Important breaking news:
"Research conducted by the University of NSW finds that, when people are confronted by a succession of bearded men, clean-shaven men become more attractive to them.
This process also works in reverse, with men with heavy stubble and full, Ned Kelly-style beards judged more attractive when present in a sea of hairless visages." The Guardian
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Across the United States, many local governments are responding to skyrocketing levels of inequality and the now decades-long crisis of homelessness among the very poor ... by passing laws making it a crime to sleep in a parked car." The Guardian
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Clearly a step in the right direction.
"Germany’s third largest city, Munich, has legalised public nudity by introducing six designated nudist zones."
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I think this campaign is an interesting intervention. Opinions?
"The ‘Vote No’ campaign does not assert electoral abstentionism as a principle. On the contrary the suggestion that votes are either spoilt or given to smaller parties is understood as a conjunctural and tactical intervention that is in part a holding operation until a credible electoral choice or choices emerge and in part an attempt to make it clear that there will be fertile ground for credible alternatives." Sacsis
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"You see this relationship between power and design throughout the history of the office: in the early clerical offices (think Bartleby, the Scrivener or Scrooge’s office in A Christmas Carol), the spaces were small, intimate; even though a vast distance in power separated a partner in a firm from his bookkeeper, the fact that they worked close together made both feel like they were in a father-son sort of relationship (the offices were all male at the time), and there was every expectation that a junior clerk would eventually rise and take over the firm.
Later, an increased division of labor and enormously expanded hierarchy led to the offices that we more or less recognize today: large floors, filled with desks, where lower level employees work; offices along the side of the building for middle management (each of these with slight gradations to indicate status or privilege: a nicer desk; carpet on the floor, etc.); and corner offices for executives, or even different floors with different bathrooms. In places like these, space almost directly reflects hierarchy.
As we approach the present, people began to recognize this: things like the open-plan office, invented in Germany in the 1950s (and called the Bürolandschaft, or “office landscape”), attempted to level hierarchies by making everyone work out on the open floor. But even in the earliest versions of the open-plan, small markers of status began to assert themselves: Managers would apportion more plants to themselves, or set up informal private spaces through creative use of more desks and partitions. So design at work often seems to say something about relations of power at work." Atlantic Cities
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I've had this problem in attempting describe what I *do* all day - people don't seem to have an intuitive grasp on philosophy as an activity.
"There is an aesthetic crisis in writing, which is this: how do we write emotionally of scenes involving computers? How do we make concrete, or at least reconstructable in the minds of our readers, the terrible, true passions that cross telephony lines? Right now my field must tackle describing a world where falling in love, going to war and filling out tax forms looks the same; it looks like typing." Quinn Norton
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So this is interesting. To what extent does our resentment of what Graeber calls "bullshit jobs" reproduce an older disdain for intellectual or clerical labour? Thought sparked by the following quote:
"19th century thinkers (Marx, especially) made a lot out of the fact that industrial objects appeared in stores or arrived in your hands without a trace of the impressive labor (or the hands of the laborers) that went into them.
But at least on the surface office work is seems to be even more “alienated,” if that’s the right term; it’s not clear what office workers actually “make.” For years, office workers just produced paper, and the paper they produced was often abstractly related to some kind of manual labor taking place elsewhere.
For this reason early American commentators, for whom office work was not a natural or dominant kind of work (the country was much more agrarian, and nascently industrial), viewed office work as “not real work”—not least because it seemed to require no physical effort." (Atlantic Cities)
See also the Economist's take on the issue
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Thoughts?
" To call working class politics a form of identity politics is not, however, to dismiss it. Indeed, all successful political movements rely on the construction of what historian Benedict Anderson refers to as an “imagined community.” " Jacobin
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Lots of problematic remarks in this article, but nevertheless an interesting picture of elite sex work in 18th century Paris and its relation to broader social norms.
"the police kept track of them as part of the effort to provide oversight to a group that naturally had none. Kept women were largely outside the concatenation of corporations that defined 18th-century France. Few were married and hence were not under the “governance” of husbands. Those living with families often dominated them, as heads of household and hence were not supervised by fathers, as was considered natural. They were free to leave their patrons and often did. They were not bound by the workshop and hence the master." Slate
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Gosh, this is contrary to standard dogma.
"... demand for highly skilled workers in the United States peaked around 2000 and then fell, even as their supply continued to grow. This pushed the highly educated down the ladder of skills in search of jobs, pushing less-educated workers further down." New York Times
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"... inheritances depend on the extent to which the elderly accumulate—which is greater the longer they live—and on the rate at which they die. These two forces yield a flow of inheritances that Piketty estimates to be about 15 percent of annual income presently in France—astonishingly high for a factor that gets no attention at all in newspapers or textbooks." Dissent
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