, but how Didion handles it: "The fact that it was his in the first place was arbitrary, having to do with who was around on the day the answering machine last needed programming, but if I needed to retape it now I would do so with a sense of betrayal." The precision of her observation—that acknowledgment of arbitrariness colliding with the weight of meaning we assign to such accidents—captures something fundamental about how grief transforms the ordinary world.

We anticipate grief wrong, she tells us. "We anticipate needing to steel ourselves for the moment: will I be able to greet people, will I be able to leave the scene, will I be able even to get dressed that day? We have no way of knowing that this will not be the issue."

What we don't anticipate is the endless succession of ordinary moments that follow. The way the world keeps insisting on its own continuance. The way time refuses to stop even when it feels like it should.

"I find myself wondering," she writes, "with no sense of illogic, if it had also happened in Los Angeles." This is grief thinking—simultaneously razor-sharp and completely unmoored from normal logic. The journalist's mind keeps working, keeps observing, even as it grapples with impossible questions about time zones and alternate endings.

She moves between analytical distance and raw immediacy without warning. The professional writer's observant eye collides with the widow's visceral experience, creating a kind of double vision where everything is both fact and feeling, both reportage and raw nerve ending.

Facts dissolve.

Time refuses linear progression, instead moving in spirals and sudden drops. Her attention catches on details, snags on memories, ruptures into research, then suddenly coheres into devastating clarity: "Marriage is memory, marriage is time."

Everything means too much. Nothing means enough.

Didion's narrative mirrors this impossible balance, shifting between microscopic focus and vast emptiness. Between the weight of a left-behind dictionary and the weightlessness of absence. Between the precise notation of medical terminology and the imprecise territory of loss that no terminology can adequately map.

"We are imperfect mortal beings," she writes, "aware of that mortality even as we push it away, failed by our very complication, so wired that when we mourn our losses we also mourn, for better or for worse, ourselves. As we were. As we are no longer. As we will one day not be at all."

This is perhaps why the book resonates so deeply—it's not just a memoir of loss but a perfect capture of how consciousness fragments and reforms around absence. Through her scattered attention, her obsessive returns to certain moments, her sudden diversions into research or memory, Didion shows us how grief actually works in the mind. Not as a clean progression through stages, but as a chaotic reconstruction of reality itself.

Some stories can only be told through broken patterns.

The dictionary still holds his last query.

The shoes still wait by the door.

When we talk about attention disorders, we often focus on what's missing—the ability to filter, to stay on task, to maintain what neurotypical minds consider "normal" focus. But what if these different patterns of attention sometimes let us see what others miss? What if, in grief, we all become radical noticers, unable to maintain the comfortable fiction that some details matter more than others?

Didion's innovation isn't just stylistic. By allowing her narrative to mirror grief's cognitive patterns—that tendency toward fractured attention, unexpected connections, time-blindness—she achieves something remarkable. She shows us how loss doesn't just change what we think about, but how we think.

I keep returning to that moment with the dictionary. "What word had he last looked up, what had he been thinking?" The questions themselves reveal how grief transforms us into detectives of the ordinary, obsessive archivists of the everyday. We become collectors of details that meant nothing until suddenly they meant everything.

This is perhaps why "The Year of Magical Thinking" feels so essential now, in our era of constant documentation. We live in a world where every moment can be preserved, every conversation saved, every photo tagged and stored. Yet Didion's narrative suggests that memory—especially memory shaped by loss—follows its own strange logic. No archive can capture what she calls "the unending absence that follows, the void, the very opposite of meaning, the relentless succession of moments during which we will confront the experience of meaninglessness itself."

Yet through her fractured attention, her willingness to let the narrative spiral and double back and chase down seemingly random connections, Didion creates something more true than any straightforward account could achieve. She shows us how grief makes poets of us all—not in the sense of crafting beautiful language, but in that more fundamental way: seeing connections others miss, finding meaning in the seemingly meaningless, reading omens in ordinary things.

The book ends where it began, with time refusing to behave normally. But we've learned to read differently. We understand now why the narrative had to scatter, had to spiral, had to resist traditional chronology. We see how those broken patterns create their own kind of sense.

In the end, what Didion gives us isn't just a memoir of loss but a new way of seeing. Through her scattered attention, she reveals how grief changes not just what we notice, but the very mechanics of noticing itself. She shows us how loss makes strangers of us in our own minds, even as it sharpens our attention to life's smallest details.

The shoes still wait by the door. The dictionary still holds its secrets. The answering machine still carries his voice through time.

But now we understand why these details matter. We see how grief transforms the ordinary world into a landscape of symbols, how loss makes hyperrealists of us all. Through Didion's fractured lens, we learn to read absence itself.

Some stories can only be told through broken patterns. Some truths can only be seen through scattered light.

Read Along: Infinite Jest, P. 8 - 13

Today’s notes!

TLDR: Hal takes us back, sort of, and talks for for a min before everyone freaked out as thought he turned into a monster or something

Loc 296 | Highlight

"funny what you don't recall."

Ideas:

1. When Hal think back to when he was maybe 5 years old, it prefixes the following setup. Sets up memory as unreliable - both in terms of what we forget and what we "remember" that might not be true. Later I call this as Anti Proustian, where Proust is clear, here it is a mess.

2. Meta-commentary on how we interpret past memories through present understanding. I had a hand written note: "example of our interpretations", how interpretations dictate existence.

3. First layer of narrative unreliability - opening scene reliability now questionable

Loc 299 | Highlight

"gas-driven thing that roared and snorted and bucked and he remembers seemed to propel the Moms rather than vice versa,"

Ideas:

1. Grammar shifts signal altered states/memory distortion (handwritten note: "diff grammer")

2. Machine description mirrors communication breakdown from opening scene

3. Power dynamics reversed (machine controlling mother) - hints at larger theme of control/lack of control

Loc 303 | Highlight

"He says I was around five and crying and was vividly red in the cold spring air."

Ideas:

1. Proustian memory inversion - triggered by decay rather than pleasure (handwritten: proustian inversion! )

2. Shift to third person suggests dissociation from memory, really primes the reader to be aware of when to change perspectives and even point of view.

3. "vividly red" works as both physical and emotional state descriptor

Loc 316 | Highlight

"I had stopped crying, he remembers, and simply stood there, the size and shape of a hydrant, in red PJ's with attached feet, holding out the mold, seriously, like the report of some kind of audit."

Ideas:

1. Anxiety's effect on memory formation/suppression

2. Child performing adult behavior ("audit") while in childish clothing (pjs with attached feets, Boss Baby)

3. Mold as symbol of decay/corruption juxtaposed with childhood innocence

Loc 319 | Highlight

"she yells in Orin's second and more fleshed-out recollection,"

Ideas:

1. Multiple versions of truth - "fleshed-out" suggests artificial construction

2. Memory as collaborative/competitive narrative between family members

3. "Second" recollection implies constructed rather than authentic memory

Loc 321 | Highlight

"while O. gaped at his first real sight of adult hysteria."

Ideas:

1. Loss of parental infallibility moment (handwritten note: what were some of your first hysteria or extreme memories. )

2. "Real" suggesting previous encounters with hysteria weren't authentic

3. Moment of childhood innocence breaking down

Loc 324 | Highlight

"her footprints Native-American-straight,"

Ideas:

1. Cultural stereotype used as precision marker (handwritten note: "weird flex")

2. Mother's controlled response vs. previous hysteria

3. Linear thinking vs. emotional chaos

Loc 340 | Highlight

""DeLint at the big man’s arm: ‘Stop it!’ ‘I am not what you see and hear.’ Distant sirens. A crude half nelson. Forms at the door. A young Hispanic woman holds her palm against her mouth, looking. ‘I’m not,’ I say."

Ideas:

1. I have no idea what is going on, is he having a panic attack? Is he a Lovecraftian monster?!

2. Once again another tone shift, and it reminds me of Halloween 1978, when they revealed that it was a kid in a mask that did that. I'm not saying Hal is a monster, I'm saying it has that same level of surprise.

3. So far, very fun.

---

---

Highlights

Loc 324 | Highlight

"her footprints Native-American-straight,"

Note: weird flex wallace

Loc 321 | Highlight

"while O. gaped at his first real sight of adult hysteria."

Note: what is your earliest memories of a hysteria

Loc 319 | Highlight

"she yells in Orin's second and more fleshed-out recollection,"

Note: same or diff recollsctions

Loc 316 | Highlight

"I had stopped crying, he remembers, and simply stood there, the size and shape of a hydrant, in red PJ's with attached feet, holding out the mold, seriously, like the report of some kind of audit. O. says his memory diverges at this point, probably as a result of anxiety."

Note: anxiety causes memory suropression. psychology ref

Loc 309 | Highlight

"and in that most maternal of reflexes she, who feared and loathed more than anything spoilage and filth, reached to take whatever her baby held out — as in how many used heavy Kleenex, spit-back candies, wads of chewed-out gum in how many theaters, airports, backseats, tournament lounges?"

Note: intense maternal instinct detail

Loc 303 | Highlight

"He says I was around five and crying and was vividly red in the cold spring air."

Note: inverted proustian recollesction thats why popsicle reference

Loc 303 | Highlight

"I was saying something over and over; he couldn't make it out until our mother saw me and shut down the tiller, ears ringing, and came over to see what I was holding out. This turned out to have been a large patch of mold"

Note: communication breakdown again

Loc 299 | Highlight

"gas-driven thing that roared and snorted and bucked and he remembers seemed to propel the Moms rather than vice versa,"

Note: diff grammer as an altered state description

Loc 298 | Highlight

"The garden's area was a rough rectangle laid out with Popsicle sticks and twine."

Note: childhood memory details

Loc 297 | Highlight

"eldest brother Orin"

Note: first brother mention

Loc 296 | Highlight

"Our first home, in the suburb of Weston, which I barely remember —"

Note: memory setup

Loc 296 | Highlight

"funny what you don't recall."

Note: this is why this paragraph is funky. its an example of our interpretations of our memories in the past

Loc 293 | Highlight Continued

what lmao .

disconnect between hal and narration

Loc 293 | Highlight

"I cannot make myself understood. 'I am not just a jock,' I say slowly. Distinctly. 'My transcript for the last year might have been dickied a bit, maybe, but that was to get me over a rough spot. The grades prior to that are de moi.' My eyes are closed; the room is silent. 'I cannot make myself understood, now.' I am speaking slowly and distinctly. 'Call it something I ate.'"

Note: first time hearing hal talk. hmm. the narration is very different.

Loc 290 | Highlight

"Mr. Incandenza, Hal, please just explain to me why we couldn't be accused of using you, son. Why nobody could come and say to us, why, look here, University of Arizona, here you are using a boy for just his body, a boy so shy and withdrawn he won't speak up for himself, a jock with doctored marks and a store-bought application."

Note: ironic.

Loc 288 | Highlight

"The yellow Dean has leaned so far forward that his tie is going to have a horizontal dent from the table-edge, his face sallow and kindly and no-shit-whatever:"

Note: physical description shows power dynamic

Loc 283 | Highlight

"The sort of all-defensive game Schtitt used to have me play: the best defense:"

Note: first mention of tennis coach/style

Loc 277 | Highlight

"... a bright,"

Note: cutoff dialogue technique

Loc 273 | Highlight

"Alpha of the pack here and way more effeminate than he'd seemed at first, standing hip-shot with a hand on his waist, walking with a roll to his shoulders, jingling change as he pulls up his pants as he slides into the chair still warm from C.T.'s bottom, crossing his legs in a way that inclines him well into my personal space, so that I can see multiple eyebrow-tics and capillary webs in the oysters below his eyes and smell fabric-softener and the remains of a breath-mint turned sour."

Note: salesmen

Loc 270 | Highlight

"but they are mine; de moi."

Note: french flex

Loc 270 | Highlight

"not quite on the application's instructed subject of Most Meaningful Educational Experience Ever."

Note: more academic bs

Loc 266 | Highlight

"— that we've known in processing several prior applications through Coach White's office that the Enfield School is operated, however impressively, by close relations of first your brother, who I can still remember the way White's predecessor Maury Klamkin wooed that kid, so that grades' objectivity can be all too easily called into question —"

Note: narration keeps interrupting the head with hals monologues. missing what the admin said . but nothing matters at the end

Read Along: Infinite Jest, P. 3 - 8 ….

1. Introduction to Hal and Initial Observations

- Quote: “You are Harold Incandenza, eighteen, date of secondary-school graduation approximately one month from now, attending the Enfield Tennis Academy, Enfield, Massachusetts, a boarding school, where you reside.”

- Thoughts:

- Sets a formal, almost detached tone.

- Hal’s identity is defined by external labels—his school, age, status — sounds like Stewie Griffen. Lmao

- Reflects the weight of expectations and pressures he faces, particularly in academia and sports.

2. Meta-Irony in Reading Hal’s Perspective

- Quote: “The issues my office faces with the application materials on file from you, Hal, involve some test scores!… The Admissions staff is looking at standardized test scores from you that are, as I’m sure you know and can explain, are, shall we say… subnormal.?”

- Thoughts:

- Hal’s analysis traps both him and the reader in loops of self-reflection.

- Wallace uses this “meta” style to make us overthink the process of reading, almost poking fun at it.

- Creates a shared experience with Hal—our own “trap” of trying to over-interpret every layer. I need to start counting the traps, it’s at least one to two per page so far.

3. Academic Satire and Hyper-Specialized Essays

- Quote: “The monograph’s length application is just extra essays that they don’t need, such as our neoclassical assumption and contemporary prescriptive grammar, the implications of post-Fourier transformation for a holographically mimetic cinema, the emergence of heroic stasis of broadcast entertainment.”

- Thoughts:

- Ridicules academia’s tendency toward jargon and intellectual posturing, while also being astute and acuity aware of ivory tower absurdity

- Satire on how academia often values complexity and exclusivity over clarity or purpose.

- Wallace points out the absurdity in trying too hard to sound intelligent or exclusive.

4. Dean’s Authority vs Hal’s Vulnerability

- Quote: “The dean with the flat yellow face has leaned forward, his lips drawn back from his teeth in what I see as concern.”

- Thoughts:

- Illustrates the power imbalance between Hal and the dean—a closed, authoritative figure vs. Hal’s fragile self.

- Hal feels exposed and scrutinized, echoing his larger struggle with self-doubt.

- Captures the intense, often dehumanizing pressure of institutional judgment.

5. Deadpan Humor and Exaggerated Normalcy

- Quote: “C.I. has crossed his arms casually; their triceps’ flesh is webbed with mottle in the air-conditioned sunlight.”

- Thoughts:

- Hal’s deadpan observation makes an ordinary moment feel absurdly serious.

- Highlights Wallace’s humor in turning trivial details into sources of exaggerated tension.

- Shows the contrast between how characters perceive small actions and the overblown significance Hal assigns them.

6. Over-Analysis Trap and Meta-Reflection

- Quote: “The coach, in a slight accent neither British nor Australian, is telling C.T. that the whole application-interface process, while usually just a pleasant formality, is probably best accentuated by letting the applicant speak up for himself.”

- Thoughts:

- Wallace plays with word choice to make readers overthink (“accentuate” vs. “facilitate”). While constantly superimposing super formal speech with flourishes.

- Satire on how easily we can fall into obsessive interpretation, even over single words. What I talked about traps above.

- Reflects Hal’s (and perhaps my) inability to simply accept things at face value.

7. Quadrivium-Trivium Model and Academic Prestige

- Quote: “It’s focused on the total needs of the player and student, founded by a towering intellectual figure whom I hardly need name, here, and based by him on the rigorous Oxbridge Quadriv-ium-Trivium curricular model.”

- Thoughts:

- Wallace mocks academia’s obsession with tradition and prestige.

- Shows the emptiness behind “important-sounding” concepts when they are used merely to appear sophisticated.

- Highlights the irony of academic elitism—the institution’s prestige feels almost absurdly exaggerated.

8. Coach’s Interjection to Break Over-Analysis

- Quote: “DeLint is moving toward the tennis coach, who is shaking his head.”

- Thoughts:

- A humorous break in the over-analysis, with the coach’s head shake as if telling us to lighten up.

- Wallace might be hinting that we should enjoy the story without needing to dissect every detail.

- Adds a human touch, gently reminding us to find humor and ease, even in a dense narrative.

---

And I’m only 8 pages in…. Here are more quotes that made me giggle or has fun tools of the trade.

Opening Scene Quotes

[Location 137]

"Three faces have resolved into place above summer-weight sportcoats and half-Windsors across a polished pine conference table shiny with the spidered light of an Arizona noon."

[Location 138]

"three Deans — of Admissions, Academic Affairs, Athletic Affairs."

[Location 139]

"I believe I appear neutral, maybe even pleasant, though I've been coached to err on the side of neutrality and not attempt what would feel to me like a pleasant expression or smile."

[Location 142]

"My fingers are mated into a mirrored series of what manifests, to me, as the letter X."

[Location 144]

"The tennis coach jingles pocket-change. There is something vaguely digestive about the room's odor."

[Location 150-151]

"Harold Incandenza, eighteen, [...] His reading glasses are rectangular, court-shaped, the sidelines at top and bottom. 'You are, according to Coach White and Dean [unintelligible], a regionally, nationally, and continentally ranked junior tennis player, a potential O.N.A.N.C.A.A. athlete of substantial promise, recruited by Coach White via correspondence with Dr. Tavis here commencing… February of this year.' [...] 'You have been in residence at the Enfield Tennis Academy since age seven.'"

[Location 156]

"'Coach White informs our offices that he holds the Enfield Tennis Academy's program and achievements in high regard, that the University of Arizona tennis squad has profited from the prior matriculation of several former E.T.A. alumni, one of whom was one Mr. Aubrey F. deLint, who appears also to be with you here today. Coach White and his staff have given us —'"

[Location 168]

"'I've been asked to add that Hal here is seeded third, Boys' 18-and-Under Singles, in the prestigious WhataBurger Southwest Junior Invitational out at the Randolph Tennis Center —' says what I infer is Athletic Affairs, his cocked head showing a freckled scalp."

[Location 174]

"believe scheduled for 0830"

[Location 178-179]

"C.T. has crossed his arms casually; their triceps' flesh is webbed with mottle in the air-conditioned sunlight. 'You sure did. Bill.' He smiles. The two halves of his mustache never quite match. [...] let me say if I may that Hal's excited, excited to be invited for the third year running to the Invitational again, to be back here in a community he has real affection for, to visit with your alumni and coaching staff, to have already justified his high seed in this week's not unstiff competition, to as they say still be in it without the fat woman in the Viking hat having sung, so to speak, but of course most of all to have a chance to meet you gentlemen and have a look at the facilities here."

[Location 189]

"'Is Hal all right, Chuck?' Athletic Affairs asks. 'Hal just seemed to… well, grimace. Is he in pain? Are you in pain, son?'"

[Location 198-199]

"while usually just a pleasant formality, is probably best accentuated by letting the applicant speak up for himself. [...] I presume it's probably facilitate that the tennis coach mistook for accentuate, though accelerate, while clunkier than facilitate, is from a phonetic perspective more sensible, as a mistake."

[Location 202-203]

"His own fingers look like they mate as my own four-X series dissolves and I hold tight to the sides of my chair. [...] need candidly to chat re potential problems with my application, they and I, he is beginning to say. He makes a reference to candor and its value. 'The issues my office faces with the application materials on file from you, Hal, involve some test scores.' [...] 'The Admissions staff is looking at standardized test scores from you that are, as I'm sure you know and can explain, are, shall we say… subnormal.'"

[Location 208-209]

"And surely the little aviarian figure at right is Athletics, [...] an I'm-eating-something-that-makes-me-really-appreciate-the-presence-of-whatever-I'm-drinking-along-with-it look that spells professionally Academic reservations."

[Location 211]

"The incongruity between Admissions's hand- and face-color is almost wild. '— verbal scores that are just quite a bit closer to zero than we're comfortable with,'"

[Location 219-220]

"the appearance of incongruity if not out-right shenanigans.' [...] 'Surely by incredible you meant very very very impressive.

Essential Wei Reading List: Foundations to Practice

Core Foundation Texts (Start Here)

1. Understanding Media - Marshall McLuhan
Crucial for understanding how media affects messages and our perceptions.
2. Against Interpretation - Susan Sontag
Key ideas for cultural criticism and analysis.
3. Discipline and Punish - Michel Foucault
Important for exploring power structures and institutions.
4. Being and Time - Martin Heidegger
Foundational work on existence and meaning.

Cultural Analysis & Identity

5. Notes of a Native Son - James Baldwin
Insightful look at identity, race, and culture.
6. The Joy Luck Club - Amy Tan
Important view on Chinese-American identity and culture.
7. Between the World and Me - Ta-Nehisi Coates
Modern discussion of race, identity, and society.
8. The Chinese in America - Iris Chang
Thorough history of the Chinese-American experience.

Content Creation & Style Development

9. On Writing Well - William Zinsser
Key text for clear and effective writing.
10. Show Your Work! - Austin Kleon
Guide for sharing creative work and engaging an audience.
11. Bird by Bird - Anne Lamott
Essential for finding your unique voice and practicing consistently

Critical Theory & Analysis

12. Ways of Seeing - John Berger
Essentials of visual culture and perception
13. A Thousand Plateaus - Deleuze and Guattari
Framework for cross-disciplinary thinking
14. The Culture of Critique - Kevin MacDonald
In-depth look at cultural criticism

Humor & Engagement

15. A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again - David Foster Wallace
Combines humor with deep thought
16. Born a Crime - Trevor Noah
Uses humor to address serious issues

Community & Connection

17. The Art of Community - Charles Vogl
Guide to creating strong communities
18. Bowling Alone - Robert Putnam
Study of community and social ties

Strategic Growth

19. Range - David Epstein
Benefits of broad knowledge
20. Antifragile - Nassim Nicholas Taleb
How to thrive in uncertainty

Digital Age & Evolution

21. The Shallows - Nicholas Carr
Impact of digital media
22. The Content Trap - Bharat Anand
Strategy for digital contenT

---

Reading Order Recommendations

First Month

1. Understanding Media
2. On Writing Well
3. Show Your Work!
4. The Art of Community

Second Month

1. Against Interpretation
2. Ways of Seeing
3. A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again
4. The Content Trap

Third Month

1. Notes of a Native Son
2. The Joy Luck Club
3. Between the World and Me
4. Born a Crime

Advanced Phase

1. Discipline and Punish
2. Being and Time
3. A Thousand Plateaus
4. The Culture of Critique

Study Tips

1. Read Actively

• Take good notes

• Highlight main ideas

• Write short summaries in the margins

2. Practice Integration

• Link ideas from different books

• Use insights in your work

• Experiment with concepts in your content

3. Review Cycle

• Read the introduction carefully

• Skim the content first

• Read deeply

• Review and summarize

4. Implementation Strategy

• Create content from each book

• Test ideas with your audience

• Improve understanding through practice

Note-Taking Framework

• Main Ideas

• Practical Uses

• Content Ideas

• Notable Quotes

• Connection Points

Remember: This is more than a reading list; it's a development program. Each text builds a deeper understanding of content creation, cultural analysis, and community building.

Phaedo, Plato, and James Baldwin: Rebirth

On Threads, my friend posted a quote by Baldwin:

“It took many years of vomiting up all the filth I’d been taught about myself, and half-believed, before I was able to walk on the earth as though I had a right to be here.”

Reading Baldwin’s reflection reminded me of a Platonic dialogue, where they mentioned the river Styx.

---

In Phaedo:

“when the dead arrive at the place to which the genius of each severally conveys them, first of all they have sentence passed upon them, as they have lived well and piously or not. And those who appear to have lived neither well nor ill, go to the river Acheron, and mount such conveyances as they can get, and are carried in them to the lake, and there they dwell and are purified of their evil deeds, and suffer the penalty of the wrongs which they have done to others, and are absolved, and receive the rewards of their good deeds according to their deserts.”

---

Baldwin describes a visceral process of unlearning, the painful shedding of internalized racism and homophobia. This isn't mere self-improvement but a fundamental transformation, a reclaiming of humanity from the weight of imposed beliefs.

His words echo an ancient metaphor found in Plato's Phaedo, where souls journey across the River Styx. In the dialogue, Plato writes: "when the dead arrive at the place to which the genius of each severally conveys them... there they dwell and are purified of their evil deeds, and suffer the penalty of the wrongs which they have done to others, and are absolved." This crossing represents transformation - a shedding of earthly impurities for renewal.

Charon carries souls across the river Styx by Alexander Dmitrievich Litovchenko.

Where Plato wrestles with philosophical questions of the soul, Baldwin confronts the lived reality of racism, homophobia, and systemic oppression. His metaphor of "vomiting up all the filth" grounds abstract ideas of purification in embodied experience. The "filth" represents societal beliefs aimed at dehumanization, and his liberation comes through their violent rejection.

Both describe a necessary death of false knowledge. Plato's souls achieve understanding through divine purification. Baldwin reclaims his identity through the expulsion of internalized oppression. But while Plato seeks transcendence, Baldwin fights for his right to exist fully within this world.

Baldwin's metaphor reaches beyond personal transformation to critique the systems perpetuating racism and homophobia. His act of self-liberation becomes a challenge to power structures that shape identity. The mythological crossing of the Styx transforms into a story of resistance and reclamation.

"Walking on earth as though I had a right to be here"

James Baldwin at his home in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, southern France, in 1979. Image Credit: Ralph Gatti/AFP via Getty Images

Baldwin's words remind us that true liberation demands we confront uncomfortable truths. Only by rejecting beliefs can we claim our place in the world as complete and authentic beings. His "vomiting up all the filth" becomes more than metaphor, it's an urgent call to shed the poisonous ideas society forces us to swallow, and through that violent rejection, find our way home to ourselves.

---

Book recommendations

1. “The Fire Next Time” by James Baldwin
2. “Notes of a Native Son” by James Baldwin
3. “Giovanni’s Room” by James Baldwin
4. “Phaedo” by Plato
5. “The Souls of Black Folk” by W.E.B. Du Bois
6. “Black Skin, White Masks” by Frantz Fanon
7. “Pedagogy of the Oppressed” by Paulo Freire

Out of Office Highlights

NOTES FROM

Out of Office

Anne Helen Petersen

October 23, 2024

Between 1979 and 1996, more than forty-three million jobs were eliminated from the U.S. economy. In the 1980s, the composite of laid-off workers tilted more heavily toward manufacturing and other “lower skilled” jobs, whose pay averaged under $50,000 a year.5 Between 1990 and 1996, that number shifted: the majority of people who lost their jobs were “white collar,” and they lost them at nearly double the rate that they had in the 1980s. Over that same period,

October 23, 2024

“There’s an entropy associated with meetings,” Eric Porres, who runs the company MeetingScience, told us. “They take on a life of their own. We’ve been trained and conditioned to schedule meetings for half an hour to an hour. When we look at a company and they have all of their meetings in thirty-, sixty-, ninety-minute chunks, we say, wow, you have a big problem. You don’t have any time to process. And when do you actually get any work done?” MeetingScience gathers the wealth of information available through a company’s digital calendars and analyzes it alongside a thirteen-question anonymized survey, sent to individuals after every meeting, about what just happened. Was there an agenda? Did you know what was expected of you? Were there clear next steps? Was the meeting satisfying? Was it important for me to be there? Did it start on time, or did it start late?

October 23, 2024

The tech company Hugo, which bundles meeting scheduling and notes, tracks the number of meetings per week among its clients. As you’d expect, the numbers over the course of the pandemic were telling: Between January and May, the average number of meetings climbed from 12 to around 15, before dipping to around 14.5 for most of the summer. But in early September, the number started climbing again; by November, users were averaging 16.5 meetings per week: more than 3 meetings a day, every day of the week. (Microsoft Teams data shows that this meeting surge was global: between February 2020 and February 2021, average Teams meeting time rose from thirty-five minutes to forty-five minutes.)17 Hugo’s users began meeting more when they hit remote, and then spiked again right as kids went back to school: the more stressed we became, the more meeting we called. In our heads, meetings are usually drawn up in an attempt at having more control over a project or a particular decision.

October 23, 2024

Overanalysis and optimization always risk squeezing the vibrancy and serendipity out of work. Which is why you don’t necessarily need a company to help you, but you do need perspective. Regular meetings should be held up to the light and examined, even the ones that have been on the books for years. It’s not just figuring out the meeting’s goal. It’s figuring out whether a meeting is the best way to achieve it in the first place. Many companies have become so reliant on meetings as their primary mode of accomplishment—and demonstration of busyness—that it’s hard to imagine alternatives. Or, if they do, they feel too technically advanced for broad-scale adoption. You’d be surprised, though, just how old-fashioned some of these fixes feel.

October 23, 2024

This isn’t an advertisement for a specific piece of technology, but it is a full-throated endorsement for non-text-based conversations (especially ones where you don’t also have to stare at yourself in a small box in the corner). Video can convey tone in a way that no number of emojis quite can. Our brains, after all, use visual and audio cues like facial expressions to add context to words. Visuals can clear up confusion, demonstrate seriousness, and, most important, help set our minds at ease. According to Roderick M. Kramer, who studies organizational behavior, their absence while working from home can exacerbate uncertainty about status, which can lead to overprocessing information.18 In short, we get paranoid about whether we’re doing good work, about to be fired, annoying our managers, and so on. But

October 23, 2024

And yet productivity went up; employees felt as productive as during the five-day schedule, if not more so, and employee stress levels improved. And this included developers and engineers: actual coding days went down (3.4 to 2.7 for product; 3.2 to 2.9 for mobile and infrastructure), but “productive impact,” a.k.a. how much they were actually getting done, increased significantly and in the case of infrastructure and mobile doubled.21 Buffer opted to extend the trial another six months, to see if it was sustainable, and in February 2021 decided to officially adopt the schedule moving forward.

October 23, 2024

Perry started thinking about what an equitable, flexible, simple, and intuitive system for leave and benefits would look like. It would have to be transparent but also have tolerance for error and even, theoretically, misuse. He called it “universal design for work-life balance.” “Universal design” is the term for the movement to create spaces, tools, and lived environments that are accessible to all, regardless of age or ability. The thing about universal design is that its benefits are not simply for those who need it most. A curb cut in the sidewalk, for example, makes the sidewalk accessible for wheelchair users, but it also makes navigating the space infinitely easier for people on bikes or pushing strollers.

October 23, 2024

As a corporate strategy, “flexibility” transformed so many workplaces into sites of anxiety where productivity-obsessed workers lived in anticipation of the next massive layoff. At the same time, it was repackaged, often to those same workers, as the future: we laid you off, but we’ll give you your job back, as a “flexible” subcontractor, only with fewer benefits and less stability, and you’ll have little choice but to take it.

October 23, 2024

Productivity bibles like The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People functioned, in Gregg’s words, as “a form of training through which workers become capable of the ever more daring acts of solitude and ruthlessness necessary to produce career competence.”11 But the other thing they taught was satisfaction, or at least a demeanor that approximated it. Life at a flexible company might be unstable, with ever-shifting demands, goals, and expectations for future pay and benefits. But successful workers were the ones who could roll with it: make themselves flexible and remain mostly upbeat. The

October 23, 2024

The “burdens” of flexibility “have been unequally distributed,” the tech employment scholar Carrie M. Lane writes. “Employees are expected to become infinitely mutable while employers become increasingly rigid, demanding that workers ask nothing more than a paycheck—no benefits, no training, no personal accommodations, no promise of security or upward mobility.”15 Even the bare minimum employer responsibility (for example, paying workers for their labor) has been recast as a form of benevolence. Workers should not feel entitled to wages: they should, instead, be grateful.

October 23, 2024

Consider just how much work you’ve had to do, how disciplined you’ve had to remain, year in and year out, in order to achieve and maintain that ideal. There’s no true allowance for sickness, or sadness, or caregiving. And, if you take time off, it’s often just an opportunity for someone to prove they’re more flexible—and thus more valuable—than you.

October 23, 2024

But instead of making us work efficiently—and, by extension, less—all of this tech has mostly just made us work more. With time, that amount of output isn’t considered above and beyond. Spending an extra two hours on work at home isn’t a way to distinguish yourself. It’s just the norm. It’s keeping up. It’s treading water. But it’s also, in the vast majority of cases, uncompensated labor.

October 23, 2024

But they’re one of the main things that people say they miss about the office: unanticipated, organic interactions. But what people are actually missing is twofold. Some actually crave disruption and dynamism in their days, a symptom that they probably actually don’t need to be in the office, in one place, as much as they are. But most want generative, collaborative conversations, the sort that make the work you’re doing feel, well, alive. It’s not the drive-by meeting itself that’s essential. It’s the space for authentic idea generation and human interaction. And that can be found in any number of places, if we actually allow ourselves to let go of our limited ideas of where it can happen.

October 23, 2024

When Perpetual Guardian first implemented the program, some workers took off Mondays, some Fridays, others loved a day off in the middle of the workweek, but everyone took it, from the newest hires to the most senior managers. The effect was startling: at the end of a two-month trial, productivity had risen 20 percent, and “work-life” balance scores rose from 54 percent to 78 percent. After the change was made permanent, overall revenue went up 6 percent, and profitability rose 12.5 percent. Other experiments have yielded similarly astounding results: at Microsoft Japan, a four-day workweek led to 40 percent gains in productivity; a 2019 study of 250 British companies with four-day weeks found that companies had saved an estimated £92 million, and 62 percent of companies reported that employees took fewer sick days.19

October 23, 2024

For the Microsoft Japan trial, all meetings were thirty minutes or less and limited to five people—the logic being that if more than five people needed to be there, it should be an announcement, not a meeting.

October 23, 2024

The real innovation of the four-day week, like other flexible, intentional schedules, is the conscious exchange of faux productivity for genuine, organization-wide, collaborative work. For the four-day companies, that strategy was so effective that it opened up an entire day. For your company, that exchange might open up the mornings, or the middle of the day, or anytime after 2:00, depending on the rhythms of your business and your employees’ lives. If that sounds like magic, it’s not because it’s actually mystical, or make-believe; it’s a sign of how thoroughly you’ve internalized a rigid understanding of how work works.

October 23, 2024

The reality of working from home—at least during a pandemic—has disabused them of that fantasy. But what they haven’t learned is that working from home is a discrete, defined skill. “If you’re going to give PowerPoint presentations, or draw blueprints, you see that as a skill, something you have to learn and apprentice at, get feedback on, and continue to learn,” Dowling said. “But no one has really thought about working from home as a skill: it’s not taught; it’s not addressed. It’s just sort of like, ‘Be on your laptop at home.’ And that’s just not sufficient.”

October 23, 2024

One answer is completing delegated tasks with accuracy and submitting them on time. But that’s too straightforward for a frazzled, anxious, pandemic brain. Instead, our stress makes it difficult to concentrate, and that difficulty is exacerbated by the growing number of meetings and emails and messages that other people’s frazzled, anxious, pandemic brains are sending us. You feel as if you were not getting enough done, and compensate by working more hours, even if they’re scattered, made inefficient by fatigue, alcohol, and other forms of distraction. It’s so incredibly easy to enter the fugue state where you always feel as if you are half working, half not.

October 23, 2024

Reading Ferriss’s book can feel cathartic, especially if you find yourself burned out or frustrated by your work situation. When he suggests strategically withholding productivity so that you get more done on days where you propose a “trial” work-from-home situation, it’s easy to smile at the puckish manipulation. But you can achieve Ferriss’s level of productivity only by ruthlessly off-loading tasks onto others (Ferriss has a whole section about outsourcing menial tasks to cheap virtual personal assistants based overseas) and constantly toeing the line of appropriate behavior—a strategy almost exclusively available to white men.

October 23, 2024

They’re simply not a sustainable option for the vast majority of workers, especially those who aren’t in senior positions, who are women, who are people of color, or who are disabled. For those groups, attempting to maintain them can lead to an office reputation as difficult, aloof, unresponsive, or the dreaded “such a millennial” or “not a team player.” It might mean getting passed over for promotions or, eventually, getting fired. You

October 23, 2024

When it became clear that emails and digital contact were hopping over those guardrails, leaders recognized that they could not depend on individual companies—or the individuals within them—to accomplish what was, in truth, a national goal. Legislation can slow the inertia of capitalist growth, but it cannot counteract it entirely. If you’re an “executive,” you’re allowed to violate the thirty-five-hour weekly cap. And non-executives break it all the time: a 2016 study found that 71.6 percent of French employees worked more than thirty-five hours a week.26

October 23, 2024

Respect for others’ time demands care, knowledge, and thoughtful implementation of policies and practices. Many team status meetings were set years ago, by someone who might not even be your manager anymore, often at a somewhat arbitrary time. Maybe it worked for everyone on the team then. But it has little relation to the needs of your team now, or when people’s schedules become even more flexible.

October 23, 2024

Exercising respect means continual consideration of a meeting’s utility, its place in the day, and its form. Same for email: Does this need to be an email? Do I need to send it now? How would I feel if I received this email right now? How can I make it so that it arrives in my colleague’s in-box at a time that will be more respectful of their time?

October 23, 2024

Front allows users to integrate workflows, chat, and “next steps” into email; in companies dealing with tens of thousands of customer service emails, for example, it allows workers to delegate responsibility, action, and follow-up on each one.

October 23, 2024

But so much of that mindset is simply a long-running coping mechanism for workplace precarity. To be essential, at least in this office job capacity, is to build a protective shell around yourself during times of economic insecurity. It’s a survival strategy, built on fear and desperation. And it makes everyone miserable, no one more so than yourself. Front’s real utility is its ability to transform email from a personal burden into a collective, collaborative task. To do that, however, you have to actually trust your colleagues and be less precious about your own essential role in the process.

October 23, 2024

Say an entire company adopts a force-field approach to email. A culture begins to develop around time off. Those taking time off will be more aware of who will pick up their work burden. They’ll be more appreciative—and ideally more respectful—of others’ time. There might be more coordination, more care, and more respect involved in handing over responsibilities. More important, colleagues in a force-field situation might be more mindful that their requests will fall to others. At its best, it could trigger others to inventory their demands on others’ time.

October 23, 2024

If someone tries to work during a break, chiding them and letting it happen just further normalizes the behavior. When an employee takes time off, not working becomes their job. So how can your team actively set expectations to take that job as seriously as their everyday one? Whatever the policies are, they have to be more than mealymouthed “suggestions” and arrive in collaboration with workers themselves.

October 23, 2024

With time, she grew accustomed to the daily cadences of her job. But she still felt like a stranger in her own company, whose remote policies were haphazard at best. To send chats, employees used an outdated version of Skype; in Zoom meetings, almost all co-workers left their cameras off. Months into her job, she could identify co-workers only by their chat avatars and voices. At one point, she says, she began “obsessively stalking” her company’s Glassdoor reviews, just to try to get a sense of the company culture. She was, by her own admission, unmoored, totally unmentored, and insecure, with no way to learn from her colleagues. It’s one thing to start a new job remotely. It’s another to start your entire career that way.

October 23, 2024

For Kiersten, who has never set foot in her office, her professional life has come to feel like an abstraction—to the point that she’s sometimes not even sure if she’s employed (she is). Worse, her job feels almost completely transactional, with her conversations limited, in her words, to “exchanging information in pursuit of an immediate, work-related goal.”

October 23, 2024

Small talk, passing conversations, even just observing your manager’s pathways through the office, may seem trivial, but in the aggregate they’re far more valuable than any form of company handbook. But that doesn’t mean they can’t be translated into the remote or flexible work environment.

October 23, 2024

We asked early career workers what resources they wished they could have had during those early pandemic months, and the responses were full of helpful ideas for any company. Most important, they wanted a clearly delineated mentor who—crucially—was not also their supervisor or in charge of evaluating their performance. One suggested a dual mentor program that paired new employees with a co-worker in a similar position in the company who could offer advice on more quotidian concerns, as well as a more senior employee who could provide longer-term career advice.

October 23, 2024

For organizations with a hybrid approach, where employees split time between home and the office, some of these problems may quickly abate. A few days in the office won’t fix these larger issues. But intentional design could. Truly flexible work may seem breezy and carefree, but it’s actually the product of careful planning and clear communication. It requires peering around corners and attempting to identify needs and problems before they fester. It may seem onerous at first, especially when “let’s just go back to the way things were before” seems like such a clear option

October 23, 2024

But it’s not. We’ve moved past that point. If we’re serious about building a sustainable future of work, we can’t leave a whole swath of employees behind. They’ll just develop bad habits and waste endless hours trying to piece together the rules of the game when someone could’ve just told them.

October 23, 2024

You can temporarily and authentically lower productivity expectations. Or you hire slightly more than enough people, thereby building in the expectation that a percentage of your workforce could be taking time off at any moment, and it wouldn’t overload the system. Many companies are theoretically set up this way: an average employee’s baseline of assigned tasks should take up, say, 80–85 percent of their day, leaving them available to take on 15 to 20 percent more work when a colleague is sick, on vacation, or on leave. As many of our survey respondents confessed, they usually do their core work over a short period of time anyhow.

October 23, 2024

As will become clear in the next chapter, companies spend millions of dollars on consultants every year trying to hit that sweet spot, and historically it usually means cutting middle management and support staff. The end result: employees are increasingly forced to self-manage and do the essential support work of those who were let go, often quite poorly, instead of what they were actually hired to do. Cue: ever-expanding work hours, and the message that if you’re not getting your work done during traditional hours, the failure, again, is yours, for poor prioritizing.

October 23, 2024

That NCR has such a durable corporate culture that it can survive literal airstrikes? Or is it that NCR’s employees are so dedicated that amid unspeakable death and destruction they feel the need—not to be with or tend to family—but to help rebuild a factory? Deal and Kennedy seem to acknowledge the outlandishness of the anecdote. But that doesn’t keep them from arguing that it remains one of the pantheon of “myths and legends of American business.”

October 23, 2024

But starting in the early 1970s, a wave of recessions and economic stagnation shook even the strongest of those companies’ foundations. Behemoths of respective industries entered the decade fat and happy and naive—characteristics that, under the unforgiving eye of a slumping economy, quickly morphed into bloated, occasionally lazy, and flat-footed in the race to compete globally. Their solution, as we noted in the last chapter, was cuts. In the first eight years of the 1980s, Fortune 500 companies cut more than 300 million jobs, many of them the stable, middle-management positions that had not only helped expand the modern middle class but functioned as the organizational sentries of culture.

October 23, 2024

s tendency to treat management as an “add-on”—as opposed to an actual job, requiring a refined skill set—is, as the Nightingales found, rampant in start-ups, both new and long solidified. But it’s also common in cash-strapped nonprofits, in academic departments (see department chairs), and in “legacy” companies that overcorrected the sprawling, management-heavy org charts of the 1960s and 1970s. Back then, people often dealt with bad management by expanding the org chart with even more badly trained managers. Now we deal with it by ignoring it. Many of these companies view middle management as bloat, waste, what David Graeber would call a “bullshit job.” But that’s because bad managing is waste; you’re paying someone more money to essentially annoy everyone around them. And the more people experience that sort of bad management, and think of it as “just the way it is,” the less they’re going to value management in general. The key, then, is to think of how to treat management as a discrete, valuable skill: a deliverable that contributes to the overall value and resiliency of your organization. Otherwise, managers will continue to feel like deadweight, no matter how flexible an[…]

October 23, 2024

They found that remote managers they surveyed had an average of about 4.87 direct reports. That might not sound like much, but it was overwhelming most managers as they attempted to deal with 5 different emotionally complex human beings, all under stress and with their own needs and demands. Worse yet, 21.5 percent of the remote managers they spoke with had less than one year of management experience when mandatory working from home began. They’d stumbled on the same problem as the Nightingales had: managers were under-trained, under-experienced, overworked, and forced into a stressful new reality. As a result, everyone was suffering. “To be a good manager, you need to be emotionally intelligent,” Pandiya told us. “It’s our whole company thesis: the emotional intelligence of the managers is what makes a company’s culture miserable or excellent.

October 23, 2024

The secret to good culture and even good management isn’t some weekend off-site or even a fancy piece of technology. As Tan put it, “There’s no way to Ping-Pong table or happy hour your way out of it.” Analytics won’t magically turn you into a better manager. You can use them to inform and transform your own behavior, but only if you actually have a vested interest in managing with more empathy and intentionality. We’re all figuring out what our jobs are going to look like in this new reality, and if we do it on our own, remote work will continue to look like the anxious, endless jumble of the pandemic year. The process is going to require a significant amount of experimentation and grace, communication and transparency.

October 23, 2024

Kill the Monoculture In 2020, 92.6 percent of CEOs on the Fortune 500 were white.36 A survey conducted that same year of more than forty thousand workers at 317 companies found that while white men make up just 35 percent of the entry-level workforce, they compose 66 percent of the C-suite.37 For every one hundred men who were promoted to manager, only fifty-eight black women and seventy-one Latina women were promoted. Only 38 percent of respondents in entry-level management positions were women of any race. You’ve heard these statistics, or something approximating them, before. No matter how many diversity, equity, and inclusion workshops your organization requires, if your leaders and managers aren’t truly diverse, then the monoculture will prevail.

October 23, 2024

Left to its own devices, monoculture will self-sow and replicate itself endlessly. The things that a white male, for example, might understand as the hallmarks of “good leadership” and “good management” are the things that feel like good leadership and management to him—characteristics that can manifest themselves in everything from standards of professionalism to tone of voice. He will naturally promote, elevate, or otherwise privilege workers with those attributes and marginalize or ignore those without them. Frequently, those perpetuating the monoculture aren’t even aware they’re doing it. But this is how monoculture persists: people endlessly promoting people like them for the rest of time

October 23, 2024

Olson’s solution almost feels like a cheat code. Her organization, We Are Rosie, works as a twenty-first-century version of a long- and short-term temp firm, connecting more than six thousand workers in the marketing field with companies and agencies across the world. Some of these “Rosies,” as employees are called, work for a few weeks on a “pop-up” project at an organization. Some work on political campaigns. Others become long-term placements at legacy organizations, from Bloomberg to Procter & Gamble. But We Are Rosie is not a traditional subcontractor. It takes the reality of the existing fissured workplace and attempts to stabilize it for its employees. Rosies can be remote and work from wherever they want. They can find actual part-time work that still pays well. They have a robust online support community. And if a company tries to cut corners on their contract, treat them poorly, or change the parameters of the project they’ve been hired to complete, they have an external advocate whose primary interest is retaining the Rosies, not the client. The result: a workforce that’s more than 90 percent remote, more than 40 percent Black, indigenous, and people of color[…]

October 23, 2024

Steven Aquino has been covering the technology industry from California for the last eight years. Before that, he was a preschool teacher, but his cerebral palsy made it difficult to meet the physical needs of his students, day in and day out. He looked for something he could do, ideally from home, that would be less physically taxing. He found it in writing and reporting. That shift to working from home “really changed who I am,” Aquino said. “I’m not always so tired anymore. Because I’m not so exhausted, and hurting, and thinking about it all the time, I’ve been able to concentrate on doing work I enjoy and take pride in.” Working from home also helped with Aquino’s social anxiety, which was exacerbated by his stutter. Still, the rhetoric of the current moment and the opportunities of flexible work have felt, in his words, disorienting. “We’re in a society where diversity and inclusion is a big subject right now,” he said. “And it’s inspiring to see. But it isn’t evenly distributed. We talk about inclusion, and then people like me are always off to the side, way over there.”

October 23, 2024

Forced into formalized, factory-like arrangements, laborers viewed six-hour workdays as onerous and perhaps only temporary until desired productivity had been achieved. Attendance was poor. Something had to be done to condition the workforce to perform strenuous labor on behalf of others. Owners began to impose fines and strict oversight because, as the social psychologist Shoshana Zuboff points out, “workers submitted to the physical rigors of factory discipline only when other alternatives had been exhausted.”3 Early factory designs were modeled after workhouses and prisons.4 Positive reinforcement was attempted, but the carrot was usually abandoned for the stick, even when it came to the children who increasingly filled the workforce.

October 23, 2024

Frederick Winslow Taylor. As an employee for Bethlehem Steel, Taylor lamented that workers were naturally lazy, and in order to counter their slovenly attitudes, he began to closely study their movements. He realized that coal shovelers with standardized shovel sizes could haul more weight without getting tired quickly. He timed others’ movements on the factory floor with a stopwatch, looking for extraneous movements to shave off their routines.

October 23, 2024

As office work began to expand over the course of the twentieth century, workers were sold on promises of comfort and satisfaction. Instead of toiling on a factory room floor, welding the same joint over and over again, you could sit in an office, filing the same report over and over again. Your collar, as Upton Sinclair famously put it, would be white; your work, at least in the vast majority of cases, would be salaried and steady.

October 23, 2024

The goal was to keep your head down, do what was expected of you (but nothing more!), and encourage others to do the same. Workers conformed, but they did so, according to Whyte, with a placid smile: they were undergirded by real support, whether in the form of their salary, their pension, or their enduring job security. “It is not the evils of organization life that puzzle him, but its very beneficence,” Whyte explained. “He is imprisoned in brotherhood.”

October 23, 2024

imprisonment extended to the home, where the ethos of organization man culture was instrumental in shaping the structures of (white) middle-class life. Early suburbs were quite literally built to accommodate and incubate organization men, their families, and their social lives, which became appendages of the company. Social status was cemented through perks like local country-club memberships, while the organization man’s family, especially his wife, became a form of corporate asset, valued for her ability to host and socialize. Employees were expected to leverage their family life to woo clients and executives alike. “Actually, it’s hard to tell where the workday ends and the ‘pleasure’ begins,” one manager told Whyte. “If you count all the time required for cocktails, dinners, conferences, and conventions, there is no end to work.

October 23, 2024

interests,” Bennett writes. “Dozens of managers stayed with their companies in the face of disastrous situations, working, and working hard. These were the loyal soldiers, staying at their posts no matter what.”17 These middle managers might have felt like loyal soldiers at the time, but they were blinded by loyalty and perks and a workplace “family” that didn’t allow them to see that their battalion had been moved to the front lines in order to be sacrificed.

October 23, 2024

Bennett described the ramifications of downsizing as “the same as suffering a divorce or a death in the family.”18 For the downsized, losing a job wasn’t just losing financial stability but expulsion from one’s social life. Losing the physical space of the office meant disconnection from their daily rhythms and the hundreds of seemingly inconsequential actions that defined their lives. Many had been with their companies for decades and had no idea how to begin to search for new jobs.

October 23, 2024

First, there’s the sheer number of hours we’re working. According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the average American works more hours than the average laborer in any peer nation. But unlike many Western nations, where increased productivity and wealth tend to lead to more leisure time, Americans continue to overwork themselves despite productivity gains. The OECD found that “the US works 269 more hours than its enormously wealthy economy would predict—making it by this measure the second-most overworked country in the world.”27

October 23, 2024

When the journalist Chika Ekemezie first began interviewing women of color who had made the shift to working from home during the pandemic, she was interested in the ways that remote work liberated black women workers from (white) standards of professionalism in their offices. “I’ve long been a believer that professionalism is just a synonym for obedience,” she wrote. “The less social capital you have, the more you are tethered to professionalism. It’s why Mark Zuckerberg can wear the same T-shirt to work while Black women are punished for wearing braids.”

October 23, 2024

Surveys conducted during the first ten months of the pandemic illustrate the complex relationship that some BIPOC employees have to remote work. Data collected by Slack’s Future Forum showed that black employees were working longer hours and experiencing higher stress around pressure to perform—a sign of a lack of mutual trust between the employees and the managers. But overall, black employees expressed a 29 percent increase in feelings of satisfaction and belonging working remotely, compared with being primarily in the office. One reason for this, respondents said, was that working from home meant less code switching or pressure to modulate their behavior for a boss or co-worker.

October 23, 2024

workers’ “offices” moved into their homes, though, some began to feel standards of professionalism extend to judgments about personal spaces.42 What do my books, my art, my clutter communicate about my competence as a worker? Who’s able to “professionalize” their home spaces for remote appearances, and who’s trying to angle the camera so that colleagues can’t tell they’re Zooming from their bedroom? Which employees feel empowered to say, “Screw it, I don’t care what my background is,” and who is spending outsize time thinking about it?

October 23, 2024

you already have a family, chosen or otherwise. And when a company uses that rhetoric, it is reframing a transactional relationship as an emotional one. It might feel enticing, but it is deeply manipulative and, more often than not, a means to narrativize paying people less to do more work. Family evokes not just a closeness but a devotion and a lasting bond, infused with sacrifice: family comes first.

October 23, 2024

Treating your organization as a family, no matter how altruistic its goals, is a means of breaking down boundaries between work and life, between paid labor and the personal. When you’re assaulted by powerful feelings of familial obligations from all sides—your actual family, but also your manager and your colleagues—it’s all the more difficult to prioritize. And in these situations, your actual family, which is often more forgiving, more malleable, and more attuned to your needs, will always suffer.

October 23, 2024

In reality, Taber argues, family farms are just as hierarchical, patriarchal, and exploitative of workers. She points to the historian Caitlin Rosenthal’s book, Accounting for Slavery, which traces how early slave plantation farms developed many of the management and accounting practices that still structure corporate life. The early agrarian economy was ruthless. It was also a family business, and the abolition of slavery didn’t magically destroy the power imbalances present in agriculture, even on family farms. “Working on a family farm means working in somebody’s home,” she argues. “There are tremendous gaps in wealth and status and power.”

October 23, 2024

they were also mentally miserable. Shoshana Zuboff spent hours interviewing workers in industrial settings for In the Age of the Smart Machine, but she also spent significant time with clerical workers. Like their blue-collar counterparts, the people she interviewed were adrift as the result of the fast technological changes of their jobs. Dentist office employees and insurance claims workers both saw their jobs, which were once social in nature, turn into glorified data entry positions. Cubicles visually walled them off from their colleagues, turning co-workers into an annoying buzz of wafting voices and telephone rings and keyboard clacks. As the job increasingly tethered them to their desks, they became more estranged from their managers, who in turn began to view them as drones. “We used to be able to see each other

October 23, 2024

from this fact: just group them in inviting environments that fit the company’s projected cultural values of “dynamism” and “community.” The office, in other words, as city—or, even better yet, as campus. Back in the 1970s, midwestern corporate giants like 3M and Caterpillar had designed sprawling, bucolic office parks for their thousands of employees, and early Silicon Valley companies like Xerox famously embraced the campus layout in the 1970s. These early campus environments made economic sense: they allowed companies to abandon costly urban real estate, and their location was easier to sell to prospective employees who planned to make their homes in the suburbs. But as William Whyte, author of

October 23, 2024

This is the nightmare scenario for Christie and the focus of much of Twitter’s early hybrid work planning. The solution? Destroy the FOMO and level the playing field by making the office less appealing. “You need to eliminate the idea that you’ll miss out if you’re not in the office,” she told us. Which is why they’re attempting to figure out ways to actively disincentivize people from coming back to the office full-time. “For a long time we’ve rallied around office perks and keeping people around and in the building,” she said. “Tech companies have celebrated and mastered it: come to the office, and you get fed, you get cared for.” That whole well-fed, well-cared-for campus philosophy has to change, Christie says. And it starts with the way the office is arranged and the expectations for people within those spaces. At Twitter, everyone inside the conference room will be asked to have an open laptop and dial into the meeting to make sure that remote participants can see all faces clearly and hear those who, in a different configuration, might have traditionally been far away from the conference microphone. The company plans to get rid[…]

October 23, 2024

That intentionality especially applies to groups that are usually left out of the design process. For leaders in the disability community, the remote work shift can feel fraught. Flexible work—an accommodation people with disabilities have been asking for, and denied, for decades—is more available than ever before. But there’s also a very real concern that the ability to work from home could end up making actual office spaces less inclusive. “What I don’t want to see is all employees who have disabilities relegated to working from home because newly designed spaces are even less accessible than they are now,” Maria Town, the president and CEO of the American Association of People with Disabilities, told us. It’s far too easy to imagine companies offering hybrid work but treating their disabled workers as fixed remote employees, thereby reinforcing the segregation of disabled people in the workforce.

October 23, 2024

Despite the miraculous technological affordances in our life, few of them have liberated us as advertised. And nowhere is that truer than our working lives, where today’s office tech has absorbed all of the formalities, anxieties, and oppressive mundanity of corporate life and ported them into every corner of our lives. The magical ability to see your co-workers face-to-face from anywhere in the world morphs into Zoom fatigue. The lively, collaborative instant messaging app gives way to an always-on surveillance tool that lives on company servers forever. A shared digital calendar evolves into a way for others to demand our time and attention until there’s none left for ourselves. The more efficient we become, the more overwhelmed we feel.

October 23, 2024

But almost all have unintended consequences, even when they’re not digital. From the open office plan to the Aeron chair, new ideas about the physical design of the office have reshaped not only our work environment but also our relationship to work. Innovations that were supposed to make the office more humane get co-opted, put through cost-efficiency calculators, and end up making the workplace feel even more like an overdesigned cage.

October 23, 2024

In 1981, while working on a book about the future of work, a young Harvard business professor named Shoshana Zuboff visited an old pulp mill. The mill’s bleach plant had recently been redesigned and outfitted with state-of-the-art technology, including digital sensors and monitors that fed signals to a shiny, new centralized control room, stocked with computers whirring away on brand-new microprocessors. To an outsider, it was all very impressive. But, as Zuboff quickly learned, the workers despised it.

October 23, 2024

Across the office world, workers were promised that these new technologies would make their lives easier. And yes, it was great not to have to type the same letter in triplicate. But many of the machines were situated in spaces that simply weren’t designed for them: mimeographs in rooms without ventilation, word processors in spaces without proper lighting. Thousands of workers reported migraines, severe eyestrain, cataracts, bronchitis, and allergies.16 Automation was literally making office workers sick.

October 23, 2024

As workers, we’ve always been assisted by technologies in some form. Those tools have become more sophisticated with time, but as their users we remain stubbornly human, and there are limits to the productivity that any body or mind can sustain. In the early 1980s, workers began to brush up against those limits but were driven into survival mode by the continued volatility of the American economy. It didn’t matter if the office sucked, if it made you feel ill, if it made you resent your co-workers. Attempts to organize, like those led by Nussbaum and Working Women, ran headfirst into a massive wave of antilabor sentiment and legislation. It felt as if there were no recourse, no way to push back. And so a whole generation of employees internalized their employers’ quest for productivity as their own, settled for less pay and less stability, and got back to work.

October 23, 2024

Reflecting today, Wilkinson’s less sure of that vision. Over the last two decades, his brilliant, innovative designs have rippled through the architecture world, as large-scale tech companies and smaller start-ups alike have cribbed elements of his team’s dynamic workplaces for their spaces. And Wilkinson’s increasingly aware of the insidious nature of those same perks. “Making the work environment more residential and domestic is, I think, dangerous,” he told us in late 2020. “It’s clever, seductive, and dangerous. It’s pandering to employees by saying we’ll give you everything you like, as if this was your home, and the danger is that it blurs the difference between home and office.”

October 23, 2024

The new campus design had a profound impact on company culture. Some of that impact was undeniably positive: he created work spaces where people genuinely want to be. But that desire becomes a gravitational pull, tethering the worker to the office for longer and longer, and warping previous perceptions of social norms.

October 23, 2024

With time, your colleagues become your closest friends and, with even more time, your only friends. It’s easier to hang out and have a social life at work, because everyone’s just already there. Life feels streamlined, more efficient. Even fun! Sometimes you’re just goofing off, killing time, kinda like back in the dorm room in college. Other times you’re working together, like those endless nights back in the library. Sometimes it’s a hazy hybrid of both, but it’s generative nonetheless. It’s the new organization-man-style company devotion, only the country club’s moved on campus.

October 23, 2024

When we moved away from New York, however, we came to realize how work friendships had functioned as Trojan horses for work to infiltrate and then engulf our lives. These relationships didn’t make work-life balance more difficult. Instead, they eclipsed the idea of balance altogether, because work and life had become so thoroughly intertwined that spending most of our waking moments with some extension of our corporation didn’t seem remotely odd or problematic. It was just . . . life.

October 23, 2024

In 2012, McKinsey was on the hunt for just such a solution: something, anything, that could decrease the email burden on workers and boost productivity among its clients. In a report from that year, its analysts found that the average knowledge worker spent 28 percent of their workweek managing email, and nearly 20 percent looking for internal information, or simply tracking down colleagues who could help with specific tasks. They believed some sort of collaborative chat—or “social technology”—had the potential to raise the productivity of knowledge workers by between 20 and 25 percent.31

October 23, 2024

Many companies own or lease their office space on long-term contracts. And when the space is there, sitting on the company’s expenses, it’s likely that management is going to incentivize employees to use it. And after we’ve been trapped in our homes hiding from a deadly virus for well over a year, we’re starved for social interaction. Many of our former commuting and workplace annoyances now sound like tiny luxuries. Some of us miss our colleagues. Others are just sick of their homes and apartments and, yes, even their partners and kids. The only question is, how?

October 23, 2024

To be clear, there’s no quick technological fix to what ails our workplace. What works best for Mills and his team of young, extremely online employees likely won’t work for Linda or Mark in accounting at a regional auto parts company. What Branch does best, however, is clarify what the office actually means to you. Because what a lot of us actually miss about the office—apart from not being in our claustrophobic homes—isn’t anything that practical. You might miss what tech executive and essayist Paul Ford calls its “secret, essential geography”: knowing the best place to cry, or find privacy, or use the bathroom.40 But what you really miss is a feeling. In some offices, that feeling is playfulness. In others, it’s siloed concentration. For Mills, it’s an empathic, ambient presence. “You can create connection just by being present, even if you’re not saying anything,” he told us. “People know if they do talk, somebody is there to listen.”

October 23, 2024

LARPing is a virulent pathogen, but there is an antidote. It’s just trust: cultivating it, communicating it, propagating more of it. When you don’t feel as though your manager trusts you—or, more specifically, how you make use of your time—you feel the need to underline just how much of it you’re dedicating to work. You update, you check in, you sneak in casual mentions of how late you worked on something. Maybe your manager actually does trust you but is incredibly bad at communicating it. Maybe they’ve never told you to update this way but have never told you to stop, either. What matters is that the distrust hangs in the virtual air, goading you to spend more time evidencing your work than actually working.

October 23, 2024

Microsoft found that between February 2020 and February 2021 the average Teams user was sending 45 percent more chats after hours and 50 percent of Teams users responded to chats within five minutes or less.42 More and more, we find ourselves in a fun-house mirror of performance anxiety that distorts our understanding of what work even is.

October 23, 2024

But one of the companies that has managed to do so has a lesson for the aspirationally flexible office. That company is GitLab, a software platform that helps web developers build and share open-source code. If you’ve read about remote work before, chances are you’ve seen it mentioned as an example. That’s because, even pre-pandemic, it had built its company on the premise of truly reimagining work. It doesn’t have any offices and its employees live everywhere, across many time zones. It’s fully distributed, fully remote, and fully asynchronous and it embraces a radical form of transparency.

October 23, 2024

Because employees are working at different hours in all parts of the world, the company relies on meticulous documentation. Employees take extensive notes on calls, meetings, memos, brainstorming sessions, you name it. Almost all of it, including many of the company’s internal deliberations and operations, is posted publicly. In practice, that means someone outside the company can get an idea of how its employees are building the product they might ultimately buy. Internally, it means that an employee in the marketing department can go into GitLab’s system and follow what the legal, comms, finance, and engineering teams are doing. They can read the team’s notes, monitor their objectives and reports, and follow along with colleagues as they work.

October 23, 2024

And that was before the pandemic. If financial firms don’t get on board with flexible work, Poleg predicts, that shift toward tech will only continue. This principle applies far beyond the world of finance. “Executives have had flex forever,” Michael Colacino, the head of the commercial real estate firm SquareFoot, told us. “I’ve been able to work from home on Friday since 1992. People always say that the future is here, it just hasn’t been evenly distributed. And that’s true: flexibility has just been segregated off into the C-suite and slightly downstream. So what you have happening now is that no one’s going to accept the five-days-in-the-office mentality. Now that they’ve tasted the forbidden fruit, there’s no going back. If you say to a millennial, come back 9:00 to 5:00, five days a week, people are just going to quit.” Finance execs know they should be figuring out new ways to work, but those who rose through the ranks one way, and endured a particular form of suffering and overwork, are reluctant to change their ways, no matter how much evidence is presented of the benefits of abandoning them. It’s irrational, it’s[…]

All Excerpts From

Anne Helen Petersen. “Out of Office.” Scribe Publications Pty Ltd, 2022-01-05. Apple Books.
This material may be protected by copyright.

It 2017

1. Beginning (First Few Minutes):

• Quote: “HOLY SHIT HE BIT OFF THE KID’S ARM.”

• Comment: You reacted strongly to the opening scene where Pennywise bites off Georgie’s arm, setting the tone for the horror you remembered but hadn’t experienced fully in previous viewings.

2. 23 Minutes In:

• Quote: “Not too scary.”

• Comment: You noted supernatural events involving a black kid and a Jewish pastor’s child but found it more eerie than terrifying, observing that it wasn’t as scary yet.

3. Library Scene:

• Quote: “The kid in the library got chased by a headless Penny.”

• Comment: You noted the chase scene with the headless figure and were surprised by how violent the movie was, particularly when one kid’s stomach was cut with a name.

4. Humor and Gross Moments:

• Quote: “It’s basically piss and shit LMAO.”

• Comment: You commented on the gross sewer water scene with humor, balancing the horror with lighter moments.

5. Eddie’s Mom and Themes of Control:

• Quote: “Like a lot of parents think they have the power to enforce but for a lot of the teenage kids they’ve already grown beyond that.”

• Comment: You analyzed Eddie’s mom and how the dynamic between parents and kids represents a broader theme of control and the kids’ growing independence.

6. The Bathroom Scene (52-55 Minutes):

• Quote: “There’s been a trope… the blood on the bathroom. Reminds me of The Shining.”

• Comment: You connected the bathroom blood scene with The Shining and interpreted the blood as a metaphor for the girl’s puberty, deepening the personal horror.

7. Georgie’s Discovery:

• Quote: “Ayyyy they found Georgie. But he’s still missing an arm.”

• Comment: You noted the unsettling moment when the kids find Georgie, but he’s still injured, which added a mix of relief and continued horror.

8. Final Fight Against Pennywise:

• Quote: “When they stop fearing, Pennywise gets weaker… When the kids fought back, he got hurt.”

• Comment: You observed the theme that Pennywise weakens when the kids let go of their fear, emphasizing the movie’s deeper message about the power of bravery.

9. End of Movie:

• Quote: “Oh wow. They were able to make the clown go away. Impressive!!!”

• Comment: You were impressed by the kids’ victory over Pennywise, appreciating the way they made him disappear through their unity and courage.

The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue: A Meditation on Memory, Identity, and the Weight of Time

"What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: 'This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence—even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned upside down again and again, and you with it, speck of dust!'

"Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: 'You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine.' If this thought gained possession of you, it would change you as you are or perhaps crush you. The question in each and every thing, 'Do you desire this once more and innumerable times more?' would lie upon your actions as the greatest weight. Or how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life?" - Nietzsche

There’s this moment in V.E. Schwab’s The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue that’s burned into my mind—Addie, standing in a world that refuses to remember her, her gaze heavy with the centuries she’s lived yet never truly existed. Similar to the days during Covid quarantine when daily choirs became an anchor point in our lives. It’s more than a tale about a deal with the devil; it’s an unraveling into what it means to live, to be seen, to leave a mark that endures. Schwab doesn’t just play with fantasy tropes here, she strips them down and uses them to ask the messiest questions about identity and the human need for connection.

It reminds me of Nietzsche’s concept of eternal recurrence, this idea that we live the same life over and over, caught in a loop of both the beautiful and the tragic. But for Addie, it’s not just about living the same moments repeatedly; it’s about the ache of erasure. Her curse forces her to stare into Nietzsche’s abyss, where everything meaningful slips away. Her existence becomes a mirror to that void, a life of infinite days that no one remembers.

What hits hardest is that the real battle in Addie’s life isn’t with the devil who tricked her or even the people who forget her, it’s with herself. It’s the breakdown of identity when there’s no one around to reflect you back to yourself. Schwab peels away the layers of Addie’s soul, asking how much of who we are is defined by the people we interact with, by the memories they hold of us, by the marks we leave on their lives. When all of that is taken away, what’s left? Who are we when there’s no proof that we ever existed?

Addie’s transformation from a rebellious young woman in 18th-century France to this ageless wanderer feels like a Kafkaesque journey (like Rick Grimes in The Walking Dead), lost in an unending maze of choices that all seem wrong. Every decision she makes pushes her further into this gray area where morality blurs and selfhood feels like a losing game. You can see her sense of self fracturing under the weight of her own invisibility, and it makes you wonder: how much of yourself would you give up just to keep existing, even if no one else ever knew?

And that’s what The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue does so well. It refuses to give us easy answers. Schwab doesn’t let us settle into the comfort of right or wrong, good or evil. Instead, she plunges us into Sartre-like existential uncertainty, where existence precedes essence, and Addie has to recreate herself from scratch every day. In a world that forgets her as soon as she leaves a room, she becomes her own myth, constantly redefining what it means to be alive.

What I love about this novel is how it plays with the concepts of memory and identity in a way that feels almost subversive. Addie’s world forces us to reconsider what it means to connect with others when the very fabric of identity is ripped away. She evolves not because time ages her, but because she’s always in flux, reinventing herself in a society that doesn’t offer her a solid place to stand. It’s a radical meditation on how we define ourselves when all the usual anchors—family, history, relationships—are gone.

And then there’s Henry, the one who remembers her. His fear of being insignificant, of living a life that goes unnoticed, stands in sharp contrast to Addie’s endless anonymity. They’re two sides of the same existential coin, one cursed to never be remembered, the other desperate to be known. Their relationship doesn’t just spark because he sees her; it’s because they’re both haunted by this terror of not mattering in a world that measures worth in permanence.

Luc, the devil in Addie’s bargain, serves as a twisted reflection of immortality and memory. He’s this eternal being who remembers everything, whose presence is always grounded in history, while Addie drifts through centuries with nothing to hold onto. Their dynamic isn’t just a classic battle of wills; it’s a philosophical debate on whether immortality without meaning is any better than mortality with memory. Luc’s stability against Addie’s constant flux forces us to confront what it really means to live a life stretched thin over centuries.

Schwab’s narrative leans heavily into existentialist thought, digging into themes of authenticity, freedom, and the absurdity of creating meaning in a world that offers none. Without the ability to leave a lasting mark or form stable connections, Addie has to find value in the moment itself. It’s this terrifying kind of freedom that demands she build her own meaning from scratch every single day. The novel makes us ask: without external validation or a lasting impact, what makes a life truly worth living?

Time in this story isn’t just a linear progression; it’s a fog that wraps itself around Addie’s existence, making years blur together while each day brings a fresh struggle to survive. It’s reminiscent of Heidegger’s concept of being-toward-death, where the awareness of our mortality shapes how we live. But for Addie, that awareness is twisted into something unrecognizable—her life stretches out into infinity, where time itself loses meaning, and every moment feels like a desperate act to hold onto something real.

What The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue captures so brilliantly is the tension between being and being known. It’s a study in what happens when every trace of your existence is erased, yet you keep fighting to make those fleeting moments count. Even though Addie can’t create anything that lasts, she becomes a muse—a whisper in the ear of artists, a shadow in the margins of their work. Her influence is invisible but undeniable, like ripples spreading out long after the stone has sunk.

Schwab’s prose is like a spell—it lingers in the mind, each word heavy with the weight of forgotten moments. She paints Addie’s centuries of life with such detail that you feel every brushstroke, every memory slipping through her fingers. It’s this slow accumulation of small, vivid experiences that shows how a life can still be rich and full, even if it’s destined to disappear without a trace.

The novel’s exploration of love is just as layered. For Addie, love has to be reinvented every day, stripped of the comfort that comes with shared history. It asks whether love can truly exist in the present moment, untethered from the past or future. Schwab pushes us to rethink what connection means when you can’t rely on familiarity, when each encounter is a chance to build something entirely new, even if it’s gone by morning.

As I closed the final pages of Addie’s story, I found myself wrestling with my own questions. What would be left of me if all the markers of my identity disappeared? How much of my sense of self relies on being seen, remembered, reflected back by others? If I knew I would be forgotten, would I love differently, live differently? The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue doesn’t answer these questions—it just holds up a mirror and makes us stare at the reflection we might not want to see.

Ultimately, this novel isn’t just about a girl who made a deal with the devil; it’s a philosophical inquiry into what it means to exist when everything that defines you is stripped away. It’s about legacy, memory, and the small acts of resistance we engage in just to prove we were here. Addie’s life, filled with centuries of anonymity, forces us to confront our own fears of being forgotten and our desperate desire to leave a mark, however small, on the world.

As I let Addie’s story settle in, I found a deep appreciation for the tiny moments of connection we create every day, the ways we leave pieces of ourselves in the lives we touch. In a world that often feels too fast, too transient, Addie’s journey is a reminder to inhabit each moment fully, to let the simple act of remembering become an act of defiance against the inevitability of forgetting.

The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue is more than a novel; it’s an insight to the resilience of the human spirit and the power of reinvention. It’s a story about the “invisible” threads that bind us, the marks we leave even when no one sees them, and the beauty of living a life that refuses to be defined by its limitations.

The Walking Dead: A Journey into the Abyss of Human Nature

Outline

1. Introduction
2. Walkers as Symbols
3. Rick Grimes’ Change
4. Rise of New Communities
5. Survival and Morality Challenges
6. Changes in Characters
7. Villains and Leadership Styles
8. Philosophical Ideas
9. Negan’s Power and Control
10. Conclusion

There’s a moment from The Walking Dead that stays with me: Rick Grimes standing in the ruins of a world that once made sense, his face etched with the weight of leadership, his eyes reflecting the uncertainty of everything that remains. This moment isn’t just about surviving the undead, it’s also a confrontation with the depths of human nature when the comforts of civilization are stripped away. The Walking Dead isn’t just a dystopian nightmare. It’s ann exploration of humanity’s fragile psyche and the moral decay that comes when societal norms collapse. It feels like a call into the Nietzschen abyss and confront what stares back.

The walkers themselves become almost peripheral, less antagonists and more like haunting symbols of decay. They’re external manifestations of the characters’ internal conflicts, the fears, regrets, and primal instincts that rise to the surface when the rules no longer apply. Much like the ocean in Lem’s Solaris, which materializes the deepest recesses of the protagonists’ minds, the apocalypse here serves as a canvas for exploring the raw, uncharted territories of the human condition. The true conflict isn’t the external threat of the walkers. It’s what happens inside the survivors as they’re forced to face their own moral ambiguities.

Rick’s transformation from law-abiding sheriff to someone who makes unimaginable choices is a Kafkaesque journey in itself, reminiscent of individuals lost within incomprehensible systems. His path is a labyrinth of ethical quandaries, each decision eroding his sense of right and wrong. You can feel the tension as his old world crumbles, and with it, his moral foundation. It’s a raw portrayal of what happens when the weight of responsibility threatens to crush the very humanity he’s fighting to preserve. His journey, like Didion’s reflections on grief, becomes one of survival in a world that no longer follows the rules he once knew.

As the series progresses, the communities that emerge: Woodbury, Terminus, Alexandria. They become microcosms of political ideologies in a post-collapse world. These settlements reflect the desperate attempts to rebuild society, but also the compromises and ethical trade-offs that come with power. The Governor’s authoritarian grip on Woodbury presents a veneer of normalcy, while underneath lies a chilling control that reveals the dangers of unchecked power. Terminus, on the other hand, pushes utilitarianism to its extreme, where survival justifies even the most horrifying actions. And then there’s Alexandria, a fragile attempt at democracy, offering hope, but always teetering on the edge of collapse.

What draws me to The Walking Dead is how it doesn’t give us clean answers. It’s not about finding the right path. It’s about grappling with the complexity of survival, morality, and leadership in a world that no longer has clear rules. This series doesn’t just ask what it takes to survive. It asks what we’re willing to become in the process. It reminds me of Peter Watts’ Blindsight, probing the limits of human understanding and forcing us to confront the parts of ourselves we’d rather not face.

In this redefined world, characters undergo profound transformations. Carol, once vulnerable and underestimated, becomes a symbol of resilience. Her journey is one of survival and reinvention, raising questions about identity and the lengths we’ll go to protect the ones we love. It’s a theme that resonates deeply, how loss, like grief in Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking, reshapes our understanding of who we are and what we can endure.

Michonne’s arc is equally powerful. Initially a solitary cool samurai figure, hardened by the brutality of the world, she evolves into someone who allows herself to reconnect, to trust, and to find humanity again amidst the chaos. Her relationships, especially with Rick and their group, become a testament to the importance of community, even when everything around them is crumbling.

And then there are the antagonists like the Governor and Negan, who embody different visions of leadership in the apocalypse. The Governor’s descent into madness reflects the corrupting influence of power, while Negan, with his brutal code, represents a twisted utilitarianism, sacrificing the few for what he sees as the greater good. Both characters force us to question the nature of power, morality, and control when there are no longer systems of accountability in place.

Drawing from Nietzsche, the series delves into the concept of the Übermensch and the necessity of reevaluating values when the traditional moral frameworks disintegrate. Characters like Rick, Carol, and Michonne are left to construct their own ethical codes, leading to moments of ethical relativism where survival often outweighs conventional morality. The abyss Nietzsche speaks of, the one that stares back, becomes a metaphor for the psychological toll of living in constant proximity to death and moral compromise.

“I Am Negan”

Foucault’s ideas on power and discipline resonate throughout The Walking Dead. The show illustrates how, when conventional systems of power collapse, new structures emerge from the ruins. These new power dynamics are often based on fear, surveillance, and the control of bodies and behavior. Foucault’s vision of power as pervasive, not limited to formal institutions, is made real in the struggle for dominance in the post-apocalyptic world. The Governor and Negan, with their oppressive regimes, are examples of how power morphs into something darker when it is untethered from accountability. Their rule isn’t just about survival; it’s about control over the physical and psychological lives of their people, referencing Foucault’s notion of biopower.

Negan’s rule in the later seasons, particularly the “I am Negan” philosophy, presents a different take on power compared to the Governor’s more isolated, authoritarian control. Where the Governor ruled through fear and spectacle in Woodbury, Negan creates a decentralized system of biopower, where surveillance is not just top-down but embedded within the community itself. Every individual in the Saviors becomes part of the surveillance network, monitoring each other and reinforcing Negan’s control. By having his followers declare “I am Negan,” he extends his power through them, dissolving individual identities into a collective where everyone is an enforcer of the system.

This structure of surveillance and control is more insidious than the Governor’s overt authoritarianism. Instead of ruling through sheer terror, Negan’s system functions by creating a network of loyalty, fear, and complicity. His lieutenants, the workers in his compound, and even the communities under his thumb all operate within this network, constantly being watched and watching others. It’s a more subtle form of biopower, where Negan’s influence permeates every level of the organization, making rebellion almost impossible. The power isn’t just concentrated in Negan himself but dispersed across the people who identify with him and enforce his rules.

Foucault’s ideas on surveillance as a mechanism of control are clearly at play here. The omnipresence of Negan’s network mirrors Foucault’s notion of the panopticon, where the possibility of being watched keeps people in line, even if they aren’t being actively observed. In this way, Negan’s “I am everywhere” mentality is an evolution of the Governor’s rule. While the Governor relied on fear and intimidation, Negan creates a self-sustaining system where the people he controls actively reinforce his power.

In summary

The Walking Dead is a powerful commentary on the fragility of civilization and the psychological burden of survival. It asks uncomfortable questions about who we become when the world we know is gone and forces us to confront the darker parts of ourselves. Like Didion’s reflections on grief, it holds a mirror up to our vulnerabilities, our capacity for resilience, and our need for connection, even when everything around us is falling apart.

In a playfield of political theories, The Walking Dead isn’t just about the apocalypse. It’s about the human condition, the capacity for both cruelty and compassion, the struggle to maintain our sense of self when the world is unrecognizable, and the deep, existential question of what it means to be human in the face of unrelenting adversity.

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Book Recommendations

1. “Thus Spoke Zarathustra” by Friedrich Nietzsche
Examines the idea of the Übermensch and questions traditional morals, similar to how characters in The Walking Dead shift their ethics in a collapsed society.

2. “Discipline and Punish” by Michel Foucault
Studies power, surveillance, and control in society, reflecting the new power structures in the post-apocalyptic world of the series.

3. “The Trial” by Franz Kafka
A story about someone lost in a confusing system, paralleling Rick’s unsettling journey through a world of unclear rules.

4. “The Year of Magical Thinking” by Joan Didion
A deep look at grief and loss, relating to how characters change and cope with ongoing hardship.

5. “Solaris” by Stanisław Lem
Science fiction that explores human consciousness and inner conflict, like how walkers represent the characters’ deepest fears.

6. “Blindsight” by Peter Watts
A novel that challenges our understanding and self-awareness, reflecting the show’s investigation of humanity under stress.

7. “Lord of the Flies” by William Golding
Looks at the collapse of social order and the fall into savagery, mirroring the moral dilemmas faced by survivors.

8. “1984” by George Orwell
Discusses totalitarianism and control, similar to the oppressive leaders like the Governor and Negan.

9. “Station Eleven” by Emily St. John Mandel
Follows survivors after a pandemic, highlighting art, memory, and rebuilding society.

Death’s End

Highlights

Helena left home and began to live and ply her trade on her own. She had been to Jerusalem and Trabzon, and even visited Venice. She was no longer hungry, and she dressed in beautiful clothes. But she knew that she was no different from a blade of grass growing in the mud by the road: indistinguishable from the muck, as travelers trampled over her.

——————

During that time, Tianming dated two women, but the relationships fizzled quickly. It wasn't that Cheng Xin already occupied his heart: For him, she would always be the sun behind a veil of clouds. All he wanted was to look at her, to feel her light and warmth. He dared not dream of taking a step toward her. He never even sought out news about her. He guessed, based on her intelligence, that she would go for a Ph.D., but he made no conjectures about her personal life. The main barrier between him and women was his own withdrawn personality. He struggled to build his own life, but it was too difficult.

——————

we include some basic sensors and take into account the necessary antenna and radioisotope power source to transmit information back from the Oort Cloud, about two to three thousand kilograms ought to do it." "No!" Vadimov shook his head. "It has to be like Cheng Xin said: light as a feather." "If we stick with the most basic sensors, maybe one thousand kilograms would be enough. I can't guarantee that's going to succeed--you're giving me almost nothing to work with." "You're going to have to make it work," said Wade. "Including the sail, the entire probe cannot exceed one metric ton in mass. We'll devote the strength of the entire human race to propel one thousand kilograms. Let's hope that's light enough."

——————

As soon as Cheng Xin walked into the PIA chief's spacious office, she was greeted by the strong smell of cigar smoke. A large painting hung on the wall. A leaden sky and the dim, snow-covered ground took up most of the painting; in the distance, where the clouds met the snow, a few dark shapes lurked. A closer examination revealed them to be dirty buildings, most of them one-story clapboard houses mixed with a few European-style houses with two or three stories. Based on the shape of the river in the foreground and other hints in the geography, this was a portrait of New York at the beginning of the eighteenth century. The overwhelming impression given off by the painting was coldness, which Cheng Xin thought fit the person sitting under the painting rather well.

——————

A few titters. Camille laughed the loudest. "My dear, you have sketched for us a scene out of a cartoon. Your spaceship is filled with a pile of nuclear bombs, and there's a giant sail. On the ship is a hero who bears more than a passing resemblance to Arnold Schwarzenegger. He tosses the bombs behind the ship, where they explode to push the ship forward. Oh, it's so cool!" As the rest of the staff joined in the mirth, she continued. "You may want to review your homework from freshman year in college and tell me: one, how many nuclear bombs your ship will have to carry; and, two, with that kind of thrust-to-weight ratio, what sort of acceleration you can achieve."

——————

"What new plan? A five-hundred-gram cat?" "Of course not." Vadimov's and Camille's eyes brightened. Cheng Xin also seemed to have recovered her strength. She stood up. Accompanied by military escort vehicles and helicopters, an ambulance departed with the Fourth Wallfacer. Against the lights of New York City, Wade's figure appeared as a black ghost, his eyes glinting with a cold light. "We'll send only a brain," he said.

——————

ages!" "Doesn't everything we've been through seem like a dream?" "I feel like I'm dreaming now." "I'm utterly terrified of space." "Me too. I'm retiring as soon as we get back. I'm going to buy a farm and spend the rest of my life on solid ground." It had been fourteen years since the complete destruction of the Earth's combined fleet. The survivors, after engaging in separate internecine battles of darkness, cut off all contact with the home planet. However, for a year and a half thereafter, Bronze Age continued to receive transmissions from Earth, most of which were surface radio communications, but which also included some transmissions intended for space.

——————

Most people surely understood that these reactions were excessive and meaningless. The peak of the Earth's projection of electromagnetic signals into space had occurred during the age of analog signals, when television and radio transmission towers operated at high power levels. But as digital communication became prevalent, most information was transmitted via wires and optical cables, and even radio transmissions for digital signals required far less power than analog signals. The amount of electromagnetic radiation spilling into space from the Earth had fallen so much that some pre-Crisis scholars had fretted that the Earth would become impossible to discover by friendly aliens.

——————

Only something like the transmission by Ye Wenjie, which relied on the power of the sun as an antenna, could be intercepted by listeners among the stars.

——————

Although the celebrating crowd around them continued to dance and wave their arms, they made no sound. All that anyone from Bronze Age could hear was the fleet captain's voice. His face still bore a kind smile, but in that eerie silence, his voice sounded as sharp as the edge of a sword. "You're hereby informed that you have been dishonorably discharged. You are no longer members of the Solar System Fleet. But the stain you have brought upon the fleet can never be erased! You will never see your loved ones again, because they have no wish to see you. Your parents are ashamed of you, and most of your spouses have long ago divorced you. Even though society has not discriminated against your children, they spent the past decade growing up in the shadow of your disgrace. They despise you!

Oof

——————

Just as Bronze Age was about to begin accelerating away from home again, the unimaginable happened: A sophon unfolded into low dimensions on the ship, establishing a quantum communication channel with Earth. Finally, the crew received confirmation of all that had occurred.

——————

A cold voice spoke to them from somewhere. "All armed crew members must immediately relinquish your weapons. If you do not cooperate, we cannot guarantee your safety. You're under arrest for murder in the first degree and crimes against humanity."

——————

SCOTT: We're not traitors against humanity! Where were you when we fought for Earth? PROSECUTION: You are absolutely traitors! While the ETO from two centuries ago only betrayed the interests of humanity, today, you betray our most basic moral principles, a far worse crime.

——————

The Germans made a film based on Jones's experiment, and Jones himself wrote a book about it: The Third Wave. When those of us aboard Bronze Age found out that we were doomed to wander space forever, we formed a totalitarian state as well. Do you know how long it took? Five minutes.

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JUDGE: What did you do with the bodies? ROVINSKI: We built a monument to them, like Blue Space did. JUDGE: You mean, you left the bodies in the monument? ROVINSKI: No. I doubt that the monument built by Blue Space had any bodies in it, either. JUDGE: You haven't answered my question. I asked what you did with the bodies. ROVINSKI: We refilled the food stores on Bronze Age with them. JUDGE: All of them? ROVINSKI: All of them. JUDGE: Who made the decision to turn the bodies into food? ROVINSKI: I... really can't remember. It seemed a completely natural thing to do at the time. I was responsible for logistics and support aboard the ship, and I directed the storage and distribution of the bodies. JUDGE: How were the bodies consumed?

——————

ROVINSKI: Carol Joiner was the communications officer aboard Quantum. He was eating a part of her. JUDGE: How could he know that? ROVINSKI: We were all fitted with a tracking and identification capsule about the size of a grain of rice. It was implanted under the skin of the left arm. Sometimes the cooking process didn't remove it. I'm sure he just found it on his plate and used his communicator to read it.

——————

In the end, Captain Neil Scott and six other senior officers were convicted of murder and crimes against humanity and sentenced to life imprisonment. Of the remaining 1,768 members of the crew, only 138 were declared innocent. The rest received sentences ranging from twenty to three hundred years. The Fleet International prison was located in the asteroid belt, between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. Thus, the prisoners had to leave Earth again. Although Bronze Age had reached geosynchronous orbit, the prisoners were doomed never to travel the last thirty thousand kilometers of their 350-billion-kilometer voyage home.

——————

It took only an hour to complete the session. Schneider tapped the floating control interface a few times, as though closing some windows out of habit. All of a sudden, he kicked the spherical wall of the cabin hard, and propelled himself to the other end of the chamber. Simultaneously, the walls shifted and divided the cabin into two halves. The three officers and the military policeman were trapped in one half, and Schneider was alone in the other. Schneider brought up a floating window. He tapped on it, his fingers a blur. It was the control interface for the communications system. Schneider brought the ship's high-powered interstellar communications antenna online. A faint pop. A small hole appeared in the cabin wall, and the cabin was filled with white smoke. The barrel of the military policeman's gun poked through the hole and aimed at Schneider.

——————

SCHNEIDER: At that moment--not the moment of the attack, but the moment when I realized that Bronze Age would never return home, when the ship would be my entire world--I changed. There was no process; I was simply transformed from head to toe. It was like the legendary mental seal.

——————

SCHNEIDER: Of course not. I was talking metaphorically. Space itself is a kind of mental seal.... In that moment, I gave up my individual self. My existence would be meaningful only if the collective survived.... I can't explain it better than that. I don't expect you to understand, Your Honor. Even if you boarded Bronze Age and sailed twenty thousand AU from the Solar System, or even farther, you still wouldn't understand.

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Trisolaris brought up the idea of sending a speedy droplet--formally, it was called a strong-interaction space probe--to pursue and destroy Blue Space. But Earth unequivocally refused. From humanity's perspective, Blue Space should be dealt with as a matter of internal affairs. The Doomsday Battle was humanity's greatest wound, and after more than a decade, the pain had not lessened one whit. Permitting another droplet attack on humans was absolutely politically unacceptable. Even though the crew of Blue Space had become aliens in the minds of most people, only humanity should bring them to justice.

——————

The UN and the Solar System Fleet wanted to reclaim DX3906, but this couldn't be done legally unless the owner agreed to transfer the title. Thus Cheng Xin was awakened from her slumber after 264 years of hibernation. The first thing she found out after emerging from hibernation was this: As she had expected, there was no news whatsoever about the Staircase Program. The Trisolarans had not intercepted the probe, and they had no idea of its whereabouts. The Staircase Program had been forgotten by history, and Tianming's brain was lost in the vastness of space. But this man, this man who had merged into nothingness, had left a real, solid world for his beloved, a world composed of a star and two planets.

——————

Cheng Xin tried to think as AA suggested and forced herself to return to the present. She had only been here for a few days, and had just grasped the broadest outline of the history of the past three centuries. The strategic balance between the humans and the Trisolarans as a result of dark forest deterrence had shocked her the most. A thought popped into her mind. A world dedicated to femininity... but what does that mean for deterrence?

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"What if he killed millions? I can guarantee you such a person would not be considered a murderer. Indeed, such a person may not even be thought to have broken any law. If you don't believe me, just study history! Anyone who has killed millions is deemed a 'great' man, a hero. "And if that person destroyed a whole world and killed every life on it--he would be hailed as a savior!" "They're talking about Luo Ji," said AA. "They want to put him on trial." "Why?"

——————

During the brief life of the Stars Our Destination Project, a total of fifteen individuals were granted ownership of seventeen stars. Other than Cheng Xin, the other fourteen owners were lost to history, and no legal heirs could be located. The Great Ravine acted like a giant sieve, and too many did not make it through. Now, Cheng Xin was the only one who held legal title to a star.

——————

To Cheng Xin, AA resembled a vivacious bird fluttering around her nonstop. AA told Cheng Xin that she was familiar with people like her, who had come from the past--known as "Common Era people" after the old calendar--since her own dissertation advisor was a physicist from back then. Her knowledge of Common Era people was why she had been appointed as Cheng Xin's liaison from the UN Space Development Agency as her first job after her doctorate.

——————

"I'm working for you now," she said, "so let me speak for a minute about your interests. Are you nuts?! Of all the choices available to you, you picked the worst! You could have sold the star along with the planets, and you would have become one of the richest people in the universe! Alternatively, you could have refused to sell, and kept the entire solar system for yourself. The law's protection of private property is absolute, and no one could have taken it away from you. And then you could have entered hibernation and woken up only when it's possible to fly to DX3906. Then you could go there! All that space! The ocean, the continents... you can do whatever you want, of course, but you should take me with you--"

——————

But, in our age, conscience and duty are not ideals: an excess of either is seen as a mental illness called social-pressure personality disorder. You should seek treatment."

——————

From time to time, a window or two left the traffic in the road and followed them for a while, and drifted back into the current when AA and Cheng Xin showed no interest. All

——————

Understanding dawned on her after a moment. The trend had been obvious even earlier. The decade of the 1980s was probably the last time when masculinity, as traditionally defined, was considered an ideal. After that, society and fashion preferred men who displayed traditionally feminine qualities. She recalled the Asian male pop stars of her own time who she had thought looked like pretty girls at first glance. The Great Ravine interrupted this tendency in the evolution of human society, but half a century of peace and ease brought about by the Deterrence Era accelerated the trend.

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After the start of the Deterrence Era, most heavy industries had moved into orbit, and the Earth's natural ecology recovered. The surface of the Earth now looked more like it did in pre--Industrial Revolution times. Due to a drop in population and further industrialization of food production, much of the arable land was allowed to lie fallow and return to nature. The Earth was transforming into a giant park.

Good emperor of dune

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When the deterrent is the complete destruction of both the deterrer and the deteree, the system is said to be in a state of ultimate deterrence. Compared to other types of deterrence, ultimate deterrence is distinguished by the fact that, should deterrence fail, carrying out the threat would be of no benefit to the deterrer. Thus, the key to the success of ultimate deterrence is the belief by the deteree that the threat will almost certainly be carried out if the deteree thwarts the deterrer's goals. This probability, or degree of deterrence, is an important parameter in deterrence game theory. The degree of deterrence must exceed 80 percent for the deterrer to succeed. But people soon discovered a discouraging fact: If the authority to carry out the threat in dark forest deterrence is held by humanity as a whole, then the degree of deterrence is close to zero.

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In a sense, everyone alive would be unaffected. But in the event of deterrence failing, carrying out the threat and broadcasting would mean that destruction could come at any moment, a far worse result than not carrying out the threat. Thus, if deterrence failed, the reaction of humankind as a whole could be easily predicted.

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The art and culture of this age were nothing like what she had imagined, but it wasn't simply a matter of a return to classical style, either. It was more of a spiraling sublimation of post-postmodernism, built upon a new aesthetic foundation. For instance, A Fairy Tale of Yangtze contained profound metaphors for the universe and space and time. But Cheng Xin was most impressed by the disappearance of the gloomy despair and bizarre noise so prevalent in the postmodern culture and art of the twenty-first century. In their place was an unprecedented warm serenity and optimism. "I love your era," said Cheng Xin. "I'm surprised."

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But Trisolaris defied those expectations. Within a brief period of time, they systematically transmitted an enormous amount of knowledge. The treasure trove mainly consisted of basic scientific information, including mathematics, physics, cosmology, molecular biology of Trisolaran life forms, and so on. Every subject was a complete system

——————

Trisolarans produced sophisticated, high-quality art. Scholars called this phenomenon cultural reflection. Human civilization now possessed a mirror in the universe, through which humanity gained a new understanding of itself through a novel perspective. In the following ten years, Trisolaran reflection culture became popular on Earth, and began to displace the decadent native human culture that had lost its vitality. Reflection culture became the new source for scholars seeking new cultural and aesthetic ideas.

——————

the same time, Trisolaris itself remained shrouded in mystery, with almost no details about the world itself being transmitted. The

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This wasn't a lie. Cheng Xin really had been found. Her mother had never married, but one night, while on a date with her boyfriend at the time, she saw a three-month-old baby abandoned on a park bench, along with a bottle of milk, a thousand yuan, and a slip of paper with the baby girl's birthday. Her mother and the boyfriend had intended to bring the baby to the police, who would have turned the baby over to the city's civil affairs department, who would have sent her to an orphanage. Instead, her mother decided that she wanted to bring the baby home and go to the police in the morning. Perhaps it was the experience of being a mother for a night, or some other reason, but the next morning, she found that she couldn't send the child away. Every time she thought of parting from the young life, her heart ached, and so she decided to become the child's mother.

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Her mother had held her hand and said, "My darling, the three of us are together because of love...." Cheng Xin spent that night standing in front of her parents' window. In her mind, the night breeze and the twinkling stars and everything else repeated her mother's last words. Three centuries later, she was finally ready to do something for love. "I will be a candidate for the Swordholder," she said to the young mother.

——————

Gravity had been pursuing Blue Space for half a century. It finally approached its target. Only three AU separated the hunter and the hunted. Compared to the 1.5 light-years that the two ships had traversed, this was mere inches.

——————

Most of the one hundred-plus officers and crew aboard Gravity didn't experience this solitude because they had spent the majority of the past fifty years in hibernation. During routine cruising, only about five to ten crew members needed to be on duty. As the crew rotated through hibernation, each person was usually on duty for three to five years.

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The entire pursuit was a complex game of acceleration between Gravity and Blue Space. First of all, Blue Space couldn't just accelerate continuously, as doing so would cost it precious fuel and ultimately deprive it of mobility. Even if it managed to escape Gravity, it would be committing suicide in the endless empty desert of outer space if it exhausted its fuel. Although Gravity had more fuel onboard than Blue Space, it had constraints of its own. Since it needed to be prepared for a return voyage, its fuel reserves had to be divided into four equal parts: the acceleration away from the Solar System; the deceleration before its destination; the acceleration toward the Solar System

——————

A year previously, when Gravity and Blue Space were thirty AU apart, something not entirely unexpected occurred: Gravity and the two accompanying droplets entered a region of space where the sophons lost their quantum ties to home, terminating real-time communications with Earth. Gravity had to communicate with Earth through only neutrinos and radio. Transmissions from Gravity now took a year and three months to reach the Earth, and the ship had to wait an equally long time to receive a reply.

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"Doctor, I'm a survivor of the Doomsday Battle. After my ship exploded, I was curled up in a life pod the size of your desk, drifting in the vicinity of Neptune's orbit. By the time I was rescued, I was close to death, but my mind was still sound, and I never suffered any delusions.... I believe what I saw." Devon got up and walked away. He turned around at the cabin door. "If I meet that bastard again--doesn't matter where--I'm going to kill him."

——————

But the micrometeoroid had to have come from space. Based on the condition of the rupture, the micrometeoroid had struck the tube at a relative velocity of thirty thousand meters per second. It would have been impossible to accelerate the projectile to such speed from within the ship, much less from within the ecological area. "It's like a ghost," a sublieutenant named Ike muttered, and left. His choice of words was meaningful: About ten hours earlier, he had seen another, bigger ghost.

——————

The doctor pulled Guan Yifan along, and the two drifted toward the bow of the ship. If the ship were accelerating, going from the stern of the ship to the bow would be equivalent to climbing up a one-kilometer well, but in the weightlessness of coasting, the trip was a lot easier. Plaza #1 was located at the bow of the cylindrical ship, under a semispherical, transparent dome. Standing there was like standing in space itself. Compared to the holographic projections of the star field on the walls of spherical cabins, this place induced an even stronger sense of the "desubstantiation effect." "Desubstantiation effect" was a concept from astronautic psychology. Humans on Earth were surrounded by objects, and the image of the world in their subconscious was thus material and substantial. But in deep space, away from the Solar System, the stars were only distant points of light and the galaxy was nothing more than a luminous mist. To the senses and the mind, the world lost its materiality, and empty space dominated. A space voyager's subconscious image of the world thus became desubstantiated. This mental model was the baseline in astronautic psychology. Mentally, the ship became the[…]

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Guan shook his head, struggling to remember. "I don't know if it was a dream; I don't know if I was awake. Sometimes, you can think you're waking from a dream, only to find yourself still dreaming; other times, you're awake, but it seems like you're dreaming." "The second situation is extremely rare. If you experienced that, then it was almost certainly a symptom of some mental disorder. Oh, sorry, now you're unhappy with me again." "No, no. I think we're actually very similar. We both have our targets of observation. You observe the deranged, and I observe the universe. Like you, I also have some criteria for evaluating whether the observed objects are sound: harmony and beauty, in the mathematical sense."

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"Because of the speed of light. The known universe is about sixteen billion light-years across, and it's still expanding. But the speed of light is only three hundred thousand kilometers per second, a snail's pace. This means that light can never go from one end of the universe to the other. Since nothing can move faster than the speed of light, it follows that no information and motive force can go from one end of the universe to the other. If the universe were a person, his neural signals couldn't cover his entire body; his brain would not know of the existence of his limbs, and his limbs would not know of the existence of the brain. Isn't that paraplegia? The image in my mind is even worse: The universe is but a corpse puffing up." "Interesting, Dr. Guan, very interesting!

——————

Those who had been awakened faced the prospect of both a target nearly at hand and the loss of real-time communications with Earth. This loss did not pull them spiritually closer to the crew of Blue Space. To the contrary, like a child who was separated from her parents, the crew distrusted the parentless wild children even more. Everyone wished to capture Blue Space as quickly as possible and return home. Even though both crews were in the cold vastness of space, voyaging in the same direction at approximately the same speed, the natures of their voyages were completely different. Gravity had a spiritual anchor, while Blue Space was adrift

——————

Guan Yifan turned his gaze back to West. "Last night, I had a dream. I went somewhere, somewhere really open, open in a way that you can't even imagine. After I woke up, reality felt very enclosed and narrow, and that was how I came to be claustrophobic. It's like... if, as soon as you were born, you were locked inside a small box, you wouldn't care because that was all you've known. But once you've been let out and they put you back in, it feels completely different."

——————

Most people were convinced that the six droplets were hidden somewhere in the Solar System. But because the droplets were tiny, fast, and invisible to radar, they were extremely difficult to locate and track. Even by spreading oil films or using other advanced detection techniques, humans could only reliably detect droplets if they approached within 1/10 AU of the Earth, or fifteen million kilometers. Outside this sphere, the droplets were free to roam undetected. At maximum speed, a droplet could cross fifteen million kilometers in ten minutes. This was all the time the Swordholder would have to make a decision if dark forest deterrence broke down.

——————

Luo Ji stood tall and straight. He looked at the white wall, which he had stared at for more than half a century, for a few more seconds. Then he bowed slightly. He was paying his respects to his enemy. To have stared at each other across an abyss of four light-years for half a century had bonded them by a link of destiny.

——————

By the time the swords had clashed but once, one side had already fallen in a pool of blood. But before this moment, the opponents stared at each other like statues, sometimes for as long as ten minutes. During this contest, the swordsman's weapon wasn't held by the hands, but by his heart. The heart-sword, transformed through the eyes into the gaze, stabbed into the depths of the enemy's soul. The real winner was determined during this process: In the silence suspended between the two swordsmen, the blades of their spirits parried and stabbed as soundless claps of thunder. Before a single blow was struck, victory, defeat, life, and death had already been decided.

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Throughout this time, Luo Ji had remained silent, not uttering a single word. As a matter of fact, after a person ceased to speak for ten or fifteen years, he lost his powers of speech. He might still be able to understand language, but he would not be able to speak. Luo Ji certainly could no longer speak; everything he had to say, he put into his gaze against the wall. He had turned himself into a deterrence machine, a mine ready to explode on contact at each and every moment during the long years of the past half century, maintaining the precarious balance of terror between two worlds.

——————

In Cheng Xin's subconscious, she was a protector, not a destroyer; she was a woman, not a warrior. She was willing to use the rest of her life to maintain the balance between the two worlds, until the Earth grew stronger and stronger with Trisolaran science, until Trisolaris grew more and more civilized with Earth culture, until one day, a voice told her: Put down that red switch and return to the surface. The world no longer needs dark forest deterrence, no longer needs a Swordholder.

——————

She turned around and saw the mushroom cloud on the horizon. Formed by the earth and dust thrown up from deep underground, it was very thick, appearing almost solid. It looked so out of place in the serene scene that it resembled a bad Photoshop job. A closer examination led Cheng Xin to imagine it as an ugly bust showing a strange expression in the setting sun. That was where the droplet had penetrated the Earth.

——————

Half a century of cruising in formation with the droplets made everyone familiar with their appearance, and what they saw now shocked them. The droplet on the display was still shaped like a teardrop, but its surface was no longer a perfectly smooth mirror. Instead, it was dim and coppery yellow, as though full of rust. It was as if a magician's spell of eternal youth had failed, and the marks left by three centuries of spaceflight had all appeared at once. Instead of a shining spirit, the droplet had turned into an ancient artillery shell drifting through space. Communications with the Earth during the last few years had given these officers some basic insight into the principles of strong-interaction materials. They knew that the surface of a droplet was held in a force field generated by mechanisms inside. This force field counteracted the electromagnetic force between particles, allowing the strong nuclear force to spill out. Without the force field, strong-interaction material reverted to ordinary metal.

——————

The original plan had intended the hailing message as an experiment; there was no preparation for how to develop further communications. While the three in the pinnace debated what to do, the Ring sent a second bitmap to the pinnace: 1, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 1, 4, 2, 1, 5, 9. Then a third bitmap: 1, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 16, 6, 10, 10, 4, 7. A fourth: 1, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 19, 5, 1, 15, 4, 8. A fifth: 1, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 7, 2, 16, 4, 1, 14.

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I think there's an even more interesting question: Have we encountered them before? Think about the Earth: It's been careening through space for several billion years. Is it not possible that it had entered a four-dimensional fragment in the past?" "That would have been an astonishing sight. I find it hard to imagine that humanity had experienced it.... But I wonder if dinosaurs could have located warped points..." "Why are there bubbles at all? Why are there so many four-dimensional fragments in three-dimensional space?"

——————

This was the first time humans had come close to a four-dimensional object. Similar to high-dimensional spatial sense, they felt the magnificence of high-dimensional materiality. The Ring was completely sealed, and they could not look inside the band, but they could feel an immense sense of depth and of containment. What they were seeing wasn't just a Ring, but an infinity of Rings all stacked together in concealment. This sensation of four-dimensionality impressed itself upon the soul, and gave the observers the experience of seeing the mountain contained in a mustard seed described in Buddhist parables.

——————

Widnall said, "If we really discover a photoid, it would be better to not issue a warning at all. It's useless, anyway. To die suddenly without even knowing what hit you is actually a rather fortunate fate. But you'd rather torture a few billion people for twenty-four hours. I think that's akin to a crime against humanity."

——————

Seeing this silvery graveyard more than forty trillion kilometers away made Widnall wax philosophical. "From a scientific perspective, 'destroy' isn't really accurate. Nothing has disappeared. All the matter that used to be there is still there, and so is all the angular momentum. It's only the arrangement of matter that has changed, like a deck of cards being reshuffled. But life is like a straight flush: Once you shuffle, it's gone."

——————

That smile, like a crack in the ice, spread across Wade's face. "You are perfectly aware that if I break my promise, it will actually be a blessing for you. But unfortunately, I will keep my promise." Wade walked back and straightened his leather jacket, which only caused more wrinkles to appear. He stood in front of Cheng Xin and solemnly said, "I promise that if, during the process of researching lightspeed spaceflight, we discover anything that may harm the human race, regardless of the form of the danger, we'll awaken you. You'll have the final say and can take back all of my authority."

——————

"You believe he'll keep his promise?" asked Cheng Xin. AA stared straight ahead, as though looking at a ghost Wade. "I do. I think the devil will do as he says. But just like he said, that's not necessarily a good thing for you. You could have saved yourself, Cheng Xin, but in the end, you didn't." Ten days later, Thomas Wade became the president of the

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Everything you own. Your company, your wealth, your authority, your position--and if possible, your reputation and glory. I will use them all to build lightspeed ships, for your ideals, and for the grandness of the human spirit."

——————

It was time: The hydrogen bomb exploded. Without the obstruction of an atmosphere, nearly all of its energy was released in the form of radiation. In the live feed taken from about four hundred kilometers away, a fireball appeared next to the Sun. Soon, the brightness and size of the fireball exceeded the Sun itself, and the camera's filters quickly dimmed the light. If someone were to gaze at it directly from this distance, he or she would be blinded permanently. By the time the fireball reached maximum brightness, there was nothing in the camera's view but pure whiteness. The flame seemed ready to swallow the entire universe.

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Bunker Era, Year 11 Bunker World #37813, your hibernation is at an end. You have been in hibernation for 62 years, 8 months, 21 days, and 13 hours. Your remaining hibernation allotment is 238 years, 3 months, 9 days. This is Asia Hibernation Center #1, Bunker Era, Year 11, May 9, 2:17 P.M.

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The clouds began to dissipate, revealing a large opening. Through the opening, Cheng Xin did not see a blue sky; instead, she saw... more ground. The ground in the sky was studded with the buildings of a city very similar to the city around her, except she was now looking "down"--or "up"--at it. This must have been the "other side" Cao Bin referred to. Cheng Xin realized that the rising "mountainside" in the distance wasn't a mountain at all, but continued to rise until it connected with the "sky." The world was a giant cylinder, and she was standing on the inside of it. "This is Space City Asia I, in the shadow of Jupiter," Cao Bin said. The new world that had seemed so common a moment ago now stunned her. Cheng Xin felt that she had finally, truly awakened.

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The city government is different from the atmospheric system, much more complicated. When you get there, pay attention to the office politics. Don't get too close to anyone at first, but don't hold yourself apart either."..."It's not right to charge separately for the heat; that should have been included in the electric bill."..."If they had subbed for that fool earlier they wouldn't have lost so badly."..."Don't be so disappointed. I've been here since the city was built, and how much do you think I make every year?"..."That fish is no longer fresh. Don't even think about steaming it."..."The other day, when they had to make an orbital adjustment, Park Four's water spilled again and flooded a large area."..."If she doesn't like him, he should just give up. All that effort is just going to be wasted."..."That can't be authentic. I don't even think it's a high-quality imitation. Are you kidding me? At that price?"... Cheng Xin's heart felt warm and co

——————

Pacific I was a city in permanent night, and each building maintained illumination with a nuclear battery. Thus, the interior was filled with glowing, floating lights. Most of the buildings in the city were simple shacks built from abandoned construction materials. Since there was no "up" or "down," most of the shacks were cube-shaped, with windows (which also acted as doors) on all six sides. Some were shaped as spheres, which had the advantage of being more resilient, as the drifting buildings inevitably collided against each other. There was no notion of land ownership in Pacific I because all the buildings drifted around with no permanent location. In principle, each resident had the right to use any space in the city. The city had a large number of homeless individuals who didn't even possess a shack. All of their possessions were kept in a large net sling to prevent them from scattering everywhere,

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As they left the floating city in eternal night, Cheng Xin gazed at it through the porthole of the dinghy. This was a city of poverty and homelessness, but it also possessed its own rich life, like a weightless version of the famous Song Dynasty painting, Along the River During the Qingming Festival. She understood that compared to the last era, the Bunker World was not at all an ideal society. The migration to the rim of the Solar System had caused some toxic social conditions, long eliminated by progress, to reemerge. This wasn't exactly regression, but a kind of spiraling ascent, a necessary condition for the exploration and settlement of new frontiers.

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In total, behind Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune, there were sixty-four large space cities and nearly a hundred medium and small cities, plus numerous space stations. Nine hundred million people lived in the Bunker World. This was almost the entirety of the human race. Even before the arrival of the dark forest strike

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The closest approach, like you experienced just now, was a hundred and fifty kilometers, basically brushing right by us. We don't really have a choice. Jupiter has thirteen moons, and it's impossible for the space cities to avoid them all. Europa's orbit is inclined only slightly from the equator, and so it's very close to these cities here. It's the main source of water for the Jovian cities, and we've built a lot of industry on it. But when the dark forest strike comes, all of it will have to be sacrificed. After the solar explosion, all of the Jovian moons' orbits will shift dramatically. Maneuvering the space cities to avoid them at that time will be a very complicated operation."

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The first was North America I, the closest city to Asia I. The main advantage of its spherical construction was that a single artificial sun at the center was sufficient to illuminate the entire city, but the disadvantage of such a design was obvious as well: The gravity changed depending on one's latitude. The equator had the most gravity, which decreased as you went up in latitude. The polar regions were weightless. Inhabitants in the different regions had to adjust to life under various gravity conditions.

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North America I had been completed early on. With a radius of twenty kilometers and twenty million inhabitants, it was the largest city by population. It acted as the prosperous commercial center for all the Jovian cities.

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Europe IV had the smallest population of all the cities, only 4.5 million. It was the wealthiest city of the Bunker World. The exquisite houses illuminated by miniature suns amazed Cheng Xin. Each house came with its own swimming pool, and a few had wide lawns. Tiny white sails dotted the serene equatorial sea, and people sat on the shore, fishing leisurely. She saw a yacht sail by slowly, and it looked as luxurious as any yacht on ancient Earth. There was a cocktail party being held aboard the yacht with live musicians.... She was astonished that such life could be transplanted into the shadow of Jupiter, eight hundred million kilometers from the Earth.

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Millions of construction workers had lived in Pacific I during the early years of the Bunker Project. As the project progressed, it was used to warehouse construction materials. Later, as the numerous flaws of this early-phase experimental space city became apparent, it was abandoned. But, after the resettlement to the Bunker World had been completed, people began to live here again, and finally formed a city of their own, with a city government and police force. However, the authorities only maintained the most basic public infrastructure, and society was left basically to run on its own. Pacific I was the only city to which people were free to immigrate without a residential permit. Most of the population consisted of unemployed and homeless wanderers, poor people who had lost social security for various reasons, and bohemian artists. Later, it became the base for extremist political organizations.

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Cheng Xin and Cao Bin drifted close to a group of homeless men gathered around an open fire. Such a fire would have been prohibited in any other city. The fuel seemed to be some kind of flammable construction material. Due to the weightlessness, the flames did not rise up, but formed a ball of fire floating in place. The way they drank was also special. They tossed alcohol out of bottles, forming liquid spheres in the air. Then the men, dressed in rags and with unshaven faces, drifted along with them, capturing the spheres with their mouths and swallowing. One of the drunken men vomited, and the vomit rushing out of his mouth propelled him back, sending him tumbling in midair....

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The Earth was now barely inhabited. Only about five million people remained there. These were individuals who did not wish to leave their home and who had no fear of the prospect of Death at any moment. Many brave men and women living in the Bunker World also traveled to Earth as tourists, though each journey meant gambling with their lives. As time passed, the anticipated dark forest strike loomed larger, and people gradually adapted to life in the Bunker World. Their yearning for their homeland lessened as they busied themselves in their new homes, and fewer and fewer now visited the Earth. The public no longer cared much about news from the home world, and were only vaguely aware that Nature was enjoying a resurgence. Forests and grasslands covered every continent, and those who stayed behind had to carry guns to defend against wild beasts when they went out, but it was rumored that they lived like kings, each with a vast estate and personal forests and lakes. The entire Earth was now only a single city in the Solar System Federation.

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What happened after 高 Way was sucked in was almost too strange to describe. Scientists observed the black hole via remote-controlled microscopes, and discovered that at the black hole's event horizon--that's the surface of that tiny sphere with a diameter of twenty-one nanometers--there was the figure of a person. It was 高 Way passing through the event horizon. "Under general relativity, a distant observer would see a clock near the event horizon slow down, and the process of 高 Way falling toward the event horizon would also slow down and stretch into infinity. "But within 高 Way's own frame of reference, he had already passed through the event horizon. "Even more oddly, the figure's proportions were normal. Perhaps it was because the black hole was so small, but tidal forces did not seem to be at work. He had been compressed into the nanometer range, but space there was also extremely curved. More than one physicist believed that the body structure of 高 Way wasn't harmed at the event horizon. In other words, he's probably still alive at this moment.

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Six years after the commencement of studies on the black hole specimen, 高 Way died. According to the official account of the World Academy of Sciences, he was accidentally 'sucked into the black hole' during an experiment.

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Inside Lightspeed II, there was a protective net around the black hole with a radius of five thousand meters. Research personnel were forbidden to enter. Since the radius of Leda was originally only eight thousand meters, the black hole's gravity at this distance was not much greater than the gravity on the surface of the original Leda. It's not a very powerful pull--a person standing there was essentially weightless, and could easily escape using the thrusters on their space suit. Thus, Gao couldn't have been 'sucked' in.

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And thus the life insurance company refused to pay out, although 高 Way had passed through the event horizon in his frame of reference, and should now be dead. But the insurance contract was made within the frame of reference of our world, and from this perspective, it is impossible to prove that 高 Way is dead. It's not even possible to begin the settlement process. Insurance claims settlement can only occur after the conclusion of an accident, but as 高 Way is still falling toward the black hole, the accident isn't over, and will never be over.

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The next coil is one point five million kilometers away, four or five times the distance from the Earth to the moon. You can't see it," Cao Bin said. "This is a supercollider capable of accelerating a particle to the energy level of the big bang. Ships are not allowed anywhere near the orbit of the accelerator. A few years ago, a lost freighter drifted into the orbit by mistake and was hit by a beam of accelerated particles. The ultrahigh-energy particles struck the ship and produced high-energy secondary showers that vaporized the ship and its cargo of millions of tons of mineral ore in an instant." Cao

——————

But one week later, Federation Fleet Command revealed to the world the captured antimatter bullets. The pile of golden Death stunned everyone. The Halo Group was declared an illegal organization, and the Federation Government confiscated all its property and took over the circumsolar particle accelerator. The Federation Fleet declared a long-term occupation of Halo City, and the Academies of Science and Engineering were dissolved. More than three hundred people, including Wade, the other leaders of the Halo Group, and the city self-defense force, were arrested. In the subsequent trial in Federation court, Thomas Wade was convicted of crimes against humanity, war crimes, and violations of the laws prohibiting research into curvature propulsion. The sentence was death.

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Once she was outside the detention center, Cheng Xin picked out one of the cigars and borrowed a light from one of the guards. She took her first puff of a cigar in her life. Oddly, she didn't cough. She watched the white smoke rise in the sunlight of the capital, watched it dissipate in her tear-filled vision like the three centuries she and Wade had lived through. Three days later, a powerful laser vaporized Thomas Wade in one-ten-thousandth of a second.

——————

She was only thirty-three. Cheng Xin and AA rode Halo back to the Jovian city cluster and once again entered hibernation in Asia I. The contracted-for time was two hundred years, but they included a provision in the contract stating they should be awakened if a dark forest strike occurred before then. And then they slept. Dreamless.

——————

Fleet International, which had been formed to combat the Trisolaran invasion, lost its reason for existence and gradually diminished in relevance until it was finally dissolved. The Solar System Fleet that had belonged to Fleet International became the property of the Solar System Federation. This was the first time in human history where a unified world government controlled the majority of humanity's armed forces. Since it was no longer necessary to maintain a large space force, the fleet's size was drastically reduced. After the commencement of the Bunker Project, most of the then-extant hundred-plus stellar-class warships were converted for civilian use. After they were disarmed and their ecological cycling systems removed, they became interplanetary industrial transports for the Bunker Project. Only

——————

The danger of lightspeed ships lay not only in the trails, but also in upsetting the new social stability in the Bunker World, a prospect that could not be tolerated. A resolution was passed to authorize the government takeover of Halo City and the circumsolar particle accelerator, and to put a complete stop to the Halo Group's theoretical research and technical development in curvature propulsion. Thereafter, the Halo Group's behavior would be subjected to close monitoring.

——————

Wade gestured for the self-defense force to leave. They departed noiselessly, and the hall brightened as though a dark cloud had dissipated. Wade struggled to stand, walked around the pile of antimatter cartridges, and slowly opened the glass dome. He blew at the curvature propulsion platform and Cheng Xin's hair disappeared. He closed the dome, turned to Cheng Xin, and smiled. "You see, I've kept my promise, little girl."

——————

They returned to Australia. Only Canberra remained inhabited, and a tiny town government there called itself the Australian Federal Government. The Parliament House where Sophon had proclaimed the plan for the extermination of the human race was still there, but thick layers of vegetation sealed its doors, and vines climbed up the eighty-meter-tall flagpole. They found Fraisse's record in the government archives. He had lived until he was 150, but finally, time had defeated him. He had died more than ten years ago.

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Examining the data was Singer's job; judging the sincerity of the coordinates was Singer's joy. Singer understood that what he did wasn't important--it just filled in the pieces. But it had to be done, and the task was enjoyable. Speaking of enjoyment, when this seed had departed from the home world, that world was still a place full of joy. But later, as the home world began to war against the fringe world, joy diminished. By now, more than ten thousand grains of time had passed. There wasn't much joy to speak of on the home world or in this seed. The happiness of the past was recorded in classical songs, and singing those songs was another of the few joys left. Singer sang one of these classical songs as he reviewed the data.

Alien

——————

The set of coordinates was broadcast by long membrane, and even Singer himself couldn't be sure what told him that the set of coordinates was sincere--intuition could not always be explained. He decided to cleanse it. He wasn't busy, and the task wasn't going to distract him from singing. Even if he got it wrong, it was not a big deal. Cleansing was not a precision task and didn't require absolute accuracy. It also wasn't urgent. He just had to get it done eventually. This was also why his position wasn't prestigious. Singer took a mass dot out of the seed's magazine, then he turned to look for the star indicated by the set of coordinates. The main core guided his gaze, like a spear sweeping through the starry sky. Singer grasped the mass dot with a force field feeler and prepared to flick it. But then he saw the location indicated by the set of coordinates and the feeler relaxed.

——————

Back to the coordinates. Many sets of coordinates flitted across space, like the matrix insects flitting across the sky of the home world. Picking up coordinates was the job of the main core, which swallowed all the messages passing through space: medium membrane, long membrane, light membrane, and maybe one day even short membrane. The main core remembered the positions of all the stars. By matching the received data against various map projections and position schema, it could pick out the coordinates of the messages' origin. It was said that the main core could match position schema from five hundred million time grains ago. Singer never tried anything like that--it would be meaningless. In that distant age, the low-entropy clusters in space were rare and far apart, and had not evolved the hiding gene and the cleansing gene. But now--

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Sincere coordinates followed certain patterns. For instance, a mass cluster of coordinates was usually insincere. But these patterns were all only heuristics. Judging the sincerity of coordinates effectively required intuition. The main core on this seed was incapable of this task, and even the supercore back on the home world could not do it. This was one reason why low-entropy entities had no substitute.

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Singer

——————

Singer's spirit crossed the chasm of space and time, resonated with the spirit of the broadcaster, and felt its terror and anxiety, along with other feelings unfamiliar to the home world, such as hatred, envy, greed, and so on. But for the most part, it was terror. Terror was what endowed a set of coordinates with sincerity. For all low-entropy entities, terror guaranteed existence.

——————

Singer soon understood why the cleansing had happened so fast. He saw a slow fog in the vicinity of that destroyed world. The slow fog was about half a structure length away from that world. Seen by itself, it wasn't apparent where the fog had come from, but when connected with the broadcast coordinates, it was obvious that the fog belonged to that world. The slow fog showed that the world was dangerous, which was why the cleansing had come so quickly. It appeared that there were other low-entropy entities with even sharper intuition than he; but that wasn't strange. It was as the Elder said: In the cosmos, no matter how fast you are, someone will be faster; no matter how slow you are, someone will be slower.

We are nothing

——————

If Singer were patient, all sincere coordinates would eventually be cleansed by other, unknown low-entropy entities. But this was not a good thing for either the home world or the seed. Since Singer had received the set of coordinates and even glanced at the world pointed to by the coordinates, Singer had a connection to that world. It would be naïve to think of this connection as unidirectional. Recall the great law of reversible discovery: If you could see a low-entropy world, then that low-entropy world could also see you--it was only a matter of time. Thus, waiting for others to complete cleansing was dangerous.

——————

Among the "personal effects" was something that piqued Singer's interest. It was a record of the dead world's three communications with another location using medium membrane. Medium membrane was the least efficient communication membrane, also called primitive membrane. Most communications preferred long membrane, though it was said that even short membrane could be used to convey messages. If true, that would make the communicators akin to gods. But Singer liked primitive membrane. He thought primitive membrane possessed a simple beauty, symbolizing an age full of joy. He often turned primitive membrane messages into songs. He thought they sounded pretty, even if he didn't understand them. Understanding them wasn't necessary, however; other than coordinates, primitive membrane messages didn't have much useful information. It was enough to enjoy the music.

——————

Why did whoever cleansed the dead three-star world not also cleanse the world of the Star-Pluckers? Many possibilities. Perhaps they hadn't noticed these three communications--primitive membrane messages often didn't get much attention. But given the millions upon millions of worlds out there, someone would have noticed--Singer was just one who did. Even without Singer, some other low-entropy entity would have noticed them; it was just a matter of time. Or perhaps they had noticed them, but decided that a low-entropy group that didn't possess the hiding gene wasn't much of a threat, and cleansing them was more trouble than it was worth.

——————

"There's no point. The bunker is useless," Cao Bin said, lowering his eyes. "How far is the photoid from the Sun?" Cheng Xin asked. "There's no photoid." "Then what have you found?" Cao Bin gave a wretched laugh. "A slip of paper."

——————

Bai Aisi pondered this. "No. This desert wasn't the result of the Earth's natural evolution, but the result of man-made forces. The behavior of civilizations can't be grasped through the laws of physics." "Very good. Then why do we and our colleagues all want to try to explain the conditions of today's cosmos, and to predict its future, solely through deductions based on the laws of physics?" Ding Yi's words surprised Bai Aisi. The man had never revealed such thoughts in the past. Bai Aisi said, "I think that's beyond physics. The goal of physics is to discover the fundamental laws of nature. Although the man-made desertification of the Earth could not be calculated directly from physics, it still follows laws. Universal laws are constant."

——————

After another hour during which no signs of the slip could be detected, Vasilenko ordered the pinnace to return to Revelation. But the two crew members on duty in the pinnace didn't acknowledge the order; the radio only transmitted a hurried conversation between them. "Look out below! What's going on?" "It's rising!" "Don't touch it! Get out!!" "My leg! Ahhh--" After the scream, the monitoring terminal on Revelation showed one of the crew members leaving the pinnace and activating the thrusters on his space suit in an attempt to escape. They saw a bright light; the source was the bottom of the pinnace, which was melting! The pinnace looked like a scoop of ice cream dropped onto a scalding sheet of glass: The bottom was melting and spreading in every direction. The "glass" was invisible, and the plane's existence was indicated only by the spreading pool of melted pinnace material. The pool spread into an extremely thin sheet and emitted bewitching, colorful lights, like fireworks scattered through a sheet of glass.

——————

As soon as he saw the escaping crewman's feet touch the invisible plane, Vasilenko gave the order. Revelation wasn't a stellar ship, so when it engaged in Full Ahead acceleration, the crew did not need to enter into the protective deep-sea state. But the hypergravity was enough to sink everyone deep into their seats. Since the order was given in such a hurry, a few couldn't get to their seats in time and fell to the stern of the ship with injuries. Revelation's exhaust nozzles emitted a plasma stream several kilometers long that pierced the dark night of space. Far in the distance, where the pinnace was still melting, they could see the phosphorescent glow like will-o'-the-wisps in the wilderness. From the zoomed-in view on the monitoring terminal, they could see that only the very top part of the pinnace was left, and that too soon disappeared into the brilliant plane. The body of the dead crewman was also diffused into the plane, showing up as a gigantic, man-shaped glow. His body had been transformed into a slice on the plane without thickness. Though large in area, it had no volume. "We're not moving[…]

——————

When the projectile was about 150 AU from the Sun, the gravitational waves it emitted began to rapidly decrease in frequency. The advance warning system discovered that this was due to its deceleration. Within a few days, the projectile's velocity went from lightspeed to one-thousandth of lightspeed, and continued to decrease. Such low speed meant that it wasn't enough to threaten the Sun, which provided further comfort. In addition, at this speed, human spacecraft could keep up with it. In other words, it was possible to send out ships to intercept it.

——————

Ding Yi continued, "At the beginning of the crisis, when the sophons were interfering with the particle accelerators, a few people committed suicide. At the time, I thought what they did made no sense. Theoreticians should be excited by such experimental data! But now I understand. Those people knew more than I did. Take Yang Dong, for instance. She knew much more than I did, and thought further. She probably knew things we don't even know now. Do you think only sophons create illusions? Do you think the only illusions exist in the particle accelerator terminals? Do you think the rest of the universe is as pure as a virgin, waiting for us to explore? Too bad that she left with everything she knew."

——————

Just as four-dimensional space collapses into three dimensions, three-dimensional space can collapse into two dimensions, with one dimension folding and curling into the quantum realm. The area of that slice of two-dimensional space--it only has area--will rapidly expand, causing more space to collapse.... We're now in space that is falling toward two dimensions, and ultimately, the entire Solar System will follow. In other words, the Solar System will turn into a painting with no thickness."

——————

On the plane two thousand kilometers away, the light emitted by the two-dimensionalized pinnace and crewmen had already gone out. Compared to collapsing from four dimensions to three, the fall from three dimensions to two gave off much less energy. Two two-dimensional structures were revealed clearly by the starlight. On the two-dimensionalized pinnace, it was possible to see the details of three-dimensional structures unfolded in two dimensions--the crew cabin, the fusion reactor, and so on--as well as the curled-up figure of the crewman in the cabin. In the figure of the other crewman, the bones and blood vessels could be clearly discerned, as well as all the body parts. During the process of falling into two dimensions, every point on a three-dimensional object was projected onto the plane in accordance with precise geometric principles, and so these two figures turned out to be the most complete and precise images of the original three-dimensional pinnace and people. All the internal structures were now laid out side by side in two dimensions with nothing hidden.

——————

True. What was there to say? Civilization was like a mad dash that lasted five thousand years. Progress begot more progress; countless miracles gave birth to more miracles; humankind seemed to possess the power of gods; but in the end, the real power was wielded by time. Leaving behind a mark was tougher than creating a world. At the end of civilization, all they could do was the same thing they had done in the distant past, when humanity was but a babe: Carving words into stone.

——————

True, to the extraterrestrial discoverers of the far future, the human classics left on the walls here would probably resemble Linear A, Cretan hieroglyphics, and other ancient scripts that no one could read. Perhaps there was no realistic hope that anyone would. By the time the builders of this monument truly understood the power of time, they no longer believed that a vanished civilization could really leave behind any marks that would last through geologic eons. As Luo Ji had said, this wasn't a museum. A museum was built for visitors; a tombstone was built for the builders. The three continued onward, and Luo Ji's cane tapped along the ground rhythmically.

——————

Van Gogh's representation of space had left a deep impression on her. In his subconscious, space seemed to have structure. Cheng Xin wasn't an expert in theoretical physics back then, but she knew that according to string theory, space, like material objects, was made up of many microscopic vibrating strings. Van Gogh had painted these strings: In his paintings, space--like mountains, wheat fields, houses, and trees--was filled with minute vibrations. Starry Night had left an indelible mark in her mind, and she was amazed to see it again four centuries later on Pluto.

——————

Each large ring was composed of many smaller rings, full of detailed structures. As they examined the planets further, the two giant eyes now more resembled the rings of a newly felled tree. Around each two-dimensional planet were a dozen or so small circles--moons that had also been flattened. Around Saturn was another faint large circle--its rings. They could still find the Sun in the sky, a small disk emitting faint yellow light. Since the two planets were still on the other side of the sun, their area after collapsing into two dimensions was breathtaking. Both planets had no thickness anymore.

——————

Cheng Xin and AA asked Luo Ji to come onto Halo. Luo Ji said he would like to see it, and went to look for a space suit. As the three of them carried the artifacts out of the monolith, the sight of a flattening Earth greeted them. The Earth was the first solid planet to collapse into two dimensions. Compared to Neptune and Saturn, the "tree rings" in the two-dimensionalized Earth were even more replete with fine details--the yellow mantle gradually shifted over to the deep red nickel-iron core--but the overall area was much smaller than the gas giants. Unlike in their imagination, they couldn't see any hint of blue.

——————

On the surface, they saw that yet another two-dimensional planet had appeared in the sky: Mercury (Venus was on the other side of the Sun at this moment). It looked smaller than the two-dimensional Earth, but the light generated by its recent collapse into two dimensions made it very bright. After they packed the artifacts in the hold, Cheng Xin and AA came out of Halo. Luo Ji, who was waiting outside, leaning on his cane, said, "All right. I think that's enough. It's meaningless to carry more, anyway."

——————

They were much taller, and each had a unique design. The tips of some of the skyscrapers almost touched the axis of the city. Buildings in the shapes of trees reappeared as well, and they looked about as large as the ones that had been built on Earth, though the leaves hung more densely. It was possible to imagine the city's beauty and magnificence when lit up at night. But now, only cold moonlight illuminated it, and the tree-buildings cast wide shadows so that the rest of the city appeared as ruins nestled in the shade of a giant forest.

——————

These are probably the darkest things in the universe," Cheng Xin said. The death lines showed no details except an exceptional blackness showing the boundaries of the zero-lightspeed region, with no real surface. Looking up, the lines showed up clearly even against the dark backdrop of space. "These are the deadest things in the universe as well," said Guan Yifan. "Zero-lightspeed means absolute, one hundred percent death. Inside it, every fundamental particle, every quark is dead. There is no vibration. Even without a source of gravity inside, each death line is a black hole. A zero-gravity black hole. Anything that falls in cannot reemerge." Yifan picked up a rock and tossed it toward one of the death lines. The rock disappeared inside the absolute darkness.

——————

Are these the most advanced lightspeed ships?" "Maybe. But this is a rarely seen technique. Death lines are usually the products of Zero-Homers." "Zero-Homers?" "They're also called Resetters. Maybe they're a group of intelligent individuals, or a civilization, or a group of civilizations. We don't know exactly who they are, but we've confirmed their existence. The Zero-Homers want to reset the universe and return it to the Garden of Eden."

——————

The space suit had no automatic systems, and everything required manual operation. "There are no computer chips inside this suit at all. Right now, none of our computers--electronic or quantum--work anymore." "Why?" "The speed of light right now is less than twenty kilometers per second."

——————

Neural computers. Computers that can operate under reduced lightspeed. The shuttle and Hunter both have two control systems, one of which is based on neural computers." Cheng Xin was amazed that such machines existed. "The key isn't the speed of light, but the system design. The transmission of chemical signals in the brain is even slower, only two or three meters per second--not much faster than us walking. Neural computers can still work because they imitate the highly parallel processing found in the brains of higher animals. All the chips are designed specifically to function under reduced-lightspeed conditions."

——————

There are many laws that can be manipulated into weapons, but most commonly, the focus is on spatial dimensions and the speed of light. Typically, lowering spatial dimensions is a technique for attack, and lowering the speed of light is a technique for defense. Thus, the dimensional strike on the Solar System was an advanced attack method. A dimensional strike is a sign of respect. In this universe, respect is not easy to earn. I guess you could consider it an honor for Earth civilization."

——————

While Cheng Xin was still recovering from the shock, Yifan continued, "The speed of light is also frequently used as a weapon. I'm not talking about building light tombs--or, as you call them, black domains. Those are just defensive mechanisms employed by weak worms like us. The gods do not stoop so low. In war, it's possible to make reduced-lightspeed black holes to seal the enemy inside. But more commonly, the technique is used to construct the equivalents of pits and city walls. Some reduced-lightspeed belts are large enough to traverse an entire arm of a galaxy. In places where the stars are dense, many reduced-lightspeed black holes can be connected together into chains that stretch for tens of millions of light-years. That's a Great Wall at the scale of the universe. Even the most powerful fleets, once trapped, would not be able to escape. Those barriers are very difficult to cross."

——————

The longest few lines, in fact, took up almost a third of the sky. These lines crossed each other at different angles and made space appear far more confusing and chaotic than before. "I think they're stars," repeated Yifan. "A star's light must pass through two interfaces before getting to us: First, it must go through the interface between regular lightspeed and reduced lightspeed, and then through the event horizon of the black hole. That's why the stars look so strange to us now." "We're inside the black domain?" "That's right. We're inside the light tomb."

——————

More than eighteen million years after the DX3906 system turned into a reduced-lightspeed black hole, seventeen billion years after the birth of the universe, a man and a woman held each other tightly. Cheng Xin sobbed her heart out over Yifan's shoulder. In her memories, she had cried like this only once before, when Tianming's brain had been taken out of his body. That was... 18,903,729 years plus six centuries ago, and those six centuries were but a rounding error at such geologic timescales. This time, she cried not only for Tianming. She cried out of a sense of surrender. She finally understood how she was but a mote of dust in a grand wind, a small leaf drifting over a broad river

——————

Average atomic decay dating results (error range: 0.4%): Stellar time periods lapsed: 6,177,906; Earth years lapsed: 18,903,729.

——————

They could see the backs of two figures standing on the horizon: a man and a woman. The man had just put down his uplifted arm. "That's us," said Cheng Xin. In front of those two figures, they could see a distant white house and trees, exact duplicates of the ones nearby. They couldn't see what was at the feet of those figures due to the distance, but they could guess that it was another black field. At the end of the world was a duplicate of it, or maybe a projection.

——————

Thus, this is a completely enclosed world in which the end is also the beginning. The images we see all around us are the result of light returning to the starting point after crossing the world. We're still in the same world we started from, because this is the only world that exists. Every copy we see around us is just an image of this world." "So this is..." "Yes!" Yifan swept his arm around to indicate everything. "Yun Tianming once gave you a star, and now he's given you a universe. Cheng Xin, this is an entire universe. It might be small, but it's a complete universe."

——————

The fusion drive activated and the thrusters emitted a dim blue light. The spaceship slowly went through the door of the universe. The message in a bottle and the ecological sphere were the only things left in the mini-universe. The bottle faded into the darkness so, in this one-cubic-kilometer universe, only the little sun inside the ecological sphere gave off any light. In this minuscule world of life, a few clear watery spheres drifted serenely in weightlessness. One tiny fish leapt out of a watery sphere and entered another, where it effortlessly swam between the green algae. On a blade of grass on one of the miniature continents, a drop of dew took off from the tip of the grass blade, rose spiraling into the air, and refracted a clear ray of sunlight into space.

Out of Office, Highlights

NOTES FROM

Out of Office

Anne Helen Petersen

June 5, 2024

Between 1979 and 1996, more than forty-three million jobs were eliminated from the U.S. economy. In the 1980s, the composite of laid-off workers tilted more heavily toward manufacturing and other “lower skilled” jobs, whose pay averaged under $50,000 a year.5 Between 1990 and 1996, that number shifted: the majority of people who lost their jobs were “white collar,” and they lost them at nearly double the rate that they had in the 1980s. Over that same period,

June 5, 2024

“There’s an entropy associated with meetings,” Eric Porres, who runs the company MeetingScience, told us. “They take on a life of their own. We’ve been trained and conditioned to schedule meetings for half an hour to an hour. When we look at a company and they have all of their meetings in thirty-, sixty-, ninety-minute chunks, we say, wow, you have a big problem. You don’t have any time to process. And when do you actually get any work done?” MeetingScience gathers the wealth of information available through a company’s digital calendars and analyzes it alongside a thirteen-question anonymized survey, sent to individuals after every meeting, about what just happened. Was there an agenda? Did you know what was expected of you? Were there clear next steps? Was the meeting satisfying? Was it important for me to be there? Did it start on time, or did it start late?

June 5, 2024

The tech company Hugo, which bundles meeting scheduling and notes, tracks the number of meetings per week among its clients. As you’d expect, the numbers over the course of the pandemic were telling: Between January and May, the average number of meetings climbed from 12 to around 15, before dipping to around 14.5 for most of the summer. But in early September, the number started climbing again; by November, users were averaging 16.5 meetings per week: more than 3 meetings a day, every day of the week. (Microsoft Teams data shows that this meeting surge was global: between February 2020 and February 2021, average Teams meeting time rose from thirty-five minutes to forty-five minutes.)17 Hugo’s users began meeting more when they hit remote, and then spiked again right as kids went back to school: the more stressed we became, the more meeting we called. In our heads, meetings are usually drawn up in an attempt at having more control over a project or a particular decision.

June 5, 2024

Overanalysis and optimization always risk squeezing the vibrancy and serendipity out of work. Which is why you don’t necessarily need a company to help you, but you do need perspective. Regular meetings should be held up to the light and examined, even the ones that have been on the books for years. It’s not just figuring out the meeting’s goal. It’s figuring out whether a meeting is the best way to achieve it in the first place. Many companies have become so reliant on meetings as their primary mode of accomplishment—and demonstration of busyness—that it’s hard to imagine alternatives. Or, if they do, they feel too technically advanced for broad-scale adoption. You’d be surprised, though, just how old-fashioned some of these fixes feel.

June 5, 2024

This isn’t an advertisement for a specific piece of technology, but it is a full-throated endorsement for non-text-based conversations (especially ones where you don’t also have to stare at yourself in a small box in the corner). Video can convey tone in a way that no number of emojis quite can. Our brains, after all, use visual and audio cues like facial expressions to add context to words. Visuals can clear up confusion, demonstrate seriousness, and, most important, help set our minds at ease. According to Roderick M. Kramer, who studies organizational behavior, their absence while working from home can exacerbate uncertainty about status, which can lead to overprocessing information.18 In short, we get paranoid about whether we’re doing good work, about to be fired, annoying our managers, and so on. But

June 5, 2024

And yet productivity went up; employees felt as productive as during the five-day schedule, if not more so, and employee stress levels improved. And this included developers and engineers: actual coding days went down (3.4 to 2.7 for product; 3.2 to 2.9 for mobile and infrastructure), but “productive impact,” a.k.a. how much they were actually getting done, increased significantly and in the case of infrastructure and mobile doubled.21 Buffer opted to extend the trial another six months, to see if it was sustainable, and in February 2021 decided to officially adopt the schedule moving forward.

June 5, 2024

Perry started thinking about what an equitable, flexible, simple, and intuitive system for leave and benefits would look like. It would have to be transparent but also have tolerance for error and even, theoretically, misuse. He called it “universal design for work-life balance.” “Universal design” is the term for the movement to create spaces, tools, and lived environments that are accessible to all, regardless of age or ability. The thing about universal design is that its benefits are not simply for those who need it most. A curb cut in the sidewalk, for example, makes the sidewalk accessible for wheelchair users, but it also makes navigating the space infinitely easier for people on bikes or pushing strollers.

June 5, 2024

As a corporate strategy, “flexibility” transformed so many workplaces into sites of anxiety where productivity-obsessed workers lived in anticipation of the next massive layoff. At the same time, it was repackaged, often to those same workers, as the future: we laid you off, but we’ll give you your job back, as a “flexible” subcontractor, only with fewer benefits and less stability, and you’ll have little choice but to take it.

June 5, 2024

Productivity bibles like The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People functioned, in Gregg’s words, as “a form of training through which workers become capable of the ever more daring acts of solitude and ruthlessness necessary to produce career competence.”11 But the other thing they taught was satisfaction, or at least a demeanor that approximated it. Life at a flexible company might be unstable, with ever-shifting demands, goals, and expectations for future pay and benefits. But successful workers were the ones who could roll with it: make themselves flexible and remain mostly upbeat. The

June 5, 2024

The “burdens” of flexibility “have been unequally distributed,” the tech employment scholar Carrie M. Lane writes. “Employees are expected to become infinitely mutable while employers become increasingly rigid, demanding that workers ask nothing more than a paycheck—no benefits, no training, no personal accommodations, no promise of security or upward mobility.”15 Even the bare minimum employer responsibility (for example, paying workers for their labor) has been recast as a form of benevolence. Workers should not feel entitled to wages: they should, instead, be grateful.

June 5, 2024

Consider just how much work you’ve had to do, how disciplined you’ve had to remain, year in and year out, in order to achieve and maintain that ideal. There’s no true allowance for sickness, or sadness, or caregiving. And, if you take time off, it’s often just an opportunity for someone to prove they’re more flexible—and thus more valuable—than you.

June 5, 2024

But instead of making us work efficiently—and, by extension, less—all of this tech has mostly just made us work more. With time, that amount of output isn’t considered above and beyond. Spending an extra two hours on work at home isn’t a way to distinguish yourself. It’s just the norm. It’s keeping up. It’s treading water. But it’s also, in the vast majority of cases, uncompensated labor.

June 5, 2024

But they’re one of the main things that people say they miss about the office: unanticipated, organic interactions. But what people are actually missing is twofold. Some actually crave disruption and dynamism in their days, a symptom that they probably actually don’t need to be in the office, in one place, as much as they are. But most want generative, collaborative conversations, the sort that make the work you’re doing feel, well, alive. It’s not the drive-by meeting itself that’s essential. It’s the space for authentic idea generation and human interaction. And that can be found in any number of places, if we actually allow ourselves to let go of our limited ideas of where it can happen.

June 5, 2024

When Perpetual Guardian first implemented the program, some workers took off Mondays, some Fridays, others loved a day off in the middle of the workweek, but everyone took it, from the newest hires to the most senior managers. The effect was startling: at the end of a two-month trial, productivity had risen 20 percent, and “work-life” balance scores rose from 54 percent to 78 percent. After the change was made permanent, overall revenue went up 6 percent, and profitability rose 12.5 percent. Other experiments have yielded similarly astounding results: at Microsoft Japan, a four-day workweek led to 40 percent gains in productivity; a 2019 study of 250 British companies with four-day weeks found that companies had saved an estimated £92 million, and 62 percent of companies reported that employees took fewer sick days.19

June 5, 2024

For the Microsoft Japan trial, all meetings were thirty minutes or less and limited to five people—the logic being that if more than five people needed to be there, it should be an announcement, not a meeting.

June 5, 2024

The real innovation of the four-day week, like other flexible, intentional schedules, is the conscious exchange of faux productivity for genuine, organization-wide, collaborative work. For the four-day companies, that strategy was so effective that it opened up an entire day. For your company, that exchange might open up the mornings, or the middle of the day, or anytime after 2:00, depending on the rhythms of your business and your employees’ lives. If that sounds like magic, it’s not because it’s actually mystical, or make-believe; it’s a sign of how thoroughly you’ve internalized a rigid understanding of how work works.

June 5, 2024

The reality of working from home—at least during a pandemic—has disabused them of that fantasy. But what they haven’t learned is that working from home is a discrete, defined skill. “If you’re going to give PowerPoint presentations, or draw blueprints, you see that as a skill, something you have to learn and apprentice at, get feedback on, and continue to learn,” Dowling said. “But no one has really thought about working from home as a skill: it’s not taught; it’s not addressed. It’s just sort of like, ‘Be on your laptop at home.’ And that’s just not sufficient.”

June 5, 2024

One answer is completing delegated tasks with accuracy and submitting them on time. But that’s too straightforward for a frazzled, anxious, pandemic brain. Instead, our stress makes it difficult to concentrate, and that difficulty is exacerbated by the growing number of meetings and emails and messages that other people’s frazzled, anxious, pandemic brains are sending us. You feel as if you were not getting enough done, and compensate by working more hours, even if they’re scattered, made inefficient by fatigue, alcohol, and other forms of distraction. It’s so incredibly easy to enter the fugue state where you always feel as if you are half working, half not.

June 5, 2024

Reading Ferriss’s book can feel cathartic, especially if you find yourself burned out or frustrated by your work situation. When he suggests strategically withholding productivity so that you get more done on days where you propose a “trial” work-from-home situation, it’s easy to smile at the puckish manipulation. But you can achieve Ferriss’s level of productivity only by ruthlessly off-loading tasks onto others (Ferriss has a whole section about outsourcing menial tasks to cheap virtual personal assistants based overseas) and constantly toeing the line of appropriate behavior—a strategy almost exclusively available to white men.

June 5, 2024

They’re simply not a sustainable option for the vast majority of workers, especially those who aren’t in senior positions, who are women, who are people of color, or who are disabled. For those groups, attempting to maintain them can lead to an office reputation as difficult, aloof, unresponsive, or the dreaded “such a millennial” or “not a team player.” It might mean getting passed over for promotions or, eventually, getting fired. You

June 5, 2024

When it became clear that emails and digital contact were hopping over those guardrails, leaders recognized that they could not depend on individual companies—or the individuals within them—to accomplish what was, in truth, a national goal. Legislation can slow the inertia of capitalist growth, but it cannot counteract it entirely. If you’re an “executive,” you’re allowed to violate the thirty-five-hour weekly cap. And non-executives break it all the time: a 2016 study found that 71.6 percent of French employees worked more than thirty-five hours a week.26

June 5, 2024

Respect for others’ time demands care, knowledge, and thoughtful implementation of policies and practices. Many team status meetings were set years ago, by someone who might not even be your manager anymore, often at a somewhat arbitrary time. Maybe it worked for everyone on the team then. But it has little relation to the needs of your team now, or when people’s schedules become even more flexible.

June 5, 2024

Exercising respect means continual consideration of a meeting’s utility, its place in the day, and its form. Same for email: Does this need to be an email? Do I need to send it now? How would I feel if I received this email right now? How can I make it so that it arrives in my colleague’s in-box at a time that will be more respectful of their time?

June 5, 2024

Front allows users to integrate workflows, chat, and “next steps” into email; in companies dealing with tens of thousands of customer service emails, for example, it allows workers to delegate responsibility, action, and follow-up on each one.

June 5, 2024

But so much of that mindset is simply a long-running coping mechanism for workplace precarity. To be essential, at least in this office job capacity, is to build a protective shell around yourself during times of economic insecurity. It’s a survival strategy, built on fear and desperation. And it makes everyone miserable, no one more so than yourself. Front’s real utility is its ability to transform email from a personal burden into a collective, collaborative task. To do that, however, you have to actually trust your colleagues and be less precious about your own essential role in the process.

June 5, 2024

Say an entire company adopts a force-field approach to email. A culture begins to develop around time off. Those taking time off will be more aware of who will pick up their work burden. They’ll be more appreciative—and ideally more respectful—of others’ time. There might be more coordination, more care, and more respect involved in handing over responsibilities. More important, colleagues in a force-field situation might be more mindful that their requests will fall to others. At its best, it could trigger others to inventory their demands on others’ time.

June 5, 2024

If someone tries to work during a break, chiding them and letting it happen just further normalizes the behavior. When an employee takes time off, not working becomes their job. So how can your team actively set expectations to take that job as seriously as their everyday one? Whatever the policies are, they have to be more than mealymouthed “suggestions” and arrive in collaboration with workers themselves.

June 5, 2024

With time, she grew accustomed to the daily cadences of her job. But she still felt like a stranger in her own company, whose remote policies were haphazard at best. To send chats, employees used an outdated version of Skype; in Zoom meetings, almost all co-workers left their cameras off. Months into her job, she could identify co-workers only by their chat avatars and voices. At one point, she says, she began “obsessively stalking” her company’s Glassdoor reviews, just to try to get a sense of the company culture. She was, by her own admission, unmoored, totally unmentored, and insecure, with no way to learn from her colleagues. It’s one thing to start a new job remotely. It’s another to start your entire career that way.

June 5, 2024

For Kiersten, who has never set foot in her office, her professional life has come to feel like an abstraction—to the point that she’s sometimes not even sure if she’s employed (she is). Worse, her job feels almost completely transactional, with her conversations limited, in her words, to “exchanging information in pursuit of an immediate, work-related goal.”

June 5, 2024

Small talk, passing conversations, even just observing your manager’s pathways through the office, may seem trivial, but in the aggregate they’re far more valuable than any form of company handbook. But that doesn’t mean they can’t be translated into the remote or flexible work environment.

June 5, 2024

We asked early career workers what resources they wished they could have had during those early pandemic months, and the responses were full of helpful ideas for any company. Most important, they wanted a clearly delineated mentor who—crucially—was not also their supervisor or in charge of evaluating their performance. One suggested a dual mentor program that paired new employees with a co-worker in a similar position in the company who could offer advice on more quotidian concerns, as well as a more senior employee who could provide longer-term career advice.

June 5, 2024

For organizations with a hybrid approach, where employees split time between home and the office, some of these problems may quickly abate. A few days in the office won’t fix these larger issues. But intentional design could. Truly flexible work may seem breezy and carefree, but it’s actually the product of careful planning and clear communication. It requires peering around corners and attempting to identify needs and problems before they fester. It may seem onerous at first, especially when “let’s just go back to the way things were before” seems like such a clear option

June 5, 2024

But it’s not. We’ve moved past that point. If we’re serious about building a sustainable future of work, we can’t leave a whole swath of employees behind. They’ll just develop bad habits and waste endless hours trying to piece together the rules of the game when someone could’ve just told them.

June 5, 2024

You can temporarily and authentically lower productivity expectations. Or you hire slightly more than enough people, thereby building in the expectation that a percentage of your workforce could be taking time off at any moment, and it wouldn’t overload the system. Many companies are theoretically set up this way: an average employee’s baseline of assigned tasks should take up, say, 80–85 percent of their day, leaving them available to take on 15 to 20 percent more work when a colleague is sick, on vacation, or on leave. As many of our survey respondents confessed, they usually do their core work over a short period of time anyhow.

June 5, 2024

As will become clear in the next chapter, companies spend millions of dollars on consultants every year trying to hit that sweet spot, and historically it usually means cutting middle management and support staff. The end result: employees are increasingly forced to self-manage and do the essential support work of those who were let go, often quite poorly, instead of what they were actually hired to do. Cue: ever-expanding work hours, and the message that if you’re not getting your work done during traditional hours, the failure, again, is yours, for poor prioritizing.

June 5, 2024

That NCR has such a durable corporate culture that it can survive literal airstrikes? Or is it that NCR’s employees are so dedicated that amid unspeakable death and destruction they feel the need—not to be with or tend to family—but to help rebuild a factory? Deal and Kennedy seem to acknowledge the outlandishness of the anecdote. But that doesn’t keep them from arguing that it remains one of the pantheon of “myths and legends of American business.”

June 5, 2024

But starting in the early 1970s, a wave of recessions and economic stagnation shook even the strongest of those companies’ foundations. Behemoths of respective industries entered the decade fat and happy and naive—characteristics that, under the unforgiving eye of a slumping economy, quickly morphed into bloated, occasionally lazy, and flat-footed in the race to compete globally. Their solution, as we noted in the last chapter, was cuts. In the first eight years of the 1980s, Fortune 500 companies cut more than 300 million jobs, many of them the stable, middle-management positions that had not only helped expand the modern middle class but functioned as the organizational sentries of culture.

June 5, 2024

s tendency to treat management as an “add-on”—as opposed to an actual job, requiring a refined skill set—is, as the Nightingales found, rampant in start-ups, both new and long solidified. But it’s also common in cash-strapped nonprofits, in academic departments (see department chairs), and in “legacy” companies that overcorrected the sprawling, management-heavy org charts of the 1960s and 1970s. Back then, people often dealt with bad management by expanding the org chart with even more badly trained managers. Now we deal with it by ignoring it. Many of these companies view middle management as bloat, waste, what David Graeber would call a “bullshit job.” But that’s because bad managing is waste; you’re paying someone more money to essentially annoy everyone around them. And the more people experience that sort of bad management, and think of it as “just the way it is,” the less they’re going to value management in general. The key, then, is to think of how to treat management as a discrete, valuable skill: a deliverable that contributes to the overall value and resiliency of your organization. Otherwise, managers will continue to feel like deadweight, no matter how flexible an[…]

June 5, 2024

They found that remote managers they surveyed had an average of about 4.87 direct reports. That might not sound like much, but it was overwhelming most managers as they attempted to deal with 5 different emotionally complex human beings, all under stress and with their own needs and demands. Worse yet, 21.5 percent of the remote managers they spoke with had less than one year of management experience when mandatory working from home began. They’d stumbled on the same problem as the Nightingales had: managers were under-trained, under-experienced, overworked, and forced into a stressful new reality. As a result, everyone was suffering. “To be a good manager, you need to be emotionally intelligent,” Pandiya told us. “It’s our whole company thesis: the emotional intelligence of the managers is what makes a company’s culture miserable or excellent.

June 5, 2024

The secret to good culture and even good management isn’t some weekend off-site or even a fancy piece of technology. As Tan put it, “There’s no way to Ping-Pong table or happy hour your way out of it.” Analytics won’t magically turn you into a better manager. You can use them to inform and transform your own behavior, but only if you actually have a vested interest in managing with more empathy and intentionality. We’re all figuring out what our jobs are going to look like in this new reality, and if we do it on our own, remote work will continue to look like the anxious, endless jumble of the pandemic year. The process is going to require a significant amount of experimentation and grace, communication and transparency.

June 5, 2024

Kill the Monoculture In 2020, 92.6 percent of CEOs on the Fortune 500 were white.36 A survey conducted that same year of more than forty thousand workers at 317 companies found that while white men make up just 35 percent of the entry-level workforce, they compose 66 percent of the C-suite.37 For every one hundred men who were promoted to manager, only fifty-eight black women and seventy-one Latina women were promoted. Only 38 percent of respondents in entry-level management positions were women of any race. You’ve heard these statistics, or something approximating them, before. No matter how many diversity, equity, and inclusion workshops your organization requires, if your leaders and managers aren’t truly diverse, then the monoculture will prevail.

June 5, 2024

Left to its own devices, monoculture will self-sow and replicate itself endlessly. The things that a white male, for example, might understand as the hallmarks of “good leadership” and “good management” are the things that feel like good leadership and management to him—characteristics that can manifest themselves in everything from standards of professionalism to tone of voice. He will naturally promote, elevate, or otherwise privilege workers with those attributes and marginalize or ignore those without them. Frequently, those perpetuating the monoculture aren’t even aware they’re doing it. But this is how monoculture persists: people endlessly promoting people like them for the rest of time

June 5, 2024

Olson’s solution almost feels like a cheat code. Her organization, We Are Rosie, works as a twenty-first-century version of a long- and short-term temp firm, connecting more than six thousand workers in the marketing field with companies and agencies across the world. Some of these “Rosies,” as employees are called, work for a few weeks on a “pop-up” project at an organization. Some work on political campaigns. Others become long-term placements at legacy organizations, from Bloomberg to Procter & Gamble. But We Are Rosie is not a traditional subcontractor. It takes the reality of the existing fissured workplace and attempts to stabilize it for its employees. Rosies can be remote and work from wherever they want. They can find actual part-time work that still pays well. They have a robust online support community. And if a company tries to cut corners on their contract, treat them poorly, or change the parameters of the project they’ve been hired to complete, they have an external advocate whose primary interest is retaining the Rosies, not the client. The result: a workforce that’s more than 90 percent remote, more than 40 percent Black, indigenous, and people of color[…]

June 5, 2024

Steven Aquino has been covering the technology industry from California for the last eight years. Before that, he was a preschool teacher, but his cerebral palsy made it difficult to meet the physical needs of his students, day in and day out. He looked for something he could do, ideally from home, that would be less physically taxing. He found it in writing and reporting. That shift to working from home “really changed who I am,” Aquino said. “I’m not always so tired anymore. Because I’m not so exhausted, and hurting, and thinking about it all the time, I’ve been able to concentrate on doing work I enjoy and take pride in.” Working from home also helped with Aquino’s social anxiety, which was exacerbated by his stutter. Still, the rhetoric of the current moment and the opportunities of flexible work have felt, in his words, disorienting. “We’re in a society where diversity and inclusion is a big subject right now,” he said. “And it’s inspiring to see. But it isn’t evenly distributed. We talk about inclusion, and then people like me are always off to the side, way over there.”

June 5, 2024

Forced into formalized, factory-like arrangements, laborers viewed six-hour workdays as onerous and perhaps only temporary until desired productivity had been achieved. Attendance was poor. Something had to be done to condition the workforce to perform strenuous labor on behalf of others. Owners began to impose fines and strict oversight because, as the social psychologist Shoshana Zuboff points out, “workers submitted to the physical rigors of factory discipline only when other alternatives had been exhausted.”3 Early factory designs were modeled after workhouses and prisons.4 Positive reinforcement was attempted, but the carrot was usually abandoned for the stick, even when it came to the children who increasingly filled the workforce.

June 5, 2024

Frederick Winslow Taylor. As an employee for Bethlehem Steel, Taylor lamented that workers were naturally lazy, and in order to counter their slovenly attitudes, he began to closely study their movements. He realized that coal shovelers with standardized shovel sizes could haul more weight without getting tired quickly. He timed others’ movements on the factory floor with a stopwatch, looking for extraneous movements to shave off their routines.

June 5, 2024

As office work began to expand over the course of the twentieth century, workers were sold on promises of comfort and satisfaction. Instead of toiling on a factory room floor, welding the same joint over and over again, you could sit in an office, filing the same report over and over again. Your collar, as Upton Sinclair famously put it, would be white; your work, at least in the vast majority of cases, would be salaried and steady.

June 5, 2024

The goal was to keep your head down, do what was expected of you (but nothing more!), and encourage others to do the same. Workers conformed, but they did so, according to Whyte, with a placid smile: they were undergirded by real support, whether in the form of their salary, their pension, or their enduring job security. “It is not the evils of organization life that puzzle him, but its very beneficence,” Whyte explained. “He is imprisoned in brotherhood.”

June 5, 2024

imprisonment extended to the home, where the ethos of organization man culture was instrumental in shaping the structures of (white) middle-class life. Early suburbs were quite literally built to accommodate and incubate organization men, their families, and their social lives, which became appendages of the company. Social status was cemented through perks like local country-club memberships, while the organization man’s family, especially his wife, became a form of corporate asset, valued for her ability to host and socialize. Employees were expected to leverage their family life to woo clients and executives alike. “Actually, it’s hard to tell where the workday ends and the ‘pleasure’ begins,” one manager told Whyte. “If you count all the time required for cocktails, dinners, conferences, and conventions, there is no end to work.

June 5, 2024

interests,” Bennett writes. “Dozens of managers stayed with their companies in the face of disastrous situations, working, and working hard. These were the loyal soldiers, staying at their posts no matter what.”17 These middle managers might have felt like loyal soldiers at the time, but they were blinded by loyalty and perks and a workplace “family” that didn’t allow them to see that their battalion had been moved to the front lines in order to be sacrificed.

June 5, 2024

Bennett described the ramifications of downsizing as “the same as suffering a divorce or a death in the family.”18 For the downsized, losing a job wasn’t just losing financial stability but expulsion from one’s social life. Losing the physical space of the office meant disconnection from their daily rhythms and the hundreds of seemingly inconsequential actions that defined their lives. Many had been with their companies for decades and had no idea how to begin to search for new jobs.

June 5, 2024

First, there’s the sheer number of hours we’re working. According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the average American works more hours than the average laborer in any peer nation. But unlike many Western nations, where increased productivity and wealth tend to lead to more leisure time, Americans continue to overwork themselves despite productivity gains. The OECD found that “the US works 269 more hours than its enormously wealthy economy would predict—making it by this measure the second-most overworked country in the world.”27

June 5, 2024

When the journalist Chika Ekemezie first began interviewing women of color who had made the shift to working from home during the pandemic, she was interested in the ways that remote work liberated black women workers from (white) standards of professionalism in their offices. “I’ve long been a believer that professionalism is just a synonym for obedience,” she wrote. “The less social capital you have, the more you are tethered to professionalism. It’s why Mark Zuckerberg can wear the same T-shirt to work while Black women are punished for wearing braids.”

June 5, 2024

Surveys conducted during the first ten months of the pandemic illustrate the complex relationship that some BIPOC employees have to remote work. Data collected by Slack’s Future Forum showed that black employees were working longer hours and experiencing higher stress around pressure to perform—a sign of a lack of mutual trust between the employees and the managers. But overall, black employees expressed a 29 percent increase in feelings of satisfaction and belonging working remotely, compared with being primarily in the office. One reason for this, respondents said, was that working from home meant less code switching or pressure to modulate their behavior for a boss or co-worker.

June 5, 2024

workers’ “offices” moved into their homes, though, some began to feel standards of professionalism extend to judgments about personal spaces.42 What do my books, my art, my clutter communicate about my competence as a worker? Who’s able to “professionalize” their home spaces for remote appearances, and who’s trying to angle the camera so that colleagues can’t tell they’re Zooming from their bedroom? Which employees feel empowered to say, “Screw it, I don’t care what my background is,” and who is spending outsize time thinking about it?

June 5, 2024

you already have a family, chosen or otherwise. And when a company uses that rhetoric, it is reframing a transactional relationship as an emotional one. It might feel enticing, but it is deeply manipulative and, more often than not, a means to narrativize paying people less to do more work. Family evokes not just a closeness but a devotion and a lasting bond, infused with sacrifice: family comes first.

June 5, 2024

Treating your organization as a family, no matter how altruistic its goals, is a means of breaking down boundaries between work and life, between paid labor and the personal. When you’re assaulted by powerful feelings of familial obligations from all sides—your actual family, but also your manager and your colleagues—it’s all the more difficult to prioritize. And in these situations, your actual family, which is often more forgiving, more malleable, and more attuned to your needs, will always suffer.

June 5, 2024

In reality, Taber argues, family farms are just as hierarchical, patriarchal, and exploitative of workers. She points to the historian Caitlin Rosenthal’s book, Accounting for Slavery, which traces how early slave plantation farms developed many of the management and accounting practices that still structure corporate life. The early agrarian economy was ruthless. It was also a family business, and the abolition of slavery didn’t magically destroy the power imbalances present in agriculture, even on family farms. “Working on a family farm means working in somebody’s home,” she argues. “There are tremendous gaps in wealth and status and power.”

June 5, 2024

they were also mentally miserable. Shoshana Zuboff spent hours interviewing workers in industrial settings for In the Age of the Smart Machine, but she also spent significant time with clerical workers. Like their blue-collar counterparts, the people she interviewed were adrift as the result of the fast technological changes of their jobs. Dentist office employees and insurance claims workers both saw their jobs, which were once social in nature, turn into glorified data entry positions. Cubicles visually walled them off from their colleagues, turning co-workers into an annoying buzz of wafting voices and telephone rings and keyboard clacks. As the job increasingly tethered them to their desks, they became more estranged from their managers, who in turn began to view them as drones. “We used to be able to see each other

June 5, 2024

from this fact: just group them in inviting environments that fit the company’s projected cultural values of “dynamism” and “community.” The office, in other words, as city—or, even better yet, as campus. Back in the 1970s, midwestern corporate giants like 3M and Caterpillar had designed sprawling, bucolic office parks for their thousands of employees, and early Silicon Valley companies like Xerox famously embraced the campus layout in the 1970s. These early campus environments made economic sense: they allowed companies to abandon costly urban real estate, and their location was easier to sell to prospective employees who planned to make their homes in the suburbs. But as William Whyte, author of

June 5, 2024

This is the nightmare scenario for Christie and the focus of much of Twitter’s early hybrid work planning. The solution? Destroy the FOMO and level the playing field by making the office less appealing. “You need to eliminate the idea that you’ll miss out if you’re not in the office,” she told us. Which is why they’re attempting to figure out ways to actively disincentivize people from coming back to the office full-time. “For a long time we’ve rallied around office perks and keeping people around and in the building,” she said. “Tech companies have celebrated and mastered it: come to the office, and you get fed, you get cared for.” That whole well-fed, well-cared-for campus philosophy has to change, Christie says. And it starts with the way the office is arranged and the expectations for people within those spaces. At Twitter, everyone inside the conference room will be asked to have an open laptop and dial into the meeting to make sure that remote participants can see all faces clearly and hear those who, in a different configuration, might have traditionally been far away from the conference microphone. The company plans to get rid[…]

June 5, 2024

That intentionality especially applies to groups that are usually left out of the design process. For leaders in the disability community, the remote work shift can feel fraught. Flexible work—an accommodation people with disabilities have been asking for, and denied, for decades—is more available than ever before. But there’s also a very real concern that the ability to work from home could end up making actual office spaces less inclusive. “What I don’t want to see is all employees who have disabilities relegated to working from home because newly designed spaces are even less accessible than they are now,” Maria Town, the president and CEO of the American Association of People with Disabilities, told us. It’s far too easy to imagine companies offering hybrid work but treating their disabled workers as fixed remote employees, thereby reinforcing the segregation of disabled people in the workforce.

June 5, 2024

Despite the miraculous technological affordances in our life, few of them have liberated us as advertised. And nowhere is that truer than our working lives, where today’s office tech has absorbed all of the formalities, anxieties, and oppressive mundanity of corporate life and ported them into every corner of our lives. The magical ability to see your co-workers face-to-face from anywhere in the world morphs into Zoom fatigue. The lively, collaborative instant messaging app gives way to an always-on surveillance tool that lives on company servers forever. A shared digital calendar evolves into a way for others to demand our time and attention until there’s none left for ourselves. The more efficient we become, the more overwhelmed we feel.

June 5, 2024

But almost all have unintended consequences, even when they’re not digital. From the open office plan to the Aeron chair, new ideas about the physical design of the office have reshaped not only our work environment but also our relationship to work. Innovations that were supposed to make the office more humane get co-opted, put through cost-efficiency calculators, and end up making the workplace feel even more like an overdesigned cage.

June 5, 2024

In 1981, while working on a book about the future of work, a young Harvard business professor named Shoshana Zuboff visited an old pulp mill. The mill’s bleach plant had recently been redesigned and outfitted with state-of-the-art technology, including digital sensors and monitors that fed signals to a shiny, new centralized control room, stocked with computers whirring away on brand-new microprocessors. To an outsider, it was all very impressive. But, as Zuboff quickly learned, the workers despised it.

June 5, 2024

Across the office world, workers were promised that these new technologies would make their lives easier. And yes, it was great not to have to type the same letter in triplicate. But many of the machines were situated in spaces that simply weren’t designed for them: mimeographs in rooms without ventilation, word processors in spaces without proper lighting. Thousands of workers reported migraines, severe eyestrain, cataracts, bronchitis, and allergies.16 Automation was literally making office workers sick.

June 5, 2024

As workers, we’ve always been assisted by technologies in some form. Those tools have become more sophisticated with time, but as their users we remain stubbornly human, and there are limits to the productivity that any body or mind can sustain. In the early 1980s, workers began to brush up against those limits but were driven into survival mode by the continued volatility of the American economy. It didn’t matter if the office sucked, if it made you feel ill, if it made you resent your co-workers. Attempts to organize, like those led by Nussbaum and Working Women, ran headfirst into a massive wave of antilabor sentiment and legislation. It felt as if there were no recourse, no way to push back. And so a whole generation of employees internalized their employers’ quest for productivity as their own, settled for less pay and less stability, and got back to work.

June 5, 2024

Reflecting today, Wilkinson’s less sure of that vision. Over the last two decades, his brilliant, innovative designs have rippled through the architecture world, as large-scale tech companies and smaller start-ups alike have cribbed elements of his team’s dynamic workplaces for their spaces. And Wilkinson’s increasingly aware of the insidious nature of those same perks. “Making the work environment more residential and domestic is, I think, dangerous,” he told us in late 2020. “It’s clever, seductive, and dangerous. It’s pandering to employees by saying we’ll give you everything you like, as if this was your home, and the danger is that it blurs the difference between home and office.”

June 5, 2024

The new campus design had a profound impact on company culture. Some of that impact was undeniably positive: he created work spaces where people genuinely want to be. But that desire becomes a gravitational pull, tethering the worker to the office for longer and longer, and warping previous perceptions of social norms.

June 5, 2024

With time, your colleagues become your closest friends and, with even more time, your only friends. It’s easier to hang out and have a social life at work, because everyone’s just already there. Life feels streamlined, more efficient. Even fun! Sometimes you’re just goofing off, killing time, kinda like back in the dorm room in college. Other times you’re working together, like those endless nights back in the library. Sometimes it’s a hazy hybrid of both, but it’s generative nonetheless. It’s the new organization-man-style company devotion, only the country club’s moved on campus.

June 5, 2024

When we moved away from New York, however, we came to realize how work friendships had functioned as Trojan horses for work to infiltrate and then engulf our lives. These relationships didn’t make work-life balance more difficult. Instead, they eclipsed the idea of balance altogether, because work and life had become so thoroughly intertwined that spending most of our waking moments with some extension of our corporation didn’t seem remotely odd or problematic. It was just . . . life.

June 5, 2024

In 2012, McKinsey was on the hunt for just such a solution: something, anything, that could decrease the email burden on workers and boost productivity among its clients. In a report from that year, its analysts found that the average knowledge worker spent 28 percent of their workweek managing email, and nearly 20 percent looking for internal information, or simply tracking down colleagues who could help with specific tasks. They believed some sort of collaborative chat—or “social technology”—had the potential to raise the productivity of knowledge workers by between 20 and 25 percent.31

June 5, 2024

Many companies own or lease their office space on long-term contracts. And when the space is there, sitting on the company’s expenses, it’s likely that management is going to incentivize employees to use it. And after we’ve been trapped in our homes hiding from a deadly virus for well over a year, we’re starved for social interaction. Many of our former commuting and workplace annoyances now sound like tiny luxuries. Some of us miss our colleagues. Others are just sick of their homes and apartments and, yes, even their partners and kids. The only question is, how?

June 5, 2024

To be clear, there’s no quick technological fix to what ails our workplace. What works best for Mills and his team of young, extremely online employees likely won’t work for Linda or Mark in accounting at a regional auto parts company. What Branch does best, however, is clarify what the office actually means to you. Because what a lot of us actually miss about the office—apart from not being in our claustrophobic homes—isn’t anything that practical. You might miss what tech executive and essayist Paul Ford calls its “secret, essential geography”: knowing the best place to cry, or find privacy, or use the bathroom.40 But what you really miss is a feeling. In some offices, that feeling is playfulness. In others, it’s siloed concentration. For Mills, it’s an empathic, ambient presence. “You can create connection just by being present, even if you’re not saying anything,” he told us. “People know if they do talk, somebody is there to listen.”

June 5, 2024

LARPing is a virulent pathogen, but there is an antidote. It’s just trust: cultivating it, communicating it, propagating more of it. When you don’t feel as though your manager trusts you—or, more specifically, how you make use of your time—you feel the need to underline just how much of it you’re dedicating to work. You update, you check in, you sneak in casual mentions of how late you worked on something. Maybe your manager actually does trust you but is incredibly bad at communicating it. Maybe they’ve never told you to update this way but have never told you to stop, either. What matters is that the distrust hangs in the virtual air, goading you to spend more time evidencing your work than actually working.

June 5, 2024

Microsoft found that between February 2020 and February 2021 the average Teams user was sending 45 percent more chats after hours and 50 percent of Teams users responded to chats within five minutes or less.42 More and more, we find ourselves in a fun-house mirror of performance anxiety that distorts our understanding of what work even is.

June 5, 2024

But one of the companies that has managed to do so has a lesson for the aspirationally flexible office. That company is GitLab, a software platform that helps web developers build and share open-source code. If you’ve read about remote work before, chances are you’ve seen it mentioned as an example. That’s because, even pre-pandemic, it had built its company on the premise of truly reimagining work. It doesn’t have any offices and its employees live everywhere, across many time zones. It’s fully distributed, fully remote, and fully asynchronous and it embraces a radical form of transparency.

June 5, 2024

Because employees are working at different hours in all parts of the world, the company relies on meticulous documentation. Employees take extensive notes on calls, meetings, memos, brainstorming sessions, you name it. Almost all of it, including many of the company’s internal deliberations and operations, is posted publicly. In practice, that means someone outside the company can get an idea of how its employees are building the product they might ultimately buy. Internally, it means that an employee in the marketing department can go into GitLab’s system and follow what the legal, comms, finance, and engineering teams are doing. They can read the team’s notes, monitor their objectives and reports, and follow along with colleagues as they work.

June 5, 2024

And that was before the pandemic. If financial firms don’t get on board with flexible work, Poleg predicts, that shift toward tech will only continue. This principle applies far beyond the world of finance. “Executives have had flex forever,” Michael Colacino, the head of the commercial real estate firm SquareFoot, told us. “I’ve been able to work from home on Friday since 1992. People always say that the future is here, it just hasn’t been evenly distributed. And that’s true: flexibility has just been segregated off into the C-suite and slightly downstream. So what you have happening now is that no one’s going to accept the five-days-in-the-office mentality. Now that they’ve tasted the forbidden fruit, there’s no going back. If you say to a millennial, come back 9:00 to 5:00, five days a week, people are just going to quit.” Finance execs know they should be figuring out new ways to work, but those who rose through the ranks one way, and endured a particular form of suffering and overwork, are reluctant to change their ways, no matter how much evidence is presented of the benefits of abandoning them. It’s irrational, it’s[…]

All Excerpts From

Anne Helen Petersen. “Out of Office.” Scribe Publications Pty Ltd, 2022-01-05. Apple Books.
This material may be protected by copyright.

Jenkins - Daisy Jones and The Six by Reid

By: Taylor Jenkins

Review:

When I started googling why I haven't heard of these band members, this band, that's when I realized that I wasn't reading nonfiction. I was reading a novel, and the whole thing is made up. I spend 10 minutes questioning myself, why doesn't apple music or Spotify has it. If these people were so large, so well described, so recorded, then why couldn't I find them? The reasons were visible, the writing, the speeches, the dialogue, the emotion, the audiobook, were real. They existed in a part of my head. They orated like it was a spectacular set of interviews, from the author to them. And, the author wrote their stories.

The author wrote each and every interview as, as a documentary that was supposed to teach the aura of the 1970s. They took us out of time and lived it through their eyes, every little cup of vodka being drunk, every shard of glasses being broken, every heart being broken, and sown. They're real, they felt authentic. We knew what was going to happen, the burnout, the death, the puking, the heartbreaks.

We all knew. And there are so many themes being taught, especially gender and sexuality. Especially feminism. Especially the addictions.

Especially them all, with many parts from the book are lessons from the ages of rock and roll.

Stats:

• Reading Time: 12/12/19 - 12/13

• Review: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Notes:

• December 13, 2019 –
  90.0% "“I decided I don’t need perfect love and I don’t need a perfect husband and I don’t need perfect kids and a perfect life and all that. I want mine. I want my love, my husband, my kids, my life.
  “I’m not perfect. I’ll never be perfect. I don’t expect anything to be perfect. But things don’t have to be perfect to be strong”"
  

• December 13, 2019 –
  84.0% "D:When T died, that was it. I’d decided there was no sense in getting sober. I rationalized it. You know, If the universe wanted me to get clean, it wouldn’t have killed Teddy. You can justify anything. If you’re narcissistic enough to believe that the universe conspires for and against you—which we all are, deep down—then you can convince yourself you’re getting signs about anything and everything."
  

• December 13, 2019 –
  79.0% "And when you rediscover your sanity, it’s only a matter of time before you start to get an inkling of why you wanted to escape it in the first place.”"
  December 13, 2019 –
  79.0% "“It’s funny. At first, I think you start getting high to dull your emotions, to escape from them. But after a while you realize that the drugs are what are making your life untenable, they are actually what are heightening every emotion you have. It’s making your heartbreak harder, your good times higher. So coming down really does start to feel like rediscovering sanity."
  

• December 13, 2019 –
  72.0% "“Karen and Graham must be sleeping together. And I say to them, I said, “Are you two an item?” And Graham says yes and Karen says no.
  G: I didn’t understand. I just didn’t understand Karen.
  K: Graham and I could never last, it was never…I just needed it to exist in a vacuum, where real life didn’t matter, where the future didn’t matter, where all that mattered was, you know, how we felt that day.”"
  December 13, 2019 –
  51.0% "“BILLY: I couldn’t stay. I couldn’t stay because when I looked at Daisy, wet and bleeding and out of it and half-near falling down, I did not think, Thank God I stopped using.
  I thought, She knows how to have fun.”"
  December 12, 2019 –
  50.0%
  

• December 12, 2019 –
  36.0% "“BILLY: When she took her key out of her pocket, she also took out a bag of coke. She was going into her room, and she was gonna, at the very least, have a bump. I…I didn’t want to be around it.
  I couldn’t go into that room.
  DAISY: I had thought for a moment that he and I could be friends, that Billy could see me as an equal. Instead, I was a woman he shouldn’t be alone with.”"
  

• December 12, 2019 –
  23.0% "“Teddy said, “How do you feel?”
  And I told him I felt like I’d made something that wasn’t exactly what I’d envisioned, but it was maybe good in its own right. I said it felt like me but it didn’t feel like me and I had no idea whether it was brilliant or awful or somewhere in between. And Teddy laughed and said I sounded like an artist. I liked that.”"
  

• December 12, 2019 –
  22.0% "Teddy said, “Daisy, someone who insists on the perfect conditions to make art isn’t an artist. They’re an asshole.”
  I shut the door in his face.
  And sometime later that day, I opened up my songbook and I started reading. I hated to admit it but I could see what he was saying. I had good lines but I didn’t have anything polished from beginning to end."
  

• December 12, 2019 –
  22.0% "It didn’t seem right to me that his weakest self got to decide how my life was going to turn out, what my family was going to look like.
  I got to decide that. And what I wanted was a life—a family, a beautiful marriage, a home—with him. With the man I knew he truly was. And I was going to get it, hell or high water."
  

• December 12, 2019 –
  22.0% "“ I went to rehab so I don’t have to meet my own new daughter.”"
  

• December 12, 2019 –
  5.0% "The audiobook is really fun! Each section is read by a different orator!"

Metzl - Dying of Whiteness: How the Politics of Racial Resentment Is Killing America's Heartland.

Author: Jonathon Metzl.

Review:

An overview and introduction into the major causes of politically induced death, of whites are cleared stated in this book. It talks about the outcome of whites in the rural Midwest after the Trump administration. Through the 3 major causes of death for rural white Americans are 1. Gun induced suicide, 2. Lack of hospital due to reduced ACA and 3rd. The reduction in education spending. All of those major scenarios have an epidemiological approach and conclusion of their research, introduction into the history of racism in that field, soulful interviews with communities that have gone through it, and with disclaimers of why a certain research approach was picked.

I’m really happy with this book’s introduction to the politics of guns, and is a great place to jump off into the world of gun related death statistics. Heavily reliable for the understandings of rural white Americans who’s lives, some racist, of why they do the actions they do. The conclusion of this book is thus: dying of whiteness.”

Reading Stats:

• 12/31/19 - 1/1/20

• Reading Level: Sophomore Level College

• Rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Notes

• The “Dickies” legislation that was passed in 1996 prohibits any NIH or public funding on any research that could be used to study gun violence or any research that has to do with gun prevention. The legislation has been renewed every year since then.

• Due to the lack of funding in gun prevention research, there is thus a lack of public information on guns! So one of the best place for gun information is from death! Since the “causes of death” section of death certificate includes guns. :D

• Fascinating research on suicidality methods! Thinking is the best prevention for suicide, thinking requires more time to concentrate the death. Thus pills have a 3 percent chance of death, even though it’s the highest weapon of suicide where as guns have 85 percent due to lack of time to think. To think then kill rather than eat, think, then die.

• How many people just wanted to make a statement, to the end that turned themselves into a number wasting away.

• Americans held 4.4 percent of the world population but owns about 43 percent of the world supply of privately own guns. Like whaaaa?? Also there’s 200 million guns in the United States, wtf.

• The gun acts as a form of totem for whites, it symbolizes: masculinity, freedom, and patriarchy. But for the non whites it’s like giving the tools of oppression to the oppressor (the whites).

• Gun Background Check law( PTP) In Missouri when the ptp law was rejected, there was an increase of 16 percent in gun suicides, where as the enforcement of sub laws in Connecticut has reduced gun suicide by 13 percent. Other variables has been included for control sample.

• White men in Missouri is 7x times more likely to kill them selves with a handgun than it is to protect themselves when armed. Bruh

• Cost! Healthcare. The ACA saved money and allowed people to live longer!