Earlier this week, a senior official in the US Treasury Department was charged with giving an unnamed journalist (a reporter at BuzzFeed, it is widely believed) confidential information about people being investigated in the special counsel probe into Russian interference in the 2016 US election.
In the rush of a busy conference or trade show, a branded freebie may be the only thing that lures a potential client to a booth long enough for a conversation, or triggers a memory of that discussion after the event has wrapped.
Open-plan offices are distracting. They’re anxiety-producing. But what if you could work distraction-free, limited from seeing anything beyond your central vision? What if this private space could travel with you and block out others wherever you work, be it at a busy office, a noisy coffee shop, or your own kitchen table?
When Shonda Rhimes announced last year that she had signed with the streaming-video giant Netflix, she kept the terms of the deal quiet.
Last month, the Quartz at Work team decided to try an experiment to help us understand how we use our time at work. Each member of the team was instructed to download the time-tracking app Toggl and spend one week tracking how much time we devoted to our most common workplace tasks: reporting and information gathering, writing and editing, meetings, social media, email, Slack, and miscellaneous activities.
Look at that guy over there at work. Listen to him. He is the worst. The worst. “Jerk” feels too soft for someone this aggressively foolish; “asshole” feels too grand, somehow, for someone this blundering.
Among the 1,400 new words, phrases, and definitions added to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) this month is a noun that has enjoyed sudden popularity of late: boof.
Prepper, alt-right, nothingburger, and idiocracy are among the more than 1,400 new words, meanings, and phrases the Oxford English Dictionary has added in its most recent quarterly update.
Shark specialist David Shiffman is a postdoctoral research fellow in conservation biology at Canada’s Simon Fraser University and the expert behind @WhySharksMatter and the online column Dear Shark Man.
In May, a volunteer editor at Wikipedia rejected a submitted biographical article about Donna Strickland, on the grounds that the laser physicist did not meet the site’s “notability guidelines.” This week (Oct. 2), Strickland won the Nobel Prize for her work on ultrashort lasers.
Earlier this year, a New Zealand firm that manages trusts and estate planning ran an experiment to see what would happen if everybody in their office worked less.
Canadian laser physicist Donna Strickland became the 209th scientist to win the Nobel Prize in physics on Oct. 2. She is only the third who is also a woman, and the celebration of her achievement also highlighted the apparent double standard that female scientists still face. Wikipedia rejected a biographical entry about her earlier this year, claiming she wasn’t yet notable enough. Observers questioned on Twitter why the University of Waterloo still hasn’t given her the title of full professor (for which Strickland, it turns out, has never applied).
Today, optical physicist Donna Strickland received the Nobel Prize for her work on ultrashort lasers.
Fifty years ago, biologist and giraffe expert Anne Innis Dagg had a theory: the distinctive geometric shapes of a giraffe’s fur coat were not random, but an inheritable pattern passed down from parent to offspring.
From: Corinne Purtill (Quartz)To: Corinne Purtill (Gmail)Mon, Oct 1, 2018 at 11:08 AM
It is a bold move to sit, as Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh did yesterday, and confidently claim under oath to have been a young person who liked beer, drank beer, sometimes had too many beers, but never once experienced a lapse in memory as a result of drinking too many beers. (He vomited, sure, but only because he has “a weak stomach, whether it’s with beer or with spicy food or anything.”)
The “daily routine” story, in which accomplished people reveal their typical workday schedules, is one of magazine journalism’s most delicious genres. Most interviewees describe days of relentless productivity that begin with 3:40 a.m. workouts, homemade cashew milk, and sentences like: “I usually wake up at 6:30am, and start with some Kundalini meditation and a 23-minute breath set—along with a copper cup of silver needle and calendula tea.”
The Rubik’s Cube, the geometric puzzle created in 1974 by a Hungarian architecture professor, has 43 quintillion possible positions and exactly one correct solution, which at the moment feels about as close as the nearest star.
Recently, in response to an Atlantic article pointing out the confounding mismatch between the average child’s school schedule and the average parent’s working one, Wharton professor Adam Grant offered a solution: What if we all just left the office around the same time kids leave school?
For years, software engineer Linus Torvalds—creator of the Linux kernel, the basis of the Linux operating systems—has been as well known for his combative attitude as for his tech.
Editor’s note: This post was written in three back-to-back five-minute sessions on The Most Dangerous Writing app.
It’s called the “dinner party problem”: A table of four or fewer people may happily converse as one, but a party of five or more will splinter fairly quickly into separate conversations of two or three four people each. What is it about the number four?
Think of the two friends you spend the most time with (and to whom you’re neither related nor romantically attached). How did you meet?
Among the symptoms of dementia is a phenomenon called “sundowners syndrome”: an increase in agitation, confusion, and anxiety as late afternoon transitions to evening. Its cause isn’t well understood; circadian rhythm disruptions precipitated by the change in light, anxiety over end-of-day activity, and hormonal fluctuations have all been floated as theories. Whatever the trigger, sundowners can make otherwise amiable people combative and even violent, a frightening and unsettling experience for patients and caregivers alike.
