I was recently one of 20 people laid off from The Intercept, and one of my sources of comfort in the wake of that event has been re-watching Drifting Clouds, a 1996 film from the gifted director Aki Kaurismäki. It portrays a couple who lose their jobs amid recession in early 1990s Finland. There's a great scene set at the closing night of a restaurant where one of the couple works as head waitress. The owner spends her last moments there listening to a band play the sentimental iskelmä song Kohtalon Tuulet, or "Winds of Fate," and watching the aging clientele dance. Subtitles helpfully translate the wistful lyrics into English:

My youth is gone, but bitter I never should be
Happiness I was able to feel
With my friends to accompany me

All of our dreams now faded away
Bringing tears to my eyes

The winds of fate took all that away
All of our dreams never fulfilled

When those winds blow over me some day
You will never see me here again

As the band plays its final notes inside the plush and colorful restaurant, the head waitress, from the cold grays of a Helsinki sidewalk, bundles the owner off into a cab. "Thanks for everything, Ilona," says the owner. "And farewell."

"Goodbye manager," says the head waitress.

It is about as moving a depiction as I've seen of the last moments of a job, of the heartbreaking blend of sentimental humanity and brutal reality.

But really what sticks with me are the lyrics, and how Kaurismäki links the "winds of fate," a kind of death, to the end of a job. It's a perceptive move, because these days our careers feel like a series of hypotheses about how the world will work — and all of them are eventually smashed.

The Intercept I just left is, for example, one in a series that were born and died in my seven and a half years there: The editor in chief who hired me left a few months in and was replaced, the parent company's business model switched from blogs to streaming video, the publication went from for-profit to nonprofit, we housed and then relinquished the Snowden archive, the staff grew and shrank, the focus evolved.

Another provocative media company where I used to work, in the same building as The Intercept, was profitable and thriving until one day it ended up bankrupt because its reporting angered the wrong billionaire.

The couple in Drifting Clouds persevere, even as the setbacks pile up to comical heights, and with some merciful good luck create a new start for themselves. Similarly, change in the media business has done me more favors than harm. When I started college, my expected career track was to start at a small newspaper and hop to a series of progressively larger ones, earning a pittance along the way. By the time I graduated there was an explosion of web publications, then blogs, then digital media juggernauts like BuzzFeed and Vox, nonprofit investigative publications like Pro Publica and The Intercept, then the micro-nonprofits, and now further atomization into the likes of Substack and Patreon-supported publishers. I find these new vistas invigorating.

I'm on record as saying that some post-me Intercept is going to be the best yet, but I'm still proud of the ones I was a part of. My colleagues there (and the contractors and freelancers I worked with) were unbelievably talented and generous human brings, and thanks to them my teams

• revealed hidden NSA listening stations in a New York skyscraper and across the U.S.;
• exposed Google's secret plans for a search engine censored by the Chinese government;
• revealed Facebook's secret blacklist of people and groups too dangerous to praise;
• reported out the biggest-ever leak of files from Chinese authorities;
• explained new forms of surveillance, from tower dumps to your car's onboard computer to plug-in video surveillance networks;
• shined light on Oracle's activities in China;
• carefully redacted, reported out, and published more than 2000 internal NSA documents; and
• caught Zoom lying about encryption.

Yes, the "winds of fate" eventually blew over me, and I got bundled into my metaphorical cab. That was the price of being able to work at a fearless investigative online magazine with the kindest and most capable coworkers I've ever encountered, and it was absolutely worth it. At some point I'll figure out what comes next; hit me up on LinkedIn! In the meantime I'm enjoying some much-deserved beach time with my family this summer, which thankfully comes with some much nicer winds (and sadly not any iskelmä).

—Ryan Tate, June 15, 2022

At one point around 2010 I was researching and writing a book while working full time as a gossip blogger at a very fast-paced website. I was basically working both weekdays (on the blog) and weekends (on the book) and as the stress built I coped by making elaborate fatty foods, shaking increasingly esoteric cocktails, and watching the Big Lebowski, which had been something of a touchstone since I saw it as a fifth year senior at Berkeley.

The cocktails and the fatty food paired well with the Lebowski, and the newly invented iPad allowed me to combine these activities in bed, until my laughing and spilling woke up my wife one too many times and my little Lebwoski parties were banished to the couch.

Anyway the book was successfully published and the blogging job gave way to a slightly slower paced magazine/website job. After a breather I released some audio transcription software I had written during the book project. But I never got around to releasing a video I had made in the same period about the Big Lebowski. Until today.

It’s truly the work of a disturbed mind. While watching the movie literally dozens of times I was able to notice, despite the whisky sours and daiquiris and martinis and yes White Russians, that the filmmakers (Coen Brothers) repeated certain phrases and speech patterns a lot, seemingly strategically. This is, it turns out, a known tick of theirs, but I was curious the meaning, and threw myself into compiling examples of the repetition and reading books about the movie.

After I compiled enough examples in a text file I decided to begin splicing copies of those examples out of a digital copy of the film and smushed them together into a sort of rough “supercut” compilation. Then I spent months (very occasionally) obsessively editing and adding new clips to these supercuts. Then I would forget about the project for months or years, watch the last supercut, and make a new, better, version.

Anyway it looks like the last version I made, version 24, was done in January 2019, and the one before that was made in 2015. And it looks pretty good! If you really like the movie maybe give this compilation of repetition a watch, I think it builds and builds and toward the end you may find some examples you had not noticed before. Only 1 minute 48 seconds and pretty fast paced. Enjoy.

Before she died last month, Renée French was a nurse at New York Presbyterian Columbia Hospital. At some point before that, she rendered an unforgettable performance in downtown indie film icon Jim Jarmusch’s Coffee and Cigarettes as herself, or at least a version of herself with the same name, leafing through a gun magazine in a restaurant. She was poised and smoldering, gracefully insisting, to a persistently helpful waiter, that she be left alone to simply drink her coffee. “I really wish you hadn’t done that,” she says at one point, as he pours an unsolicited refill. “I had it the right color, the right temperature — it was just right.”

Coffee and Cigarettes was released in 2004, but French’s scene was shot some time during the preceding 18 years, during which Jarmusch filmed the movie’s 11 distinct stories. It’s not clear how much acting she subsequently did; IMDB lists just one other performance credit. Presumably, French might have found more work had her performance in Coffee been released sooner. (Jarmusch did try to do so, at one point reportedly nearing a deal to showcase the shorts on MTV before concerns about glorifying smoking scuttled things.)

After Jarmusch memorialized French on his Instagram, photographer Stephen Torton wrote about her recent life, saying in a comment, “Renee was a single mom and a front line nurse who died after months of near round the clock work.“ Another commenter wrote, “ She helped my mom when she was at her lowest during the peak of this pandemic. I’ll be forever grateful for her compassion and love for helping others.” French was a longtime New Yorker, and other friends remembered her working at and patronizing various downtown bars in the 1990s. “She cared about fellow humans,” one wrote. Jarmusch remembered her as “a truly rare and remarkable human being... kind, selfless, beautiful.”

It’s clear, in other social media posts, that French was grappling with the emotional toll of her work. At one point she wrote, as the pandemic waned, “I am struggling coming out of this ‘dream’.” Another time: “Just wanna have a few drinks and SLEEP.“

In the week and a half since I learned of French’s death, my thoughts have repeatedly returned to her. I saw Coffee for the first time maybe a month ago, part of a Jarmusch binge that began in March, as the city began its move indoors. In her work we see that peace is necessary for compassion, that providing solitude is as much an act of love as active care. I wish as a city and community we could have provided Renée with more of these things, and looking at what we together have gone through, and what many brave people have fought for, these last few days, I think they clearly are also needed by our most vulnerable citizens. Let people alone to live in peace, to care for others and to pursue happiness.