BlackRock will buy two ports after Trump's interest in taking back control of the key shipping route.

Trump is making a high-stakes bet that could either reap major political dividends, or seriously undercut his second term.

After leaving the chamber, Green told reporters, “I’ll accept the punishment. It’s worth it to let people know that there’s some of us who are going to stand up against this president’s desire to cut Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security."

As the outbreak in West Texas reached 159 confirmed cases Tuesday, Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo and Houston Mayor John Whitmire both encouraged residents to get the measles vaccine.

This post was written by Alison Green and published on Ask a Manager.

I’m getting a flood of questions about resumes, so here are seven resume questions and answers.

1. Can my resume just list my last two jobs and leave the earlier ones off?

The company I’m currently employed by is closing. It was sudden and, while not completely unexpected, it’s still a blow. I’m dusting off ye olde resume, but I’m torn on what to leave in and what to leave out.

The issue is my age. I was at the employer before this one for 25 years, until they, too, closed. I was lucky with CurrentJob because the owner is my age, and the ageism that is rampant, (yes, yes it is) wasn’t an issue. Now, however, I’m thinking of only putting CurrentJob and OldJob (a total of 30 years work history) on my resume and leaving off earlier jobs that really don’t pertain to the type of work I’m looking for and won’t boot me out of the hiring process just by virtue of showing my age. Is this okay to do? I already tint my hair (something my mom told me to do after her experiences in job hunting after a certain age) and I just don’t want to be discounted because I’m not young.

It is absolutely okay to only list the last two jobs. In general, you really only need your resume to go back 15 or so years. In your case, you’ll need it to go back further than that since you were at the previous job for so long, but you definitely don’t need to include anything before that.

Keep in mind that a resume is a marketing document, not a comprehensive account of everything you’ve ever done. You’re allowed to pick and choose what to include based on what makes you the strongest candidate for the job you’re applying for. In many/most cases, jobs from 20+ years ago really won’t strengthen your candidacy and so it makes sense to leave them off. (Occasionally there’s an exception to this, like if an older job was extraordinarily impressive or it shows a long-running interest in a field that your more recent job history doesn’t show — but most of the time it makes sense to leave older jobs off.)

Related:
how far back should your resume go?

2. Can I combine two positions on my resume?

Can I combine two positions on my resume? I did the same job on two different teams within the same organization for a year each; the first was a fixed-term contract for maternity cover, the second was a toxic team, where I started in March 2020 and I couldn’t stay longer for my own physical and mental health. Since leaving that team, I’ve been in my current (very similar) role in the same industry for four years. My current manager understood why I was leaving the old team when she hired me, as my old boss had a reputation in our industry.

Now I’m looking for a similar role in a different sector, and I’m not sure how to best present my experience. I know that job-hopping is generally frowned upon, so would it be acceptable to lump the two previous roles together as “two years working as an X at Y” or should I keep them separate? I’ve not got much job history before this as I graduated in 2018.

Since the jobs were both at the same organization, it doesn’t really raise job-hopping concerns; job-hopping is about moving from company to company, not moving around within a company. But regardless, you can list it this way:

Groats Academy, July 2019 – November 2020
Oatmeal Stirrer, July 2019 – February 2020
Oatmeal Taster, February 2020 – November 2020
* achievement
* achievement
* achievement

On the other hand, if your title was the same in both positions, then you can just list the title once, without separating it out like that. But if the two titles were different, you should list them both (so that the info your company verifies will match up with what you listed).

3. Can I combine two positions on my resume, part 2

I’m updating my resume and wondering if I need to separate duties for two roles that were similar — think payroll senior specialist and payroll manager. If I was in each role approximately the same amount of time, can I just combine the two as far as the accomplishment bullets? I am including both roles with their dates, so this isn’t to present things as if I was the manager the whole time.

Also, as far as measurable accomplishments, will it look strange/bad if I have more as a specialist (I do) than I did as the manager?

You can combine them the exact same way as shown in #2 above — where you list both titles and the dates you held them, but combine accomplishments for both. (Note this only makes sense to do when the roles are similar; you wouldn’t do it if the work of each was very different.)

Your second question is moot if you’re combining them, but if they were separated out: it wouldn’t look bad if you had more accomplishments as a specialist than as a manager unless you a manager for much longer than you were a specialist. In that case, I might advise balancing them out a little more (meaning cutting some of the specialist accomplishments unless they’re all so impressive that none should be sacrificed).

4. Education section of a resume when you don’t have a degree

I got my GED over 20 years ago, but due to a combination of money, undiagnosed ADHD, and chronic illness, I never completed even an associate’s degree, despite many attempts over the years. In the past, I just left education off my resume entirely, but I’m unsure how that would go nowadays, especially since I’ve been a paralegal for years at this point. How would you recommend handling it?

(Many people, including some in the legal industry, don’t realize that anyone can be a paralegal and there is not a required certification, although there are many programs that do so. I was merely fortunate enough to be taken under the wing by an amazing attorney who worked her way through law school as a paralegal herself.)

Just keep leaving the education section off your resume. If you don’t have anything to put there, it’s completely fine to just skip it.

If you think the coursework you did complete would strengthen your resume, it’s fine to include something like “coursework in taco analysis at the University of Dinner,” but you don’t have to include it if you don’t think it adds anything.

Related:
should you list coursework on your resume?

5. When you attended college but didn’t graduate

Due to struggles with mental health (to greatly simplify a complicated situation), I ended up withdrawing from my state university in 2018 after attending for four years. I did not receive a diploma, and I was more than a semester away from doing so. I did spend a couple years at community college after this, but again, did not receive any degree. When applying for my current job, I was still attending community college, and had my state university on my resume (dates attended listed, no mention of graduation).

Now I’m more at peace with the thought that I may never go back to college, but I’m wondering how to address it on my resume. In an interview or cover letter, I know I could talk about how I’ve learned my own strengths and weaknesses, as well as knowledge and experience you can only achieve from higher education! But because I will be essentially stuck in the service industry for the foreseeable future, I don’t know if it matters to put university on a resume when I’m applying. It also feels a little icky because one might assume that because I attended for four years, I obtained my degree. So should I leave in my “education”? Should I drop the dates and just say “no degree acquired”?

See the answer above! You don’t need to include it at all if you don’t think it strengths your candidacy, but it’s also fine to have an Education section that says something like:

University of Dinner, 2014-2018

or

University of Dinner, 2014-2018 (coursework only)

or

University of Dinner (coursework only)

or

University of Dinner, 2014-2018
Tacotown Community College, 2019-2020

You’re not implying you have a degree if you don’t specifically call out that you don’t, but it’s also fine to clarify like in the second and third examples above.

It’s also fine to remove the years; in general, the further away you are from when you attended, the more you should just leave them off entirely. At some point the years aren’t relevant anymore, and at some point you’re also getting closer to age discrimination considerations. You don’t have to include the years.

6. What dates to list for a job when I left for a month but then came back

In December, I left Employer 1 to go to Employer 2, but due to restructuring was terminated from Employer 2 in January. Employer 1 never backfilled my role and I accepted their offer to basically pick up where I left off, beginning in February.

As I started again at Employer 1 in February and did not work there at all in January, I don’t think it is accurate for my resume in future job searches to say “Employer 1 – Beginning date—current,” as that would imply there was no break in service and that I worked there in February. I don’t plan to include Employer 2 on my resume, given my short tenure and lack of real accomplishments while there. How should my future resumes account for the break in service at Employer 1 in February without getting unwieldy or confusing?

Like this:

Employer 1
June 2023 – January 2025, February 2025 – present

7. Listing a less skilled, less relevant current job on a resume

I was laid off from my job over a year ago. While I’m still applying for jobs in my field, I was recently lucky enough to get set up with a long-term temp job … in an unskilled position with absolutely no relevance to my experience or industry (think experienced journalist turned grocery store cashier). How do I list this on my resume? I don’t want it to be the first thing recruiters see, but I obviously want to show that I’m taking initiative and paying my bills even if the job market is slow.

One option is to divide your Experience section into Relevant Experience and Other Experience, and list the irrelevant stuff under the latter.

But you also don’t need to include it at all if you don’t think it strengthens your candidacy for a particular job.

This post was written by Alison Green and published on Ask a Manager.

It’s five answers to five questions. Here we go…

1. My coworker keeps a wall of embarrassing photos of former coworkers

I started a new job at a start-up a few months ago and one of my coworkers, who I work closely with, has a wall next to his desk where he has pinned up half a dozen enlarged photos of everyone who has left the company recently. He finds an old school photo, or them in a costume, or with braces, whatever he thinks is funny. As soon as someone puts in their two weeks, their photo goes up on the wall.

He recently got told by HR to take the photos down after someone complained. Everyone in my corner of the office is vocally on his side and against the reporter. They all seem to agree that the photos are all in good fun and shouldn’t be something to get upset about. They joke about making everyone take down family photos to show the reporter how silly they are.

I have had a neutral opinion of the photo wall so far, but now I am on the side of the reporter. If I were to resign, I definitely would not like the idea of my photo on that wall. I also don’t want to say anything since the team is very chummy and I’m trying to fit in as the newbie. What should I do? Are the photos appropriate or not?

That’s a really odd thing for him to do, and HR was right to tell him to stop. It wouldn’t be a big deal if he did it once or twice as a good-natured joke with resigning employees who he was friends with, but it’s his system that he does every time someone leaves? He’s in the wrong to make a big deal of being told to stop, and the coworkers who are outraged that he was told to stop are being ridiculous too. If it’s “all in good fun,” then they’d surely want to be sensitive to anyone who doesn’t want to be included, right? The fact that they’re not says that it’s not really “in good fun” at all.

But as for what you should do as a new person, it’s okay to just stay out of it! If someone directly asks what you think, you can shrug and say, “Eh, if someone was upset by it, it doesn’t seem that weird that the company told him to stop.”

2. Manager says staff absences are too high

I work at a company where each employee receives PTO that can be used for sick or personal reasons. PTO requires a doctor’s note or written explanation for absences longer than three consecutive days. Each person also has a separate bank of vacation time. The amount of paid time off we are given is typical for our industry. Most people use all or most of their vacation time and some of their PTO as needed. While various employees have had medical issues and/or leaves of absences over the years, I don’t think anyone abuses the system. It doesn’t seem like anyone has excessive absences.

One of my managers, Dan, disagrees. He has made several comments in the past year to indicate that employee absences are too high (within the allotted time, he admits, but still too high in his opinion). He called a meeting this week specifically to discuss attendance.

Dan feels absences are to blame for a big issue we’re having, and he asked us to brainstorm ways to increase attendance without spending any money (insert eye roll). I disagree. The issue we’re having has about 10 causes — half could be solved by management with moderate effort (like reworking the production schedule), and half are out of our control (such as industry-wide supply issues). Attendance may be a minor cause but not enough to warrant the time and effort we are now dedicating to “solve” it. It feels like scapegoating, putting the blame on us rather than attempting to address the other causes. However, Dan is senior management and well-liked by the CEO/owner, so no one ever challenges him. No one spoke up in this meeting, although several colleagues later told me they were shocked and upset.

Even if attendance was the sole cause of the issue, my opinion is that if people are not exceeding their allotted PTO and vacation time, then they are within their right to take the time given to them. Am I wrong?

If I’m correct, then do you have any suggestions on how to tell him that? Dan does not take well to anyone questioning his opinion, so it would need to be carefully worded. We are meeting again soon to hear what (free!) ideas we’ve come up with.

You are correct. If the company offers paid time off, it’s part of people’s compensation and they should take it, and managers should expect they will take it.

Dan sounds like A Problem, so I’m not sure there will be any benefit to trying to set him straight (as opposed to just letting him continue to wring his hands over the dreadful problem of people using their time off). But if you want to, you could try saying, “The amount of time off in our benefits package is consistent with industry norms and people obviously need time off in order not to burn out, so if you think there’s a coverage issue, we should look at increasing staffing.” After delivering this bad news to him, you could then immediately pivot to other solutions to whatever he’s reacting to, like changes to the production schedule and planning differently for supply issues.

If he starts actively interfering with people’s ability to use their time off or making people feel they’ll be penalized if they do, that’s time to bring in HR, framing it as “not allowing people to use their promised benefits.”

3. When I ask my team for updates, should I share my own as the boss?

I am a new department head and would like to introduce a weekly check-in during our department meeting to ask everyone what they are currently working on and what they accomplished in the past week. Should I include myself in this process and answer these questions as well for transparency reasons?

My work is much more abstract than that of my team members, and many of my tasks are repetitive (meetings, etc.). My progress is often harder to define because it largely depends on the progress of my team.

Yes. It doesn’t need to be comprehensive, but you should have at least one thing to share each week about what you’re working on, ideally something that will be relevant to at least some of the team.

That said … do you have a good reason for introducing these meetings? You very well might! Sometimes it’s really important for reasons of communication or team cohesion that people regularly hear about what others on their team are working on. Sometimes, though, this kind of meeting isn’t a great use of people’s time and can feel like something that’s happening because the manager vaguely thought it sounded like a good idea but can’t tie it to any real impact on people’s work. I’m not assuming it won’t be useful in your case — it often is! — just urging you to make sure you know what results you’re looking for from it (and how you’ll know if it is or isn’t getting you those results), and can communicate that to your team too.

4. Measles and traveling for work conferences

I am attending a national conference next month and, given the current measles outbreak, I asked my doctor about the need for a booster since my last (and only) MMR vaccination was decades ago. My doctor did recommend that anyone with an immunization history like mine get a booster, which I did.

We have many other employees also attending national conferences, and I wonder how much we can say to encourage them to check with their own doctors about a booster during this outbreak. Would there be any liability for not mentioning it?

Your company can absolutely encourage people to make sure they’re up-to-date on vaccinations, and can cite the measles outbreak specifically and suggest people check with their doctors to see if they need any boosters and/or can share info like this from the CDC (or this piece from NPR, which does a better job of answering “do I need a booster as an adult?”). But there’s no legal liability to not mentioning it, either.

5. Start date coincides with a planned vacation

I’m hoping to get a job, and there’s a good chance I’m a lead candidate. They want overlap with the existing job holder and the new person, which sounds great to me. Problem is, that person’s last day is the Friday before my kid’s spring break, for which we already have paid plans for Sunday through Wednesday.

Do I bring this up at all now, or wait until I have an actual offer? And then, is “doing the right thing” offering to come back that Thursday, which would cause some childcare complications, or is it reasonable to ask for the whole week off? To clarify, this would be the first week of me in the role flying solo. There is a part-time assistant. This is in the middle of a big organization-wide project.

In my current job, I’ve had to work every single vacation I’ve ever taken, near or far. I’m trying to get away from that. This organization doesn’t have that culture, but this timing really stinks.

Wait until you have the offer. Then explain you have pre-paid vacation plans for that week and that normally you’d suggest starting after that but you know they’d like you to have overlap with the person leaving, and so you’re hoping you could simply take that week unpaid, so that it works out for everyone. I wouldn’t start by offering the Thursday return date; wait and see how they respond. If they seem worried about it, at that point you can offer the Thursday return date as a compromise.

It’s great to move away from working every vacation, but this this is a different set of circumstances — this is trying to work something out when you’re brand new to a job and wouldn’t normally expect to have a full week off right after starting.

Related:
everything you need to know about time off when you start a new job

President Donald Trump’s 25% taxes on imports from Mexico and Canada went into effect today, the latest salvo in a North American trade war that may have already stoked inflation and impeded growth. What do you think?

The post Trump’s 25% Tariffs On Canada, Mexico Take Effect appeared first on The Onion.

OTTAWA – Following America’s unprecedented levying of 25% tariffs on all Canadian products, Prime Minister Trudeau announced that Canada will apply retaliatory tariffs to specific US goods, including any Trump family businesses that haven’t already been driven into insolvency. “In response to these pointless American levies, our counter tariffs will target $30 billion in US […]

The post Trudeau announces counter tariffs on any Trump businesses that haven’t already gone bankrupt appeared first on The Beaverton.

THESSALONIKI, GREECE ― Following a short jet-lagged nap, 34-year-old stock broker Rowan Goulding of Oshawa effectuated a Google search for “best restaurants near me.” Within moments, he was forced to, with the help of Google Translate, decipher the set of characters corresponding to “reject all” and carefully memorize them for future reference.  This increased the […]

The post Well-travelled man can now reject digital cookies in over a dozen languages appeared first on The Beaverton.

“The Case of the Jade Cartel” was referenced briefly in Wicked Things, the series that Wobbly Head is meant to finally close the door on (copies are still available from your bookseller). I’m not 100% sure what happened during this undocumented mystery but we can tell from this page, for certain, that it involved a lot of jade. And Sonny.

The post Classique Carlotta ingenuity appeared first on Bad Machinery.

This post was written by Alison Green and published on Ask a Manager.

A reader writes:

I am to be married next year and decided to send out save-the-dates early. I really like my coworkers and my boss and wanted to invite them to the wedding. When my boss received my save-the-date, they swung by my desk to congratulate me and we got to chit chatting. The conversation led to my boss asking to see a photo of my fiancé as they had never met before. I showed them a photo from my engagement and —

It was like the smile literally slid off their face. I asked if they were okay, and all they said was: “Is this who you are marrying?” I was really confused and had a very bad feeling.

I went home that night and asked my fiancé why on earth this person would react to his face in such a manner. My fiancé claimed to not remember them, but clearly he recognized them. After a huge argument, he revealed that he was a prankster in school and may have sometimes involved them in “pranks.”

I’m not stupid, I can read between the lines. “Pranks” are only funny when everyone is laughing and based on my boss’s reaction, it was clear they never found these pranks funny. We had another huge blow-up and only when I threatened to walk out did he reveal the full extent of these pranks, all the while telling me “he wasn’t this person anymore,” etc. etc.

The pranks were horrific, atrocious, and not funny. Once, on a dare, he and his friends took pictures of my boss in the gym locker rooms and plastered his naked pictures all over the school. This is just the least horrific thing him and his friends did. I’m disgusted that the man I love and want to spend the rest of my life with could ever be this person.

I returned to office the next day and requested to meet with my boss. My boss wasn’t in the office, and in fact took the next two days off. When they returned to work, they did not really engage with me or even look in my direction.

Now I am unsure what I should do. My engagement is almost over. There is no way I can marry my fiancé now that I know what he is capable of. I’m humiliated. I don’t have any friends who aren’t his friends too. My parents are telling me to move and find another job and marry my fiancé because he is rich and treats me well.

I’m unsure of how to navigate the situation at work, given that my boss really doesn’t want to engage with me. Any advice you can offer about the personal aspect of this situation will also be really appreciated.

First, full disclosure: something about this letter pings my “is this real?” alarm. Apologies to the letter-writer if it is; life is often stranger than fiction. But even if it’s not, it’s useful and interesting to talk about how to handle it if it turns out your boss has a history with someone important in your life. With that said…

A lot of people were very different as adolescents than they are as adults. A lot of people behaved badly toward others in their youth but learned from it, regret their behavior, and have resolved to be better people now. The troubling part to me is less that your fiancé was an asshole in school and more that he’s minimizing it now. If he originally didn’t come clean because he was ashamed, that’s one thing (although still not great). But if his position is that these were just youthful hijinks and no real harm was done and you shouldn’t be upset about it now, that’s about his character now.

And if the best argument your parents, who presumably know him, can come up with for staying with him is that he’s rich and treats you well … that’s really not good. (It’s also fairly insulting to you, as if that’s the pinnacle of what you could expect in marriage.)

You said you’re humiliated, and you shouldn’t be. You learned something about your fiancé and decided to act on it before binding yourself to him for life. There’s nothing humiliating about that. If anything, there’s admirable strength in knowing that sending out save-the-dates doesn’t obligate you to move forward with an enormous decision that you no longer believe is right for you, something not everyone has the wherewithal to do.)

As for the work stuff, you really have two options:

1. You can make a point of acting aggressively normal with your boss and just give them some time to get back to normal with you. Sometimes when you’re doing this it can help to go out of your way to find opportunities to have normal interactions, so that their most recent associations with you are normal work things rather than whatever was going through their mind when they saw that photo. Also, if you do call off the engagement, make sure your office (and therefore your boss) knows.

2. You can address it head-on. Set a meeting with your boss or raise it next time you’re one-on-one and say, “I saw the reaction you had to seeing Bob’s photo and when I asked him about it, he was evasive but I learned enough to understand he was a jerk in school. What I learned through this conversation about his character now was enough for me to call off the engagement. I’m sorry if that photo was an unexpected shock. I’ve always valued my working relationship with you and I hope we can move forward without letting him affect that.”

I lean strongly toward #1. I have a high tolerance for awkward conversations if they’re in the interest of getting everyone on the same page, but there’s a very good chance that #2 won’t be necessary after some time goes by … although you could keep it in your back pocket to use if things aren’t back to normal a few weeks from now.

The US vice-president faces criticism after saying troops from "some random country" will not deter Russia.

Today's links

• There Were Always Enshittifiers: My March, 2025 Locus Magazine column.
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• Object permanence: 2015, 2020, 2024
• Upcoming appearances: Where to find me.
• Recent appearances: Where I've been.
• Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Colophon: All the rest.

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There Were Always Enshittifiers (permalink)

My latest Locus column is "There Were Always Enshittifiers." It's a history of personal computing and networked communications that traces the earliest days of the battle for computers as tools of liberation and computers as tools for surveillance, control and extraction:

https://locusmag.com/2025/03/commentary-cory-doctorow-there-were-always-enshittifiers/

The occasion for this piece is the publication of my latest Martin Hench novel, a standalone book set in the early 1980s called "Picks and Shovels":

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels

The MacGuffin of Picks and Shovels is a "weird PC" company called Fidelity Computing, owned by a Mormon bishop, a Catholic priest, and an orthodox rabbi. It sounds like the setup for a joke, but the punchline is deadly serious: Fidelity Computing is a pyramid selling cult that preys on the trust and fellowship of faith groups to sell the dreadful Fidelity 3000 PC and its ghastly peripherals.

You see, Fidelity's products are booby-trapped. It's not merely that they ship with programs whose data-files can't be read by apps on any other system – that's just table stakes. Fidelity's got a whole bag of tricks up its sleeve – for example, it deliberately damages a specific sector on every floppy disk it ships. The drivers for its floppy drive initialize any read or write operation by checking to see if that sector can be read. If it can, the computer refuses to recognize the disk. This lets the Reverend Sirs (as Fidelity's owners style themselves) run a racket where they sell these deliberately damaged floppies at a 500% markup, because regular floppies won't work on the systems they lure their parishioners into buying.

Or take the Fidelity printer: it's just a rebadged Oki­data ML-80, the workhorse tractor feed printer that led the market for years. But before Fidelity ships this printer to its customers, they fit it with new tractor feed sprockets whose pins are slightly more widely spaced than the standard 0.5" holes on the paper you can buy in any stationery store. That way, Fidelity can force its customers to buy the custom paper that they exclusively peddle – again, at a massive markup.

Needless to say, printing with these wider sprocket holes causes frequent jams and puts a serious strain on the printer's motors, causing them to burn out at a high rate. That's great news – for Fidelity Computing. It means they get to sell you more overpriced paper so you can reprint the jobs ruined by jams, and they can also sell you their high-priced, exclusive repair services when your printer's motors quit.

Perhaps you're thinking, "OK, but I can just buy a normal Okidata printer and use regular, cheap paper, right?" Sorry, the Reverend Sirs are way ahead of you: they've reversed the pinouts on their printers' serial ports, and a normal printer won't be able to talk to your Fidelity 3000.

If all of this sounds familiar, it's because these are the paleolithic ancestors of today's high-tech lock-in scams, from HP's $10,000/gallon ink to Apple and Google's mobile app stores, which cream a 30% commission off of every dollar collected by an app maker. What's more, these ancient, weird misfeatures have their origins in the true history of computing, which was obsessed with making the elusive, copy-proof floppy disk.

This Quixotic enterprise got started in earnest with Bill Gates' notorious 1976 "open letter to hobbyists" in which the young Gates furiously scolds the community of early computer hackers for its scientific ethic of publishing, sharing and improving the code that they all wrote:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Open_Letter_to_Hobbyists

Gates had recently cloned the BASIC programming language for the popular Altair computer. For Gates, his act of copying was part of the legitimate progress of technology, while the copying of his colleagues, who duplicated Gates' Altair BASIC, was a shameless act of piracy, destined to destroy the nascent computing industry:

As the majority of hobbyists must be aware, most of you steal your software. Hardware must be paid for, but software is something to share. Who cares if the people who worked on it get paid?

Needless to say, Gates didn't offer a royalty to John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz, the programmers who'd invented BASIC at Dartmouth College in 1963. For Gates – and his intellectual progeny – the formula was simple: "When I copy you, that's progress. When you copy me, that's piracy." Every pirate wants to be an admiral.

For would-be ex-pirate admirals, Gates's ideology was seductive. There was just one fly in the ointment: computers operate by copying. The only way a computer can run a program is to copy it into memory – just as the only way your phone can stream a video is to download it to its RAM ("streaming" is a consensus hallucination – every stream is a download, and it has to be, because the internet is a data-transmission network, not a cunning system of tubes and mirrors that can make a picture appear on your screen without transmitting the file that contains that image).

Gripped by this enshittificatory impulse, the computer industry threw itself headfirst into the project of creating copy-proof data, a project about as practical as making water that's not wet. That weird gimmick where Fidelity floppy disks were deliberately damaged at the factory so the OS could distinguish between its expensive disks and the generic ones you bought at the office supply place? It's a lightly fictionalized version of the copy-protection system deployed by Visicalc, a move that was later publicly repudiated by Visicalc co-founder Dan Bricklin, who lamented that it confounded his efforts to preserve his software on modern systems and recover the millions of data-files that Visicalc users created:

http://www.bricklin.com/robfuture.htm

The copy-protection industry ran on equal parts secrecy and overblown sales claims about its products' efficacy. As a result, much of the story of this doomed effort is lost to history. But back in 2017, a redditor called Vadermeer unearthed a key trove of documents from this era, in a Goodwill Outlet store in Seattle:

https://www.reddit.com/r/VintageApple/comments/5vjsow/found_internal_apple_memos_about_copy_protection/

Vaderrmeer's find was a Apple Computer binder from 1979, documenting the company's doomed "Software Security from Apple's Friends and Enemies" (SSAFE) project, an effort to make a copy-proof floppy:

https://archive.org/details/AppleSSAFEProject

The SSAFE files are an incredible read. They consist of Apple's best engineers beavering away for days, cooking up a new copy-proof floppy, which they would then hand over to Apple co-founder and legendary hardware wizard Steve Wozniak. Wozniak would then promptly destroy the copy-protection system, usually in a matter of minutes or hours. Wozniak, of course, got the seed capital for Apple by defeating AT&T's security measures, building a "blue box" that let its user make toll-free calls and peddling it around the dorms at Berkeley:

https://512pixels.net/2018/03/woz-blue-box/

Woz has stated that without blue boxes, there would never have been an Apple. Today, Apple leads the charge to restrict how you use your devices, confining you to using its official app store so it can skim a 30% vig off every dollar you spend, and corralling you into using its expensive repair depots, who love to declare your device dead and force you to buy a new one. Every pirate wants to be an admiral!

https://www.vice.com/en/article/tim-cook-to-investors-people-bought-fewer-new-iphones-because-they-repaired-their-old-ones/

Revisiting the early PC years for Picks and Shovels isn't just an excuse to bust out some PC nostalgiacore set-dressing. Picks and Shovels isn't just a face-paced crime thriller: it's a reflection on the enshittificatory impulses that were present at the birth of the modern tech industry.

But there is a nostalgic streak in Picks and Shovels, of course, represented by the other weird PC company in the tale. Computing Freedom is a scrappy PC startup founded by three women who came up as sales managers for Fidelity, before their pangs of conscience caused them to repent of their sins in luring their co-religionists into the Reverend Sirs' trap.

These women – an orthodox lesbian whose family disowned her, a nun who left her order after discovering the liberation theology movement, and a Mormon woman who has quit the church over its opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment – have set about the wozniackian project of reverse-engineering every piece of Fidelity hardware and software, to make compatible products that set Fidelity's caged victims free.

They're making floppies that work with Fidelity drives, and drives that work with Fidelity's floppies. Printers that work with Fidelity computers, and adapters so Fidelity printers will work with other PCs (as well as resprocketing kits to retrofit those printers for standard paper). They're making file converters that allow Fidelity owners to read their data in Visicalc or Lotus 1-2-3, and vice-versa.

In other words, they're engaged in "adversarial interoperability" – hacking their own fire-exits into the burning building that Fidelity has locked its customers inside of:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/adversarial-interoperability

This was normal, back then! There were so many cool, interoperable products and services around then, from the Bell and Howell "Black Apple" clones:

https://forum.vcfed.org/index.php?threads%2Fbell-howell-apple-ii.64651%2F

to the amazing copy-protection cracking disks that traveled from hand to hand, so the people who shelled out for expensive software delivered on fragile floppies could make backups against the inevitable day that the disks stopped working:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bit_nibbler

Those were wild times, when engineers pitted their wits against one another in the spirit of Steve Wozniack and SSAFE. That era came to a close – but not because someone finally figured out how to make data that you couldn't copy. Rather, it ended because an unholy coalition of entertainment and tech industry lobbyists convinced Congress to pass the Digital Millennium Copyright Act in 1998, which made it a felony to "bypass an access control":

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/07/section-1201-dmca-cannot-pass-constitutional-scrutiny

That's right: at the first hint of competition, the self-described libertarians who insisted that computers would make governments obsolete went running to the government, demanding a state-backed monopoly that would put their rivals in prison for daring to interfere with their business model. Plus ça change: today, their intellectual descendants are demanding that the US government bail out their "anti-state," "independent" cryptocurrency:

https://www.citationneeded.news/issue-78/

In truth, the politics of tech has always contained a faction of "anti-government" millionaires and billionaires who – more than anything – wanted to wield the power of the state, not abolish it. This was true in the mainframe days, when companies like IBM made billions on cushy defense contracts, and it's true today, when the self-described "Technoking" of Tesla has inserted himself into government in order to steer tens of billions' worth of no-bid contracts to his Beltway Bandit companies:

https://www.reuters.com/world/us/lawmakers-question-musk-influence-over-verizon-faa-contract-2025-02-28/

The American state has always had a cozy relationship with its tech sector, seeing it as a way to project American soft power into every corner of the globe. But Big Tech isn't the only – or the most important – US tech export. Far more important is the invisible web of IP laws that ban reverse-engineering, modding, independent repair, and other activities that defend American tech exports from competitors in its trading partners.

Countries that trade with the US were arm-twisted into enacting laws like the DMCA as a condition of free trade with the USA. These laws were wildly unpopular, and had to be crammed through other countries' legislatures:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/15/radical-extremists/#sex-pest

That's why Europeans who are appalled by Musk's Nazi salute have to confine their protests to being loudly angry at him, selling off their Teslas, and shining lights on Tesla factories:

https://www.malaymail.com/news/money/2025/01/24/heil-tesla-activists-protest-with-light-projection-on-germany-plant-after-musks-nazi-salute-video/164398

Musk is so attention-hungry that all this is as apt to please him as anger him. You know what would really hurt Musk? Jailbreaking every Tesla in Europe so that all its subscription features – which represent the highest-margin line-item on Tesla's balance-sheet – could be unlocked by any local mechanic for €25. That would really kick Musk in the dongle.

The only problem is that in 2001, the US Trade Rep got the EU to pass the EU Copyright Directive, whose Article 6 bans that kind of reverse-engineering. The European Parliament passed that law because doing so guaranteed tariff-free access for EU goods exported to US markets.

Enter Trump, promising a 25% tariff on European exports.

The EU could retaliate here by imposing tit-for-tat tariffs on US exports to the EU, which would make everything Europeans buy from America 25% more expensive. This is a very weird way to punish the USA.

On the other hand, now that Trump has announced that the terms of US free trade deals are optional (for the US, at least), there's no reason not to delete Article 6 of the EUCD, and all the other laws that prevent European companies from jailbreaking iPhones and making their own App Stores (minus Apple's 30% commission), as well as ad-blockers for Facebook and Instagram's apps (which would zero out EU revenue for Meta), and, of course, jailbreaking tools for Xboxes, Teslas, and every make and model of every American car, so European companies could offer service, parts, apps, and add-ons for them.

When Jeff Bezos launched Amazon, his war-cry was "your margin is my opportunity." US tech companies have built up insane margins based on the IP provisions required in the free trade treaties it signed with the rest of the world.

It's time to delete those IP provisions and throw open domestic competition that attacks the margins that created the fortunes of oligarchs who sat behind Trump on the inauguration dais. It's time to bring back the indomitable hacker spirit that the Bill Gateses of the world have been trying to extinguish since the days of the "open letter to hobbyists." The tech sector built a 10 foot high wall around its business, then the US government convinced the rest of the world to ban four-metre ladders. Lift the ban, unleash the ladders, free the world!

In the same way that futuristic sf is really about the present, Picks and Shovels, an sf novel set in the 1980s, is really about this moment.

I'm on tour with the book now – if you're reading this today (Mar 4) and you're in DC, come see me tonight with Matt Stoller at 6:30PM at the Cleveland Park Library:

https://www.loyaltybookstores.com/picksnshovels

And if you're in Richmond, VA, come down to Fountain Bookshop and catch me with Lee Vinsel tomorrow (Mar 5) at 7:30PM:

https://fountainbookstore.com/events/1795820250305

---

Hey look at this (permalink)

• How far I'll go to make an RSS feed of your website https://tech.chrishardie.com/2025/rss-feed-of-your-website/

• Are We Headed into Recession? https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/monopoly-round-up-are-we-headed-into

• Worker-to-Worker Organizing Can Save the Labor Movement https://www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/worker-to-worker-organizing-can-save

---

Object permanence (permalink)

#10yrsago The book thieves of 1990s London https://thedabbler.co.uk/2015/03/the-book-theives-of-london/

#5yrsago African Whatsapp modders are outcompeting Facebook https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/05/warner-chappell-copyfraud/#gbwhatsapp

#5yrsago Copyright experts' panel on fair use removed from Youtube https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/05/warner-chappell-copyfraud/#kafkatube

#5yrsago Bookstores, libraries, human thriving and mental health https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/05/warner-chappell-copyfraud/#booksbooksbooks

#5yrsago Keyless car fobs can be defeated with a cheap RFID cloner https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/05/warner-chappell-copyfraud/#toy-yoda

#5yrsago Right to Repair is the right to resilience https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/05/warner-chappell-copyfraud/#righttoresilience

#5yrsago Decentralizing the web is a human problem https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/05/warner-chappell-copyfraud/#dweb

#5yrsago RIP, Jim Tyre https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/05/warner-chappell-copyfraud/#jimtyre

#5yrsago Warner Chappel discoved a new form of copyright fuckery so dense it blew a wormhole into another dimension https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/05/warner-chappell-copyfraud/#warnerchappell

#1yrago The real problem with anonymity https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/04/greater-corporate-fuckward-theory/#counterintuit-ive
*

---

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

• DC: Picks and Shovels with Matt Stoller, Mar 4
  https://www.loyaltybookstores.com/picksnshovels

• Richmond, VA: Picks and Shovels with Lee Vinsel, Mar 5
  https://fountainbookstore.com/events/1795820250305

• Virtual: With Great Power Came No Responsibility: How Enshittification Conquered the 21st Century and How We Can Overthrow It (Indiana University), Mar 7
  https://events.iu.edu/mediaiub/event/1783095-with-great-power-came-no-responsibility-how-enshitti

• Austin: Reclaim, Reframe, Reimagine, Mar 7
  https://schedule.sxsw.com/2025/events/PP150498

• Austin: EFF-Austin Salon, Mar 7
  https://www.grotto101.com/effaustinsxsalon2025/

• Austin: Tensions in Creative Labor & Generative AI, Mar 8
  https://schedule.sxsw.com/2025/events/PP149418

• Austin: The Next 25: A Conversation About the Future of Open, Mar 8
  https://www.classy.org/event/creative-commons'-open-house-for-an-open-future/e663144

• Austin: Fediverse House, Mar 10
  https://about.flipboard.com/fediverse-house/

• Austin: Picks and Shovels at First Light Books, Mar 10
  https://thethirdplace.is/event/cory-doctorow-picks-shovels-1

• Burbank: Picks and Shovels with Wil Wheaton, Mar 13
  https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3257/Thu%2C_Mar_13th_6_pm%3A_Pick_%26_Shovel%3A_A_Martin_Hench_Novel_HB.html#/

• Europa Park: Cloudfest, Mar 17-20
  https://cloudfest.link/

• San Diego: Picks and Shovels at Mysterious Galaxy, Mar 24
  https://www.mystgalaxy.com/32425Doctorow

• Virtual: Picks and Shovels at Imagine! Belfast, Mar 24
  https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/cory-doctorow-in-conversation-with-alan-meban-tickets-1106421399189

• Chicago: Picks and Shovels with Peter Sagal, Apr 2
  https://exileinbookville.com/events/44853

• Chicago: ABA Techshow, Apr 3
  https://www.techshow.com/

• Bloomington: Picks and Shovels at Morgenstern, Apr 4
  https://morgensternbooks.com/event/2025-04-04/author-event-cory-doctorow

• Pittsburgh: PyCon, May 16
  https://us.pycon.org/2025/schedule/

• PDX: Teardown 2025, Jun 20-22
  https://www.crowdsupply.com/teardown/portland-2025

• PDX: Picks and Shovels at Barnes and Noble, Jun 20
  https://stores.barnesandnoble.com/event/9780062183697-0

• New Orleans: DeepSouthCon63, Oct 10-12, 2025
  http://www.contraflowscifi.org/

---

Recent appearances (permalink)

• Democracy Now
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tKV5GB6dN3o

• The Culture Show
  https://www.wgbh.org/podcasts/the-culture-show/february-20-2025-chelsea-handler-cory-doctorow-and-the-red-bull-heavy-metal-contest-at-boston-city-hall

• Picks and Shovels with Yanis Varoufakis and David Moscrop (Jacobin)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xkIDep7Z4LM

---

Latest books (permalink)

• • Picks and Shovels: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels).
• The Bezzle: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (the-bezzle.org). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3062/Available_Feb_20th%3A_The_Bezzle_HB.html#/).

• "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3007/Pre-Order_Signed_Copies%3A_The_Lost_Cause_HB.html#/)

• "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245).

• "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com. Signed copies at Dark Delicacies (US): and Forbidden Planet (UK): https://forbiddenplanet.com/385004-red-team-blues-signed-edition-hardcover/.

• "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com

• "Attack Surface": The third Little Brother novel, a standalone technothriller for adults. The Washington Post called it "a political cyberthriller, vigorous, bold and savvy about the limits of revolution and resistance." Order signed, personalized copies from Dark Delicacies https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1840/Available_Now%3A_Attack_Surface.html

• "How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism": an anti-monopoly pamphlet analyzing the true harms of surveillance capitalism and proposing a solution. https://onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-8135e6744d59?sk=f6cd10e54e20a07d4c6d0f3ac011af6b) (signed copies: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2024/Available_Now%3A__How_to_Destroy_Surveillance_Capitalism.html)

• "Little Brother/Homeland": A reissue omnibus edition with a new introduction by Edward Snowden: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250774583; personalized/signed copies here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1750/July%3A__Little_Brother_%26_Homeland.html

• "Poesy the Monster Slayer" a picture book about monsters, bedtime, gender, and kicking ass. Order here: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781626723627. Get a personalized, signed copy here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2682/Corey_Doctorow%3A_Poesy_the_Monster_Slayer_HB.html#/.

---

Upcoming books (permalink)

• Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025
  https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/

• Unauthorized Bread: a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2026

• Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026

• The Memex Method, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2026

---

Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

• Enshittification: a nonfiction book about platform decay for Farrar, Straus, Giroux. Status: second pass edit underway (readaloud)

• A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

• Picks and Shovels, a Martin Hench noir thriller about the heroic era of the PC. FORTHCOMING TOR BOOKS FEB 2025

Latest podcast: With Great Power Came No Responsibility: How Enshittification Conquered the 21st Century and How We Can Overthrow It https://craphound.com/news/2025/02/26/with-great-power-came-no-responsibility-how-enshittification-conquered-the-21st-century-and-how-we-can-overthrow-it/

---

This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net.

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution.

---

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"When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla

ISSN: 3066-764X

Neither of the Legislature’s voucher bills require private schools to accept certain students, which some warn could block the neediest children from access.

Canada has imposed its own retaliatory tariffs, which will remain in place until the US reverses course.

In brief: Houston may see some short-lived thunderstorms this morning ahead of a front. But the real weather story is likely to be gusty, very dry winds that will increase the potential for wildfires this afternoon and evening. Please take care with open fires. After that we have a mostly spring-like, mostly pleasant week ahead of us.

Red Flag warning

Nearly all of the metro area, save for areas east of Baytown, are under what is known as a “Red Flag” warning today after 10 am CT. This indicates the potential for fire danger due to strong winds and very low humidity. By late morning we will see westerly winds sustained to about 25 mph, and gusts up to 40 mph or potentially higher along with a front that is moving in. During this time you should avoid open flames and take care with cigarettes. Winds should begin to slacken this evening.

Tuesday

Houston faces the potential for one, or possibly two, thin lines of storms this morning ahead of a cool front. Although these storms are unlikely to be severe within the metro area of Houston, we cannot rule out some briefly strong thunderstorms. (The odds of severe weather are greater to the northeast of Houston, in locations such as Livingston). The last of these storms should clear the area by or before noon, with most locations picking up a few tenths of an inch of rain. Temperatures ahead of the front will be in the 70s for the most part with plenty of humidity. However, this humidity will sharply drop after the front, hence the Red Flag warning.

Rodeo forecast

The Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo kicks into high gear today, with the first concert of the season in Reba McEntire. This is a forecast you’ll want to pay attention to, because although you won’t have to worry about storms, winds will peak during the mid- to late- afternoon hours above 20 mph, with gusts of 40 mph or higher possible. These winds will have died down somewhat after the show is over. Temperatures will be about 70 degrees heading into the show, falling to the lower 60s by the end of the concert. Lows will fall into the low 50s by Wednesday morning in Houston.

Wednesday and Thursday

These will be a pair of sunny, calm days with highs in the mid- to upper-60s. Wednesday night into Thursday morning will be the coldest one of the week, with lows dropping into the mid-40s in Houston, and cooler for inland areas. Thursday night will be several degrees warmer as a southerly flow returns.

Friday

This day should bring cloudy skies back into the forecast, and highs approaching 80 degrees. There will be plenty of humidity as well. Lows on Friday night will fall to around 60 degrees.

Saturday and Sunday

A cold front will arrive on Saturday, perhaps during the morning hours. Most of our guidance indicates this front will be dry, but at this point we cannot rule out the possibility of a few showers and thunderstorms. Saturday afternoon likely will see clearing skies, highs in the 70s, and breezy northerly winds. Overnight lows drop into the 40s in Houston.

Sunday looks sunny and very pleasant, with highs in the mid- to upper 60s. Expect another night in the 40s, probably.

Next week

We’ll be fairly warm next week, with highs likely pushing into the lower 80s. It should be some of our warmest weather of the year so far. Overall rain chances look fairly slight for much of the week.

The fourth edition of Dallas Contemporary’s (DC) Dallas Art Book Fair will take place on March 15 and 16.

Launched in 2022 as a one-day event, last year the book fair expanded to a two-day program. The fair features vendors, artists, and publishers as well as a schedule of programming such as readings, workshops, and activities. Publishers included in this year’s fair are Alliance Française de Dallas, BLACKLIT, Can Can Press, Corsicana Artist & Writer Residency, Dallas Public Library, Deep Vellum, Impresos México/Miau Ediciones, K.Co Press, Southwest Review, and Spectacle Box & Pryor Press.

Additionally, DC has already begun satellite programming for the fair with partner organizations such as Soft Spots, a local Risograph press; Apprentice Creative Space, a nonprofit literary and creative hub; and Spacy, a microcinema inside Tyler Station. On Friday, March 7, from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m., DC will co-host a First Friday mixer with Apprentice Creative Space (919 Morrell Ave #110).

The Dallas Art Book Fair will take place on Saturday, March 15 and Sunday, March 16, from Noon to 5 p.m. Learn more about the free event and RSVP via the DC website.

The post Dallas Contemporary’s Art Book Fair Returns This Spring appeared first on Glasstire.

Upon entering Sicardi | Ayers | Bacino Gallery, you are in a small foyer which forms a lovely right-angled cubicle – here the title of the show appears on the wall faced by one of Miguel Ángel Ríos’ new landscapes that promises to merge the object that appears (in the foreground, in this case) with the vast expanse of territory. The painting is titled Double Vision and features two plant objects, green and yellow cacti, that are shadowing each other, one large, one small, divided by swathes of bright orange, red, yellow, green and brown color masses that stretch out like ambling mountain ranges — horizon lines that could also be the limbs of a giant outstretched body. The “stretching out” is a recurring metaphor and the dominant stylistic element of the canvasses.

Continuing into the exhibition, we encounter more of these wide-screen stretches of surreal color; they resemble an abstracted symbolic dreamscape, perhaps associated with an idea of Mexico or the Andean regions in Bolivia and Peru. Knowing the artist’s biography, one recalls his childhood in the Calchaquí Valleys, Ríos’ Catamarca homeland in Northern Argentinia, and his later migrations to New York City and Mexico. The notion of migration came to my mind when I stepped into the large gallery, where on three walls we see five medium-sized paintings (including one smaller horizontally stretched canvas) of the same psychedelic color palette, faced on one side by In the middle of nowhere, an enormous early painting from 1989. 

The large canvas is shockingly complex, filled with what might be a secret or forgotten language of hieroglyphs, Aztec pictographs and ideograms, and glyphs that resemble plants and snakes. These ideograms could also be made up by the artist who tricks our imagination by drawing these undecipherable bulbs that look like plants or mushrooms but could be tiny water towers. In the middle of the enormous canvas appears a skeleton figure — a portrait of the artist as a young man (with a hat on his head — another recurring aspect of Ríos’ depictions of himself as an older man now lost in the vastness of the mountains). As an autorretrato, In the middle of nowhere may well refer to his childhood, as a boy on empty Catamarca land (the next farm, he told me in conversation, was seven kilometers away), invoking a sense of isolation that compares fragile figures (sometimes even just outlines) against the vast immensity of the landscape. 

Ríos was born in 1943 in a mountainous region with a mix of valleys, some fertile and others very arid, as is characteristic of the Andes. The deserts, salt flats, volcanoes, and diverse landscapes that include gorges and high dunes make it a region with a very rugged relief and varied terrain. The figure recalls such an arid land and his time as a young autodidact, given the ominous name Miguel Ángel by his mother. He later studied art at the Escuela de Bellas Artes in Buenos Aires before moving to New York in the 1970s to escape the military dictatorship in Argentina. The painting evokes a haunting spinal fragility to me. I also see a figure in a Procrustean dilemma, or a dancer that rehearses to move to the rhythm of the pointed arrows of the snake-like glyphs, inside an imaginary spirit map — one that foreshadows the later hand-made maps Ríos created in the 1990s. In that phase of his career, he began creating a series of maps, which he carefully folded and pleated by hand. Marking the 500th anniversary of the so-called discovery of the Americas, Ríos’ maps indicate the longue durée (a term coined by the French historian Fernand Braudel) of power and colonial experience. They also pay homage to traditional Indigenous arts in the Americas (including the Andean quipu).

The dancer also recurs in some of the video works that choreograph the violence of a struggle, the games of power (e.g. in Aqui [2007], with the ballet of trompos; or in Crudo [2008] with a white-suited tap dancer swinging two ropes with meat on each end — suddenly barking dogs enter the frame one by one until the dancer is surrounded).

Some of the paintings imply the empty vastness of undulating mountain landscapes devoid of humans, but the formal choice of garish, psychedelic colors suggests otherwise. Small rectangular canvases (7.8x31cm; 26×105.1cm) also toy with our sense of the tradition of large 19th-century sublime landscape painting (Turner, Constable, Cole) or late 20th-century overreachers (Anselm Kiefer). 

In Merge with Vastness, we zoom down to a small landscape with a dog. The dog looks at a cactus as if puzzled, and there is a red figure in flight, another dancer moving off-center. The marvelous, thought-provoking exhibition is the artist’s sense of seeing himself double in hallucinatory states induced by plant-based drugs or the thin air, or he sees his doubles through the eyes of a dog. 

In Be careful, a shadowy face aims a slingshot at the viewer, as if the dark figure wanted to warn us not to come too close — to be careful. 

The small double is fragile. Sometimes, it is drawn as a silhouetted figure, a shadowy outline of the man who is disappearing in The Visible to the Invisible (2023). 

During journeys through diverse mountain regions, Ríos explored both botanical and ritualistic knowledge of Indigenous customs, especially those ancestral practices that tapped into medicinal and hallucinogenic expansions of the mind. I do not see Ríos being attracted to a spiritual connection or merger with nature and the environment. Nor would I recognize any merging with Earth or Gaia, and certainly, there are no more gods, as Nietzsche told us. There are dogs and mules (in his 2014 video Mulas, shown together with Landlocked in a separate room) and a few tiny ants. Rather than reaching for a spiritual dimension or enlightenment, Ríos is a trickster figure who plays with us, laughs behind his mask as in the strange face he paints in Territorio de la Mente (2024), hanging down from a snake-like cable that opens out into a blossoming red flower petal inside which the joker is inserted. 

This clownesque character of the work is as astonishing as the vigorous struggle of the five dogs in Landlocked, who seem to have dreams of the Pacific and desperately dig through a wall of sand and soil in the high mountains of Bolivia and Chile, as if they could breach the wall and reach the ocean. They hear the water or have picked up its scent, tunneling forward. Or do we only imagine hearing what they hear? Are we equally entranced by the impossible, sand flung in the eyes by the hindlegs of digging dogs (named Pila, Filpo, Trompito, Chiquita and Horrible)? 

The most vexing work is a painting in which we see the artist, laying sprawled across the foreground, with his back to us and coca leaves under his left arm, looking at his smaller double swimming in a curving river in front of the mountains, while on the shore there is a strange congregation of ants, burning plants, and a hovering outline that is magically diffuse — a cactus dreaming itself. They stole the map of my town further stretches the vision of the artist seeing himself double, as in De lo visible a lo invisible, where we can see at least two silhouettes in front of the artist, and one further behind that is heading in the same direction — a half-double that Ríos paints with two shadowy colors, pink-grey and brown.

The surprising pink is also the color of a foregrounded cactus in Different time in the same frame, a painting in which a dog on center stage watches the puny contours of the man with the hat, heading nowhere. In this exhibition, one trusts that Miguel Ángel Ríos has reached a state of calm resignation, a turning inside and reflecting on our delusions. In these landscapes he now paints, there are no more power struggles that betray the deadly conflicts in the geopolitical theatre of operations — the disasters caused by climate catastrophe. We live in different times now, times of a crisis that will not end well for the planet. Ríos, the artist who has explored his hemisphere throughout a very productive life, seems to be in the state that the Japanese call hikikomori, withdrawing from the pressures of the social world, receding into an expansive inner state. The mulas in the video, two animals carrying packages of a white powder on the saddlebacks, have also withdrawn, slowly and patiently climbing to the top of a steep hill. They take a look and descend again. We see them wading through tall grass and, at some point, entering into a wild mulas trance dance during which the sacks of white powder rip open and swirl through the air, leaving their dusty trail on empty land. 

 

Johannes Birringer is a choreographer and media artist. He co-directs the DAP-Lab, and has taught Performance Technologies at Northwestern University, Ohio State University, and Brunel University London. He has created numerous dance-theatre works, video installations, and digital projects in collaboration with artists in Europe, the Americas, China, Japan, and South Africa. He authored Media and Performance (1998), Performance on the Edge (2000), Performance, Science and Technology (2009), Kinetic Atmospheres: Performance and Immersion (2021), and edited numerous transdisciplinary books, including Dance and Cognition (2005), Dance and Choreomania (2011) and Things that Dance (2019).

 

Merged with Vastness is on view at Sicardi | Ayers | Bacino, Houston through March 8.

The post Seeing Double: Miguel Ángel Ríos’ “Merged with Vastness” appeared first on Glasstire.

This post was written by Alison Green and published on Ask a Manager.

It’s five answers to five questions. Here we go…

1. Coworker asks someone to get him food from the cafeteria every day

I work as a consultant for a company and have an older male colleague (in his late 40s) who has mobility issues due to his weight. He sits almost all day and arrives very early before anyone else arrives. He cannot walk more than a few feet without pain and asks me (or another colleague) to grab meals for him at the cafeteria almost daily. He gives people money for his food, which is always junk food, and is very apologetic and appreciative.

Most people, including myself, bring packed meals and rarely eat in the cafeteria. It’s very awkward being put on the spot, especially since everyone is polite and usually willing to help anyone. I’m a classic “people pleaser”, which is something I really need to work on. My work crosses paths occasionally with this colleague so I don’t want any bad blood impacting my interactions with him. I don’t know him very well and he is not a “work friend.” Even if he were, it is still an uncomfortable situation.

While I sympathize with his chronic pain issues, I’m fed up and not his personal assistant! His boss often travels overseas and is rarely in the office. Due to my role, I work for an outside vendor with an unrelated HR team. He’s not in a supervisory role over anyone here, including me. If he needs a disability accommodation, that’s between him and his manager. How do I handle this colleague tactfully and avoid being offensive?

“Oh, I’m sorry — I’m not going to the cafeteria today!”

That’s it.

If he asks if you’d mind going anyway and you don’t want to, you can say, “I’m sorry, I can’t — I’m swamped.” He’s likely to stop asking pretty quickly.

For what it’s worth, I don’t think it’s an outrageous imposition that he asks people for help. There are probably people who don’t mind and who see it as a kindness they’re happy to offer, and it’s reasonable for anyone to say no if it’s too much of an inconvenience on any given day or in general. I think the issue here is more that you don’t feel comfortable saying no than that he’s asking in the first place! Kindly saying you can’t do it should take care of it.

2. New hire took the “fork in the road” and now we might not be able to hire a replacement

I’m hoping to get a sanity check from you on a situation that just happened on my team. I know you generally say employees have to do what’s in their best interests, and sometimes burning a bridge is worth it, but this whole situation feels like more than just the “cost of doing business.” I work for a large federal agency in the D.C. area. Unlike many federal employees who are seeing their work slashed and burned, the team I lead has been launched from complete obscurity to being very high-visibility and is working incredibly hard. We used to be a strict 40-hour week team and now we routinely have team members staying past 8 or 9 pm to get all of our tasks done.

During this time, we put out an internal job posting to hire a senior individual contributor position. We did interviews and selected someone who seemed pretty qualified, though not “knock it out of the park” qualified relative to the other candidates. He accepted and started working on the team recently. Within a couple of days after he started, our HR informed us this employee had taken the deferred resignation option, aka Elon Musks’s “fork in the road,” and his last day would be about two weeks after starting. The employee never informed us of any of this, and what makes me particularly peeved is that he sent in his deferred resignation several days before interviewing with us and accepting the position.

All of this would fall under “not cool, but I guess we’ll just deal with it” except for one additional wrinkle: people who leave under the deferred resignation program can’t get their jobs backfilled. (Actually, my agency has to give up a billet for every single person that opted in, even if they don’t actually leave.) My supervisor is fighting to make the case that the unit he belonged to when he first resigned should be the one losing a billet, rather than our unit that he was in when he signed the final paperwork, but we don’t know how that’s going to turn out. We also don’t know, even if we can fill the position, whether we can just call up our second choice and make them an offer, or whether the rules will require us to go through a lengthy re-posting and re-interviewing process. And all the while, my team of junior employees are working their asses off without the help of a senior who could relieve some of the pressure.

Either way, there’s nothing I can do, but am I off-base in thinking this was much more egregious than a standard situation of a new hire backing out? I feel that at least, the employee should have told us he opted in to the deferred resignation when he received the offer, so that we could have made an informed decision.

Yeah, that’s pretty crappy. In fairness, it’s possible that he wasn’t confident that the deferred resignation email would be honored, since there’s still plenty of doubt about that. And he might have figured that at this point he doesn’t owe any particular courtesy to an employer that’s treated its workforce so disrespectfully (and … there’s something to that). But yeah, he screwed your team to get something for himself (which I wouldn’t say if he didn’t put you in a position where you might not be allowed to re-fill the job).

However, it’s far, far more absurd that HR didn’t tell you before the hire was finalized! That’s relevant info that you should have been made aware of, and it’s either by extreme incompetence or deliberate design that they didn’t.

3. Should I tell my employees that someone assaulted me?

Content warning for sexual assault

I wish I did not have to ask this. I live in a very small community with a staff of about 10. I am a sexual assault survivor with CPTSD and anxiety disorder from that experience growing up. Unfortunately, this weekend I had a stranger break into my apartment and attempt to rape me. While the assailant was caught and arrested and I was able to fight them off (and I’m in therapy), I am understandably very shaken up and this has opened some new wounds. Is it appropriate for me to tell my employees what happened in general terms and ask them to be careful when approaching me, especially from behind over the next few weeks as this is very triggering for me? This was all over our local media and some of them already know, and I have taken the next few days off of work because of the event.

How awful, I’m so sorry. Yes, you can absolutely share with your employees what happened in general terms so they have context for the requests you’re making (requests that will be completely understandable to anyone once they know why). “Broke in and attempted to attack me” will carry enough relevant information if you’re more comfortable with that wording.

I hope you heal as quickly as possible.

4. The lack of clarity of “Sunday at midnight”

I’ve always had a pet peeve as a student when I would get assignments that were due on, say, “Sunday night at midnight.” Does that mean you need my paper by Saturday night going into Sunday morning, or do you need my paper by Sunday night going into Monday morning? Because midnight is the start of the next day! I never asked because nobody else seemed to have an issue, but more importantly, it would only be a real issue if you weren’t completing your assignment in a timely manner. I always made a point to turn in my assignments at least 48 hours before a deadline anyway, so there was no reason to bring it up.

Now, I’m a grad student who’s a teaching assistant for a professor, and I’m responsible for writing the homework assignments for his undergrads. I tell students, “Submit this assignment by Sunday at 11:59 pm.” I feel this is much clearer than “Sunday at midnight,” and if a student were to, say, procrastinate on a lab report, a 60-second difference will not matter.

The professor, however, said that I should keep the “Sunday at midnight” vernacular because it’s industry standard (not just in our field, but in others). The actual amount of days given to complete the assignment was always correct, but I didn’t say anything because I feel like my concerns will be dismissed as mere semantics. It’s one of those weird little things where you feel silly for wanting to argue more for it, but you also feel frustrated because that means the other person is being equally silly for arguing against it. So then you just don’t argue to keep the peace but still have unresolved frustration. How common is “Sunday at midnight” in the working world? What should it mean?

It’s incredibly common!

And I am right there with you on it; you’re essentially giving a deadline that’s a day earlier than what you really mean and causing unnecessary confusion. The real deadline is Sunday at 11:59 pm. I think people are willing to live with it, though, because it’s not going to result in a student being late; if someone takes it literally, they’d be a day early instead. That’s still not particularly fair or clear … but if assignments were late as a result of it, they’d be more moved to change it.

5. Dealing with someone who’s in denial about their unreliable email

A physician I see regularly is having problems with her email. I’m sure that the problems are on her end because (a) they happen repeatedly, (b) they happen with no one else in my contact list, and (c) other people (like my occupational therapist) also have problems with her email communications. Sometimes she doesn’t receive emails that I’ve sent her, but she also sometimes says she’s sent me an email that never arrived in my inbox. (I’ve checked for these emails thoroughly). I’m not sure if the problem is that she’s very loose in how she handles her email or if there’s some technical issue on her end. In any case, it’s causing me real problems from time to time.

When I’ve brought this problem up, she’s been resistant to the possibility that the problem is on her end. She either shrugs off the missing email or implies that I somehow missed it or inadvertently deleted it — but I know, from ongoing exploration, as well as others’ communications with her, that the issue is definitely on her side. It feels quite rude to say to a professional, “I know that this problem might seem like a one-off, or like it might be a technical glitch on my end, but I have been tracking patterns for a while now, and I can tell you with confidence that some of your emails are not arriving and that you are often not getting the emails I send, and it is causing Big Problems. Could you fix it?” In some ways, I would prefer a simple workaround that acknowledged the situation without demanding that she address it: something like, “Since, as we’ve discussed, my emails don’t always make it to you, is there another way I could be corresponding just to make sure we’re communicating reliably? If I have a question, would you rather I call and leave a voice message with the question, or email you and then call to confirm receipt?” Does either of these seem likeliest to work, or most appropriate?

Sure, that’s appropriate.

But note at least for half the problem (the half where she misses your emails), you don’t even need to sort it out with her ahead of time. You can simply assume email isn’t a reliable method of reaching her and just switch to calling instead (or emailing and then calling to confirm receipt). The piece that you have a lot less control over is when she thinks she’s emailed you but hasn’t — so I’d focus on that piece of it. For example: “For whatever reason, your emails don’t reliably reach me. I don’t want to miss important messages from you, so can we switch to a different communication method, like texts or phone calls?”

A New Hampshire woman was arrested after several years of allegedly urinating on items at a food co-op and posting videos of it online. What do you think?

The post Woman Contaminates Grocery Store Food With Urine For Years appeared first on The Onion.

WASHINGTON—Declaring the utter lack of alcohol in the Pentagon kitchen to be a “national emergency,” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth reportedly deployed 3,000 troops American on a beer run Monday. “As of this morning, I have ordered our armed forces to travel to liquor stores, gas stations, and 7-Elevens across the country to stock up on brewskis ASAP,” said Hegseth, adding that he’d also sent a Stryker Brigade Combat Team and a General Support Aviation Battalion to load up their armored vehicles and aircraft with as many 30-packs of Keystone Light, Busch Light, and Natty Light as they could fit. “Although we previously ordered the National Guard to score beer back in January, it ran out in, like, a day. Now it’s becoming increasingly clear that without military intervention, our kegs will run dry before the night even begins. The last thing this nation needs is to be left with nothing but tequila. That shit gives me such a fucking hangover.” According to sources, Hegseth also ordered the military to buy several thousand bottles of Smirnoff for some chicks he had been texting.

The post Pete Hegseth Deploys 3,000 U.S. Troops On Beer Run appeared first on The Onion.

FAIRFAX, VA—Calling the young students “the true enemy of gun rights,” the National Rifle Association reportedly issued an “F” rating Monday to dead schoolchildren. 

“This is our lowest rating, and it’s exactly what this radical group of anti-gun extremists deserves,” said NRA CEO Doug Hamlin, who lambasted the deceased American shooting victims as “selfish, divisive, and tyrannical.” “From preschool to high school, dead schoolchildren are an assault on freedom. No one in the nation has ever done more to hurt the reputation of the Second Amendment. It’s going to take billions in fundraising to undo the political damage they’ve done.” 

In a later announcement, Hamlin awarded mass shooters a perfect “A+.”

The post NRA Gives Dead Schoolchildren ‘F’ Rating appeared first on The Onion.

BEVERLY HILLS, CA—Growing increasingly anxious as yet another minute passed without the 56-year-old consultant’s return, Jennifer Lopez reportedly expressed concerns Thursday that her Bumble date was not coming back from the bathroom at the Maybourne Bar. 

“We were really vibing on text, and it seemed things were going pretty good over the first drink, but Rich has been gone for way too long,” said the singer and actress, who nervously tapped her fingers on the booth’s table, peeked down the hallway toward the restroom to look for the divorced father of one, and then told a passing waiter that “they were probably okay” on orders for now. “Jeez, I knew I shouldn’t have talked about my ex so much. I keep doing this. What’s wrong with me? Dammit. Okay, I’ll give it another few minutes, and then I guess I’ll just call an Uber.” 

At press time, sources confirmed that Lopez’s date was in the bathroom desperately watching a clip of This is Me…Now in order to find something to talk about for the remainder of the evening.

The post Jennifer Lopez Worried Bumble Date Not Coming Back From Bathroom appeared first on The Onion.

The post Elon Musk Begins Cabinet Meeting By Putting Index Finger Through Fly Of Pants appeared first on The Onion.

CHICAGO—A feeling of utter helplessness flooding his nervous system from the very moment he spotted the “enormous” brown paper sack, area 34-year-old Caleb Atkinson told reporters Wednesday his DoorDash order had arrived in a humiliatingly large bag. 

Atkinson, who lives alone, alleged the size of the bag used by local restaurant Gyro Grill to pack his order was grossly disproportionate to the modest amount of food it contained. He reportedly winced when he accepted the delivery, looking left and then right to see if anyone had witnessed him taking the bag that had so much extra space he could “feel the food sliding around in there.”

“The bag is way too big,” said Atkinson, who grew increasingly agitated as he recalled how the delivery driver, identified by the app simply as “Bryan,” had handed him the bag using both hands, as if it were heavy, though by any objective standard it was not. “I only got a couple things. It doesn’t make any sense to give me a bag this big.”

“Why would they do this?” he added.

Initially, Atkinson presumed the order was for another resident of his building. Given the bag’s excess size, the medical billing specialist stated that he thought it must have belonged to his upstairs neighbors, a couple with two children. But that assumption was quickly turned on its head, he explained, when the driver carrying the bag looked at him and—to his great embarrassment and dismay—said, “Caleb?” 

“If anybody would have seen me, they would have probably thought I got a ton of food,” said a visibly exasperated Atkinson, noting that the only items in his order were a crispy chicken sandwich without tomato and a side of fries, which could have been contained in a package one-fourth or even one-fifth of the bag’s size. “It’s not fair, because I didn’t. I just got one meal.”

“I don’t understand why they didn’t give me a smaller bag,” he continued. “You could fit enough in this one to feed a whole family. And it’s just me in this apartment.”

Sources confirmed the large paper bag continued to plague the man throughout what he had hoped would be a peaceful evening. According to Atkinson, the bag was so tall that it blocked the lower third of his television screen, causing him to have to get off the sofa and move it from the coffee table to the floor. In what he described as a hassle that “added insult to injury,” Atkinson was also forced to repeatedly stick his arm up to his elbow inside the offending bag every time he wanted to retrieve a fry. 

When asked for his view on the quality of the meal, Atkinson told reporters the food was “fine,” though he admitted he might have enjoyed it more had he not been so distracted by the bag.  

“I kept thinking about the bag,” he said, acknowledging that while it was a possibility Gyro Grill had run out of small- and medium-
sized bags, he was disinclined to believe it. “Even if they were all out of smaller bags, I would have preferred no bag at all to this big bag. It was too big. Much too big for what I ordered, which wasn’t much at all.”

Reached for comment on the size of the bag, Molly Carson, who lives across the street from Atkinson, said she had witnessed the delivery and concluded her neighbor “must have been really hungry,” because his order appeared to be “a disgustingly huge dinner” for any one man to consume. 

The post DoorDash Order Arrives In Humiliatingly Large Bag appeared first on The Onion.

After a ceiling collapsed onto the audience during a screening of the latest Marvel film, a theater in Wenatchee, WA is working with local authorities to determine the cause of the disaster. What do you think?

The post Movie Theater Ceiling Collapses During ‘Captain America’ Screening appeared first on The Onion.

EDMONTON – Alberta’s experiment with private healthcare delivery is already paying off, as the system is generating scandals at a rate unheard of by the province’s public-facing healthcare system. “Scandals are very important to the healthcare experience,” University of Alberta professor Alfie Cave explained. “When Albertans face longer waits because Danielle Smith is throwing healthcare […]

The post Alberta proves private healthcare is more efficient at generating scandals appeared first on The Beaverton.