DIRS.INFO The most relevant business & tech news

☆ Will A.I. Kill Meaningless Jobs?
▼ + stars: | 2024-08-03 | by ( Emma Goldberg | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

This is what it must have felt like to be a guest showing up for a party at Jay Gatsby’s house, Mr. Wang thought. He hopped from one software engineering role to another, toiling on some projects that he felt were meaningless. At Google, he worked for 15 months on an initiative that higher-ups decided to keep pursuing even though they knew it would never launch. He then spent more than a year at Facebook on a product whose primary customer at one point described it to the engineers as unhelpful. During the pandemic, tens of thousands of people joined the subreddit page r/antiwork to share quips about rejecting drudge work and, in most cases, all work.

Persons: Brad Wang, Jay Gatsby’s, Wang, drudge, ”, Herman Melville’s “, Scrivener, “ Organizations: Google, Facebook, “

☆ James McBride Doesn’t Read Reviews. Here’s Why.
▼ + stars: | 2023-08-24 | by ( Elisabeth Egan | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

Between these poles are all forms of social media; and, on a different continent but still the same planet, reviews printed in the font you’re reading now. When it comes to all of the above, James McBride takes a page from Herman Melville’s short story “Bartleby, the Scrivener.” Like the titular clerk, McBride prefers not to — in his case, read reviews. I’m grateful that people read the work. If you’re writing about humans, you’ve got to be around humans. The big secret to writing good books is to stay around people, and not stay around what they write on the internet.”

Persons: James McBride, Herman Melville’s, Scrivener, McBride, “ I’m, ”, Danez Smith, ” McBride, “, I’m, I’ve, —, you’ve Locations: Columbia

☆ Nobody Ever Read American Literature Like This Guy Did
▼ + stars: | 2023-07-29 | by ( A.O. Scott | More About A.O. Scott | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

It has been a hundred years since D.H. Lawrence published “Studies in Classic American Literature,” and in the annals of literary criticism the book may still claim the widest discrepancy between title and content. Not with respect to subject matter: As advertised, this compact volume consists of essays on canonical American authors of the 18th and 19th centuries — a familiar gathering of dead white men. Some (Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman) are still household names more than a century later, while others (Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, Richard Henry Dana Jr.) have faded into relative obscurity. My point is that nobody ever read them like Lawrence did — as madly, as wildly or as insightfully. “Studies in Classic American Literature” is as dull a phrase as any committee of professors could devise.

Persons: Lawrence, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, Hector St, John de Crèvecoeur, Richard Henry Dana Jr, Melville’s, Moby, Dick, ”, Farmer ”, — Organizations: “

Search resuls for: "Melville’s"

3 mentions found