The Nowhere Office: Reinventing Work and the Workplace of the Future

"A crisis can also be an opportunity, and one of the notable effects of being forced to work from home during the global pandemic has been to shine the spotlight on whether working in an office every day of the week is something we want or indeed need—and if it’s not, to make sure we don’t go back to how things were before. This is something Julia Hobsbawm has been looking at as Chair of the Demos Workshift Commission . As she pointed out on taking charge, “Covid presents a once-in-a-generation opportunity to shift the dial on the manifest problems around working life.” The book promises to be an important contribution at a pivotal moment. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Economist journalist Sebastian Mallaby takes on venture capital in The Power Law: Venture Capital and the Art of Disruption . Venture capitalists do determine our future in many ways, so this is well worth reading. For me, it’s the difference between Five Books (run on a shoestring but freely available to any English speaker anywhere in the world) and Blinkist (which has raised over $35 million from venture capitalists, and constantly bombards me with Twitter ads about what Elon Musk is reading). The Founders by Jimmy Soni is a book about Paypal and its billionaire founders–Elon Musk, Peter Thiel and Reid Hoffman—though its subtitle “The Company that Made the Modern Internet” suggests that it might be a bit too boosterish for my own tastes. Literary Books For the more literary-inclined readers of nonfiction, there’s a newly translated biography of Dante by Alessandro Barbero (though bear in mind that Dante is so embedded in Italian culture, that the book may be a little too granular for the Anglophone reader who isn’t quite as familiar with The Divine Comedy ). Also, if you’ve never read Ulysses by James Joyce , there’s a really nice guide to reading it just out by Patrick Hastings, who runs the Ulysses.com site. He also gave us some tips on how to embark on this project in a Q&A . Maybe if there’s another lockdown I’ll finally be able to knock Ulysses off my bucket list, a project I last attempted when I was 22. Part of our best books of 2022 series."