Behind the scenes accounts of different jobs

October 28, 2022 6:26 PM

I’d like to read articles written by employees or subculture members about what their world is like. Could be a big company, could be a religion, or an unusual career, etc. Any great articles come to mind? (Articles, not books please, my attention span begs you)
posted by nouvelle-personne to Society & Culture (11 answers total)

Gig is a modern version of Working. It's not by Studs Terkel, but it's the same concept and format. It's been many years since I read it, but I think each story was only a few pages. It's very interesting and entertaining.
posted by jonathanhughes at 7:51 PM on October 28, 2022 [1 favorite]

A classic: Anthony Bourdain's "Don't Eat Before Reading This."
posted by praemunire at 7:55 PM on October 28, 2022 [1 favorite]

Since May 2021, fantasy novelist Amanda Downum has been writing a short, regular column about her other career as a night-shift embalmer: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17.
posted by Wobbuffet at 9:00 PM on October 28, 2022 [1 favorite]

For a look at what it was like working in a recording studio, check out The Mixerman Diaries. It started as serialized postings and then got made into a book, so I'm not positive the individual postings are still available, but for the sake of your attention span, it looks like there's a podcast that breaks it out into smaller pieces if that works for you.

Similarly, Waiterrant started as individual postings and are still available for bite sized tastings but were turned into a book.
posted by Candleman at 9:40 PM on October 28, 2022

Seconding Gig--fascinating and this reminds me I really should check out Working too.
posted by shakobe at 9:44 PM on October 28, 2022

Anthony Bourdain's New Yorker essay "Don't Eat Before Reading This" (which he later expanded into his bestselling memoir Kitchen Confidential if you want more).
posted by Rhaomi at 10:41 PM on October 28, 2022

The online magazine Slate used to have a feature called Slate Diaries where, over the course of a 5-day work week, people with interesting jobs would post diary entries about their jobs and lives. They got compiled into a book, The Slate Diaries, that is very easy to flip through and dip into for individual diary entries. And if you dig around the Slate archives you can probably find the original posts.
posted by brainwane at 4:26 AM on October 29, 2022

Aha: Slate's "diary" category/tag has the archives. Can be kind of hard to navigate since some of the metadata isn't visible on each individual entry page, as with this 2004 post by Robin Nagle, a person in a class of recently hired New York City sanitation workers.

You can borrow the book electronically on the Open Library.
posted by brainwane at 7:22 AM on October 29, 2022

Funny enough, I am currently reading Between You and Me by Mary Norris which is about being a copy-editor at The New Yorker.
posted by radioamy at 1:12 PM on October 31, 2022

Staffmeup has a series about various film crew jobs.
posted by Ideefixe at 4:14 PM on November 1, 2022

Popula's "Me Today" article series has one-day diaries of people's lives and sometimes they have unusual jobs or are part of particular subcultures. Here's an example about a US Congressional staffer.
posted by brainwane at 9:06 AM on November 29, 2022