Busy Hands are Healthy Hands!

As with Shop Class, Crawford’s earlier examination of “the de-skilling of everyday life” and a surprise bestseller of 2009, The World Beyond Your Head has bigger fish to fry than degree-toting snobs who look down on plumbers and mechanics. Crawford, who teaches in the University of Virginia’s Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture and runs a small custom-motorcycle repair shop, believes that our culture’s denigration of skilled manual labor stems from a radical misreading of human nature and our proper relationship to the world. Grievous consequences flow from that mistake.