The Workplace Nightmares of “Severance”

Office Politics

In the world of Severance, a medical procedure splits a person’s consciousness into two: one that exists, 9 to 5, as the person works in the headquarters of Lumon (the company that invented the procedure) and another when that person is outside of work. It’s a stark metaphor for what many companies ask of their employees today: to be workers and only workers, whose surplus labor, employers can extract during office hours. The first season, as our critic Jorge Cotte observes in our April issue, put this metaphor to the test, stretching it to its boundaries in an otherwise contained and highly stylized show that dramatizes the alienation caused by a capitalist system of work. Now in its second season, the show begins to try to weave together these two worlds—the world of the worker and the world of the worker when the person is no longer at work. One might have hoped this would lead to a satisfying culmination of many of the series’ plot lines but, Cotte argues, it does the opposite: In abandoning “its precise and manicured style” and embracing the melodrama of a soap opera, the show loses its “cold, antiseptic” feel and in doing so fails to sustain a compelling “indictment of a system.” Read “The Workplace Nightmares of “Severance””

Sunbelt Ringstrasse

One of Atlanta’s most notable architects and developers, John Portman, is responsible for the city’s hostility to walkers. In the mid-1960s, Portman began the project of rebuilding a 2.5-million-square-foot chunk of downtown Atlanta in keeping with his theory that urban life as it once existed—the hustle and bustle of pedestrians visiting local shops and socializing on the pavement—was over. For Portman, what was needed instead were “total environments” in which “all of a person’s needs are met,” preferably without ever leaving the building. That trend is now reversing itself in Atlanta, as architecture critic and expert urbanist Karrie Jacobs writes. Visiting Atlanta and surveying its Beltline, a large pedestrianized area that encircles part of the city, she finds “a magnet for walkers and bicyclists” even if they have to “often drive to get there.” “Like New York City’s High Line, Detroit’s Joe Louis Greenway, or Dallas’s Katy Trail, the Beltline,” Jacobs argues, “doesn’t just provide a recreational conduit; it changes the way people live in the city around it.” Read “How Atlanta Became a Walkable City”