Afghanistan, Again, Becomes a Cradle for Jihadism—and Al Qaeda - The terrorist group has outlasted the trillion-dollar U.S. investment in Afghanistan since 9/11. - link
Have You Already Had a Breakthrough COVID Infection? - The question of what “infection” means is just one of the riddles posed by the late-stage pandemic. - link
Meeting “the Other Side”: Conversations with Men Accused of Sexual Assault - In 2011, I helped launch a movement to aid survivors on college campuses. That meant I also had to think hard about the rights of those under scrutiny. - link
Do No Harm? The Doctor Who May Have Enabled R. Kelly - Witnesses called to testify against the R. &. B. superstar, who has been charged with the sexual exploitation and trafficking of minors, included Kris McGrath, who did nothing to report or stop Kelly’s alleged crimes. - link
How the Sports Media Covers Sexual Abuse - An interview with Katie Strang, a sports journalist whose stories mostly take place off the court. - link
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I lost my hobby and gained a revenue stream.
Part of the Leisure Issue of The Highlight, our home for ambitious stories that explain our world.
I didn’t love my old therapist, but she did give me one crucial piece of advice: Get a hobby. I was writing about food for work, so cooking didn’t really count as a hobby anymore — I’d already monetized that one — nor did reading, nor socializing, especially since all of my friends worked in my industry. I needed something in my life that existed apart from all that. I was stressed and, of course, also on my phone too much (and still am).
Maybe something you can do with your hands. The suggestion felt like an escape hatch: Maybe a hobby could free me from toil. Cooking had once been the thing I did to relax when I got home from work, the thing I was curious about, the thing that distracted my brain from its standard litany of complaints. Puttering in the kitchen had once been a release, but now it was part of my professional life. It needed a replacement. A few months later, I dutifully signed up for a ceramics class at a studio nearish my Brooklyn apartment.
This was March 2016. One of my roommates was an artist who had taken a class at that same studio, and I always envied the little pots she made. One of them was shaped like the face of a woman, with a ponytail for a handle. She gave it to me, and I put a small succulent in it that would soon die. I hoped that taking a class could make me more like her, or at the very least, happier — and if not that, well, maybe I’d make myself a bowl to put pasta in.
Learning to make ceramics on the wheel — this is what you picture when you think of that scene from Ghost — feels initially impossible, pointless, tantrum-inducing. In class, our teacher showed us how to take a blob of clay and slam it onto the machine’s surface, strong-arm it into symmetry as the wheel whirred around, dig a hole in its center with our fingers, make the hole wider, and then raise up the walls that would make it a vessel. Doing it on my own was another thing entirely: a reminder of the unkind presence of physics, an asymmetrical lump thwapping around like an off-balance tornado, just some really ugly shit that would occasionally collapse in on itself.
This is par for the course. Most of us suck at first. The stuff you made in second-grade art class was objectively better. Clay shrinks when fired in a kiln, so the first mugs I made that weren’t ugly came out more like handled thimbles. Glazing each piece — decorating it with the often-colorful vitrified coating that makes it water-tight and food-safe, and glossy or matte — was its own messy challenge. My goal became not to make art or even craft, so much as to make things I didn’t hate. Of course, failing at something new doesn’t feel good; it feels like banging your head against a wall in front of an invisible audience of your own making. Turning off the desire to excel once you leave work is often impossible, if not difficult.
That said, the pace of my failure was different at the studio. Making ceramics requires patience and is an exercise in delayed gratification (or dissatisfaction). There are so many ways to fuck something up, so many stages to the process, and entering that cycle of hope, expectation, and either failure and trying again or ecstatic satisfaction added a new dimension to the rhythms of my life.
Through this mild and harmless struggle, I acquired a hobby. “How agitated I am when I am in the garden, and how happy I am to be so agitated,” Jamaica Kincaid writes in My Garden (Book). “Nothing works just the way I thought it would, nothing looks just the way I had imagined it, and when sometimes it does look like what I had imagined (and this, thank God, is rare) I am startled that my imagination is so ordinary.”
Powerlessness, for an amateur, can be its own draw. At the studio, I started as a lazy learner, but in a few months became obsessed, signing up for more classes when my session ended. My classes netted out to about $40 a week, plus materials and the cost of firing. I was spending maybe $200 a month, which required an increased vigilance in my other spending but also meant I had something to care about. I had a place to go in my free time that was not my office, or my apartment, or a friend’s apartment, or a restaurant, or a bar. I had something to be curious about, and my goals were unrelated to exterior forces: a boss, a job, a market, a reader. Unlike with writing, my progress was quantifiable: Now I can make a vase this tall. Now I have made a planter. Now my handles are beautiful. Now I have made two things that more or less look like a pair.
I also relished having something to do that didn’t involve a screen and therefore felt far from the style of work to which I was most accustomed. Hands covered in clay cannot swipe very well. Hobbies have always been defined by their tenuous relationship to work: After industrialization bifurcated life into the realms of work and leisure, hobbies appeared as something “productive” for workers to do with their newly minted chunks of free time.
“Leisure came to represent freedom because it took place in time separate from work, and time in an industrial world could be used for either work or leisure,” writes Steven Gelber in his book Hobbies: Leisure and the Culture of Work in America. “For this reason, industrial capitalism sharpened the West’s ambivalent feelings about leisure.” Leisure does not exist without work and is therefore defined by it.
Even as hobbies gained popularity among the 19th-century middle class, they mimicked the capitalist attitudes of the workplaces from which they were meant to provide relief. “Since the hobby was done at home in free time, it was under the complete control of the hobbyist. It was, in other words, a re- embracing of preindustrial labor, a recreation of the world of the yeoman, artisan, and independent merchant,” Gelber writes. “Hobbies were a Trojan horse that brought the ideology of the factory and office into the parlor.”
The capitalist value of a “work ethic” has always been present in the world of the hobbyist. We love hobbies because they are something to do that isn’t work, something that we choose to do. But they still so often require toil; we are still proud of ourselves when we perform our hobbies efficiently, competently. Pursuit of mastery is implied, if not always present. For me, few things match the thrill of pulling something beautiful out of the kiln. It always feels like a surprise I have magically given myself.
Once I had made a few things that I didn’t hate — and because I have a smartphone and a need for validation — I began posting photos of my work on Instagram. I loved making mugs, loved their practicality and the way they fit into a home. A mug can look like anything. I had newfound opinions on what mine should look like, and that felt good. By the winter, people were asking to buy them. I was freelancing at the time, and my studio cost about $200 a month, plus more for materials. If I could regularly sell a few mugs, I’d break even. The baseline price for these things, according to a brief survey of other potters, was around $40 — I started selling mine for $35 or $40, depending on size.
From the beginning I felt like I was doing everything wrong. Like maybe I should wait until I got a little better, or until I could make a nice shiny website, or until I had, I don’t know, SKUs. But it felt irresponsible to turn down a few people who would help cover my expenses and who wanted my work in their hands. Once you start making things, you have to put them somewhere. You begin to understand why people collect stamps.
Certain hobbies are difficult to monetize — say, bird-watching. Coin collecting, unless you sell it all. Gardening. Many things can only be monetized by becoming a teacher, or maybe now an influencer. Once demand appeared, selling felt like an inevitability. I wanted to keep making things but didn’t have space to keep it all; people love mugs; selling something feels like a pat on the head followed by a treat. (To be clear, the treat is money.)
People began commissioning mugs, and they’d tell me what color they wanted, send me a photo of something I’d made and ask for something similar. It was slapdash but it worked, and it covered my expenses. I was having fun and only mildly stressed by the process, always behind schedule. I look back now at some of the things that people paid for and feel a bit embarrassed, but I’m always wishing my work were a little uglier, so maybe I should be proud.
Somewhere along the line I made a website and started selling things more formally, claiming the revenue on my taxes, finding a person with a real camera to take photos of my work. I’d leave my day job at a magazine and go to the studio, often until 1 or 2 in the morning. It made me late for work, but I didn’t care; I ended up getting laid off with one foot out the door, and was given the gift of time — more daytime hours, at least — to spend at the studio. I had lost my hobby and gained a revenue stream.
My ceramic work, now, is caught up in the question of selling. Mugs sell, so I make more of them. I take a sick pleasure in the exhausting production line of throwing, trimming, attaching handles, smoothing everything down, painting, glazing, firing, staring at rows of cups lined up like synchronized swimmers, ready to jump. It’s the same sick pleasure I get in staying up until 2 am working on a jigsaw puzzle: maniacally focused on my goal at the expense of my posture. Untangling the question of what I want to make from what will sell feels like crawling out of a very deep well.
The swiftness with which modern craftspeople can and do monetize their hobbies is, of course, not a surprise. Traditional careers are crumbling, and side hustles are fetishized; Instagram has turned marketing into a basic skill we’re all expected to have. It’s easier to sell the crap you make in your spare time, and you’re more likely to need the money than you might have been a few decades ago, when you could have just foisted it all on your friends. This all risks turning hobbies into even more of an illusion, a mirage of leisure that quickly turns to obligation.
Some people, though, have fought the seduction of commerce and won. RC, an artist who makes work under the name marinatedclouds, began her first sculptural project with the express intention not to sell it. She was burned out from working a full-time job in graphic design, where in order for an idea to succeed, it needed to be marketable. “So many interesting concepts got dismissed because they couldn’t fit into a business context,” she remembers. “It became a situation where I started feeling really empty — I didn’t know how to have fun anymore.”
She had long toyed with the idea of creating a book about chicken and rice, with 35 different dishes from around the world. But she’d never gotten around to it; the work was too similar to her job as a graphic designer. So she decided to turn it into a sculptural project, quitting her job in April 2018 and giving herself the summer to focus on ceramic chicken and rice. Once she was done, she just kept making things. Her work is influenced by early 2000s nostalgia and her Taiwanese American upbringing; her pieces look like something made by a child from a different dimension, playful and mind-blowing in one. Pencils are sliced like bananas; crayons threaten to crawl out of their box. She once made an entire aughts-era desktop computer.
“Nurturing ideas was and is something I’m still extremely steadfast about,” RC says. “I want to pursue every idea, whether it lacks concept or not. Sometimes just making crayons is literally what I want. There’s no additional background to it, I just like the rainbow.” Refusing to sell her work — something she did for two years, despite enthusiastic interest from people on Instagram — allowed her to create the world of marinatedclouds without tainting it with outside influence. “For me, it’s just pursuing any and every idea that I have. That’s my form of self-expression.”
Quickly, her pieces began to pile up in her one-bedroom apartment. She was tripping over things. She got rid of her living room and turned it into a studio; she has no couch. But last winter, after a financially challenging 2020, she decided to sell some of her older pieces, both to make money and to clear space for new work. She learned that donuts sell really well. “That’s feedback that I didn’t actually need, but it does stay in the back of my head, and that’s something I do really want to avoid,” she says. She doesn’t want to cater to demand — only her own whims.
This is, for many of us, the dream: unfettered commitment to externalizing our innards without concern for any gaze but our own. Reclaiming one’s time, you could say. But it requires nothing short of a battle. “Society puts so much pressure on success as in status or monetization,” RC says, “but success to me now is being true to myself.”
I can no longer call ceramics my hobby, and I doubt I ever will. I assume I will sell my work until people stop buying it, both out of necessity and because it does bring me joy to make a silly little thing that someone will incorporate into the tableau of their home. The struggle, for me, is between what I want to make and what I assume people will buy; the struggle of wishing I could log off forever but knowing that Instagram is the most direct marketing tool I have. The only solution I have come up with is to have a segment of my work I make just for myself, without concern for the market — or at least with an attempted lack of concern.
But making time for that also means carving out time, both for creation and inspiration, for the rest that is required for my brain to think thoughts. This is something I crave more than a new hobby; this is peace.
Marian Bull is an editor, writer, and potter living in Brooklyn.
The Court’s decision on Trump’s “Remain in Mexico” policy upends decades of precedent warning that judges shouldn’t mess with foreign affairs.
The Supreme Court handed down an order Tuesday evening that makes no sense.
It is not at all clear what the Biden administration is supposed to do in order to comply with the Court’s decision in Biden v. Texas. That decision suggests that the Department of Homeland Security committed some legal violation when it rescinded a Trump-era immigration policy, but it does not identify what that violation is. And it forces the administration to engage in sensitive negotiations with at least one foreign government without specifying what it needs to secure in those negotiations.
One of the most foundational principles of court decisions involving foreign policy is that judges should be extraordinarily reluctant to mess around with foreign affairs. The decision in Texas defies this principle, fundamentally reshaping the balance of power between judges and elected officials in the process.
The central issue in Texas is the Biden administration’s decision to terminate former President Donald Trump’s “Remain in Mexico” policy, which required many asylum seekers arriving at the United States’ southern border to stay in Mexico while they awaited a hearing on their asylum claim. Although the policy was formally ended under Biden, it hasn’t been in effect since March 2020, when the federal government imposed heightened restrictions on border crossings due to Covid-19.
Nevertheless, a Trump-appointed federal judge, Matthew Kacsmaryk, ordered the Biden administration to reinstate the policy, and he gave the administration exactly one week to do so. The Supreme Court’s order effectively requires the administration to comply with Kacsmaryk’s order, at least for now, with one vague and confusing modification.
Technically, this case is still on appeal. The Biden administration requested a stay of Kacsmaryk’s order while its appeal is pending. But the administration is now under an immediate obligation to comply with that order.
And the Supreme Court’s decision to deny the stay bodes very ill for the ultimate outcome of that appeal. The Court did not disclose every justice’s vote, but liberal Justices Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan did disclose that they dissent.
Kacsmaryk’s opinion, it should be noted, was dead wrong. It effectively claimed that a 1996 law required the federal government to implement the Remain in Mexico policy permanently. That policy didn’t even exist until 2019, so the upshot of Kacsmaryk’s opinion is that the government violated the law for nearly a quarter-century and no one noticed.
The Supreme Court does not go that far. Instead, it suggests that the Biden administration did not adequately explain why it chose to end the Remain in Mexico policy. In theory, that’s a solvable problem. Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas could comply with the Supreme Court’s decision by issuing a new memo providing a more fleshed-out explanation.
Except that the Supreme Court does not even offer a hint as to why it deemed the Biden administration’s original explanation insufficient. Here is the entire text of the Court’s order:
And so, without an explanation as to how it could comply with the conservative justices’ understanding of the law, the administration is left with two untenable choices. The first is that it can try to guess what, exactly, the justices want them to say in a new memo explaining its policy. The second is to make what could be a futile effort to reinstate Trump’s policy.
It should go without saying that Mexico is likely to have strong opinions about this abrupt policy shift. The original Remain in Mexico policy came about only after the United States secured Mexico’s cooperation, and it is unlikely that the United States could successfully reimplement this policy without Mexico’s permission.
So one of the upshots of the Supreme Court’s order is that the administration must now go, hat in hand, to the Mexican government and beg them to cooperate again.
For decades, the Supreme Court warned the judiciary to avoid “unwarranted judicial interference in the conduct of foreign policy.” Judges, the Court explained in Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Petroleum Co. (2013), should be “particularly wary of impinging on the discretion of the Legislative and Executive Branches in managing foreign affairs.”
Apparently that’s all out the window now: Unless the Biden administration can figure out what it needs to put in a new memo explaining its policy, it must reopen diplomatic negotiations with Mexico (and possibly with Central American nations whose citizens are seeking asylum in the United States) in order to reinstate a policy that it does not agree with, and that it believes, in Mayorkas’s words, will leave untold numbers of immigrants without “stable access to housing, income, and safety.”
The one mitigating factor is that the Court also left in place an appeals court decision holding that the administration will not violate the court order against it so long as it tries in “good faith” to reinstate the Trump-era policy. But this “good faith” requirement raises more questions than it answers.
As the Court held in Schmidt v. Lessard (1974), because “an injunctive order prohibits conduct under threat of judicial punishment, basic fairness requires that those enjoined receive explicit notice of precisely what conduct is outlawed.” But the court order against the Biden administration doesn’t provide any such notice.
Suppose, for example, that Mexico agrees to work with the United States to reinstate Trump’s policy, but only if the United States agrees to turn over its entire supply of Covid-19 vaccines. Or only if the United States agrees to fork over a trillion dollars. Or only if the United States agrees to execute a US resident who is despised by the Mexican government.
If the Biden administration refuses such demands, has it acted in good faith? Who knows? The Court hasn’t told us. And Judge Kacsmaryk now has the power to hold the Biden administration in contempt if he determines that they haven’t acted in good faith.
The decision upends the balance of power between the elected branches and the judiciary. It gives a right-wing judge extraordinary power to supervise sensitive diplomatic negotiations. And it most likely forces the administration to open negotiations with Mexico, while the Mexican government knows full well that the administration can’t walk away from those negotiations without risking a contempt order.
With this order, Republican-appointed judges are claiming the power to direct US foreign policy — and don’t even feel obligated to explain themselves.
What if paid work were no longer the centerpiece of American life?
Once upon a time, there were good jobs.
These jobs paid people enough money to live on, even enough to support a family. They provided health insurance so people could go to a doctor if they got sick. They even came with pensions so that once you’d worked for a certain number of years, you could actually stop working. You could rest.
But there was a problem.
These jobs weren’t for everyone. They were mostly for white men, and mostly in certain places, like a factory or an office. For everyone else, there were jobs that paid less, with fewer benefits — or no benefits at all. And over time, there were more and more bad jobs and fewer and fewer good jobs, and even the good jobs started getting less good, and everyone was very tired, and there was not enough money.
Then there was a plague.
While this little fable may oversimplify the history of work in America over the past century, it’s not that far off.
Since about the 1940s, Americans have been encouraged to look to their jobs for nearly all of life’s necessities: a living wage, health insurance, and retirement benefits, as well as intangibles like friendship, identity, and a sense of purpose. But these benefits were never universal, and they became less and less common as the years went by.
The pandemic has made matters even worse. Millions of front- line workers risked their lives doing jobs that often offered them little more than poverty-level wages in return. Even for those able to work in the relative safety of their homes, the pandemic often sapped whatever joy, camaraderie, or fulfillment jobs had once offered — 40 percent of workers in one 2020 survey, the majority of them working remotely, reported experiencing burnout during the pandemic. The problem was only compounded for parents and others who took on new caregiving responsibilities, with mothers especially dealing with high levels of exhaustion and depression.
But the pandemic has also been a turning point for many workers, leading them to reevaluate their jobs in the face of new dangers — or a realignment of priorities brought on by a once-in-a-lifetime public health disaster. Indeed, the pandemic has led to record numbers of people quitting their jobs — 4 million this April alone, a phenomenon so widespread it’s been called the Great Resignation. And it’s leading employers, policymakers, and society at large to rethink jobs and how they dominate our days.
“I think it’s changed everything, and I think it’s changed everything fundamentally,” James Livingston, a history professor at Rutgers University and the author of No More Work: Why Full Employment Is a Bad Idea, told Vox.
We’ll (probably) always have work, but could the job as the centerpiece of American life be on the way out?
To understand the question, you have to know how the country got to where it is today. The story starts, to some degree, with a failure. Much of American labor law — as well as the social safety net, such as it is — stems from union organizing and progressive action at the federal level in the 1930s, culminating in the New Deal. At that time, many unions were pushing for a national system of pensions not dependent on jobs, as well as national health care, Nelson Lichtenstein, a history professor at the University of California Santa Barbara, told Vox. They did win Social Security, but with many people left out, such as agricultural and domestic workers, it wasn’t a full nationwide retirement system. And when it came to universal health care, they lost entirely.
So “the unions said, okay, we can’t get this on a national basis, which we think is the most equitable, rational, cheapest,” Lichtenstein said. “We’ll link it to the job.”
Job- linked benefits like health insurance rose during World War II, when inflation made employers reluctant to raise wages — so they added benefits instead. “Perks” like health care were also a way to keep workers happy so they wouldn’t leave.
Meanwhile, in 1938, the 40-hour workweek was enshrined in labor law, putting an end to six- and seven-day weeks for many workers and requiring employers to pay overtime for anything above 40 hours. For some, the American job became a one-stop shop where they could get many, if not all, their needs met — all on a (relatively) reasonable schedule.
But those jobs were never for all Americans. For example, as with Social Security, domestic and agricultural workers — who were disproportionately Black Americans and other people of color — were excluded from the Fair Labor Standards Act establishing the 40-hour workweek, among other New Deal programs. And whole categories of jobs never offered the kind of wages or benefits that workers in “good” jobs enjoyed.
Jobs in retail and hospitality, for example, were considered “women’s jobs” for “pin money,” Lichtenstein said. These jobs were low-paying and typically lacked benefits because employers assumed that workers’ husbands or fathers would provide for them.
But over the past 70 years or so, retail, hospitality, and other service jobs have proliferated while the manufacturing sector and others that once provided well-paid jobs with benefits have shrunk. That’s part of the reason American wages stagnated and more and more people had to go without health insurance (at least before the passage of the Affordable Care Act). “To a degree, the crisis today in work is because of this huge expansion of the service sector, which was not covered by the kind of regulations or unions or social norms that we once expected,” Lichtenstein said.
Other factors, too, combined to make jobs worse. Long hours became more common as more and more workers were declared exempt from the 40-hour standard. The rise of “just-in-time scheduling” made retail and other service work increasingly unpredictable, leaving workers unsure if they’d get enough hours to be able to pay rent, or be able to find child care during their ever-changing shifts. And some jobs themselves changed to become less pleasant. Retail, for example, “moved toward more customer self-service and away from the sort of skilled model of retail selling,” which meant less opportunity to interact with customers and hone sales techniques, and more of an emphasis on mechanically keeping people moving through a store, Peter Ikeler, a sociology professor at SUNY Old Westbury, told Vox in a June interview.
Overall, by 2020, the American job had fallen far, far from its midcentury ideal. Then the pandemic hit.
As Covid-19 spread around the country, jobs became even more difficult for huge swaths of American workers. While some front-line workers, like doctors, are highly paid, many are the same service workers who have had to contend with low pay and a lack of benefits — including health insurance and paid sick leave — for years. As one worker put it in an interview with Vox last year, “I did not sign up for the military. I signed up for Walmart.”
Even for those able to work remotely, however, the pandemic has had an immense impact on work. With school buildings and day cares closed, millions of Americans were stuck trying to manage remote school while working at the same time — working moms spent an average of eight hours a day on child care last year, on top of six hours a day on work. And for parents and non-parents alike, remote work during the pandemic hasn’t been the same as taking a casual work-from-home day in the Before Time — it’s been a nonstop slog of trying to be productive from underneath the weight of crushing existential dread. As David Blustein, a professor of counseling psychology at Boston College, put it to Vox in June, “managing anxiety is time-consuming.”
And even some of the most high-profile jobs in America have become less fulfilling during the pandemic. Professional and Olympic athletes have talked about the difficulties of competing in isolation, without family, friends, or fans. “We’ve basically just gone from bubble to bubble to bubble, all around the world,” professional tennis player Jamie Murray told the Associated Press last year. It’s perhaps no surprise that sports stars like Naomi Osaka and Simone Biles have stepped back from certain events during the pandemic, a time that has taxed athletes’ mental health as well as everyone else’s.
The pandemic has called into question many Americans’ psychological and emotional relationships with their jobs. Work has long been a social outlet for Americans — we’re more likely to make new friends through our jobs than any other setting, including school, neighborhood, or through existing friendships, according to the Survey Center on American Life. But for remote workers, the pandemic put an end to coffee-room chitchat and elevator banter, making jobs that much more utilitarian (though it’s worth noting that for some Black workers and other people of color, working from home has also been a welcome break from office microaggressions).
Meanwhile, for many Americans, work isn’t just something they do — it’s part of who they are. The idea that “you don’t get something for nothing” — that we must work to earn the necessities of life — dates back to the Protestant Reformation of the 16th century, Livingston, the Rutgers historian, told Vox. And thinkers from Benjamin Franklin to Karl Marx have put forth various versions of the idea that “work gives meaning to life,” Lichtenstein said.
But the late 20th and early 21st centuries saw an even more extreme version of that idea, with college-educated people — those who, presumably, had more choices about their work — putting in longer and longer hours and ranking career more and more highly among their priorities in life. The Atlantic’s Derek Thompson calls it “workism,” or “the belief that work is not only necessary to economic production, but also the centerpiece of one’s identity and life’s purpose.”
That idea has taken a big hit during the pandemic, with many people questioning the outsize role work plays in their lives. “I realized I was sitting at my kitchen counter 10 hours a day feeling miserable,” Brett Williams, a lawyer who left his partner position for a less time-consuming job at a small firm, told the New York Times this spring. “I just thought: ‘What do I have to lose? We could all die tomorrow.’”
Millions of Americans, from professional sectors like law and business to lower-paid retail work, have left their jobs in recent months, often seeking alternatives that are safer, lower-stress, or both. In some cases, the disruption of the pandemic, during which many people have been laid off or furloughed, may actually have provided the impetus for change. Those disruptions “gave breathing space for a lot of workers to rethink: ‘I have to go back to work. And now what should it be?’” Stephanie Luce, a professor of labor studies at CUNY, told Vox earlier this year.
It’s not just individual workers. The pandemic has also shown a lot of employers and employees that big changes to the way we work are possible — whether that’s working from home or taking time off in the middle of the day to care for a child. Even if some of those changes aren’t necessarily ideal, the point is that a job doesn’t need to be a rigid, all-consuming grind that crowds out everything else in life.
The pandemic has laid bare that “organizations can still survive and do well if you accommodate, to a reasonable degree, the needs of your staff and your workforce,” Michelle Holder, an associate professor of economics at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, told Vox.
Essentially, the past year and a half has shown Americans that a lot of jobs are terrible and that they don’t have to be. So what now?
The answers vary. At a minimum, many say, it’s time to make jobs better. For Holder, that starts with wages. “The federal minimum wage at $7.25 an hour is just incredibly inadequate, given the cost of living today,” she said. A family of three with a breadwinner making the federal minimum — also the minimum in 21 states — falls below the federal poverty line. “If you are working full time, you should not be considered officially poor in this country,” Holder said.
Efforts to raise the federal minimum wage have faced opposition from Republicans and centrist Democrats, but it remains a critical step, Holder said. Meanwhile, unions and other workers’ rights groups continue to push for higher wages — Restaurant Opportunities Centers United (ROC United), which works on behalf of low-wage restaurant workers, for example, advocates for a true living wage, which it puts at as much as $24 an hour in some places.
Beyond higher wages, better jobs would offer paid leave and health insurance as well as a safe working environment and flexibility in terms of when and where people work. That includes “a serious conversation about this rush back to the office,” Holder said, and whether having everyone in one place from 9 to 5 (or longer), five days a week, is really necessary.
Meanwhile, some are asking whether contemporary jobs really need to take up 40 hours of our week. A recent experiment with shorter workweeks in Iceland was a big success and generated headlines around the world, and American companies like Kickstarter are now trying out the idea.
Recent interest in shorter workweeks is part of a larger shift among millennials and younger workers toward “living our lives rather than making a living” and accumulating money and possessions, Benjamin Hunnicutt, a historian at the University of Iowa, told Vox. Younger workers today are more likely to prioritize “having more time to experience their lives rather than waking up my age on the deathbed and regretting that I hadn’t spent time with my granddaughter,” he said.
And beyond the way we spend our time, some are questioning whether so many aspects of American life need to be tied to our jobs. Universal health care and a universal retirement system, like what labor unions were pushing for back in the 1940s, would liberate Americans, to some degree, from the tyranny of our jobs. “If you have universal benefits, not linked to the job, that means that workers can take a look at the job on its own and make decisions,” Lichtenstein said.
That’s happened to some extent in the pandemic, with federal stimulus money making it a bit easier for unemployed workers to hold out for jobs with good pay and conditions. “The lousiest jobs are the ones that have been having trouble filling up,” Lichtenstein said.
But some experts have proposed bigger changes to decouple jobs from Americans’ most basic needs. A team at the New School’s Institute on Race and Political Economy has proposed a guaranteed annual income of $12,500 per adult and $4,500 per child, phasing out at the national median income. Giving people money is “the most direct and parsimonious way to eliminate poverty,” Darrick Hamilton, the director of the institute and one of the authors of the plan, told Vox.
The plan isn’t meant to put an end to jobs — it should actually be coupled, Hamilton said, with a federal job guarantee. People would still work; some research shows that providing people with a basic income actually increases employment. But they would have more power to demand fair conditions or to quit an abusive job and find a better one because they would have a basic safety net in place. The plan would give workers “authentic agency,” Hamilton said, something that’s lacking in a system where poverty leaves millions of Americans — disproportionately people of color and women — vulnerable to exploitation.
Such a plan, or any of a number of other approaches to severing our basic livelihoods from wage work, would surely face political opposition, as they would likely require significant tax increases. They would also require changing a fundamental American belief: that we should have to earn the basic necessities of life through our jobs.
However, some say the idea that we actually earn our income has already been exposed as a fraud — just look at the fact that the average CEO made almost 300 times the median worker salary last year, a gap that’s only growing. “If we can detach income from work — and that’s what’s happened in the labor market — why not just do that?” Livingston asked.
For now, it seems like a fairy tale — the idea that Americans could choose to work or not work based on their desire, rather than the threat of starvation. But maybe, in some ways, the pandemic has brought that fairy tale a little closer to reality.
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Indian women’s cricket team’s schedule for Australia could be altered - Cricket Australia had said it is monitoring the situation.
Three Indians in finals of Asian junior boxing in Dubai - India’s assured medal tally stood at over 20 on the day of the draws itself as many countries either skipped or fielded smaller squads due to the COVID-19 travel restrictions.
WTC: India lead points table with 14 points - The current WTC cycle will run till 2023. New Zealand became the inaugural champions in June after defeating India in the finals
Karipur plane crash: victims’ forum to resort to ‘intense strike’ over compensation - Victims claim that the airline, Air India Express, is forcing passengers to accept meagre compensation
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Pegasus row: Supreme Court asks Bengal to wait and not go ahead with judicial inquiry - The Bench said it may take up the Pegasus cases next week and pass a comprehensive order
Over 60 crore Covid vaccine doses administered in India: Health Minister - India took 85 days to touch the figure of 10 crore
German poison probe after drinks spiked at university in Darmstadt - Six people were taken to hospital with bluish extremities after using a science department’s tea area.
Biscarosse beach: Man missing after French plane makes emergency landing - Rescue services search for a co-pilot who leapt into the sea when a light aircraft got into trouble.
Could this solar farm be a climate change solution? - UN experts say rapid innovative solutions are needed to end our dependency on fossil fuels. Could this new project provide an answer?
Tralee: Swimmer rescued after nearly 12 hours at sea - The man, believed to be from Londonderry, was spotted floating with a pod of dolphins miles from shore.
Russian toddler lost in woods for four days vows ‘never again’ - The 22-month-old Russian girl was found alive by a search party, four days after she wandered off.
Europe’s July floods: So rare and extreme, they’re hard to study - One river basin might have seen a 1-in-15,000 year event. - link
A decade and a half of instability: The history of Google messaging apps - Sixteen years after the launch of Google Talk, Google messaging is still a mess. - link
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Years after its competition, Hulu begins streaming in HDR - The Handmaid’s Tale and other Hulu Originals lead the charge. - link
Florida man catches COVID, delaying $6M Arizona vote “audit” - Officials are unsure if the partisan exercise will produce a full report. - link
Because 4 was 22.
submitted by /u/Existential_Crisis_9
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They live for 5 days and don’t require any food or water.
submitted by /u/PlasmaPenguin82
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A white missionary was visiting an African tribe. After a year of sharing the same village, the chieftain’s wife gave birth…to a white baby.
The chieftain was enraged and called for the preacher’s death. The missionary attempted to calm the chief, asking him to take a walk with him through the village to cool his head and talk about the situation.
As the men walked, they passed by a field full of sheep. All the sheep in the field were white save one, a little black sheep. “See?” the pastor said, pointing to the animals: “these types of things happen in nature from time to time.”
The chief paused and seemed to be deep in thought. At last he leaned toward the missionary and whispered under his breath, “All right–I won’t say anything about the baby if you don’t say anything about the sheep.”
submitted by /u/Therealdankllama
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Suddenly, the Jewish man slaps the Chinese man across the face.
“What was that for?” asks the Chinese man..
“For Pearl Harbor” says the Jewish man.
“That was Japanese. I’m Chinese,” the Chinese man says.
“Chinese, Japanese” what’s the difference?
Few minutes later, the Chinese man slaps the Jewish man.
“What was that for?” asks the Jew.
“It’s for the Titanic.”
“The Titanic? That was an iceberg…”
“Iceberg, Goldberg, what’s the difference?” says the Chinese man.
submitted by /u/MudakMudakov
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A successful businessman flew to Vegas for the weekend to gamble. He lost the shirt off his back, and had nothing left but a quarter and the second half of his round trip ticket. All he needed to do was somehow get to the airport, and then he’d be home-free.
So he went out to the front of the casino where there was a cab waiting. He got in and explained his situation to the cabbie. He promised to send the driver money from home. He offered him his credit card numbers, his drivers license number, his address, etc…
The cabbie said, ‘’If you don’t have fifteen dollars, get the hell out of my cab!’’
So the businessman was forced to hitchhike to the airport and was barely in time to catch his flight.
One year later the businessman, having worked long and hard to regain his financial success, returned to Vegas and this time he won big. Feeling pretty good about himself, he went out to the front of the casino to get a cab ride back to the airport. Well who should he see out there, at the end of a long line of cabs, but his old buddy who had refused to give him a ride when he was down on his luck.
The businessman thought for a moment about how he could make the guy pay for his lack of charity, and he hit on a plan.
The businessman got in the first cab in the line, ‘’How much for a ride to the airport,’’ he asked?
‘’Fifteen bucks,’’ came the reply.
‘’And how much for you to give me a blowjob on the way?’’
‘’What?! Get the hell out of my cab.’’
The businessman got into the back of each cab in the long line and asked the same questions, with the same result.
When he got to his old friend at the back of the line, he got in and asked, ‘’How much for a ride to the airport?’’ The cabbie replied, ‘’Fifteen bucks.’’
The businessman said, ‘’OK,’’ and off they went.
Then, as they drove slowly past the long line of cabs, the businessman gave a big smile and thumbs up sign to each of the other drivers.
submitted by /u/JosephineAlberts
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