Tara McMullin

The coping strategies that you adopt will determine how well you handle the stressor.

According to Lazarus and Folkman, there are two aspects to managing a stressful situation:

• Problem-based coping: the practical steps that you take to manage the problem.


• Emotion-based coping: how you manage your emotions when you become stressed.

Taken together, the union of all your ways of potentially or actually being at home in various areas of your life, online and offline, constitute how you are at home in the universe itself, and on the planet in particular. Along each dimension, you might exist anywhere from nascent, to viable, to disintegrated conditions of identity.

None of us is... See more

What would happen if we stopped acting as if the primordial form of work is laboring at a production line, or wheat field, or iron foundry, or even in an office cubicle, and instead started from a mother, a teacher, or a caregiver? We might be forced to conclude that the real business of human life is not contributing toward something called “the... See more

I believe that fandom is a wonderful and vital organ of contemporary culture, without which that culture ultimately stagnates, atrophies and dies. At the same time, I’m sure that fandom is sometimes a grotesque blight that poisons the society surrounding it with its mean-spirited obsessions and ridiculous, unearned sense of entitlement.

Variety of work is the next point, and a most important one. To compel a man to do day after day the same task, without any hope of escape or change, means nothing short of turning his life into a prison-torment. Nothing but the tyranny of profit-grinding makes this necessary.

But here's the thing: being able to say, "wherever you get your podcasts" is a radical statement . Because what it represents is the triumph of exactly the kind of technology that's supposed to be impossible: open, empowering tech that's not owned by any one company, that can't be controlled by any one company, and that allows people to have... See more