Finding the right phenotype

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Mouse jiggler

My colleagues were always ‘reaching out’, ‘circling back’ and ‘going forward’, and occasionally offered to ‘tick-tack about it offline’. These expressions were not literal, because almost everything occurred on Teams or by email. The meaning of other popular phrases – such as ‘workforce capability uplift’, ‘social prescribing’ and ‘vulnerable, highly mobile cohorts’ – were harder to ascertain.

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Class acts

Non-fictionSocial media has made available to us whole new audiences and vectors for class and lifestyle performance. Where previously your political commitments or what books you were reading might have been topics of conversation with close friends at the pub, now they can be projected to hundreds or thousands of followers. Eating at a restaurant is another example; a previously private and intimately social act can now be a place to be seen, not by the people you’re dining with, or even the other patrons, but by everybody who follows you.

Conferral

Non-fictionBeneath my fantasy of a regular wage is the puerile hunch that if I stay in academia, I can regain some of the nervy possibility I held as an undergraduate student. It was at university that I first met people whose days were preoccupied with thinking, reading and writing, revelatory mostly because they were compensated for these activities with bourgeois trappings and validation. With hindsight, I can recognise that my straining so doggedly to become the kind of person who succeeded according to the university’s metrics mainly taught me what bell hooks says is the primary lesson of college – namely, ‘obedience to authority’.

Habitat

PoetryIt was early. I recognised my fate in the bathroom mirror. Behind which he slept deep into the morning...