Coffee, with a Side of Deadline Hectoring (The New Yorker)

One recent rainy day, in the hip Tokyo neighborhood of Koenji, Takuya Kawai greeted a customer. She was a college student, working on a translation of an interview with a refugee from Cameroon for a research project. Kawai is the proprietor of a new kind of co-working space, designed for procrastinators. After its opening, in April, Kawai tweeted, “At the Manuscript Writing Café, people who aren’t facing a deadline cannot enter! I ask for your understanding and coöperation in order to maintain the tension in the café.”

Read the article here. (Published in the print edition of the January 2 & 9, 2023 issue, with the headline “Finish Line.”)