Society

Remote work, hybrid, flexible staggered hours, job sharing, four-day workweeks, five-hour days, hot desks and other initiatives are being tried out by companies to enhance employee happiness and retain talent.

Germany and the Netherlands are the latest additions to a World Bank list of countries that offer full equal rights for women. Which are the others?

Precolonial kingdoms challenge our beliefs about people power and monarchies.

Some people think that number of publications or citations, weighted by venue prestige, is an adequate measure of one key kind of academic productivity. To such people, tenure looks inefficient. Why not just pay academics per output? Sure an institution might invest in someone before they get max productive, and wait out modest temporary fluctuations in output. And they might pay for other outputs, like teaching, or journal editing. But why commit, via tenure, to keeping someone even if their output drops to zero and stays there?

How the professional platform makes networking weird

The title of this essay should disturb you. We have been brought up to believe that tolerating other people is one of the things you do if…

While restrictions are being lifted and hospitals are no longer besieged, the pandemic's impact persists.

On living in the status quo of dystopia and, possibly, imagining something beyond.

There’s a new op-ed in The New York Times from Noam Chomsky and two of his academic colleagues — Dr. Ian Roberts, a linguistics professor at University of Cambridge, and Dr. Jeffrey Watumull,…

Today is the 40th anniversary of Blue Monday, the canonical synthpop song: the Platinum-Iridium reference 12" single, stored in a vault in Manchester,* against which all other 12" singles are measured. * Under what is now a parking lot and upscale condominiums. In addition to being just a perfect song, it was also a glorious physical artifact. I still remember the first time I saw it: the ...

This story is fucking nuts.

What government officials are saying in public, and private, is fascinating—and full of contradictions.

With the company pausing construction on its ‘second headquarters’ in Virginia, we can see the HQ2 bidding war for what it was: a mass intelligence-gathering operation.

Assistant District Attorney Howard Malloy (Franchot Tone) wonders where the payoff is. How can a hate group make money? His future brother-i...

Obscure government algorithms are making life-changing decisions about millions of people around the world. Here, for the first time, we reveal how one of these systems works.

There’s been a lot of grumpy commentary about this recent NYT op-ed by Adam S. Hoffman, a Princeton senior claiming that conservatives are being driven off campus. Its basic claims: In the no…

Senate Bill 5069 — one of several marijuana-related bills this legislative session — lays the groundwork for interstate trade.

The date is now Saturday, March 1,099th, 2020. The fourth March of the ongoing pandemic that is still killing more than 11,000 people a month in the US alone, and permanently disabling so many more. And still you assholes won't even consider masking. If you choose to stand around inside a crowded room without wearing a mask -- I think you're a fucking idiot. Turns out, nearly every person I ...

Many of us have played the hit board game Monopoly and have basked in the joy of owning the entire board, collecting dues when our friends land on our

The evidence emerging from the Dominion lawsuit against Fox News has the quality of liberal fever dreams. What's the worst you can possibly imagine about Fox? What's the most cartoonish caricature…

An exhausting — if not exhaustive — timeline of J.K. Rowling’s transphobia.

In the latest episode of The Problem With Jon Stewart on Apple TV+, viewers are treated to a display of argumentative firepower as the host takes on the pitifully outmatched Nathan Dahm (R-OK), a s…

The most plausible explanation for teenage unhappiness.

Why we are seeing so many attempts to link magic to science.

Arthur C. Clarke famously said, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,” a provocative statement to which Robert Anton Wilson brilliantly responded: “Any …