Susan Zieger reviews Hu Anyan’s I Deliver Parcels in Beijing as both a revealing account of gig work in China and a frustratingly muted critique of the system exploiting its workers. Through Hu’s experiences as a courier—where every minute has a monetary value and even eating lunch can become an una…

Susan Zieger traces the hidden history of logistics as women’s work, arguing that the same organizational labor once performed by soldiers’ wives now appears in the unpaid work of managing households, children, schedules, and care. From Napoleonic battlefields to modern domestic life, women have dis…

In this ZEIT interview, Zieger argues that “logistics” isn’t just shipping—it’s the whole system that organizes the movement of goods, people, and information, and we’re trained to only notice it at the moment of consumption even though it structures everyday life. She frames logistics as a power te…

Logistics remains a magical art of the ‘black box,’ a mechanism or object whose stimulus and response are visible, but whose internal operations remain opaque. Stage magicians’ trick boxes furnished the original concept of the ‘black box’ to cybernetics in the 1940s and 50s; the term now more widely…

Anyone who has tracked a package from a fulfillment center will recognize the logistical plot of Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula (1897). The count packs himself in one of fifty boxes of Transylvanian soil, shipping them all to Whitby, where the Russian consul pays the wrecked Demeter’s harbor dues, and …

The early 2020s commonplace that everything seems a bit unreal is a material truth. Not only our shoes and handbags, but our makeup, phone chargers, glassware, and medications; our oven mitts and bike helmets and airplane parts; the components in our intravenous drip machines and defibrillators, the…