Books – Page 17 – artdiamondblog.com

Engerman, with Fogel, Courageously Asked Politically Incorrect Questions about Slavery

(p. D8) Stanley Engerman, one of the authors of a deeply researched book that, wading into the fraught history of American slavery, argued that it was a rational, viable economic system and that enslaved Black people were more efficient workers than free white people in the North, died on May 11 [2023] in Watertown, Mass.

. . .

In their two-volume “Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery” (1974), Professor Engerman and Prof. Robert W. Fogel used data analysis to challenge what they called common characterizations of slavery, including that it was unprofitable, inefficient and pervasively abusive.

They said they were not defending slavery. “If any aspect of the American past evokes a sense of shame,” they wrote, it’s the system of slavery.” But much of the accepted wisdom about it, they said, was distorted, or just plain wrong.

“Slave agriculture was not inefficient compared with free agriculture,” they wrote. “Economies of large-scale operation, effective management and intensive utilization of labor made Southern slave agriculture 35 percent more efficient than the Northern system of family farming.”

They insisted that the typical slave “was not lazy, inept and unproductive” but rather “was harder working and more efficient than his white counterpart.” They contended that the destruction of the Black family through slave breeding and sexual exploitation was a myth, and that it was in the economic interest of plantation owners to encourage the stability of enslaved families.

They also wrote that some slaves received positive incentives, such as being elevated to overseers of work gangs, to increase their productivity.

The book attracted a lot of attention, including a rave review by the economist Peter Passell in The New York Times. “If a more important book about American history has been published in the last decade, I don’t know about it,” he wrote. He described the work as a corrective, “a jarring attack on the methods and conclusions of traditional scholarship” on slavery.

. . .

. . . the Marxist historian Eugene D. Genovese, whose own book about slavery, “Roll, Jordan Roll: The World the Slave Made,” was also published in 1974, called “Time on the Cross” an “important work” that had “broken open a lot of questions about issues that were swept under the rug before.”

For the full obituary, see:

Richard Sandomir. “Stanley Engerman, 87, Scholar Who Disputed Views on Slavery, Dies.” The New York Times (Monday, May 29, 2023): D8.

(Note: ellipses, and bracketed year, added.)

(Note: the online version of the commentary was updated May 30, 2023, and has the title “Stanley Engerman, Revisionist Scholar of Slavery, Dies at 87.”)

The book praised in the obituary quoted above is:

Fogel, Robert William, and Stanley L. Engerman. Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1974.

“Evaluate an Argument on Its Own Merits, Not on the Race of the Person Making It”

(p. A22) In 1991, Stephen L. Carter, a professor at Yale Law School, began his book “Reflections of an Affirmative Action Baby” with a discomfiting anecdote. A fellow professor had criticized one of Carter’s papers because it “showed a lack of sensitivity to the experience of Black people in America.” When the professor, who was white, learned that Carter was Black, he withdrew the remark rather than defend his claim. It was a reminder to Carter that many people, especially among his fellow establishment elites, had certain expectations of him as a Black man.

“I live in a box,” he wrote, one bearing all kinds of labels, including “Careful: Discuss Civil Rights Law or Law and Race Only” and “Warning! Affirmative Action Baby! Do Not Assume That This Individual Is Qualified!”

This was a book that refused to dance around its subject.

Weaving personal narrative with a broader discussion of affirmative action’s successes and limitations, “Reflections of an Affirmative Action Baby” offered a nuanced assessment. A graduate of Stanford and Yale Law, Carter was a proud beneficiary of affirmative action. Yet he acknowledged the personal toll it took (“a decidedly mixed blessing”) as well as affirmative action’s sometimes troubling effects on Black people as the programs evolved.

. . .

An early critic of groupthink, Carter warned against “the idea that Black people who gain positions of authority or influence are vested a special responsibility to articulate the presumed views of other people who are Black — in effect, to think and act and speak in a particular way, the Black way — and that there is something peculiar about Black people who insist on doing anything else.”

In the past, such ideas might have been seen as “frankly racist,” Carter noted. “Now, however, they are almost a gospel for people who want to show their commitment to equality.” This belies the reality that Black people, he said, “fairly sparkle with diversity of outlook.”

. . .

At the same time, Carter bristled at the judgment of many of his Black peers, describing several situations in which he found himself accused of being “inauthentically” Black, as if people of a particular race were a monolith and that those who deviated from it were somehow shirking their duty. He said he didn’t want to be limited in what he was allowed to say by “an old and vicious form of silencing.”

In an interview with The Times in 1991, Carter emphasized this point: “No weight is added to a position because somebody is Black. One has to evaluate an argument on its own merits, not on the race of the person making it.”

For the full commentary, see:

Pamela Paul. “A 1991 Book Was Stunningly Prescient About Affirmative Action.” The New York Times (Friday, May 26, 2023): A22.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date May 25, 2023, and has the title “This 1991 Book Was Stunningly Prescient About Affirmative Action.”)

The book praised in the commentary quoted above is:

Carter, Stephen L. Reflections of an Affirmative Action Baby. New York: Basic Books, 1991.

Rage That Transplant Medicine Stagnates

The essay quoted below provides one more example of why we should unbind medical entrepreneurs to allow them to bring us more and faster cures.

(p. 8) Today, I will explain to my healthy transplanted heart why, in what may be a matter of days or weeks at best, she — well, we — will die.

. . .

Organ transplantation is mired in stagnant science and antiquated, imprecise medicine that fails patients and organ donors.

. . .

Over the last almost four decades a toxic triad of immunosuppressive medicines — calcineurin inhibitors, antimetabolites, steroids — has remained essentially the same with limited exceptions. These transplant drugs (which must be taken once or twice daily for life, since rejection is an ongoing risk and the immune system will always regard a donor organ as a foreign invader) cause secondary diseases and dangerous conditions, including diabetes, uncontrollable high blood pressure, kidney damage and failure, serious infections and cancers. The negative impact on recipients is not offset by effectiveness: the current transplant medicine regimen does not work well over time to protect donor organs from immune attack and destruction.

. . .

I am speaking for my transplant cardiologist, the finest physician I have ever known, who sat across from me last month and cried into his palms when he told me I had incurable cancer.

For the full essay, see:

Amy Silverstein. “My Donor Heart And I Will Die Soon.” The New York Times, SundayOpinion Section (Sunday, April 23, 2023): 8.

(Note: ellipsis added; in the original, the word “we” in the first sentence is in italics.)

(Note: the online version of the essay has the date April 18, 2023, and has the title “My Transplanted Heart and I Will Die Soon.”)

In Blackberry Movie “The Excitement of Disruption and the Thrill of Creation Become Tangible”

(p. C9) In Matt Johnson’s “BlackBerry” — a wonky workplace comedy that slowly shades into tragedy — the emergence of the smartphone isn’t greeted with fizzing fireworks and popping champagne corks. Instead, Johnson and his co-writer, Matthew Miller (adapting Jacquie McNish and Sean Silcoff’s 2015 book “Losing the Signal: The Untold Story Behind the Extraordinary Rise and Spectacular Fall of BlackBerry”), have fashioned a tale of scrabbling toward success that tempers its humor with an oddly moving wistfulness.

. . .

. . ., we’re in Waterloo, Ontario, in 1996, where Mike Lazaridis (a perfect Jay Baruchel) and Doug Fregin (Johnson) — best friends and co-founders of a small tech company called Research in Motion (RIM) — are trying to sell a product they call PocketLink, a revolutionary combination of cellphone, email device and pager.

. . .

The corporate types don’t understand Mike and Doug’s invention, but a predatory salesman named Jim Balsillie (a fantastic Glenn Howerton), gets it. Recently fired and fired up, Jim sees the device’s potential, making a deal to acquire part of RIM in exchange for cash and expertise. Doug, a man-child invariably accessorized with a headband and a bewildered look, is doubtful; Mike, assisted by a shock of prematurely gray hair, is wiser. He knows that they’ll need an intermediary to succeed.

Reveling in a vibe — hopeful, testy, undisciplined — that’s an ideal match for its subject, “BlackBerry” finds much of its humor in Jim’s resolve to fashion productive employees from RIM’s ebulliently geeky staff, who look and act like middle schoolers and converse in a hybrid of tech-speak and movie quotes. It’s all Vogon poetry to Jim; but as Jared Raab’s restless camera careens around the chaotic work space, the excitement of disruption and the thrill of creation become tangible.

For the full movie review, see:

Jeannette Catsoulis. “When Geeks Clash With Suits, They’re All Thumbs.” The New York Times (Friday, May 12, 2023): C9.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the movie review has the date May 11, 2023, and has the title “‘BlackBerry’ Review: Big Dreams, Little Keyboards.”)

The book that is the basis of the movie under review in the passages quoted above is:

McNish, Jacquie, and Sean Silcoff. Losing the Signal: The Untold Story Behind the Extraordinary Rise and Spectacular Fall of Blackberry. New York: Flatiron Books, 2015.

Communists Want Us to Forget the 1.6 Million Chinese They Murdered in Cultural Revolution

(p. A23) It would seem impossible to forget or minimize the Cultural Revolution in China, which lasted from 1966 to 1976, resulted in an estimated 1.6 million to two million deaths and scarred a generation and its descendants. The movement, which under Mao Zedong’s leadership sought to purge Chinese society of all remaining non-Communist elements, upended nearly every hallowed institution and custom. Teachers and schools long held in esteem were denounced. Books were burned and banned, museums ransacked, private art collections destroyed. Intellectuals were tortured.

But in China, a country where information is often suppressed and history is constantly rewritten — witness recent government censorship of Covid research and the obscuring of Hong Kong’s British colonial past in new school textbooks — the memory of the Cultural Revolution risks being forgotten, sanitized and abused, to the detriment of the nation’s future.

The Chinese government has never been particularly eager to preserve the memory of that sordid decade. When I spent six weeks traveling in China in 1994 — a slightly more open time in the country — I encountered few public acknowledgments of the Cultural Revolution. Museum placards and catalogs often simply skipped a decade in their timelines or provided brief references in the passive voice along the lines of “historical events that took place.”

But in her new book, “Red Memory: The Afterlives of China’s Cultural Revolution,” the journalist Tania Branigan notes that under Xi Jinping, China’s top leader, efforts to suppress this history have intensified — with troubling implications for the political health of the country at a time when it looms larger than ever on the world stage. “When you’ve had a collective trauma, you really need a collective response,” she told me recently. “I can see why the Communist Party wants to avoid the rancor and bitterness, but when you don’t have that kind of acknowledgment, you can move on — but you can’t really recover.”

For the full commentary, see:

Pamela Paul. “The Decade That China Cannot Delete.” The New York Times (Friday, May 19, 2023): A23.

(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date May 18, 2023, and has the title “The Decade That Cannot Be Deleted.”)

The book on the cultural revolution mentioned above is:

Branigan, Tania. Red Memory: The Afterlives of China’s Cultural Revolution. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2023.

Fred Siegel Went from Liberal to Conservative During the New York Blackout of 1977 When Looters Burned Stores, Restaurants, and Civility

(p. B10) Fred Siegel, a passionate urban historian whose rejection of the liberal establishment’s response to crime, poverty and public civility transformed him from a spokesman for the Democratic presidential nominee George McGovern in 1972 to a voter for Donald J. Trump in 2020, died on Sunday at his home in Brooklyn.

. . .

His ideological evolution was evidenced in the titles of his books: “The Future Once Happened Here: New York, D.C., L.A., and the Fate of America’s Big Cities” (1997); “The Prince of the City: Giuliani, New York, and the Genius of American Life” (2005), which he wrote with Harry Siegel; and “The Revolt Against the Masses: How Liberalism Has Undermined the Middle Class” (2014).

. . .

And, perhaps more in sorrow than in anger, he quoted former Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York as saying that his fellow Democrats had “rewarded the articulation of moral purpose more than the achievement of practical good.”

. . .

. . . in 1991, Mr. Siegel argued: “Middle-class citizens, rightly or wrongly, have become convinced that modern liberal urban government is mostly about letting the poor misbehave at the expense of the middle class, and paying public employees very well to deliver services very poorly.”

. . .

Mr. Siegel’s metamorphosis — from a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, a fellow of the Progressive Policy Institute and a voter for the independent John Anderson in 1980 and the Democrat Walter F. Mondale in 1984 (each time voting against the Republican Ronald Reagan) — reached its apogee (depending on one’s political point of view) in 2020.

After a lifetime of sitting out presidential elections or mostly voting for losers, he cast his ballot for Mr. Trump.

He listed his reasons for doing so in 2020 in an interview with The Wall Street Journal, lauding Mr. Trump for “crushing ISIS, pulling us out of the Iran nuclear deal, moving our embassy to Jerusalem and making fools of those people who insist that the Palestinian issue is at the heart of the Arab-Israeli conflict.” He also favored Mr. Trump, he said, for displaying an “ability to withstand a prolonged coup attempt by the Democrats and the media” and for championing “bourgeois values.”

In an online tribute this week, Brian C. Anderson, the editor of City Journal, wrote that Mr. Siegel had identified what he called a “riot ideology” that took hold of public officials in major cities, “making them reluctant to confront public disorder and crime for fear of violent opposition.”

. . .

The essayist Irving Kristol famously defined a neoconservative, a breed Mr. Kristol epitomized and popularized, as “a liberal who has been mugged by reality.” But Mr. Siegel’s conversion wasn’t the result of a single personal experience, his son said — even though a thief once grabbed a bag of $100 worth of kosher meat from him on the subway and several of the family’s cars were stolen.

If Mr. Siegel approached a philosophical epiphany, though, it was during the blackout of 1977, when looters raged through parts of Brooklyn, stripping stores of merchandise and setting them ablaze in a night of rioting.

Mr. Siegel, whose favorite restaurant, Jack’s Pastrami King, was among the places destroyed, reflected in 2017: “The city itself had been mugged, I realized. I’m still haunted by that moment from 40 years ago, when my political re-education began.”

For the full obituary, see:

Sam Roberts. “Fred Siegel, 78, Urban Historian And a Former Liberal, Is Dead.” The New York Times (Saturday, May 13, 2023): B10.

(Note: ellipses, and bracketed date, added.)

(Note: the online version of the obituary was updated May 15, 2023, and has the title “Fred Siegel, Urban Historian and a Former Liberal, Is Dead at 78.”)

The most recent of Siegel’s books mentioned above is:

Siegel, Fred. The Revolt Against the Masses: How Liberalism Has Undermined the Middle Class. New York: Encounter Books, 2014.

“By Far the Biggest Risk to Global Climate Comes From Volcanoes”

(p. C9) What’s the connection between sugar and Xi Jinping? Why does the political turbulence in today’s Middle East trace back to the Cretaceous period? How did the humble potato revolutionize the world? Why did the great Mayan cities of the ninth century run out of potable water? What does the contemporary West African practice of polygyny—one man, many wives—have to do with the trans-Atlantic slave trade?

Peter Frankopan raises these beguiling questions—and many others, bless him—in “The Earth Transformed,” a book that examines the entire sweep of the relationship between humans and nature.

. . .

Whereas Mr. Frankopan never disguises the fact that he is on the greenish side of the climate-change conversation, he steers clear of enviro-preaching and finger-wagging. . . . In words that will startle many of us, he says that “by far the biggest risk to global climate comes from volcanoes.” He contrasts the “considerable thought and attention” that have gone into planning for a warming world with the almost complete absence of planning or funding on the likely implications of major volcanic eruptions. Estimates put the chances of a mega-eruption—one that could cost “hundreds of millions of lives”—at one in six before the year 2100.

. . .

The history of the Earth is a history of large-scale transformations that have wreaked havoc in some cases and blessed us with benign climatic eras in others (such as the Roman Warm Period from 300 B.C. to A.D. 500). The most famous instance of the former was the asteroid strike in the Yucatán Peninsula 66 million years ago in which our beloved dinosaurs were wiped out. The rise of humankind, Mr. Frankopan writes, was the result of an “extraordinary series of flukes, coincidences, long shots and serendipities” that made the planet hospitable to our existence. It was “geological chance” that gave the Middle East its oil reserves, the result of warming in Cretaceous times.

. . .

Mr. Frankopan’s thesis is that civilizations thrive best when they are resilient to shocks. Yet “hyperfragility,” he believes, is the name of the game in the 21st century—whether in response to warming, a rudderless U.S., Mr. Xi and Taiwan, Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine, or a nuclear Saudi Arabia and Iran. The march of history has left such places as Uruk, Nineveh, Harappa, Angkor and Tikal in ruins, not because of climate change but because of a lack of resilience to shocks, made worse by obtuse planning and even worse decision-making. That’s the lesson Mr. Frankopan is trying to teach us.

For the full review, see:

Tunku Varadarajan. “Doom May Have to Be Delayed.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, April 22, 2023): C9.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the review has the date April 20, 2023, and has the title “‘The Earth Transformed’ Review: Doom May Be Delayed.”)

The book under review is:

Frankopan, Peter. The Earth Transformed: An Untold History. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2023.

Man Died When Pharmacist Refused to Give Him EpiPen Without the Mandated Prescription

(p. A15) Rates of hospital admissions for asthma, nut allergies in children, and prescriptions for EpiPens (used to treat extreme reactions) have all tripled in recent decades. Not only are food allergies now more common in children, but they are less likely to be outgrown with age than in years past.

The causes and consequences of this epidemic are the subject of “Allergic,” an important and deeply researched book by Theresa MacPhail, a medical anthropologist who memorably portrays the human face of disease. . . . Ms. MacPhail . . . has a personal connection to this subject: Her father died after being stung by a bee on the main street of the New Hampshire town where she grew up. (His girlfriend drove him to a drugstore instead of a hospital; even though he was in extremis, the pharmacist refused to dispense an EpiPen without a prescription.)

For the full review, see:

John J. Ross. “BOOKSHELF; Runny Noses, Itchy Eyes.” The Wall Street Journal (Wednesday, May 24, 2023): A15.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the review has the date May 23, 2023, and has the title “BOOKSHELF; ‘Allergic’ Review: Runny Noses, Itchy Eyes.”)

The book under review is:

MacPhail, Theresa. Allergic: Our Irritated Bodies in a Changing World. New York: Random House, 2023.

Milton Friedman Was a “Formative Intellectual Influence” to George Shultz

(p. A13) [George] Shultz, an unflamboyant personality once described by a college classmate as a “steady, plodding intellect,” reached the commanding heights of American government, holding four cabinet posts over his career from secretary of the Treasury to state. Shultz died in 2021 at the age of 100.

. . .

For a time Shultz was on track for a career in academia, working in the economics department at MIT and later the University of Chicago. “Chicago is what started me,” Shultz said. Milton Friedman, a formative intellectual influence and enduring friend, methodically deepened Shultz’s faith in free markets and his skepticism of government intervention in the economy. “Milton didn’t hit the tennis ball hard but it always came back,” Shultz once remarked, “which was reflective of the way he argued, too.”

. . .

. . . Shultz was hardly immune from being wrong. For example: Along with the rest of the State Department, he tried to talk Reagan out of using the line “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.” Shultz worried it was too provocative.

The cautionary tale is that many know Shultz from perhaps the biggest error in judgment he ever made, some 90 years into his life. That’s his association with Elizabeth Holmes, the Silicon Valley founder convicted of fraud in federal court. Shultz was one of Ms. Holmes’s first marks, and he helped her assemble a board for her blood-testing company from his Rolodex. Among the wreckage was Shultz’s relationship with his own grandson, Tyler, who early on discovered the company’s misrepresentations.

For the full review, see:

Kate Bachelder Odell. “BOOKSHELF; Subsume the Ego And Stay Loyal.” The Wall Street Journal (Tuesday, March 7, 2023): A13.

(Note: ellipses, and bracketed name, added.)

(Note: the online version of the review has the date March 6, 2023, and has the title “BOOKSHELF; ‘In the Nation’s Service’ Review: George Shultz’s Quiet Strength.”)

The book under review is:

Taubman, Philip. In the Nation’s Service: The Life and Times of George P. Shultz. Stanford, Cal.: Stanford University Press, 2023.

Longevity Proof of Concept–A Jellyfish That Can Return to a Younger Form

(p. A15) When Benjamin Franklin wrote that “nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes,” he must have thought he was stating an eternal truth. But if biotechnology researcher Nicklas Brendborg is to be believed, Franklin’s joke may need some updating. According to Mr. Brendborg, scientists have discovered a jellyfish the size of a fingernail that responds to stress by “ageing backwards,” reversing the normal direction of its development to become a bottom-dwelling polyp. This trick can be repeated over and over again with “no physiological recollection of having been older,” he explains, making this jellyfish “an example of the holy grail of ageing research—biological immortality.”

This tiny Methuselah is one of the striking examples in Mr. Brendborg’s breezy survey of the science of longevity, “Jellyfish Age Backwards,” which the author has translated from the Danish with Elizabeth DeNoma.

. . .

Short chapters built from short, declarative sentences combine with familiar material to give “Jellyfish Age Backwards” the feel of an introductory survey rather than a novel argument. Perhaps its piecewise construction is only a reflection of the disjointed state of the subject, where researchers are pulling on various threads but have not yet managed to knit them into a coherent whole. Mr. Brendborg finishes with a ringing declaration that the “noble” efforts of medical science will “eventually defeat” aging. But biology is complicated, as the author admits, and the strands of this multivariate and complex phenomenon may eventually prove to be tangled in some unresolvable knot.

For the full review, see:

Richard Lea. “BOOKSHELF; Dying Young At a Late Age.” The Wall Street Journal (Friday, Dec. 30, 2022): A15.

(Note: the online version of the review has the date December 29, 2022, and has the title “BOOKSHELF; ‘Jellyfish Age Backwards’ Review: Dying Young at a Late Age.”)

The book under review is:

Brendborg, Nicklas. Jellyfish Age Backwards: Nature’s Secrets to Longevity. Translated by Elizabeth DeNoma. New York: Little, Brown & Company, 2023.

Lockdowns in China Move Atlas to Shrug

(p. A1) By the usual measures, Loretta Liu had it made. She graduated in 2018 from one of China’s top universities, rented an apartment in the glamorous city of Shenzhen, and had been hired as a visual designer at a series of high-flying companies, even as youth unemployment in China was reaching record highs.

Then, last year, she quit. She now works as a groomer at a chain pet store, for one-fifth of her previous salary. She spends hours on her feet, wearing a uniform in place of her once carefully selected outfits.

And she is delighted.

“I was tired of living like that. I didn’t feel like I was getting anything from the work,” Ms. Liu said of her previous job, where she said she had little creative freedom, often worked overtime, and felt her mental and physical health deteriorating. “So I thought, there’s no need anymore.”

Ms. Liu is part of a phenomenon attracting growing attention in China: young people trading high-pressure, prestigious white-collar jobs for manual labor. The scale of the trend is hard to measure, but widely shared social media posts have documented a tech worker becoming a grocery store cashier; an accountant peddling street sausages; a content manager delivering takeout. On Xiaohongshu, an Instagram-like app, the hashtag “My first experience with physical labor” has more than 28 million views.

. . .

Around the world, the coronavirus pandemic spurred people to reassess the value of their work — see the “Great Resignation” in the United States. But in China, the forces fueling the disillusionment of young people are particularly intense. Long working hours and domineering managers are common. The economy is slowing, dimming the prospect of upward mobility for a generation that has known only explosive growth.

And then there were China’s three years of “zero Covid” restrictions, which forced many to endure prolonged lockdowns, layoffs and the realization of how little control their hard work gave them over their futures.

“Emotionally, everyone probably can’t bear it anymore, because during the pandemic we saw many unfair and strange things, like being locked up,” Ms. Liu said.

. . .

When Yolanda Jiang, 24, resigned last summer from her architectural design job in Shenzhen, after being asked to work 30 days straight, she hoped to find another office job. It was only after three months of unsuccessful searching, her savings dwindling, that she took a job as a security guard in a university residential complex.

At first, she was embarrassed to tell her family or friends, but she grew to appreciate the role. Her 12-hour shifts, though long, were leisurely. She got off work on time. The job came with free dormitory housing. Her salary of about $870 a month was even about 20 percent higher than her take-home pay before — a symptom of how the glut of college graduates has started to flatten wages for that group.

But Ms. Jiang said her ultimate goal is still to return to an office, where she hoped to find more intellectual challenges. She had been taking advantage of the slow pace at her security job to study English, which she hoped would help her land her next role, perhaps at a foreign trade company.

“I’m not actually lying flat,” Ms. Jiang said. “I’m treating this as a time to rest, transition, learn, charge my batteries and think about the direction of my life.”

For the full story, see:

Vivian Wang and Zixu Wang. “In China, Young Workers Ditch Prestige Jobs for Manual Gigs.” The New York Times (Tuesday, April 11, 2023): A1 & A11.

(Note: bracketed year added.]

(Note: the online version of the story has the same date as the print version, and has the title “In China, Young People Ditch Prestige Jobs for Manual Labor.”)

The title of this blog entry alludes to Ayn Rand’s novel:

Rand, Ayn. Atlas Shrugged. New York: Random House, 1957.