All posts filed under: Workbook

How a strange job interview turned into a journalistic investigation

May 6, 2025
by Bobbie Johnson
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Workbook
Simon Wijckmans, the CEO of web security company C.Side, wears a black baseball cap in a shadow profile photograph by Darrell Jackson

Last year I met a young CEO who was suspicious that some folks interviewing for coding jobs at his company were scammers. We chatted about the situation, and it was interesting—but I fully expected it to be some common-or-garden fraud, or the kind of “overwork” scam that has gotten popular since the pandemic. On closer inspection, though, the reality was much stranger than I ever imagined. It turned out they weren’t ordinary fraudsters, but in […]

Sweat equity

April 29, 2024
by Bobbie Johnson
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Workbook

I love my Peloton bike. I know people rag on it, but about five years after I got mine I can say that it’s more than earned its keep. I love real bikes too, but the Peloton has a lot of advantages: it’s always there, weather-resistant, can be adjusted to any member of the family, and requires very little from me to get going. Daily rides absolutely kept me sane during the pandemic, and while […]

Radar, week 24: Hustlers and homes

June 19, 2022
by Bobbie Johnson
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Link / Things my friends have made / weeknotes / Workbook

• Loved this Mia Sato report from Gary Vaynerchuck’s VeeCon. Internet-driven fandoms are such fertile (and often terrifying) territory. • The rise of the internet’s creative middle class. • Robots building offshore wind turbines. • How Houston moved 25,000 people from the streets into homes of their own. • Megan Tatum on queer campaigners using the net to organize in a conservative Muslim country.

Just a formality

April 14, 2022
by Bobbie Johnson
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Workbook

Form follows function: an inspiration for designers and makers of all kinds. You see it surface in other ways, twisting a little, showing a different face: Separate content and presentation; Radical functionalism; Let people’s needs determine the shape of the thing, not the other way around. But form follows function is an ideal, not a fact.  It appeared as a counter to formal constriction, not as a natural law. Because while function is the why, […]

Inspired by gravity

February 13, 2022
by Bobbie Johnson
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Workbook

Kevin Kelly’s 1,000 True Fans said if you inspire enough people to support your work just enough, you can earn a living from almost anything. A thousand people, a hundred dollars each, that’s enough to build on. A simple theory. Li Jin recently put forward a modest proposal: what if you get 100 people who give much, much more? More money from fewer people. Why stop there? Why not a single patron giving one thousand […]

Loss and survivance

February 7, 2022
by Bobbie Johnson
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Workbook

You can lose a lot of things. Your door keys. Your temper. The plot.  If you’re particularly careless, you might even lose entire countries.  Ukraine is on the edge right now. It’s not the first. Doggerland was a piece of prehistory, a stretch of marshy coastline from when Britain was just an archipelago dangling from one corner of Europe. It was misplaced during the Original Brexit 9,000 years ago when the sea carved East Anglia […]

You’re interviewing somebody, not dating them

November 24, 2020
by Bobbie Johnson
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Media / Workbook

Interviewing people is hard. It’s not easy to talk to someone to try and understand who they are and what they’re about. In journalism, you’re trying to get interviewees to say interesting things too—things that hold up on the page, sound good to the reader, that get the subject to provide a kind of forensic self-examination. The result is that the best interviews are elevated to an art form. But interviewing is also a skill […]

Rate my room, Swiss hoarding edition

October 13, 2020
by Bobbie Johnson
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Workbook

We’re all spending a lot more time on Zoom these days. Hangouts with friends are a lot like work meetings are a lot like coffee chats are a lot like calls to family. And we’re all spending a lot more time thinking about—and commenting on—our Zoom backgrounds. Room rating is a thing. I wonder how the developmental psychologist Jean Piaget would have gotten along with it all. I mean, I don’t think he’d have cared […]

Arundhati Roy on the pandemic

August 12, 2020
by Bobbie Johnson
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Workbook

Only just found this extremely salient piece from April: Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next. We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can […]