A Microsoft Excel painting by Tatsuo Horiuchi.
Greetings from Washington, D.C.! It’s been a while since my last Substack post — I’ve since finished my Ph.D., moved to D.C. for the year, and am excited to then make Seattle my long-term home. Now that the dust has temporarily settled, I’ve been able to finally return to writing this summer and am happy to share a couple of new essays.
The first piece is in the WIRED Software Review, a new series by WIRED devoted to software criticism. In the piece, I explore the history of Microsoft Excel and the ways in which the office productivity software has been incessantly marketed as exciting and fun over the years. Many thanks to Angela Chen for editing this piece! I’ll also add that it’s great to see a popular venue devote space to software criticism in the vein of media archaeology & critical data studies, and I’m looking forward to reading future installments!
The second piece is in Jacobin and is on the 20th anniversary of Moneyball, Michael Lewis’s famed sports book that subverts the usual narrative of players as protagonists by positioning the *managers* as the underdogs. I had a lot of fun finding euphemistic Moneyball references across the web, including “Moneyball for Management,” “Moneyball for Arbitrators,” and “Medical Sales Moneyball” (click through for more!). Thank you to Meagan Day for editing this one!
Lastly, my close friend, Arjun S. Byju, and I wrote a piece for the July-August issue of Current Affairs, which should be mailed out to subscribers in the coming weeks. I’m really excited to see it published and will share it once it’s online!
That’s all for now!
Stay gold,
Ben