Three new essays!
On stray shopping carts, contested keywords about work, and the vocation of a dying college
Two new essays of mine were published the other day, one in the new issue of Commonweal, the other in the new issue of The Hedgehog Review. And a week or two before, an essay appeared in the new issue of Intersections, a journal focused on Lutheran higher education.
The main message of this post is, please read these essays. I spent vastly more time researching, thinking about, writing, and editing them than I ever will on a newsletter post. I enjoy working on these posts, and I try to give good value for the time you spend with them, but you will always find my best work in venues that have editorial oversight. I send my best ideas to these editors, I put more effort into that work, and the editors always make it better.
The Commonweal essay is about the work of the graphic artist Julian Montague, whose 2006 book, The Stray Shopping Carts of Eastern North America: A Guide to Field Identification, has just been reissued in a revised edition. The book puts forth a system for classifying shopping carts found in “the wild,” but it’s chiefly a photography book documenting hundreds of “specimens” Montague came across in Buffalo, New York.
When it first came out, this book got me to look at an easily-overlooked aspect of the world in a wholly new way. Seventeen years later, I think something more profound is going on:
“True strays exhibit a degree of drift where the source lot becomes indeterminate, and the cart’s new placement mysterious proof of an invisible urban infrastructure,” Montague wrote in a 1999 version of the system reproduced in a new afterword. It’s as if currents in our cities keep the carts in motion until they find a stable niche in someone’s garage, wedged between disused buildings, in a landfill, or, as Montague documents, at the bottom of the Niagara Gorge.
The currents, of course, are human beings, but they are all but absent from Montague’s photographs. Remarkably, just a handful of people are visible in the deep background of a photo of a mangled A/6 (“plow crush at source”) resting atop a huge snow pile in a busy parking lot. The photos suggest that behind the currents are familiar forces like neglect, mischief, and thoughtless do-gooderism. Ingenuity plays a role, too: Montague shows carts employed in apartment complexes to help residents carry laundry and carts with their baskets removed so they can carry bulkier loads. The range of the carts’ experience shadows our own.
The book is a great piece of deadpan humor that, to my eyes, conveys a serious point about how people interact with the limited public goods available in U.S. society. Montague’s work as a whole (here’s his website), which includes an elaborate, evolving project investigating animals living as uninvited guests in human habitations, is often about the agents we only know by the artifacts they leave behind: spider webs, collections, art-exhibition ephemera. I’m fascinated by it. The Commonweal essay explains why.
The Hedgehog Review essay builds on my long-running burnout project. As I discuss in my book, The End of Burnout, the concept of burnout as we know it today arose in the 1970s to help describe and ameliorate the negative experience of professionals whose work served the public: social workers, teachers, nurses, bus drivers, and so on. Burnout quickly became a buzzword in the 1970s and 80s, but then it faded from public view in the U.S. until — well, until January 5, 2019, when Anne Helen Petersen’s BuzzFeed News article on milennial burnout changed the burnout conversation literally overnight. Pretty soon, that conversation became a competition over who was most burned out, pitting American workers against each other across familiar lines of race, gender, class, and generation. This was a dispiriting development, because burnout is a widely-shared condition, and healing it on a cultural scale will require workers to cooperate across lines of difference.
Even more dispiriting, burnout is not the only social-scientific term of 1970s/80s vintage that underwent such a fate. “Emotional labor” was coined by the sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild to describe how the inner lives of service workers (paradigmatically, flight attendants) had become the means of production across many industries. When that term came back into vogue in the mid-2010s, it, too, became a site of competition. Likewise the term “professional-managerial class”; when this term returned in 2019 after four decades’ dormancy, it was as a term for one group of highly-educated workers to use in mocking another, barely-distinguishable group.
I see this pattern as a problem for the pro-labor left:
These conflicts over identity are a common and self-defeating feature of the political left, the traditional home of pro-labor politics. As the religion scholar Vincent Lloyd said in a 2023 interview with The Atlantic, “Left political discourse today takes social movements, or even just an individual who has suffered, as conversation stoppers rather than conversation starters.” Conversations about work, even among people acutely attuned to labor exploitation, often stop short because they quickly devolve into a competition over virtue. If you assume that capitalism exists to benefit wealthy white men by exploiting everyone else—poor workers, migrant workers, black and brown workers, and women who work either for low wages or in the home—then people with historically marginalized identities are necessarily working too hard for a meager reward. At the same time, a noble lie undergirds American capitalism in the widespread belief that hard work, no matter the reward, is morally good. Even the critics of American capitalism accept this doctrine. When workers fight to be seen as the most burned out or as doing the most emotional labor or as the least like those PMC ghouls, they are trying to claim the highest status in the American work ideology: that of the work martyr.
The problem is that by fighting over that status, workers entrench the very ideology they need to uproot. (I wish I had written that sentence a year ago and included it in the essay!) The terms burnout, emotional labor, and professional-managerial class could be incredibly useful in uprooting that ideology if only they were returned to something like their original meanings and used to find points of solidarity among all who labor.
I don’t often wade directly into political questions in my writing. You could say that this essay is my critique of the social-justice, fourth-wave feminist, and “dirtbag” leftist movements and my defense of something like the New Left of the 1970s. Or, in other words, the essay is a call for a left politics that doesn’t make the internet the principal site of its action.
The Hedgehog essay is currently behind a paywall. It won’t be forever, but if you’d like to read it, you might consider subscribing to a magazine that I have found insightful and provocative for more than 20 years. A year’s digital subscription is twenty-five dollars. That may be the best deal in all of media. It’s half the price of some rambling, unedited blog about Why GPT-5 Will Mean the End of YIMBYism. Once you have your Hedgehog subscription, you can spend your other $25 on a yearlong print + digital subscription to Commonweal, a magazine that’s truly beautiful in print. Subscribing to the venues that publish my work is one of the best ways you can support it.
Finally, I gave the keynote address at the meeting of the Network of ELCA Colleges and Universities in July, and a shortened version of that talk, titled, “Do One Thing: Academic Vocation in the Age of Burnout,” was published in Intersections, the NECU magazine. Here’s some of what I had to say:
A mission should not be a mandate to do anything and everything that seems financially expedient. Rather, a mission should be one thing. I’m borrowing this idea from the Danish Lutheran writer Søren Kierkegaard, who wrote a book in 1846 called Purity of Heart is to Will One Thing. For Kierkegaard, the “one thing” is the Good. “There is only one end: the genuine Good,” he writes, “and only one means: this, to be willing only to use those means which genuinely are good.” A pure heart, Kierkegaard argues, will subordinate all other things to the Good and desire it for its own sake. If you desire something other then the Good for its own sake—even something relatively good like honor or wealth—then your will is divided, your heart impure.
I think colleges and universities are under a lot of pressure to do too much. The result is that their employees burn out, and the colleges wind up unable to do even the things they were trying to do in the first place. So it’s time for them to narrow their focus.
There are several other good essays in all of these magazine issues. In Intersections, I really liked Krista Hughes’s essay, “A Lutheran Call for Educator Flourishing.” If you work in religious higher ed, you might appreciate it, too.
I intend to write a followup to my recent post about something I called “liberal nihilism.” It’s in the works, but it needs more thought and will have to wait. In the meantime, I’ve left you plenty more to read.