everything changes

A COUPLE OF WEEKS ago, I wrote on A Working Library about James C.

IN URSULA LE GUIN’s Always Coming Home, which takes place in what might be far future California, the people of the Valley tell stories about the “backward-heads.”

I HEAR SOME VERSION of this about once a week: “I’ve been doing this thing for 15, or 20, or 25 years, and I don’t think I can do it anymore.

In Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We, the totalitarian One State has invented a surgery that can remove a person’s imagination.

This is a handy set of guidelines for using AI at work, acknowledging that if you toss unexamined AI-output onto your colleagues for review, they will not thank you for it.

BRIAN MERCHANT writes about the abrupt Sora shutdown and notes one important component of that whole fiasco: the most common response to slop is revulsion.

FAR BE IT for me to add to the habit discourse, a field so overgrown with weeds that we must wade in with machete in hand, but I’m going to chance it.

THERE’S A MOMENT in most work lives where we find ourselves in a place that no longer fits.

A group of tech workers wants to help you organize around AI policies in your workplace.

IT’S ANNUAL REVIEW SEASON in a lot of workplaces, which means there’s a range of anxieties surfacing, both about completing the reviews themselves (which always takes way too long) and about the consequences that come with them: bonuses, warnings, raises,…

Jason Koebler reports on a study that defines “work slop” (truly a cursed phrase) as work that “masquerades as good work, but lacks the substance to meaningfully advance a given task.”

Virginia Valian has a work problem: she struggles to do the work she wants to do.

IN THE CARTOON, two frogs lounge in a cauldron, fire building below, elbows perched over the edge like they’re at the pool.

Brian Merchant asked workers what AI was doing to their jobs and got back loads of thoughtful, hilarious, at times desperate and at times righteous responses.

Oliver Burkeman on the insufferable edicts to use AI in your work: “The obvious answer, of course, is that you might have no choice: that given what’s coming, anyone who wants to keep food on the table must give up their dreams of aliveness, and buckle do…

AMIDST THE UNENDING LAYOFFS and the edicts to use nonsense-making machines, the forced commutes, the increasingly lengthy and arbitrary interview processes, and the retrenchment of already minimal efforts at diversity and inclusion—a question is lurking in

Applications are open now for the summer speculative fiction work/shop.

ONE OF THE RHETORICAL moves I often observe in response to fear about work is a kind of casual dismissal.

IN THE PRACTICE of listening to people talk about their work, I collect a lot of stories.

Defector has a series of interviews with federal workers, including this one with Sabrina Valenti who was a budget analyst at NOAA.