Jonathan Malesic teaches first-year writing at Southern Methodist University and is the author of The End of Burnout: Why Work Drains Us and How to Build Better Lives. His essays have appeared in The New Republic, New York Times Magazine, The Point, Chronicle of Higher Education, America, Commonweal, and elsewhere. He was a 2004–05 visiting fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture.
Moral growth doesn’t just mean looking to the future but reconciling past and present selfhood. It demands regret.
The fact is, work as we know it isn’t worth saving anyway.
The conflict between the solitary ideal and Thoreau’s real drive to map connection plays out concretely in his many ascents up New England’s peaks.
What makes someone a likely Substack star is an ability to cultivate one-way, parasocial relationships with readers.
Many office workers aren’t tasked with anything useful to do.