Sarah Todd

On the beloved NBC workplace sitcom Parks & Recreation, actress Amy Poehler played Leslie Knope, an unstoppable blonde whirlwind of hard work and positive vibes who went out of her way to make the people around her feel appreciated, whether that meant gifting her colleagues with personalized, 5,000-word essays about their individual awesomeness or plotting the world’s most perfect birthday celebration for her boss.

By now you are probably familiar with the gender pay gap. But have you heard about the gender trust gap?

“I do not wish [women] to have power over men; but over themselves,” 18th-century British feminist Mary Wollstonecraft writes in the seminal book A Vindication of the Rights of Women, explaining the case for offering women equal access to education. Wollstonecraft was fed up with the idea that women’s supposedly soft and delicate nature meant that they simply weren’t cut out to know things. The real problem, she argued, was that denying women education meant that stereotypes about their inferior intelligence became a self-fulfilling prophecy: “Every thing conspires to render the cultivation of the understanding more difficult in the female than the male world,” Wollstonecraft writes.

Beyond Meat wants to change the way we eat. That means the plant-based protein company, currently in the midst of planning an initial public offering expected to put its value at $1.2 billion, needs to ensure that its products appeal to all kinds of people—including men.

The idea that it’s sometimes necessary to quit your job on ethical grounds is well-established in contemporary culture. In 2015, Greg Smith walked away from an executive-director-level role at Goldman Sachs. “To put the problem in the simplest terms, the interests of the client continue to be sidelined in the way the firm operates and thinks about making money,” he wrote in a New York Times op-ed announcing his resignation. In 2018, Gizmodo reported that roughly a dozen Google employees were leaving the company over objections to its artificial-intelligence contract with the Pentagon. And earlier this year, actress Emma Thompson resigned from the Skydance Media’s forthcoming film Luck after the studio hired John Lasseter, a Pixar co-founder who had been accused of decades of sexual misconduct.

People are often advised to use “I” statements when dealing with conflict at work. For example, “I felt anxious when you committed corporate espionage and gave my big photo spread to a rival magazine.”

Would you like to be an Avenger? On the one hand, what an honor, to run toward supervillains stone-faced in a cool V-formation! On the other hand, ack: That is definitely a job title that gives you a lot to live up to.

People love drama. Spectators delight when Real Housewives fight over who said what, when vegan YouTube stars are caught in the scandalous act of eating fish, and when hip-hop celebrities feud. But if the drama in question unfolds at our own workplaces, our first instinct is often to stay out of it.

At just 28 years old, Sally Rooney is already the author of two critically acclaimed novels—and she thinks it’s possible she’ll never write another book.

Last year, doctors at a Nairobi hospital performed surgery to remove a blood clot from a patient’s brain. Hours into the surgery, they came to a horrible realization: They were operating on the wrong guy, someone who had no need for an invasive medical procedure at all.

For one woman, it was a male boss who patted the top of her hair as he walked past her desk. Another recalls the manager who touched her shoulder whenever he wanted a favor. Yet another recalls shrinking away from a colleague’s hug.

Everyone knows that a toxic workplace culture is bad for employees. But Uber’s long-awaited IPO filing on April 11 shows how allowing harassment, discrimination, mismanagement, and other forms of bad behavior to persist unchecked can also endanger companies’ long-term financial prospects.

About a year ago, I asked three co-workers a question that would change the nature of our working lives and, perhaps, the course of history. Here is a screenshot of the Slack message I sent at 6:13pm on May 22, 2018:

Last week, Microsoft was rocked by the outing of an extensive email chain in which women detailed allegations of sexual harassment and discrimination they’ve experienced while working at the Seattle-based software giant. In 90 pages’ worth of emails, as first reported by Quartz, women shared stories of egregious behavior—from death threats to a request to sit on someone’s lap—including incidents that they had reported to management or human resources, only to be dismissed.

Magic Johnson didn’t like being the boss—so he decided to quit his job. That’s smart!

If you’ve ever cried at work, you may be able to relate to the recent Saturday Night Live sketch “PowerPoint.” In it, a pair of receptionists played by Aidy Bryant and Kate McKinnon burst into tears in front of their colleagues at a Microsoft training session as soon as their mock PowerPoint presentation appears on the projector screen. The presentation is, to be fair, not very good. The first page features nothing but layers of empty squares and the desperate lowercase missive, “help.”

“Congratulations! The job you wanted to have when you were five [years old] is now yours. What do you do now for a living?”

Cats appear to understand and respond to their own names when they’re called, according to a new study published in the journal Scientific Reports. So why is your cat still ignoring you? We turned to an expert, Mittens, a bodega tuxedo cat, to explain the study and its implications. (The following has been edited lightly for clarity.)

The world of office startups is fast approaching its own singularity moment.

A lot of job-interview questions can be real bummers, from “What’s your greatest weakness?” to “Where do you see yourself in five years?” But among the most problematic is “What’s your current compensation?”—a query that perpetuates the gender pay gap and other forms of wage discrimination.

For nearly a decade, I’ve been trying to write a young-adult zombie novel. But until recently, I was stuck around the 3,000-word mark.

According to a recent poll, 94% of humans would rather turn into a can of tuna every night than go out and make professional connections. That is a statistic that is made up. And yet it is a deeply moving fake statistic because it speaks to a universal truth: Meeting people who can help you succeed in your chosen field is both necessary and, particularly when you are trying to break into a competitive industry, so daunting as to seem impossible.

“So where do you want to be in five years?”

Sex can be a lot of fun. It can also be weird—confusing, disappointing, embarrassing, or emotionally fraught.