The pitfalls of loving your job a little too much | Life in Gaza is a series of calculations. How much water do you really need? | "Anatomy of a Fall" Is Prestige Cinema as Airport Novel | Zadie Smith on Optimism and Despair

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� � � � � � You Might Like � � � � � � � � � The pitfalls of loving your job a little too much - The Economist    Back in the dim and distant past, job candidates had interests or hobbies. Those interests could be introspective: reading a book was a perfectly acceptable way of spending your spare time. No longer. Today you will probably be asked if you have a “personal passion project”, and the more exhausting your answer sounds, the better. Go white-water rafting, preferably with orphans. Help build motorway crossings for endangered animals. If you must read, at least do so in the original. Passion is becoming a staple for workplace success. A new piece of research from Jon Jachimowicz and Hannah Weisman of Harvard Business School includes an analysis of 200m job postings in America. It finds that the number which explicitly mention “passion” rose over time, from 2% in 2007 to 16% in 2019. Career websites offer helpful advice on how to come across as passionate about deeply ordinary pursuits. Here is a suggestion from one site on how to talk to prospective employers about putting things into an oven. “I love the process of researching new recipes and testing them out. I’ve been writing up my experiences with baking for the past three years…I’m very detail-oriented, and love the scientific aspects of baking. However, I’m also a very social person, and use my baking as a chance to get together with friends and family.” Do not say: “I just really like cake.” Continued here Life in Gaza is a series of calculations. How much water do you really need? - The Economist    My phone battery is on 30%. My laptop died a few days ago. I don’t know how much longer I’ll be able to keep communicating with the outside world. I’ve been able to charge my phone until now because someone in the neighbourhood had a generator. For two hours a day he would let people charge their phones on it – he wouldn’t accept any money. Money doesn’t mean anything any more anyway. You can’t buy fuel. Now my neighbour has run out of fuel for his generator. Life is an endless series of calculations. Such as: how much water do you really need? I moved my family away from air strikes in the north of Gaza city to my uncle’s two-bedroom flat after the war started. There are 17 of us living here now. When we ran out of bottled water I had to walk 5km to an outpost run by an aid agency, pick up the ration, which was three gallons per family, and carry it home. Being on the streets is dangerous. So we try to go to the outpost just once every few days, even though we don’t have very much water. One of our neighbours had spare water from his father’s well. When people started to run out he drove a giant bottle of water around on a donkey cart, giving it away to people. I offered to pay him but he refused to accept money, even though he’s from a poor family. A couple of days ago he stopped – he’d run out of fuel to draw water from the well. Continued here Don't like ads? Go ad-free with TradeBriefs Premium "Anatomy of a Fall" Is Prestige Cinema as Airport Novel - The New Yorker    The more I consider "Anatomy of a Fall," the new French courtroom drama by Justine Triet that opens Friday, the more I love "France." Not France the country (though it is something of a home away from home) but "France" the movie, Bruno Dumont's frenetic 2021 satire about a TV journalist whose ambitious and intrepid reports, with their standardized format and their unchallenged attitudes, have become sensations of the mediascape. "Anatomy of a Fall" is something of a counterpart to those reports but in the cinematic realm; it's both a product and an echo of high-minded consensus. It's a movie of manifest ambition, suggested by the literary milieu in which it's set and the themes that come with it, but one that realizes it's ambition with prefabricated attitudes and a numbingly conventional form that only reinforces them. It's prestige cinema. The German actress Sandra Hüller stars as Sandra Voyter, a German writer whose husband, Samuel Maleski (Samuel Theis), falls to his death from the third-floor balcony of their isolated chalet. Sandra is accused of killing him, and her effort to clear her name at trial is complicated by the fact that the main witness to the couple's life is their eleven-year-old son, Daniel (Milo Machado Graner), who is blind. On the day of Samuel's death, Sandra is interviewed at home by a graduate student named Zoé (Camille Rutherford)—and, during the interview, Samuel blasts hip-hop (an instrumental version of 50 Cent's "P.I.M.P.") from his work room, upstairs, at ear-splitting volume, forcing the women to put an end to their talk. A short time later, Daniel returns from a walk with his dog, Snoop, and finds Samuel's body in the snow. The prosecution begins to build its case around inconsistencies in Sandra's account of the day, peculiarities in the forensic report on Samuel's fatal injuries, and apparent discord in the couple's relationship. As the cinematic equivalent of an airport read, "Anatomy of a Fall" is adequate—not brisk but twisty, not stylish but unobtrusively informational. But the artistic failings are obvious and distracting throughout. For starters, it's filled with herrings that surely turned red from blushing with shame, starting with the interview itself. To Zoé, Sandra talks in literary terms of the uncertain distinction of reality from fiction—an abstract theory that seems to provide ready-made self-exoneration in advance of any inconvenient evidence. There's also Daniel's visual impairment, which, though treated sensitively, hand-waves a facile metaphor regarding the source of knowledge and the nature of bearing witness. There's Samuel's obstreperous misbehavior, a seemingly obvious provocation of Sandra's (murderous?) rage; the movie could be subtitled "Death of an Asshole." There's the fact of Samuel's frustrated literary ambitions. There's the revelation that Sandra is bisexual, which, as I watched the movie, struck me as an instant exoneration, for the simple reason that a film governed by high-minded consensus would no longer dare to posit a bisexual woman as a wanton killer; the same goes for the fact that Sandra is the more productive and successful writer, and that she's a foreigner. There's the prosecuting attorney's buzzcut, suggesting that he's a right-wing bigot who takes all these clues and identifiers as suspicious. He's a perfect embodiment of traditionalist persecution of a sexually and intellectually free woman artist (and of a foreigner). Then, there's the revelation that Samuel had been refusing to have sex with Sandra, which, I figured, made her an instant martyred innocent and put the movie a wink away from Samuel's posthumous prosecution for abuse. Continued here Zadie Smith on Optimism and Despair - The Marginalian    “All the goodness and the heroisms will rise up again, then be cut down again and rise up,” John Steinbeck wrote to his best friend at the peak of WWII. “It isn’t that the evil thing wins — it never will — but that it doesn’t die.” Caught in the maelstrom of the moment, we forget this cyclical nature of history — history being merely the rosary of moments the future strings of its pasts. We forget that the present always looks different from the inside than it does from the outside — something James Baldwin knew when, in considering why Shakespeare endures, he observed: “It is said that his time was easier than ours, but I doubt it — no time can be easy if one is living through it.” We forget that our particular moment, with all its tribulations and triumphs, is not neatly islanded in the river of time but swept afloat by massive cultural currents that have raged long before it and will rage long after. I have long believed that critical thinking without hope is cynicism, but hope without critical thinking is naïveté. Where are we to turn for lucid hope, then, in cultural moments that inflame despair, which so easily metastasizes into cynicism? That is what the inimitable Zadie Smith explores in a piece titled “On Optimism and Despair,” originally delivered as an award acceptance speech and later adapted for her altogether fantastic essay collection Feel Free (public library). Continued here

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