I had to take that flight. There were not many options to reach Catania and, from there, Salina, one of the Aeolian Islands, where the fourth Early Career Semin…

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I have been carrying little L for roughly 500 kilometres now. We share a strong passion for long walks. He is the best walking mate ever: he rarely complains about the length of the journey, the uncoolness of the places we visit or the excessive effort involved. He sleeps most of the time and, when he does not, he is obsessively fascinated by everything around him.

I had seen many nonnas staring at us and smiling. Surprised and elated. The bakery owner always wanted to emphasise that the baby boy was in heaven. The security guard at the supermarket regularly volunteered to help me with the bags. At the park, especially during spring, it was common to exchange knowing looks with other people in the same situation, and some nannies too.

It was not until Raffa, one of my partner’s best friends, asked me how I felt about all those looks that I started noticing just how many there actually were. Maybe too many? How did I feel about all those gazes directed at us?

This slightly awkward realisation coincided with long walks on the beach, early in the morning in southern Italy, with my little boy sleeping peacefully in his baby carrier. By chance, I ran into an old friend of my dad’s. He was enthusiastic, clearly wanted to compliment me for doing something he instinctively associated with mothers, and eventually erupted into an odd joke: “Make sure you don’t have to breastfeed him.”

During these long promenades, we have been met with a whole range of typical reactions, from astonishment to puzzlement, with divides cutting almost orthogonally across age groups. Now, walking around with a baby will hardly make me father of the month, but the question Raffa raised made me think a lot about the role fathers can occupy (both in the household and in society).

Becoming a father is one of the most underrated challenges we are told about. If I had to write a preliminary, ongoing report, I would say that it is an exciting rollercoaster of emotions, encompassing the full catalogue of colours. It is rewarding, humbling, adventurous, frightening, refreshing and tiring. It is intense, in that particular sense of the word that still contains some beauty.

Part of this intensity comes from the need to be present, first and foremost to yourself, for a number of hours, days and weeks unmatched by life before caring responsibilities. It means redesigning your own existence into a new version that somehow feels elevated to another level and, at the same time, spectacularly chaotic, sleep-deprived, fast-paced and emergency-driven. Helping your kid survive is an explosive combination of selflessness and devotion, so extreme that it can become strangely addictive, as it happens in those interstitial moments of surprise when L wakes you up in the morning with a smile of suspended, unconditional happiness (can I say love?).

Fatherhood, among other things, is arguably a different way of looking at things, partly mirrored in the reactions of a baby whose skills currently span pooping, eating and crying, and partly in the way your partner, your friends and your milieu start looking at you. It is also an opportunity to “cut the bullshit” and recalibrate the needles of your compass, or simply to run faster in the direction you had chosen.

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Some people think best near water: by the sea, under a shower, watching a river, listening to the rain or even inside a submarine.
So here, gathered together, are the fi…

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Listening to the choir of messianic tech CEOs who always pretend to have the solution to our problems—solutions that sooner or lat…

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I was in an elevator with some students a few weeks ago. Two or three of them were staring at the same phone. One reacted loudly: “Qué asco, parece hecho por IA” (…

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Last summer, I almost got scammed. What I did not realise at the time was that I was rehearsing a much broader experience of contemporary work.

I had to officiate my best f…

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Borgo Mezzanone is a rural settlement near Foggia, in the Italian region of Apulia. It hosts one of the largest informal migrant communities in the country, home to roughly 3,000 to 5,000 people, mostly agricultural workers, often undocumented. The site is defined by dangerous, inhumane conditions: corrugated metal shacks, no electricity, no running water. A large community waiting for the tomatoes to ripen, for winter to pass. The newspaper shorthand is telling: il ghetto.

Apulia, my own region, carries a long-standing reputation for gangmastering in the agricultural sector. Every summer, nothing changes. Fifteen years ago, a strike broke out for the first time among the tents of Boncuri, on the outskirts of Nardò, another village in Salento, “the heel of the boot”, as I usually explain to friends who have never visited, tracing the shape of the peninsula with my hands. It was a loud protest against Ghanaian caporali who supply labour to small firms, imposing appalling conditions and taking a cut of workers’ pay.

Now, a change of scenery. Picture the polished windows, fancy restaurants and soaring towers of Milan, the city that “never stops”, as its mayor proclaimed just hours before shutting it down at the outbreak of Covid. A few weeks ago, the public prosecutor ordered the local subsidiary of Deliveroo to be placed under special court administration, accusing the food delivery service of exploiting its workers. The order followed a copycat measure issued against Glovo, and another, dating back to 2020, when Uber Eats first came under scrutiny.

The accusation is the same for all players: practices associated with caporalato, unlawful labour intermediation and exploitation (a criminal offence). Food delivery companies are suspected of taking advantage of the “state of need” of thousands of riders to impose non-decent working conditions and wages that are, to say the least, laughable: roughly €2.50 per delivery, for shifts ranging from nine to ten hours, six days a week, sometimes every single day. The prosecutors appointed a judicial administrator to oversee the company, tasked with “regularising” its workers and ensuring compliance with labour rules and working conditions.

In several testimonies, couriers have also described the company’s methods of control over their work: “If there is a delay in the delivery, Glovo calls me to ask for explanations and to know where I am”. This suggests that, according to the reconstruction of the prosecutor’s office, “the IT architecture of the app […] is suited to enabling constant monitoring of work activity”. In their words, the offences “reflect a deliberate choice to engage in unlawful conduct, implementing a corporate policy that explicitly disregards the need to comply with the law”.

There is a great deal of Apulia in Milan. It is the business model, one might argue.

Like many other researchers in (labour) law and technology, I have spent the last decade following legal developments in the gig (or platform) economy. I have written far too many papers and blog posts on the topic, even co-authored a book. Every time an editor invites me to contribute my ideas on this phenomenon, I promise myself it will be the last time. Every time, I lie to myself. Not without reason, as recent years have culminated in the adoption of a timidly bold EU directive that attempts to bring a pinch of reality back to a world of overhyped myths.

Here, I do not want to rewrite the genealogy of this hoax, but rather offer a kind of funeral elegy, one of the few in which the dead are not spoken of kindly.

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I have this thing with hospitals. I hate them.

Part of this feeling, I suspect, comes from family matters. My mum has worked in the laboratory of my hometown hospital for as long as I can remember. As a child, I could not help associating her job with phones ringing in the middle of the night during her on-call shifts, sometimes more than three times before dawn. Long before the advent of mobile phones, I vividly remember her crossing the corridor to answer the landline, while the rest of us tried to gauge the severity of the situation from the tone of her voice. “Call the doctor on duty, I’m coming”.

From time to time, in quiet defiance of certain rules, I had the chance to accompany her and spend hours in a small staff room where they had scraped together enough money to buy a tiny television, not even connected to an antenna. Apart from the occasional gifted pizza, there was little to enjoy. Her job also came with the lottery of missing holidays and the acrobatics required to reconcile family events with extra time.

Most of all, I associate her work with the endless discussions brought home: the drudgery of relentless shifts, the impossibility of delivering decent care with an understaffed team, the lack of security at night and the daily struggle to respond to every kind of request with painfully limited resources. Stories of harassment, peer pressure, favoritism and chronic strain.

In hindsight, I now see that a common-sense diagnosis of this state of affairs lies in the way structural mismanagement is displaced onto conflicts among coworkers, who end up paying the price for poor organisational practices. The failure to expand staffing and improve working conditions backfires on the workers themselves, left to fend for one another in an environment where scarcity prevails over solidarity.

As you can imagine, I never considered that career path, unlike my sister, who went on to work in the pharmacy of a large “excellence” hospital.

By chance, she started her contract during the Covid-19 pandemic in Lombardy, one of the hardest-hit areas in Europe, at a time when our family chat was constantly flooded with grim updates, compounded by the stress of being on the frontline while everyone else was told that staying home was the only way to avoid a deadly virus.

The stories of my mum and sister, sadly, are far from exceptional.

They echo the experiences of all those categories that emergency decrees labelled “essential”. Without hypocrisy, being essential often meant a shortage of personal protective equipment, unreliable public transport, constant fear of exposure, repeated precautionary isolation, low salaries, controversies over priority vaccination plans and little more than a pat on the back accompanied by genuine applause from balconies.

I have tried as much as possible to stay away from hospitals and for a long time I managed to do so. But nemesis has its ways.

Over the past three years or so, I have spent more time than I ever wished in waiting rooms, walking what felt like marathons through cold white corridors and behind fire doors. First, supporting my dad through cancer treatment, surgery and post-op recovery. And, more recently and joyfully, to welcome my newborn son.

Hospitals are the most wonderful place on earth.

The more time I spend in contact with healthcare workers, the more I realise how superbly talented, careful and deeply motivated they are. In moments of extreme vulnerability, their work combines a deep mastery of evidence-based science with the flexibility required to handle exceptions and make difficult calls. From janitors to nurses and doctors, this extraordinary devotion to humankind is often inversely proportional to the quality of their working conditions. If one reflects on it, it is strikingly foolish that we allow ourselves to mistreat those who handle our bodies at their most fragile.

My baby boy was born in a public university hospital in Brussels, after a rather complicated labour and a rough start to life.

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“Mum, it could be that in a few months I’ll come back home, unemployed”. End of Beginning plays faintly in the background, as the reel flows:

“Hi, my name is Jacopo. I develop AI for Amazon in the US. This could be the last time I take this route to the office, because tomorrow I might be fired. For around 15,000 people, tomorrow won’t be just another Tuesday. At 6 a.m., an email will land in their inbox with an update on their role.

From there, it will be the beginning of the end. Then comes the final interview, where the severance is formalised. I might be among them, and that’s not something that leaves me calm. And yet, knowing that tomorrow this torture of uncertainty will finally end is, in a strange way, also a relief.”

Instagram and TikTok have recently been populated by dozens of videos in which tech workers film the hours leading up to a potential layoff. It is not the first time this has happened. Back in 2024, The New York Times published a piece tellingly titled “Watch Me Lose My Job on TikTok”. What once would have been a private moment of shock is turned into public content, often filmed minutes after the news arrives. These videos mix raw emotion, irony, self-branding and commentary on questionable corporate practices, and frequently go viral.

This trend exposes how job insecurity has become normalised. For some workers, posting is a way to regain a sense of control over a situation otherwise managed by opaque algorithms, automated HR processes and impersonal emails. For others, visibility may lead to job opportunities or at least social validation. At the same time, the NYT piece highlights the ambivalence of this visibility. Layoffs are turned into a form of performance, blurring the line between solidarity and spectacle. The platform rewards vulnerability but also intensifies emotional labour, pushing workers to narrate their own dispossession in ways that fit the logic of the feed.

Having a dismissal livestreamed makes you wonder: is AI coming for my job? Should my boss be telling me something? As a result, the die-hard myth of technology’s job-displacing impact is gaining new traction. Doomsday predictions usually arrive with a familiar set of corollaries. First, AI is coming for junior roles performing clerical tasks in cognitive industries (the “end-of-the-intern” thesis). Second, a blue-collar revival is supposedly under way, as electricians, carpenters and repair workers are deemed safe from digital destruction (the “Bob-the-Builder” thesis). Third, for everyone else, a new wave of collective redundancies is just around the corner (the “disaster capitalism” thesis).

The picture, however, is far more complicated. In many cases, these messages are exaggerated, often to inflate hype and, with it, market capitalisation. So far, the evidence remains contentious, and establishing clear causal links between the emergence of AI systems and corporate decisions to shrink headcounts is anything but straightforward.

A growing sentiment suggests that managers and CEOs may be conveniently using technology as a potent alibi to justify dubious choices. Blaming AI is much easier than admitting mistakes. Over the past few years, digital firms expanded their workforces on the back of low interest rates, during a period of near-free credit and under the impression, fuelled by the pandemic, that large portions of daily life would permanently migrate online (Metaverse, anyone?), only to rediscover that humans are, after all, social animals. Reality, as ever, has come to collect.

Companies like Klarna, the Swedish fintech known for its “buy now, pay later” services, took advantage of the advent of chatbots to lay off hundreds of customer-service workers, only to later admit they had gone too far. A textbook case of moving fast and breaking things, including customer satisfaction. CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski publicly acknowledged that while AI promised speed and cost savings, it ultimately fell short in terms of quality for end users, prompting a rapid retreat. He is far from alone in learning this lesson the hard way.

In 2025 alone, Accenture announced a restructuring plan involving swift exits for workers deemed not “AI-ready”. Lufthansa declared it would eliminate 4,000 jobs by 2030 as it increasingly relies on AI to boost efficiency. Duolingo stated that it will gradually reduce its reliance on contractors, using AI to fill the gaps. Amazon likewise invoked AI when announcing job cuts, revealing plans to let go of 14,000 employees. Microsoft laid off 15,000 workers despite posting multibillion-dollar quarterly profits. Salesforce laid off 4,000 customer-support workers last September. A similar pattern emerged at IBM, which announced a “low single-digit” reduction of its global workforce, amounting to several thousand jobs.

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In a podcast released a few weeks ago, the Italian architect (and life senator) Renzo Piano, probably the world’s best known in his field and decorated with countless prizes, retraces the episodes and values that have shaped his long career. This relaxed journey takes the form of an extended conversation with novelist Alessandro Baricco, staged on a terrace overlooking the sea.

Genova Tapes is the title: two episodes, each running for more than two and a half hours, contrary to any recent content-creation golden standard of synthesis and nonetheless so mesmerizing that one cannot help but devour them during a couple of longish walks, in the slow intermezzo between a feast and the following one, or while crossing the city to buy the best galette des rois at a trendy bakery (this one, according to recent rankings, in case you were wondering).

The two old friends convivially revisit landmark projects completed by Piano, from the Parisian Centre Georges Pompidou (pictured above), built in the Seventies, to more recent works such as the gigantic Shard in London and the Whitney Museum in New York City. Anecdotes flow, drifting between vivid memories and plain confessions. Piano reflects on his approach to people-centric infrastructure, like a piazza, where relationships are born and flourish. He also revisits the importance of having a solid polar north (a passion, a plan, an obsession) that orients choices even in turbulent times or after a dizzying shake-up.

There is no way I am going to be able to summarise an exchange that ranges from the stubbornness of youth in overturning received wisdom to the role of architecture in sustaining “monumental” revolutions, or in making space for “scandalous beauty”. At some point, however, Piano turns to something of particular interest to anyone concerned with regulation and innovation. Pushed by an input, he calmly states (the translation is mine, as faithful as possible):

“Well, here I’m not talking about freedom from limits, because the designer who says ‘I want to be without limits’ is a bit of an idiot. Limits are necessary. They’re what allow you to concentrate energy, just as in music, just as in everything else. You need limits.

We need anchors, we need an order; only then can we spend our time and energy dissolving that order, disobeying it. But first, we need it. That kind of unfettered freedom would be chaos: the famous blank page. You wouldn’t even know where to begin”.

Undisputable, no? Constraints matter. One could go so far as to say that boundaries foster creativity, and very few would disagree. Human nature is genetically trained to wrestle with problems in search of inventive solutions. We celebrate scientists, entrepreneurs, pioneers, explorers and hackers precisely because they engage, not metaphorically, with impossibility and turn it into something that then becomes the new norm, for the future.

I was thinking about the significance of boundaries when I stumbled upon yet another argument fetishising innovation (per se, with no adjectives), and started wondering how it happened that luminaries have been replaced by a cohort of careless whiners (not winners), now on display across multiple circles, quick to parrot the false, yet popular, meme “the US innovates, China replicates, Europe regulates”. How is it possible that pushing boundaries has been turned into a litany of meaningless complaints and bad excuses?

Piano’s praise for limits is innocently timely, at a moment when the EU’s institutional compass is tilted towards a new deregulatory impetus. Without going into too much detail, since the publication of Draghi’s report, the von der Leyen Commission has invested considerable energy in promoting a grand simplification plan that simultaneously affects environmental and digital legislation. It is ironic that what has long been dubbed the “twin transitions” (digital transformation and climate-action) are now truly united, but in an unfortunate, divestment-like fate.

In a nutshell, the project aims to “reduce red tape to unleash competitiveness”. Large chunks of due diligence reporting and data protection regulation are about to be axed, in the context of a process that is constitutionally weak, to say the least, and procedurally messy to the point that it exacerbates, rather than reduces, uncertainty. In some corridors in Brussels, the conviction seems to be that after years of intense activism, the only way to placate a hungry narrative is to “undo something, whatever it takes”, as an apocryphal motto might recite.

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