I often joke that I'm waiting for the day when a (large) sum of money magically appears in my bank account. Sadly, that day has yet to arrive. Until it does, I remain Corporate Lackey 37B/6.

With that out of the way, let's get Monday started with these links:

The Man Who Reads Books For a Living (One Every Two Days) — A dive into the professional world of Clarke Speicher, one of those invisible people in the film industry who can influence whether or not a book has a shot at being made into a movie.

From the article:

When Clarke recommends a book for further consideration, he is usually recommending one of two things: either the underlying idea can serve as a foundation for something larger, or the book is adaptable more or less as-is. One route involves interpolation, recontextualization, and refocusing; the other approaches transposition. West Side Story and Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet, respectively. For audiences, fidelity is often the real sticking point. But pressure to pay that kind of fan-service seldom makes an adaptation better.

"Do You Actually Have to Finish That Novel?" — An examination of the guilt that many of us feel when we stop reading a book (or think about doing that) before we turn the final page. But why continue if you're not enjoying a book or getting anything out of it?

From the article:

[I]n a lifetime of nonfinishing I have learned that the practice can be its own way of reading, even a way of admiring the book I seem to be spurning. Sometimes I am so intoxicated by the beauty and the intelligence of a novel that I must set it aside. The charge it delivers is so inordinate that I need to measure out the doses I permit myself. (Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s The Leopard is one such book for me.) Or I put the book down because I fear its force. It’s so good I worry it will smother every last spark I need for my own writing (which is how Virginia Woolf felt about Proust).

Gig workers are endlessly exploited. AI could make more of us share their fate — If you needed another reason to hate Big Tech and modern, rampant capitalism here is that reason. What they're trying to do will be for the benefit of a small number of people. Can you imagine what a tender world that will be?

From the article:

Like Uber, these platforms have sought exemption from policies that would regulate them in many states, they have been successful. At least 17 states now recognize gig nursing platforms as “healthcare worker platforms” rather than staffing agencies, exempting them from many of the regulations that protect workers, and leaving less pay and fewer worker protections. Many of these “Uber for nursing” platforms have reached billion-dollar valuations.

How Aspiring Autocrats Exit — Javier Corrales and Susan Stokes examine the ways in which leaders, who seem to have a death grip on power, can be peacefully ousted.

From the article:

It is worth emphasizing that elections matter, since many voters come to think that elections are hopeless tools against autocratizing leaders and may choose to stay home on election day. But in these six cases, the opposite happened. Voting surged. This surge tends to favor the opposition. The key takeaway is that, even if the rules are unfavorable, it pays for opposition leaders to invest in getting the vote out.