In 1976, Carol Lopate wrote a remarkable essay about daytime television and the daily rhythms of housework. “The noise of the game shows’ shrieks and laughter injects the home with…
Archive for January, 2024
Working Hard or Hardly Working? Gig-Work and the Gimmick in The Beautiful Bureaucrat
“Has evolution really managed to culminate in this? This spoon, this cup, this plate; us, here.”1 Helen Phillips’ The Beautiful Bureaucrat documents the brief period during which its protagonist, Josephine…
Shadows of the Occupation: Wendy Trevino’s “Sonnets for Brass Knuckles Doodles” and Nonprofit Epistemology
“The same ‘reason’ I thought I could help change the world is the ‘reason’ I thought the sonnet form would lead to a ‘conclusion.'” — Bernadette Mayer, author’s note to…
“Unsevered is Not a Word”: Anti-work Beyond the Office in Severance
Severance is one of the most uncompromising anti-work shows to appear on TV, turning office comedy cringe to explicit horror. A nightmare masked as fantasy, Severance asks: what if we…
False Premises: Tabitha Lasley’s Sea State
Tabitha Lasley’s Sea State — a memoir so unreliable that it appears dishonest, so thieving it has been clubbed into a series of “backdoor memoirs” — traffics in the oily,…
Introduction: Anti-Work Aesthetics
There’s nothing new about the hatred of work. So long as there has been work, work has always been hell, and workers have always known it. Working conditions transform, innovating…