Around the start of the twenty-first century, the Oxford sociologist Jonathan Gershuny noticed a change in the way the privileged behaved: the leisure class that the economist Thorstein Veblen had described during the Gilded Age seemed no longer to exist. The farther up people were on the income ladder, the harder they worked. “Busyness,” Gershuny concluded, was “the badge of honor for the new superordinate working class.” These days, even the highest-profile billionaires tend to be a little grimfaced. Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos— they practice judo throws, but do they ever smile? Recently, the Wall Street Journal reported on the minting of a new mega-billionaire, the eighty-sixyear-old Texas wildcatter Autry Stephens, who, in February, sold his company and its meticulously assembled Permian drilling rights for twenty-six billion dollars. Stephens had driven to his office every day for forty-five years, lately in an old Toyota Land Cruiser. Was he looking forward to enjoying his extraordinary gains? Not really—he would miss the grind. “There is certainly some sadness on my part,” Stephens said.
Why work this hard? Doesn’t a life of ease beckon? Aren’t there polo ponies to raise? The traditional rationale is to provide comforts to those you love. “Familia, id est substantia,” the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century southern-European jurists argued—in other words, the family is the patrimony. But, at Stephens’s level, the logic dissolves.
この記事は The New Yorker の May 20, 2024 版に掲載されています。
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この記事は The New Yorker の May 20, 2024 版に掲載されています。
7 日間の Magzter GOLD 無料トライアルを開始して、何千もの厳選されたプレミアム ストーリー、8,500 以上の雑誌や新聞にアクセスしてください。
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INSIDE JOB-"Hit Man"
Years before Hannah Arendt coined, in the pages of this magazine, the phrase \"the banality of evil,\" popular films and fiction were embodying that idea in the character of the hit man. In classic crime movies such as \"This Gun for Hire\" (1942) and \"Murder by Contract\" (1958), hit men figure much as Nazis do in political movies, as symbols of abstract evil.
WHATEVER YOU SAY
Rereading Jenny Holzer, at the Guggenheim.
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Does every generation get the Freud it deserves?
BY A WHISKER
Louis Wain and the reinvention of the cat.
Beyond Imagining
Bessie, Lotte, Ruth, Farah, and Bridget, who had been lunching together for half a century, joined in later years by Ilka, Hope, and, occasionally, Lucinella, had agreed without the need for discussion that they were not going to pass, pass away, and under no circumstances on.
STATES OF PLAY
Can advocates use state supreme courts to preserve-and perhaps expand-constitutional rights?
THE LONG RIDE
The surf legend Jock Sutherland's unlikely life.
ARE WE DOOMED?
A course at the University of Chicago thinks it through.
GOD EXPLAINS THE RULES OF HIS NEW BOARD GAME
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RED LINE
With the election approaching, the U.S. and Mexico wrangle over border policy.