I wrote about what's actually going on when your day is filled with meeting after meeting after meeting and no one's paying attention and then you have to schedule another meeting:
When I started looking at this graph it took me awhile to realize that the big jump about 2/3 of the way into the year coincided almost perfectly when kids went back to school — people started scheduling *even more* meetings
To me, this gets to the heart of constant-meeting-culture: scheduling meetings feels like a way to assuage concerns about productivity (and precarity); in practice, more meetings almost always just makes you feel less productive, more like shit
And I'm going to keep repeating this stat from a detailed survey of 9000 remote office workers: those who received status updates via email reported a significantly *higher* sense of belonging compared to those who attended status meetings:
You think you're making people feel better by calling a meeting, but you're making everyone—save maybe, v temporarily, yourself—feel worse. There's almost always a better way to achieve what you want to achieve w/o a meeting; then what meetings remain can actually be good
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Unmanageable traffic, neglected public transit, no parking downtown, roomy homes with backyards a solid 45 minutes away in traffic, untenable extended summers, you know, the dream
I loved my old picture palace in Lewiston, Idaho growing up, I loved the cinder block multiplex with 4 screens that's now a doggy daycare, I love shiny new mall 20-plexes with 17 escalators and I really love tiny indie houses figuring out how to make it work
I love my weird rituals (no one touches the popcorn until the credits roll), I love previews, I love the weird AMC quasi-commercials, I love shushing the person behind me, I especially love going to the movies by myself
Overwhelming email feedback that I somehow left the Mom labor of Elf on the Shelf out of this piece; what can I say, I'm an Old Millennial without Kids, I don't know any Elves on any Shelves
Fascinated by how many women have now told me that they have holiday cards that they made from previous years and just....kept in a drawer b/c they lost steam
The federal govt has refused to act & 26 million don't have enough to eat. I spent the week talking to ad hoc orgs & mutual aid groups filling in the ever-widening gaps in the social safety net. They are *remarkable* & I hope you'll share their stories:
In South Philly, Syona Arora helped launch 2 community fridges:
“Every day, the fridge empties out. Every day, it fills back up again. We hold ourselves to a high standard with what goes in the fridge, & we have a high level of respect for each other"
"Women experience this mandate to feed others at the same time that they absorb the message that women are more valued, & valuable, when they are beautiful, especially when they are also thin"
I talked to @EmilyContois about gender, power, Thanksgiving:
@EmilyContois "The work of idealized womanhood lies at this complex intersection of feeding others out of love, while denying our own appetites to feed ourselves so we’ll be thin and considered lovable."
When I first happened on some really troubling Intermittent Fasting threads on FB I wanted to write about it then thought nope gonna talk to someone who’s actually thought through this stuff