Today, we look at calls for a four-day work week, the radicalism of The Purge film franchise, and Bo Burnham’s uncanny channeling of our feelings about extremely online journalism.

Earlier this month, media worldwide gave enthusiastic coverage to the results of an Icelandic study that could help change the way we work. 

The study showed that people who worked fewer hours but were paid the same amount were just as productive as when they worked more hours. The study, run by Reykjavík City Council and the Icelandic government, took place between 2015 and 2019, and included more than 2,500 workers from across various industries.

Headlines were celebratory. “Four-day week 'an overwhelming success' in Iceland,” the BBC declared, while the Washington Post wrote, “Iceland tested a 4-day workweek. Employees were productive — and happier, researchers say.” This was, unfortunately, a little bit of an exaggeration. As The Conversation explained: Workers across 66 workplaces shortened their workweek by some number of hours, from 40 hours to 36 or 35, close but not quite the eight hours of a standard work day. The study has lately come under a bit of fire.

But instead of nitpicking Iceland’s research, perhaps we should wonder why we need a study to state the obvious: Everyone is being overworked.

The pandemic took a heavy toll on all workers, from gig workers forced to carry on without sick leave, to salaried workers burned out in their makeshift home offices, to working parents who were stretched thin as homeschool teachers and childcare providers. But this crisis was just an exaggerated version of most Americans’ miserable experiences of work.

After the pandemic, people have resisted returning to jobs that don’t pay enough, or offer benefits. If workers can’t look forward to a $15 minimum wage (which still isn’t enough to live off of), a shorter workweek for the same pay would at least be progress. 

Who cares if Iceland’s famous study isn’t perfect? People are voting with their feet for less labor.

— Samantha Grasso (@samjgrasso)

📺 Writing through the pandemic

There’s a line at the beginning of comedian Bo Burnham’s new Netflix special Inside that haunts me.

The special, running an hour and a half, was made during the height of the pandemic and America’s racial justice uprisings. Burnham uses lights, lasers and projections while filming himself singing songs that are clever and sad enough to indicate a dramatic departure from the teen who got famous publishing cringey songs on YouTube over a decade ago. The special has provoked a lot of conversation – on speaking out against anti-Black racism as a self-aware white man with a Netflix deal, for example, or highlighting deteriorating mental health during the pandemic – and reviewers have done a thorough job of analyzing it. But nothing caught my attention like this one line.

Burnham begins the first song of Inside sitting in his house, completely dark except from a light rig to his right, casting some Rembrandt-style lighting across his face. He’s singing, his head pointing downward, an object strapped to his forehead, but obscured by his shaggy hair (he’s got a pandemic beard to boot). In the song, he explains that he’s a little depressed and that he’s started writing songs, because at least it couldn’t hurt. 

“I’m sorry I was gone,” he sings, “But look, I made you some content!” 

Burnham grabs hold of the thing on his forehead, a headlamp, switches it on, swings his head up, and the beam flashes over the camera lens, and then hits a disco ball spinning madly above him. 

Now, horizontal dashes of lavender light scatter across the walls, illuminating the studio’s clutter of keyboards and equipment stands. A second track starts singing under him in harmony. He continues. “Daddy made you your favorite, open wide!” The disco ball slows down and then reverses course. “Here comes the content! It’s a beautiful day to stay inside!”

All Burnham did was swing a headlamp into the trajectory of a spinning disco ball, and I saw a metaphor for how I’ve lived my pandemic life as a journalist in the internet’s Big Take Machine. And there’s two parts to that joke, really. As a reporter, you shine your metaphorical light on something happening in the dark. Then there’s the feeling of producing glittery entertainment while the apocalypse rages.

I started my career in the 2010s – a heyday for personal essays, especially for younger women and queer people whose editors pushed them to excavate their traumas in return for “exposure” and little else. I took seriously the warnings of my peers that not everything needs to be submitted to the Personal Essay Industrial Complex. And then the pandemic hit, and creating content under these pressures felt, quite seriously, kind of impossible. My well ran dry, again and again. I found myself producing personal essays that weren’t totally ready to be written, baking half-risen dough. I wrote pieces that fulfilled a quota and said something, despite wanting nothing more than to say nothing. My brain felt deflated, but my fingers kept typing. 

Sometimes when I’m trying to write a “take,” and I have no words left to give, it feels like shining a light into a reflective surface to make some more light bounce around a room and going, “Is this something? Is this anything?” I am Burnham, throwing words into the abyss, going, “But look, I made you some content! Daddy made you your favorite, open wide.”

The line is supposed to be a reference to the people who are consuming content generally. It’s all of us – we are all, in some medium or another, content consumers, even when we don’t want to be, especially during the pandemic. What else are people to do to enjoy their time during lockdown? 

The journalist Karen K. Ho popularized a term for a particular strain of this phenomenon – “doomscrolling,” spending excessive time scrolling through dystopian news. If I don’t write, what else am I supposed to do? If I don’t consume content, what else am I supposed to do? I wonder if, despite my exhaustion, despite feeling like I was merely shining a flashlight on a cheap reflective orb, throwing myself into this work helped distract me from living my life, a life thrown into disarray by COVID. 

Bo Burnham sees me:

“So I’ve been freaking out for a long time, thinking that I’m never gonna finish this special and I’m gonna be working on it forever,” he says halfway through the special. “And recently I’ve been feeling like, ‘Oh man, maybe I am getting close to done with this, maybe I’m gonna finish it after all,’” he says. “And that has made me completely freak out, because if I finish this special, that means that I have to, um, not work on it anymore, and that means I have to just live my life.”

— Samantha Grasso (@samjgrasso)

✊ The antifascist horror flick

Reviewed: The Forever Purge, directed by Everardo Valerio Gout

Critics and fans have lauded (and bemoaned) the recent trend of “elevated” or “prestige horror” – a subgenre of politically and aesthetically adventurous and self-conscious horror movies that includes hits like Get Out, Hereditary or The Witch. But they have dismissed The Purge franchise’s openly political action thrillers that challenge white supremacy. 

The premise of the series is simple and dystopian: A far-right U.S. political party called the New Founding Fathers takes power and institutes one night every year, called The Purge, where “crime is legal,” thereby encouraging mass murder to keep the crime and unemployment rates down. This setup has been used, to varying degrees of success, to tell fun, frightening and astute stories about American policing, racism and statecraft. 

Prequel film The First Purge (2018) was probably the best anti-Trumpist Hollywood film to come out during his term, with a story about a far-right party attempting to use The Purge to force a Black neighborhood to descend into violent crime – but the neighborhood comes together instead, so the government sends in police and vigilantes to make it look like the violence was spontaneous. The Forever Purge (the fifth in the franchise, released July 2), attempts to make this critique even more explicit. It focuses on a pair of undocumented immigrants as they face down a white supremacist rebellion aiming to expand the Purge from one night of state-sponsored violence into a total genocidal race war. 

Horror films, reflecting fantastically on the fears of society, have always played on important of-the-moment political issues. Alas, with The Forever Purge, (and all too often in “elevated horror” in general), when the allegorical and unconscious become literal and self-conscious, we often get less interesting, or scary, stories. 

The Forever Purge engages in a bit of bothsidesism, as some images of the fascist uprising look uncomfortably like the George Floyd rebellion, and the central narrative about respectable hard-working immigrants befriending kind-hearted middle class white people is standard Hollywood claptrap. Still, the movie is fun and tense, with great production design and a few genuinely excellent action sequences. 

And anyway, where else will a big budget film portray the border wall as the terrifying monument to death and suffering that it is or show a Black man and an undocumented Mexican woman righteously dispatch a neo-Nazi in the back of an overturned police van or have an Indigenous man pick up a crossbow and say “this has been our fight for the last 500 years”? The Purge is a fun as hell anti-fascist popcorn flick franchise, and will stand the test of time better than many of its more celebrated and aesthetically “serious” horror compatriots.

— Vicky Osterweil

We keep launching billionaires into space, but they keep coming back. [Financial Times]

A surveillance scandal is unfolding in Israel. [The Guardian]

Small landlords aren’t good landlords. [The New Republic]

After the Haitian assassination. [London Review of Books]

In the U.S., the pet chooses you. [The Cut]

R.I.P. Biz Markie, a friend to all 💔 [YouTube/UPROXX Video]

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