Tara McMullin

@taramcmullin

Writer, podcaster, and producer baffled by the absurdity of neoliberal capitalism. Autistic feminist. Aspiring independent scholar. Amateur baker. Host of the What Works podcast and author of a book of the same name.

whatworks.fyi

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Science Fiction and

I’ve been mainlining Le Guin’s non-fiction writing. It strikes me reading this passage again that she’s bumping up against Harry Frankfurt’s definition of “bullshit.” To paraphrase, that bullshit doesn’t concern itself with the truth—it’s objective is outside the realm of information. I don’t think fiction is bullshit, obviously. But now I’m curious about the qualities of fiction as they relate to the qualities of bullshit.

Worldbuilding, for me, was a form of expansive hope—a necessary imagination for being alive.

Morgan Harper Nichols • A Necessary Imagination

Worldbuilding

I know what kind of work it takes to complete a book manuscript, and I want to do that work, but to arrive at the end of it and learn that what I should have been doing instead is flooding the zone on Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok? That is fundamentally demoralizing.

Collin Brooke • Unfluence

Media & Culture and

The fact that many American companies are paying paltry wages to workers while lavishing cash on top executives and investors is no happenstance. It's a policy choice. In the United States we have a tax and regulatory environment that rewards that behavior. We can decide to maintain the status quo or change it.

Judd Legum • If the U.S. economy is doing well, why do so many Americans say it's terrible?

Labor Under Capitalism and Economy

Just a moment...

Bonnie Burstow journals.sagepub.com

Emotions @ Work

"Toward a Radical Understanding of Trauma and Trauma Work" by Bonnie Burstow:: https://www.academia.edu/download/35938648/burstow2003_radicaltraumawork.pdf

During it, we learn to adopt a story about ourselves—what our value is, what beauty is, what is harmful and what is normal—and to privilege the feelings, comfort, perceptions, and power of others over our own.

Melissa Febos • Girlhood

The Mythical Norm

The theory that “labor” is not a word for human beings whose flourishing is the proper interest of the state, but rather a word for a cost that should be brought as close to zero as possible in order to accrue wealth for owners of capital, has been entrenched in red states and particularly the South for much longer than I have been alive. It’s... See more

Hamilton Nolan • No Captives

Labor Under Capitalism

Although repetition is necessary, practice isn’t just repetition. When we practice, we do two things: we isolate a technique for study, and we engage with difficulty.

Why Write in Form? by Rebecca Hazelton | Poetry Foundation

Media & Culture

The securitized subprime mortgages that triggered the global financial crisis demonstrated that even the most material of possessions—the home—was as if made of air and could burst like a bubble. The same years saw the permeation of network technologies into everyday life through smartphone use. These were years in which the meanings of materiality... See more

Introduction to Hoardiculture | Stanford Humanities Center

Broken Links