Right on Time
What 3,130 knitting designers taught me about breaking into the creator economy
Read essay →Essays
Writing about the strange systems we build around work, creativity, technology, and culture. You can find more of my writing on Performance Anxiety.
Featured Essays
Millennials Were Supposed to Fix Work
A 2014 prediction, twelve years of careers-page data, and what worker leverage actually bought us
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It's Not Just a Pipeline Problem
What the Epstein Files Taught Me About the Tech Industry
Read essay →Reading paths
I've grouped some related essays together, along with books and other reading that help me think about them. Start wherever you like.
Community & Resilience
What helps people get through difficult times? Essays and reading about resilience, burnout, and the support we need from each other.
View path →Labor & Recognition
Who gets credit for the work, and who keeps doing it anyway? Essays and reading about invisible labor, gender, and burnout.
View path →The Language of Work
Essays from the careers-page research — what two decades of how tech companies describe themselves as employers reveals about idealism, care, and who actually holds leverage.
View path →Recent essays
Dark Places
David Heinemeier Hansson, 37signals, and the myth of the non-political workplace
Masculine Energy
On hardcore, hard mode, mariachi bands, and the measurable gender of "we're not for the faint of heart."
Deeply Resentful
What Google's employee number four tells us about parental leave
A Team, Not a Family
And how a 2009 Netflix deck taught everyone to say "talent density"
Who Gets to Be the Hero?
On heroes, housework, and the labor no one sees
What Hannah Arendt taught me about burnout, and why fantasy heroes always seem to have magic doing their laundry.
Themes
Select a topic to see essays tagged with that theme.
- Millennials Were Supposed to Fix Work
- Who Gets to Be the Hero?
On heroes, housework, and the labor no one sees
- Resilience Is a Systems Problem
Why grit isn't enough
- Dark Places
- Masculine Energy
- Deeply Resentful
- Who Gets to Be the Hero?
On heroes, housework, and the labor no one sees
- It's Not Just a Pipeline Problem
- Deeply Resentful
- Millennials Were Supposed to Fix Work
- Who Gets to Be the Hero?
On heroes, housework, and the labor no one sees
- Resilience Is a Systems Problem
Why grit isn't enough
- Right on Time
- Dark Places
- Masculine Energy
- Deeply Resentful
- Millennials Were Supposed to Fix Work
- A Team, Not a Family
- Who Gets to Be the Hero?
On heroes, housework, and the labor no one sees
- It's Not Just a Pipeline Problem