"
Trusting your child with someone else is one of the hardest things that a parent has to do — and in the United States, it’s harder still, because American day care is a mess. About 8.2 million kids—about 40 percent of children under five — spend at least part of their week in the care of somebody other than a parent. Most of them are in centers, although a sizable minority attend home day cares.... In other countries, such services are subsidized and well-regulated. In the United States, despite the fact that work and family life has changed profoundly in recent decades, we lack anything resembling an actual child care system. Excellent day cares are available, of course, if you have the money to pay for them and the luck to secure a spot. But the overall quality is wildly uneven and barely monitored, and at the lower end, it’s Dickensian."
posted by zarq
on Apr 15, 2013 -
139 comments
Is Giving the Secret to Getting Ahead? [Adam] Grant, 31, is the youngest-tenured and highest-rated professor at Wharton....
Grant might not seem so different from any number of accessible and devoted professors on any number of campuses, and yet when you witness over time the sheer volume of Grant’s commitments, and the way in which he is able to follow through on all of them, you start to sense that something profoundly different is at work. Helpfulness is Grant’s credo.... For Grant, helping is not the enemy of productivity, a time-sapping diversion from the actual work at hand; it is the mother lode, the motivator that spurs increased productivity and creativity. In some sense, he has built a career in professional motivation by trying to unpack the puzzle of his own success. He has always helped; he has always been productive. How, he has wondered for most of his professional life, does the interplay of those two factors work for everyone else?
[more inside]
posted by caddis
on Mar 28, 2013 -
46 comments
The Everyday Sexism Project collects user-submitted reports from women to document their day-to-day experiences with normalized sexism, including sexual harassment and job discrimination. Entries can be submitted at the site, in an email to founder Laura Bates or to their
twitter account.
[more inside]
posted by zarq
on Feb 20, 2013 -
200 comments
Where I work: LinkedIn recently asked their Influencers to write blog posts showing where they work, and explaining how they work. More than fifty responded - from Craig Newmark to Arianna Huffington to David Cameron. The workspaces range from staid offices to open bullpens, airplanes and hotel rooms, 10 Downing Street, university lecture rooms, a place for emergency naps, and everything in between. At least one of them includes a reminder to floss daily. Take a look:
John C. Abell, Lou Adler, Rafat Ali, Steve Anders, Dan Ariely, Richard Branson, Tim Brown, Oliver Bussmann, David Cameron, Anand Chandrasekaran, Emily Chang, Andrew Chen, Deepak Chopra, Kevin Chou, James Citrin, Linda Coles, Claire Diaz-Ortiz, Heather Elias, Michael Fertik, Inge Geerdens, Herb Greenberg, Peter Guber, Eric Hippeau, Arianna Huffington, Aaron Hurst, Jeff Jordan, J.T. O'Donnell, Bruce Kasanoff, Tom Keene, Steve Knight, Jordy Leiser, Betty Liu, Michael Moritz, Craig Newmark, Deep Nishar, T. Boone Pickens, Ilya Pozin, Daniel Rosensweig, Naomi Simson, Trish Regan, Steve Rubel, Dharmesh Shah, Colin Shaw, David H. Stevens, Gijs van Wulfen, Martin Varsavsky, Andreas von der Heydt, Jeff Weiner, Geni Whitehouse,
posted by NotMyselfRightNow
on Jan 30, 2013 -
64 comments
From the mid 40s to the mid 50s
Coronet Instructional Films were always ready to provide social guidance for teenagers on subjects as diverse as
dating,
popularity,
preparing for being drafted, and
shyness, as well as to children on
following the law,
the value of quietness in school, and
appreciating our parents. They also provided education on topics such as the connection between
attitudes and health,
what kind of people live in America,
how to keep a job,
supervising women workers,
the nature of capitalism, and
the plantation System in Southern life. Inside is an annotated collection of all 86 of the complete Coronet films in the
Prelinger Archives as well as a few more. Its not like you had work to do or anything right?
[more inside]
posted by Blasdelb
on Nov 1, 2012 -
41 comments
Citizens United has wrought widespread changes in the election law landscape. Yet, a lesser-known consequence of this watershed case might have a significant impact in the workplace: it may permit employers to hold political captive audience workplace meetings with their employees. Under Citizens United’s robust conception of corporate political speech, employers may now be able to compel their employees to listen to their political views at such meetings on pain of termination. [1]
And
employers such as Koch Industries are taking full advantage of this.
[more inside]
posted by eviemath
on Oct 14, 2012 -
83 comments
Female executives at Twitter, Yahoo and Google
discuss work/life balance at the top of the tech industry, how women should negotiate at work, and whether women view job satisfaction differently than their male colleagues.
[more inside]
posted by Catseye
on Oct 6, 2012 -
57 comments
"
It's the 21ist century--why are we working so much?" In which Owen Hatherley exhumes the humiliated, expired idea that the reduction of work is a worthwhile goal. "If there's one thing practically all futurologists once agreed on, it's that in the 21st century there would be a lot less work. What would they have thought, if they had known that in 2012, the 9-5 working day had in the UK become something more like 7am to 7pm? They would surely have looked around and seen technology take over in many professions which previously needed heavy manpower, they would have looked at the increase in automation and mass production, and wondered – why are they spending 12 hours a day on menial tasks?"
[more inside]
posted by byanyothername
on Jul 10, 2012 -
106 comments
Researchers found
[.pdf], after a series of four studies that "husbands embedded in traditional and neo-traditional marriages (relative to husbands embedded in modern ones) exhibit attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors that undermine the role of women in the workplace." The potential resistors focused on are husbands embedded in marriages that structurally mirror the 1950s ideal American family portrayed in the “Adventures of Ozzzie and Harriet” sitcom.
[more inside]
posted by ambrosia
on Jul 5, 2012 -
56 comments
I am not busy. I am the laziest ambitious person I know. Like most writers, I feel like a reprobate who does not deserve to live on any day that I do not write, but I also feel that four or five hours is enough to earn my stay on the planet for one more day. On the best ordinary days of my life, I write in the morning, go for a long bike ride and run errands in the afternoon, and in the evening I see friends, read or watch a movie. This, it seems to me, is a sane and pleasant pace for a day.
Tim Kreider:
The ‘Busy’ Trap.
posted by goodnewsfortheinsane
on Jul 1, 2012 -
107 comments
In Praise of Leisure - "Imagine a world in which most people worked only 15 hours a week. They would be paid as much as, or even more than, they now are, because the fruits of their labor would be distributed more evenly across society. Leisure would occupy far more of their waking hours than work. It was exactly this prospect that John Maynard Keynes conjured up in a little essay published in 1930 called '
Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren.' Its thesis was simple. As technological progress made possible an increase in the output of goods per hour worked, people would have to work less and less to satisfy their needs, until in the end they would have to work hardly at all... He thought this condition might be reached in about 100 years — that is, by 2030." (
via)
[more inside]
posted by kliuless
on Jun 22, 2012 -
117 comments
"I had always assumed that if I could get a foreign-policy job in the State Department or the White House while my party was in power, I would stay the course as long as I had the opportunity to do work I loved. But in January 2011, when my two-year public-service leave from Princeton University was up, I hurried home as fast as I could."
Anne Marie Slaughter, the former policy director for the State Department and professor at Princeton University, has written a nuanced essay for this month's Atlantic Monthly, about the feminist generation gap and work-life balance at the top levels of government and academia:
Why Women Still Can't Have It All. [more inside]
posted by lunasol
on Jun 21, 2012 -
125 comments
'At Angola Prison in Louisiana, model inmates or "trustees" are encouraged to participate in "hobby craft" as a part of their rehabilitation. Hobby craft is an arts program that involves painting, wood & leather working, taxidermy, furniture building, and many other disciplines.In many cases, they are given special workshops, tools and even private studios to work in.The goods are sold to the public at the prison’s annual rodeo and art fair. The money raised is then split mainly between inmates' families and prison administration, with the inmates themselves receiving only a small amount to buy more materials for the next fair. A sad irony is that this rehabilitation will rarely benefit the prisoners in the outside world because 90% of them have life sentences, and will end up being laid to rest at "The Farm."'
A photographic essay.
posted by I love to count
on Jun 20, 2012 -
34 comments
You may have seen
Replacements, Ltd.'s print ads in the back of PARADE magazine (of
Howard Huge fame). Replacements, both a seller and a
resource for china and glassware owners, was one of the few North Carolina businesses to
publicly take a stand [NYT] against the state's vote to ban gay marriage.
As an employer, Replacements is one of only nine companies in the country to receive a
perfect score for ten years straight in the Human Rights Campaign's Corporate Equality Index. But the company is also known for another surprisingly liberal policy: encouraging its 450 employees to bring their pets to work amidst millions of pieces of china and glassware. How many?
A whole lot. [more inside]
posted by Madamina
on May 29, 2012 -
31 comments
