What Really Wrecked Boeing–Neoliberalism is an ideology that attempts to subject all of human activity to the invisible hand of the market, and since 1997, when Boeing acquired rival McDonnell Douglas (and more consequentially, its management), it has been neoliberalism that has guided the company on its decades-long flight from quality. It was neoliberalism that persuaded Boeing’s new management that its only fiduciary responsibility was to maximize value for shareholders. It was neoliberalism that caused management to fritter away the most skilled, experienced, and proud workforce in the industry. It was neoliberalism that literally unhinged Boeing from its glorious past. democracyjournal.org
Weather Report–Papa respected the weather. The slight, strong, sinewy man, in his scratchy, wool checkered shirts, would walk from his house to stand at the sandy beach and look out onto the ocean at the western sky. He’d accurately forecast what Sila would do for the days, the week ahead. He knew her signs. Her moods. Her desires. From the shape of the clouds. The color of the water. The direction of the ocean current, the winds and the way the island, Qikiqtaġruk, looked on the horizon. He learned the signals from his dad, from his grandpa, from the generations before who could predict Sila’s movements and plans. And then he’d plot our days. To dry fish. To hunt ugruk (big bearded seal). To pick berries. To dig for masru (potato root). Or stay home and wait for a good report. From Papa. From Sila. orionmagazine.org
There Is No Point in My Being Other Than Honest with You: On Toni Morrison’s Rejection Letters–During her 16 years at Random House, Morrison wrote hundreds of rejection letters. Usually typed on pink, yellow, or white carbonless copy paper, and occasionally bearing Random House’s old logo and letterhead, these are now filed among her correspondence in the Random House archives at Columbia University’s Rare Book & Manuscript Library. While many of the letters were mailed to New York, Boston, and even Rome, others were sent to writers in more obscure places; some are addressed to “general delivery” in various small towns across the United States. lareviewofbooks.org
Keeping Up With the Laverys–Waiting for a baby here mostly entails talking. “When I say we hope that the baby will be gay, I think maybe we’re all saying that we hope the baby will have an aesthetic life,” says Lily later as we curl up on the couch in their Brownstone Brooklyn living room. “I don’t know if you guys agree with that or not.” “I’m just picturing a little Bob Newhart baby,” Danny says. “Oh!” Grace says, then realizes, relieved. “I was thinking of Bob Ross.” www.thecut.com
Life at the sad café–Though she was not a deaf-mute engraver, a gay United States army captain, a Black Marxist physician or a dapper hunchback, Carson McCullers wrote all these characters, and wrote them well, and did so before her thirtieth birthday. For a biographer this bodes ill. There are some writers whose work composts fascinatingly into their biographies, and others whose work sits in their life story like a body in an anaerobic bog, weird and leathery and stubbornly separate. Both the unaccountable precocity of her achievements and the all-round freakiness of her imagination suggest that McCullers is the second kind of writer. www.the-tls.co.uk
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