James' World 2

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Recently, I had a reunion with some old university friends. After dinner and a bottle (or two) of wine, we slumped down together in front of the television. A few minutes later our host slid open his laptop and started moving parts around on a PowerPoint presentation. “Just getting ahead of something for Monday,” he shrugged.

The next morning we went for a walk. In the middle of taking in the fresh air and catching up about work and kids and life in general, a friend who runs a small business dropped behind a little to look at his phone. “Emails,” he sighed. He was on holiday, but not really. “It’s not like I’m abroad,” he reasoned.

It used to be that work was an ironed shirt and a train journey away. But during the pandemic, WFH changed all that for many people, and it seems to have stuck. Back in 2020, my partner and I would convene from different ends of our flat at the end of the workday with a slightly crazed look in our eyes and compare notes on how we’d barely eaten or taken a break. No one was demanding or expecting this behavior, – on the contrary, our bosses would have been appalled – but the boundaries between work and life had suddenly become porous, and we didn’t know how to deal with it. Three years later, it’s not clear anyone has really figured it out.

The idea of setting boundaries has been fodder for self-help books since around the mid-80s, but in 2022 the idea is making a roaring comeback. And it’s no surprise. After a period in which our digital lives expanded at the same time as our physical freedoms shrank, knowing where to draw the line has never felt more difficult – and it’s not just a work thing. Technology means that as parents, partners, and friends we are available to anyone who might want our attention at any time. If we’re single and trying to find love we have to accept we can be tracked, studied, and judged by people we haven’t even met yet, assuming we’re active on social media (and if we’re not, it’s hard to even play the dating game in the first place).

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The idea of setting boundaries has been fodder for selfhelp books since around the mid-80s, but in 2022 the idea is making a roaring comeback.’ Photograph: Rudzhan Nagiev/Getty Images

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The everyday experience of irritation conceals a paradox. When one is suitably attuned, virtually anything is liable to provoke it: a telephone left to ring or a phone call taken, people who walk too slowly or drive too quickly. Running late is irritating, but so is arriving early. Impudence is irritating but obsequiousness even more so. Yet, however various its incitements, irritation is also an empty and tautological feeling. The irate know their claims against the world to be baseless or at least wildly exaggerated, and this, too, annoys them. Seemingly about every little thing and also nothing at all, irritation is a feeling in search of causes: it goes out into the world, and finds them.

On a recent train journey, my irritation flared by degrees. There were no tables or plugs, so I couldn’t work. The chair was uncomfortable, my back sore, and the loudspeaker kept sounding directly overhead. I sighed and shifted in my seat, feeling my partner grow irritated by me, and this seemed to relieve me of the feeling. Moving closer, I tried to comfort her; at which point she got up to fetch her water bottle, took a few performative sips, and settled into the chair opposite. I found the dishonesty of this gesture grating and, as the train crawled towards our destination, irritation passed between us like a ball, both of us insisting that nothing at all was the matter.

Something about this ordinary, negligible feeling seems to make it inaccessible to critical reflection. Perhaps because, when irritable, we tend to be at our least reflective – preoccupied with those diminutive miseries whose oversize effect we know would not stand up to criticism. It is as though irritation always suspects itself to be ridiculous, and must avoid looking at itself too closely lest it be annoyed by its own speciousness.

For Aristotle, irritation was closely related to anger. You might say that irritation is anger’s meaner little sibling – what, in Ugly Feelings (2007), the scholar Sianne Ngai calls ‘inadequate’ anger. One loses oneself in a rage – that is one of anger’s seductions: it offers a holiday from the self, that licenses acts ordinarily proscribed. To be irritated is to hover at anger’s threshold, while knowing its repertoire of decisive actions are inappropriate responses to the present situation. Communicated by huffs and sighs but rarely through more drastic measures, irritation is a feeling that’s expressed only through being inadequately expressed. One is not moved to commit appalling acts due to irritation. Nor is one permitted to do so: there are no ‘crimes of irritation’, no clemency for the irate.

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Photo by Richard Kavlar/Magnum

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Explore A quarter-mile below the ocean’s surface, in the borderless realm of the midwater, two blue-green orbs illuminate the inky black. They glow for a few seconds, then disappear.

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This giant squid has the world’s biggest light-producing organs. But why?

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From start to finish, the biggest art heist in modern history lasted just 81 minutes. At 1:24 a.m. on March 18, 1990, two men dressed as police officers walked into Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. They overpowered two unsuspecting night security guards, then duct-taped their victims to a pipe and a workbench in the museum basement.

“Gentlemen, this is a robbery,” the criminals announced.

The pair proceeded to remove 13 treasured artworks on display in the lavishly decorated gallery, smashing the protective glass of two Rembrandt paintings and cutting the canvases from their gilded frames. Just over an hour later, the thieves made off with a staggering collection of art that’s valued today at $500 million.

Despite a flurry of press attention—and the $10 million reward offered by the museum for the items’ safe return—the stolen works have never been recovered. In 2021, Netflix docuseries “This Is a Robbery: The World’s Biggest Art Heist” took a deep dive into the thorny mysteries surrounding the crime. As Adrian Horton reports for the Guardian, the four-part show built on the reporting of the Boston Globe and WBUR, as well as the FBI’s ongoing investigation.

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Netflix documentary “This Is a Robbery” delves into the mystery of a 1990 art heist. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons

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Tyler Hicks/The New York Times

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The numbers are stunning.

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Illustration by Sam Whitney/The New York Times

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It was happy hour at the whitewashed hotel on the remote volcanic island of Salina, perched in the Tyrrhenian Sea, a short hydrofoil ride from northern Sicily. Around the pool, honeymooning couples, including my husband and me, drank tamarind margaritas and watched the sunset against Salina’s sister island Stromboli, which puffed out plumes of volcanic smoke into the encroaching dusk.

It was as romantic as I hoped it would be when booking the trip a year earlier – with one unanticipated and starkly unromantic caveat. A woman on one of the sun loungers had Zoomed into her New York work meeting, running through a pitch deck and talking loudly about ROI.

People run away to remote islands on vacation to pretend for a moment that the real world – the world of corporate culture and incessant demands on your time and energy – doesn’t exist. But with that one Zoom call, the mirage was dispelled. All of the disbelief we had collectively suspended came crashing down as we were sucked, unwillingly, into someone else’s remote working experience.

As good, reliable Wi-Fi becomes available in increasingly far-flung locations, there are few places it’s truly impossible to work from. I’m not immune to the lure of this lifestyle myself. I’m definitely guilty of camping at tables with plug sockets in coffee shops around Europe. But I came away from my honeymoon experience asking the question: Just because you can work from anywhere these days, does that mean you should?

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Robert Rodriguez/CNET

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