A Working Library
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Weapons used abroad always come home, and weapons of the mind are no different.
In this short fable of midwinter, Susanna Clarke tells of the speech of dogs and pigs and foxes and the woods themselves, who talk to those who know how to listen.
In The Middle Passage, James Hollis writes: “Grief, for example, is the occasion for acknowledging the value of that which has been experienced.”
“Mid-way in life’s journey / I found myself in a dark wood, / having lost the way.”
In The Sea and Summer, Melbourne of the mid-twenty-first century is half buried under the rising sea.
In The Unaccountability Machine, Dan Davies argues that organizations form “accountability sinks,” structures that absorb or obscure the consequences of a decision such that no one can be held directly accountable for it.
Dan Davies hypothesizes that organizations form “accountability sinks”—structures that serve to obscure, deflect, or otherwise insulate decision makers from the consequences of their decisions.
A book that is both fiction and non-fiction, both wave and particle, both history and imagination, and somehow, something else entirely.
As I retreat from the socials, something I have been wondering about is how much of the frenetic, restless, too-much feeling I get from them is a product of the algos and the corporate incentives, and how much of it might just be something *we’re* doing.
There’s a joke about a writer and her therapist that I’ve seen various versions of over the years. The writer complains about how terrible the writing is, how difficult it is to show up each day, how the writing is blocked, the writing is bad, she can’t sleep or eat or think.
Rollo May shares a story from Jules Henri Poincaré, writing in his autobiography. In it, Poincaré describes many long days trying to sort out some mathematical question and finding no solution.
Marion Fourcade and Kieran Healy dive into how the imperative to create, measure, and collect data wherever and whenever possible has scrambled our ways of knowing the world, each other, and crucially ourselves.
In Always Coming Home, a woman named Stone Telling writes the story of her life, beginning with her parents and the first time she meets her father. Of this telling, she writes:
In the final chapter of Everything for Everyone, M.E. O’Brien interviews Alkasi Sanchez. The conversation takes place in Brooklyn, on May 2, 2072.
In Lifehouse, Adam Greenfield writes: Stability will be the fundamental value proposition of a certain kind of politics in our time of undoing, and we need to reckon with just how seductive it will prove to be.
Adam Greenfield proposes a strategy for surviving the climate crisis: Lifehouses, or a network of places of care, mutual aid, resource distribution, and solidarity.
Psychologist James Hillman borrows from Plato and others and posits that we are each accompanied by a mystical, nonhuman being which accompanies us throughout our lives and through a series of whispers, nudges, accidents, silent exhortations, and mysterious excitements, directs us towards our purpose.
Jungian psychoanalyst James Hillman posits that we are each accompanied by what he variously calls our “acorn,” “daimon,” or “angel”—that mystical being who both protects us and insists on driving us toward our soul’s calling.
On holiday in a hunting lodge in the Austrian mountains, a middle-aged woman wakes up to find that an invisible wall has descended all around her.
In 1898, Frederick Taylor was hired as a consultant by the Bethlehem Iron Company with the stated mission of improving the efficiency of the workers. It was there that Taylorism morphed from the wheedling ideas of an eccentric into a canonical corporate management practice.
Things that were heralded as “laborsaving” devices gave rise to a whole new industry, and to more labor.
Unusually hot, dry June weather has me thinking about climate change (of course), which brings me to Ursula Franklin (*of course*) and her earthworm theory of social change:
“Empathy is an illusion at best, or simply—as is said in moments of deep reflection—bullshit!”
On May 6, 2052, a sex worker named Miss Kelley joined with her neighbors in Hunts Point to take over a produce market and distribute the food to those in need.
One of the most inescapable edicts when leading a team is the order to optimize the system towards the organization’s goals.
Good infrastructure is thankless. You only notice it when it fails.
Following the threads from the witch hunts in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to present-day gendered violence, Silvia Federici shows how—then as now—such oppression is not only a tool of capitalism but a critical component of it.
One of the reasons we seem enamored with the early states, per James C. Scott’s excellent *Against the Grain*, is that they left records for us to read:
Like another book with the same name, James C. Scott’s *Against the Grain* argues that the “just so” story of humans’ progression from barbarians to civilized agriculturalists is not the success story we might have thought.
In the woods of Wisconsin, a young forester named Rand Brandt learns that he can grow any plant he imagines in minutes, merely by touching the dirt.
One of the principles I come back to over and over is adrienne maree brown’s invitation to move at the speed of trust. That is, whenever attempting any effort with other people, prioritize building trust and respect for each other over and above any other goal. The trust forms the foundation from which the work can grow.
In *Being Wrong,* Kathryn Shulz addresses the commonly held myth that we should at all times avoid hedging our bets:
Kathryn Schulz posits a vision of wrongness as both the inevitable human condition and a generative source from which creativity, art, brilliance, risk-taking, and so much more arises.
Judy Wallach-Stevens is woken one night to a warning about pollutants in the nearby Chesapeake Bay. With her wife and newborn in tow, she heads out to see what’s up—and ends up making first contact with a group of friendly aliens.
In The World of Silence, Max Picard describes silence as an active presence, a kind of independent and infinite substrate upon which all speech emerges from and then descends into. He believes silence to be a sacred and necessary component of living, and is quite distraught at the perceived lack of it in his day. Since he was writing in the...
“Silence is not simply what happens when we stop talking. It is more than a mere negative renunciation of language; it is more than simply a condition we can produce at will.”
In the middle of the last century, a research and development complex in California’s Simi Valley experienced multiple near-catastrophic accidents, leaking radiation and other toxins into the surrounding communities.
When the murderer of Taryn Cornick’s sister is himself murdered just days after his release from prison, detective Jacob Berger is certain she has something to do with it.
“Technoableism is a belief in the power of technology that considers the elimination of disability a good thing, something we should strive for.”
In the seconds after Fetter is born, his mother kills his shadow.
In the fourth and as yet final book of the Steerswoman series, Rowan and Bel return to Donner, where they last barely escaped an attack of dragons.
Rowan arrives in Alemath, at the steerswomen’s Annex, searching for information.
The second book in the extraordinary Steerswoman Series follows Rowan and her companion, Bel, as they venture into the outskirts: a dangerous, inhospitable land marked by few sources of food and panoply of monsters intent on killing the humans who dare to live there.
Ask a steerswoman any question, and she will answer it truthfully and to the fullest of her knowledge. In return, you must answer any question she puts to you.
In Conflict Is Not Abuse, Sarah Schulman describes a common scenario in which conflict between two or more people has degenerated until the point where one or more of them refuses any further engagement. We’ve all witnessed this, or even been in that position ourselves, I’d wager. This is the move that often accompanies edicts like, “Don’t...