This month, I have been mostly not reading, except for things like this:

• Garbage Language: Why do corporations speak the way they do? — Molly Young in Vulture: Our attraction to certain words surely reflects an inner yearning. Computer metaphors appeal to us because they imply futurism and hyperefficiency, while the language of self-empowerment hides a deeper anxiety about our relationship to work — a sense that what we’re doing may actually be trivial, that the reward of “free” snacks for cultural fealty is not an exchange that benefits us, that none of this was worth going into student debt for, and that we could be fired instantly for complaining on Slack about it. When we adopt words that connect us to a larger project — that simultaneously fold us into an institutional organism and insist on that institution’s worthiness — it is easier to pretend that our jobs are more interesting than they seem. Empowerment language is a self-marketing asset as much as anything else: a way of selling our jobs back to ourselves.
• The Making of Joe Biden’s Conservative Democratic Politics — Branko Marcetic in Jacobin: It is no small irony that Joseph Robinette Biden Jr was born in the cradle of the New Deal order he would later help dismantle. Neither Biden nor the United States is unique in this respect. Look at just about any developed country’s generous postwar welfare state, and among its rich and powerful foes, you’ll find many who benefited most from its generosity, only to turn against the system that created them, convinced they had done it all on their own.
• How to Transition From a Democracy to an Autocracy — Devorah Blachor in McSweeney's Internet Tendency: Stop, breathe, and look around. What’s happening? Has your faith in democratic institutions been pulverized underneath the crushing weight of a sham trial that called zero witnesses? Was an already unhinged president just given carte blanche to do whatever he wants because he knows there won’t be any consequences? Perhaps a cadre of lawyers embroiled in various sexual assault scandals of their own have made a series of ludicrous claims to justify incontrovertibly corrupt behavior without a hint of shame or irony? Take stock of your surroundings, meet yourself wherever you are, and remember to reach out and say howdy to others who have recently made the transition from democracy to autocracy.