Listen to enough people talk about work, and you start hearing the same ideas repeated in a chorus of different voices. One common refrain is a distaste for corporate slogans, things like “Show backbone and speak out!” adorning the walls …
The world belongs to late bloomers
Lots of people don’t believe in second acts, second lives, mid-life resurrections. As F. Scott Fitzgerald put it in The Last Tycoon, published in 1941: “There are no second acts in American lives.” But his absolutism was being embarrassed at …
The sexual holy war is coming for you
“Children in their games are wont to submit to rules which they have themselves established, and to punish misdemeanours which they have themselves defined.” Thus did Tocqueville marvel at Americans’ habit of self-government, and the temperament it both required and …
Why I became a time lord
In the classic John Huston film Beat the Devil, the diminutive character actor Peter Lorre delivers a concise disquisition on the nature of time: “What is time? Swiss manufacture it. French hoard it. Italians squander it. Americans say it is …
