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What's your most frustrating experience with bureaucracy? Plus, best reads from 2024.
In Part III, Chapter 25 of Anna Karenina Konstantin Levin visits a provincial government in order to resolve an issue with his estate. The scene may be reminiscent of an experience youâve had with government or bureaucracies generally: he finds the office in a state of chaos; the clerks keep referring him to one another without offering any tangible assistance; his attempts to understand the system are frustrated by the realization that the clerks are too inept, too lazy, or too strictly bound by protocol to be of any real use; he eventually comes to understand that the bureaucracy is meant only to perpetuate itself and not to resolve the issues of its constituents; and the result is that he leaves in frustration without resolving the issue.
In May 2023, I published the first installment of âThe Reincarnation Bureau!â. Since that time, Iâve been collecting further anecdotesâboth mine and those from the experiences of othersâfor future episodes of this heavenly nightmare.
I want to hear your experiences with bureaucracy:
Does a particular moment stand out in memory?
Was it a specific department or organization?
What were you trying to accomplish?
Was it something routine that felt unnecessarily complicated by protocol or the ineptitude of âclerksâ?
Did you, like Levin, leave frustrated? Or were you able to resolve the issue?
If youâre interested in sharing your story (or stories) with me, simply reply to this email. Iâll be working on several more installments in 2025, and youâll be able to catch those here and at www.thehartandthecur.com. A big thank you in advance!
Top Reads from 2024
Here are the top three reads from The Portmanteau in 2024 based on reader views, covering Artificial Intelligence, free speech and the singular story of James Joyceâs Ulysses, and what we learn about ourselves when we horde college engineering assignments.
What does it mean to be human?
In March, we published essays on humans, machines, and artificial intelligence. These essays spanned the spectrum of viewpointsâfrom techno-optimism, to techno-skepticism, and something in-between. In the inaugural essay, I argued for a human-centric future to whatever next steps we take in our relationship to technology.
One (More) Book Called Ulysses
âBut my considered opinion, after long reflection, is that whilst in many places the effect of âUlyssesâ on the reader is somewhat emetic, nowhere does it tend to be an aphrodisiac.â
The landmark Woolsey ruling on Joyce's Ulysses in 1933 ushered in a new era of free speech. We need another Ulysses to shake us up.
"The Papers"
I carried a host of papers from college for over 10 years across three continents. Why did I do it? And why was I finally able to get rid of them?
"These papers seem the desperate plea of a person trying to hold a world together that was dynamic and moving, spinning and changing far outside his control."