They’ll sell it to you as “wellness.”
Not the soft kind with yoga mats and playlists. The corporate kind: a sterile smile stapled to a spreadsheet, the kind of wellness where your nervous system becomes an underperforming asset and your burnout is a “capacity planning issue.” They won’t call it slavery, obviously. Slavery is a word with history. They’ll call it optimisation, which is slavery with a product manager and … Read the rest
By Eric Le Roy
One of my students put this article under my nose yesterday during a class discussion. He is Swiss, and the original article was in German. So here is a translation of the gist of it:
Germany: In front of a nursing home for people with dementia in Duisburg, a fake bus stop has recently been installed. A fictitious timetable hangs on the typical bus … Read the rest
A man I knew used to carry a small object in his pocket. Not a charm exactly—he would have laughed at that word—but something smooth he could roll between his fingers when he was anxious. He said it helped him focus. It gave his hands something to do while his mind calmed down. Later I saw the same man in a church, doing almost the same thing with a prayer … Read the rest
I have no interest in mocking anyone’s faith. Not because I am afraid of offending people, but because faith is often where people keep their most tender parts: grief, hope, guilt, gratitude, love. If you kick that door down with sarcasm, you do not prove you are intelligent. You prove you are careless.
And yet, if something is truly sacred, it should be able to breathe in daylight. Questions are … Read the rest
Europe is very easy to insult.
From a certain angle, the continent looks like an aging museum with Wi-Fi: polite, overregulated, uncomfortable with power, lost in its own procedures while other players move faster and hit harder. If you lived here in the 1970s and come back now, the contrast feels almost obscene. Where once your memory stored quiet town squares and local accents, now it finds the familiar … Read the rest
