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What emerges from these early aughts attempts to understand shootings using the tools of cinema is a need to understand, in a way that ends up centering the shooter. Does that have an effect on viewers? Does it position the shooter as the true protagonist of the tale? And — perhaps most chillingly — is it possible that it makes the character, however heinous their deeds, sort of attractive to certain audiences?

It’s impossible to say, and maybe even dangerous to posit. But as the months after Columbine showed — when garbled stories grew into folk legends that could end up hurting survivors further — that focus could be, at best counterproductive. And in the decades of school shootings since, survivors have found themselves processing their trauma in different ways, complicated by having to navigate those emotions with a still-developing brain. Meanwhile, we can offer all kinds of reasons that school shootings happen so frequently in America, including a prevalent gun culture and lack of mental health support. But those confront the symptoms, not the cause. We still don’t have real answers for the why of it all, the senseless violence, the unending tragedy, the thing that might make a young person want to do something so awful — the thing movies tried to figure out.

So perhaps it’s unsurprising that filmmakers have been gradually turning in the direction The Fallout takes, focusing more on what happens next. We’ve all been living, to one degree or another, in the wake of school shootings, whether we’ve experienced them directly or not.

This isn’t easy to do well. Brady Corbet’s 2018 film Vox Lux leans hard into the skid, following a pop star who rises to fame after she survives a shooting at her school, then writes and performs a song about it and becomes a hit. She’s destroyed by adulthood, but whether it’s the trauma or the lifestyle or the fame or all of it, it’s hard to say — and the film seems a little too in love with its conceit to actually embody its goals.

A man and a woman sit across from one another, weeping. Ryan Jackson-Healy / Bleecker Street
Jason Isaacs and Martha Plimpton in Mass.

Fran Kranz’s gentler and more devastating ensemble drama Mass, released last year, gets at something profound. It’s the story of four people who meet to talk years after a shooting: the parents (Jason Isaacs and Martha Plimpton) of a boy who died in a shooting, and the parents (Ann Dowd and Reed Birney) of the shooter. Their conversation is knotty and painful. Here, the parents are added to the ranks of the survivors, run ragged and devastated by the ways they’ve tried to respond, to understand how their own child could have been the shooter, or the shot.

And as they stand in for the thousands of parents living through the same thing, they beckon the audience to live through their eyes, to understand the tangly and uncertain world they occupy. Mass ends with grace, maybe a little catharsis, but no answers or explanations. This is a mess that we are living through, one that can be confronted but requires courage.

Meanwhile, the kids try to keep living. The best moment in The Fallout comes right at the end, when Vada seems to have recovered just enough to “move on” from what happened. We think she’s got the tools to cope and keep living. But in the final moments, she picks up her phone to see a news alert about a shooting at a high school halfway across the country.

And the last thing we hear is Vada’s breath as she has a panic attack. For the second generation of school shooting survivors, it’s never really over. The best the movies can do is try to capture that experience, let it linger, give space for grief to survivors, and make sure all of us understand.

The Fallout is streaming on HBO Max. Mass is streaming on Hulu and available to rent on digital platforms.

There’s a song for every emotion: love, heartbreak, anger, despair. Les Miserables, the musical based on Victor Hugo’s sprawling 19th-century novel about French revolutionaries, has launched a million dreams and memes.

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But whether you’re a superfan who wants to fight me about the novel’s 100-page Battle of Waterloo digression or whether Nick Jonas was well-cast as Marius in the 25th anniversary concert (I’m down on Waterloo and up on Nick), or just sort of remember seeing the movie 10 years ago, Les Miserables is something that sticks with you. And that’s because it’s one of the few pieces of art that manages to capture basically everything about humanity.

The musical has, in many ways, overtaken the novel in the cultural imagination. The songs in Les Mis are so catchy that they become the be-all and end-all of the piece, something to be sung on road trips and, for many people, completely divorced from the story. But what gives those songs their gravitas are the themes of Les Mis: It’s fundamentally about misplaced justice and social inequality. The key to not taking the songs of Les Mis for granted is looking more closely at the book the musical is based on.

My first job out of college was in economics research. I lived in Zambia and interviewed people about a sewer system that was supposed to be built in the next couple of months. The sewer system was planned for a “peri-urban” neighborhood located in the space where the city met the countryside. Every month, they would wait for it to be built, and every month, it was not built. Every winter, because of the lack of a sewer system, the streets flood, and cholera sweeps through much of peri-urban Lusaka.

This doesn’t, at first, seem like it has to do with Les Mis. But as Victor Hugo, the author, wrote: “The history of men is reflected in the history of sewers.”

Les Mis is set in 19th-century peri-urban Paris, which is completely removed from the reality of many upper-middle-class Americans, and so is easy to think of as only a musical set piece for romantic and revolutionary songs. But this setting looks a lot like many peri-urban areas today. The “justice” system that puts Jean Valjean, one of the characters at the center of the story, in prison for 19 years for stealing a loaf of bread to feed his family looks uncomfortably like modern America.

At the end of Les Miserables, Valjean has a confrontation with his former pursuer, the cop Javert, who has no sense of mercy, in the Paris sewers.

In this part of Les Miserables, the book, Hugo goes on a massive digression about the sewer systems of Paris: their history, their present, and the possibility for social progress and hygiene through their cleaning.

This is what Hugo is dealing with in the book: inequality, injustice, and what happens when you have a massive urban and peri-urban environment where people are going hungry. He digs into how it’s really bad when people don’t have functional sewer systems and they are driven to revolution. He explicitly states this in his original epigraph!

“As long as social damnation exists, through laws and customs, artificially creating hell at the heart of civilisation and muddying a destiny that is divine with human calamity; as long as the three problems of the century — man’s debasement through the proletariat, woman’s demoralisation through hunger, the wasting of the child through darkness — are not resolved; as long as social suffocation is possible in certain areas; in other words, and to take an even broader view, as long as ignorance and misery exist in this world, books like the one you are about to read are, perhaps, not entirely useless.”

Social novels provide a map of the conditions that drive people to revolution and force people to look at the worst parts of the society we create. But, as this review of the book says, Hugo’s own words above provide a limited vision of what his book does. Literature does what economics cannot: It provides not only policy prescriptions that allow more people to live, but provides the reasons for living.

The musical might not quite get across the social gravity of the novel, but it gets across the human part well, showing through music and dance the infinite range of human experience. The combination of what people remember — catchy songs — and what people forget — serious social commentary — is what makes Les Mis so brilliant.

The reason the revolutionaries in Les Mis are fighting and Hugo is writing is 1) for things like better sewer systems or social programs, and 2) because of the options these sewer systems provide to live. Eponine should be worried about cholera; Eponine also sings a song that anyone, anywhere who has experienced unrequited love can understand. Les Mis starts with an exploration of an unjust justice system and provides an answer in the mercy of the Bishop and the life of Jean Valjean.

That’s the genius of good art; it’s the genius of Les Mis. The memes are good. The singing is great, and the jokes, and all that, because that is what makes us human. It’s not here to kill your joy because joy is what makes us human — it’s here to complicate it. It says there is poverty, there is hunger, and it makes us inhuman to ignore it and not work toward social progress. And yet, there is joy, there is love, and there is beauty and forgiveness and mercy.

Ultimately, we want a world where humans are thriving. This is a world with functional sewer systems and a world with singing. Les Miserables, in all its forms, gives us a vision for both.

You can read Les Miserables for free here. For more recommendations from the world of culture, check out the One Good Thing archives.

We often begin to understand things only after they break down. Your furnace fails, or your marriage does, and you suddenly have to address elementary questions. This is why, in addition to being a worldwide catastrophe, the pandemic has been a large-scale philosophical experiment. It shook up our lives and forced us to ask why we travel, why we go to school, why we touch each other.

American working life suffered its greatest breakdown since at least the Great Depression. Now, offices are reopening even as quit rates are near record highs and millions of workers remain out of the labor force. But the questions raised by mass layoffs, remote work, and the risks borne by front-line workers remain unsettled: What good is work? How should it fit into our lives?

There is a surprising skepticism toward work in the US today — surprising because Americans have for centuries valued hard work and identified themselves with their jobs. From Ben Franklin’s “time is money” to pre-pandemic hustle culture, Americans have viewed work as essential to human value. Now, the “antiwork” movement — most visible on the r/antiwork and r/workreform Reddit forums, where people discuss abstruse Marxist philosophy and celebrate workers who tell off their petty bosses — has grown more prominent as the labor market churns. Some opinion- makers are staking claim to “anti- ambition,” a cold-eyed view of work as little more than an economic transaction: no more doing what you love, no more turning work into a religion.

I find this skepticism encouraging. For years, I have written about the bad bargain work has become in the United States, with workers often enduring insecurity, crummy wages, and burnout. Alongside writers like David Graeber, Miya Tokumitsu, and Jenny Odell, I have argued that work is so miserable, we ought to reimagine our society so that we can live decent lives while doing as little of it as possible — ideally, none at all.

But when I listen to Coates talk about her job, or when I consider work’s role in my own life, I think there’s something about it that’s worth saving: the social, psychological, and moral structure that, at its best, work can provide us.

An automated, post-work utopia is worth striving toward. There’s no telling, however, when such a dream might be realized; we currently have neither the civic institutions nor the cultural values to have a leisure society. And in the meantime, most adults, myself included, have to earn money and depend on others’ labor.

Many critics of American work culture are not in a position to change federal or corporate policy. They can, however, provide the vision and energy to push for change. To do so, they will need to reckon with what people get out of their work, figure out ways to preserve the good while eliminating the bad, and ultimately envision a society in which people can get those benefits, both material and moral, by other means.

Coates’s coworker Joey Fry has worked for the grocery chain for 20 years. “I always thought about my job as just money and separated it from a passion,” he told me. His true passion is making ceramic art. He works 35 hours a week at the store and earns “just barely enough” to support himself.

Money is the most obvious thing people want from work, and so higher wages must be at the center of any effort to make work better, with some sort of basic income a feature of the postwork world. People, however, also work in pursuit of more abstract goods, such as meaning or purpose. That is not just a luxury for elite workers. Although workers without a college degree put more importance on salary and security when making career decisions than workers with degrees do, as the sociologist Erin Cech has found, there is no difference in the value workers place on finding meaningful work.

Stocking shelves may not be Fry’s passion, but over the course of our conversation, he kept bringing up social and ethical aspects of his job at the grocery store. “There has to be some integrity behind my job,” he said. “I find it there.” He enjoys the physical nature of the work, and he likes the fact that he works in his neighborhood. “I want to go to work, doing something that’s good for the community, providing food,” he said.

Covid-19 posed a moral challenge to Fry. When the pandemic arrived and shelves emptied of toilet paper and pasta, Fry, who is 39, stayed on the job out of a sense of duty. “A lot of my coworkers chose to not work,” he said. “I just didn’t feel like I had any good reason not to.” He noted that he could have made more money on unemployment. “But I thought I would get bored, and I thought it was the right thing to do,” Fry said. The store was “struggling,” he added. “I felt like they needed me there.”

Work is a social arrangement. It mediates countless relationships, both casual and intimate. Go to the tailor often enough, and you’ll become part of each other’s lives, sharing jokes and complaints about the weather or, where I live, the Dallas Cowboys. I still miss the regulars at the restaurant where I worked many years ago. Even at a workplace with high employee turnover, Fry has made friendships that have lasted for two decades. Or as Coates put it, “We all have our work wives.” Sometimes, a coworker becomes your actual wife. One of mine did.

The tight weave between work and society is why it’s so worrisome that customers’ angry outbursts at retail, restaurant, and airline workers have become more common lately. Both Coates and Fry said that customers not masking — even in an area like the East Bay, where vaccination and masking rates were high — were a source of stress.

Still, not even a pandemic can erase societal goodwill altogether. Fry said some customers expressed genuine appreciation for his work. “There was a super sweet couple,” he recalled, “that stopped by every morning and thanked every single person who worked there.”

Even as the antiwork counterculture grows, so do calls to “get back to work.” Conservative politicians have been saying this all along, but now President Joe Biden has joined the chorus, saying in his State of the Union address this year, “It’s time for Americans to get back to work and fill our great downtowns again.”

Looming large in such arguments are the supposed perils of idleness. The political economist Nicholas Eberstadt told the Wall Street Journal’s Mene Ukueberuwa in January that working-age adults who chose to stay out of the workforce were inviting a “fundamentally degrading” purposelessness into their lives. Out-of-work men, Eberstadt’s research suggests, spend their time not in contributing to their communities but in front of screens: watching TV, playing video games. “By and large,” Eberstadt said, “nonworking men don’t ‘do’ civil society.” Work is their main link to it, and when it’s severed, they become more isolated and despondent.

I have to admit, I know firsthand what Eberstadt is talking about. After I burned out and quit my dream job as a college professor in Pennsylvania, I followed my wife’s career to Texas and decided I would try freelance writing. The work felt very lonely. She went off to work, and I stayed home, ostensibly to write, with nothing to anchor my time. Ideas and words — and thus money, too — came to me slowly. I spent a lot of time lying on the couch. I was the sort of person Eberstadt is talking about. Even as I was writing about the problem with relying on work for your life’s meaning, it became clear I needed a job.

After a year and a half, I returned to a familiar place: the classroom. I’m now a part-time writing instructor at the nearest university, a 30-minute walk from my house. The 10 or 12 hours a week I spend on teaching don’t earn me much money, and they cause me mild stress during grading periods, but I also get back many intangible benefits. Students are counting on me to show up at a specific place and time and teach them. That schedule gives shape to my days. In class, I exercise skills I spent decades building. When I go to meetings of my program, I feel like I am part of a worthy enterprise. I’ve made friends with a few colleagues. I can walk across campus and know I belong there. And if anyone asks what work I do, I have a straightforward answer.

Coates’s anxiety and my boredom pose a challenge to antiwork advocates. True, with less work, everyone would be free to structure their lives however they wanted, but in fact, few people are good at that. I certainly am not. I’m much less happy in summers, when I don’t have the routine and obligation of classes to focus my time and effort.

One reason work has so much power to shape our lives is that adults lack alternative social structures. Work is just the default mode of engaging with society for anyone who’s out of school, especially if they are not caring for young children. This helps explain why, prior to the pandemic, many retirees who didn’t need the money went back to work anyway. Habits of social engagement built up over decades do not disappear on your 65th birthday.

The antiwork vision may seem far-fetched, but it has never really been given a chance. Early in the pandemic, some people glimpsed a postwork society because the $600-a-week unemployment supplements meant they could support their families without work. Because everything else shut down, however, there were limited opportunities to create new institutions that could order our time and effort. It’s no surprise, then, that 70 percent of remote workers reported working on the weekends in 2020, or that 45 percent reported working more than they did before. What else was there to do?

It’s true that work can contribute the structure and resources people need to live satisfying lives. But how big a role does work need to play? Can’t we get what we need from work without it dominating our lives?

If the most obvious benefit of work is money, then the most obvious cost is time. Or, to put it another way, work costs us our lives. This is why work that feels pointless or pays too little is such an insult. “We tend to speak of our having a limited amount of time,” writes Oliver Burkeman in his book, 4,000 Weeks: Time Management for Mortals. “But it might make more sense … to say that we are a limited amount of time.” If our lives are time, then understanding how the costs and benefits of work play out over time is the key to figuring out how work ought to fit into our lives.

Some of the goods of work increase with the length of the workday. Most notably, this is true of earnings for most workers. But with most other goods, you don’t get more as you work more. In fact, many of the social and psychological benefits come from having a job rather than putting in long hours. That is, you have an answer to the “What do you do?” question even if you only work a few hours a week. You don’t get a better answer with more hours. You don’t get more of the feeling that people are counting on you, that you are contributing to society. You probably don’t make more friends.

And at some point, you stop getting the benefit of a schedule to your time, because you have less and less time when you aren’t at work. Your productivity slows, too, past 40 or 50 hours a week. Meanwhile, stress rises with time spent working. A Korean study found that younger workers’ risk of stress, depression, and suicidal thoughts dramatically increased when they worked longer than a standard schedule.

For workers to reap the social, moral, and even spiritual goods US culture promises them, and to avoid the drawbacks, they certainly should be able to cap their hours at 40 per week, and ideally would be working somewhat fewer. That isn’t realistic for many people unless wages increase accordingly. For this reason, shorter-hours policies — like California Democratic Rep. Mark Takano’s proposed four-day workweek bill, which would require overtime pay after 32 hours — need to be coupled with higher-wage policies.

Higher wages and shorter hours: The way to tame work is almost too obvious.

Yet in the context of US history, it’s revolutionary. Real wages have been flat for decades. And the standard workweek hasn’t changed in 85 years. Average working hours in the US have declined slightly since 1980, but not nearly as fast as they have in economic peer countries like Canada, France, or Japan.

We will also need policy to break the vicious cycle between work and social alternatives to it: If everyone is working, then there’s no time to build civic institutions like social clubs or activist groups, but if there are no civic institutions, you may as well keep working. As Sunday-closing laws have relaxed in the US, there is no longer any common time free from work, no period when you can count on others to be available to get together and build social connections. Free time is a human right, argues the political scientist Julie Rose. It’s a necessary condition for attaining the other rights, like freedom of association, expression, and worship, that liberal democracies are meant to guarantee. And so time away from work and weekly restrictions on commerce should be protected by law.

But policy alone will not solve the problem of work. Culture needs to change, too, and antiwork advocates can push for it to happen. They have the vision and can encourage the building of institutions that will provide an off- ramp from our total work society. We need to make time away from work appealing not just as the absence of toil but as a mode of flourishing and fulfilling our human needs for camaraderie, moral growth, and purpose. That may be the only way we’ll convince people like Nicholas Eberstadt that those who opt out of the labor market, even if they aren’t caring for children or others, are making a positive, worthy choice. That will require foregrounding models of activity and civic engagement — retirees, student activists, disabled people, members of religious orders —that don’t put work at the center. If the antiwork movement can emphasize the positive appeal of not-work, then employers will feel pressure to improve work in turn, if they’re going to lure us back.

Both Laurel Coates and Joey Fry told me they wished they were paid more, but they also said they appreciated the limits on their work, and how they never have to take their work home with them. “My philosophy is, it’s okay to be a little settled,” Fry said. “I’m 70 percent happy at my job most of the time.”

And when it’s over, it’s over. A good job is one you can leave at the end of a shift and then get started doing something better.

Jonathan Malesic is the author of The End of Burnout: Why Work Drains Us and How to Build Better Lives. He is a former sushi chef and parking attendant.

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