A professional chef buys a heavy cast iron pan and a high-carbon steel knife and a set of copper pots because they know the heat will hold and the edge will stay sharp and the weight will anchor the kitchen.

A person who wants to be a chef buys a $400 blender with twenty-four pre-programmed settings and a digital screen and a pulse mode that can crush a brick but they only use it to make a smoothie once every three months when they feel bad about their health.

We do this with our bodies and we do this with our software and we do this most aggressively with the places where we sleep and sit.

The Struggle in Tuen Mun

It is Friday night in Tuen Mun and it is 10:40pm and the air is heavy with the kind of humidity that makes everything feel slightly damp to the touch. Winnie is on her knees on the floor of her living room and she is breathing hard and her face is red.

Her cousin is staying the night and the cousin is standing near the front door with a small backpack and looking at her shoes because she

The smell of wet wool and radiator dust filled the small office, a scent that always seemed to intensify when the radiators hissed at four in the afternoon. Sarah pulled her coat closer around her shoulders, the dampness from the walk back from the courthouse still clinging to the fabric.

She was holding a physical file, the edges frayed and the manila surface stained with a ring from a coffee cup that wasn’t hers. Inside this file was an email, printed out on cheap paper that felt thin and overly smooth. It was from a woman named Elena, written back in February, and it contained three paragraphs of devastatingly honest prose regarding her husband’s cognitive decline and the specific date he had forgotten their daughter’s name.

Sarah had been tasked with summarizing this case for a Monday morning briefing. The summary needed to be tight, clinical, and persuasive. She looked at the laptop sitting on her desk, its lid closed for the moment, and then back at the printed email. She knew that if she opened that lid and fed Elena’s words into the tools she usually used, the summary would be finished in under ninety seconds.