Daily-Dose

Contents

• From New Yorker
• From Vox
• From The Hindu: Sports
• From The Hindu: National News
• From BBC: Europe
• From Ars Technica
• From Jokes Subreddit

From New Yorker

• What’s Next for the Campaign to Break Up Big Tech? - A judge recently dismissed two antitrust cases against Facebook. But what appeared to be a setback for the effort may actually provide a road map for how it can succeed. - link

• Biden’s Invisible Ideology - The President has deployed an exasperating but effective strategy to counter Trumpism. - link

• Redefining Populism - A political philosopher offers a new way of looking at Donald Trump, Narendra Modi, Jair Bolsonaro, and other right-wing leaders. - link

• Who Owns Mike Disfarmer’s Photographs? - Strangers made his small-town portraits famous in the art world. Decades later, his heirs want control of the estate. - link

• The Biden Antitrust Revolution - A new executive order calls for the federal government to work proactively to end monopolies that undermine economic fairness and American democracy. - link

From Vox

• The five-day workweek is dead -

  

  It’s time for something better.

  The five-day workweek is so entrenched in American life that everything, from vacation packages to wedding prices to novelty signs, is built around it. When you live it every Monday through Friday, year in and year out, it can be hard to imagine any other way.

  But there’s nothing inevitable about working eight hours a day, five days a week (or more). This schedule only became a part of American labor law in the 1930s, after decades of striking by labor activists who were tired of working the 14-hour days demanded by some employers. Indeed, one of the biggest goals of the American labor movement beginning in the 19th century was “an attempt to gain time back,” Erik Loomis, a history professor at the University of Rhode Island, told Vox.

  And now, more than 15 months into the pandemic, there’s a growing conversation about how American workers can take back more of their time. The trauma and disruption of the last year and a half have a lot of Americans reevaluating their relationships to work, whether it’s restaurant servers tired of risking their safety for poverty-level wages or office workers quitting rather than giving up remote work. And part of that reevaluation is about the workweek, which many say is due for a reboot.

  Over the past few decades, work for many salaried employees has ballooned far beyond 40 hours a week, thanks to a combination of weakened labor laws and technology that allows bosses to reach workers at any time of the day or night. At the same time, low-wage and hourly workers are frequently subject to unpredictable schedules that can change at a moment’s notice, and may not give them enough hours of paid work to live on. Today’s work schedules, with their combination of “overwork and then no work,” in many ways mirror the conditions that preceded the reforms of the 1930s, Loomis said.

  Then as now, the country may be ripe for a change. Some employers are testing out four-day workweeks. A recent study of shorter workweeks in Iceland was a big success, boosting worker well-being and even productivity. And workers themselves are pushing back against schedules that crowd out everything that isn’t work. During the pandemic, there’s a growing feeling that “we have one life — and are we working to live, or are we living to work?” Rachel Deutsch, director of worker justice campaigns at the Center for Popular Democracy, told Vox.

  But to really make the workweek fair and humane for all Americans — and give us more time to do things that aren’t work — the country will need systemic changes to help workers take back their power. Otherwise, only the most privileged will benefit from the new interest in shorter workweeks — if anyone benefits at all.

  The 40-hour workweek was a hard-won victory for labor activists

  In the 19th century, many factory and other low-wage workers were at work nearly all the time. The workweek was whatever your employer said it was, which “could be 14 hours a day, it could be six days a week, it could be seven days a week,” Loomis said. In “strike after strike after strike,” he explained, workers fought for a more livable schedule, a push exemplified by the 1880s slogan, “eight hours for work, eight hours for rest, eight hours for what we will.”

  They won some victories — the Ford Motor Company, for example, reduced its workweek from 48 to 40 hours in 1926 (though that may have been more about Henry Ford’s conviction that fewer hours made workers more productive). But it wasn’t until the 1930s that the Great Depression and more mass strikes convinced President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and reformers in the federal government that something had to change.

  The result was the Fair Labor Standards Act, passed in 1938, which — among other reforms — required overtime pay for many employees if they worked more than 40 hours a week. There were exceptions — farm workers, for example, were not guaranteed overtime — but for millions of workers, the eight-hour day and five-day week became the law of the land.

Not everyone wanted to stop there. “There really were battles in the ’40s and ’50s over whether or not the eight-hour day was sufficient,” Loomis said. Pushes for a six-hour day or other ways of shortening the workweek continued in the 1960s, but rising unemployment in the 1970s had labor leaders focusing all their attention on trying to save jobs. The idea of a shorter workweek fell by the wayside.

But since then, a lot of Americans’ work schedules have only gotten worse. For example, many salaried workers (as opposed to those paid an hourly wage) are exempt from the overtime requirements of the Fair Labor Standards Act, and employers have taken advantage of this to require more and more hours of these workers. As of 2014, the average salaried worker worked 49 hours per week, according to a Gallup survey, with 25 percent working more than 60 hours — and working hours for many have actually gone up, not down, during the pandemic.

Meanwhile, the rise of smartphones and laptops has broken down the barriers between work and home, allowing bosses to contact employees at any time of the day or night. As management professor Scott Dust wrote at Fast Company earlier this year, “thanks to technology, the eight-hour, ‘9-to-5’ workday is a mirage.”

Hourly workers, especially in low-wage service jobs, meanwhile, have faced a different problem: the rise of just-in-time scheduling, in which employers decide on worker schedules just days in advance, depending on factors like how busy a particular store is. That practice has led many large employers to keep most of their employees part-time, so they can be called in at a moment’s notice, and not paid when they aren’t needed. It’s a way of essentially “offloading all of the risk of your business model onto workers,” Deutsch said.

For workers subject to just-in-time scheduling, long workweeks aren’t necessarily the problem: rather, one- third of retail and food-service workers in one 2019 survey said they were involuntarily working part-time, wanting more hours than their employer would give them. That can make it difficult or impossible for people to pay their bills, necessitating a second job — except that unpredictable schedules make juggling two or more jobs complex, to say the least. And a constantly changing work schedule can also make it hard to arrange for child care — the same survey found that unpredictable schedules for parents led to instability in children’s routines, as well as anxiety and behavior problems in kids.

A constantly changing schedule meant that Madison Nardy, a former beauty consultant at a Philadelphia-area Target, never knew how much money she’d be taking home each week, as she struggled to balance work with attending community college and caring for her mom, who has a disability. Though she was hired with the understanding that she would work 30 or 35 hours a week, soon “my hours began to dwindle down,” she told Vox. “One week I would have eight hours, the next week it would go up to 20, and then back down to 12.”

The hours she did work could be punishing — sometimes she was scheduled to close the store at 1 am and come back the next morning at 7 or 8, a practice called “clopening.” Her constantly fluctuating schedule left her so exhausted and stressed that there were days “where I would go in the bathroom and just cry,” Nardy said. “I was always running around like a chicken without a head.”

The pandemic could be paving the way for a new workweek revolution

Nothing in the Fair Labor Standards Act prohibits the practices Nardy said she experienced — employers switching up workers’ schedules with little notice, or giving each employee too little work to live on. “The only protections that we have for hourly workers are from a time when overwork was the only problem,” Deutsch said.

Recently, however, there’s been a growing push for workers’ rights in general, not just around scheduling. The Fight for $15, for example, has won minimum-wage increases in many states as well as drawing the attention of policymakers to issues facing hourly workers. “Labor reform is rising in the Democratic Party for the first time since the ’30s,” Loomis said, in part because “people are out in the streets demanding it.”

And the pandemic has only intensified that push. Record numbers of Americans across economic sectors are quitting their jobs, with nearly 4 million people handing in their notice in April alone. Whether it’s hourly retail workers frustrated with contingent schedules or more highly-paid salaried employees tired of working 60-hour weeks, there is “a broader consensus now that our work should sustain us,” Deutsch said. “Our whole life should not be at the mercy of a job that does not allow us to thrive.”

More livable schedules have had success elsewhere in the world. Companies in Japan, New Zealand, and elsewhere have experimented with shorter workweeks in recent years, often reporting happier workers who are actually better at their jobs. But one of the largest and most high-profile recent experiments took place in Iceland, where local and federal authorities working with trade unions launched two trials of a shortened workweek, one in 2015 and one in 2017. In the trials, workers shifted from a 40-hour work week to 35 or 36 hours, with no cut to their pay. It wasn’t just office workers who participated — the trials included day care workers, police officers, care workers for people with disabilities, and people in a variety of other occupations.

The results were impressive, according to a report on the trials published in June by Autonomy, a UK- based think tank that helped analyze them. Workers reported better work-life balance, lower stress, and greater well- being. “My older children know that we have shorter hours and they often say something like, ‘Is it Tuesday today, dad? Do you finish early today? Can I come home directly after school?’” one father said, according to the report. “And I might reply ‘Of course.’ We then go and do something — we have nice quality time.”

And perhaps counterintuitively, worker productivity generally stayed the same or actually increased during the trials. Workers and managers worked together to make changes like reorganizing shift changes and reducing meetings, Jack Kellam, an Autonomy researcher who co-wrote the report, told Vox. “These trials were not implemented top-down.”

Just having more rest may have helped people be more productive — as the Autonomy researchers note, overwork can lead to fatigue, which actually lowers productivity.

Encouraged by the results of the trial, many Icelandic workplaces have embraced shorter hours, with 86 percent of the working population either working shorter hours already or on contracts that will phase in the reduction in the coming years. The Autonomy report has also generated global interest at a time when workers and companies alike are rethinking what jobs should look like. For example, the shift to remote work over the last 15 months has shown that “quite drastic changes in working practices can happen quite quickly,” Kellam said. Now his work on the Iceland trials has gotten news coverage in countries from Australia to Germany, and several companies have approached Autonomy for advice on implementing shorter hours for their employees.

But making something like the Icelandic trials work in the United States would require major changes. For one thing, unions in Iceland, which represent 90 percent of workers, played a big role in negotiating both the trials and the long-term adoption of shorter hours that resulted. But union density is much lower in the United States, with just 10.8 percent of workers represented.

Making it easier to form unions would be a big step toward helping American workers negotiate better schedules, Loomis said. The PRO Act, which would reverse years of anti-union legislation at the state level, would be a start — but so far, it appears unlikely to pass the Senate.

As for unpredictable schedules, years of worker activism have led to fair workweek laws in cities like New York and San Francisco, which typically require employers to provide adequate notice of schedules (often two weeks ahead of time) and compensation for last-minute changes, as well as banning “clopening.” Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-CT) and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) have introduced such a law at the federal level, called the Schedules That Work Act — but it, too, has gained little traction with Republicans in the Senate.

Such nationwide changes can seem far-off, and in a country as work- focused as the United States, it can be hard to imagine reforms that would help (some) people work less. But some say the pandemic, along with growing worker activism in recent years, have created conditions similar to the 1930s, where big changes finally seem possible. The fact that labor law reform has close to universal support among Democrats in Congress — after decades of not being a priority for the party — is meaningful, Loomis said. And that happened in large part because workers demanded it.

Nardy is one of the workers agitating for change. She was part of a coalition that helped push Philadelphia to pass a fair workweek law in 2018, and now she’s studying political science at Temple University, with the goal of running for city council. “There isn’t really somebody sitting in office that really, genuinely cares about workers’ rights,” she said.

But one day, that person might be her. And although workers in the United States don’t yet have the kind of bargaining power they wield in other countries, their voices are growing louder, and their discontent more palpable, by the day. At this point in the pandemic, many are saying, “maybe the life I was leading that seemed inevitable, and never-changing, maybe I don’t want that,” Loomis said. It’s a kind of “spontaneous realization by millions of people that they could do better.”

• For women, remote work is a blessing and a curse -

  

  Despite stress, depression, and overwork, women still want to work from home.

  Women may be more likely to want to work from home than men. They’ve also had a harder time doing so, reporting higher rates of stress, depression, and sheer hours worked — especially if they have kids. This paradox is a result of women trying to do the best thing for their careers while also navigating an unfair role in society and at home. In other words, women need more flexible work arrangements, because women have more to do.

  While the ability to work from home has been a godsend for working parents who were able to keep their children and jobs safe during the pandemic, it’s also exacerbated deeply ingrained gender inequality. Too often a crying toddler makes a cameo on a mother’s Zoom call and not a father’s. In a spare moment, women turn over the laundry while men don’t. Day-to-day scheduling, schooling, as well as decisions about their family’s health amid a global health crisis disproportionately fall to women.

  And that’s only talking about women fortunate enough to be able to work from home — typically knowledge workers, whose relatively high-paying jobs have also afforded them a measure of physical safety. For many women, working from home isn’t an option at all. Women who have to work outside the home and care for children, especially without a partner at home, have to face a whole different set of challenging, and dangerous, circumstances.

  Even before the pandemic, women were doing what sociologists describe as the “second shift,” where they complete an inordinate amount of household and caregiving chores after they’ve finished their paid labor. The pandemic has made things even worse, since much of the infrastructure that helps alleviate those tasks — schools, day care, elder care, cleaning services — has been off- limits. While women and men alike have worked from home, employed women are three times more likely than men to be their children’s main caregiver during this period. Additionally, telecommuting moms significantly increased the amount of housework they did while working from home (men didn’t).

  “They literally were not having the same experience,” Alexis Krivkovich, a senior partner in McKinsey & Company’s Bay Area office and co-author of “Women in the Workplace,” a report about the female corporate workforce in 2020, told Recode. “The double shift turned into the double double.”

  Matthew J. Lee/The Boston Globe/Getty Images

  The result is that women are more likely to feel burned out than men, and that has negatively affected their experience working from home. Some 79 percent of men said they have had a positive work-from-home experience during the pandemic, compared with just 37 percent of women, according to McKinsey. In turn, one in four women and one in three mothers said they were thinking about downshifting their careers or stepping out of the workforce entirely. “They couldn’t juggle the added responsibility that was coming on the household front at the same time they were trying to maintain the job front,” Krivkovich said.

  Indeed, women have been leaving the workforce at much higher rates than men — a move that could affect their careers and earning power if and when they return. Some fear that with the rise of remote work, these issues will continue, even after the pandemic’s most acute effects subside.

  Why women are having a worse time

  Despite massive strides in education and workforce participation, caregiving and household work are still considered women’s duties. That message is reinforced by a combination of cultural norms and economic structures.

  A lot of American work culture is based on a “traditional,” 1950s ideal: Men work outside the house, women stay at home with the kids. But this was never the reality for many working-class families, or families of color, across American history. And today, it’s economically necessary for both parents to do paid work for a living, even in middle-class households.

  The burden of domestic labor, however, is not being shared equally among heterosexual couples.

  “What we see is this drastic change in women’s behavior by entering paid work,” Caitlyn Collins, an assistant professor of sociology at Washington University in St. Louis, said of women’s movement into the workforce since the mid-1900s. “But we have not seen a similar drastic change in men’s uptake of domestic labor.”

  Many antiquated ideas of women’s place in society persist. Women are more likely to be held responsible for household chores and child care, while men get to prioritize their work — despite the fact that both men and women are working.

  During the pandemic, mothers have been twice as likely as fathers in a dual-career couple to do an extra five hours of domestic chores per day, according to McKinsey, which looked at the issue from June to August of 2020. Yale research shows that even in cases where both parents worked from home, women have done more household and child care work.

  “A lot of women, we grow up in this environment, so we internalize these kind of norms,” said Emma Zang, a Yale assistant professor in sociology who co-authored the study. “So if you have to sacrifice a little bit from family for work, then women may feel more stressed, more frustrated compared to men, because they view that taking care of family is more of their responsibility.”

  Even at senior levels, the situation is inequitable. An unpublished McKinsey survey found that while two-thirds of men in top management positions had a partner who stayed at home or who didn’t work full time, two-thirds of women in those positions had a partner who was working full time. In other words, executive women are less likely to have domestic help from their spouse.

  Lea Suzuki/The San Francisco Chronicle/Getty Images

  There’s also evidence that, since the pandemic began, US attitudes about gender roles have become more conservative. While people are now more likely to say women should make money than they were pre-pandemic, they’re also more likely to think women should parent young children and stay at home, according to research published in the American Sociological Association’s journal.

  In addition to these cultural norms, women must also deal with economic precedents.

  Employers don’t compensate women as highly as men — even in high-skill fields. If women make less than men, it’s easier for a couple to decide that the woman’s job is less important. That can lead to the woman cutting down or relinquishing her career to take care of domestic duties. Frequently it means taking on domestic duties in addition to paid labor.

  “Many of the moms that we talked to, for example, were already earning less than their husbands or partners before the pandemic,” Jessica Calarco, an associate professor of sociology at Indiana University, told Recode. “And so when the pandemic hit, it seemed practical for them to be the ones to care for their children at home.”

  Even when domestic tasks are done as paid labor, they’re dominated by women — and the pay is paltry.

  “The reason we don’t pay caregivers well is because we don’t value caregiving, and think of it as an unskilled task, because it’s associated with femininity,” Collins said. “Secondly, we don’t think of it as skilled labor like construction. There is a belief in US society that caregiving is something you don’t have to learn how to do.”

  As Calarco put it, “The labor that women are doing as caregivers has been undervalued in a way that systematically benefits men in the workplace, and allows men to better compete in their careers.”

  In other words, both cultural and structural systems are stacked against women. And though remote work can in some ways seem detrimental to women, women ultimately view its flexibility as a positive development and a way to achieve equality at work.

  Flexible work can be good for women

  Even before the pandemic, women were clamoring for remote work, according to data from McKinsey. Generally they think its pros — giving them the ability to perform domestic tasks they do anyway and allowing them to sidestep an office-centric model more likely to benefit men — outweigh its cons. And as more people in general work remotely, lingering misgivings about remote work will likely dissolve.

  The second shift existed before the pandemic, and it will exist after it, too. Remote work is an acquiescence to what is a reality for many women: doing more.

  “If women feel disproportionately responsible for the household activities and for parenting, working remotely makes life a whole lot more flexible,” Jerry Jacobs, a sociology professor at the University of Pennsylvania, said.

  Child care and other domestic work have been more obviously demanding during the pandemic, but they’ve always been demanding. Remote work just makes an untenable situation more possible.

  “Remote work is central to allowing people with caregiving responsibilities the flexibility and control over their schedules that they need to provide that care,” Collins said.

  It’s also important to remember that the office has never been particularly hospitable to women. That’s in part because office culture rewarded long hours as well as hours after work fraternizing with bosses while a partner helped out at home. It’s a situation that usually benefited men, not women.

  “We need to reimagine that,” Krivkovich said. “Most women are not living that reality.”

  Women were left out of conversations in the physical office, demeaned, or made to feel like they didn’t belong. Women in senior-level positions, especially Black women, are frequently the only person of their sex or race in the room, which can result in pressure to work more or feelings of otherness.

  “Particularly women of color really want remote work, because it allows them to avoid some of the microaggressions that they would experience on a daily basis,” said Tara Van Bommel, director and statistician at Catalyst, a nonprofit advocating for women in the workplace.

  That’s not to mention dangers like sexual harassment, which can be more acute in a physical setting.

  Mothers, especially, have faced stigma in the office.

  “Mothers are treated differently in the workplace than fathers,” Gayle Kaufman, a professor of sociology at Davidson College, said. “For fathers, my research suggests that they’re not even seen as fathers.”

  When women become mothers, they’re expected to cut back on paid work, and it adversely affects perceptions of their career prospects. When men have kids, it’s a different story.

  “If it affects them, it’s going to affect them in a good way, because they’re going to want to provide for their family,” Kaufman said, describing how men are perceived.

  Dania Maxwell/Los Angeles Times/Getty Images

  All in all, the office could be a bit of a boys’ club. With this in mind, women’s experience of working from home can be better than working in the office.

  “We find that remote work access diminishes burnout across three different types of burnout. And it does that for everyone, not just for women,” Van Bommel said. Employees with access to remote work had lower rates of burnout in regard to work, their personal life, and Covid-19, according to her research with Catalyst.

  Remote work is, at least, more likely to keep women in the workforce.

  Catalyst also found that working from home could help keep women with kids in the workforce. Women with child care responsibilities who could work remotely were 32 percent less likely to say they’re going to leave their job in the next year compared to those who couldn’t work from home. A 2013 Catalyst study of people in MBA programs found that when women didn’t have access to flexible work arrangements, they were more than twice as likely as men to downsize their career aspirations.

  Some fear that remote working could hinder women’s careers since bosses might equate face time with actual work, or that it could dampen women’s likelihood of promotion since working from a distance could make them seem less involved. That’s less likely to be the case as more and more people continue working remotely.

  “Working from home is going to become more common, and people will be less judgmental towards men or women who work from home,” Zang said. “If you’re less likely to be judged, then we would suppose that they will be less likely to face career consequences if they want to work from home.”

  All in all, it’s certainly possible that remote work could be a good thing for women. However, it might take some effort to get it there.

  “Remote work absolutely can work for women,” Krivkovich said. “What we need is to make sure that the support that allows working women to equally focus on work as their male peers is there.”

  How do we make working from home more fair to women?

  It’s not that remote work itself is inequitable to women. Rather, the situation in which we’re performing remote work is unjust. To ameliorate it, experts say there are a number of things the government and employers can do:

  • Paid parental leave. Giving men and women paid parental leave would make it so that both sexes would learn how to care for their children, so that the burden doesn’t fall as unfairly on women. It’s also important that the amount paid parental leave compensates parents is near to all of the wages they would lose out on, to make sure both parents take it. Men, like women, have to learn how to care for children. “My research shows once they’re spending time with their kids at an early age, right off the bat, they want to be involved,” Kaufman said. “That affects how they approach their life, including work, so they start making decisions about work based on their family lives, just as mothers have done.”
  Subsidized child care. Child care, especially for young children, exists in a patchwork fashion in the US. Affordable and accessible child care is necessary to keep women from doing a disproportionate amount of it themselves while they work.
• Compensate women equally. If women were paid as much as men, their work would be less likely to play second fiddle to men’s.
• Focus on productivity, not hours logged. To make sure women aren’t punished for remote work, employers must measure work by the work itself — not how long they spend doing it. “We’re still measuring productivity in terms of inputs, not outputs, meaning we’re overly fixated on ‘can you get in a car and drive and sit at this desk where I can watch you work’ as opposed to focusing on great output of work,” Krivkovich said. “What you see with women, in part because of the pressures they feel around all the other responsibilities they hold outside of the workplace, is that breaking that assumption is just hugely valuable to them.”
• Promote people who work from home equally. Make sure there’s not a two-tier system that preferences those who can show up in the office more. As Van Bommel put it, “Tracking who’s getting advancement opportunities, who’s getting promotions, sponsorship, stretch assignments, to ensure that there’s equity regardless of people’s location, is really critical to countering that bias towards face time.”
• Be clear about remote work expectations. If working from home is going to work for women, it’s important that there are clear boundaries around how and when employees are expected to communicate, lest the flexibility of remote work simply result in more work. “I think if it’s clear that you’re not supposed to work at night, not supposed to work on weekends, any more than you were before,” Jacobs said, “that’s going to disproportionately benefit women.”

Brent Stirton/Getty Images

• Ask a book critic: What’s a good summer read with a Wonder Years feel? -

  

  Our book critic recommends good summer reading and more.

  Welcome to the latest installment of Vox’s Ask a Book Critic, in which I, Vox book critic Constance Grady, provide book recommendations to suit your very specific mood: either how you’re feeling right now or how you’d like to be feeling instead.

  If you prefer your recommendations in audio form, you can listen to Ask a Book Critic, part of Vox Quick Hits. Hear a new episode of Ask a Book Critic every two weeks wherever you listen to podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, and Spotify.

Now let’s get started.

I’m 19 years old and I’m lost. Like totally lost. I lost the love of my life a year ago and still can’t get over that. I’m lost, confused, don’t know what to do with myself. Everything is falling apart. I need a way out, I’m tired of being like this. Please suggest me a book that can help me through this rough time.

I think you need a book that brings joy to your life, so I’m going to recommend P.G. Wodehouse’s Jeeves and Wooster stories. They’re early 20th-century novels about a hapless young man about town who is constantly getting rescued by his valet, and they’re some of the funniest books ever written. I hope they help you feel better!

I’m a newly minted public defender and I’m wondering if you have any recommendations for work about humans navigating the criminal justice system or just generally the population I work with. I’m looking for narrative-driven books that are still nuanced and well- observed, basically not sensational or bang-you-over-the-head preachy in style. Fiction or nonfiction welcome.

Congrats on your new job! American Prison by Shane Bauer is probably a good option for you in the nonfiction spectrum — it’s by an investigative reporter who got an entry-level job as a guard in a private prison, with lots of history of how the for-profit prison industry came together.

For fiction, you might try American Marriage by Tayari Jones. It’s about a young Black couple who find themselves upended when the husband is incarcerated for a crime he didn’t commit, and the story traces how what comes next ends up shaping their lives. It’s a really nuanced and thoughtful book that won a million awards when it came out in 2018, and it’s especially trenchant on the responsibilities forced on to the families of incarcerated people.

My friend and I are looking for some books to read that are not new, as we get them from the library. We are looking for books that take place in the summer that are light and fun. My friend puts it as “something with a Wonder Years feel.”

Last summer’s release We’re All Adults Here is a really lovely and nostalgic summer read that takes place in a small village on the Hudson, and I think it has the vibe you’re looking for. For something a little older, an undying summer classic is Judy Blume’s adult novel Summer Sisters. It’s about two girls who are best friends as teens and then start to grow apart as they grow up, and reading it just feels like you’re sitting in a beach house rental that has kind of a weird smell (Judy Blume is committed to the physical reality of adolescence, odors and all), you just ate lunch, and you’re counting down the minutes until you can go jump in the water again.

I’m a big fan of Kazuo Ishiguro, especially The Remains of the Day. The storyline is important, but it is the ambience that is so entrancing, sort of like an impressionist painting. Any recommendations?

Love an Ishiguro request! I think you might like Helen Oyeyemi. She writes very beautiful, very eerie novels, often built out of a mishmash of references that come together to create a fragmented portrait of a mind. Her latest, Peaces, is so bizarre that as I came out of it I thought, “Oh, I think she’s hit her Unconsoled phase.” Which means we’re just 10 years out from her Never Let Me Go phase!

I’m looking for a book like The Secret History by Donna Tartt. It’s one of my favorite books of all time — everyone I know who has read it loves it as well. So I want to read something that’s in a similar mold: really well-written, intriguing, mysterious, centered on young people, maybe (but not necessarily) with a death or murder.

Ha, this is one of my most frequent requests. Here are a few different directions you can go:

• Basically The Secret History but the serial numbers are filed off: If We Were Villains by M. L. Rio; The Likeness by Tana French. If you only read one of these make it The Likeness: French has her own murder mystery style going on, but If We Were Villains is so close to The Secret History that it can feel a little disorienting, like, why am I not just reading The Secret History?
• Still dark academia with a similar vibe, but also there is magic: Leigh Bardugo’s Ninth House, Pamela Dean’s Tam Lin. Tam Lin is a little bit nerdier, Ninth House a little bit sexier.
• In general for gothics with young people and beautiful writing, go forth and seek out Joyce Carol Oates (bad at Twitter, good at novels), Gillian Flynn (more than just Gone Girl!), and Shirley Jackson.

You can also check out our Vox Book Club coverage of The Secret History for more discussion. Enjoy!

If you’d like me to recommend a book for you, email me at constance.grady@vox.com with the subject line “Ask a Book Critic.” The more specific your mood, the better!

From The Hindu: Sports

• Olympic athletes to put on own medals at Tokyo ceremonies - The “very significant change” to traditional medal ceremonies in the 339 events was revealed on Wednesday by International Olympic Committee president Thomas Bach

• Tokyo Olympics 2020 | Physio John Gloster says ban on spectators could work to India’s advantage - Gloster, who has been working with 11 elite Indian athletes, says COVID-19 has given the chance to work more on the mental side of the game

• ICC confirms new WTC points system: 12 for win, 4 for draw, 6 for tie - “We received feedback that the previous points system needed to be simplified.”

• My idea as a leader is to keep everyone together, happy: Dhawan - “It is a big achievement for me that I have become the captain of the Indian side.”

• Hockey: Varun, Simranjeet late inclusions in indian men’s Olympic side; Reena, Namita in women’s team - Hockey India, which had originally named 16-member men’s and women’s squads for the upcoming Games, have now added two players each in both the teams

From The Hindu: National News

• Record 99.47% pass in SSLC exam - Number of students having A+ in all subjects touches a high at 1,21,318

• Whoever tries to shoot at police will get an answer, says Assam CM - Those who defend drug dealers should train them not to escape from custody, he says.

• Cabinet nod for subsidy scheme to boost merchant ships - It will also increase training opportunities and employment for seafarers.

• Army truck falls in gorge in Arunachal Pradesh; 1 jawan dead, many injured - ‘Critically injured jawans were evacuated by an army chopper’

• Piyush Goyal appointed Leader of the House in Rajya Sabha - Currently he holds the textiles and commerce portfolio

From BBC: Europe

• EU unveils sweeping climate change plan - It proposes taxing jet fuel and effectively banning the sale of petrol cars within 20 years.

• The EU countries ‘pushing back’ asylum seekers at sea - Human rights groups allege that thousands of people seeking asylum in Europe have been pushed back from Greece to Turkey before being given a chance to apply for asylum.

• Lithuania votes to curb influx of migrants from Belarus - The strict legislation allows the mass detention of migrants, as hundreds arrive from Belarus.

• Russian-linked ransomware websites disappear - The REvil group has been blamed for cyber-attacks on hundreds of businesses worldwide.

• Islamic State children in Syria face a lifetime in prison - A BBC investigation found that children, whose parents supported IS, are caught in a conveyor belt of incarceration.

From Ars Technica

• We’re getting a Wheel of Time prequel film trilogy to augment Amazon series - Films will focus on history of Robert Jordan’s fictional world before events of books. - link

• SolarWinds 0-day gave Chinese hackers privileged access to customer servers - Hackers IDed as DEV-0322 have a fondness for defense contractors and software-makers. - link

• Museum obtains rare demo of id Software’s Super Mario Bros. 3 PC port - 1990 demo was rejected by Nintendo but led to id’s own Commander Keen. - link

• Tennessee has gone “anti-vaccine,” state vaccine chief says after being fired - Vaccine chief says she was fired for noting state’s 34-year-old policy for vaccinating teens. - link

• How much do you pay your ISP? Consumer Reports wants to see your bill - Your bill and a speed test can help Consumer Reports analyze Internet prices. - link

From Jokes Subreddit

• An older woman, well past child-bearing years went to a walk-in clinic where she was seen by a young, new doctor. After about 3 minutes in the exam room, the doctor told her she was pregnant. She burst out the door, screaming as she ran down the hall. -

  An older doctor stopped her and asked her what the problem was, and she told him what had happened. After hearing her out, he sat her down in another exam room and marched back to where the first doctor was and demanded, “what is the matter with you? That lady is over 60 years old, has four grown children and several grand children! And you told her she was pregnant?”

  The young doctor continued to write on his clipboard, and without looking up, he asked, “Does she still have the hiccups?”

  submitted by /u/Briancrc
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• As the Kardashians celebrate their 20th and final season… -

  I would LOVE to congratulate myself for never watching a single episode.

  submitted by /u/VERBERD
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• A male whale and a female whale were swimming off the coast of Japan when they noticed a whaling ship. -

  The male whale recognized it as the same ship that had harpooned his father many years earlier. He said to the female whale, “Lets both swim under the ship and blow out of our air holes at the same time and it should cause the ship to turn over and sink.”

  They tried it and sure enough, the ship turned over and quickly sank. Soon however, the whales realized the sailors had jumped overboard and were swimming to the safety of shore. The male was enraged that they were going to get away and told the female, “Let’s swim after them and gobble them up before they reach the shore.” At this point, he realized the female was becoming reluctant to follow him.

  “Look,” she said, “I went along with the blow job, but I absolutely refuse to swallow the seamen.”

  submitted by /u/WhiteGuyInPI
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• A wife was in bed, naked with her lover when she heard her husband’s key in the door. “Stay where you are,” she said. “He’s so drunk he won’t even notice you’re in bed with me.” -

  The husband lurched into the bed, but a few minutes later, through a drunken haze, he saw six feet sticking out at the end of the bed.

  He turned to his wife: “Hey, there are six feet in this bed. There should only be four. What’s going on?”

  “You’re so drunk you miscounted,” said the wife. “Get out of bed and try again. You can see better from over there”

  The husband climbed out of bed and counted. “One, two, three, four. Damn, you’re right”

  A few minutes later, the wife got horny and asked her lover to continue.

  The man was too scared so the woman said, " He is so messed up I’ll pull out one of his butt hairs and he won’t move a bit".

  So she did - The husband didn’t move an inch, so they continued to make passionate love with the husband right beside them.

  A couple of hours later, she repeats the process - the husband is still passed out - they get busy and messy once again.

  Then Just before dawn the wife wants one more ride. So she reaches over and plucks a third ass hair! Whereupon the husband looks at the lover and says ," I don’t mind you screwing my wife but do you have to keep score on my ass??

  submitted by /u/littleboy_xxxx
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• An injured American soldier is boarding a train to the hospital, but the train is full because a woman and her dog took up the last two seats. -

  The man says to the woman, “would you please mind taking up only one seat? You don’t need two separate seats for you and your dog.” But the woman refuses. Then the man tells the woman that he is exhausted from the war and is injured, the last seat on the train isn’t too much to ask for, yet the woman still refuses.

  The man gets extremely angry and forcefully picks up the woman’s dog, throws it out the window, and sits down at the last seat.

  A British man sitting next to him starts getting angry and starts yelling at the American solider, “You Americans have terrible manners and drive me crazy! Americans like you drive on the wrong side of the road, use the wrong measuring system, write dates in the wrong order, and most importantly, you threw the wrong bitch out the window!”

  submitted by /u/Yt_GamingwithCharlie
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