It’s Discovery Wednesday here at Prufrock, and leading today’s list of things I discovered while browsing EST’s pre-dawn Internet is a 700-year-old Buddhist statue that has 180 artifacts (including scrolls) hidden inside. Also: The most-cited article on Wikipedia is a climate map—it has apparently been cited over 2.8 million times—and there are no hidden chambers in King Tut’s tomb.
In nontrivial news: “The Austrian paediatrician Hans Asperger has long been recognized as a pioneer in the study of autism. He was even seen as a hero, saving children with the condition from the Nazi killing programme by emphasizing their intelligence. However, it is now indisputable that Asperger collaborated in the murder of children with disabilities under the Third Reich.” Simon Baron-Cohen reviews Edith Sheffer’s Asperger’s Children: The Origins of Autism in Nazi Vienna.
Landed a book contract? Did you sign the morality clause? “Major publishers are increasingly inserting language into their contracts—referred to as morality clauses—that allows them to terminate agreements in response to a broad range of behavior by authors. And agents, most of whom spoke with PW on the condition of anonymity, say the change is worrying in an industry built on a commitment to defending free speech.”
A hierarchy and a network walk into a bar. Which one comes out alive?
Barracoon’s vivid first-hand account of slavery in America (and violence in Africa).
Dave Itzkoff tells the sad story of Robin Williams’s final days.
Essay of the Day:
Is one of the most useless job in the world—in terms of real work accomplished—the non-executive university administrator? Yes, says David Graeber:
“Let me begin by introducing a concept: managerial feudalism. Rich and powerful people have always surrounded themselves with flashy entourages; you can’t be really magnificent without one. Even at the height of industrial capitalism, CEOs and high-ranking executives would surround themselves with a certain number of secretaries (who often did most of their actual work), along with a variety of flunkies and yes men (who often did very little). In the contemporary corporation, the accumulation of the equivalent of feudal retainers often becomes the main principle of organization. The power and prestige of managers tend to be measured by the number of people they have working under them — in fact, in my research, I found that efficiency experts complained that it’s well-nigh impossible to get most executives, for all their ‘lean and mean’ rhetoric, to trim the fat in their own corporations (apart from blue-collar workers, who are ruthlessly exploited).
“Office workers are typically kept on even if they are doing literally nothing, lest somebody’s prestige suffer. This is the real reason for the explosion of administrative staff in higher education. If a university hires a new dean or deanlet (to use Ginsberg’s charming formulation), then, in order to ensure that he or she feels appropriately impressive and powerful, the new hire must be provided with a tiny army of flunkies. Three or four positions are created — and only then do negotiations begin over what they are actually going to do. True, if the testimonies I’ve received are anything to go by, many of those people don’t end up doing much; some administrative-staff will inevitably end up sitting around playing fruit mahjong all day or watching cat videos. But it’s generally considered good form to give all staff members at least a few hours of actual work to do each week. Some managers, who have more thoroughly absorbed the corporate spirit, will insist that all of their minions come up with a way to at least look busy for the full eight hours of the day.
“To get a sense of how this dynamic might work itself out, let me take an example from one of the testimonies I received. Let’s call our informant ‘Chloe, the nonexecutive dean.’ Chloe’s testimony is particularly useful because she has stood, as it were, on both sides of the divide. She not only performed a stint creating bull***t tasks for others to do, but afterward, as head of department at a different university, was able to see what the effects of such behavior actually were.”
Photo: Bird with shark with fish
Poem: Sarah Wardle, “After Ralph Vaughan Williams”
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