There and here
To keep the word, we must keep our distance.
A working library
A working library is a project about work, reading & technology by mandy brown
Latest posts
The Beginning Place
A kind of coming of age story, if coming of age was the work not of one but two, not of solitude or isolation but of connection, conjoining, coupling.
Reading matters deeply
You must read where you are, not in some hypothetical sanitized reading room, but in the dirt.
Virtue Hoarders
Catherine Liu argues that the professional managerial class (PMC) uses meritocracy, philanthropy, and virtue signaling to promote the core premise of neoliberal economics: an isolationist individualism that simultaneously preaches self-sufficiency and blocks collective efforts towards social justice.
Was
In 1989, Jonathan boards a plane to Manhattan, Kansas, where he rents a car, explaining to the man at the Hertz desk that he’s dying.
The open universe
“The capacity to face an open universe. Physically open, psychically open. No doors shut.”
The Language of the Night
This is one of Le Guin’s earliest collections of essays, bringing together writing about the genre of science fiction and fantasy with reflections on her own fiction.
Kraken
Billy Harrow is taking people on a tour at London’s Natural History Museum when he makes a discovery: the enormous specimen of *Architeuthis dux,* the museum’s carefully preserved giant squid, is gone, tank and all.
Hungrier than before
You cannot fill your belly with illusions.
The Eye of the Heron
On the planet Victoria, the people of Shantih Town live alongside the people of the City.
Anarchist calisthenics
“Every day or so break some trivial law that makes no sense, even if it’s only jaywalking.”
Two Cheers for Anarchism
An anarchism of doing rather than an anarchism of theory.
The Rift
Twenty years after she disappears without a trace, Selena’s sister Julie rings her up.
Umyazu
Reading is the art of attention.
Ten times
“After all, who could be opposed to getting more done with less work?”
A Granite Silence
In 1934, eight-year-old Helen Priestly sets out from her home in Aberdeen, Scotland, and is never seen alive again.
Promises and perils
“Fear that there may be no alternative to the will of the AI arise because we have been told for decades that there is no alternative to neoliberalism.”
Why We Fear AI
Our fears of what AI will do to us are really just our fears of what capitalism is *already* doing.
House of Day, House of Night
In a region that was once Germany but is now Poland, a woman and her husband make a life in a house where a stream runs through the foundation.
Freedom from unreal loyalties
Four great teachers.
Pedro the Vast
Pedro is vast, but he is also hidden and mysterious, tucked behind locked doors and a colloquy of priests and doctors.
Into the gap
It is right that the murder of many people be mourned and lamented.
Reconsidering Reparations
Olúfémi O. Táíwò argues for a *constructive* form of reparations: distributive justice that looks to the past to construct a transition from the global racial empire we have today to the more just world we wish to arrive at tomorrow—and beyond.
The Shapeless Unease
Struck by the sudden and untimely death of her cousin, and distressed by the terrible political order, Samantha Harvey finds that she cannot sleep.
The “correct” attitude
In one layoff announcement after another, we hear that AI can now do the work of a great many people, which is why fewer people are needed to do the work.
The Third Reich of Dreams
In 1933, shortly after Hitler took power, Charlotte Beradt started having nightmares.
Automation conformity
In our effort to escape anxiety, we run further into its jaws.
The Meaning of Anxiety
Rollo May refutes the assertion that mental health is living *without* anxiety, proposing instead that anxiety is a necessary condition for creativity, intellect, and freedom.
Orbital
Six people—four astronauts and two cosmonauts—may be among the last to circle the Earth.
We
In a glass-walled city ruled by the totalitarian One State, citizens have no privacy, no identity, no freedom, and no names: they each bear only a number.
Reformed
A trained secret police is still the secret police.
The Salt Eaters
“Are you sure, sweetheart, that you want to be well?”
Designed to be specialists
What kind of people are we designing now?
The Waves
Six children—three girls and three boys—play in a garden by the sea.
Pseudo-culture
Trust your own eyes.
A Strategy for Labor
“A system that makes people work like zombies to produce useless, destructive, or self-destructive things has outlived its usefulness.”
Patient urgency
“Psychological experiences require patience while so much in the world demands urgency.”
The Cancer Journals
Between 1978 and 1980, Audre Lorde wrote about her experience with breast cancer and mastectomy, connecting her trials and treatment to her own work and to the collective effort of liberation for all women.
Loss of an ideal
From phenomena to pathology.
Burnout
Hannah Proctor visits the concept of burnout as the experience of political defeat—the disappointment, despair, and grief that emerges when one becomes aware that the political project they have committed themselves to may not succeed.
Sisters of the Yam
bell hooks approaches notions of self-care among communities of Black women, locating it within the work of grief, testimony, and reconciliation.
Tyrannies and servilities
The tyranny of government is the tyranny of the workplace is the tyranny of the home.
Annals of the Western Shore
In these three short novels, Le Guin takes us to the Western Shore, where people of magic and people of war and people of books all try to make their lives together.
What books are for
When action grows unprofitable, gather information; when information grows unprofitable, sleep.
Searoad
This collection of interlocking stories tells of the people who live in a small town on the Oregon coast.
Live at enmity with unreality
“What is meant by ‘reality’?” asks Virginia Woolf.
Mitz
In the summer of 1934, Leonard and Virginia Woolf adopted a marmoset named Mitz.
Where there is a wall
“Are not force and possessiveness very closely connected with war?”
A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas
This pair of essays from Virginia Woolf attends to women’s exclusion from educational institutions and economic independence on two fronts.
Thingness
A politics of refusal must be more than a closed door.