Extremely Hardcore: Inside Elon Musk's Twitter
by Zoë Schiffer · 13 Feb 2024 · 343pp · 92,693 words
against remote work. The pushback he was getting seemed ridiculous. If people building cars and serving food couldn’t work from home, why should the laptop class get to do so? “Let me be crystal clear,” he said. “If people do not return to the office when they are able to return
The Big Fix: How Companies Capture Markets and Harm Canadians
by Denise Hearn and Vass Bednar · 14 Oct 2024 · 175pp · 46,192 words
outage was a nuisance that prevented them from responding to a work email or making a phone call. Downtown coffee shops were swarmed as the laptop class sought Wi-Fi. Small businesses that used the popular payment processor Interac, which relied on Rogers, lost thousands of dollars.2 For others, the outage
The Village Effect: How Face-To-Face Contact Can Make Us Healthier, Happier, and Smarter
by Susan Pinker · 30 Sep 2013 · 404pp · 124,705 words
experimental laptop program that they wanted empirical proof that it worked, no matter what. They got it by keeping the highest-performing students in the laptop class, sometimes against their will. The interesting question is why otherwise exacting parents and school administrators have fallen so hard for classroom technology. In his book
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learning communities” of other math teachers so they could mentor each other, and finally, helped them integrate the new technology into their teaching. If experimental laptop-class teachers participated in such training for two years, their students’ math scores improved slightly more than the control group’s did (the experimental group improved
In Covid's Wake: How Our Politics Failed Us
by Stephen Macedo and Frances Lee · 10 Mar 2025 · 393pp · 146,371 words
were substantially more likely to get infected.32 It was striking how little attention or discussion these inequities received during the pandemic. Members of the “laptop class”—adult knowledge workers and others able to work remotely—typically coped adequately with or even thrived amid pandemic restrictions. The wealthy saw their bank accounts
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-being of young p eople and the poor especially. The interventions most benefited t hose who made them: mature and well- off members of the “laptop class.” Among t hose who bore a disproportionate burden w ere the 30 or 40 percent of workers deemed essential. Women bore more of a burden
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of the millions of less affluent “essential workers” to the feasibility and the comfort of lockdown were taken for granted by anxious members of the laptop class. There was no alternative. This view was, as we s hall see, asserted emphatically by influential figures in the WHO, in public health and academic
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. According to the authors of the Declaration, lockdowns were themselves just a form of focused protection for professional and managerial workers, a “luxury of the laptop class.”17 The costs of enforced quarantines w ere easy to discount for t hose able to work from home; order food, wine, and medicine online
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, less privileged p eople w ere exposing themselves daily to the virus and doing all the in-person work that was necessary to make the laptop class comfortable. Debate about this particular distribution of costs and benefits was surprisingly truncated. The Declaration’s authors w ere hardly infallible. Like
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in communities that were not New York City or some other big city. Or an elite university town composed of highly educated members of the laptop class—a place that had voted 94.7 percent for Biden and 3.5 p ercent for Trump.99 Perhaps the most glaring error made by
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. Lost connections—new friends that students would have made in person, lost loves never met in chance encounters, forgone travel. Even teleworking members of the laptop class lost connections with work colleagues—collaborations that never happened, new ideas no one ever had b ecause the conversation that would have sparked them never
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the globe tend to be drawn from particular segments of society; they are comfortable members of the educated professional class—the global laptop class. Third, specialists tend to develop vested interests in their own programs and power. They care a great deal about their reputations, and their prestige is
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—on less affluent segments of society and even on the developing world. In the United States, these were the “essential workers,” not members of the laptop class. The Covid crisis shone a harsh light on persistent inequalities in American society, from which many would like to turn away. Indeed, our