June 20, 2009
Fitter, happier, more productive
Following up on my post of last week that started with a quote from Matthew B. Crawford’s article “The Case for Working With Your Hands,” here is a review from the New Yorker of of Crawford’s book Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work, from which the article was excerpted.
Crawford’s brief for skilled manual labor is rooted in firsthand experience: repairing motorcycles fills him with a “sense of agency and competence.” But what would he say to the accountants in de Botton’s book, who express “earnest pride in their mastery of a labyrinthine craft”? Crawford decries our “ignorance of the world of artifacts,” and mourns “the disappearance of tools from our common education.” But he never quite gets around to explaining what counts as a tool, and why.
—Kelefa Sanneh, “Out of the Office: Fast bikes, slow food, and the workplace wars,” New Yorker, June 22, 2009
(Also via Dervala.)
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