When I applied for this job, I pitched a story idea.
The idea was inspired by reading Alain de Botton’s book, “The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work.” In it, he traveled to the Maldives to see how tuna was harvested at a commercial scale.
“Two centuries ago,” de Botton wrote, “our forebears would have known the precise history and origin of nearly every one of the limited number of things they ate and owned, as well as of the people and tools involved in their production.”
He questioned the pace and scale of our time (the book was originally published in 2009), and he described the “uniquely modern sense of dislocation between the things we so heedlessly consume in the run of our daily lives and their unknown origins and creators.”