I wish I could say that the spontaneity trap we discussed two weeks ago was the only pitfall that has to be avoided on the way to a successful career as a writer—or, for that matter, on the way to a successful life. Here as elsewhere, the writing business offers a convenient microcosm of life…
Tag: economics
Writing as Microcosm 2: A Door Will Open
Two weeks ago we talked about the writing business as a microcosm of today’s economy. Like nearly everyone else in the modern world, writers have to deal with a barrage of advice—no, let’s be honest and call it propaganda—that’s meant to lure them into choices that benefit the corporate system at their expense. Like nearly…
Writing as Microcosm, Part One: Publish and Perish
I’m not sure how many of my readers have noticed the massive realignment going on right now at the foundations of the industrial economy. Venture below the towering abstractions of notional wealth that fill business websites, all the way to the base, and you’ll find that the whole gargantuan structure rests on certain relationships between…
The Great Rehash, Part One: The Best and the Brightest
July seems to be a good time for explosions, and not just in Fourth of July fireworks displays in the US. Already this month, a bomb blew up a controversial monument in rural Georgia, while on the other side of the world in Sri Lanka an angry mob stormed the presidential palace and drove the…
The Twilight of Empire
The third of the topics I’ve discussed at length in my blogs over the last sixteen years, the decline and fall of America’s global empire, is especially timely just now. I noted in a post last year, while discussing the debacle of the US withdrawal from Afghanistan, that the remaining scraps of America’s global hegemony…
Running On Empty
Well, we definitely seem to have passed a threshold of sorts. For most of the sixteen years since I started blogging, one of the things I had to point out constantly to my readers was the slow pace of historical change. Whenever I posted an essay on the twilight of industrial society, I could count…
Slack! An Irreverent Proposal
For quite some time now, utterances from the elite classes of the industrial world have had a sidelong relationship at best to the reality that most of us inhabit. Recent weeks have seen the surreal quality of official pronouncements slam into overdrive, however. I first noted some time ago that the most difficult job in…
Reimagining Political Economy
Over the last couple of months I’ve discussed the way that contemporary industrial societies struggle under the weight of a disastrous failure of imagination. That’s among the most potent and disturbing political facts of our time. Even though the existing order of society has proven to be a miserable failure in terms of every human…
The Revolt of the Imagination, Part Three: Co-Creating the Future
As I write these words, the Russo-Ukrainian war has raged for a week. To a great many people, crises like these make the theme of my recent posts here—the potential of the human imagination—seem wholly irrelevant. That’s a common mistake, but it’s still a mistake. To begin with, let’s please remember that wars and the…
A Season for Giving
As I write these words, Christmas is a little more than a month away. Normally I don’t look forward to that December day with any noteworthy enthusiasm. Granted, it’s nice to know that the auditory drool that spatters down from loudspeakers every December is almost done for another year. It also means that my wife…