Step Into My Office, and Other News

Except I’m actually in my bedroom.

The secret’s out: I’m writing this in my underwear, from my bedroom. I reveal this hideous truth to make a point about the nature of the workplace today—that it is everywhere, and that today’s “knowledge worker” can perform his functions from anyplace in the world, as long as there are pour overs available and chic quasi-industrial design aesthetics around. As Miya Tokumitsu and Joeri Merijn Mol argue, “It is always anytime. And anytime is check-in time … Wherever you are, you respond to the most urgent requests and make sure to nowhere yourself by deleting your ‘sent from my iPhone’ signature. You could be at your desk already, right? No one needs to know that you are two blocks away. You don’t want to convey that you are on the run and not giving them your full attention. So with some digital camouflaging you say: I am in a place where I can give you due consideration. At no point are we on the train, in a café, in bed, in the restroom … Airspace is essentially diffused workspace because the office has become a mobile home. We take it with us everywhere we go.”

Hey, you wouldn’t, by some chance, have happened to see a bunch of letters between Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Morley Callaghan about a 1929 boxing match in which Callaghan kicked Hemingway’s ass, would you? If you have seen those letters, can you get in touch with David Mason? He’s been looking for them since 1993: “After receiving the books and letters, I locked them in a store safe. When I opened my shop the next day, I was shocked to discover the safe had been cracked. Except for the letters, very little else of value was taken; it seems clear the thieves were after those artifacts specifically. The case grew stranger when a street criminal was arrested with one of the stolen postcards from the lot in his possession. Soon after confessing that he was part of the crew who robbed the store, he was found dead in his cell—a puzzling suicide. Upon his death, the case went cold.”

In which Luc Sante recalls knowing Jean-Michel Basquiat in the eighties: “The last time I saw Jean I was going home from work, had just passed through the turnstile at the 57th Street BMT station. We spotted each other, he at the bottom of the stairs, me at the top. As he climbed I witnessed a little silent movie. He stopped briefly at the first landing, whipped out a marker and rapidly wrote something on the wall, then went up to the second landing, where two cops emerged from a recess and collared him. I kept going. A month later he was famous and I never saw him again. We no longer traveled in the same circles. I was happy for him, but then it became obvious he was flaming out at an alarming pace. I heard stories of misery and excess, the compass needle flying around the dial, a crash looming. When he died I mourned, but it seemed inevitable, as well as a symptom of the times, the wretched eighties.”

“From nothing to being there is no logical bridge,” William James once wrote. Which is true, and a bummer. Amanda Gefter offers a brief history of physicists’ thwarted efforts to find that bridge: “Physicists today conceive of nothing as the ultimate state of symmetry—a relentless sameness that precludes the differentiation one would need to define any ‘thing.’ Indeed, as physicists run the cosmic film in reverse, tracing deep history back in time, they see the disparate shards of reality reunite and coalesce into an ever-growing symmetry, a symmetry that signifies an origin—and a nothing … ”

Meanwhile, down here on the ground, we have more prosaic problems. If you want to witness a reactionary protest that is so blindingly stupid and irresponsible that it crosses the threshold into some kind of nihilistic performance art, look no further than “rolling coal”: “There is a new menace on America’s roads: diesel truck drivers who soup up their engines and remove their emissions controls to ‘roll coal,’ or belch black smoke, at pedestrians, cyclists and unsuspecting Prius drivers … Even in this election year of bombastic rhetoric on political correctness and climate change, rolling coal stands out as an ideological statement. At its core, it also struggles with a basic, somewhat existential question: Should we seek to minimize the human footprint on the earth, or should we flaunt it?”

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