Perhaps it is this specter that most haunts working men and women: the planned obsolescence of people that is of a piece with the planned obsolescence of the things they make. Or sell.

Cannot Hannah Arendt's 'banality of evil' be subject to transposition: the evil of banality?

I cannot even picture myself retiring. What would I do? I'll always be doing something, asking somebody questions, even if there weren't a book.

Something was still there, that something that distinguishes an artist from a performer: the revealing of self. Here I be. Not forlong, but here I be. In sensing her mortality, we sensed our own.

Work is about a search for daily meaning as well as daily bread, for recognition as well as cash, for astonishment rather than torpor; in short, for a sort of life rather than a Monday through Friday sort of dying.

When it comes to the news, the corporate view is `objective,' all else is propaganda.

Work is born in us. We take to it kindly or unkindly. The terms may be easy or harsh, but the contract is binding.