Pedro González

3 weeks ago | chroniclesmagazine.org | Pedro Gonzalez |Pedro González

In Peter Farrelly’s Dumb and Dumber (1994), the titular dummy, Harry Dunne, relates a still-raw heartache to his similarly dimwitted buddy Lloyd Christmas while the two are sitting in a heart-shaped hot tub. Lloyd wants him to get back on the horse, but Harry isn’t over being dumped. “I thought we were going to be together forever,” he laments. “About a week later, right out of the blue, she sends me a John Deere letter.” Lloyd asks if she gave him cause.

4 weeks ago | chroniclesmagazine.org | Pedro Gonzalez |Pedro González

Writing a novel is hard. Writing one in a month is insane. Unless you are William Faulkner, who wrote As I Lay Dying in six weeks, between the hours of midnight and four in the morning. Indeed, the author himself claimed, “I set out deliberately to write a tour-de-force. Before I ever put pen to paper and set down the first word I knew what the last word would be and almost where the last period would fall.” Faulker said he did not change a word in the end.

1 month ago | chroniclesmagazine.org | Pedro Gonzalez |Pedro González

Writing about politics these days is a challenge because things move nearly at the speed of social media. One day, the Trump administration announces some move that generates outrage on the left and cheers on the right, only for that decision to be reversed by tweet and then revived temporarily before it goes into cardiac arrest again for good. Max Weber called politics “a strong and slow boring of hard boards.” Today, it’s forceful and fast banging of one’s head against the timeline.

1 month ago | readcontra.com | Aaron Everitt |Pedro Gonzalez |Pedro González |Jack Buckby

Back in 2023, ResumeBuilder asked 1,000 business leaders whether and how they surveil employees on a primarily remote or hybrid arrangement. More than a third said that they used webcams to monitor workers. The previous year, the New York Timesreported on the rise of the “worker credit score,” the new model of productivity enforcement in which bonuses and promotions are tied to mechanical inputs like keyboard swipes that are not necessarily reflective of real productivity or creativity.

1 month ago | chroniclesmagazine.org | Pedro Gonzalez |Pedro González

Neill Blomkamp is going back to Planet P—back to Bug City—to hunt for something no one’s ever seen before: a faithful adaptation of Robert A. Heinlein’s Starship Troopers. Don’t get me wrong, I love Paul Verhoeven’s 1997 cut, not least because Verhoeven tried and failed to satirize the subject matter.