My friends sometimes approach me with career anxieties, under the false impression that writing about economics makes somebody a good career advisor. My counsel is typically something like optimistic incrementalism. Don’t quit your job, mastery comes with time, job satisfaction comes with mastery… that sort of stuff.
On April 2, 2014, a protester in Oakland, California mounted a Yahoo bus, climbed to the front of the roof, and vomited onto the top of the windshield.
Sometimes, productivity science seems like an organized conspiracy to justify laziness.
At 10:13 PM last night, I sent Atlantic assistant editor Joe Pinsker an email to say I was writing an article about all the after-work time we spend on email.
When I was 17, if you asked me how I planned on getting a job in the future, I think I would have said: Get into the right college. When I was 18, if you asked me the same question, I would have said: Get into the right classes. When I was 19: Get good grades.
Beauty, closely studied, seems nearly indistinguishable from quick math.
You can hear it in the game rooms of Google’s Chelsea office, smell it from the ice cream shops on Facebook’s Menlo Park campus, and see it with yoga mats aligned on the rooftop of OpenDNS: We are living in an Age of Peak Perk. (Some of us, anyway).
It is said that what America needs to swing it out of the present economic tailspin is a new industry. Many things just over the horizon have been suggested. But none of them seems yet to have materialized in terms of wages…
The meme about Millennials living in their parents’ basements is overblown, thanks to the Census’ quirky definition of “parents’ basements.” (It includes college dorms.)
The United States’ mostly inspired—and occasionally soul-crushing—group play in the World Cup this year has garnered record-breaking ratings. Our first match, a victory over Ghana, was the most-watched soccer game ever on ESPN. Official ratings for the second match, a brutal tie against Portugal, are still being processed, but they will certainly (and deservedly) be astronomical.
What are the most popular social networks, apps, and websites for high schoolers? Niche asked. Seven thousand teenagers answered. Here are the results.
The US economy is growing limply, as it has for years. If it weren’t for trucks, we might scarcely be growing at all.
What makes things cool? What penumbral principle explains not only the marketing campaigns of Harley Davidson, Apple, and Dos Equis, but also the appeal of cowboys, James Dean, and Jennifer Lawrence?
Feeling harried? Swamped? Overwhelmed? Lucky you. It is, in many ways, a privilege to feel busy in America.
America’s middle class has been richest in the world for decades, but as David Leonhardt and Kevin Quealy write in the Times‘ new site The Upshot, they’ve lost that distinction to their neighbors from the north.
In 1998, researchers from the University of Pennsylvania published a study that might strike you as kind of mean.
Yahoo is huge. It is the fourth-biggest internet domain in the US. It is the fourth-biggest seller of online ads in the country. It is the most popular destination for fantasy sports, controls one the most-trafficked homepages in news, and owns the eighth-most popular email client. In the last three months, it collected more than $1 billion in revenue. It’s very rich.
General Mills, the food mega-corporation that owns Betty Crocker, Nature Valley, and basically every sweet cereal you ate and served your kids, has a startling new legal policy making it illegal to sue the company after you:
Uber has demonstrated that it can cheaply and efficiently deliver cars to specific addresses (provided it’s neither a snow storm nor a national holiday), so now the company is going meta and getting into the delivery business for everything else.
For years, I’ve been making the same embarrassing mistake about US economic inequality. Sorry.
A Bachelor of Science from Harvey Mudd College, the small California science and engineering school, is the most valuable college degree in America.
Malaysian officials announced Saturday what many people already suspected: Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 was hijacked or somehow deliberately steered off course after the plane’s communication systems were disabled.
Take one look at this graph, and you’ll think you recognize the story: Yeah, yeah, yeah, the 1% blasts into the stratosphere while the 99% languishes in stagnation, moving on…
