Sign up

A working library

Not verified No WebSub updates No webmention support Valid

A working library is a project about work, reading & technology by mandy brown

Author
mandy brown
Rights
Copyright 2008–2026 mandy brown
Public lists
davewiner/blogroll
Fetched

A working library Valid
Text

Trouble on Triton

Bron Helstrom is in some trouble.

A working library Valid
Text

There and here

To keep the word, we must keep our distance.

A working library Valid
Text

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.

A working library Valid
Text

Reading matters deeply

You must read where you are, not in some hypothetical sanitized reading room, but in the dirt.

A working library Valid
Text

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.

A working library Valid
Text

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.

A working library Valid
Text

The open universe

“The capacity to face an open universe. Physically open, psychically open. No doors shut.”

A working library Valid
Text

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.

A working library Valid
Text

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.

A working library Valid
Text

Hungrier than before

You cannot fill your belly with illusions.

A working library Valid
Text

The Eye of the Heron

On the planet Victoria, the people of Shantih Town live alongside the people of the City.

A working library Valid
Text

Anarchist calisthenics

“Every day or so break some trivial law that makes no sense, even if it’s only jaywalking.”

A working library Valid
Text

Two Cheers for Anarchism

An anarchism of doing rather than an anarchism of theory.

A working library Valid
Text

The Rift

Twenty years after she disappears without a trace, Selena’s sister Julie rings her up.

A working library Valid
Text

Umyazu

Reading is the art of attention.

A working library Valid
Text

Ten times

“After all, who could be opposed to getting more done with less work?”

A working library Valid
Text

A Granite Silence

In 1934, eight-year-old Helen Priestly sets out from her home in Aberdeen, Scotland, and is never seen alive again.

A working library Valid
Text

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.”

A working library Valid
Text

Why We Fear AI

Our fears of what AI will do to us are really just our fears of what capitalism is *already* doing.

A working library Valid
Text

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.

A working library Valid
Text

Freedom from unreal loyalties

Four great teachers.

A working library Valid
Text

Pedro the Vast

Pedro is vast, but he is also hidden and mysterious, tucked behind locked doors and a colloquy of priests and doctors.

A working library Valid
Text

Into the gap

It is right that the murder of many people be mourned and lamented.

A working library Valid
Text

Reconsidering Reparations

Olúfémi O. Táíwò argues for a *constructive* form of reparations: distributive justice that looks to the past to construct a transition from the global racial empire we have today to the more just world we wish to arrive at tomorrow—and beyond.

A working library Valid
Text

The Shapeless Unease

Struck by the sudden and untimely death of her cousin, and distressed by the terrible political order, Samantha Harvey finds that she cannot sleep.

A working library Valid
Text

The “correct” attitude

In one layoff announcement after another, we hear that AI can now do the work of a great many people, which is why fewer people are needed to do the work.

A working library Valid
Text

The Third Reich of Dreams

In 1933, shortly after Hitler took power, Charlotte Beradt started having nightmares.

A working library Valid
Text

Automation conformity

In our effort to escape anxiety, we run further into its jaws.

A working library Valid
Text

The Meaning of Anxiety

Rollo May refutes the assertion that mental health is living *without* anxiety, proposing instead that anxiety is a necessary condition for creativity, intellect, and freedom.

A working library Valid
Text

Orbital

Six people—four astronauts and two cosmonauts—may be among the last to circle the Earth.