For the past year and half, I, like so many Americans, have looked forward to the return of many of the activities the pandemic put restrictions on: seeing extended family and friends, travel, going out to eat, and most especially seeing all my students on campus again. But despite the More
Before the pandemic emptied offices and turned dining tables into desks, getting a midday haircut or heading out for 5 p.m. therapy could involve a bit of clandestine choreography: clearing one’s schedule of meetings, finding a friend to cover, then slipping out while the boss was away. That dance came More
Back when commuting was a requirement for going to work, I once passed through a subway tunnel so filthy and crowded that the poem inscribed on its ceiling seemed like a cruel joke. “overslept, / so tired. / if late, / get fired. / why bother? / why the pain? / just go home / do it again.” “The Commuter’s Lament,” which adorns a subterranean More
Burnout is generally said to date to 1973; at least, that’s around when it got its name. By the nineteen-eighties, everyone was burned out. In 1990, when the Princeton scholar Robert Fagles published a new English translation of the Iliad, he had Achilles tell Agamemnon that he doesn’t want people More
… Psychological safety is the belief that you can speak up, take risks and put forward ideas, questions or challenges without facing ridicule or retaliation. Amy Edmondson, a professor at Harvard Business School, has been researching — and has popularized — the idea since it was first written about by the psychologist More
Just one year ago, dads were as likely as moms to crowd the halls of my kids’ elementary school at morning drop-off and wash burp cloths at the laundromat, babies strapped to their chests. I loved that my kids — along with a whole neighborhood of kids — were growing More
