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Inside look at Tom Thibodeau’s legendary work ethic: ‘no shortcuts’
As his team begins its third playoffs in four years, Tom Thibodeau enters with probably the highest approval for a Knicks coach in decades.
nypost.com
Kaylee Gain is walking, ‘greatly improved’ less than 2 months after having head slammed into ground near school
Kaylee Gain is “greatly improved” and walking again less than two months after suffering horrific brain injuries from having her head repeatedly slammed into the ground during a fight near her school, her family has revealed. “We have been truly amazed by the progress she has made in such a short time,” Kaylee’s parents, Clint...
nypost.com
War Maps Reveal How Russia Could Attack NATO
Defeating Ukraine would free up significant Russian forces to drive further west, according to the Institute for the Study of War.
newsweek.com
The Sports Report: Will Kawhi Leonard play in Game 1 for the Clippers?
Clippers coach Tyronn Lue says he is preparing to have Kawhi Leonard on the court when the Clippers open the playoffs.
latimes.com
Deion Sanders pushes back on 'stupid lie' top Colorado players would refuse to play for some NFL teams
Colorado Buffaloes head coach Deion Sanders shot down the "stupid lie" that his players would refuse to play for some NFL teams heading into next year's draft.
foxnews.com
Monkey Man’s imperfect political critique still packs a punch
Dev Patel as Kid in his directorial debut Monkey Man. | Universal Pictures Dev Patel’s action-packed directorial debut also takes aim at contemporary Indian politics. Monkey Man, a gripping, blood-soaked action film from first-time director Dev Patel, has garnered acclaim for its fight scenes — including, famously, when the main character cuts a man’s throat open by holding the knife in his mouth. Undergirding all this action, however, is also an attempt at commentary about growing authoritarianism in India, and how political leaders leverage both religion and police to maintain their power. “Having spent most of my career traveling in and out of India shooting films, it is hard to ignore some of the stories that fill the columns of the newspapers there,” Patel said in a BBC interview. “I wanted to touch on some of that and maybe reach an audience that would never normally access such topics.” Monkey Man’s debut comes as India navigates its 2024 elections, which the right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, a chief proponent of Hindu nationalism, hopes to use to maintain its political dominance nationally. Since he came to power in 2014, Modi has acted to suppress political opposition, to undermine the free press, and to discriminate against Muslim people, all efforts that mark what experts describe as a backsliding of the country’s secular democracy. Monkey Man stops short of critiquing the BJP’s policies explicitly — and in fact reportedly underwent minor changes to avoid doing so. But key plot points levy clear broadsides against India’s current political leaders, Hindu nationalism, and corruption in law enforcement. Centered on a protagonist known as “Kid” (Patel) seeking vengeance for his mother’s murder at the hands of a brutal police chief (Sikandar Kher), Monkey Man is largely a breakneck action film jam-packed with stunts, gore, and creative uses of fireworks.That Patel was willing to use this forum to make a political statement, however, is significant as the Indian government has cracked down on journalists, freedom of expression, and cinema. Notably, too, Monkey Man goes further than many mainstream Bollywood films, which are unlikely to have such pointed politics — and which at times have even boosted Modi. Monkey Man’s villains are analogues for contemporary politics In his efforts to avenge his mother (Adithi Kalkunte), Kid’s chief targets are Rana Singh, the police chief of a fictional city clearly meant to be a stand-in for Mumbai, as well as Baba Shakti (Makarand Deshpande), the religious leader Singh works for. Shakti (whose name translates to “power” in Hindi) is depicted as a guru who capitalizes on religious fervor to justify crimes like the land dispossession of minority groups.While not a political leader himself, Shakti is portrayed as the puppetmaster behind a political leader’s operation. Singh, meanwhile, is shown using violence and authority to hurt those with less power and to implement Shakti’s plans. Given the framing of these characters, Shakti has been perceived by many viewers and critics as an analogue for Modi and key members of the BJP, like Yogi Adityanath, a far-right populist spiritual leader and politician who built his following in part through a fiery, reactionary interpretation of Hinduism. Like Modi, Adityanath has been accused of using his political power to harm minority communities. Monkey Man takes direct aim at both Shakti and Singh’s characters, with a particularly devastating scene featuring the police destroying Kid and his mother’s village, as the officers seek to clear the land for development under Shakti’s orders. That destruction is followed by Singh’s attempted sexual assault and then violent murder of Kid’s mother, a harrowing attack that fuels the protagonist’s lifelong pursuit of revenge. While Kid grew up listening to stories about Hindu gods and isn’t Muslim, these developments echo real-life land dispossession that has specifically targeted Muslims in India and been overseen by the state and by police. “Thousands of Muslim families have been forcibly evicted [in the Indian state of Assam] since 2021 from land they had been residing on for decades,” Nazimuddin Siddique writes for Al Jazeera. “Since 2016, police have shot at and killed protesters in at least two instances.” Modi has also been repeatedly scrutinized for his role in anti-Muslim riots in 2002, which police and government officials did little to stop and which killed 1,200 people in the state of Gujarat. As chief minister of the state at the time, Modi has been accused not only of condoning but inciting this violence. He has been cleared of wrongdoing by Indian courts, but questions about his involvement remain, and were most recently surfaced by a 2023 BBC documentary about the massacre that was censored by the Indian government. In 2005, the State Department barred Modi from a US visit due to concerns about his involvement. Shakti’s power only grows after the destruction of Kid’s village, and as Monkey Man documents the success of the political party he supports in the film, it also intersperses clips from actual news reports on protests against the rise of anti-Muslim sentiment in India. Shakti at one point also utilizes the Hindi phrase “Bharat Mata ki jai,” which translates to “Long live Mother India,” and is often employed by BJP leaders, including Modi. For all its efforts to broach this subject, the film’s critiques could be even sharper. When it comes to its depiction of Shakti, the film doesn’t offer many specifics about his ideology, beyond that he abuses the support he receives. And much of the attention in the movie is dedicated to the individual animus Kid has toward Singh, the police officer, rather than the system that he’s a part of. Some film critics, including Siddhant Adlakha, who wrote a piece for Time, andPrabhjot Bains, who authored a review for But Why Tho, also took issue with how the film employed certain Hindu references. For Bains, the use of the phrase, “Jai Bajrang Bali,” which praises Hanuman, the Hindu monkey god behind the film’s namesake, contained uncomfortable echoes of how Hindu nationalists have utilized it. This phrase is used by a viewer at a boxing match to support Patel’s character, who is dressed like a monkey. That same phrase, however, has also been used as a slogan by Hindu nationalists while committing harm against Muslims, Bains writes. For Adlakha, efforts to recast Hindu imagery were also complicated by how they were used to endorse violence. “The reclamation of such images appears to be Patel’s goal — one he shares with numerous Hindu leaders who have continued to battle Hindu nationalism,” Adlakha adds. “But the use of Hindu imagery as a call to violence, reminiscent of the Hindutva project, is central to Kid’s mission, resulting in narrative dissonance.” It’s worth noting that the film’s inclusion and celebration of trans people in India, some of whom are part of a community known as hijra, is also significant, directly pushing back on how they have been marginalized by media and in society. In Monkey Man, a group of hijra offer Kid sanctuary, train him in a martial arts montage, and rescue him during an especially pivotal fight scene. Monkey Man’s depictions of the sexual assault and harassment of women also nod at enduring violence that women have experienced in India, drawing more awareness to this ongoing problem. you don’t understand. the people in this gif are hijras/transfemme/3rd gender people & they’re about to kick ass. MONKEY MAN is an incredible action film featuring INDIAN TRANS PEOPLE as a major part of the plot! I can’t stop screaming it from the rooftops! Dev Patel ilysm ️‍⚧️ pic.twitter.com/WX4fQE2Omo— Jeremy Allen Black ✊ (they/them) (@LKirwanAshman) April 7, 2024 Despite its shortcomings, it’s nonetheless notable that Patel made political criticism of Indian leaders such a pivotal aspect of the film, especially given the current climate and how heavily studios count on the Indian market. According to Irfan Nooruddin, a professor of Indian politics at Georgetown University, it’s “virtually unheard of” for mainstream films to make such a direct critique of Modi and the BJP. That’s because film censorship in India has gotten worse in recent years as the BJP has increased scrutiny of art and expression that’s critical of the government. Ahead of April’s election, for instance, Bollywood has released a slew of films that amplify Modi’s agenda. Besides the BBC documentary, other projects — including a film adaptation of Maximum City, a book that nods at Muslim oppression in India, and Gormint, a political satire — have also been tabled by Netflix and Amazon due to what The Washington Post describes as “self-censorship.” Concerns about this were even clear in Monkey Man itself, which was bought then dropped by Netflix, with some reports suggesting that may have been due to worries about its political content. Even after it was rescued by Universal, there appear to have been changes: In one example, an early trailer showed the banners for the political party in the film as saffron — the color of the BJP. In the final film, some of these banners have been changed to red. And presently, it’s still uncertain if Monkey Man will screen in India at all. the new trailer shows that they've changed the colors of the evil political party from saffron (hindu nationalist BJP) to red (communist party) https://t.co/HYFrhNqcV8 pic.twitter.com/te2NKTYy2p— atulya (@computer_atulya) March 23, 2024 “I don’t see it coming out in India, but if it does it’s not going to come out in one piece,” Adlakha tells Vox, citing likely censorship of violence, sexuality, and politics in the film. “It’s going to be a heavily compromised version.” There are major threats to India’s democracy Monkey Man is premiering during a period when experts are worried about the state of India’s democracy and the potential for more erosion. In a federal election set to begin on April 19, the BJP is expected to maintain its majority in Parliament, wins that could further cement the anti-Muslim positions it employs and its efforts to subvert major institutions like the press and the judiciary. As Vox’s Zack Beauchamp has written, the BJP rose to power while pursuing “policies undermining Muslim rights and inflaming Hindu anxieties about their Muslim neighbors.” A key law that has raised concern is the Citizenship Amendment Act, which excludes Muslims from neighboring countries from obtaining a fast track to Indian citizenship. That same law allows members of other religious groups including Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains, and Christians to expedite their attempts at naturalization. Both Modi’s and the party’s rhetoric have sought to exploit existing divides between Hindu and Muslim people, including questioning the right of certain Muslims to be in India and alleging that they’re seeking to overtake the Hindu majority by growing their population. One example of this has been fears that the BJP have stoked about the concept of “love jihad,” which alleges that Muslim men are interested in marrying Hindu women in order to establish a larger presence in India. There’s “a growing sense of fear that a continued run of the BJP is going to bring more laws that are going to really put Muslims in second-class citizenship status,” says Nooruddin. During Modi’s tenure, there have also been a number of anti-democratic developments, including the increased jailing of opposition, attacks on journalists, media censorship, and the weakening of the judiciary. In recent weeks, the chief minister of Delhi, a major opposition leader, was jailed shortly before the election on corruption charges he claims are politically motivated. Assaults on the press have also become more common, with police raiding the homes of reporters at a left-leaning publication in 2023, and some mainstream outlets now dubbed “lapdog media” by prominent journalists who call them that for their willingness to dilute critiques on the government. Top political leaders have also tried to diminish the role of the judiciary and to exert greater influence in the selection of judges. Monkey Man, though imperfect, dares to allude to some of these concerns in a time when even doing that is a risky move.
vox.com
Meghan Markle’s A-List pals Mindy Kaling, Tracee Ellis Ross show off American Riviera Orchard jams she gifted to just 50 people
The Duchess of Sussex's celeb pals have flocked to social media to show off the exclusive American Riviera Orchard jam jars they've received.
nypost.com
California establece límite para el cromo tóxico de la película 'Erin Brockovich' en agua potable
LOS ÁNGELES (AP) — Los reguladores del agua en California aprobaron el miércoles establecer un límite de cromo hexavalente en agua potable, un químico que puede causar cáncer cuando se ingiere y que se hizo famoso por la película “Erin Brockovich”.
latimes.com
Chinese Embassy defends TikTok against potential forced sale in meeting with congressional staffers: report
Chinese diplomats reportedly held meetings with congressional staffers to argue against legislation that would force the sale of TikTok.
foxnews.com
Salmonella Outbreak Sparks Massive Trader Joe's Recall
Trader Joe's is calling on customers who purchased Infinite Herbs Organic Basil to discard the product or return it to the store amid a salmonella outbreak.
newsweek.com
Protester outside Columbia University seen yelling ‘We’re all Hamas,’ ‘Long live Hamas’
The clip shows a female protester with a keffiyeh covering her head and face loudly banging on NYPD barricades erected near the university's Morningside Heights campus.
nypost.com
Solomon Islands national election count begins, closely watched by US, China
Counting began on Thursday in the Solomon Islands following a national election, with electoral officials seeking a larger venue in the Pacific Island capital.
foxnews.com
California establishes nation's first drinking water limit in response to 'Erin Brockovich' contaminant
California regulators have adopted a drinking water limit on toxic hexavalent chromium, a chemical compound made infamous by the movie “Erin Brockovich."
foxnews.com
Juez ordena procesar al cantante mexicano Kalimba por presunto abuso sexual
Un juez de la capital mexicana ordenó procesar al cantante por su probable participación en el delito abuso sexual agravado
latimes.com
Everything ends. Even Bluey.
Ludo Studio Did you see a parent crying today? The brilliant kids’ TV show Blueyis why. If you happen not to have children or have been living under a rock, let me introduce you to someone. Her name is Bluey. She’s a 7-year-old who lives with her younger sister Bingo and her dad Bandit and mom Chili in the bucolic Australian city of Brisbane. Also, she’s a dog — a blue heeler, to be precise. And a cartoon. And she’s really, really big. The brainchild of Australian animator Joe Brumm, the kid’s cartoon Bluey premiered in its home country in 2018 before taking the rest of the world by storm. In 2023, Bluey was the second-most popular streaming show in the US, where it was watched for 731 million hours. But a better measurement of Bluey’s power is in the mindspace of its tens of millions of young fans and the wallets of their parents, who bought enough books, dolls, albums, juices, cookies, and even theater tickets to make the Bluey brand worth an estimated $2 billion. (As Bluey herself might say, that’s a lot of dollarbucks.) Which is why the most recent episode of Bluey, which hints at a possible ending for the show, was so shocking — not just to her multitudes of adoring kid fans and their parents, but to the major media companies like Disney that are banking on a never-ending supply of content like Bluey. But like childhood itself — for both children and the parents who watch them grow — nothing as perfectly beautiful as Bluey is meant to last forever, unchanged. Which may be the lesson the show was trying to tell us all this time. Bluey, explained You have to watch Bluey — and you absolutely should — to really understand what makes it so superior to the vast, often-polluted river that is children’s TV content. It’s funny in a way that 5-year-olds and 45-year-olds can appreciate. But what pushes Bluey into the realm of the masterpiece is Brumm and his colleagues’ ability to thread real-life themes into their richly realized childhood world. Aging parents, infertility, parental fighting, sibling rivalry: Each of these complicated subjects gets its moment in between the games of keepy-uppy. And not in a didactic, Afterschool Special sort of way. The lessons Bluey has for children and parents alike aren’t told; they’re lived. You can see that for yourself in the most recent episode, which dropped globally on April 14, a 28-minute special titled “The Sign.” Bandit has gotten a new job, one that Chili tells the kids “can give them a better life” — but it requires selling their beloved home in Brisbane and moving across the country. A sudden, major move is about as traumatic as it gets for kids — and that’s precisely how Bluey responds. She becomes fixated on the “For Sale” sign outside her house, reasoning with perfect kid logic that if the sign is removed, the house can’t be sold. But life doesn’t stop because of one kid’s crisis, whether in Bluey or in the real world. While Bluey struggles with the sign, her beloved babysitter tries to decide whether to go through with a wedding, while her mother Chili comes to grips with her own doubts about the move. Spoiler alert for all our 6-year-old Today, Explained readers: The family does not, in the end, go through with the move. It was an unusual decision for a show that generally hasn’t shied away from the challenges of reality. At our house, at least, the ending was received by a great flow of what my son and my wife called “happy tears.” But much of the angst that has greeted “The Sign” has less to do with the episode itself than the very real chance it could represent, if not a full-stop ending to Bluey, at the very least a significant change. If its current incarnation does end, there would be a flood of “sad tears.” But it would also underscore why Bluey is so great — and so unusual for kids’ programming. The longest shortest time Bluey is the closest thing a multibillion-dollar media property can be to a truly artisan production. It has remained defiantly Australian, down to the accents and the lingo. Brumm writes or co-writes all the episodes. He’s kept production at his studio in Brisbane, rather than subcontracting it out to cheaper countries. All that makes for greatness — and burnout, something that critics have noticed sneaking into Brumm’s characterization of his stand-in Bandit. He told Bloomberg Businessweek earlier this month about his worries that he would repeat himself, that the quality couldn’t possibly keep climbing. The slowness to announce what would be a fourth season, combined with the soft finale feeling of “The Sign,” has fans panicking. As you can imagine, studios like Disney and the BBC that have a huge financial stake in the continued production of Bluey have no desire to see it end. The streaming ecosystem needs a constant supply of new content to keep subscribers hooked and bring on new ones (which is one reason why they’re so excited about the dystopian possibility of AI-generated content). If the quality suffers, that’s a small price to pay to keep the IP flowing. It’s not clear what will happen with Bluey next, though producers involved in the show have promised fans it will be returning in some form. But Brumm has spoken about his reluctance to replace the actors who voice Bluey and Bingo as they age out of the roles and the fact that, as his own daughters get older, he can’t draw from their experiences as he once did. I can relate. My own son, the one who cried the “happy tears,” is turning 7 soon, aging out of the Bluey zone. This is one of the fundamental facts of the longest shortest time that is parenting. On top of the sleepless nights, the endless hours to fill, and, yes, all that joy, raising a kid is one long experience of loss. We lose the 1-year-old with his arms outstretched to be picked up, the 4-year-old bravely marching to his first day of preschool, the 6-year-old who just wants to snuggle on the couch and watch Bluey. They’re replaced by new people we can’t wait to meet, but the ones they were, the ones we knew and loved, they’re gone forever. Maybe that’s why I love Bluey so much — so much I almost hope it ends now, at its zenith. Watching it is a time capsule for a moment I would hold onto with all my strength, even as I know I can’t. I suspect Brumm knows that too. This story appeared originally in Today, Explained, Vox’s flagship daily newsletter. Sign up here for future editions.
vox.com
Jawbone of Long Dead U.S. Marine Found in Kid’s Rock Collection
Ramapo College of New JerseyCapt. Everett Leland Yager of the U.S. Marine Corps was 30 years old when he embarked on a military training exercise back in California in 1951, and it’s fair to say the World War II vet probably had a lot of ideas about how he wanted to be remembered by his wife and two children should he be killed during his service. Full military honors, perhaps a somber memorial. A burial site where future generations could remember him.He almost certainly didn’t expect any of his remains to wind up in a child’s rock collection. And yet that’s exactly what happened, according to genealogy experts.The “unexpected” discovery was announced this week by the Ramapo College of New Jersey, where a genetics lab determined that Yager’s jawbone had somehow been mistaken for a rock during a “scavenging exploration” in Arizona. The “rock” was finally referred for forensic testing in January 2023, and students ultimately found it was a DNA match to Yager’s daughter.Read more at The Daily Beast.
thedailybeast.com
Justice Department ramps up efforts to reduce violent crime
The Justice Department is ramping up its efforts to reduce violent crime in the U.S., launching a specialized gun intelligence center in Chicago and expanding task forces to curb carjackings
abcnews.go.com
Taylor Swift Album Leak Alleged as Lyrics Mocked Online
"She's really torturing poetry," wrote one confused fan, while others refused to believe the leak—and bizarre lyrics—are really by Swift.
newsweek.com
How Trump's Swing States Fortunes Shifted Over 6 Weeks
There's good news and bad news for Donald Trump in a review of recent polls amid a close race with President Joe Biden.
newsweek.com
America's Top 10 Most Endangered Rivers Revealed
The rivers of New Mexico have been classed as the most endangered in the whole country, due to a loss of federal stream and wetland protections.
newsweek.com
Iranian-American lawyer whose response to anti-Israel protesters went viral predicts new 'world war'
Elica Le Bon, a lawyer and self-described "daughter of Iran," joined "Hannity" to condemn the anti-Israel protests across the country.
foxnews.com
Polish president meets with Trump in New York City amid criminal trial
Former President Donald Trump welcomed Polish President Andrzej Duda to Trump Tower in New York City, New York on Wednesday for a discussion about the Ukraine-Russia conflict and NATO.
foxnews.com
Ex-pharmacy exec faces sentencing in Michigan woman's death linked to tainted steroids
The head of a specialty pharmacy will be sentenced in Michigan for 11 deaths more than a decade ago that were tied to tainted steroids, according to officials.
foxnews.com
China's iPhone-Making Dominance May Be Coming to an End
India is offering lucrative manufacturing support programs to attract companies like Apple that want to move their supply chains away from China.
newsweek.com
New Louisiana congressional district 'textbook racial gerrymandering,' detractors say
Debate rages over whether LA's new congressional district map is racially or politically motivated after a judge ruled the previous map violated the Voting Rights Act.
foxnews.com
Endangered Puerto Rican parrot threatened by fiercer hurricanes
Hurricane Maria nearly wiped out an endangered parrot in Puerto Rico, highlighting the grave threat climate change-fueled storms pose to endangered species.
cbsnews.com
What's inside the $95-billion House package focused on aiding Ukraine and Israel
What's in the House package of bills to provide military aid to Ukraine and Israel, replenish U.S. weapons systems and give humanitarian assistance in Gaza?
latimes.com
Closing Sanctions Loopholes on Russia's Energy Empire | Opinion
How can the international community apply additional pressure on Russia to force it to stop its war?
newsweek.com
Mercedes-Benz Goes Beyond Cars to Make Cities Greener
For the German automaker, making a more sustainable commercial vehicle means also doing good for the world around the company's vans.
newsweek.com
2025 Toyota Camry Review: Jack of All Trades, Master of Many
The four-door Camry shored up its handling and power to become everything to everyone
newsweek.com
Taylor Swift Isn’t the Economic Force. It’s Her Fans
Women today want content that speaks to their lived experiences. And they’re willing to pay for it, too.
time.com
The Paradox of the American Labor Movement
Last year was widely hailed as a breakthrough for the American worker. Amid a historically hot labor market, the United Auto Workers and Hollywood writers’ and actors’ guilds launched high-profile strikes that made front-page news and resulted in significant victories. Strikes, organizing efforts, and public support for unions reached heights not seen since the 1960s. Two in three Americans support unions, and 59 percent say they would be in favor of unionizing their own workplace. And Joe Biden supports organized labor more vocally than any other president in recent memory. You could look at all this and say that the U.S. labor movement is stronger than it has been in decades.But you could just as easily say that worker power in America is as low as it has been in nearly a century. Despite all the headlines and good feeling, a mere 10 percent of American workers belong to unions. In the private sector, the share is just 6 percent. After years of intense media attention and dogged organizing efforts, workers at Amazon, Starbucks, and Trader Joe’s still don’t have a contract, or even the start of negotiations to get one. Union membership is associated with higher earnings, better benefits, stable hours, protection from arbitrary discipline, and more—but most Americans haven’t had the chance to experience these advantages firsthand. In 2023, according to an estimate by the Economic Policy Institute, a progressive think tank, 60 million working people in this country wanted a union but couldn’t get one. How can this be? The answer, as I learned during my 25 years working for the AFL-CIO, the nation’s largest federation of unions, is that the story of organized labor in America is really two stories. On the one hand, established unions—especially those that emerged in the 1930s, when labor protections were at their most robust and expansive—are thriving. On the other hand, workers who want to unionize for the first time can’t get their efforts off the ground.This is because the legal and policy shifts that hobbled the American labor movement were not primarily aimed at dismantling existing unions, at least not right away. Rather, they were designed to make it difficult to form new ones. Those efforts worked. In 1954, 16 million working people belonged to a union, and they accounted for about a third of the workforce. Today, nearly as many people are in unions—about 14 million—but they make up only 10 percent of the workforce. In other words, the numerator of unionized workers has held steady even as the denominator of overall jobs in the economy has grown dramatically. And all the support from the public and even the president can’t do much to change that. As hopeful as today’s moment might seem for workers, those hopes will not be realized without reversing the changes that laid unions low in the first place. A century ago, an even smaller portion of the workforce belonged to a union than does today, and it showed. Then, as now, income inequality had reached staggering heights. Industrial workplaces of the 1920s were police states, with corporate spy agencies, private armies, and company stores.The tide shifted in workers’ favor during the Great Depression. In 1935, responding to years of rising labor militancy, Congress passed the Wagner Act, an integral part of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal agenda. The law gave working people robust rights to form and join labor unions and to take collective action, such as strikes. It created the National Labor Relations Board, tasked with ensuring that employers didn’t violate these rights. And it declared that protecting “the free flow of commerce” also meant protecting the “full freedom” of working people to organize. Overall union membership rose from just 11 percent of the workforce in 1934 to 34 percent in 1945.[Morgan Ome: What the labor movement can learn from its past]Then the tide shifted back. After the Congress of Industrial Organizations began organizing multiracial unions in the South, segregationist Southern Democrats, whose votes had been crucial for passing the Wagner Act, joined forces with pro-corporate Republicans to stymie the New Deal labor agenda. This effort culminated in the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947, which stripped key labor protections from the Wagner Act. President Harry Truman denounced the bill as “a shocking piece of legislation” that would “take fundamental rights away from our working people.” But the Senate overrode his veto.Taft-Hartley marked the beginning of the end of America’s short-lived period of strong organized-labor rights. It allowed states to pass “right to work” laws that let workers free-ride on union benefits without paying dues, which would help keep southern states low-wage and non-union. Taft-Hartley made it a crime for workers to join together across employers in “sympathy strikes” (unlike in Sweden, where postal workers refused last year to deliver license plates as a show of support for striking Tesla workers), or even across workplaces in the same industry. It also included anti-communist provisions that led to a purge of many of the labor movement’s most effective organizers, especially those most successful in promoting multiracial organizing. Taken together, these changes choked off the growth of working-class solidarity that was flourishing in other Western democracies at the time.Taft-Hartley did not immediately doom the labor movement, however. It was more like a time bomb. Established unions remained strong and popular for decades, boosted by the conventional wisdom that a careful balance between labor and capital was the goose laying the postwar golden eggs. As Dwight Eisenhower wrote to his brother in 1954, “Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history.”The time bomb finally began to go off in the 1970s, when a confluence of factors—the stagflation crisis, the rise of Milton Friedman–style economic theory, the fracturing of the Democratic coalition—made anti-union policy much more politically viable. And corruption in some unions, laid bare by high-profile congressional hearings, cast doubt on the integrity of unions generally. Richard Nixon appointed pro-corporate justices to the Supreme Court who over the following decades would dilute labor protections even further than Taft-Hartley had. And in 1981, Ronald Reagan crushed the air-traffic-controller strike, signaling that the federal government would tolerate aggressive union-busting actions by employers. This in turn gave birth to a new “union avoidance” consulting business that taught bosses how to exploit the vulnerabilities that had been injected into labor law. Those vulnerabilities turned out to be extensive.During the period between the passage of the Wagner Act and Taft-Hartley, union organizing was relatively straightforward. Organizers would typically distribute cards to rank-and-file activists, who would collect signatures and return them to the organizers, who would file the signed cards with the NLRB. If a majority of a workplace signed the cards, the NLRB would certify the union. During bargaining, if the company and the union couldn’t reach agreement, the workers had various ways of exerting leverage, including calling a sit-down strike or blocking the employer’s goods from being accepted at other workplaces.Today, even if a majority of workers sign union cards, the union has to win an NLRB election to be recognized. This process does not much resemble the free and fair elections we vote in every other November. The company can hire anti-union consultants, who will advise doing everything possible to delay that election, giving management time to intensify its lobbying efforts to scare employees out of voting yes. Thanks to Taft-Hartley’s so-called free-speech clause, employers have a broad range of tactics to choose from. For instance, although they are not technically allowed to threaten to close a warehouse if workers unionize, they can “predict” that the warehouse will have to close if the union goes through. They can make employees attend anti-union propaganda meetings during work hours, and they don’t have to let union organizers set foot in the parking lot to respond.If a union overcomes these obstacles to win majority support, corporate higher-ups, though technically obligated to bargain in good faith, can drag their heels on contract negotiations with few repercussions. This helps explain why the Amazon Labor Union—which was founded in Staten Island in April 2021 and recognized by the NLRB in April 2022— still doesn’t appear close to having a contract. Labor might be regaining its cultural cachet, but after the triumphant vote is complete and the news cameras go away, employers hold almost all the cards.[Adam Serwer: The Amazon union exposes the emptiness of ‘woke capital’]This dynamic, rather than economic or technological shifts, is the key reason workers in more recently established industries are not organized. If Uber and Lyft had been invented in the 1930s, there would be a large, powerful Rideshare Drivers’ Union. If movies had been invented in the 2020s, the notion of an actors’ guild or a screenwriters’ union would seem absurd to most people. There is nothing more inherently “unionizable” about one job versus another.Organized labor could still make a true comeback, one reflected not just in public goodwill but in actual union jobs. The Protecting the Rights to Organize Act, first introduced in 2019, is a comprehensive effort to restore the balance of power in the workplace—repealing much of the Taft-Hartley Act, including its so-called right-to-work provisions and its ban on solidarity actions. The PRO Act passed the House, but stalled in the Senate when a few Democratic senators refused to back filibuster-reform efforts in 2021. The PRO Act is a strong bill, and I fought for it during my time as political director of the AFL-CIO. But one of the lessons of the American labor movement is that legal change tends to follow cultural change. Recent trends are encouraging. Biden brags about being the first president to visit a picket line, and Trump, despite having pursued anti-labor policies while president, at least feels the need to try to appear pro-union. At the same time, with less fanfare, the strategic effort to dilute worker power continues apace: Red-state legislatures are rolling back basic labor laws, including those that protect children, and Amazon, Starbucks, SpaceX, and Trader Joe’s have asked the the Supreme Court to declare the NLRB unconstitutional.The paradox is that it’s hard for labor law to become a top-tier political issue precisely because so few Americans have firsthand experience with union membership, or recognize what they have to gain from resetting the balance of power between workers and corporations. Overcoming that challenge requires recovering the wisdom that created the modern labor movement: that the fate of working people anywhere is the fate of working people everywhere. It happened once, nearly a century ago. The country was a very different place back then. But, for better and for worse, it was also much the same.
theatlantic.com
Abolish DEI Statements
This month, Professor Randall L. Kennedy, an eminent scholar of race and civil rights, published an op-ed in The Harvard Crimson denouncing the use of diversity, equity, and inclusion statements in academic hiring. “I am a scholar on the left committed to struggles for social justice,” he wrote. “The realities surrounding mandatory DEI statements, however, make me wince.”More and more colleges started requiring faculty to submit these statements in recent years, until legislatures in red states began to outlaw them. They remain common at private institutions and in blue states. Kennedy lamented that at Harvard and elsewhere, aspiring professors are required to “profess and flaunt” their faith in DEI in a process that “leans heavily and tendentiously towards varieties of academic leftism.” He concluded that DEI statements “ought to be abandoned.”Conor Friedersdorf: The hypocrisy of mandatory diversity statementsBut a “contrasting perspective” on diversity statements that the Crimson published argued that “furor over diversity statements in hiring is a red herring.” Edward J. Hall, a Harvard philosophy professor, acknowledged flaws in the way DEI statements are currently used, going so far as to declare, “I share my colleague professor Randall L. Kennedy’s anger.” However, he continued, “we should direct that anger at its proper target: not diversity statements themselves, but rather the horribly distorted view that has taken hold about what they should contain.”The headline of his op-ed, “Don’t Eliminate. Improve,” seemed to endorse a reformist position on DEI statements that I’ve begun to encounter often in my reporting. Lots of liberal-minded academics feel favorably toward diversity and inclusion as values, but they also dislike dogmatism and coercion, qualities that they see in today’s DEI statements. If only there were a way for a hiring process to advance DEI without straying into illiberalism.But people who see the flaws of the status quo should not be seduced by the illusion that tweaking how DEI statements are solicited or scored is a solution. In fact, interviewing Hall, the ostensible reformer in the Harvard Crimson debate, left me more convinced that abolishing DEI statements is the best way forward.In Kennedy’s case against DEI statements, he provides an example: a job opening for an assistant professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, where applicants are required to submit a statement of teaching philosophy that includes “a description of their ‘orientation toward diversity, equity, and inclusion practices.’”Notice what is implied: that there is a set of known DEI practices professors can deploy to advance diversity, equity, and inclusion, if they possess the desire to do so. In reality, however, there are robust scholarly debates about how best to advance or even define diversity, equity, and inclusion, let alone a bundle of all three values. One cannot reliably distinguish among applicants by their “orientation to DEI practices” without advantaging one side in such debates, infringing on academic freedom and contributing to an ideological monoculture.I am not a neutral observer here. In 2023, I published “The Hypocrisy of Mandatory Diversity Statements,” in which I argued that forcing all who seek faculty jobs to pledge fealty to the same values will make colleges less diverse. I interviewed a math professor who grew up in the Soviet Union about why he abhors diversity. I documented how California’s community colleges are violating the First Amendment rights of their faculty by enforcing conformity with DEI ideology. And I endorsed Utah’s decision to eliminate diversity statements in public institutions.Still, each time I encounter a new proposal for a reformed diversity-statement regime, I try to evaluate it on the merits. Frustratingly, Hall’s op-ed stopped short of offering details about what an improved system for DEI statements would look like. In a best-case scenario, what specific prompt would applicants be compelled to write on? How would the answers be evaluated? When pressed, Hall was up for wrestling with my skeptical questions. And his answers were illuminating. To my surprise, he and I barely disagree.Although Hall’s op-ed was titled “Don’t Eliminate. Improve,” the position he actually wants to stake out is better summed up this way: Critics should be clear about what makes today’s DEI statements flawed, because otherwise the understandable and necessary backlash against them could go too far. It could convey the conclusion that there is no legitimate reason a faculty hiring process would be concerned with diversity, inclusion, or belonging. He believes an applicant’s orientation to diversity, if defined in the right way, is useful to probe.“Students should come out of a liberal-arts education vastly more skilled at diagnosing, combating, and guarding against ignorance,” Hall said. “I don’t mean mere lack of knowledge but the kind of ignorance that is akin to having a blind spot.” He recounted the old riddle about the father and son who get in a car accident. Both are rushed to the hospital, where the surgeon says, “I can’t operate on this boy, he’s my son.” How can that be? Those confounded by the riddle have a blind spot: They assume the surgeon is a man, when, of course, the surgeon is the boy’s mother.“You don’t produce knowledge without well-structured inquiry. You don’t have well-structured, healthy inquiry if it’s infected by this kind of ignorance,” Hall said. “A good liberal-arts education should provide the kind of flexibility of mind and social skills needed to identify, guard against, and combat ignorance. And if this kind of vaccination against ignorance is a core part of what we’re trying to give our students, it’s essential that students learn how and why to disagree with each other and with us.”[Conor Friedersdorf: The state that’s trying to rein in DEI without becoming Florida]And “disagreement requires diversity,” he said. “So now you’ve got a rationale for valuing diversity. You’ve got a rationale for valuing inclusion and belonging, understood the right way.” He sees belonging as classrooms where all students have “equal standing to have their voices taken up, responded to, and engaged with,” so their diverse viewpoints can work to combat ignorance.I followed his logic. But in this example, why not ask prospective hires how they’d teach students to combat ignorance rather than about their perspective on diversity?He agreed, noting that there is no shared understanding of what diversity means today, and that lots of applicants try to guess at what those evaluating DEI statements want to hear. “The language has been corrupted,” he said. To yield useful information, better to avoid the word diversity. Then he offered what he’d consider an improved prompt: “What do you do to foster a culture in the classroom in which students can engage in serious, good-faith, curiosity-driven disagreement? That’s a question I would like to see.”I asked how he would evaluate different answers to that prompt.Say one applicant writes, Having delved deeply into research literature on authoritarian personality types, I feel the best way to minimize racial animus in classroom culture is to treat members of every racial group in a color-blind manner, because who we consider “other” is malleable and raising the salience of race could foster a climate that resulted in more minority students being othered.Meanwhile, a competing job candidate writes, Having delved deeply into critical race theory, explicitly race-conscious approaches to classroom management strike me as vital for students of color to participate as equals in curiosity-driven disagreement.Both applicants are earnestly and cogently propounding theories that are plausibly derived from peer-reviewed scholarship and utterly in conflict. Who scores more highly?“They both can’t be right, but they could both be excellent candidates, and they’ve signaled that by the seriousness with which they took the question,” Hall said. “I would probe for signs that they try to evaluate whether their approach is actually working. Are they absolutely convinced of the soundness of their theory, which would be worrying, or are they empirical about it and open to adjustments if it isn’t working? But on the content, I would judge them equally strong.” In a university, he argued, “you shouldn't take for granted that something as complex as teaching is an area where we should all agree there’s one right way to do it. I’m happy with a kind of pluralism.”The information that Hall wants to elicit from job candidates, and his pluralistic attitude toward evaluating their answers, strikes me as defensible and even sensible.But his approach is wildly different from every actual DEI-statement process I’ve seen. “Wouldn’t most supporters of today’s DEI statements hate the approach you’re proposing?” I asked.[Conor Friedersdorf: A uniquely terrible new DEI policy]“What I’m proposing is absolutely a different thing,” he said. “My vision would be viewed as hostile by many who are ardent supporters of DEI in its current incarnation.”Hall told me that “given the current climate, it’s really not possible to get useful information from diversity statements.” In fact, “we probably should just get rid of them,” he clarified soon after. “There is not any kind of useful purpose that they’re serving, and there’s a pretty destructive purpose that they can serve.” As a result of all the signaling around DEI in academia, “we need to do some counter-signaling,” he added, to make clear that hiring committees are open to diverse perspectives from job seekers––otherwise, the effect is “perceived pressure to align with politicized concepts” that “narrows the range of perspectives we get in our applicant pools.”After talking with Hall, I want to slightly amend my position in this debate: Colleges should fully abolish diversity statements in hiring––while noting that by doing so, they aren’t in any way implying that diversity, inclusion, or any other value is irrelevant to good teaching.In fact, my ideal college press release announcing the end of mandatory DEI statements would clarify that lots of values, including DEI, can bear on research and teaching––and that healthy universities allow faculty members to contest how best to define and prioritize such values. The alternative, where the DEI bundle is treated as so important as to justify coercion, is anti-diversity and authoritarian.
theatlantic.com
Who’s Afraid of a Chinese EV?
Chinese electric vehicles—cheap, stylish, and high quality—should be a godsend to the Biden administration, whose two biggest priorities are reducing carbon emissions quickly enough to avert a climate catastrophe and reducing consumer prices quickly enough to avert an electoral catastrophe. Instead, the White House is going out of its way to keep Chinese EVs out of the U.S. What gives?The key to understanding this seeming contradiction is something known as “the China shock.” American policy makers long considered free trade to be close to an unalloyed good. But, according to a hugely influential 2016 paper, the loosening of trade restrictions with China at the turn of the 21st century was a disaster for the American manufacturing workforce. Consumers got cheap toys and clothes, but more than 2 million workers lost their jobs, and factory towns across the country fell into ruin. Later research found that, in 2016, Donald Trump overperformed in counties that had been hit hardest by the China shock, helping him win key swing states such as Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania.Upon taking office, the Biden administration committed itself to making sure nothing like this would happen again. It kept in place many of Donald Trump’s tariffs on China and even introduced new trade restrictions of its own. Meanwhile, it pushed legislation through Congress that invested trillions of dollars to boost domestic manufacturing. For Biden, the transition to green energy represented a chance to bring good jobs back to the places that had been hurt the most by free trade.Then China became an EV powerhouse overnight and made everything much more complicated. As recently as 2020, China produced very few electric vehicles and exported hardly any of them. Last year, more than 8 million EVs were sold in China, compared with 1.4 million in the U.S. The Chinese market has been driven mostly by a single brand, BYD, which recently surpassed Tesla to become the world’s largest producer of electric vehicles. BYD cars are well built, full of high-tech features, and dirt cheap. The least expensive EV available in America retails for about $30,000. BYD’s base model goes for less than $10,000 in China and, without tariffs, would probably sell for about $20,000 in the U.S., according to industry experts. This leaves the White House in a bind. A flood of ultracheap Chinese EVs would save Americans a ton of money at a time when people—voters—are enraged about high prices generally and car prices in particular. And it would accelerate the transition from gas-powered cars to EVs, drastically lowering emissions in the process. But it would also likely force American carmakers to close factories and lay off workers, destroying a crucial source of middle-class jobs in a prized American industry—one that just so happens to be concentrated in a handful of swing states. The U.S. could experience the China shock all over again. “It’s a Faustian bargain,” David Autor, an economist at MIT and one of the authors of the original China-shock paper, told me. “There are few things that would decarbonize the U.S. faster than $20,000 EVs. But there is probably nothing that would kill the U.S. auto industry faster, either.”[Andrew Moseman: The inconvenient truth about electric vehicles]The president has chosen which end of the bargain he’s willing to take. The Biden administration has left in place a 25 percent tariff on all Chinese vehicles (a measure initiated by Donald Trump), which has kept most Chinese EVs out of the U.S. even as they are selling like crazy in Europe. That probably won’t hold off Chinese EVs forever, which is why the administration is contemplating further restrictions. “China is determined to dominate the future of the auto market, including by using unfair practices,” Biden said in a statement in February. “I’m not going to let that happen on my watch.”One view of this approach is that Biden is choosing to sabotage his own climate goals by cynically pandering to a tiny group of swing voters. As Vox’s Dylan Matthews has observed, less than 1 percent of Americans work directly in the auto industry, whereas more than 90 percent of American households have a car.The Biden administration, unsurprisingly, sees the situation differently. Biden’s team starts from the premise that decarbonizing the U.S. economy will be a decades-long effort requiring sustained political buy-in from the public. Chinese EVs might lower emissions in the short term, but the resulting backlash could help elect Trump and other Republicans intent on rolling back the Biden administration’s hard-won climate achievements. Keeping out Chinese EVs now, in other words, may be necessary to save the planet later.“We ran this experiment before,” Jennifer Harris, who served as the senior director for international economics in the Biden administration, told me, referring to the first China shock. “We saw whole industries shift overseas, and Trump rode those grievances right to the White House. And last time I checked, he didn’t do much decarbonizing.” Already, Trump is trying to turn Chinese EVs into a wedge issue in the 2024 election; his recent “bloodbath” comments were a reference to what would happen to America if Chinese cars were allowed into the country.That doesn’t mean the Biden administration is giving up on an electric-vehicle future; it just means that future will need to be built at home instead of imported from abroad. Threading that needle won’t be easy. Apart from Tesla, American automakers still make the bulk of their profits selling gas-powered pickup trucks and SUVs while bleeding money on EVs. (Last year, GM lost $1.7 billion on its EV business; Ford lost $4.7 billion.) Although the generous subsidies in the Inflation Reduction Act are designed to speed up the pivot to electric vehicles, U.S. companies—including Tesla—aren’t close to profitably producing EVs nearly as cheaply as China can today.The most straightforward way to buy time is by imposing further trade restrictions. But doing so effectively requires careful calibration: Expose American automakers to Chinese competition too quickly and they could whither and die, but protect them for too long and they might remain complacent selling expensive gas-guzzling cars instead of transitioning toward cheaper EVs. “The sweet spot is where you prevent a rapid shift of production to China while also holding the auto industry’s feet to the fire,” Jesse Jenkins, who leads the Princeton Zero-Carbon Energy Systems Research and Optimization Lab, told me.Separating technocratic analysis of policy objectives from the vicissitudes of politics, however, is easier said than done. Trump recently called for a 100 percent tariff on Chinese cars; Republican Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri recently proposed legislation to raise that to 125 percent. Even congressional Democrats—many of whom are facing close elections in Rust Belt states such as Michigan, Ohio, and Wisconsin—have recently begun pressuring the Biden administration to raise tariffs further.That isn’t the only way political currents could undermine the transition to electric vehicles. In order to compete with Chinese EVs, American companies must, paradoxically, learn from Chinese battery makers, who have spent decades developing the best EV batteries in the world. The U.S. auto industry knows this, which is why in February of last year Ford announced a partnership with China’s leading battery maker, CATL, to open a factory in Michigan. Ford would pay CATL to, in the words of Ford’s chairman, “help us get up to speed so that we can build these batteries ourselves” and create 2,500 new manufacturing jobs in the process. (Such partnerships are common in the EV industry; Tesla, for instance, partnered with the Japanese company Panasonic to develop its batteries.) Everybody would win: Ford, CATL, American workers, the planet.But the backlash was swift. Republican Governor Glenn Youngkin of Virginia called the Ford-CATL partnership a “Trojan-horse relationship with the Chinese Communist Party” and vowed to keep similar projects out of his state. House Republicans launched multiple investigations into the deal, claiming that it could pose a national-security risk. Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia, who was instrumental in passing the Inflation Reduction Act, has balked at the notion that a partnership with a Chinese company could qualify for the subsidies that that law provides.[Zoë Schlanger: Joe Biden and Donald Trump have thoughts about your next car]Perhaps not coincidentally, the Biden administration eventually announced new guidelines that could disqualify the deal, and others like it, from being eligible for some of the IRA’s tax credits and grants—a move that would make it much harder for American car companies to gain the expertise they need to produce better, cheaper EVs. “It’s ironic, really,” Ilaria Mazzocco, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told me. “Our efforts to cut China out from every part of the supply chain might actually be what prevents us from competing with their EVs.”Herein lies the Biden administration’s deeper dilemma. Decarbonizing the U.S. while retaining a thriving auto industry requires a delicate balance between tariffs and subsidies, between protection and competition, between beating the Chinese and learning from them. The prevailing sentiment toward China in Washington, however, is neither delicate nor balanced. That America’s leaders are committed to preventing another China shock is commendable. But going too far in the other direction could produce a different kind of avoidable disaster.
theatlantic.com
How to Be Less Busy and More Happy
Want to stay current with Arthur’s writing? Sign up to get an email every time a new column comes out.Are you feeling a little guilty about reading this article? Not because of the content, of course—nothing scandalous here!—but rather because of the time it takes away from something else you feel you should be doing. Perhaps you are taking a break from work but feel that you shouldn’t because deadlines and obligations are nipping at your ankles this very minute.If so, that’s because you’re probably too busy. Not that this is some amazing diagnosis: Most people are too busy. According to surveys conducted in recent years by the Pew Research Center, 52 percent of Americans are usually trying to do more than one thing at a time, and 60 percent sometimes feel too busy to enjoy life. When it comes to parents with children under the age of 18, a full 74 percent said that they sometimes feel too busy to enjoy life.The solution to excessive busyness might seem simple: do less. But that is easier said than done, isn’t it? After all, the overstuffed schedule we have today was built on trying to meet the expectations of others. But we do have research on busyness, which indicates that the real reasons you’re so overbooked might be much more complicated than this. So if you can understand why you end up with too little time and too much to do, that can point you toward strategies for tackling the problem, lowering your stress, and getting happier.[Read: One reason hybrid work makes employees miserable]Researchers have learned that well-being involves a “sweet spot” of busyness. As you surely know from experience, having too little discretionary time lowers happiness. But you can also have too much free time, which reduces life satisfaction due to idleness.Think of a time when a class was way too easy, or when a job left you with too little to do. Being able to goof off might have been fun for a while, but before long, you probably started to lose your mind. In 2021, scholars at the University of Pennsylvania and UCLA calculated the well-being levels of people with different amounts of time to use at their own discretion; the researchers found that the optimal number of free-time hours in a working day was 9.5—more than half of people’s time awake.Nine and a half hours is probably a lot more than you usually get or ever could get, between staying employed and living up to family obligations. In fact, the average number of discretionary hours found in the data is 1.8. But even if 9.5 hours is unrealistic, this huge difference is probably reflected in your stress levels and may have longer-term health consequences. The World Health Organization and the International Labour Organization estimate that worldwide, in 2016, as a result of working at least 55 hours a week, some 398,000 people died of a stroke and a further 347,000 died from heart disease. So even if you never get near 9.5 hours, increasing discretionary time is the right health and well-being strategy for most people—and probably for you too. So why aren’t more Americans demanding better work-life balance?[Read: ‘Ugh, I’m so busy!’: A status symbol of our time]One answer is that for most of us, too much discretionary time is scarier than too little, and we overcorrect to avoid it. If we don’t know how to use it, free time can become idleness, which leads to boredom—and humans hate boredom. Typically, when we are under-occupied, a set of brain structures known as the Default Mode Network is activated, with behavioral effects that can be associated with rumination and self-preoccupation.The pattern of thought when that network is involved can be merely trivial (How did my fingernails get so dirty?) or speculatively terrifying (What could my teenager be up to?). To avoid activating this unproductively ruminative state, we look for ways to force ourselves to be busy, such as scrolling through social media and staying busy with some goal-oriented task. In other words, the crazy calendar that doesn’t even give you time to use the bathroom might be—at least in part—a self-imposed creation, after you said “yes” to too many things as an insurance policy against going into that default mode.Besides having a dread of anxiously pensive boredom, we respond to two other factors when we make ourselves overly busy. First, in American culture, busyness tends to confer social status. Researchers in 2017 demonstrated this with a series of experiments, such as one in which subjects were asked to rate the status of a person based on their Facebook posts. According to their findings, posts that publicized an overworked lifestyle were rated more highly. Second, work performance and busyness tend to be positively correlated.Research from 2016 also showed that busier people had faster processing speed, better memory, better reasoning, and more knowledge than less busy people. Noteworthy, though, is that the direction of causation is unclear: High performers at work may simply be people who make themselves busier, and they would be just as effective and able if they thinned out their schedule in an effort to be happier.[Arthur C. Brooks: Overwhelmed? Just say ‘no.’]For most people, the trouble with busyness is that they are far below the sweet spot of discretionary time in their average workday. This may be unavoidable in part, and some people have a lot less control than others over their schedule. But as the research suggests, many people seem to be inflicting greater busyness on themselves than is necessary because of a fear of idleness.The solution starts with knowledge of this tendency and a willingness to confront it. Carefully monitor your work patterns and commitments for a week. If you have a hole in your schedule, do you jam it with a low-priority meeting or tasks you would ordinarily avoid? When you unexpectedly find yourself with a free hour because of a cancellation, do you fill it with make-work such as calls and emails that aren’t immediately necessary? These are telltale signs of idleness aversion.One remedy is to create a list of discretionary tasks that are creative and attractive to you but do not involve a deadline. For me, this means sketching out book ideas in a notebook I carry around with me. When I have unfilled time, I pull out the notebook and start brainstorming. This inevitably induces a pleasurable “flow state,” which gives me energy and refreshes me—and creates an incentive to block out more discretionary time. At one point in my career, when I was running a large organization, this observation led me to ring-fence two hours a day in the morning, when I know that my brain chemistry is best for idea work.Beyond being fun, such a practice can be revolutionary for your career. Google reserves 20 percent of engineers’ time for projects of their own choosing—literally whatever they want to work on. This free fifth of their time has generated more than half of the company’s highest-revenue-generating products, including Gmail, Google Maps, and Google Earth. If your employer doesn’t go in for a similar program, see if you can do it for yourself by being very strict about getting your official work done within specific time limits, leaving you time for your creativity and passion.[Derek Thompson: Why Americans suddenly stopped hanging out]Perhaps you try to follow this advice and still find yourself hopelessly busy. I have one other technique, which I learned some years ago from an efficiency expert. She told me to make a list of the 20 things I felt I had to get done the next day, in order of priority. Then she instructed me to take the top 10 items and list them according to how much I looked forward to doing each one. Finally, with that order, she told me to take my pencil and cross out the bottom 15 items. The top five would be my actual to-do list.“What about the others?” I asked, dumbfounded. Her response: “You won’t do them, and no one will really notice or care, because everything else will be so good.” Obviously, there are limits to this strategy: If an emergency appendectomy isn’t in your top five because you’re not looking forward to it, you should definitely still get it done. For the most part, though, she was right—and my life improved as a result.
theatlantic.com
Why Conflict is Essential to Creative Work
slate.com
Ex-Barstool Sports CEO Erika Ayers Badan has a surprising new job: old one was ‘a heart attack every day’
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Linebacker Payton Wilson riding momentum of unreal combine into 2024 NFL Draft
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Charlotte Tilbury launches a line of mood-boosting fragrances — from ‘Calm Bliss’ to ‘More Sex’
Charlotte Tilbury’s new fragrances give all the feels.  The celebrity makeup artist, who aims to empower people through beauty, is introducing a collection of six science-backed, mood-boosting scents. The line will launch on her app on April 30 and the Charlotte Tilbury website on May 2. “Innovation is the heart of everything that I do,...
nypost.com
Lauren Boebert Insists She Is 'Winning Fight' Despite Poll Problems
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Massachusetts son Jack Callahan who allegedly killed ‘possessed’ father in baptism-style execution facing trial
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Trump lawyers say Stormy Daniels refused subpoena outside a Brooklyn bar, papers left ‘at her feet’
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Ukraine Ramps Up Patriot Requests: Here Are the Countries That Have Them
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Poland's Duda is latest foreign leader to meet with Trump
Former President Donald Trump met Wednesday in New York with Polish President Andrzej Duda, the latest in a series of meetings with foreign leaders as Europe braces for the possibility of a second Trump term.
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Trump taunts Dems' strategy as hush money trial set to pick back up and more top headlines
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Experience Louisiana's rich culture, irresistible charm with these tourism locations
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Kanye West is suspect in battery case after man allegedly ‘assaulted’ wife Bianca Censori: report
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Sydney church bishop stabbed in 'terrorist incident' says he forgives attacker
An Australian church bishop and priest who was stabbed in a "terrorist incident" on April 16 said he is recovering quickly and has forgiven his attacker.
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