ReadGlobe · morning brief · archive
Saturday 26 September
1 · The text
We Wear the Mask
Fifteen lines on the face you put on for everyone else.
1 min · Paul Laurence Dunbar · The Complete Poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar · 1913 · public domain
We wear the mask that grins and lies, It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes,— This debt we pay to human guile; With torn and bleeding hearts we smile, And mouth with myriad subtleties.
Why should the world be over-wise, In counting all our tears and sighs? Nay, let them only see us, while We wear the mask.
We smile, but, O great Christ, our cries To thee from tortured souls arise. We sing, but oh the clay is vile Beneath our feet, and long the mile; But let the world dream otherwise, We wear the mask!
2 · One idea · Organisations & productivity
Parkinson's law
An elderly lady has one postcard to send to her niece. It takes her the entire day.
An hour to find the card. Another to find her glasses. A long search for the address, a long time over the words, and then the question of whether to take an umbrella to the postbox.
That scene opens a comic essay the historian C. Northcote Parkinson wrote for The Economist in 1955. His first line became the law: work expands to fill the time available for its completion.
The joke had teeth. His real target was the British Admiralty, whose officials kept multiplying while its ships grew fewer.
In one line. Parkinson's law is the observation that work expands to fill the time available for its completion. Give a task a week and it takes a week; give it a day and it often takes a day — because tasks stretch to consume whatever time they’re allotted.
Worked example
A report due in a month gets started in week three and finished in a frantic final week — the same quality it would have reached in a few focused days. The extra weeks filled with worry and minor fiddling, not real progress.
How to use it, and where it fails3 · One number
Adults who can read and write, world
190021%
202488%
4.1 times the 1900 level.
Everything on this site assumes a reader; for most people who ever lived, that was not a safe assumption.
Source: Our World in Data, world estimates, read 2026-09-24.