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In a review of Nikil Saval’s Cubed: A Secret History of the Workplace, Jenny Diski comments on the rise of work-from-home freelancers:

These workers are a serious new class, known as the precariat: insecure, unorganised, taking on too much work for fear of famine, or frighteningly underemployed. The old rules of employment have been turned upside down. These new non-employees, apparently, need to develop a new ‘self-employed mindset’, in which they treat their employers as ‘customers’ of their services, and do their best to satisfy them, in order to retain their ‘business’.

She continues:

The US Bureau of Labor Statistics projects that ‘by 2020 freelancers, temps, day labourers and independent contractors will constitute 40 per cent of the workforce.’ Some think up to 50 per cent. Any freelancer will tell you about the time and effort required to drum up business and keep it coming (networking, if you like) which cuts down on how much work you can actually do if you get it. When they do get the work, they no longer get the annual salaries that old-time clerks were so proud to receive.

Getting paid is itself time-consuming and difficult. It’s estimated that more than 77 per cent of freelancers have had trouble collecting payment, because contractors try to retain fees for as long as possible. Flexibility sounds seductive, as if it allows individuals to live their lives sanely, fitting work and leisure together in whatever way suits them and their families best. But returning the focus to the individual worker rather than the great corporate edifice simply adds the burdens of management to the working person’s day while creating permanent anxiety and ensuring employee compliance. As to what freelancers actually do in their home offices, in steamy cafés, in co-working spaces, I still have no idea, but I suspect that the sumptuous stationery cupboard is getting to be as rare as a monthly salary cheque.

On a related note, Karen Alpert finds that being a work-from-home parent, in particular, is the worst of two worlds:

Every day, I hear it: You’re so lucky you get to work from home. But guess what? Being a stay-at-home mom is hard, and being a working mom is hard, but being a work-at-home mom is the suckiest choice of all. It may not be worse than the single mom who has to hold down two or three jobs and never gets to be at home with her children, but it’s worse than going to an office 9 to 5 and it’s worse than staying home with the kids all day long. I’ve done all three, and that is my conclusion. ….

[B]eing a working mom and being a stay-at-home mom are both crazy hard. But being a work-at-home mom is hard in a whole different kind of way. It’s not about seeing your kids too much or too little. It’s about ignoring your kid–a lot–and feeling like you’re constantly failing them throughout the day. … Day in, day out, I have to tell my kids to leave me the hell alone, and I constantly feel bad about it. Do they think my work is more important than they are? It’s not. But sometimes it has to be.

In an interview about their forthcoming book, Would You Baptize an Extraterrestrial?, Brother Guy Consolmagno and Father Paul Mueller – both Jesuit priests who are planetary scientists at the Vatican Observatory – respond to a question about whether or not science “disproves” the Bible:

Guy: Science doesn’t prove. Science describes. The Bible isn’t a book of propositions to be proved or disproved; it’s a conversation about God. So that question presupposes a radically false idea of what science is, and what the Bible is.

Paul: We never ask if science disproves Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, though the play includes statements that are at odds with modern science. We never ask if science disproves Maximilian Kolbe’s self-sacrificing love, though his own knowledge of science would be seventy years out of date today. Lovers don’t look to science to prove the reality of their love. Why on earth would we want to go to science for proof of the reality of God’s love?

Their thoughts on how the Bible does – and does not – inform their scientific inquiry:

Paul: Science gets along just fine, thank you, without needing to make any reference at all to the Bible. But if you’re going to do science at all, you have to first presuppose that the natural world is somehow orderly and intelligible. Our expectation that the world is that way emerges from the Biblical creation stories. Of course the Bible also informs our moral framework for thinking about how to use our scientific knowledge – will we use science for domination and power, or for service and love?

Guy: Revealed religion helps me understand why I want to do science. Science – understanding this physical world we live in – is something everyone wants to do. It’s what an infant is trying to do when he wants to touch and taste everything in reach; it’s what a toddler is trying to do when she keeps asking, “Why?” I found the hunger for science in my students when I was a Peace Corps teacher in the third world. So, why? Why this hunger? What are we really hungry for?

It reminds me of what the German theologian (and Jesuit) Karl Rahner called the “wovorher” and “woraufhin” – the thing outside us we are looking for, and the thing inside us that drives us to look. Ultimately it is the hunger for God: God the Creator. When you understand that, it changes the way you do science. The temptation is to do science for honor or glory, or financial success, or tenure. But those aren’t the deeper reasons why we’re driven to ask why. And achieving them won’t satisfy that hunger.

(Photo of a monastery under the stars by Soren Schaper)

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Hilton Als delves into some of the lesser-explored themes in Flannery O’Connor’s A Prayer Journal, such as the ambiguous role of love and desire in her thinking as a young graduate student in Iowa:

In the journal O’Connor keeps trying to break free of her erotic desires as she tries to break through to God, the better for Him to see her, direct her…. She wants to be a good artist, but an artist with the complicated task of making His word live in a changing world. To not achieve this would be to “feel my loneliness continually.” God came before carnal love, and work came before other people. Like any young artist—and some not so young—O’Connor criticizes, in the journal, a number of other writers, the better to see herself. One way to make a world is to exclude others from it.

She reads Proust with a certain amount of admiration but distaste, too:

his depiction of sex and desire does not resonate with supernatural love, that which links one to the Divine. Instead, he depicts the perverse, which is “wrong.” … It would be easy enough to dismiss O’Connor’s aversion to Proust’s view of love if one did not hear the putdown in it. Back then, certain aspects of difference were punishable by law. Gay men, for instance, were still being arrested because of their desire; black men were being lynched for imagined infractions against white women. O’Connor’s moral stance is often fascinating when it comes to ideas about fiction. And when she limits her moralizing to herself, and the split she feels between the “I” of authorship and her self-disgust when that “I” asserts itself the better to write the words we’re reading—“I do not know You God because I am in the way. Please help me push myself aside”—O’Connor writes like no one else.

Previous Dish on O’Connor’s youthful journals here, here, and here, and a quote from them here.

In an interview, Paul Elie discusses a fascinating venture he’s leading, the American Pilgrimage Project, a joint effort between Georgetown University and the oral history non-profit StoryCorps that records the stories ordinary people tell about “the role their religious beliefs play at crucial moments in their lives.” How Elie describes the undertaking’s origins:

At a certain point in the sexual abuse crisis, which is ongoing, I thought to myself: “There must be a way for Catholics to tell some of their untold stories outside of the courtroom.” What the sexual abuse crisis made clear is that there are areas that American Catholics are unaccustomed to talk about: sexuality, of course, but also other aspects of our experience. The only place we were hearing these stories publicly was in news reports about sex abuse lawsuits. It called to my attention how many stories are going untold. So I met with Dave Isay, founder of StoryCorps, and reached out to Georgetown’s president, John DeGioia—and now, some years later, the project is ready to begin in earnest.

Time and reflection have given us a better sense of what we want the project to be.

It quickly became clear that there was no good reason for us to focus on just Catholic stories, in part because those stories often involve other religions anyway. So we decided that we needed to take in religious experience in the broader sense. Another thing that became clear was the sheer breadth and variety of people’s stories that touch on belief in one way or another—stories of families, stories of neighborhoods, stories of encounters with people of other faith traditions, for example.  We hope to gather stories told by people in religiously “mixed” marriages, where interfaith dialogue takes the form of domestic encounter.

Why these stories matter:

In American society today, we hear a great deal about the religious habits of Americans from statisticians and demographers. You know how it goes: a study comes out reporting that 90 percent of people believe in this or that, or that the number of Americans with no religion has tripled, or whatever. We also hear American leaders making broad assertions about religious doctrines and their bearing on public life. But the actual experience of ordinary people is scanted or overlooked. I hope the American Pilgrimage Project will help in some small way to correct that. What do people actually believe? How do their beliefs bear on their daily lives? Those are perennial questions, needless to say. Typically to answer them we look to literature, we look to history, we look to journalism and we look to the mass media. Now the hope is that we’ll be able to turn to the American Pilgrimage Project archive as well. It will help to broaden and complicate the narrative.

You can listen to one of the stories here, in which a woman who survived a plane crash talks about discovering how precious life is.

Pico Iyer marvels at the breadth and constant surprises of the gay Catholic’s writing, noting that while his latest book, Darling, ostensibly is about religion, “it’s a central feature of his thinking that nothing—not even loneliness—is ever considered in isolation”:

[E]ven as the book with the ceremonial Catholic title Days of Obligation kept on referring to sex, so his new one, which purports to be about the desert monotheisms, calls itself Darling. Sometimes such gestures may strike readers as a bit much, but to his credit, Rodriguez does not try to link earthly and heavenly love as John Donne does, or to blend them with the abandoned ease of the Islamic high priest of Californian fashion, Rumi. Nor does he follow the familiar path of a gay believer wondering why the religion he serves so faithfully is ready to exile him for his sexual preferences.

Rather, this unpredictable maverick throws all his variegated interests into the mix and lets the sparks fly.

He’s irreverent even toward the objects of his reverence—“Is God dead?” he sincerely asked in his first book—and grave about those issues (computer technology) that others might be flip about. When fondly recalling the Sisters of Mercy who educated him, he suddenly turns to the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, an order of gay drag queens whose wild impiety he’d once written against. Now, however, as he watches them rattle cans for charity and jolly along some homeless teenagers, he has to concede that good works can make even the most outrageous poses irrelevant.

Darling begins by asserting that it will address the world in the wake of September 11 and try to bring the writer’s Catholicism into a better relation with its desert brother Islam. Happily, it soon abandons that somewhat rote mission for a much more ungovernable and unassimilable wander across everything from the decline of the American newspaper to the debate over gay marriage, from Cesar Chavez to the world of camp… Rodriguez throws off a constant fireworks display of suggestions and reveals more in an aside than others do in self-important volumes. As you read, you notice how often Don Quixote keeps recurring, and death notices, and meditations on the “tyranny of American optimism,” each one gaining new power with every recurrence, and reminding us of how the pursuit of happiness leaves us sad. The overall mosaic is far more glittering than any of its parts.

Previous Dish on Darling here, here, and here. Check out my Deep Dish conversation with Richard about the book here.

Elizabeth Stoker Bruenig finds reason to hope so:

If the Reason-Rupe and PRRI reports are right, millennials just might be opting out of the partisan approach to politics altogether, which means the partisan leash on religious constituencies might just be fraying. This makes coalitions like the faith and family left — which has commitments all across the political spectrum, founded in faith rather than political expediency — seem a lot more viable in the long run. In short, the weaker the partisan system becomes, the more nuanced the religious story about politics can become. And this means prime time for the Christian left to re-enter the political stage.

And what a smashing re-entry we’re set for, with figures like Pope Francis casually backhanding capitalism and corporate greed in graceful continuity with his praise of family life, solidarity and a culture of life.

At this very moment, different factions of the religious left are duking it out over Obama’s proposed executive order banning discrimination against LGBT workers on behalf of federal contractors, and though the diversity of the religious left might concern some, the big picture is that the religious left is a growing force for political influence. As time passes and the mantle of political participation passes from prior partisan generations down to millennials, we might see that influence continue to grow, re-invigorating some of the finest features of the Christian tradition: to resist categorization, pull hard for the oppressed and downtrodden and insist upon hope while coping with the realities of power.

But Michael Peppard is skeptical:

[M]oral attitudes and emphases associated with progressives are on the ascendant, but that does not necessarily translate into a “Religious Left” or “Christian Left.” Any comparison with the Religious Right (Moral Majority and Christian Coalition) of the 80s-90s must acknowledge how hard-won and onerous were the achievements of its leaders. Ralph Reed was one of the greatest community organizers of the 20th century.

A counter-movement would need to show regular attendance, financial support, and tenacious action. A movement needs, in short, committed bodies—not just responses to poll questions or clicks on a social action website. The Religious Right still has way more committed bodies, people organized and reared through cohesive, structured communities. There is denominational affinity, some ethnic affinity, and perhaps more importantly, geographical concentration that leads to sustained cultural engagement.

Polyamory is getting more popular:

Increasingly, polyamorous people—not to be confused with the prairie-dress-clad fundamentalist polygamists—are all around us. By some estimates, there are now roughly a half-million polyamorous relationships in the U.S., though underreporting is common. Some sex researchers put the number even higher, at 4 to 5 percent of all adults, or 10 to 12 million people. More often than not, they’re just office workers who find standard picket-fence partnerships dull. Or, like Sarah, they’re bisexuals trying to fulfill both halves of their sexual identities. Or they’re long-term couples who don’t happen to think sexual exclusivity is the key to intimacy.

Elisabeth Sheff, a sociologist who interviewed 40 polyamorous people over the course of several years for her recent book, The Polyamorists Next Door, says that polyamorous configurations with more than three people tend to be rarer and have more turnover. “Polys” are more likely to be liberal and educated, she said, and in the rare cases that they do practice religion, it’s usually paganism or Unitarian Universalism.

Polys differentiate themselves from swingers because they are emotionally, not just sexually, involved with the other partners they date. And polyamorous arrangements are not quite the same as “open relationships” because in polyamory, the third or fourth or fifth partner is just as integral to the relationship as the first two are.

Miri Mogilevsky praises Olga Khazan’s piece as “well-researched, balanced, and accurate overall,” but takes the opportunity to debunk some myths about the practice. Among them? “Bisexual people try polyamory because it’s not fulfilling to only date a person of one gender”:

Some do, yes. But this also ties into an unfortunate, harmful, and inaccurate myth about bisexual people: that they will inevitably cheat on you because they “need” to be with someone of another gender. Myths like these, in turn, contribute to prejudice and discrimination against bisexual people, who may face such hurtful attitudes both from the straight majority and from gays and lesbians.

For many bisexual people, the gender of their partner isn’t nearly as essential a factor as others seem to think it is. We may notice it, sure, but we don’t sit around thinking, “I’m very glad that I’m dating both Suzie and Tom because Suzie is a girl and Tom is a boy!” It’s just like you can be attracted to blondes, brunettes,andredheads, without necessarily feeling stifled and unfulfilled if you’re only dating brunettes at a given point in time.

The Dish thread “But What If Three People Love Each Other?” is here.

Morning-after alcohol misery isn’t so bad, according to Tom Vanderbilt. In a 1995 issue of The Baffler – which opened its archives to the public this week – he reviewed the then-new Skyy vodka “hangover free” advertizing campaign. For him, he says, “the hangover, that much-maligned malady of the engorging classes, [is] the clearest window onto my inner self, the one device through which all my pretensions in the material world are brought to a crashing halt”:

The hangover is a rich but undervalued element in our culture. In the literature of every age it provides a handy narrative device for slowing down the action and bringing the most elevated characters to a place we’ve all been. In Lucky Jim, for example, Kingsley Amis expertly captures the moment as the novel’s cheerfully bumbling protagonist awakens after a sordid escapade:

The light did him harm, but not as much as looking at things did; he resolved, having done it once, never to move his eyeballs again. A dusty thudding in his head made the scene before him beat like a pulse. His mouth had been used as a latrine by some small creature of the night, and then as its mausoleum. During the night, too, he’d somehow been on a cross-country run and then been expertly beaten up by secret police. He felt bad.

Amis, the poet laureate of the hangover, was one of the few to fathom its intricacies and divine its transcendent qualities—to find, if you will, the spiritual in the spirits. The hangover, he wrote once, is no mere physical affliction, but a “unique route to self-knowledge and self-realization.”

This is usually lost on sufferers of the “physical hangover,” obsessed as they are with feeling fresh again. But as they spend the morning shuffling through the Sunday supplements, unable to finish the simplest articles, drinking tomato juice as the sunlight stalks the living room floor, on come those colossal feelings of guilt, inadequacy, and shame—the metaphysical hangover. The best, and really the only, cure for this condition is to simply acknowledge your physical hangover for what it is, rather than attributing these unsettling thoughts to your job or to your relationship. As Amis puts it, “He who truly believes he has a hangover has no hangover.”

Explore The Baffler‘s back issues here.

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Reviewing David Mitchell’s recent Twitter experiment, which the Dish featured last weekend, Ian Crouch forecasts the future of literary Twitter:

There’s potential on Twitter for wild formal invention. Rather than just fiction tweeted, writers could find narrative in retweets, faves, blocks, and unfollows, and write in not just words but images, GIFs, emoji, and hyperlinks. Characters might exist as different Twitter handles, put in conversation, or else many characters subtly inhabiting a single account. It would wade into the messiness of parody accounts, anonymous mystery accounts, brand accounts, fake brand accounts, bots, and real people posing as bots. There are examples of this kind of writing, and its real emotional and intellectual possibilities, in the archive of work created for the Twitter Fiction Festival, which was held this past March: God tweets out a new book of the Bible about Justin Bieber; a cast of characters tweet about being trapped in a fictional airport during the polar vortex; Henry David Thoreau gets a smart phone at Walden Pond. Twitter is often funny, and so is Twitter fiction, but there are stories, too, of lost love, loneliness, and despair.

Writers may decide that Twitter is too narrow a space—too ephemeral, too rude or self-serving, too muddied by advertising and promotion—to both inspire and host meaningful fiction. Maybe everyone writing there is really still just gunning for a book deal. But I like to think that there is another kind of fiction to be written, the truest expression of the form, which embraces the quotidian nature of Twitter and its movements in real time. The project couldn’t be pre-written or announced; it would be spontaneous, changeable, full of odd tangents and breaking news and animal videos and sad, unfaved tweets. It would feature our first true @ narrator, writing in a voice that only seemed like unvarnished nonfiction opinion at the time. There may be someone out there already hard at work on the Great American Twitter Novel, tweeting and retweeting and subtweeting it one day at a time.

NYT’s Room for Debate recently rounded up writers’ thoughts on why poetry matters. Sandra Beasley’s response (NYT):

“Does poetry matter?” Yes. No one watching a competitive slam by students would doubt it. Every elegy drafted for President Lincoln “mattered,” even the trite or amateurish ones. Elegies by Walt Whitman, Gwendolyn Brooks, Langston Hughes and Stanley Kunitz mattered then, and have since endured.

What’s at question is poetry’s vaunted status above other artistic disciplines. “It’s poetry and power all the way!,” President Kennedy wrote to Robert Frost, after Frost spoke at his inauguration. He didn’t write “It’s ballet and power all the way!” and it’s probably for the same reason we do not have a Sculptor Laureate.

But Jonathan Farmer found some of the odes to poetics a tad overwrought:

David Biespel’s piece isn’t crappy. In fact, much of it is lovely. But he … gets a little carried away:

“Because poets have the highest faith that every word in a poem has value and implication and suggestion, a poem orients us in both our inner and outer existence.” Maybe I’m not a real poet (I’ve often entertained the possibility), but I have no such faith, high or otherwise. Sometimes, reading an individual poem, I’m able to gather enough conviction to start the generative chain of association that makes it so. I depend on poems to help me generate enough faith to find meaning, however provisionally. Most of the time, it doesn’t work, but I’d still like to be welcome in the church of poetry, even if I usually just stand at the back.

And yes, it does get pretty churchy in there. A little cultish sometimes, too. When [William] Logan writes, “We wouldn’t give people jobs as chemists or nuclear physicists without a decade of training, or make them pilots before they’d spent countless hours in a flight simulator,” I can’t help wondering whether he’s missed the obvious distinction or just become a little over-literal in his profession of the creed: poetry is a matter of life or death. After all, as William Carlos Williams wrote (and as poets love to quote) “men die miserably every day / for lack / or what is found there.” Even Williams, though, didn’t suggest that they literally die for lack of poetry (he was, after all, well acquainted with the actual causes of death).