Most Popular Editorials: These Are The Four Drivers Of Workaholism

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These Are The Four Drivers Of Workaholism People are driven to overwork for different reasons, but they all lead to the same bad outcomes.When I tell people that I study workaholism for a living, I'm usually bombarded by suggestions of subjects I could do a case study on. It seems that everyone can think of at least one person in their lives that they'd label a workaholic - or, perhaps, they identify as a workaholic themselves. The definition of workaholism has expanded over the years to include motivational, cognitive, emotional, and behavioral components - but understanding why you're overworking can help you unlock ways to deal with it. A BRIEF TAXONOMY OF WORKAHOLISM These are a few of the leading causes of overwork: Continued here

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Why it's OK to let friendships fade out We've fallen out of touch with friends and acquaintances. It may feel awkward, but you don't actually have to rekindle every relationship you once had.If you're vaccinated and heading back into the world, you may realise something: there are a lot of people you haven't spoken to in a year and a half. Then you realise something else: you may want to keep it that way. More of us are starting to pick back up the strands of our pre-pandemic social lives. As we figure out who the first people we want to meet up with are, we're recognising there are friendships from the 'before times' we didn't keep up during lockdown - and aren't particularly excited to re-ignite now that we can. Should we feel bad about not caring for these relationships? While people have known for years that friendships are unquestionably good for your health, experts say it's only natural for acquaintances and even friends to fall by the wayside as time goes on - and it's nothing to feel guilty about. If you really do miss someone, you can always reach back out. But if you feel obliged, or like doing so is emotional labour, take that as a sign you can cut that person loose. Continued here

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A Neuroscientist Explains Exactly How Awesome Exercise Is for Your Brain An expert explains all the amazing things that happen in your brain when you work up a sweat.Harvard psychiatrist John Ratey spoke at MIT Media Lab's Advancing Wellbeing Seminar Series, he explained that "a bout of exercise is like taking a little bit of Prozac and a little bit of Ritalin." It's a memorable turn of phrase. It's also backed up by a ton of science. Ratey went on to lay out convincing evidence that exercise makes us smarter, happier, and less stressed. But in that talk Ratey doesn't explain exactly how exercise leads to all these impressive benefits (his book, however, delves deeply into the subject). If you're the curious type who likes to know exactly what's going on in your skull when you hit the gym or jogging path, then a new Quartz article by Wayne State University psychiatrist and neuroscientist Arash Javanbakht offers an easily digestible introduction to the science, however. Continued here

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Don't Forget How to Be Alone Embrace whatever pandemic solitude remains - and, in the future, re-create itI recently found myself standing alone on the Arctic tundra, over 100 miles from civilization. I spent a month up there reporting portions of my new book, The Comfort Crisis. There was no human around me for miles and miles. There were also no people "with" me through TV, podcasts, social media, email, or text messages. The realization that I was in a rare state of supreme solitude was both unnerving and freeing. Unnerving because the frozen ground was littered with grizzly poop and if the weather were to change - and did often and quick out there - I'd be stranded for days. Freeing because without anyone else around I was completely unbeholden to any societal standards or needing to mold myself to the will of anyone but me. I was uncomfortable but untethered. The social narrative of how a man at 30-something should look, act, and carry himself didn't hold up when I removed society from the story. Continued here

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Combating Burnout as a Single Working Parent Alison Griffin, a senior vice president at Whiteboard Advisors, a social impact consulting firm, and a single mother of two boys, knows the exact moment when she hit the wall during the pandemic and felt burned out. Griffin felt her company was committed to supporting parents, and single parents like her: They embraced flexibility. Griffin had been working remotely for years from Colorado for the Washington, DC-based firm. They provided parents additional funds to cover childcare during the pandemic. They cover 100% of employee health costs. But even with support, the pandemic, quarantine, and school and childcare closures made what is challenging for single parents close to impossible. For months, like so many other parents of young children navigating Covid-19, Griffin had been getting up at 5 AM and throwing on sweats to start working on an East-coast schedule. She'd make her boys breakfast while on conference calls, with her laptop on the kitchen counter and her airpods in. She'd be going nonstop - monitoring her kids' online schooling when she could - until about 5 or 6 PM. Then she'd root around in the fridge for something for dinner, more often than not resorting to grilled cheese sandwiches because she hadn't had time to buy groceries. She'd return to the emails that threatened to overwhelm her inbox once her kids were in bed and realize she hadn't made it to the post office, hadn't picked up prescriptions, hadn't bought milk for cereal in the morning, and was too exhausted to do anything about it. Continued here

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13 Hard to Learn Skills That Will Help You Succeed These skills require a big time commitment to acquire but will pay off in the long run.The best things in life may be free, but that doesn't mean they won't take time, sweat, and perseverance to acquire. That's especially the case when it comes to learning important life skills. To ascertain which talents are worth the investment, one Quora reader posed the question: "What are the hardest and most useful skills to learn?" We've highlighted our favorite takeaways, as well as a few other skills we thought were important. 1. Mastering your sleep Continued here

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What Kind of Happiness Do People Value Most? Sure, everyone wants to be happy. But what kind of happiness do people tend to want? Is it happiness experienced moment-to-moment? Or is it a broader, remembered happiness, as in being able to look back and remember a time as happy? Nobel Prize winner, Daniel Kahneman, described this distinction as "being happy in your life" versus "being happy about your life." The two don't always go hand in hand. Researchers asked thousands of Americans (ages 18 to 81) about their preference between experienced and remembered happiness. They found that people's preferences between experienced and remembered happiness differ according to the amount of time they're considering - and that this can vary by culture. Continued here

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Why learning on the job is more important than ever (and 5 ways to do it better) As many parts of the world reopen for business, we shouldn't expect workplaces to look exactly as they did before the pandemic. Many companies have announced that workers can continue working from anywhere permanently. Meanwhile, some employees are eager to return to the office, while others are opting for something in between: working remotely while gathering in person for meetings or special events. In this hybrid work environment, employees are looking for ways to develop their skills and careers in order to thrive in a changing landscape. Managers want to engage and retain their teams, no matter where they're based. And companies need to go digital fast while bringing their workforce along. Hybrid work demands that companies find fresh ways to help employees build the skills they need to succeed. Continued here

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The Game-Changing Tweaks That Helped One Insomniac Sleep Again Insomnia will have you trying anything in the quest for a good night's sleep. For journalist and author Kate Mikhail, no amount of eye masks, ear plugs, baths, sleep supplements or lavender oil could help her get a decent eight hours. "I had trouble getting to sleep on and off for decades" she tells HuffPost UK. "I had to have prescription sleeping pills as back-up for those nights when I was still wide awake and increasingly anxious around 3am, knowing I had to get up not that much later." Mikhail would stress about not being able to sleep, which would turn into a vicious cycle the following day when it was time to hit the hay. "The worry and stress about not being able to sleep triggers our inbuilt fight or flight reaction," she explains, "and we can't relax into sleep when this is ramped up, due to the stay-awake hormones being released." Continued here

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Brainstorming Is Dumb Studies show it produces fewer good ideas than when people think on their own. Thankfully, there's a better way to work in groups. If you work in an office, your boss has probably forced you into a brainstorming session or two (or 12). Brainstorming, after all, is supposedly a killer way to come up with ideas, and businesses want to take advantage of all that collective creativity. But it turns out that brainstorming is actually a terrible technique - in fact, people generate fewer good ideas when they brainstorm together than when they work alone. Thankfully, there's a better way: a technique called brainwriting (think brainstorming, but with a pen and paper and less chitchat). And in a new study, researchers tested out variations of this method to understand exactly how to help people come up with their best ideas. Continued here

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What's So Special About Founders? Americans have an obsession with business founders and what sets them apart. Is it vision, drive, or insight that helps them turn industries upside down and conjure billions of dollars? Is it how they run meetings or make decisions? Is it because they eat vegan, take cold showers, and meditate? Founders occupy a cultural space that combines celebrity, guru, futurist eccentric, and occasionally comic book villain. And why not? Jeff Bezos changed both how we shop and how the internet operates. Elon Musk can cause a meme currency to skyrocket with a single tweet. Mark Zuckerberg can sway public discourse and elections. Bezos and Musk are in a literal space race! If you could figure out just what differentiates them from the rest of us, you could become - or at least invest in - the next superstar founder. For exactly that reason, myths about founders are powerful. They act as a filter for who gets the capital to start companies and a model for those trying to replicate phenomenal success. But although many investors have honed the art of the judgment call, it turns out that popular notions of what a promising entrepreneur looks and acts like are often wrong. Those notions can have major consequences. Continued here

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CEOs with Unusual Names Pursue Unusual Strategies David Zhu of Arizona State University and two coresearchers used Social Security Administration data to assess the frequency of given names in the United States and then mapped the results against the first names of the CEOs of 1,172 public firms and financial data on those companies over a 19-year span. Their analysis showed that the more uncommon a CEO’s name was, the more the organization’s strategy deviated from industry norms. The conclusion: CEOs with unusual names pursue unusual strategies. Continued here

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6 ways to develop leadership that create self-motivated workers Leadership has the potential to shape cultures, honoring its importance can shape a company into one with an ability to lift society in a meaningful way. Embracing leadership in lower levels of a company builds a culture of self-motivated people who are doing work they believe in. It can also be a misused tool, lifting up a select few, while simultaneously suppressing the majority of workers at the organization. Employees can feel when there’s a culture of alignment and purpose. How do you expand the leadership scope of a growing enterprise with effective accountability to ensure the team is leading with purpose? I've found these six foundational elements became essential for building measurable success. Continued here

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Remote work made digital nomads possible. The pandemic made them essential Special visas. Free Vaccines. Tax breaks. Countries around the world are courting a new class of human capital that wants to mix travel and work forever.In April, a radio DJ, a marine ecologist, a water polo player, and a migrant studies scholar flew to idyllic Dubrovnik, a seaside city in Croatia with a vast labyrinth of medieval architecture famed for composing the scenery of the cult fantasy TV show Game of Thrones. Hailing from Finland, Japan, and the United States, the travelers were among 10 lucky winners of a first-of-its-kind digital nomad residency contest, for which the prize was a month-long stay in the lush "Pearl of the Adriatic" with complimentary meals and lodging. The residents ate, drank, networked, and day-tripped to the cliffs of Konavle - home of 2020's most beautiful beach in Europe - and the island of Mljet, which is shrouded in dense forest that features exciting hazards like venomous snakes and wild mongooses. Ostensibly, they were there to brainstorm how to design Dubrovnik as a nomad-friendly city in the digital age. But for Croatia, the real goal was to market its own image away from a "holiday playground," as program director Tanja Polegubic calls it, into a serious long-term destination for remote workers. You could think of it as striking while the iron is hot - or really, while Croatia is hot: During the COVID-19 pandemic, the country saw an influx of workers fleeing expensive cities in western Europe. Continued here

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Does Birth Order Really Determine Personality? Here's What the Research Says One Friday afternoon at a party, I'm sitting next to a mother of two. Her baby is only a couple of weeks old. They'd taken a long time, she tells me, to come up with a name for their second child. After all, they'd already used their favorite name: it had gone to their first. On the scale of a human life, it's small-fry, but as a metaphor I find it significant. I think of the proverbs we have around second times - second choice, second place, second fiddle, eternal second. I think of Buzz Aldrin, always in the shadow of the one who went before him, out there on the moon. I think of my sister and my son: both second children. Continued here

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Inside the modern Indian marriage, where nothing is what it seems A decade ago, at the age of 22, American writer Elizabeth Flock moved to Mumbai with a vague idea of working in Bollywood. She ended up at the business magazine Forbes instead. But in the process of living and working in India's financial capital, Flock met and befriended a number of Indian couples whose approach to love was a lot like what many Hindi films promised: a form of devotion, if not outright obsession. It was a "showy, imaginative kind of love," she thought, but one that seemed more honest and real, compared to the failing marriages and rampant divorce she knew of in the West. Flock went back to the US after two years, but she remained fascinated by Indian relationships. So, she decided to try and write a portrait of modern-day India through the lens of its marriages. Over the next decade, though, the country's dramatic economic and social changes would transform life in the metropolis, and especially change the marriages she first encountered. Continued here

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Want to raise kids with high self-esteem? A parenting expert on the power of teaching your kids 'repetition and ritual' The first few years of parenthood is a huge adjustment, especially if you're a working parent. All of a sudden, your baby is walking ... and talking. Then they turn three, and demanding to know why you have to leave them to go to work. While transition moments (e.g., the daily goodbye, helping them cope with a caregiver or spending afternoons at daycare) are critical, so is the rest of the limited time you spend together. Whatever your work schedule, those mornings, evenings and weekends can feel very short, and you'll want to make them enjoyable and high-impact in building your kid's confidence and self-esteem. The key technique to getting there is through teaching repetition and ritual. Continued here

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Bias isn't the only problem with credit scores -- and no, AI can't help The biggest-ever study of real people's mortgage data shows that predictive tools used to approve or reject loans are less accurate for minorities.We already knew that biased data and biased algorithms skew automated decision-making in a way that disadvantages low-income and minority groups. For example, software used by banks to predict whether or not someone will pay back credit-card debt typically favors wealthier white applicants. Many researchers and a slew of start-ups are trying to fix the problem by making these algorithms more fair. But in the biggest ever study of real-world mortgage data, economists Laura Blattner at Stanford University and Scott Nelson at the University of Chicago show that differences in mortgage approval between minority and majority groups is not just down to bias, but to the fact that minority and low-income groups have less data in their credit histories. Continued here

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Haruki Murakami and the Scarcity of Serious Thought Murakami wrote his first two novels late at night after closing down the bar he owned and ran near the Tokyo city center. These works were well-received: his first won a prize for new writers from a literary magazine, and his second also attracted positive reviews. But the effort both exhausted and frustrated him. Murakami realized he was coasting on bursts of latent talent. He had caught the attention of the literary establishment because of inventive stretches in his prose, but he worried that if he kept producing these "instinctual novels," he'd reach a dead end. Against the advice of nearly everybody, he sold his bar, and moved to Narashino, a small town in the largely rural Chiba Prefecture. He began going to bed when it got dark and waking up with the first light. His only job was to sit at a desk each morning and write. His books became longer, more complex, more story driven. He discovered what became his signature style. Continued here

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Why People Fall For Conspiracy Theories Think of a conspiracy theorist. How do they see the world? What stands out to them? What fades into the background? Now think of yourself. How does the way you see things differ? What is it about the way you think that has stopped you from falling down a rabbit hole? Conspiracy theories have long been part of American life, but they feel more urgent than ever. Innocuous notions like whether the moon landing was a hoax feel like child's play compared to more impactful beliefs like whether vaccines are safe (they are) or the 2020 election was stolen (it wasn't). It can be easy to write off our conspiracy theorist friends and relatives as crackpots, but science shows things are far more nuanced than that. There are traits that likely prime people to be more prone to holding these beliefs, and you may find that when you take stock of these traits, you aren't far removed from your cousin who is convinced the world is run by lizard people. Continued here

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The secrets behind the plastic spoon: a 'perfect' design with terrible consequences An exhibit at the London Design Biennale presents hundreds of spoons as a way to start a conversation about how even good design can have unintended results.Disposable spoons are a scourge on the planet: We use them for a few minutes to scarf down our takeout or ice cream, then toss them out. They end up in a landfill, where they sit for hundreds of years, or in the ocean, poisoning marine life. But a day may soon come when single-use utensils are relics of past. A new installation at the London Design Biennale helps us imagine this future by presenting hundreds of single-use spoons as if they were already extinct. Designers Peter Eckart and Kai Linke, who created this exhibit, gathered hundreds of spoons from their own collections, artfully arranged them by color and displayed them in glass cases that would typically house fossils or butterfly species at a natural history museum. The plastic spoons are designed to spur a conversation about how even good design can have negative results and the systemic change required to combat this environmental crisis. Continued here

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If you love staying up late and sleeping in, doing otherwise might actually hurt your health Night owls might get a rap for staying up too late watching Netflix or getting lost in meme spirals on the web, but it's not all fun and games. Study after study shows the later you sleep and rise, the more likely you are to develop some serious health complications. A new paper by researchers from Northwestern University and the University of Surrey in the UK doubles down on the findings that night owls are more likely to suffer from a host of different diseases and disorders - diabetes, mental illnesses, neurological problems, gastrointestinal issues, and heart disease, to name a few. It also concludes, for the first time, that night owls had a 10 percent increased risk of dying (in the time period used in the study) compared to those who are early to rise and early to sleep (a.k.a. larks). Continued here

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Sacrificing sleep to make time for yourself? Tips to stop 'revenge bedtime procrastination.' This tendency to push off sleep - for 10 minutes, and then 15 or 30 more, even with a looming nonnegotiable wake-up call - has a name: revenge bedtime procrastination. Journalist Daphne K. Lee introduced the term in a viral tweet last summer, describing it as what happens when "people who don't have much control over their daytime life refuse to sleep early in order to regain some sense of freedom during late night hours." Lee was specifically thinking about people in China who work 12 or more hours a day and sacrifice sleep in an act of defiance; they have a term for it that roughly translates as "retaliatory staying up late." But overcommitted people worldwide have latched onto the expression as a way to articulate the desire to swap sleep for personal time. That's been especially true as the coronavirus pandemic erased the lines between work, school and home. Continued here

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How Much Energy Does Bitcoin Actually Consume? On the face of it, the question about energy use is a fair one. According to the Cambridge Center for Alternative Finance (CCAF), Bitcoin currently consumes around 110 Terawatt Hours per year - 0.55% of global electricity production, or roughly equivalent to the annual energy draw of small countries like Malaysia or Sweden. This certainly sounds like a lot of energy. But how much energy should a monetary system consume? How you answer that likely depends on how you feel about Bitcoin. If you believe that Bitcoin offers no utility beyond serving as a ponzi scheme or a device for money laundering, then it would only be logical to conclude that consuming any amount of energy is wasteful. If you are one of the tens of millions of individuals worldwide using it as a tool to escape monetary repression, inflation, or capital controls, you most likely think that the energy is extremely well spent. Whether you feel Bitcoin has a valid claim on society's resources boils down to how much value you think Bitcoin creates for society. Continued here

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How One Person Can Change the Conscience of an Organization While corporate transformations are almost universally assumed to be top-down processes, in reality, middle managers, and first-line supervisors can make significant change when they have the right mindset. Dr. Tadataka Yamada was one of dozens of executives the authors spoke to over the last several years to learn how one can succeed in making positive change in large organizations. His story shows many of traits the authors observed in interviews. He had a clarity of conscience and was willing to speak up. He took every chance, even small ones, to hone his skills of challenging the status quo for the greater good. He didn't let tough challenges gradually slip from focus because they were "too big" to tackle in the moment. Finally, he centered his purpose on helping those with less privilege. Continued here

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How to Get Your Team to Stop Asking You Every Little Question Do your employees bring you every little "speed bump" in their day? Here are four strategies for minimizing these interruptions and empowering employees to make their own decisions: 1) Put an emphasis on attention management. Start by identifying whether an "open-door policy" is something that is stated or promoted in your organization. If so, make it explicit with a clear definition. An open-door policy was never intended to mean that anyone is available to be interrupted at any time for any reason. 2) Promote self-confidence in your staff. Set boundaries for your employees, making sure they understand the responsibilities of their role, the types of decisions they can and should make on their own, and the general limits of their authority. 3) Embrace the tough decisions. If there are employees whose judgment you don't trust, try to understand why, so you can find remedies. 4) Emphasize the idea that mistakes are opportunities to learn. Hold team members accountable to their decisions by using mistakes as teaching opportunities. Continued here

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The empty office: what we lose when we work from home For decades, anthropologists have been telling us that it's often the informal, unplanned interactions and rituals that matter most in any work environment. So how much are we missing by giving them up?In the summer of 2020, Daniel Beunza, a voluble Spanish social scientist who taught at Cass business school in London, organised a stream of video calls with a dozen senior bankers in the US and Europe. Beunza wanted to know how they had run a trading desk while working from home. Did finance require flesh-and-blood humans? Beunza had studied bank trading floors for two decades, and had noticed a paradox. Digital technologies had entered finance in the late 20th century, pushing markets into cyberspace and enabling most financial work to be done outside the office - in theory. "For $1,400 a month you can have the [Bloomberg] machine at home. You can have the best information, all the data at your disposal," Beunza was told in 2000 by the head of one Wall Street trading desk, whom he called "Bob". But the digital revolution had not caused banks' offices and trading rooms to disappear. "The tendency is the reverse," Bob said. "Banks are building bigger and bigger trading rooms." Why? Beunza had spent years watching financiers like Bob to find the answer. Now, during lockdown, many executives and HR departments found themselves dealing with the same issue: what is gained and what is lost when everyone is working from home? Continued here

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The World's Northernmost Town Is Changing Dramatically Climate change is bringing tourism and tension to Longyearbyen on the Norwegian archipelago of SvalbardMark Sabbatini first noticed the cracks in his apartment's concrete walls in 2014. It had been six years since he moved to Svalbard, a Norwegian archipelago far out in the Barents Sea, about halfway between Norway's northern tip and the North Pole. He was an itinerant American writer drawn by promises of an open, international society - and jazz music. Every winter the community of Longyearbyen, the world's northernmost town at 78 degrees North latitude, holds a jazz festival to liven up the perpetual darkness. Residents, university students, tourists and visiting scientists mingle in music halls, clinking champagne glasses to melodious tones as winds howl through the surrounding mountains. On his first visit Sabbatini had arrived just in time for the festivities. Svalbard, he says, instantly felt like home. "It was like when you look across the room and spot somebody and fall in love." Continued here

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'Tacky' to 'demoralizing': Travel writers share their biggest 'bucket list' disappointments So-called bucket list destinations come with big expectations - and often big crowds too. While overtourism can ruin many a holiday destination, it's not the only reason vacations miss the mark. Here, travel writers who contribute to CNBC's Global Traveler share the worst disappointments of their professional careers. Continued here

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These creepy fake humans herald a new age in AI Need more data for deep learning? Synthetic data companies will make it for you.You can see the faint stubble coming in on his upper lip, the wrinkles on his forehead, the blemishes on his skin. He isn't a real person, but he's meant to mimic one - as are the hundreds of thousands of others made by Datagen, a company that sells fake, simulated humans. These humans are not gaming avatars or animated characters for movies. They are synthetic data designed to feed the growing appetite of deep-learning algorithms. Firms like Datagen offer a compelling alternative to the expensive and time-consuming process of gathering real-world data. They will make it for you: how you want it, when you want - and relatively cheaply. To generate its synthetic humans, Datagen first scans actual humans. It partners with vendors who pay people to step inside giant full-body scanners that capture every detail from their irises to their skin texture to the curvature of their fingers. The startup then takes the raw data and pumps it through a series of algorithms, which develop 3D representations of a person's body, face, eyes, and hands. Continued here

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The '20-5-3' Rule Prescribes How Much Time to Spend Outside Americans today spend 92 percent of their time indoors, and their physical and mental health are suffering. Use this three-number formula to make yourself stronger and happier.The herd of 400-pound caribou was running 50 miles an hour and directly at me. The 30 animals had been eating lichen in the Arctic tundra in Alaska when something spooked them. I was sitting in their escape route. The ground began to vibrate once they cracked 100 yards. At 50 yards, I could see their hooves smashing the ground and kicking up moss and moisture. Then they were at 40 yards, then 35. I could hear their breathing, smell their coats, and see all the details of their ornate antlers. Just as I was wondering if the rescue plane would be able to spot my hoof-pocked corpse, one of the caribou noticed me and swerved. The herd followed, shaking the earth as they swept left and summited a hillcrest, their antlers black against a gold sky. That moment when those caribou shook the earth also shook my soul. It was transcendent, wild as a religious experience. And it’s not even the most intense thing I did in Alaska. When I returned from the wild, my Zen-like buzz hung around for months. To understand what was happening, I met with Rachel Hopman, Ph.D., a neuroscientist at Northeastern University. She told me about the nature pyramid. Think of it like the food pyramid, except that instead of recommending you eat this many servings of vegetables and this many of meat, it recommends the amount of time you should spend in nature to reduce stress and be healthier. Learn and live by the 20-5-3 rule. Continued here

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The Delhi Walla's Visions of a Possibly Vanishing India A couple of years ago, the Indian blogger Mayank Austen Soofi took me, in an auto-rickshaw, to his favorite brothel. It was in Delhi's illegal and infamous red-light district, on Garstin Bastion Road, or G.B. Road, a crumbling commercial thoroughfare that I had encountered only in the lewd imaginings of school friends years before. Soofi had a firmer grasp of the place. He had spent two years regularly visiting the brothel, first as an English teacher for the proprietor's sons and, later, as a journalist. He published a sensitive, book-length account of the brothel's workers, in 2012, titled "Nobody Can Love You More," and he had stayed in touch with the people who live there. After being accosted on the twilit G.B. Road by pimps in T-shirts who asked "Jana hai?" ("Want to go?"), we climbed a flight of steep, uneven, betel-stained stairs and entered a large pistachio-green waiting room with a low ceiling. A single light bulb cast a bleary gleam on framed pictures of the Hindu god Krishna, the Sikh saint Guru Nanak, and a Muslim Sufi shrine - a menu of sin absolvers to choose from. A tall woman in a sari shook our hands and led us into the next room, where we were greeted by a domestic scene: two men sprawled on the ground drinking tea in front of an industrial fan; a five-year-old boy in a skullcap, praying on a mat; two young men loafing before a PC; and two sacrificial goats, straining into the room from their tether on the balcony. This was the one-room living space of the proprietor's family. At night, the adults slept on the floor of the pistachio-green waiting room; when customers arrived, later in the evening, they would step over and around the adults' supine bodies. Continued here

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Pandemic Resentment Is Real As we ease back into socializing again, we have to deal with our feelings about the very different years we've all hadI have pandemic resentment. As we ease back into socializing and I reconnect with folks I haven't seen in many months, I keep finding myself in conversations about how hard the past year has been. Inevitably someone mentions a close friend or relative who had it much easier, and we all bond over our shared sense of frustration with how unequally Covid has affected us. I don't particularly feel like I deserve to feel resentful. I got laid off from a job I loved and built a freelance business from scratch while also parenting a five-year-old and a three-year-old, but no one in my life died or even got very sick, and for that, I have nothing but gratitude. People whose jobs demand their presence in a hospital, or in a classroom, or at a cash register have had to make much more difficult decisions about personal safety and child care than I have. Continued here

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Luxury and Hunger: Two Faces of an Unequal Pandemic Mercedes-Benz AG recently introduced its Maybach sport utility vehicle in India - right in the middle of a fierce second wave of the pandemic. The 50 cars the German automaker wanted to sell by the end of 2021 were lapped up in a month. It turns out that just as the rich were scrambling to own these $400,000 wheels, annual per capita income was sliding below $2,000, with the country falling behind neighbouring Bangladesh. Colleagues at Bloomberg News recently chronicled a story that's becoming all too familiar: Shoemaker Shyambabu Nigam had to sell his modest house to pay the $8,230 medical bill from his wife's Covid-19 complications. One of his three leather-sewing machines is also gone. The debt-strapped couple is renting a room in a nearby village. Well-meaning initiatives, such as a government-backed emergency credit line that has been available to small businesses since last May, can’t reach highly informal micro units like Nigam's. Continued here

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Develop a "Probabilistic" Approach to Managing Uncertainty When faced with uncertainty, how should leaders react? Should they make a big bet, hedge their position, or just wait and see? We naturally tend to see situations in one of two ways: either events are certain and can therefore be managed by planning, processes, and reliable budgets; or they are uncertain, and we cannot manage them well at all. Fortunately, there is another approach. Imagine a billiard table. You put on a blindfold and your assistant randomly rolls a ball across the table. They take note of where it stops rolling. Your job is to figure out where the ball is. All you can really do at this point is make a random guess. Now imagine that you ask your assistant to drop some more balls on the table and tell you whether they stop to the left or right of the first ball. If all the balls stop to the right, what can you say about the position of the first ball? If more balls are thrown, how does this improve your knowledge of the position of the first ball? In fact, throw after throw, you should be able to narrow down the area in which the first ball probably lies. This is an example of probabilistic thinking. Developing a probabilistic mindset allows you to be better prepared for the uncertainties and complexities of the Algorithmic Age. Even when events are determined by an infinitely complex set of factors, probabilistic thinking can help us identify the most likely outcomes and the best decisions to make. Continued here

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Where could the next coronavirus jump to humans? New research offers clues. Scientists mapped regions where new coronaviruses may be most likely to spread from wildlife to people.For well over a year we've been living through the devastating consequences of a highly transmissible coronavirus. While the pandemic it caused is unprecedented by many measures, the novel coronavirus that causes Covid-19 is just one of many SARS-related coronaviruses lurking among wildlife in some regions of the world, many of which could theoretically jump to human populations under the right conditions. Figuring out what those conditions are is an urgent priority, and scientists have made a lot of progress on that front. They've learned, for example, that when forests get fragmented by deforestation or roads, it increases the likelihood of a virus "spilling over" from animal to human. What's more of a mystery is where, exactly, those conditions come together to create the highest risk for the next coronavirus emergence. Continued here

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Sick of dangerous city traffic? Remove left turns To reduce travel times, fuel consumption and carbon emissions, in 2004, UPS changed delivery routes to minimize the left-hand turns drivers made. Although this seems like a rather modest change, the results are anything but: UPS claims that per year, eliminating left turns - specifically the time drivers sit waiting to cut across traffic - saves 10 million gallons of fuel, 20,000 tons of carbon emissions and allows them to deliver 350,000 additional packages. If it works so well for UPS, should cities seek to eliminate left-hand turns at intersections too? My research suggests the answer is a resounding yes. As a transportation engineering professor at Penn State, I have studied traffic flow on urban streets and transportation safety for nearly a decade. Part of my work focuses on how city streets should be organized and managed. It turns out, restricting left turns at intersections with traffic signals lets traffic move more efficiently and is safer for the public. In a recent paper, my research team and I developed a way to determine which intersections should restrict left turns to improve traffic. Continued here

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Feel free to stop striving: learn to relish being an amateur The soundtrack of our lives is the sound of striving. Psychologists, philosophers and behavioural scientists are all coaxing us to strive with variations of the same loop: strive for accomplishment, strive for prosperity, and strive for happiness. We must act fast and slow, or think big and small; be calm, be on edge, eat more, eat less, dance more and sleep more, want more - or less; practise for 10,000 hours or don't practise at all; be deliberate, habitual, and intuitive, or just simply Zen out to zero. Naturally, we all want to optimise our ways of being. But every once in a while, and for every one of our aspirations, there's a contrarian voice screaming: Enough already! Can't we stop succeeding for just one moment? Cease trying to be exceptional at something? The answer is yes, but to do so you must embrace your inner amateur. Continued here

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How I built this -- Eleven Madison Park: Daniel Humm Daniel Humm dropped out of school at 14 to become a competitive cyclist, and supported himself by cutting vegetables and making soup stock at fine restaurants in Switzerland. When he eventually realized he'd never become a world-class cyclist, he pivoted to the equally competitive world of fine dining, and soon became a rising young chef in Switzerland, and then San Francisco. In 2006, he was wooed to New York to re-imagine the restaurant Eleven Madison Park, and began drawing raves for his painterly presentations of duck, foie gras, and suckling pig. The restaurant was recognized in 2017 as the world's best, but was forced to shut down during the pandemic. When it reopens in June, it will generate a new buzz in gastronomy: this time by revamping its menu to be entirely plant-based. Continued here

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How To Make Job Interviews Less Horrible We've all been there. The awkward small talk. The fluorescent lights illuminating the sweat on your brow. The feeling like you're a used-car salesman - but the used car is yourself. Job interviews are the worst. And according to a new book, they're often pretty much useless for selecting the best candidate for a position. The book is called Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment. It's by the Nobel Prize-winning psychologist and behavioral economics godfather Daniel Kahneman, as well as Olivier Sibony and Cass Sunstein (who, by the way, recently joined the Biden administration). The authors cite job interviews as an example of human decision-making going off the rails. "If all you know about two candidates is that one appeared better than the other in the interview, the chances that this candidate is indeed the better one are about 56% to 61%," they write. That's better than using the flip of a coin to make a hiring decision - but barely. Continued here