Corinne Purtill

There’s immense satisfaction in the act of crossing an item off a to-do list. It feels powerful, like a definitive strike against overwhelming responsibility. As Quartz At Work’s Lila McLellan has reported, simply saying the word “done” gives our neurochemistry a valuable happiness boost. As that relaxed, satisfied feeling accumulates, it builds the confidence necessary to take on increasingly challenging tasks.

Imagine: The people at TED (or probably—let’s be honest—the organizers of a local TEDx event) have asked you to give a talk. You’ve arrived! You’re going to get on that stage and give an audience the most memorable 18 minutes (or less) of their lives. You know what you want to say with your mouth. But what are you going to say with your hands?

Nothing changes the equation of a family’s economics like the arrival of a child.

Maybe you have the kind of job that requires, on occasion, holding the attention of others. To understand the challenge of this assignment, consider the humble airline-safety video, which is becoming an increasingly less humble affair as airlines grab for passengers’ ever-shrinking attention spans.

Stanford professor Robert Sutton is a renowned expert on toxic bullies in the workplace, though he prefers to call them by their more common name: assholes.

I write a lot about productivity and managing one’s own life. But am I doing either of those things well?

Making remote work an option is an investment that can pay off for employers and employees alike. Companies that embrace telecommuters can recruit the best talent without geographic constraints. Employees who have the opportunity to work from home or another remote location are, according to studies, happier, more productive, and more loyal to their organization. No wonder remote work is on the rise. In 2016, 43% of workers in the US reported working remotely at least some of the time. The share of people doing at least 80% of their job outside the main office rose to 31%, from 24% in 2012.

When it’s done correctly, working remotely can be a boon to workers’ personal and professional lives. Cutting out the commute gives workers extra flexibility to manage family needs and other important priorities. Meanwhile, studies show that remote workers are happier and more productive than their office-bound counterparts (while saving money in office space and furniture costs.) Here are Quartz’s recommendations on making the most of remote work.

When Amazon’s upcoming $13.7 billion purchase of Whole Foods Market was announced earlier this year, commentators speculated that the online retailer saved the upscale grocery store from a future of falling revenue.

In December, American Express announced a raft of new parental benefits for employees, including 20 weeks paid parental leave, $35,000 of health coverage for infertility treatment, and $35,000 to cover costs associated with adoption or surrogacy.

In AMERICA! people get into shouting matches over slogans. In AMERICA! some people want to hug Donald Trump and others want to strangle him. In AMERICA! all politics is a joke, except when it’s not, and sometimes it’s very hard to tell the difference.

This post has been corrected.

Two years after the United Nations set ambitious targets for reducing poverty and improving health around the world by 2030, countries have made worryingly little progress. A report last week from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation warned that the world is on track to miss the Sustainable Development Goals, at the cost of millions of lives.

The security breach at the US credit bureau Equifax is bad news for everybody. But one of the most galling things about the hack is how Equifax has made victims responsible for limiting the damage. And since Equifax still hasn’t given reliable information on who exactly was affected, that means everyone in the United States is on the hook.

We humans can be an overconfident bunch. We tend to rate ourselves above average in categories from attractiveness to altruism to driving ability.

For 25 years, photojournalist Lauren Greenfield has traveled the US and the world documenting what she calls “the influence of affluence”: a culture-wide aspiration to wealth that, fueled by mass media, only seems to deepen as social mobility stalls.

The marketing campaign for Sich Casket, a China-based manufacturer of coffins for the North American market, tries to pull off a difficult trick: celebrate the company’s Chinese roots while also distancing itself from those roots as much as possible.

Expedia CEO Dara Khosrowshahi told his current staff that he’d be leaving them and taking over Uber in a memo obtained by Recode. In it, Khosrowshahi called the decision to succeed troubled founder Travis Kalanick “one of the toughest decisions of my life.”

“If you want to have good ideas you must have many ideas,” said the chemist Linus Pauling, according to molecular biologist Francis Crick. “Most of them will be wrong, and what you have to learn is which ones to throw away.” Two researchers who in 2013 created a computational model exploring the relationship between good and bad ideas added a caveat to Pauling’s dictum: “And the best way to get lots of ideas is to first generate a few that are as different as possible and then strategically build on them.”

US president Donald Trump’s decision to pardon Joe Arpaio has focused a spotlight on the 85-year-old former sheriff. During his six terms as an elected law enforcement officer in Maricopa County, Arizona, Arpaio earned a reputation as a publicity-hungry politician who flouted civil liberties through brutal treatment of county inmates and discriminatory practices toward Latinos. He was eventually convicted of contempt of court for refusing to comply with a court order to stop illegal racial profiling.

As Hurricane Harvey closed in on the Texas Gulf Coast this past week, prices shot up on essentials like water, gasoline, and batteries. The attorney general of Texas issued a stern reminder of the state’s anti-price gouging laws, warning that anyone charging an “exorbitant or excessive price” for food, fuel, or medicine during a declared disaster risks prosecution.

When “The Dragon and the Wolf” airs tonight, the finale of the penultimate season of Game of Thrones could become the HBO hit’s most-watched episode ever. As Quartz’s Ashley Rodriguez has reported, the series has set viewership records this season, despite hacks that leaked some episodes online early.

Countless playground disputes have been settled via rock-paper-scissors, also known as paper-scissors-stone or roshambo. Humans achieve the required cognitive capacity to learn and play the game around the age of 4. Mastering the deceptively simple rules (rock crushes scissors, scissors cut paper, paper covers rock) actually requires advanced problem-solving skills, like understanding non-linear relationships and transverse patterns.

Quick. Which of these two products would you buy on Amazon: Thing A, which has an average rating of 2.7 stars and 258 reviews, or Thing B, which has an average rating of 2.7 stars and 14 reviews?