The Rationing by Charles Wheelan

THE RATIONING by Charles Wheelan is a fabulous work of political satire set in the near future. The narrator is a scientist who specializes in lurking viruses – generally benign organisms which suddenly become virulent. Some basic science is certainly important to this tale, but there is much more about corporate greed, media manipulation and politics – both domestic and international. The politicians and bureaucrats are referred to only by their titles which, for me, added authenticity to this speculative work. Wheelan’s wry tone and style of writing caused me to almost immediately think of Aaron Sorkin’s West Wing and even more of Allen Drury and his best-sellers, beginning with Advise and Consent. As one quick example, the scientist narrator, preparing to be interviewed on a news show, is told by the Communications Director: “Don’t even listen to the question. When her lips stop moving, you give the answer you want to give.” THE RATIONING is one of those stories about complex real world events where every time the situation seems evenly remotely under control, yet another aspect has the potential to become a crisis or another unintended consequence becomes apparent. Wheelan alluded to numerous “what ifs” as he related this detailed, entertaining account of “utter craziness” as America faced The Outbreak.

If Charles Wheelan’s name seems familiar, it should; he is the author of several non-fiction titles, including Naked Economics which, though published several years ago, is still required summer reading for our AP Economics classes. I can’t wait to see what Wheelan writes next and appreciated his mention in the Acknowledgments of a local independent bookstore, The Book Bin in Northbrook. THE RATIONING received a starred review from Kirkus.

Women's Work by Megan K. Stack

WOMEN’S WORK by National Book Award finalist Megan K. Stack explores a “Reckoning with Work and Home” by relating events from Stack’s time living in Beijing and India.  During those periods she and her husband became parents. They employed housekeepers and childcare workers – “migrants who’d left their own children behind to work in the city, and ended up in my house.” This extremely personal and well-written text describes Stack’s feelings about work (she had been a foreign correspondent for the Los Angeles Times) and motherhood, noting “Job, book, baby: I’d forced myself to choose the one I loved least. It was a terrible choice because I loved each of them.” WOMEN’S WORK also confronts the ideas of feminism and privilege as Stack strives to explore the lives, homes, and families of the women who worked for/with her and says, “Xiao Li, Mary, and Pooja will forever give me strength and push me forward to what needs to be done.” 

Stack recounts in detail her own experiences with post-partum depression, concluding at one point, “If a woman is in an intolerable situation, the answer is not to drug her so that she can tolerate it.  The answer should be – should be – to change the intolerable situation.” And, she honestly reflects on the role of men, particularly fathers and husbands (expat or not), who often fail to appreciate the ambivalence - even guilt - over the unsatisfactory compromises involved with employing domestic workers. In addition, she writes about Asia: “[China and India] represent our collective future; they are the stuff of the world’s dreams and nightmares. They are also places that have made statistical headway towards erasing women.” There is SO much to explore here and our students could certainly use this book as a Junior Theme research text or perhaps read portions for Senior Writers Seminar. I definitely recommend WOMEN’S WORK which received a starred review from Kirkus.

Ghost Work by Mary L. Gray and Siddharth Suri

GHOST WORK is written by Mary L. Gray and Siddharth Suri, senior researchers at Microsoft Research. Mary L. Gray is also a fellow at Harvard University's Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, and a faculty member at Indiana University.  Their book’s subtitle is “How to Stop Silicon Valley from Building a New Global Underclass” and deals with largely invisible human labor force who work to “make the internet seem smart.” These gig-economy workers complete tasks like tagging images, adding video captions, answering a web-based chat query, or editing a product review, essentially providing employment on demand in a “fusion of code and human smarts.” In this text, Gray and Suri explain the nature of ghost work and profile a number of individual workers, both in the US and India. They refer to a study by PEW Research showing that in 2015 roughly twenty million US adults earned money completing tasks distributed on demand. Thus, Gray and Suri’s work highlights a surprisingly big subset of the workforce that is being transformed due to automation and artificial intelligence advances. However, once this situation is described and it seems pretty clear what is involved, Gray and Suri go on at length with background (including historical context on piecework) which distracts from the book’s overall value. They do argue that the opportunity for exploitation exists, especially when a worker’s goal is twenty dollars (or five dollars per hour) without any kind of benefits and added cost of the time looking for work. This is also further explored in Mary Gray’s opinion piece published in early May by the Washington Post where she notes, “workers in the gig-driven ghost economy have no shared workplace, professional identity or voice to call for change.” Subsequent sections of their new book discuss the power of collaboration and the importance of paying attention to employee welfare and the “double bottom line.” Their conclusion offers a brief outline of several technical and social fixes (e.g., universal healthcare, paid family leave). Well-researched and documented, roughly twenty percent of GHOST WORK’s content is bibliography, notes, appendix and index.

Business and civics classes may find discussion prompts here, particularly in conjunction with more recent studies from PEW about concerns related to automation (2018) or contrasting views on the future economy and democracy (2019). Or, perhaps students could investigate some of the platforms for freelancing, like UpWork. Gray and Suri also write about the creation of “MTurk so that Amazon could not just offer a marketplace of books and other durable goods but make labor itself a service that anyone could find and pay for through the Amazon website.”  That seems highly relevant given yesterday’s announcement by Amazon of a $700 million investment in upskilling for its employees.