Crawford, Matthew B. "The Case for Working With Your Hands." NEW YORK TIMES May 21, 2009.

The television show Deadliest Catch depicts commercial crab fishermen in the Bering Sea. Another, Dirty Jobs, shows all kinds of grueling work; one episode featured a guy who inseminates turkeys for a living. The weird fascination of these shows must lie partly in the fact that such confrontations with material reality have become exotically unfamiliar. Many of us do work that feels more surreal than real. Working in an office, you often find it difficult to see any tangible result from your efforts. What exactly have you accomplished at the end of any given day? Where the chain of cause and effect is opaque and responsibility diffuse, the experience of individual agency can be elusive. Dilbert, The Office and similar portrayals of cubicle life attest to the dark absurdism with which many Americans have come to view their white-collar jobs. High-school shop-class programs were widely dismantled in the 1990s as educators prepared students to become “knowledge workers.” The imperative of the last 20 years to round up every warm body and send it to college, then to the cubicle, was tied to a vision of the future in which we somehow take leave of material reality and glide about in a pure information economy. This has not come to pass. To begin with, such work often feels more enervating than gliding. More fundamentally, now as ever, somebody has to actually do things: fix our cars, unclog our toilets, build our houses. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/24/magazine/24labor-t.html?_r=1.