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A batch of the best highlights from what Jophin's read, .
whenever you find someone doing something in the name of economic efficiency that seems completely economically irrational (like, say, paying people good money to do nothing all day), one had best start by asking, as the ancient Romans did, “Qui bono?”—“Who benefits?”—and how.
Bullshit Jobs
David Graeber
Joanne told me that grief is necessary. We grieve because we have loved. We grieve because the person we have lost mattered to us. To say that grief should disappear on a neat timetable is an insult to the love we have felt. Deep grief and depression, she explained to me, have identical symptoms for a reason. Depression, I realized, is itself a form of grief—for all the connections we need, but don’t have.
Lost Connections
Johann Hari
This conversion that Brown describes is a conversion of language; our speech becomes something we think of ourselves as investing in, and as simply and solely instrumental in our economic success; it serves our ambitions for personal gain. And so what we might have thought of as a shared language is a language calculated to make the shared itself a profit-making enterprise (the political being the official shared world). __If language itself is a commodity – something to invest in – what will it then be unable, or unwilling, to do?__
On Wanting to Change
Adam Phillips
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