Jonathan Malesic is the author of The End of Burnout: Why Work Drains Us and How to Build Better Lives. He teaches writing at Southern Methodist University.
Work is hard in large part because it is a site where people place serious demands on each other. Meeting those demands can be painful.
Henry David Thoreau has a reputation for being suspicious of work.
Substack prompts the question should the people we rely on to inform us be celebrities?
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.
AI offers a tempting illusion to students—and evidently to some teachers.
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.