A young worker at the C & NW RR 40th Street shops, Chicago, Ill, photograph by Jack Delano, 1942. Library of Congress.

A young worker at the C & NW RR 40th Street shops, Chicago, Illinois, 1942. Photograph by Jack Delano. Library of Congress.

Lines of Work

Volume IV, Number 2 | spring 2011

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Women become skilled shop technicians after careful training in the school at the Douglas Aircraft Company plant, Long Beach, CA, photograph by Alfred T. Palmer, 1942. Library of Congress.

Preamble

The Servant Problem

By Lewis H. Lapham

It is man’s nature to be doing something, or at least to fancy that he’s doing something, but to what purpose?

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Idle Hours, by Julian Alden Weir, 1888. The Metropolitian Museum of Art. Gift of Several Gentlemen, 1888

The Mother of Possibility

By Sven Birkerts

Idleness is what happens when we thwart the impulse to plan forward, and instead enjoy the present.

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Map

Cornering the Market

The countries that rule the industries.

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c. 1548 | Geneva

Assigned Positions

John Calvin explains how to find your vocation.More

458 BC | Rome

Public Servant

Cincinnatus, from farmer to dictator to farmer.More

1935 | New York City

Unemployment Benefits

Down and out in New York City.More

Charts & Graphs

Sexual harassment in the workplace.

Cruel and/or Unusual

Sexual harassment in the workplace.

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Japanese diarist and poet Sei Shōnagon.

German writer, composer, and painter E. T. A. Hoffmann.

American poet Theodore Roethke.

Color image of English novelist Charlotte Brontë with book in hand.

Portrait of Chinese Daoist Zhuangzi.

American musician Charles Mingus.

Photograph of American writer Ralph Ellison.

Black and white image of American writer Herman Melville.

A man is not idle, because he is absorbed in thought. There is visible labor and there is an invisible labor.

—Victor Hugo, 1862

Portrait of Philip Dormer Stanhope wearing a blue sash.

Missing contributor image silhouette

Philip Dormer Stanhope & Louis C.K.

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