The Beautiful Bureaucrat intentionally or not taps into contemporary anxieties around Big Data: how (and why, and by whom) the minutia of our lives is captured, and to what ends.

Anna Wiener, over at The New Republic, dives into Helen Phillips’s new novel, The Beautiful Bureaucrat, and all its inner darkness as a narrative for our contemporary society of database farming, the mediation of the self, and all the common anxieties underneath.