Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
In October 2011, I was rounding out a year and a half of service in a Whole Foods bakery when I finally stopped to read the text that was on the side of our pie boxes. This was a revelatory moment in my relationship with the company, which wants its employees not just to drink…
Blake Fall-Conroy’s Minimum Wage Machine “allows anybody to work for minimum wage,” and represents the grinding futility of those jobs that pay it. The hand-cranked machine pops out a penny every 4.5 seconds. If you turn it for an hour, you’ll earn yourself $8, which was New York State’s minimum wage until December 30,…
Graduate students plan to participate in an all-day celebration of their worth to the university Wednesday that some are calling a “walkout.” The event is being held in response to the administration failing to meet the deadline for seven demands listed by graduate students last week. Issued on Aug. 19, the Forum on Graduate Rights…
FKA Capital New York reports: At the behest of chief financial officer David Geithner, starting this Wednesday, sources familiar with the matter told POLITICO, the global business advisory firm FTI Consulting will begin meeting with Condé Nast employees to help assess things like editorial workflow, processes and productivity across the company’s nearly two dozen titles,…
I Had a Baby and Cancer When I Worked at Amazon. This Is My Story Last Saturday, I read the 6,000-word New York Times piece, “Inside Amazon,” in the car on my way to the beach. I sat quietly in the front seat, glued to my phone while my husband flapped his hand gesturing for…
I got some flak when I wrote about the hellmouth of HR awfulness that is Amazon. Obviously I just hate the disruptive disruptors doing their important disruption. I’d never write about the mendacious mediocrities driving the media even further into a stinking trench, would I? How would I ever get my dream job at ‘Vogue’…
On July 11, 2000, in one of the more unlikely moments in the history of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Senator Orrin Hatch handed the microphone to Metallica’s drummer, Lars Ulrich, to hear his thoughts on art in the age of digital reproduction. Ulrich’s primary concern was a new online service called Napster, which had debuted…
“I’M A huge fan of the Mexican people,” Donald Trump said in an interview this weekend with NBC’s Chuck Todd. “But they have to pay for the wall.” Mr Trump, a real-estate mogul and the current front-runner in the race for the Republican presidential nomination, is such a fan of Mexicans that, in addition to promising to bully…
Last week, I spoke to an ambitious group of high school students at SPARC in Berkeley. Several of them asked me about things I wish I had done or learned earlier in life, or regrets I had from earlier in my career. Again and again, I came back to the idea that I wish I…
The revelations aren’t surprising, this is pretty standard startup fare. Or really just the way the economy is going in general – more work, less pay (http://www.motherjones.com/…/speed-up-american-workers… ) and increasingly terrible work-life balance ( http://qz.com/…/americans-dont-just-work-longer-hours…/ ), and less regular work (http://www.theguardian.com/…/gig-economy-silicon-valley… ). Which sort of gets to another point, that this mediated work brutality is…