june 2007

I noticed the shoes first. That I was wearing them. Real shoes, the leather kind, with laces. After a year and a half, I was finally returning to the office, and that meant giving up the puffer slippers and slides that had sustained me for so long. Real shoes, I quickly remembered, are terrible. Likewise pants. Likewise getting to work, and being at work. Whew.

That was summer 2021. I’ve since acclimated to the office once again: I don the uniform; I make the commute; I pour the coffee; I do my job; and then I go back home. There are costs to this arrangement, clearly. I lose some time—time I could spend working!—transporting myself, in shoes and pants, from one building to another. I miss the chance to finish household tasks between my meetings, or fix myself a healthy and affordable lunch. As a university professor and administrator, I have more flexibility than most professionals, and I’m not required to go in each and every day. But even so, I have less control over each hour of my life than I used to—a fact that could very well be making me less productive overall. Indeed, it’s possible, or even likely, that my employer—and yours—could help their workers and the bottom line, simply by allowing us to work from home or come in on a hybrid plan. Remote, flexible employment might be a win for everyone.

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I wonder if the remaining sensible Republicans have accepted the irretrievable loss of the GOP they once knew.

But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.

• Let’s use Chicago rules to beat Russia.
• Hybrid work is doomed.
• Uber Pool is a zombie.

Harsher Truths

In 1991, the last president of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, was briefly deposed in a coup by hard-line members of the Soviet Communist Party. Gorbachev, upon his return to Moscow, tried to differentiate between the plotters and the Party itself. One of his closest advisers, Aleksandr Yakovlev, told him that this effort was pointless, akin to “serving tea to a corpse.”

Donald Trump’s interest in another run at the presidency is reportedly connected to his intensifying concerns over the January 6 Select Committee hearings. Most recently, after the vice chair, Representative Liz Cheney, suggested that the committee might make multiple criminal referrals for his conduct, Trump exploded at the “warmongering and despicable human being Liz Cheney, who … keeps saying, over and over again, that HER Fake Unselect Committee may recommend CRIMINAL CHARGES against a President of the United States who got more votes than any sitting President in history.”

Various motivations may feed into Trump’s electoral calculation for 2024, but one in particular is coming into focus. In seeking office, he would be seeking legal immunity.

When Michelle Stokes noticed a necrotic wound on her cat, Jellyfish, last July, she and her husband had to call about 50 vets before finding one that could squeeze them in.

The local emergency animal hospital was so backed up that it said the wound—serious but not yet life-threatening—wasn’t really an emergency. Jellyfish didn’t have a regular vet, because Stokes and her husband had just moved to the Cleveland area. They pulled up Google Maps and started going down the list of offices they found. It was the same response every time: no vacancies, not taking new patients, not until August or even September. Meanwhile, Jellyfish was getting sicker and more lethargic. “We just kept trying and trying and trying,” Stokes told me. “We pretty much called every single vet’s office in the greater-Cleveland area.” A week in, they finally got a lucky break. They managed to speak directly to a vet at one practice, and when Stokes sent over a photo of the wound, the vet said to bring Jellyfish in for surgery. The cat’s now doing just fine.

Watching someone take the slow train to an obvious conclusion is always frustrating. Yesterday afternoon, the Conservative politician Sajid Javid stood up in the British Parliament to criticize his party leader, Boris Johnson, for being careless with the truth. “It’s not fair on my ministerial colleagues to go out every morning defending lines that don’t stand up, or don’t hold up,” he said. “At some point we have to conclude that enough is enough. I believe that point is now.”

Johnson took a little longer to acknowledge that reality, but this morning he quit as Conservative leader. He hopes to stay on as prime minister during the contest to replace him, before an official handover in the fall.