Judy Berman in Time Magazine:
In the series premiere of Netflix’s Vladimir, Rachel Weisz awakens from troubled sleep to a cascade of texts, sighs deeply, and addresses the camera with pleading eyes. “All I want is a life free of complications,” says her unnamed lead. “If I can’t have power, can I at least be free from other people’s drama? Free from their behavior? Free from their needs and desires?”
It feels appropriate that free appears four times in this monologue, one of the character’s many fourth-wall-shattering asides. She is a blocked novelist who teaches English at a liberal arts college. And there is no setting more emblematic of freedom—and its discontents—than the campus, where tenure is supposed to protect the intellectual liberty of faculty and students living independently for the first time try on new ideas and identities. Among the most common school mottos is veritas vos liberabit: the truth will set you free.
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Scott Shambaugh,
In 2014, at a small Stanford University lecture hall, the Merriam-Webster editor Peter Sokolowski introduced the crowd of assembled nerds to the idea that a dictionary is not a static document but a living object, constantly updated and remade in response to how people write and speak. In a talk titled “The Dictionary as Data,” Sokolowski emphasized that the editors at Merriam-Webster look to how the general public uses language to guide their work. He shared enticing tidbits, including that xi and za, classic Scrabble words, were popular late-night searches in the online dictionary, and that people regularly look up love ahead of Valentine’s Day. Awed, I wrote in a campus magazine a few days later that “we forget that the dictionary, a seeming bastion of objective reality, is compiled by people who use language, too.”
If you want a surefire way to incite hostility on social media, I suggest flaunting the fact that you work nights and weekends — or complaining about those who do. The sea of humans will suddenly part before you into two angry mobs: the workaholics, who are prepared to sacrifice their lives at the altar of capitalism, and the restaholics, whose highest ideal is slacking off and who seethe with resentment at those ruining the curve. Or so the two groups understand one another. Do we work in order to rest, or do we rest in order to work? Neither answer is very appealing. Working in order to rest sounds like a paraphrase of Freud’s death drive: as though, in an ideal world, we would just be sitting quietly, motionlessly, imitating corpses. Resting in order to work suggests the equally depressing thesis that the goal of a human life is to become a well-oiled cog in some kind of machine, a tool for the use of the leviathan called society. We need to work, because survival demands it, and we need to rest, because work is tiring, but are those two possibilities really exhaustive? Isn’t there a third state — one that we don’t need but freely choose?