Max Nisen

For years, Microsoft was a firm adherent to stack ranking, a process in which every employee is graded numerically to determine promotion and compensation, and a certain percentage of the bottom rank get booted from the company yearly. It was one of the first of a wave of large companies to abandon the practice in 2013. Employees reportedly loathed it. Now, it’s coming back to haunt the company.

There are lies of commission, where false information is passed. And there are lies of omission, where information is passively omitted. And then there’s a third, trickier type of deception called “paltering”: actively using factually true information to mislead someone.

For a school that teaches the art of good management, Stanford’s elite business school is having a rough time at the top. Yesterday, the school announced that its dean, Garth Saloner, would step down at the end of this academic year in the face of a lawsuit from a former faculty member.

It’s understandable that parents worry about their children’s math performance, even at a very young age, and that they try to help. But they may need to start thinking about how they help; according to a new study in Psychological Science, the more that anxious parents try to help their kids with math homework, the more harm they do.

In many places around the US, low-income and minority children are significantly underrepresented in gifted and talented programs. This seems to be the case whether the process for identifying gifted children relies on teacher referrals for screening, or on evaluations arranged and paid for independently by parents.

Uber announced today (Sept. 9) that it will donate $5.5 million to Carnegie Mellon’s National Robotics Engineering Center to support a new faculty chair in robotics and three graduate fellowships. It’s part of the partnership established in February between the company and the university to help develop driverless cars.

Yahoo shares are tumbling on the news that a tax-free spinoff of the company’s Alibaba holdings might not work out as planned—the stock is now down some 40% since the beginning of the year. Many investors are no doubt upset. Some may even be losing patience with CEO Marissa Mayer. But probably few would dare to say what New York University marketing professor Scott Galloway said about Mayer in an interview today (Sept. 9) on Bloomberg Surveillance.

Inequality in the United States has exploded over the past 40 years, something that’s been documented at great length by economists, most notably Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez:

United Continental announced today that CEO Jeff Smisek has stepped down from the company, as have two senior executives in its communications and government affairs functions.

The weekly email that I and more than 20,000 others get from the National Bureau of Economics each Monday at 4:15am ET is something that I genuinely look forward to.

More than 2,000 union workers at Pittsburgh-based Allegheny Technologies have been locked out of their factory since August 15 as part of a contract dispute. But the specialty metals company is still operating—with the help of a private staffing company named Strom Engineering that specializes in part in supplying labor during industrial strikes, according to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

People who leave jobs without another one lined up may not realize what a disadvantaged position it puts them in, according to an analysis by the New York Federal Reserve posted on its Liberty Street Economics blog.

Cholesterol lowering statins like lipitor are some of the most widely taken drugs of the last century. They’ve prevented countless episodes of heart disease, and do so relatively cheaply. But that might be thrown into disarray by the approval of two effective yet expensive new drugs, so called PCSK9 inhibitors called Preluant (manufactured by Regeneron) and Repatha (from Amgen), the second approved last week.

Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer announced this morning via Tumblr that she’s expecting identical twin girls, likely in December. She was pregnant with her first child when she assumed the job in the first place, and was back within two weeks of his birth. She has similar plans this time around.

In September 2014, when the wildly popular computer game Minecraft sold to Microsoft for $2.5 billion dollars, the company’s founder, Markus “Notch” Persson, said that he was sick of being a symbol, and looking forward to shedding the pressure of leading something so enormous. By all accounts, the months since have been filled with expensive houses and parties.

Law might be the most politicized profession in the United States. While there are plenty of relatively apolitical corporate or divorce lawyers, many lawyers work for the government (an estimated 8% of the total). More presidents have been lawyers than any other profession, and a majority of sitting senators right now are lawyers.

Google kicked off a big and important trend when it started reporting diversity data last year. And now Twitter is joining another one that acknowledges that reporting raw data on the issue isn’t enough: The social-media site is following the example set earlier this year by Pinterest and Intel by setting firm goals for the diversity levels it wants to reach by next year.

Brown Forman, the company that makes Jack Daniels, has big global ambitions for its new lines of sweetened, flavored whisky.

Google has many ways of sourcing talent. It has a highly developed in-house recruiting organization, and gets a staggering number of external applications. But if you’re in the habit of looking up obscure coding terms, you might see one of the company’s more obscure recruiting methods, a message from Google letting you know that you’re “speaking our language,” and asking if you’re “up for a challenge.”

With two major health insurance mergers pending, the US may be headed for a healthcare market with only three major private health insurers, down from the five that exist now.

Starting in 2017, US companies will have to report the ratio of their CEO’s pay to the average employee’s salary to the Securities and Exchange Commission. But why wait? Salary-data aggregator Glassdoor put together a ranking of pay ratios for companies in the S&P 500 based on the median employee pay data it has and CEO pay data from company filings. At the top: David Zaslav of Discovery Communications with an astounding ratio of 1,951-to-one, followed by the chiefs at Chipotle (1,522), CVS (1,192), and Walmart (1,133).

Chipotle is looking to replenish its worker ranks. And fast.

The diversity issues plaguing America’s biggest tech companies often start when they’re founded. Venture capitalists tend to be biased toward white, male entrepreneurs who look the part—which also happens to look a lot like themselves, though sometimes decades earlier.

In the wake of news about Amazon’s appalling work culture, and some arrogant responses to it by tech bosses, Facebook cofounder Dustin Moskovitz has come to the defense of workers.