Barack Obama

Fair pay comes up in last night’s debate

With the economy bottoming out, it’s a given that working women are going to get slammed extra hard, what with our piddling 77 cents earned to every dollar for a man. But it seemed to me that equal pay had taken a back seat in this increasingly feisty presidential campaign. So when Barack Obama mentioned Lilly Ledbetter last night, I hooted.

Need to ace that job interview? Pop a pill

Somehow, in my seemingly endless naivete, I long assumed that performance-enhancing drugs were confined to the rarified worlds of, I don’t know, performance. Professional baseball; Olympic gymnastics; Project Runway designers just before Bryant Park. (I’m kidding; I have no way of knowing if designers pop pills. But if they don’t, …

Power to the Halfricans (and other halves)

We called ourselves halves.

Where I grew up, we were the majority—we children of mixed race, usually Asian and something else. My international community in Kobe, Japan, was lousy with us. So was our frequent vacation spot, Hawaii, where I was recently told that two out of three babies born of late are of mixed heritage.

It was only …

It’s not enough that I succeed…

…others around me must fail.

Admit it: that’s how many of us feel. And I’m not just talking to you, Barack and Hillary.

You know that feeling when you land that highly sought project—but then you learn your colleague nabbed one that’s even better? Or when you publish an important article—just as your long-struggling college buddy …

Obama: biracial like me. Only not.

Growing up in an international community made up of dozens of nationalities, I developed a keen ear for accents. I could not only differentiate the Swiss from the German, but also discern the Chinese by way of Taiwan by way of California.

Maybe that’s why it jarred me to hear Barack Obama speak to a church audience before the primaries …

I just got recruited through LinkedIn

I very rarely get recruited. So rarely that sometimes I wonder what I’m doing wrong. When my colleagues were getting picked off by that new Condé Nast magazine Portfolio–all right, all of two TIME writers defected–I got nary a phone call. Not that I would have gone. If I had, I probably would have regretted it, considering all the …

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