קול כבודה

First there were artisans: craftspeople who knew how to make a class of items by hand. Then there were factories: places where people were employed to make vast quantities of items, with the help of machines. Then came the Taylorist revolution, which redesigned the act of making an item as a set of atomic tasks. With one guy (or immigrant woman, or tween) turning the same screw for 8 to 14 hours a day, a veritable tsunami of crap could be made. The modern factory job was born, not with a bang, but with an endless series of little thwacks stretching on to eternity. They tried the same trick with knowledge work. The lawyers got offshore formatting and printing shops to make sense of their scribbles. The software developers got Agile, where it’s one person’s job to design the thing, one to build it, and one to run the meeting where they all talk about it. Medicine is the most obviously Taylorized domain. Every possible task, clinical and otherwise, is taken off the doctor’s plate so they ...

If you want to feel at peace with your life choices, picture a heinous shade of Godzilla green from floor to ceiling, and remember: this was the work of an interior design master. Interior Design Masters was a standard format reality competition show: contestants, challenges, winners, and one loser who was sent home at the end of each episode. The contestant were varying degrees of amateur interior designer (from retirees to ambiguously named "interior stylists") seeking recognition of their talents and the chance to go pro.  In one early challenge, the contestants were each assigned a room in a hotel to redesign. As an added twist - especially given the pitfalls of brown in contemporary design - the hotel's theme was "chocolate." One  contestant was a middle-aged woman who was test driving a lifetime of design hobbyism against the demands of a professional commission, amplified by the artificial constraints of reality tv. Halfway through the hotel design challe...

I. About Me (בת קול) I’ve always wanted to have a blog, but I never got past the step of brainstorming a fun name. Yet over the years, the likelihood of sharing my thoughts in writing, with strangers*, has shrunk to a vanishing point. I was the type of little girl who received notebooks as presents, and filled their pages with cringe-inducing free verse. High school English teachers read my essays aloud to the class, while I maintained a facial expression that delicately balanced feigned embarrassment with beatific grace.  The back half of my life has been decidedly less accomplished, writing-wise. Working on my college thesis taught me that I am (was?) really NOT willing to put in the work to intensively research and publish on a topic.** Since then, I’ve built a fulfilling career, which has not required further formal education. I now hold the dubious honor of being among the least educated people in my social circle. Everything I want to say here is already being said somewhere ...