Once we've read about Doctor Lion, Doctor Dog, and Nurse Nelly four or five times, she's ready to go back to the beginning. She never tires of studying the various professional activities of the residents of Busytown: Farmer Alfalfa and Grocer Cat, Blacksmith Fox and Captain Salty, homemakers and construction workers, police officers and firefighters, bakers and engineers.
The literature of work begins in childhood but doesn't end there. Novelists have long attended to labor, from the mills of Charlotte Brontë's "Shirley" and the mines of Émile Zola's "Germinal" to the more recent portrayal of Target loading docks in Adelle Waldman's "Help Wanted." In the world of nonfiction, though, we regrettably associate work with how-to and self-help: the manuals that teach you to become anything from a mechanic to a movie director; the wikiHow pages that promise to make anyone, regardless of profession, capable of cleaning a P-trap, refinishing a floor, or replacing the coolant in an air-conditioner.
This story is from the December 09, 2024 edition of The New Yorker.
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This story is from the December 09, 2024 edition of The New Yorker.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 9,000+ magazines and newspapers.
Already a subscriber? Sign In
NO WAY BACK
The resurgence, in the past decade, of Paul Schrader as one of the most accomplished and acclaimed contemporary movie directors is part of a bigger trend: the self-reinvention of Hollywood auteurs as independent filmmakers.
PRIMORDIAL SORROW
\"All Life Long,\" the title of the most recent album by the composer and organist Kali Malone, is taken from a poem by the British Symbolist author Arthur Symons: \"The heart shall be weary and wonder and cry like the sea,/ All life long crying without avail,/As the water all night long is crying to me.\"
CHOPPED AND STEWED
The other day, at a Nigerian restaurant called Safari, in Houston, Texas, I peeled back the plastic wrap on a ball of fufu, a staple across West Africa.
TOUCH WOOD
What do people do all day? My daughter loves to read Richard Scarry's book of that title, though she generally skips ahead to the hospital pages.
HELLO, HEARTBREAK
Heartbreak cures are as old as time, or at least as old as the Common Era.
ENEMY OF THE STATE
Javier Milei's plan to remake Argentina begins with waging war on the government.
THE CHOOSING ONES
The saga of my Jewish conversion began twenty-five years ago, when I got engaged to my first husband.
OBSCURE FAMILIAL RELATIONS, EXPLAINED FOR THE HOLIDAYS
Children who share only one parent are half siblings. Children who have been bisected via a tragic logging accident are also half siblings, but in a different way.
NOTE TO SELVES
The Sonoran Desert, which covers much of the southwestern United States, is a vast expanse of arid earth where cartoonish entities-roadrunners, tumbleweeds, telephone-pole-tall succulents make occasional appearances.
BADDIE ISSUES
\"Wicked\" and \"Gladiator II.\"
