Vol. 1, No. 9: Back to School Special
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Performance Improvement Plan
Performance Improvement Plan seeks to solve problems by answering questions about working in the creative industries. What’s vexing you? Talk to us: pip@softlabor.biz. All communications and sources will remain confidential and anonymous.
Dear Soft Labor,
I’m an untenured film professor at a large west coast university with a particularly pernicious colleague. He openly harasses faculty and students right up to the very edge of what he can get away with, then continues a furtive campaign after that. His filmmaking career tanked in the 90s; the school—at which he is tenured—is the only haven he has left.
Students and faculty alike have explored all available avenues toward having him fired, but his approach has been careful enough that grounds to dismiss him would be challenging to defend in court, so our university is unlikely to move on this. As the newest faculty in my department, I have not yet been a target, but I am afraid that is about to change as I am stepping into a rotation as Chair.
Thus far I have ignored him to the point of not even saying hello in the hall, but as Chair I can hardly get away with not speaking to a faculty member. And even if I don't fall under his crosshairs, I know I will be counseling those that do. So what can an untenured person do to protect my students and colleagues while maintaining sanity in the face of that tenured guy?
From the Academy,
Back to School Special
Dear Special,
Thanks for serving some professional nightmare realness to kick off the school year. As a career academic, you’re well aware of the institutional processes and procedures one might take in response to the individual described here. Many have already pursued them, to little avail. In our mind, what remains are the individual relationships you might cultivate around this person, along with the question of how to protect the students and colleagues you are so rightfully concerned for.
As Chair of the department, it might be tempting to leverage your power and express long-festering fury by simply calling this guy out—or to preemptively warn others of his inevitable behavior. Herculean as the effort will be, we suggest a more tempered approach.
As we all know, activism takes many forms and one of them is holding oneself in a more quiet countenance. In other words: Be for others the confidant that you seem to need right now. Workaday exchanges within your academic community build trust. Your credibility as a safe haven will be the invisible glue that holds the department together in a form of solidarity so strong that it doesn’t need to speak again until the moment is ripe for another form of action—one that we know you will take.
Keep it together.
Yours,
Soft Labor
Search Results
“Search Results” points toward Soft Labor’s ongoing research interests.
🔗 We’re feeling a small anticipatory thrill for our upcoming appointment at Library 180, the magazine research library—no gloves required!—based in the Financial District and blowing up in the Times and well beyond. Follow Library 180 on Instagram if you’re not already.
🔗 Speaking of magazines, on a recent trip to Amsterdam we visited the legendary Athenaeum Bookstore and News Center, wherein we nearly died. (Some light documentation may be found in Soft Labor’s are.na channel devoted to magazines.) After spotting new-looking vinyl lettering in the store’s window, we’ve since learned that it is part of a rebrand-in-progress designed by local international legends Experimental Jetset.
🔗 We also visited Karel Martens' solo exhibition, Unbound, at the Stedelijk Museum. The show was brilliantly devised and built to showcase the designer’s vast studio archive of ephemera from his prodigious career. A true delight. Experimental Jetset's Circuits also remains pleasantly on view.
🔗 Nemesis founder Emily Segal considered her complicated role as a longtime so-called “trend forecaster” in a recent talk at emerging tech and idea gathering FWB Fest 2025, a transcription of which was published on the Nemesis Substack. Segal argues—and very convincingly so—that trends have become not only increasingly illegible, but drained of meaning. Segal roots her analysis in all sorts of historical moments and references, from Dante’s Inferno to William Gibson and Lauren Berlant. It’s a prescient piece of cultural analysis, perfect for this very moment yet with legs that will stand for years to come.
🔗 From Donna Haraway to Dean Kissick, the New Yorker’s Kyle Chayka’s most recent essay, IRL Brain Rot and the Lure of the Labubu, drops so many names and lightly sprinkles cultural theory across an array of street-level trends—Labubus, nasty confection-like Matcha drinks, GLP1 drugs branded to invoke said drinks—while observing that “IRL brain rot” is as much of a thing as its Internet-driven counterpart. Chayka generally doesn’t forecast trends as much as he wraps his arms around them in a great bear hug, squeezing out their origins and permutations. We think he missed a few potential references in this mental sugar rush of an essay, but we enjoyed it in the same perverse way we occasionally enjoy sticky boba in our tea. (One hint: While we respect Chayka's attempt to win a Labubu from a claw machine, legit Labubus are best found in Flushing, Queens—not Union Square!)
🔗 It’s funny how a piece of writing can serve as a divining rod: Upon reading Chayka’s latest, we trotted over to our book collection and plucked out our pristine copy of Little Boy: The Arts of Japan’s Exploding Subculture, an exhibition catalogue for a show of the same title curated by legend Takashi Murakami for New York City’s Japan Society in 2005. The gorgeous, out-of-print book—one can find a copy for around $130 on eBay—contains several banger essays on kawaii or "cute" subcultures and art, all written just as social media emerged into public consciousness. There are cultural and historical connections to be made here! It was a groundbreaking exhibition—one of the Japan Society’s all-time best.
🔗 Unrelated: We saw Morgan Bassichis' "Can I Be Frank?" at Soho Playhouse recently and it was a wryly hilarious, sobering solo performance in the form of a memorial to downtown queer comedian, musician, and performance artist Frank Maya. It runs through September 13th. Go.
Dress Code
“Dress Code” spotlights workplace looks of all forms and kinds.
