A fearless investigation into child migrant labor. Reconstructing an activist’s tragic killing. A trip back to the place you once called home. A character study dressed as a plumbing mystery. A new look at an old trope. All that and more in this week’s installment.

1. The Kids on the Night Shift

Hannah Dreier | The New York Times Magazine | September 18, 2023 | 7,705 words

The past week saw no shortage of quality investigative reporting—Wired putting the lie to Elon Musk’s claims about Neuralink lab monkeys, ProPublica uncovering how Columbia University protected a predatorial doctor—but work like Hannah Dreier’s exposé of the child labor powering poultry plants doesn’t come along often. It begins with 14-year-old Marcos Cux getting his arm nearly torn off by a conveyor belt at 2:30 in the morning. It ends, multiple surgeries and untold heartbreaking stories later, with Cux going back to another night shift at an even more dehumanizing job. He has to; his family in Guatemala is depending on him. In between, Dreier brings you into the migrant community of rural Virginia: Dreamland, the trailer park where many of these child workers live with their relatives and guardians. The high school where exhausted children sleep through class and teachers keep their students’ overnight work schedules on sticky notes. The convenience store where teen after teen cashes in their paychecks to send money home to their families. This isn’t a drive-by, it’s a live-in, fueled by tireless reporting and peerless scenework (and phenomenal photography, courtesy of Meridith Kohut). And crucially, it’s a wake-up call. Everyone knows how the factory farming industry disrespects the animals it turns into food. They even know how that same industry feasts on the people who keep its slaughterhouses running. But until now, many of us could plead ignorance of how the Perdues and Tysons of the world, buffered by the third-party contractors they hide behind, chew through the childhoods of those who have no choice. That time is over. —PR

2. The Killing of Richard Oakes

Jason Fagone and Julie Johnson | San Francisco Chronicle | September 19, 2023 | 9,717 words

In 1969, charismatic Mohawk activist Richard Oakes led the occupation of Alcatraz, an island that was once Ohlone land. The “invasion” was in protest of the U.S. government’s treatment of Native Americans, and an act of reclamation. Oakes became the face of the “Red Power” movement, inspiring protests across the country and laying the groundwork for expanding Indigenous rights. Decades later, however, his name is largely unknown. In 1972, at just 30, he was fatally shot in the woods north of San Francisco, unarmed, by a wilderness camp caretaker who claimed self-defense. After a trial in which his shooter was acquitted, his loved ones believed that Oakes had been targeted because of his Native identity and activism. Jason Fagone and Julie Johnson dig deep to reconstruct, with meticulous detail, the events leading up to Oakes’ death. (Kudos to the whole Chronicle team for the immersive design, placing the reader right there in Oakes’ final moments in the woods.) They interview family, prosecutors, and law enforcement, and draw from hundreds of government records and secret FBI files obtained through FOIA—information never revealed during the trial—to fill in the gaps. Their words alone are powerful, but the digital presentation, including portraits of fellow activists, officials who were involved in the case, and Oakes’ living family members, come together to tell an important story about a forgotten civil rights leader. —CLR

3. Meeting Mumbai Again After a Life-Changing Loss

Shruti Swamy | AFAR | September 19, 2023 | 2,173 words

Shruti Swamy plumbs childhood memories of Mumbai, India, as she returns for the first time as a wife and mother. This is a lovely, striking meditation on what it means to return to a place you once knew—and to show it to those you love. Swamy’s dissonance is palpable when she struggles to be understood in Hindi and to navigate a city altered by time. She asks: “But is there a moment, a meal, an exchange that will make Mumbai legible to us?” As the young family visits markets, beaches, and street vendors, Swamy revels in the smells, sights, sounds, and tastes of the city. She recounts the pleasure of promised coconut cream for her four-year-old daughter and the street bite that made me want to book a plane ticket: “My husband will tear into a lifafa wrap from Swati Snacks, the both of us nearly shouting at the exquisite mix of mint and fat, the slow burn of chili. Like biting into art.”As a reader, it’s wonderful to watch as her persistence is rewarded: “Moment by moment, this city will teach me to stay awake to the present, to pay attention, to follow the thread of human connection, to take pleasure where it’s found.” If this is what it means to go home again, count me in. —KS

4. Man Called Fran

John Jeremiah Sullivan | Harper’s Magazine | August 14, 2023 | 3,700 words

I have a fear of needing to call a plumber to my house. Experience has taught me they will inevitably sigh, then inform me that whoever last ventured near my dodgy pipes was a cowboy, with hundreds of dollars now needing to be spent. My anxiety is so great that—to my immense pride—I recently fixed a running toilet myself, tying down the ballcock with a sparkly purple ribbon I found in the knickknack drawer. (A cowboy job indeed.) Obviously, I leapt to read John Jeremiah Sullivan’s delightful piece about his own plumbing woes. His innocuous opening sentence, “Here is the tale of something plumbing-related that happened at my house[,]” belies the rollercoaster journey you are about to embark on. Halfway through, I was just as invested in where that mysterious sewage smell was coming from as Sullivan. To find the solution, we have to go rogue, bringing in Greg and Fran, plumbers with “crackhead power” from the underbelly of the contractor world. Having never known of this mysterious plumber stratum, I devoured the glorious descriptions of these two men, Sullivan conjuring them from the page until I felt they stood in front of me: Fran with his buzzcut and denim culottes, bitching about Greg; Greg with his “formidable gray mustache, strong hands, and wild, piercing eyes” talking at length about bowel movements. Sullivan may be as flummoxed by plumbing issues as I am, but he is a master in character study. —CW

5. “Florida Man,” Explained

Kristen Arnett | Vox | September 18, 2023 | 1,634 words

Have you played the game Florida Man? It’s simple: type your birthday (month, date) and “Florida Man” into a search bar. You will be regaled (as I was) with not one, but several inane crimes committed over the years by men in Florida. As Kristen Arnett explains, “These crimes are odd and incomprehensible; the kind of behavior that someone might associate with a badly behaved toddler whose brain has yet to fully develop.” I had several to choose from; my favorite was the Florida Man who was caught on video driving down I-4 while standing up, his upper body poking through the sunroof. Arnett explains that the game is made possible because of the Sunshine Law, which makes arrest records and mugshots “readily available online for the general public to gawk and point at. If you’ve committed a crime in the Sunshine State, that information becomes accessible to everyone, everywhere, immediately.” This piece is far more than just a litany of bizarre behavior. Arnett, a third-generation Floridian, suggests that while the Florida Man meme makes it easy for outsiders to dismiss the state as the epicenter of America’s ills, we need to look deeper. “I think the harder lesson is that Florida is no different from anywhere else; the headlines just turn our hardships into a joke to make things more palatable,” she writes. “We can’t and won’t disregard the fact that we’re going to stay strange and continue to be completely, authentically ourselves; we also can’t forget the wonderful alongside the troubles.” Maybe it’s time we embraced that little bit of Florida Man in all of us. —KS

Audience Award

What was our readers’ favorite this week? The envelope, please.

While teenagers work legally all over America, Marcos’s job was strictly off limits. Federal law prohibits 14- and 15-year-olds from working at night or for more than three hours on school days. Older teenagers are allowed to put in longer hours, but all minors are barred from the most dangerous occupations, including digging trenches, repairing roofs and cleaning slaughterhouses.

But as more children come to the United States to help their families, more are ending up in these plants. Throughout the company towns that stud the “broiler belt,” which stretches from Delaware to East Texas, many have suffered brutal consequences. A Guatemalan eighth grader was killed on the cleaning shift at a Mar-Jac plant in Mississippi in July; a federal investigation had found migrant children working illegally at the company a few years earlier. A 14-year-old was hospitalized in Alabama after being overworked at a chicken operation there. A 17-year-old in Ohio had his leg torn off at the knee while cleaning a Case Farms plant. Another child lost a hand in a meat grinder at a Michigan operation.

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Seth Simons | Longreads | August 17, 2023 | 15 minutes (4,165 words)

When Hollywood studio executives refused to meet the reasonable demands of the writers who had made them richer than kings, they deprived the world of a historic spectacle: Pete Davidson’s return to the show that transformed him from a human being into a celebrity. The comedian was set to host Saturday Night Live on May 6, a booking timed to promote his semi-autobiographical TV series Bupkis, not to be confused with his semi-autobiographical film The King of Staten Island (itself not to be confused with Staten Island Summer, the semi-autobiographical film penned by fellow SNL star Colin Jost). Then again, maybe some confusion is appropriate. These works may not be particularly memorable or well-reviewed, but they represent a peculiar version of the American dream, one that very few people have realized and a great many have pursued. For those who attain it, an upper-class life awaits: fame, wealth, adoring fans, the freedom to make the art they wish to make, and to make it with their friends and peers, even if it’s not very good. All they have to do to earn this freedom is devote their lives to one strange and powerful man. 

I refer, of course, to SNL creator and executive producer Lorne Michaels, who receives a writing credit on every episode of the long-running variety series and waited until more than a month into the strike to comment on it publicly—in an interview at the Cannes Lions advertising festival. Perhaps he was unaccustomed to encountering the outer limits of his power. The strike achieved something not even COVID-19 could do three years earlier, when Michaels continued producing the show with a live, unvaccinated studio audience, in seeming defiance of New York guidelines. It’s a testament to SNL’s astonishing cultural influence that he was able to game a state government’s health policy during the height of a pandemic. And it’s a testament to the power of Hollywood’s writers—and to the dire conditions they work under—that this time, the show did not go on. 

Michaels is intimately acquainted with this power, having spent the last half-century using SNL to launch bankable talents and profit from their careers. Bupkis isn’t just a Pete Davidson vehicle; it’s a Lorne Michaels production. So is Staten Island Summer, for that matter, and Shrill, The Tonight Show, Schmigadoon!, and That Damn Michael Che—not to mention the recently departed The Other Two and Kenan. The promise of SNL under Michaels’ leadership is simple: If you are loyal to the family, you will reap handsome rewards. Over almost 50 years, that promise has come to justify a legacy of alleged workplace abuses ranging from the familiar to the shocking. Beyond 30 Rock’s walls, it has become the promise of the massive live comedy ecosystem feeding SNL, an amorphous network of small businesses that successfully encoded their exploitative labor practices and regressive cultural norms into the industry’s DNA. As they churned ruthlessly through generations of comedy workers, they helped create the world we’re in now, the one Hollywood writers and actors are striking to change. It’s a world where talent and hard work aren’t nearly enough to earn a stable living; a world where a few fabulously wealthy men hold the power to shape entire art forms in their image. 

It’s a world where one of them already has. 

The critical discourse surrounding TV’s longest-running variety series traditionally revolves around a boring question: is it funny? That’s not why we’re here. As a comedy lover and critic, I’ve come to believe that whether a work contains the mystical quality of funniness—the power to reach inside your body and give you sudden, uncontrollable pleasure—is usually the most obvious and therefore least interesting thing about it. More interesting to consider is what the thing says, and whether what it says is true. More interesting still is what it costs, and whether this cost is worthwhile. 

In the age of mass media, the journey a joke takes from creator to audience is fraught with risk. It touches many people along the way, some in more vulnerable positions than others. Even the end of the journey is not really the end. Like all forms of communication, comedy has the power to influence people’s beliefs and behaviors, not least their behavior as comedy consumers. This gives it the power to earn significant capital for its creators—financial, social, cultural, even political—which they can use to enact their own desires. 

This is what interests me about SNL. For almost its entire existence, its workers have been very clear about its costs. From interns to stars, they’ve described the show as an intensely discriminatory workplace run by a cold, manipulative boss. As they’ve told us this, SNL has grown into one of the most important institutions in American culture. For the last five decades, it has served as a chokepoint in the Hollywood talent pipeline, plucking writers and performers from a precarious live comedy ecosystem and giving them the capital they need to play in the big leagues. Which they have. It would not be exaggerating to say their work has defined comedy practically since SNL premiered. Animal House, Beverly Hills Cop, Three Amigos, Wayne’s World, Ghostbusters, Austin Powers, Mean Girls, Mr. Show, 3rd Rock from the Sun, That ’70s Show, The Office, 30 Rock, Parks and Recreation, Brooklyn Nine-Nine, Portlandia, Detroiters, the careers of Eddie Murphy, Chris Rock, Phil Hartman, Adam Sandler, Will Ferrell, Norm Macdonald, Molly Shannon, Conan O’Brien, Jimmy Fallon, Tina Fey, Seth Meyers, Amy Poehler, John Mulaney, Bill Hader—SNL’s contributions to the form are astounding. Not since the Hollywood studio system has one institution created so many careers.

With this in mind, I would like to discuss Lorne Michaels’ management style. 

A few things to remember. One: SNL operates in the image of its executive producer. He created it, he produces every episode, he selects every cast member and every host and every sketch, and he takes pride in knowing everything that goes on in his office. (“It’s not like me to not be aware of things,” he told Alison Castle in Saturday Night Live: The Book.) When he left in 1980, the show struggled so much that NBC brought him back five years later. He’s been there ever since, with relatively little interference from network brass. “It’s Lorne’s show,” NBCUniversal’s TV and streaming operations chairman Mark Lazarus told Variety recently. “He’s calling the shots.”

Two: If late night is big business, SNL appears to be the biggest business in late night. Its budget for Season 45, in 2018-2019, was at least $101 million, or about $4.8 million per episode. (The next season, the most recent for which this data is available, cost $91 million, likely due to several “at-home” episodes during the early pandemic lowering production costs.) In the 2021-2022 season, the average 30-second ad spot during the show’s broadcast cost $164,000. Multiply by 21 episodes with 26 minutes of commercials and you’ve got over $179 million in revenue from linear advertising alone. That Variety report offers useful context: in 2022, the seven major late night shows—SNL, The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, Late Night with Seth Meyers, Jimmy Kimmel Live!, The Daily Show, The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, and The Late Late Show with James Corden—made a combined $412.7 million from TV ads.

Three: Almost everything that you are about to read has been a matter of public record for years, if not decades.

As original cast member Dan Aykroyd and current cast member Colin Jost have said, SNL is a young person’s game. The show hires talented early-career artists and asks them to give it everything; all-nighters and 90-hour weeks aren’t out of the ordinary. The pressures are high, as are the potential rewards: An SNL credit is a golden ticket not only for relatively well-paid writers and performers, but also for interns, assistants, and other production staffers, whose jobs are even more precarious than their colleagues above the line. No matter where they appear in the credits, however, SNL is a workplace where everyone ends up feeling expendable. That’s because the job is ultimately much more than making comedy. It’s navigating what former cast member Harry Shearer once called “a highly complex, highly political hierarchical organization masquerading as a college dorm.” At the top of that hierarchy is SNL’s soft-spoken, 78-year-old executive producer.

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What do we know about how Michaels runs things? Quite a bit. Described in James Andrew Miller and Tom Shales’ oral history Live From New York as both “a psychological terrorist” and “Daddy,” Michaels has cultivated a paternal relationship with his employees since the show’s earliest days. To be clear, paternal does not mean warm. By an astonishing number of accounts, his modus operandi is to remain distant and cold (to use Bob Odenkirk’s words in that book) toward the people under him, meticulously withholding praise to the point that they’ll do whatever it takes to earn his approval. He establishes this dynamic at the beginning of a relationship—refusing to laugh during auditions, making prospective hires wait for hours before he meets with them—and maintains it even with tenured company men. “Lorne wants people to feel insecure,” a former star told New York’s Chris Smith in 1995. “It’s the same techniques cults use—they keep you up for hours, they never let you know that you’re okay, and they always make you think that your spot could be taken at any moment by someone else.”

“He rules on the theory of a house divided is a house that’s more easily controlled,” Janeane Garofalo once said, echoing others who observed that Michaels is more apt to reward difficult or childish people than loyal foot soldiers. At the same time, he diligently extracts loyalty through bizarre tests and unspoken rules. According to New York, Michaels is known to punish cast members who displease him—for instance, by taking roles in movies he’s not producing—by nixing their sketches or assigning unfavorable time slots. When Bill Hader was cast, SNL flew him to New York on the same flight as a not-yet-hired Andy Samberg, from whom Hader was instructed to keep his own hiring a secret. After Colin Jost’s first season as “Weekend Update” anchor, he was invited to re-audition for the gig, learned from his manager that his audition was successful, then received a furious call from a producer who told him Michaels was angry that Jost had told his manager the news. (To recap: he hadn’t.) By that point, Jost was a nine-year SNL veteran and co-head writer. “Until you’re actually on the air,” he wrote in his memoir, “you have no idea if Lorne will change his mind and give it to someone else.”

It would be one thing if Michaels were simply a weird, old-fashioned guy who plays mind games with his employees. The problem is that SNL has an extensive history of much more hostile work conditions. “There was a certain pride taken in not treating people well,” one ’70s-era assistant said in Doug Hill and Jeff Weingrad’s 1986 book, Saturday Night: A Backstage History of Saturday Night Live. Or, as writer Fred Wolf recalled an unidentified woman from the original cast telling him in the ’90s: “That place is evil.”

Gender-based harassment has blossomed under Michaels’ leadership since year one, when John Belushi refused to perform in sketches written by women and intentionally sabotaged them during read-throughs. The boys’ club atmosphere persisted through the ‘90s, when Chris Farley’s handsiness with women was so frequent that longtime producers Mike Shoemaker and Jim Downey pranked him with a fake sexual harassment lawsuit (while brushing aside the extra who lodged a real complaint against him). Last year, former production staffers told Insider about the demeaning sexual jokes and unwanted advances they dealt with in the early 2000s, an era when “male members of the cast and staff would hook up with female college-age interns at post-show parties.” Former cast member Jerry Minor recalled feeling “disturbed” by the presence of “obviously teenage girls” at these events. This was the same era, according to a lawsuit settled last year, when Horatio Sanz groomed and abused a teenage fan whom he brought to SNL cast parties—including one where Jimmy Fallon introduced her to Michaels himself, and another one where Sanz assaulted her as fellow cast members looked on. “If you want to metoo me you have every right,” Sanz allegedly texted her in 2019, insisting he would “swear on a stack of improv books … I’m a different person.” (His attorney denied the allegations, while NBC argued in court filings that it was not liable for actions that allegedly took place off its premises.) 

Just as SNL’s maleness empowered its men to mistreat their female colleagues, the show’s whiteness made it an environment where, to name just a few examples: Black actors were given few and stereotypical characters by white writers; Michaels was unlikely to place two sketches about Black characters in succession; performers wore blackface well into the early 2000s, with Michaels defending the practice in 2008; and future The White Lotus and Insecure star Natasha Rothwell resorted to raising her hand in order to pitch jokes in the writers’ room less than a decade ago. The show’s poor record is difficult to divorce from its leadership: if SNL was ever a show by white men, for white men, it was because Michaels didn’t care to make it anything else.

One incident illuminates this clearly. In 2013, cast members Kenan Thompson and Jay Pharoah made headlines when they criticized SNL’s longstanding failures to hire Black women. Asked about this controversy in Live From New York, Michaels and his deputies magnanimously forgave Thompson and Pharoah for being so careless as to get suckered by the press. (Pharoah later said he was nearly fired for his remarks.) Blithely noting that SNL is not taxpayer-funded, Michaels added that he’d seen “fifty or sixty” Black women audition over the years—one or two per season—but “we’re about finding people who are funny.” 

It’s an interesting thing about people in his position: They rarely seem to consider that their senses of humor might be informed by their identities: their race, for instance, or gender, age, class, or whether they’ve spent 40 years making a sketch comedy show for NBC. Nor do they seem interested in the systemic effects of the systems they run. In that same section of Live From New York, former producer Lindsay Shookus complained that even after “the flap about ethnic casting,” as Michaels called it, barely any talent representatives submitted Black women to the show. Longtime writer Paula Pell blamed the pipeline. “There were many times with auditions, you know, that we weren’t getting as many diverse people that we needed to,” she said, echoing her remarks on SNL’s failure to hire women and gay people: “A lot of times, people auditioning for SNL came from that sea of improvisational comedians—Second City and Groundlings and UCB—and oftentimes that community of people was not quite as diverse as you would wish.”

Well, yes. It was designed that way.

I am going to say something crazy: talent is not rare. Talent is plentiful. I can go to any comedy theater or club or DIY show in New York tonight and see professional-grade work by some of the funniest people I’ll ever see. Many of these comedians would kill to work at SNL, even knowing everything we know about it. I can’t blame them. SNL is a great job. It’s one of the few places you can make comedy for a large audience and make a livable income. This has always been true, but lately it matters more. It’s a network show with a massive writers’ room in an industry where rooms are shrinking; it has long seasons in a medium where they’re getting shorter; it trains writers in every aspect of TV production, a norm that’s increasingly falling out of practice; and for those who play the game well, it ensures high-paying work for life. (Colin Jost has commanded a fee of $70,000 per hour for recent college standup gigs.)

It’s also virtually the only place you can livably make sketch comedy, a rich art form that mostly exists in free web videos, family-friendly late-night talk shows (two of which are produced by Michaels), comedy theaters like the Upright Citizens Brigade (which only started paying talent last year, after decades of selling tickets to performances by comics who had themselves paid to train at UCB) and Second City (which, to its credit, has paid as far back as the 1960s), and inevitably short-lived cable or streaming series (no disrespect). If you’re a young comedian looking to make short-form work that people watch, you’d best do everything you can to work for Lorne Michaels.

And there’s the rub. Talent abounds because it occurs naturally. What’s rare are opportunities to develop talent. These are kept artificially scarce by a live comedy ecosystem that profits off comedians while telling them their work is worthless. Its low wages, pay-to-play business models, and conservative social politics act as a filter, ensuring that few are able to gain access to gatekeepers and build competitive levels of craftsmanship. (Because the industry is located in cities with high costs of living, certain demographics tend to reach these levels more easily: perhaps there is an inverse correlation between rent prices and SNL’s quality.) The survivors are then offered up to Lorne Michaels, who every year gets his pick of the country’s finest early-career comedians—remember, SNL by design hires the young and hungry—and decides which ones get the grand prize of financial stability, even entrance into the upper class. If they play their cards right, he’ll produce their post-SNL projects through his company Broadway Video, giving himself sustained influence over their careers and a respectable share of their successes. (This is not an arrangement you typically see between TV producers and the talent they discover.) 

These people become proof of the system’s value to all comedians, when really it’s directly opposed to their interests. Forget the lucky ones, the stars we’re not inclined to weep for. When we zoom out and view comedy workers as a class, we see that this system functions parasitically: it sucks them dry and discards them in its quest for the ones it can turn into Amazon shills (like Colin Jost) or political satirists happy to pal around with politicians (like Dana Carvey, Jimmy Fallon, and Colin Jost). As for those few? Well, good for them, but do let me know if you ever hear an SNL alum say a single word about the Horatio Sanz case. 

It’s true that there are other ways to make a living in comedy. SNL is not the end-all. It matters because it’s a uniquely powerful machine that has shaped the art form in America for almost half a century. To be specific, it has shaped the art form according to the whims of its central creative force, a “starfucker of the highest order” (per writer Tom Davis) who “wants everybody to love him” (Chris Elliott) and gets his way through tactics that his lieutenants are apparently free to emulate. This is a man who, according to Billie Eilish in 2021, ran the show while sick with COVID-19; who personally rebuked Cecily Strong for replying to sexist comments she received on Twitter; who allegedly pressured Chris Kattan to save a film project by sleeping with the director; who allegedly sat idly by while his employees brought underage girls to cast parties; who gave Donald Trump a hosting gig in 2015 and told his writers to go easy on the candidate; who only begrudgingly prioritized the hiring of Black women in 2014 after public controversy; who in 2020 referred to the George Floyd protests as “the beginnings of the Black Lives Matter;” and who, in spite of it all, remains one of Hollywood’s most revered icons, still in charge of the same show where all this shit happened, the beloved touchstone of American comedy he’s openly run like a cult for decades, his power and prestige unblemished. Immune. 

Very rarely can we see an entire system reflected through one person. Lorne Michaels is such a person. Popular culture would look totally different without him. It’s tempting to imagine the same stars, with their same intrinsic talents, still rising to the top in his absence, but this presumes Hollywood operates by natural selection. Michaels is not a neutral arbiter; he is a specific man with specific tastes. Comedy is not a meritocracy; it is an anti-meritocracy that explicitly uses the promise of shows like SNL to justify its practice of systemically removing talent from the pool. 

This is what I mean when I talk about costs. Every year Michaels chose not to hire a person of color, or hired only one, is a year he could have given the world any number of artists on par with the ones he did hire, potentially changing the face of comedy as we know it today. If he couldn’t find any, that’s only because he sits atop a system designed to prevent them from reaching him. The same is true for subversive, form-bending comedians who always seem to be outside the white-bread norm at SNL, even as they make some of its most lauded work. Comedy is full of Sarah Shermans and Bowen Yangs, writers like Celeste Yim and Jack Handey. They’re out there right now, grinding themselves to the bone making weird, funny work for drink tickets or cab fare or nothing at all. SNL’s function—the system’s function—is to keep them there.

Then there are the other costs. If what we’ve heard is true, many people have been hurt by this show. They’ve been tormented and harassed, abused, degraded, made to believe in their own disposability, used up, and tossed aside. And for what—comedy skits? For the Blues Brothers, for Church Lady and Stefon? For David S. Pumpkins? For a hundred or so people to live like royalty? For one man to rule an empire?

This is the question that matters most about SNL, an institution best regarded not as a comedy series but as a machine that makes people famous. For decades, Michaels has masterfully optimized it for this purpose, consolidating vast swaths of cultural production in a relatively small group of people he personally anointed. This is an astonishing achievement and a horrifying one. Whatever you may think of individual celebrities—I certainly admire a few—the phenomenon of celebrity is a grave social ill. To be a star is to lose something essential of yourself, to become divorced and insulated from the world as most people live it; to commit to a life of moral compromise and complicity in fundamentally destructive systems. 

Perhaps these trade-offs are worthwhile for some who make them, but there is no denying they must be made, nor that they invite pressures the human body is not built to sustain. We can see their effects clearly in Pete Davidson’s struggles on the national stage; in the deaths of John Belushi and Chris Farley; in Jimmy Fallon’s eyes every night on The Tonight Show; in the silence of liberal icons like Tina Fey and Seth Meyers about their erstwhile colleague Horatio Sanz; in the rightward trajectories of stars across Hollywood—not only SNL alumni like Rob Schneider and Jim Breuer, but world-famous talents like Dave Chappelle and Joe Rogan. All of these people have the same affliction, and that affliction is celebrity.

At the same time, the entertainment industry’s devaluation of creativity has collapsed its middle class, giving rise to a system in which celebrity is the clearest path to financial security within it. You have to commodify yourself to succeed in Hollywood. You have to become a brand. Comedians have known this reality for a long time, which is why SNL has never lost its sway over the art form and likely never will: it does the work for them. Few have explained this power more succinctly than recent SNL breakout James Austin Johnson in an episode of WTF with Marc Maron last year. When his wife learned he got the job, Johnson told Maron, she started sobbing. She was devastated to lose the life they’d built in Los Angeles, for themselves and the child they were expecting. “That’s what she was grieving,” he said. “She had hormonal nesting grief that her bird’s nest was destroyed.” So he reassured her. 

“I was like, ‘I know this is hard for us right now, but this is how I feed us for the rest of our marriage,’” he recalled. “‘Even if I flame out spectacularly, even if I fuck everything up for us, even if I become an absolute piece of shit, from now on it’ll say SNL in the corner of my poster, and some people will come to my show.’”

“Even if I ruin our lives, I’ll always be able to feed us,” the Trump impressionist told his wife. “Because that’s what SNL does.”

That’s what SNL does.

Seth Simons writes Humorism, a newsletter about labor, inequality, and extremism in comedy. You can contact him here.

Editor: Peter Rubin
Copy editor: Carolyn Wells
Fact checker: Julie Schwietert Collazo

In early 1998—19 years after moving to the United States—dos Santos left the Bonettis, aided by a neighbor she’d befriended, Vicki Schneider. Schneider and others helped arrange for dos Santos to stay in a secret location, according to testimony Schneider later gave in court. (Schneider declined to be interviewed for this story.) The FBI and the Montgomery County adult services agency began a months-long investigation.

When social worker Annette Kerr arrived at the Bonetti home in April 1998—shortly after dos Santos had moved—she was stunned. She’d handled tough cases before, but this was different. Dos Santos lived in a chilly basement with a large hole in the floor covered by plywood. There was no toilet, Kerr, now retired, said in a recent interview, pausing often to regain her composure, tears welling in her eyes. (Renê Bonetti later acknowledged in court testimony that dos Santos lived in the basement, as well as confirmed that it had no toilet or shower and had a hole in the floor covered with plywood. He told jurors that dos Santos could have used an upstairs shower but chose not to do so.)

Dos Santos bathed using a metal tub that she would fill with water she hauled downstairs in a bucket from an upper floor, Kerr said, flipping through personal notes that she has kept all these years. Dos Santos slept on a cot with a thin mattress she supplemented with a discarded mat she’d scavenged in the woods. An upstairs refrigerator was locked so she could not open it.

“I couldn’t believe that would take place in the United States,” Kerr said.

During Kerr’s investigation, dos Santos recounted regular beatings she’d received from Margarida Bonetti, including being punched and slapped and having clumps of her hair pulled out and fingernails dug into her skin. She talked about hot soup being thrown in her face. Kerr learned that dos Santos had suffered a cut on her leg while cleaning up broken glass that was left untreated so long it festered and emitted a putrid smell.

She’d also lived for years with a tumor so large that doctors would later describe it variously as the size of a cantaloupe or a basketball. It turned out to be noncancerous.

She’d had “no voice” her whole life, Kerr concluded, “no rights.” Traumatized by her circumstances, dos Santos was “extremely passive” and “fearful,” Kerr said. Kerr had no doubt she was telling the truth. She was too timid to lie. 

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The past few years have drastically changed how we think about our relationship to work, perhaps permanently. However, they haven’t changed the fact that billions of people on this planet spend about half their waking hours exchanging labor for money in order to secure food and shelter. As such, work has remained an inescapable part of one’s identity. “What do you do?” is still a small-talk question not because the answer is usually interesting, but because the answer tells you something about the skills and knowledge that person has amassed. And when the answer is interesting, it’s hard not to feel some measure of admiration for someone whose experience falls so outside your own.

I’ve always been fascinated by those whose daily occupations carry meaning, promise adventure, or are in any way out of the ordinary. Of course, everybody’s dream job is different, but imagine swapping sitting at a computer or working on a production line for clearing landmines, dodging tornadoes, or braving the icy waters of the Bering Sea. Not for everyone, of course—but what astonishing ways to earn a living. 

The examples you’ll encounter below range from the inspirational to the unfathomable. Who would want to toil 18-hour days, or climb to dizzying heights with little to no protection? For some, that sort of life holds a deep appeal, and herein lies the hook that draws you into these stories: In attempting to understand the motivations of others, we are by reflex attempting to understand ourselves. Each of these pieces moved me in some way, and I hope that they move you also.

Chasing Tornadoes (Priit J. Vesilind, National Geographic, April 2004)

As this mesmerizing article points out, it was the 1996 film Twister that first brought the occupation of “tornado chaser” to widespread public attention. Twister was a big deal upon its release, and I can vividly recall being spellbound by the then-cutting-edge special effects: dark and furious tendrils reaching down from the sky to pluck people, cars, and houses into the sky, spinning like toys, seemingly cut adrift from gravity itself. That film, as all movies do, exaggerated the hazards faced by its protagonists—but, judging by this primary account, not by very much. That meteorologists are still throwing themselves at deadly storms nearly 30 years on tells much of the complexity behind this destructive and spectacular weather phenomenon. 

In order to study tornados, you have to get close enough to manually drop heavy probes in their path, sometimes less than 100 meters from an approaching maelstrom. In a way, it’s comforting to know that, for all our technology and sophistication, we are in no way removed from the natural systems that surround us. Nature can always outdo us, will always win. That’s not to minimize the human cost, however, nor the bravery and determination of the tornado chasers. From the very beginning, in which an entire village is sucked into the air, this piece delivers mind-boggling drama, immersing us in a disparate group of specialists who race across the United States to seek out something most others would sooner avoid—all in the interest of furthering our understanding of an uncontrollable phenomenon.

But we’re late, and out of position. If we try to drive around the storm, we won’t have enough daylight left to see it. So we decide to “punch the core” of the thunderstorm, forcing our way into the “bear’s cage,” an area between the main updraft and the hail. It’s an apt name: Chasing tornadoes is like hunting grizzlies—you want to get close, but not on the same side of the river. Sometimes you get the bear; sometimes the bear gets you.

And so we head straight into the storm and find ourselves splattering mud at 60 miles an hour (97 kilometers an hour) on a two-lane road, threatening to hydroplane, visibility near zero. Anton is less than comforting. “The hail in the bear’s cage smashes windows and car tops,” he shouts, grinning. “The smaller stuff is kept aloft by the updraft, and only the large chunks fall. It’s like small meteorites banging down. Ha-ha-ha!”

In The Race For Better Cell Service, Men Who Climb Towers Pay With Their Lives (Ryan Knutson and Liz Day, ProPublica, May 2012)

Once again, we encounter a piece that draws aside the invisible curtain to glimpse the grueling efforts that enable our everyday creature comforts—in this case, the world of mobile communications networks. If you’ve ever shuddered at a TikTok video of a worker balanced precariously atop a tower at vertigo-inducing heights, this article probably isn’t for you. Yet, for such a dangerous job—cell tower climbing routinely claims up to 10 times the number of human lives as the conventional construction industry—it pays a relatively modest wage. What is it, then, that drives people to take up such work?

As a project manager quoted in the piece says, “You’ve got to have a problem to hang 150 feet in the air on an eight-inch strap.” Yet the workers featured in this piece, despite some suffering horrible injuries, clearly love their jobs. It’s not hard to understand the buzz that must come from routinely doing something that most people could not (and would not) do, along with sense of freedom that must come with climbing aloft to look down upon the world. As with the cobalt mining industry—itself the subject of another story in this list—there is a dark underside to this business, as sub-contractors routinely cut corners and take risks in the quest for a few extra dollars.

The greatness in Knutson and Day’s article, as with others collected here, lies in its ability to bring to life the stories and personalities of the people whose hard work makes life easier for us all. If you’re reading this on your smartphone, take a moment to consider the often-obscured reality behind mobile technology—a technology that, by its very nature, is largely invisible.

The surge of cell work forever altered tower climbing, an obscure field of no more than 10,000 workers. It attracted newcomers, including outfits known within the business as “two guys and a rope.” It also exacerbated the industry’s transient, high-flying culture.

Climbers live out of motel rooms, installing antennas in Oklahoma one day, building a tower in Tennessee the next. The work attracts risk-takers and rebels. Of the 33 tower fatalities for which autopsy records were available, 10 showed climbers had drugs or alcohol in their systems.

The Cobalt Pipeline (Todd C. Frankel, The Washington Post, September 2016)

This is where mobile technology begins: the dangerous and dirty business of mining for cobalt, a mineral essential to the construction of smartphones and laptops. As a species we are finally becoming aware that every modern amenity carries an ecological price, and that price is often paid most dearly (and ironically) by nations that are monetarily poor but resource-rich. In our relentless drive “forward,” it is often the most vulnerable who pay the price. Mining is not a calling for these men; it is a necessity.

However, there is hope to be found in this troubling story—specifically, the very fact of its existence. The best journalism reduces global issues to a human scale, and by taking us into the lives of Congolese miners risking life and limb in pursuit of the rare metal, writer Todd C. Frankel forces us to ask ourselves some uncomfortable questions.  

But Mayamba, 35, knew nothing about his role in this sprawling global supply chain. He grabbed his metal shovel and broken-headed hammer from a corner of the room he shares with his wife and child. He pulled on a dust-stained jacket. A proud man, he likes to wear a button-down shirt even to mine. And he planned to mine by hand all day and through the night. He would nap in the underground tunnels. No industrial tools. Not even a hard hat. The risk of a cave-in is constant.

“Do you have enough money to buy flour today?” he asked his wife.

She did. But now a debt collector stood at the door. The family owed money for salt. Flour would have to wait.

Mayamba tried to reassure his wife. He said goodbye to his son. Then he slung his shovel over his shoulder. It was time.

Making Our Home Safe Again: Meet the Women Who Clear Land Mines (Jessie Williams, The Observer, January 2021)

War leaves scars on every country it touches, sometimes literally: one of its most insidious instruments is buried explosives, set to trigger at the touch of a human foot. Land mines have been a topic of discussion for many years, catapulted to the front of the news in 1997, when Princess Diana raised awareness by walking through a field of live explosives in Angola. (She was a guest of the Halo Trust, an organization that undertakes the arduous and dangerous task of clearing such places for the local populace.)

Little can be more terrifying than the knowledge that each step you take could be your last. It’s a sudden, senseless, death, one without discernment or mercy. But in this inspiring story, life comes full circle, as Hana Khider returns to her ancestral homeland of the Sinjar mountains in northwestern Iraq. When Khider was a child, her mother told her stories of the family homeland they were forced to flee; now, as an adult, she works as part of a team of deminers, making that homeland safe once again. As meaningful as this work is, it also carries with it the deadliest of dangers: an average of nine people a day still fall victim to these terrible remnants of conflict.

At the start of this month, a 24-year-old man working for MAG was killed in an explosion at a munitions storage facility in Iraq’s Telefar district – a reminder of the dangers these deminers face every single day. Iraq has around 1,800 sq km of contaminated land (an area bigger than Greater London) stemming from multiple conflicts, including the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s, the Gulf War, the 2003 US-led invasion, and the Isis occupation of 2014. The Iraqi government has a target deadline of February 2028 to clear the country, which Morgan thinks is optimistic. “Last year, operators cleared just over 15 sq km,” he says. Covid-19 hasn’t helped. This year MAG has managed to disarm 1,200 mines; usually it would be 6,750 mines.

Dispatches: Life on an Alaskan Crab Boat (Andy Cochrane, Men’s Journal, April 2021)

We have always projected a certain romance onto the idea of working on the high seas, and a dignity upon those individuals brave enough to do so. For this piece, journalist Andy Cochrane signs up for a week’s work on the fishing boat Silver Spray, one of just 60 such vessels responsible for supplying all of North America with snow crab. Facing long hours, rough water, and freezing conditions, the work is as grueling as could be imagined, but surprisingly Cochrane encounters only good humor, pragmatism, and an inspiring sense of brotherhood amongst the crew.

This is work that is as fundamental to human existence as can be found. People have to eat, after all. But what really strikes me about this piece—and is a sentiment echoed by its author—is the remarkable positivity of the fishermen, which surely can’t be put down to a sense of pride and decent wages alone. Perhaps it’s the extreme conditions and the hardships that help foster such a sense of togetherness and wry determination. Whatever the cause, this is another absorbing peek into a job few of us would wish to undertake.

I was curious how these guys found their way to the industry and how they hadn’t burned out. Attrition is incredibly high, for obvious reasons—freezing temperatures, rough seas and long, exhausting hours. All three laughed off my greenhorn question, and we returned to tips on how I would survive the week.

Jose, an immigrant from El Salvador and father of two, has lived in Anchorage since the ’90s. Quiet, always smiling, and always working, he’s fished his entire career. Leo, raised in Samoa and now living in Vegas, also has two kids. Even with frozen fingers and toes, he never stopped making jokes. Jeffery, who lives half the year in the Philippines with his wife and three kids, would often give me a fist bump and say “you’ll be all right, everyone goes through this” after I puked, which happened 11 more times the first day.

Chris Wheatley is a writer and journalist based in Oxford, U.K. He has too many guitars, too many records, and not enough cats.

Editor: Peter Rubin
Copy Editor: Carolyn Wells

Much of the public response to language models like OpenAI’s ChatGPT has focused on all the jobs they appear poised to automate. But behind even the most impressive AI system are people — huge numbers of people labeling data to train it and clarifying data when it gets confused. Only the companies that can afford to buy this data can compete, and those that get it are highly motivated to keep it secret. The result is that, with few exceptions, little is known about the information shaping these systems’ behavior, and even less is known about the people doing the shaping.

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What happens when the only way to ensure the survival of the people you love the most is to leave them behind?

That’s a choice no one should have to make, and yet it is the dilemma of overseas workers everywhere, no less so than in the Philippines, which exports about a fourth of the world’s 11.5 million migrant domestic workers, a predominantly female army of nannies, maids, and cooks. A significant percentage of these women are mothers separated from their own kids while caring for the children of others, sending home remittances and boxes of chocolate, Spam, and other treats, and wondering if their husbands are faithful and how many years will pass before they can see their families again.

“In the eyes of many employers, Filipinas were at the top of the ethnic hierarchy for domestic workers,” Rachel Aviv writes in one of the powerful stories below, “as if their nationality had become synonymous with family duty and deference.” Such sought-after traits have been a blessing and a curse, giving Filipinas access to the lives of elite families in cities like Hong Kong, Dubai, and New York City, but also subjecting them to highly exploitative and even dangerous situations.

Adding to their burdens, overseas Filipino workers (OFWs) have been called on to be “modern-day heroes” and uber-patriots. “Now, more than ever, we need you, the OFWs and your families, to take part in our nation-building efforts,” former President Rodrigo Duterte once said. “I thus call on you … to make our country proud.”

Laborers who remain in the Philippines, meanwhile, face their own dismal work prospects, such as foraging for discarded valuables in Payatas, a former dumpsite outside of Manila. Whether at home or abroad, Filipino laborers struggle valiantly to preserve their humanity amid hellish work demands.

You might not think that emotionally and physically arduous labor would be an inviting subject for longform writing, but it is. That’s because the writers featured in this collection portray the subjects of their stories not as victims but instead as three-dimensional people. As a journalism professor who has also reported on labor, occupational safety, and immigrant health issues, I turn to these compelling and well-researched narratives to illustrate how to report with empathy and care.

My Filipino American students in the Literary Journalism Program at the University of California, Irvine, appear to connect to the stories in this collection at an almost cellular level.

“I didn’t realize we could be in these stories or write these stories,” a student told me after reading the work of Filipino American author Alex Tizon, whose essay is featured in this collection.

Representation matters.

Fortunately, the U.S. media has broadened its coverage of Filipino and Filipino American narratives in recent years, and we now read about Filipino American entertainers, food culture, and political leaders. But it’s important not to forget the cost—borne by so many Filipino laborers—of toiling at the hardest jobs imaginable to provide for the people they love.

The following five excellent pieces reveal the endless work ethic of Filipino workers— those who leave and those who stay.

My Family’s Slave (Alex Tizon, The Atlantic, June 2017)

With deft sentences and restrained prose, Alex Tizon recounts the story of Lola (Eudocia Tomas Polido), a servant who accompanied his family when they moved from the Philippines to the U.S. in 1964. Tizon exposes the horrors of modern-day servitude in a deeply personal and indelible way. Sadly, he died a few months before the piece was published as The Atlantic’s cover story, which went viral and generated both praise and criticism.

The story begins for Tizon at birth, when Lola served as a maid, cook, and nanny to his family while his parents worked to establish themselves in the U.S. By the age of 11, Tizon had come to understand that his beloved caretaker—who was “given” to his mother, then a child living in the Philippines—received no salary. Lola slept in random spaces of Tizon’s home, such as on the couch or in the laundry room. Lacking documentation, she could never leave the U.S. to return home; she also suffered physical abuse and cruelty at the hands of Tizon’s parents.

No other word but slave encompassed the life she lived. Her days began before everyone else woke and ended after we went to bed. She prepared three meals a day, cleaned the house, waited on my parents, and took care of my four siblings and me. My parents never paid her, and they scolded her constantly. She wasn’t kept in leg irons, but she might as well have been. So many nights, on my way to the bathroom, I’d spot her sleeping in a corner, slumped against a mound of laundry, her fingers clutching a garment she was in the middle of folding.

What strikes me each time I reread this piece is Tizon’s anguish over his family’s treatment of Lola. He also wrestles mightily with his own complicity, despite having provided Lola a pampered life when he became an adult. But as this story reminds us, good deeds don’t wipe away the sins of the past. Tizon’s final published piece is a testament to how difficult it is to forgive our family and how it’s even harder to forgive ourselves.

After Lola’s death at 86, Tizon hand-carried Lola’s ashes back to her remaining family in the Philippines, in a beautifully rendered scene of pure grief among the now-aged people who knew her as a youngster. En route to this encounter, Tizon draws on the islands’ fortitude—surprising, given their fragile formation—to suggest a metaphor for the spirit of Lola and the enduring work ethic of her beleaguered yet resilient people.

Life here is routinely visited by cataclysm. Killer typhoons that strike several times a year. Bandit insurgencies that never end. Somnolent mountains that one day decide to wake up. The Philippines isn’t like China or Brazil, whose mass might absorb the trauma. This is a nation of scattered rocks in the sea. When disaster hits, the place goes under for a while. Then it resurfaces and life proceeds … and the simple fact that it’s still there makes it beautiful.

The Cost of Caring (Rachel Aviv, The New Yorker, April 2016)

Lola is only one face of the Philippines’ massive overseas workforce. In this New Yorker piece, Rachel Aviv portrays another laborer, Emma, who leaves her nine children behind and becomes a nanny to wealthy families in the U.S. In a heartbreaking moment before her departure, Emma faces doubts too enormous to ignore.

She said, “My conscience was telling me, ‘Don’t leave your kids. Don’t leave your kids. They are young and need you.’”

But like all working mothers, she chooses work over her children. Or, more accurately, she chooses work to provide for her children. I strongly connect to Aviv’s writing—which is as elegant as her research is exhaustive—and the piece’s theme of anguished working motherhood. I hated leaving my firstborn with strangers even though his babysitters provided loving care. My plight is of course trivial in comparison to mothers like Emma, who live apart from their children for years and even decades while they channel their maternal instincts toward the children of others. I wonder: Is this rerouted maternal love a form of consolation, or a source of bitter pain?

Either way, it’s clear that Emma’s children never stopped yearning for their mother’s return during her 16-plus-year absence, during which she mainly talked to her daughters through Facebook and brief telephone conversations (five minutes for each child). And while her girls gained opportunities from Emma’s sacrifice, these advantages didn’t seem to take them far enough. We learn at the end of Aviv’s story that their economic prospects in the Philippines have not improved much in their mother’s absence—one daughter has already emigrated to Abu Dhabi to work as a secretary—which is a stunning revelation given everything that Emma sacrificed to provide for a better future. And so the arduous toil of hardworking Filipina caregivers continues: 

Emma’s daughters and their friends wished to go abroad, too, if not to America then to Japan or Hong Kong or New Zealand. “I think there’s no end to the cycle,” Emma told me. She found it hard to resist the idea of her daughters joining her in New York. She hasn’t seen them in sixteen years and still can’t discuss the separation without quietly crying. Over time, the tone of her children’s letters has evolved; there is less rivalry and more resignation. In the early years, the children kept guessing which holidays might be the occasion for Emma’s return. Gradually, they stopped asking about her plans. “I believe someday, if God permits, you can be with us once again,” her daughter Roxanne recently wrote.

Departures (Tan Tuck Ming, The Kenyon Review, October 2022)

Working for an employment recruitment agency in international domestic work, Tan Tuck Ming brings a unique vantage point to this essay about Filipina housekeepers in Hong Kong. But for him the issue is also personal: He was cared for by a beloved Filipina housekeeper as a child, and it’s clear that her kindness left an imprint on his soul. Ming’s piece mines some of the same material as Aviv’s, but the essay form allows for more rumination and ties together personal narrative with historical and theoretical frameworks. Here, for example, he discusses migrant caregiving as the fuel powering the economic engine of international commerce:

[T]he way I understand an economy is as vertical motion, people either moving up or down but never staying still. This is how cities like Hong Kong or Singapore—these dense, vertiginous centers for global capital and its circulation … are made possible by tracing the fissures of nation, empire, and debt; by the subdivision of labor charted as unskilled within the topographies of capitalism to a secondary class of migrant workers. “We need to protect domestic workers with all our might,” a member of the legislative council says, at an antitrafficking fundraising event. “After all, without them, Hong Kong cannot unleash its economic power. We must be grateful to them for releasing our workforce.” 

This politician’s statement is of course vexing. I wonder if a low-earning Filipina maid in Hong Kong actually aspires to unleash the power of the wealth-gathering class. And yet the comment suggests a key truth, which is that the center of Hong Kong’s economic juggernaut is not a technology or financial infrastructure so much as a beating heart—that of the industrious, loving Filipina caretaker.

The Laborers Who Keep Dick Pics and Beheadings Out of Your Facebook Feed (Adrian Chen, Wired, October 2014)

Of course, Filipino labor doesn’t only occur overseas. In fact, the Philippines is one of America’s leading outsourcing destinations for customer service, technical support, and other industries.

Adrian Chen explores the highly stressful labor of content moderators, whose job is to evaluate questionable uploads to social media and to remove offensive, harmful, and inappropriate material. And this profession takes a toll, as Chen documents in interviews with workers in the Philippines who spend all day looking at the beheadings, sexual assaults, animal abuse, and other horrendous content that users attempt to post on Facebook and other platforms. Chen shows us an invisible workforce taking on the worst of humanity to make our reading and viewing online more benign. But as always, it’s the laborer—and in this case, the Filipino/a worker—who makes a massive sacrifice to enable our scrolling pleasure.

In a shopping mall, I meet a young woman who I’ll call Maria. She’s on her lunch break from an outsourcing firm, where she works on a team that moderates photos and videos for the cloud storage service of a major US technology company….“I get really affected by bestiality with children,” she says. “I have to stop. I have to stop for a moment and loosen up, maybe go to Starbucks and have a coffee.” She laughs at the absurd juxtaposition of a horrific sex crime and an overpriced latte.

Constant exposure to videos like this has turned some of Maria’s coworkers intensely paranoid. Every day they see proof of the infinite variety of human depravity. They begin to suspect the worst of people they meet in real life, wondering what secrets their hard drives might hold. Two of Maria’s female coworkers have become so suspicious that they no longer leave their children with babysitters. They sometimes miss work because they can’t find someone they trust to take care of their kids.

The Magic Mountain (Matthew Power, Harper’s Magazine, December 2006)

In this final selection, the late great adventure writer Matthew Power explores one of the world’s notorious trash dumps at the time in Payatas, a barangay outside of Manila.

In this literally toxic workplace, enterprising foragers dig for buried trash items they can sell: copper wires, old cell phones, even a frozen swordfish thrown out by a restaurant. It’s grubby and exhausting work, and some of the foragers live on the site (at least at the time of Power’s visit). The descriptions are as precise as the site filthy:

The ground underneath our boots is spongy, and as we climb, black rivulets of leachate flow down the access road. A black puddle releases methane, bubbles like a primordial swamp, and the ground itself shakes when a loaded truck rumbles by.

Yes, the description is memorably graphic, but the story goes well beyond capturing the gross-out factor. Power instead brings the workers on this trash mountain to life, not only showing Filipino foragers in action but also in rare moments of leisure: singing karaoke, enjoying the cockfights, even planting gardens. The piece is ultimately a paean to work ethic and labor even in supposedly menial jobs that appear simple and straightforward. The work, like the people who perform it, is complex and worthy of our admiration:

A kalahig slits open a bag as if it were a fish, garbage entrails spilling out, and with a series of rapid, economical movements, anything useful is speared and flicked into a sack to be sorted later. The ability to discern value at a glimpse, to sift the useful out of the rejected with as little expenditure of energy as possible, is the great talent of the scavenger. 

I appreciate that Power goes beyond “studying” his subjects through the lens of first-world superiority and instead gives us reason to respect their immense work ethic and love of family. Sadly, like Tizon, Power died long before his time, in 2014. 

Amy DePaul is a college journalism instructor at the University of California, Irvine. She reports on public health, immigrant communities, and labor. You can find her boogie-boarding at Crystal Cove.

Editor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands
Copy-editor: Krista Stevens 

For people outside the industry, the woes of TV writers can elicit a boo-hoo response: it is, after all, a more lucrative form of writing than most, right? But the economics of streaming have chipped away at what was previously a route to a middle-class life, as the cost of living in Los Angeles has crept upward. “It feels like the studios have gone through our contracts and figured out how to Frankenstein every loophole into every deal, which means that, at the very best, you can keep your head above water,” Jacqmin said. “You can maybe maintain the amount of money you made the year before, but more than likely you will be asked to cut your quote. It just feels really grim.” She added, “I’m on Twitter every other day, and I’m seeing writers who are, like, ‘Please Venmo me some grocery money. I am desperate, and I have not worked in three months. Help!’ ”

Hickman’s remained the only private company in Arizona allowed to use incarcerated workers on its own turf. Two national experts in prison labor who spoke with Cosmopolitan — Corene Kendrick and Jennifer Turner, both with the American Civil Liberties Union — could cite no other instance of a state corrections department detaining people on-site at a U.S. corporation for the corporation’s express use.

Within days of the plan’s approval, a roughly 6,000-square-foot metal-sided warehouse on the Hickman’s lot at 6515 S Jackrabbit Trail in Buckeye, Arizona, had been repurposed from an apparent vehicle hangar into a bare-bones “dormitory.” It sat in plain sight, about 200 feet back from the road, near the Hickman’s corporate headquarters and retail store, where an electric signboard and giant 3D chicken beckon customers in for “local & fresh” eggs. Over the next 14 and a half months, some 300 women total would cycle through this prison outpost, their waking lives largely devoted to maintaining the farm’s operations while the pandemic raged.

Eleven of these women — all incarcerated for nonviolent offenses, which one could argue is beside the point — shared their firsthand accounts with Cosmopolitan. Our nearly yearlong investigation also turned up thousands of pages of internal ADCRR emails, incident reports, and other documents exposing a hastily launched labor experiment for which women were explicitly chosen. Housed in conditions described by many as hideous, the women performed dangerous work at base hourly wages as low as $4.25, working on skeleton crews decimated in part by COVID. At least one suffered an injury that left her permanently disfigured. These are their stories.

Unlike broken windows, burnout has shed its roots in the social scientific vision of urban crisis: We don’t tend to associate the term with the city and its tumultuous history. But it’s actually quite telling that Freudenberger saw himself and his burned-out coworkers as akin to burned-out buildings. Though he didn’t acknowledge it in his own exploration of the term, those torched buildings had generated value by being destroyed. In transposing the city’s creative destruction onto the bodies and minds of the urban care workers who were attending to its plight, Freudenberger’s burnout likewise telegraphed how depletion, even to the point of destruction, could be profitable. After all, Freudenberger and his coworkers at the free clinic were struggling to patch the many holes of a healthcare system that valued profit above access.

Many left critics of the burnout paradigm have faulted the concept for individualizing and naturalizing the large-scale social antagonisms of neoliberal times. “Anytime you wanna use the word burnout replace it with trauma and exploitation,” reads one representative tweet from the Nap Ministry, a project that advocates rest as a form of resistance. They’re not wrong. In Freudenberger’s chapter on preventing burnout, for instance, he exhorts us to “acknowledge that the world is the way it is” and warns, “We can’t despair over it, dwell on the pity of it, or agitate about it.” That’s psychobabble for Margaret Thatcher’s infamous slogan, “There is no alternative.” But if we excavate burnout’s infrastructural unconscious—its origins in the material conditions of conflagration—we might discover a term with an unlikely potential for subversive meaning. An artifact of an incendiary history, burnout can vividly name the disposability of targeted populations under racial capitalism—a dynamic that, over time, has ensnared ever-wider swaths of the workforce.