The ultimate layoff narrative?

In September, Ketzel Levine, a senior correspondent for National Public Radio, came up with an idea for a series about how Americans were handling economic pressure....

Ms. Levine and her editor didn’t want a series of unconnected stories. “We came up with the idea that each person should be connected with the next somehow, and that was the best part for me,” she said....

But there was an unexpected ending. Midway through her reporting, Ms. Levine found out that she had been laid off as part of a 64-employee cut at NPR.

Ms. Levine, who has worked at NPR since 1977, said she decided the final episode, and her final piece for NPR, should be about her own situation.

—NYT

Personal Days—the mug!

iLost

Personal Days is a "tornado of increasing tragicomedic build-up that sucks you in and vomits you into a better place. Some killer one-liners in there. Tangentially lost my iPod because of this book."
—Yellow Redneck Blues

Force quit blues

do not use force quit/cancel-force quit to manipulate your computer- i am pretty sure i broke mine today.

—The Pony Problem

Tooth flippers

An hour or two ago I dreamt that I and some coworkers were missing our top rows of teeth. On the bare gums in the tops of our mouths, we wore "reversible" dentures. If we wore the dentures one way, it looked like we had a perfect row of white teeth. If we flipped them around and wore them the other way, it looked like we had a row of perfect off-white teeth.... —Crude Futures

More!

One of the notable events in recent literary history was a modest bump in the number of novels about white-collar work. The two most heralded were, significantly, debuts: Joshua Ferris' Then We Came to the End and Ed Park's Personal Days. Both young authors, possessed of little experience besides what their cubicle daydreaming and job insecurity had supplied, they exploited the potential of office spaces to their extreme, and the immediate response these novels elicited from reviewers was: "more!" We needed more novels about bagel brunches, useless meetings, excessive coffee drinking, awkward exchanges, e-mails and layoffs. We were to re-experience what so many of us went through every day, to know it as pain, to see the expression of that pain among others as a form of solidarity.

—Nikil Savil, for The Millions' "A Year in Reading"

Technological traps

Watch this clip from James Burke's excellent show Connections. (Relevant part a bit before 3:00 mark.)



(From Uncertain Times)