A career ladder creates winners and losers; what happens to the losers?
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A working library is a project about work, reading & technology by mandy brown
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Making a Career in Dictatorship
What if the standard career path was a driver of authoritarianism?
He, She, and It
Both Shira and her husband Josh are owned by the Y-S corporation, so it is the corporation that decides to award sole custody of their son, Ari, to Josh when they split.
What person thinks person knows
“We never leave school and go to work. We’re always working, always studying.”
Woman on the Edge of Time
Trapped in a mental institution in the twentieth century, Connie Ramos learns to visit the future.
Lavinia
In the final hours of his life, Virgil finds himself in a sacred wood with a woman who turns out to be more than he imagined.
An addiction
“Talk about technology is an addiction.”
To Write Like a Woman
“Hence my love for science fiction, which analyzes reality by changing it.”
In the world
In memory of Nevan Scott, 1985–2026
Trouble on Triton
Bron Helstrom is in some trouble.
There and here
To keep the word, we must keep our distance.
The Beginning Place
A kind of coming of age story, if coming of age was the work not of one but two, not of solitude or isolation but of connection, conjoining, coupling.
Reading matters deeply
You must read where you are, not in some hypothetical sanitized reading room, but in the dirt.
Virtue Hoarders
Catherine Liu argues that the professional managerial class (PMC) uses meritocracy, philanthropy, and virtue signaling to promote the core premise of neoliberal economics: an isolationist individualism that simultaneously preaches self-sufficiency and blocks collective efforts towards social justice.
Was
In 1989, Jonathan boards a plane to Manhattan, Kansas, where he rents a car, explaining to the man at the Hertz desk that he’s dying.
The open universe
“The capacity to face an open universe. Physically open, psychically open. No doors shut.”
The Language of the Night
This is one of Le Guin’s earliest collections of essays, bringing together writing about the genre of science fiction and fantasy with reflections on her own fiction.
Kraken
Billy Harrow is taking people on a tour at London’s Natural History Museum when he makes a discovery: the enormous specimen of *Architeuthis dux,* the museum’s carefully preserved giant squid, is gone, tank and all.
Hungrier than before
You cannot fill your belly with illusions.
The Eye of the Heron
On the planet Victoria, the people of Shantih Town live alongside the people of the City.
Anarchist calisthenics
“Every day or so break some trivial law that makes no sense, even if it’s only jaywalking.”
Two Cheers for Anarchism
An anarchism of doing rather than an anarchism of theory.
The Rift
Twenty years after she disappears without a trace, Selena’s sister Julie rings her up.
Umyazu
Reading is the art of attention.
Ten times
“After all, who could be opposed to getting more done with less work?”
A Granite Silence
In 1934, eight-year-old Helen Priestly sets out from her home in Aberdeen, Scotland, and is never seen alive again.
Promises and perils
“Fear that there may be no alternative to the will of the AI arise because we have been told for decades that there is no alternative to neoliberalism.”
Why We Fear AI
Our fears of what AI will do to us are really just our fears of what capitalism is *already* doing.
House of Day, House of Night
In a region that was once Germany but is now Poland, a woman and her husband make a life in a house where a stream runs through the foundation.
Freedom from unreal loyalties
Four great teachers.