It’s Labor Day week, 2023, and Henry David Thoreau is the heart of our conversation. It’s not with him, but it’s driven by his example: American thinking at its best on the matter of how to make a living.
John Kaag.
Have no doubt that the gabby man-about-Concord in the 1850s was a worker: expert surveyor, gardener, as many trades as fingers, he said, not to mention the writer of Walden and Civil Disobedience, of course, and a life journal that came to two million words. We read Henry Thoreau anew for his insight into our work, not his: the often fruitless, driven, underpaid labor of the 2020s, and, oddly enough, our midnight anxiety that ChatGPT could take it all away. This is a conversation in the Harvard Bookstore with our friend the philosopher John Kaag, who co-wrote the pungent and personal handbook titled Henry at Work.
Nicholson Baker Finds a Likeness
Campus Uproar
American Disorder
Lessons from Hannah Arendt
Taylor Swift’s Tortured Poets
Of Melville and Marriage
Against Despair
The Rebel’s Clinic
Algorithmic Anxiety
The Humbling of Harvard
The Most Secret Memory of Men
The Revolutionary
Israel and Palestine Across History
Time’s Echo
Chas Freeman on a Kaleidoscopic Turn
Upended Assumptions
War and Dread
George Eliot’s Marriage Story
Zadie Smith on The Fraud
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It is Free
Postcards from China
Anne of Green Gables
The Count of Monte Cristo
The Money Machine