I’ve raved here in the past about Hench and Villain, two books by Natalie Zina Walschots. In Hench, a woman works very boring temp jobs for supervillains (and it turns out that even when you work for supervillains, you still need to deal with bosses who are way too interested in how you are feeling, office politics, and worries about health insurance). In Villain, the sequel that just came out last month, she’s moved into a second-in-command position and is working to destroy the organization that manages the world’s superheroes. Both books explore work, power, loyalty, and what happens when ordinary people find themselves working for extraordinary (and often terrible) bosses. So the crossover felt natural. Here’s our conversation.

Alison: Since first reading Hench in 2020, I have thought that our work overlaps in so many interesting ways: workplace power dynamics, labor exploitation, competence, resentment, burnout, institutional absurdity, the ethics of loyalty, the ways so many workplaces encourage people (subtly or not so subtly) to ignore obvious harm, and the whole emotional texture of modern work. So I am very excited to talk!

Natalie: I personally think it is fascinating, hilarious, and deeply telling that a book about working for supervillains was somehow so relatable to so many people. And certainly a lot of that is intentional — I chose to write about the mundane intersecting with the horrific and fantastic, so all the scrungly parts of reality should feel familiar in those ways. But still, I think if there are all these elements about institutional evil and crushing bureaucracy and predatory mentorship and employee mistreatment is resonating so much, if a story about working for a supervillain is something so many people saw themselves in … we should probably be looking more closely at that and what the actual fuck is wrong with our workplaces that so many people recognize themselves in Hench.

Alison: Yeah. It’s a pretty bleak statement about modern work.

You have such a talent for capturing the mundanity of office work, even against a backdrop of working for supervillains. I knew I was going to love Hench early on when one character was describing a supervillain’s office to another and she mentioned that there are out-of-date computers and an annoying assistant who microwaves fish every day, and one supervillain gets described as the type of boss who pushes too much for a “real answer” when he asks how you are, all while making too much eye contact … and when the main character first meets him, he tells her, “My partner and I have been talking about opening our relationship, and it’s going really well.” I immediately thought, man, we all recognize that boss. I get so many letters about that boss! And then you carry it on in Villain. They have department sprints! They put out an RFP for proposals of evil-doing! To what extent were you drawing on your own real-life work experiences when you wrote Hench?

Natalie: It’s coming from a real place, I can tell you that much lol. Some of the events are more directly inspired than others; I did hide my coworker’s endlessly ringing phone in a pumpkin one time, for example, and the Electric Eel is a composite of several bosses I have had. My process is pretty simple, in that I take an incident or a concept — say, for example, writing and circulating RFPs — that is extremely mundane as an activity in a lot of workplaces or industries. Then I take that thing and plop it into the context of supervillainy and evildoing, and see what happens. Usually the results are hilarious, but sometimes something really interesting happens and in addition to being funny as hell, it works a little too well and that’s when I know I have really hit gold. The things that feel too real, or almost hyperreal, tend to be where the richest narrative veins are. But honestly something being funny as fuck is perfectly valid and often enough for me to find a spot for it in a book somewhere.

Alison: If you write a third book in the series, I really hope you include a terrible office Slack channel.

Natalie: This is, of course, an excellent idea and something I have thought about a lot. Can you imagine the channels? Can you imagine the DMs and groupchats? Nightmarish. 

Also, this is a bit of an aside, but you absolutely know there are several competing supervillain Discord servers that have just the most horrific mods in the known universe.

Alison: You know the way some offices have a Slack channel for people to post photos of their pets? I like to imagine that they had one where Leviathan (the supervillain in both books) would often post photos of his lizard.

Natalie: I am wheezing about this, because the moment I read this I could see the entire thing so clearly. So of course there is a pets channel, like every other work and social space on the planet. It is quite lively and varied, and you are as likely to see a praying mantis as a can on a window perch. And then once every few months, Leviathan will post a captionless image of Shannon the Iguana, always immaculately lit, and it receives a zillion reacts but no comments because everyone overthinks their replies into paralysis. 

Alison: Yes! Yes, please.

I don’t know if you’re a fan of The Wire, but I loved that element of the mundane mixed in there too — like when Stringer Bell, who’s essentially the managing director of a criminal drug dealing network, decides they’re going to start using Robert’s Rules of Order at their meetings. And actually, in the Sopranos too, I always loved the scenes that made it clear that even in this underground criminal enterprise, they had to deal with routine personnel stuff and business minutia, and it was just as boringly human there as anywhere else.

Natalie: Perhaps extremely unsurprisingly, I love The Wire. Another example of a Stringer Bell-esque character is Charles Foster Offdensen, the manager/handler of the fictional metal band Deathklok in the show Metalocalypse. I have a deep affection for characters with practical jobs in wild fictional universes.

Crime is actually very boring most of the time. I am not kidding. A thing that came up time and time again in the research I was doing was that so much of the day-to-day of organized crime was just sitting around waiting for Something To Happen. Sometimes that was a planned something and sometimes that was not, but there was a hell of a lot of just being available when you needed to be available and killing time waiting for the next brief punctuation of extreme violence.

I think the mundane parts, the boring parts, are a crucial element to all of these stories, both because they take up the majority of the time of the illegitimately employed, and because they are a very important part of humanizing these experiences. We all know what it is like to be bored, to be endlessly waiting for Something to Happen, to have our time yoked to a job and being unable to escape that, especially when that time feels like it is utterly wasted. The feeling of being on the clock is very ordinary and terrible in its own right, and being able to really feel the boredom and tension of that time passing makes things like the life of a henchperson seem so much more real and relatable. We’ve all been there watching the clock as our shift crawls to an interminable end, and the awful truth is it doesn’t feel very different whether you are behind a counter making sandwiches or in a chopshop waiting for some shit to go down.

Alison: At one point in Villain, there’s a character, Tamara, who clearly has PTSD from her old dysfunctional job and who’s carrying that stuff forward to her new job. Her old boss was punitive in very, uh, disturbing ways, and she was braced for that happening at the new job too, and it took her a while to believe the new place wasn’t like that. Which happens all the time in real life! I loved that. No question, just wanted to say it.

Natalie: Thank you for saying it, and I have terrible news: Tamara’s experience with her boss is directly inspired by something that happened to me at work, in real life, that I am frankly still furious about. I was working in an office environment, and a relatively polished/respectable one with extremely recognizable clients, doing social media work. I got the job directly through a friend, who would be my direct supervisor, and I had a lot of hope for the job being a genuinely good and safe and supportive place to work. This is foreshadowing.

One day I arrived at work and it was just me and one other person in the elevator, a man I had seen before but did not work with directly and had never spoken to. We had no relationship at all, professional or otherwise. He was scowling when he got on, and as soon as the doors closed I could tell the vibes were rancid. A few seconds into the ride he screams “Fuck!” out of nowhere and starts punching the wall of the elevator over and over again while screaming at no one. Like he was in a rage room, just letting it all out, while I was trapped in there with him. It was absolutely terrifying.

After one million years the doors opened and he got out, and I rode the last few floss up shaking. I immediately went to my friend/boss and told her what happened, while I was visibly very shaken. She just … shrugged, and said, “Oh that’s just HisName, he gets like that, don’t worry about it.” She was just completely unbothered, like oh yeah that’s just the guy who freaks the fuck out once in a while. She was completely uninterested in talking to his supervisor and discouraged me from doing so because he was not the sort of person who would be let go for something like that and what was the point.

While Tamara’s experience in her own elevator was definitely more intense than mine, it still disturbed me greatly, and also was a moment of deep disappointment in terms of the way it was handled, or not handled. 

Alison: That’s unhinged. And then you just had to go back to work like everything was normal, and everyone around you was acting like it’s normal, which in some ways is the most deeply unsettling aspect of experiences like that.

Natalie: That is always the part that has fucked me up the most about experiences like this: I know what happened was outrageous and terrifying, but the responses of the people around me make me question my own reality. It’s profoundly destabilizing. 

Alison: Do you consider Anna/the Auditor (the protagonist in both books) a good boss? I’m curious to hear your thoughts, given the setting they’re working in (a supervillain’s lair, basically).

Natalie: I think she is trying very hard to be a good boss. I don’t think that she is especially suited for it, and managing people is neither her strong suit nor something she takes a lot of pleasure in. But she does want to protect the people working for her and give them the best chance that she can to succeed, and that counts for a lot. I think she occupies a position that most supervillains would find themselves in, which is that The Work is all consuming and managing the people who work for her is just a necessary step in service to that work, but one that often takes a much lower priority than other things. She isn’t cruel  to her team but she certainly can be neglectful, and when big shit is going down her attention is entirely elsewhere. 

She’s definitely not a good boss, but she’s not an awful one either. Being a boss is an unfortunate side effect of where she finds herself, and something she will deprioritize at the expense of her team when necessary.

Alison: At the same time, she cares about her people, she gives them a lot of autonomy to do what they’re good at, and she’s very clear about the realities they’re working with. She’s not trying to hide the reality of it from anyone, which I respect a lot.

Natalie: She is trying very hard to balance keeping her people safe while treating them as smart, capable people entitled to autonomy. She might not be the best at replying to their emails and signing off on PTO though. I think she’d be a much better mentor than a supervisor, if that makes sense.

Alison: Okay, can we talk about the boss/employee relationship between the Auditor and Leviathan? Their dynamic was obviously problematic in so many ways, but do you think the Auditor considered it that, at least in the first half of the book? I feel like, at least for a while, she did that thing that so many people do when becoming indispensable to a very powerful boss, where they’re so pleased with how indispensable and trusted they are that they don’t clearly see how deeply warped the power dynamics of the relationship are. And even once she started to see it more clearly, she never really wanted to look at it head-on. (I think we can discuss this without spoilers.)

Natalie: Oh man, this is a rich and complicated topic. Their boss/employee relationship has evolved a lot over time, so it’s hard to pin down, and the closer they have become and the more indispensable the Auditor has become, the more troubling that relationship is. I think that initially, especially in the first half of Hench, she would not have considered their relationship problematic at all (at least certainly no more so than any position working for a supervillain would be), and that even the weirdest parts were worth the benefits and the freedom that came with the position that she occupied. 

I think that has changed pretty radically over time, and she knows it; I don’t want to get into this too deeply, but I will say that I think you’re absolutely right in that it’s something she chooses not to look at too closely. Also many other things are escalating all around her in tandem with their relationship evolving, so it’s very easy for examining their relationship to drop down the priority list while so much else is on fire.

Alison: Well, now that you’ve given us this world, are you thinking about a third in the series? I really want to read about the horrible Discord mods.

Natalie: I am a lot more than thinking about it. When I wrote Hench, I had no idea what its future might be, so I wrote it to be a completely self-contained story while still leaving it open-ended enough that I could return to the world if that opportunity ever came. To my eternal gratitude it did, and so Villain was written from a different place, with a very clear path to continuing the story. It’s still in the early stages, of course, but I am already deeply invested in exploring what happens next in the Leviathan-Auditor-Decoherence hate triangle.

Alison: I am so glad to hear this!

Have you seen the Ask a Manager/Hench mash-up someone made?

Natalie: I HAVE, and it makes me SO HAPPY. I should specify that I have seen but have not read it; I have a hard rule against reading fan fiction of my own work, despite how utterly overjoyed its existence makes me. I grew up writing and reading fan fiction and writing something that inspired fanfic was always a core goal of mine, so any time there is a new entry on AO3 for the Henchiverse, my little trashbag heart swells. But I cannot read it, because I don’t want my own writing to be consciously or unconsciously influenced by it in any way. As much as it breaks my heart, my eyes must merely glance at the titles from afar. 

Alison: Well, then please just trust me that it is a beautiful thing and the person who made it is a genius.

Thank you for talking with me! This has been an absolute delight.

Natalie: Thank you so much for talking to me, this was wonderful!

Buy Hench here: Amazon, Bookshop

And its new sequel, Villain: Amazon, Bookshop

* I earn a commission if you use those links.

The post Ask a Hench: an interview with Natalie Zina Walschots, the author of Hench and Villain appeared first on Ask a Manager.

starbitten13:

wordfather:

phillyphillyphilly:

wordfather:

wordfather:

wordfather:

idk if this is an usamerican thing or not but it always blows my mind as a small european country resident that yall have many names and types of apples???? what do you mean its not just red yellow or green??? why is it so complicated??? who is granny smith????

‘whats your favorite apple’ 'red’ 'no i mean like what type’ ’??????’ actual conversatiom i’ve had with a mutual from usa

THIRTY TWO??????

Listen that doesn’t even account for all the weird shit local farmers are getting up to.

May I present the best apple:

the world is so big and beautiful

There are 7500 cultivars of culinary or “eating” apples.

Source

not-freyja:

Can everyone who makes video content do a Deaf bitch a favor? Watch your shit with the captions on and the sound off, and then do another round of editing to fix things including but not limited to:

• Captions cover the spot on the screen you put the information I need
• The dialogue is captioned but not the song you have playing that the dialogue is responding to
• You only captioned the person on the screen, not the person off screen who is also talking
• No captioning of critical sound effects (alarms, bells, dogs barking, etc)
• Speakers are not labelled at moments where it is not clear on the screen who is talking.
• Captions cover the spot on the screen that you put the information I need!

Other d/Deaf people welcome to add.

This post brought to you by the fifth video tutorial I could not follow because the bad, auto-generated captions covered what I was trying to watch today.

Two events have shaped my adult working life. They are 34 years and a week apart. Today is the anniversary of one of them. I only made the connection recently.

One involved a cow and would tortuously get me into the Foreign Service. The other was a barely noticeable bump on my right cheek. It would start me thinking seriously about the rest of my life.

I have told the cow story since it happened in 1989. It begins, “I have spent 45 minutes of my life waiting for a cow to shit.” The short version was I was sent to cover a fundraiser called Betsy Bingo when I was a reporter for The Augusta (Ga.) Chronicle. The premise was that a cow would be let loose on a field lined in a grid. The squares of the grid had been sold for 5 dollars. Wherever the cow answered nature’s call, as I described it in the story I wrote using language fit for a family paper, would earn the owner of that spot $5,000. It was craps, but not the kind they play in Vegas. The story was published on May 24, 1989. Unfortunately, it is not available online.

A few weeks later, the cow story would be the culmination of my journalism career. I quit without another job, which nearly worried my parents to death. I had tried but failed to find anything else. Newspapers were already struggling financially in the 1980s. I had gotten a 2 percent raise during my annual evaluation and was told explicitly not to tell anyone because some at the paper weren’t getting anything. Coming from a chain that a consultant had described as “papers of crushing mediocrity” wouldn’t open any doors for me. One editor told me I was a promising prospect, but there were no jobs to offer because of an indefinite hiring freeze at the paper. Unsurprisingly, The Washington Post rejected me. It was the only rejection letter I saved.

I eventually landed in the communications department of a trade association in Washington, D.C. It was a decent, well-paying, and unsatisfying job I kept for almost three years. When I asked myself if correcting others’ grammar was how I saw myself spending the next 20 years, I knew it was time to leave. (Little did I know that the Foreign Service has a disproportionate number of near-rabid grammarians who would argue use of the Oxford comma and spaces after periods as vigorously as any policy decision. I became one of them, drawing the line at the use of impact as a verb and ask as a noun. These abominations are indicative that the end of days is near, in my mind.)

I left for graduate school with the idea that a degree in international relations would get me a civil service job or something at a think tank that would give me opportunities to write about weightier issues than youth league fundraisers.

At the University of Chicago, I took the Foreign Service test mostly because. some friends persuaded me to come along with them. I had nothing else to do that Saturday morning, and it was free, so I took it.

I ended up in the Foreign Service because I spent 45 minutes waiting for a cow to shit and thought I was better than that.

Thirty-four years later, on May 29, 2023, we were driving home to Brussels from my daughter’s college graduation in Paris. I glanced in the rear view mirror and saw a small bump on my right cheek, outlined by the sunlight coming through the back window. I hadn’t noticed it before. I took a longer look at it while I was shaving the next morning. I didn’t think much of it.

Maybe it was nothing. An ingrown hair? A blocked saliva duct? It got big enough fast enough that I started referring to it as my goiter. I made sure I only got photographed from my left side in a feeble effort to hide it and keep it from being the focal point of any photo on the Embassy’s social media pages.

It wasn’t nothing. On August 30, in a brightly lit, clean-room-white office at the Jules Bordet Cancer Institute in Brussels, a hematologist slid the results of my biopsy across her desk. She told me the results as I tried to read them in French. Follicular lymphoma. Two words I had never heard and didn’t understand other than lymphoma was cancer.

I asked her what would have caused it. “We don’t know,” she told me. It’s also incurable. My immediate thought was the Russians. Weird things happened in Moscow, and I had served there twice. Ultimately, it didn’t matter what caused it — we’ll never know — but after six cycles of chemotherapy over 18 weeks, I was declared in remission in April 2024. Now two years in remission, the risk of relapse in the near term has dropped significantly.

It’s tempting to write how having beaten cancer in this first round has given me a new outlook on. life, that I have changed my ways. It’s much messier than that. Since the moment the doctor slid the diagnosis across her desk, I’ve been hyper suspicious of anything physical that seems out of the ordinary and acutely aware of my mortality. Being told I was in remission was a huge relief. Even with the positive results early on, I always worried, “What if?” In reality, two early treatments with the immunotherapy drug rituximab had largely dissolved the tumor — like ice in the summer sun, one doctor told me — before I started full chemotherapy.

I have some visible broken capillaries in my cheek as a reminder of the tumor. The indolent cells are waiting and will show themselves at some point.

Rather than some grand plan, I live a most ordinary life close to what it was before. If I have had any change in perspective, it’s that I don’t have to put up with things I don’t want to. I saw things getting worse with the Trump administration. Staying in the Foreign Service would require more compromises than I was willing to make. I walked away.

I go on living, not just surviving. No cows. No bad grammar.

h00pqueen:

spankerella:

@ goodgoodgoodco

https://wigreenfire.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/Big-Tech-Unchecked-Toolkit_final_rev19Dec25-resized.pdf

Link to the pdf of the tool kit

Love you guys, stay safe!

I’m a sucker for the technical vocabulary of traditional fields, the more obsolescent the better (cf. retting flax), so of course I enjoyed Rukmini Callimachi’s NY Times piece (archived) on the beleaguered master thatchers of olde England and the roofs they thatch:

For the most ardent traditionalists, the only true thatch is “long straw” — typically cereal straw, like wheat, which is threshed to remove the grain — believed by historians to be England’s original roof. Then there’s water reed, the more durable alternative that is increasingly imported from abroad.

For master thatcher Stephen Letch, the difference is unmistakable. The problem is that for almost everyone else it’s undetectable — which is one reason long-straw roofs are going extinct. “There’s 20 or 30 long-straw thatchers left in all of England,” said Mr. Letch, 66, who has spent much of his life trying to preserve this dying art. “We’re the last and we know we’re the last — and we know that once we’re gone, those skills will be lost.” […]

Long before Britain was stitched together by a railway, roofs were made from whatever grew nearby, like heather in the northern highlands and reed near bogs and waterways. Overwhelmingly, though, most areas of the country used straw, a byproduct of the wheat grown to make bread, according to historians. It’s a lightweight material that keeps homes well insulated in the summer heat and the winter cold, but it is also flammable, attracts insects and the spiders that feed on them, and requires costly maintenance.

According to one assessment, 90 percent of thatched roofs in England and Wales were made of straw before 1800, with the remaining share split between water reed and grasses, like heather. Now that percentage has been inverted, as more and more houses are re-thatched with the more durable reed. But it’s not sourced from the local river — much of it is shipped from Eastern Europe and China.

“We do get asked the question: Well, what is the value of it?” Mr. Letch said of the long straw. “Tradition,” he answered, before dropping his voice: “But you can’t see the tradition because it all looks the same.” […]

It’s not hard to see why water reed has won out. It lasts longer — up to 70 years, versus 40 years for long straw, according to Julia Shelley, editor of The Thatcher’s Standard, the publication of the National Society of Master Thatchers. And it’s much easier to source and to install.

“You can pick up the phone and say, ‘I need 2,000 bunches of reeds,’ and they’ll turn up next week,” said the master thatcher Bodkin Willows, 38, while it can take up to a year to source the wheat for a long-straw roof.

The reed arrives from overseas in bundles that can go straight onto a roof. Long straw, by contrast, requires a preparation so elaborate that it has its own archaic vocabulary: Straw must be “gabled,” soaked in water and sorted, before being arranged in “yealms,” and pinned into place with “broaches” or “spars” made from hazel sticks that have been sharpened into staples.

Yealm is normatively spelled yelm; the OED (entry from 1921) defines it as “In Old English, a handful, bundle, sheaf, as of reaped corn; in modern dialect use, a bundle of straw laid straight for thatching (see yelm v.): = helm n.³ 1.” and says it is “Of uncertain origin.” As for broach, the OED (entry from 1888) has a great many senses (“A pointed rod of wood or iron; a lance, spear, bodkin, pricker, skewer, awl, stout pin”; “A spit for spitting herring; a similar instrument used in Candle-making for suspending the wicks for dipping”; “A shuttle used in weaving tapestry,” etc.), but the one we want is I.5. “A piece of tough pliant wood, pointed at each end, used by thatchers for fixing their work”; the word is from French broche (“The same word as brooch n., the senses having been differentiated in spelling”).

I feel for the beleaguered thatchers, of course, but I’m afraid they’re not going to have much success trying to persuade people to undergo more trouble and expense for something that no one but an expert can tell from I Can’t Believe It’s Not Thatch. At any rate, the photos in the article are splendid — do take a look.