Last October, I posted about a so-wacky-it’s-brilliant workplace invention called the WalkStation. Steelcase, the workspace designers, came up with this answer to productivity-hobbling obesity: a treadmill equipped with a computer and stationed right inside your cubicle, so you can walk as you work. Check it out:
Is it tacky real estate marketing or a harbinger of armed conflict to come?
See, I said there’d be pictures! “Pre-war,” in New York real estate parlance, means anything built before the 1940s. This sign, in case you can’t tell, adorns a hole in the ground. I assume that what the developers are trying to say is that the building they’re putting up will look like the surrounding apartment houses, most of which …
My company made me look at porn
One of the perks, if you can call it that, of working at the world’s largest media company is that we get copies of our magazines for free. I began to see this as more of a curse when I realized I was drowning in my weekly accumulation of Fortune Small Business, Coastal Living, Time for Kids and People en Espanol. And I don’t speak …
The myth of the frequently posting blogger
I know, I know, I promised to make no more mention of The Myth of the Rational Market until I had finished the manuscript. But my failure to finish things up over the past few weeks has motivated me to take the rest of this week off to work on it. So apart from maybe a photo or two, or any cool discoveries I make while delving through …
Sex and the City? Fun. Jobs and the City? Boring.
Brooke Shields as Wendy in Lipstick Mafia. Or is it Cashmere Jungle? No, wait: it’s Sex and the Stressed Out, Sleepless Mama. / NBC
A few months ago, someone sent me the pilots to two upcoming TV series: Lipstick Jungle and Cashmere Mafia. They were oddly, even spookily, alike. I sort of vaguely knew their genesis: that Sex and the City …
We likee Hirally! She best quality!
In the run-up to the final primary smackdown, much dissecting is going on of various demographic groups and their voting preferences. Asian-Americans, for example, are said to vote Democratic, and to prefer Hillary Clinton. New America Media reports on a poll conducted by the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund that found, in …
Capital One offers five horrendous ideas for spending borrowed money
This was part of a mailing full of blank checks that I got from credit card purveyor Capital One on Saturday. By my reckoning, only one of these proposed uses of credit (“Build a deck”) is a genuine capital expenditure. Four more (“Have your house repainted,” “Buy a new TV,” “Join a gym,” and maybe “Update your wardrobe”) have some …
Craig Newmark has a bright future in advertising, and Spotme is still cool
Craig Newmark is a big fan of Dove’s Campaign for Real Beauty, which aims to fight the insanity of the beauty-industrial complex while selling lots of cleansing products. Such a big fan that he says he’s offered some advice to the people at Unilever/Dove and its ad agency, Ogilvy and Mather:
Take an ad in a fashion magazine, like Vogue,
…
New column: Do presidents matter to the economy?
I have a column in the new Time with Hillary C. and Barry O. on the cover and online here. It begins:
For decades, scholars have been churning out studies on the impact the economy has on presidential elections. The not-very-surprising message of most of them: economic trouble is bad news for the party that occupies the White House.
The
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At Halliburton/KBR, sexual assault is just part of the workplace experience for women
Like many viewers, I watched this ABC 20/20 report when it first aired in December with jaws-open, eyes-bugging horror. It told the story of two women workers for Halliburton/KBR who had been sent to Iraq. There, one, Jamie Lee Jones, a young computer tech, was gang-raped on her fourth day by coworkers after being drugged; the other, Tracy …
Never mind office romance. Fear the collenemy
I’m coining a word. Colleague + enemy = collenemy (rhymes with frienemy). Now that I write it, it sounds vaguely gastrointestinal. I perhaps ought to have consulted this instructional on Wikihow that teaches you how to make up nonsense words.
I’ve had some collenemies in my day. At the financial trade magazine where I worked as an …
So my kid may be a psycho. Great.
Let’s see. In the years preceding and all throughout my current pregnancy, my mom’s advanced cancer got progressively worse. I traveled to Japan many times to help out. On one visit in 2006, she nearly died on the operating table as I waited outside. On the last visit, I crashed their car. And last month, my dad, too, wound up in the …