Tag: work

• December 9, 2011

  The alien and the American discuss modern work life (P.S. It’s a joke)

  So the alien has scheduled an appointment with the American in order to compare notes about work life on their respective planets. This is what they said. Alien: On my planet, we have ‘companies’ that occupy physical spaces known as ‘office buildings.’ American: Yeah, we have those too. Alien: Also. On my planet, we have…
• December 1, 2011

  The return of the robots!

  Beware the tin-tin bots, my friend! The jaws that bite, the hands that snatch! Beware the Jubjub can, and shun The frumious Bandersnatch!   — Beware, beware because the robots are everywhere. They take our cash, they send us our buys, they give us our tickets, they feed us our food. They file our taxes,…
• September 7, 2011

  Wistfulness in these strange times…

  My roaming personal essay, “Wistfulness in These Strange Times,” has just been published in Spike Magazine. The piece adduces the reasons we have for being wistful, and it describes the economic situation modern workers are going through. The essay begins, This morning I awoke in a wistful mood. The birdsong coming through my bedroom window reminded me…
• August 31, 2011

  From work = life to working and resting: A 2nd essay

  First Essay: Work = Life In the past 6 months, I have written frequently about the work/life divide. It should be said at the outset that industrial capitalism inaugurated two startling, world-historical changes. First, it transformed labor into a commodity to be bought and sold in the marketplace. Second, it made work into the kind…
• August 25, 2011

  On speculative philosophical biography: A conversation with Antonio Dias

  On April 5, in a post on the work and life of the artist Eric Gill, I wrote that “philosophical biography is the  study of how well a philosopher’s ideas are realized in his life, in the core of his being, in his thoughts, habits, and actions.” I suggested that speculative philosophical biography would thus be concerned with testing…