Hands

Matthew Crawford has an essay over at the NYT, where he makes a case for working with your hands.





Here is a taste:

...The imperative of the last 20 years to round up every warm body and send it to college, then to the cubicle, was tied to a vision of the future in which we somehow take leave of material reality and glide about in a pure information economy. This has not come to pass. To begin with, such work often feels more enervating than gliding. More fundamentally, now as ever, somebody has to actually do things: fix our cars, unclog our toilets, build our houses.

When we praise people who do work that is straightforwardly useful, the praise often betrays an assumption that they had no other options. We idealize them as the salt of the earth and emphasize the sacrifice for others their work may entail...

Worth a read.



Also worth reading is the latest issue of The Economist, which takes a look at what we are getting for our trillions of dollars invested in banking/insurance/finance, why California is on the brink of constitutional collapse and gets to the root of paleolithic porn.

Perhaps I will address some of that later...or you could just go read it yourself.