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A World Without Work by Daniel Susskind review – should we be delighted or terrified? [09 Jan 2020|07:30am]

It has long been argued that workers will be replaced by machines, but now the threat is real. How will we bring about a revolution in both work and leisure?

Oscar Wilde dreamed of a world without work. In The Soul of Man Under Socialism (1891) he imagined a society liberated from drudgery by the machine: “while Humanity will be amusing itself, or enjoying cultivated leisure … or making beautiful things, or reading beautiful things, or simply contemplating the world with admiration and delight, machinery will be doing all the necessary and unpleasant work.” This aesthete’s Eden prompted one of his most famous observations: “Is this Utopian? A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at.”

In Wilde’s day the future of work was the first question that every aspiring utopian, from Edward Bellamy to HG Wells, needed to answer. Everything else, from gender relations to crime prevention, flowed from that. But proponents of the more attainable goal of drastically shorter working hours have also included Benjamin Franklin, Bertrand Russell, AT&T president Walter Gifford and John Maynard Keynes. When the great economist coined the phrase “technological unemployment” (“unemployment due to our discovery of means of economising the use of labour outrunning the pace at which we can find new uses for labour”) in Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren (1931), he focused on the potential benefits a century hence.

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The Doll by Ismail Kadare review – a fascinating study of difficult love [09 Jan 2020|09:00am]
The Albanian author explores his relationship with his mother and bittersweet memories of home

At first acquaintance, Ismail Kadare’s autobiographical novel can be read as an elegant, slightly bittersweet coming-of-age memoir, touched with nostalgia for a homeplace that is now long lost. That homeplace is the Albanian city of Gjirokastra and, more specifically, the house of Kadare’s parental ancestors, a cold but historic stone edifice that divides the two women who must share it. On the one hand, Kadare’s grandmother, its original mistress, refuses to leave the place, attempting, so it seems, to grow into the very fabric of the building. By stark contrast, his mother – the Doll of the title, who enters this dilapidated pile as a defenceless young bride – is altogether overwhelmed by having to endure her disdainful mother-in-law’s dominion, claiming that “this house eats you up”. It is here, in the midst of a conflict that is mostly tacit but nevertheless deeply felt, that the precocious teen grows into a would-be litterateur, writing one “novel” after another that consist mainly of the “big-headed” young author proclaiming his incipient genius. He even decorates each tome with its own price tag in the old, pre-communist currency and “advertisements” of its brilliance and originality.

The Doll is full of compelling details of life in a changing Albania, as the citizenry come to terms with various hues of communist rule under Soviet-backed Enver Hoxha. One of the funniest accounts is of the day, in 1953, when condoms arrive for the first time in the pharmacy: “There were contradictory instructions permitting and prohibiting them. It was suspected they might be a test to identify any weakening of the class struggle after the death of Stalin. But then it was realised that the measure was at the insistence of the Soviets and was linked to women’s rights (Rosa Luxemburg, etc), and after some hesitation by the party committee over whether communists should be advised to avoid the pharmacy and leave those bits of rubber to the increasingly depraved bourgeoisie, everything calmed down.”

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Good Husbandry by Kristin Kimball review – a new life on a community farm [09 Jan 2020|11:58am]

Sustainability and a love of the land are at the heart of a couple’s approach to farming. But grit and perseverance are essential

Kristin Kimball was a freelance writer living in New York when, at the age of 31, she went to interview an idealistic young organic farmer in Pennsylvania, “a lanky, loquacious, sharply intelligent and ridiculously energetic man”. They “clicked together like a pair of magnets” and took on a run-down farm nestling between mountains and a lake in the majestic landscape of Adirondack Park, on the rural north-eastern edge of New York State.

United by an “atavistic love for working the land”, their business model at Essex Farm is radical in every sense. Rather than growing one or two crops, they sell “memberships” so that local people can eat the way farmers used to two generations ago: “a whole diet, year-round, unprocessed, in rhythm with the seasons, from a specific piece of land, with a sense of both reverence and abundance”. For an annual fee, they supply their 200 or so members with beef, pork, chicken, eggs, vegetables, fruits, dairy, grains and flours, as well as extras such as sauerkraut, jam, maple syrup and soap. Sustainability is at the core of their approach: “feed people, be nice, don’t wreck the land”. They even use horses for farm work. As an arts graduate who had never grown a thing in her life, Kimball admits that she didn’t “know enough about farming to be afraid of it”. But as her beautifully written book shows, farming is not for the faint hearted.

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