a man must do more than sell roses
where the bums go and beg—
he must keep something holy.

the sanitation department is the most important workforce in the city of New York

This is why you need a weird obsessive nerd somewhere on your staff!

How door closers work and how to mount and adjust them.

Residents of oil-producing communities do more than merely consent to the operations of industry: they actively identify with the oil industry and perceive their interests and the industry’s interests as one and the same. This intense identification is manifest in community members’ vocal defence of the industry and in their adoption of industry-propagated frames of reference for understanding wider energy-related issues.

… bunched skin rough as braille above the heel bone,
the instep whitening under the pressure of my touch…

The brain is not a computer. It never was. Its failures are particular to its own nature, and it has to be understood on its own terms.

Time is now currency: it is not passed, but spent.

… the existence of the “sticky floor”, in that wage gaps are higher at lower ends of the distribution and steadily decline over the distribution. Machado-Mata-Melly decompositions reveal that women at the lower end of the distribution face higher discriminatory gaps in wages.

The panic attacks started after Chloe watched a man die.

What it takes to keep social media clean.

Sometimes the verbs
Aren’t important

As long as they get their money, they don’t care how many of us they kill off.

They make themselves happy and pleased. This is the second ground for praise.

The Buddha explains—and ranks!—the ten ways of seeking wealth.

The people I love the best
jump into work

[Hunter-gatherers] considered themselves affluent and enjoyed a degree of affluence as a result of that. Yet we seem to be trapped in this cycle of ever pursuing more and greater growth, greater wealth, greater anything. It seems that our aspirations now grow endlessly.

A conversation on how consumerism is making us unhappy and what a different culture might look like.

… what does it say about our society that it seems to generate an extremely limited demand for talented poet-musicians, but an apparently infinite demand for specialists in corporate law?

We have become a civilization based on work—not even “productive work” but work as an end and meaning in itself.

An expansion of Graeber’s 2013 essay on the same subject, exploring the “spiritual violence” of modern employment.

The Beauty of the House is immeasurable; its Kindness infinite. […] May the House in its Beauty shelter us both.

A man imprisoned in The Labyrinth of Forgotten Things makes sense of his new/old/perpetual Home.

The novel resists a simple, allegorical reading, but instead hums with symbolism and irony as it dances around its heady themes. While intellectuals will enjoy turning those over, ultimately it is Piranesi’s sincerity and emotional strength that ensure the book won’t soon be Forgotten.

How much evidence do we need of the harmfulness of something before we act?

Forget you. This is about waiting

A poem which shakes ‘work’ from its masculine frame and recenters it, not on you, on your brother.

The rate of change is visibly unsustainable. The profiteers call this process “disruption,” while commentators on the left generally call it “neoliberalism” or “late capitalism.” Millennials know it better as “the world,” or “America,” or “Everything.” And Everything sucks.

Explaining the economic moment we are caught in, its tangled roots, and the challenges of trying to fight our collective, exponential momentum.