Having and Being Had

The range of words for work was more expansive, Komlosy notes, before work came to be defined by paid employment in the nineteenth century. “Much of what once was assumed to be work was later excluded from the category as it became increasingly focused on gainful employment.”

She was underscoring the fact that some people get to call their work art and others have to just do their work.

Maintenance, she wrote, was the work of protecting progress, sustaining change, preserving the new, and keeping the dust off invention.

The women imagined themselves in service to the poor, but the poor served them.

Credit is a form of optimism, Yuval Noah Harari suggests. It depends on the belief that the future will be more prosperous than the present.

We’re all performing, he wants us to know, but some of us are following the script more closely than others, and some of us have been given easier parts. Easier parts with better pay.

For both Baraka and O’Hara, the tone and texture of intimate conversation was an aesthetic of resistance.

A woman, under capitalism, was no longer considered dangerous—she was helpless.

How can we hope to change anything, she asked, “if we don’t rebel in the everyday?”