pfctdayelise's shared linkshttps://pfctdayelise.newsblur.com/2023-05-19T04:58:40.406000ZpfctdayeliseThe Simple Fixes on the Quest for Improved Performance2023-05-19T04:58:40.406000ZPhillip Johnstonhttps://embeddedartistry.com/blog/2023/04/24/the-simple-fixes-on-the-quest-for-improved-performance/<table style="border: 1px solid #E0E0E0; margin: 0; padding: 0; background-color: #F0F0F0" valign="top" align="left" cellpadding="0" width="100%">
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pfctdayelise
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<p class="entry-meta"><a href="https://embeddedartistry.com/blog/2023/04/24/">24 April 2023</a> <span class="author vcard">by <a href="https://embeddedartistry.com/blog/author/phillip/">Phillip Johnston</a></span></p><p>Many people are interested in becoming more effective, improving their quality of life, having a better recall of what they learn, performing at a higher level, producing fewer errors, etc. You can find countless podcasts, books, articles, and tweets on the topic. People want to adopt strategies or structure their day to maximize effectiveness.</p>
<p>But for some reason, the simplest fixes get overlooked.</p>
<ul>
<li>If you want to become better at everything you do, there’s one basic step you can take: <a href="https://embeddedartistry.com/fieldatlas/prioritize-your-sleep/">prioritize your sleep</a>. Sleep deprivation is bad on all counts. End of story.</li>
<li>After that comes exercise – are you doing <em>any</em>? Do you just cycle through sitting at your desk, your car, a table, your couch?</li>
<li>What about nutrition – are you giving your body high quality inputs on a sound schedule, or are you eating nutrient poor food and spiking your blood sugar repeatedly throughout the day?</li>
<li>How about attention – do you create the conditions that allow you to focus on your work? Or are you constantly distracted by endless notifications, social media addiction, and the compulsion to check Slack and email every 5 minutes?</li>
</ul>
<p>These are fundamentals of life. Unless you’re attending to these areas, <em>they are probably the primary limiting factor in your effectiveness</em>. Not some hidden knowledge you haven’t yet discovered. Not the perfect tool you haven’t found yet. Not a magical process that will ensure you never make mistakes. Not some advanced skill you haven’t unlocked.</p>
<p>The most common response when I point this out is “if only it was that easy.” <strong>IT IS THAT EASY!</strong></p>
<p>Are there <em>good</em> reasons that some people don’t sleep enough (or exercise, or eat well, or or or)?</p>
<p>Yes, certainly. I’ve had to work many late nights, especially when I had a job that required talking to folks in China. I also have two kids that interrupt my sleep quite frequently. But it is willfully ignorant to act as if there are <em>only</em> good reasons we don’t get enough sleep. I often don’t get enough sleep due to my own choices: scrolling on my phone, playing chess, working on my computer too late on unimportant tasks, binge-reading a book, etc. In any case, whether the <em>reason</em> is good or not doesn’t matter one bit. Sleep deprivation affects you the same regardless of the justification.</p>
<p>“If only it were that easy” is also willfully ignorant of science and your own experiences as a human being. We have so much data on the negative impacts of insufficient sleep, skipping exercise, and eating poorly. But I don’t need studies. Basic observation works just as well. I can monitor my own state of being and see the impacts of being well-rested or not: I am meaner, more sensitive, and more distracted when I am tired. Not only do I know this about myself, but everyone around me knows it too. And the impacts of sleep, nutrition, and exercise are extremely obvious when you’re around children. Kids are much more pleasant and focused when they’re well-rested, and cranky and scattered when they are tired. When they’re eating well, they’re pleasant, and when they’re hungry or blood sugar crashes they are prone to tantrums. When they’re insufficiently exercised and full of energy, they’re unfocused and scattered and destructive and annoying.</p>
<p>Why do you think the same factors do not impact you, fellow human? Have you transcended your biology?</p>
<h2 id="References">References</h2>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://embeddedartistry.com/fieldatlas/prioritize-your-sleep/">Prioritize Your Sleep</a> (Member’s Content)</li>
</ul>
<p>The post <a href="https://embeddedartistry.com/blog/2023/04/24/the-simple-fixes-on-the-quest-for-improved-performance/" rel="nofollow">The Simple Fixes on the Quest for Improved Performance</a> appeared first on <a href="https://embeddedartistry.com" rel="nofollow">Embedded Artistry</a>.</p>Reactions to the Face Age filter on TikTok2023-03-02T02:32:49.708000ZAndy Baiohttps://twitter.com/memotv/status/1628758590033993728<table style="border: 1px solid #E0E0E0; margin: 0; padding: 0; background-color: #F0F0F0" valign="top" align="left" cellpadding="0" width="100%">
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pfctdayelise
<a href="https://pfctdayelise.newsblur.com/story/reactions-to-the-fac/3581:44876f">shared this story</a>
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related: The Atlantic on why adults over 40 typically <a href="https://archive.is/AvNM4">feel 20% younger</a> than they really are <a href="https://waxy.org/2023/02/reactions-to-the-face-age-filter-on-tiktok/">#</a>Björk’s Sonic Symbolism podcast2022-09-30T04:22:33.645000ZAndy Baiohttps://mailchimp.com/presents/podcast/sonic-symbolism<table style="border: 1px solid #E0E0E0; margin: 0; padding: 0; background-color: #F0F0F0" valign="top" align="left" cellpadding="0" width="100%">
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pfctdayelise
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she digs into one of her albums for each of the nine episodes <a href="https://waxy.org/2022/09/bjorks-sonic-symbolism-podcast/">#</a>Some ways to get better at debugging2022-09-15T07:37:25.627000Zhttps://jvns.ca/blog/2022/08/30/a-way-to-categorize-debugging-skills/<table style="border: 1px solid #E0E0E0; margin: 0; padding: 0; background-color: #F0F0F0" valign="top" align="left" cellpadding="0" width="100%">
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pfctdayelise
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<p>Hello! I’ve been working on writing a zine about debugging for a while (here’s <a href="https://twitter.com/b0rk/status/1562480240240525314?s=20&t=BwKd6i0mVCTaCud2HDEUBA">an early draft of the table of contents</a>).</p>
<p>As part of that I thought it might be fun to read some academic papers about
debugging, and last week <a href="https://third-bit.com/">Greg Wilson</a> sent me some
papers about academic research into debugging.</p>
<p>One of those papers (<a href="https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3286960.3286970">Towards a framework for teaching debugging
[paywalled]</a>) had a
categorization I really liked of the different kinds of knowledge/skills we
need to debug effectively. It comes from another more general paper on
troubleshooting: <a href="https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Woei-Hung/publication/225547853_Learning_to_Troubleshoot_A_New_Theory-Based_Design_Architecture/links/556f471c08aec226830a74e7/Learning-to-Troubleshoot-A-New-Theory-Based-Design-Architecture.pdf">Learning to Troubleshoot: A New Theory-Based Design Architecture</a>.</p>
<p>I thought the categorization was a very useful structure for thinking about how
to get better at debugging, so I’ve reframed the five categories in the paper
into actions you can take to get better at debugging.</p>
<p>Here they are:</p>
<h3 id="1-learn-the-codebase">1. learn the codebase</h3>
<p>To debug some code, you need to understand the codebase you’re working with.
This seems kind of obvious (of course you can’t debug code without
understanding how it works!).</p>
<p>This kind of learning happens pretty naturally over time, and actually
debugging is also one of the best ways to <em>learn</em> how a new codebase works –
seeing how something breaks helps you learn a lot about how it works.</p>
<p>The paper calls this “System Knowledge”.</p>
<h3 id="2-learn-the-system">2. learn the system</h3>
<p>The paper mentions that you need to understand the programming language, but I
think there’s more to it than that – to fix bugs, often you need to learn a
lot about the broader environment than just the language.</p>
<p>For example, if you’re a backend web developer, some “system” knowledge you
might need includes:</p>
<ul>
<li>how HTTP caching works</li>
<li>CORS</li>
<li>how database transactions work</li>
</ul>
<p>I find that I often have to be a bit more intentional about learning systemic
things like this – I need to actually take the time to look them up and read
about them.</p>
<p>The paper calls this “Domain Knowledge”.</p>
<h3 id="3-learn-your-tools">3. learn your tools</h3>
<p>There are lots of debugging tools out there, for example:</p>
<ul>
<li>debuggers (gdb etc)</li>
<li>browser developer tools</li>
<li>profilers</li>
<li>strace / ltrace</li>
<li>tcpdump / wireshark</li>
<li>core dumps</li>
<li>and even basic things like error messages (how do you read them properly)</li>
</ul>
<p>I’ve written a lot about debugging tools on this blog, and definitely
learning these tools has made a huge difference to me.</p>
<p>The paper calls this “Procedural Knowledge”.</p>
<h3 id="4-learn-strategies">4. learn strategies</h3>
<p>This is the fuzziest category, we all have a lot of strategies and heuristics
we pick up along the way for how to debug efficiently. For example:</p>
<ul>
<li>writing a unit test</li>
<li>writing a tiny standalone program to reproduce the bug</li>
<li>finding a working version of the code and seeing what changed</li>
<li>printing out a million things</li>
<li>adding extra logging</li>
<li>taking a break</li>
<li>explaining the bug to a friend and then figuring out what’s wrong halfway through</li>
<li>looking through the github issues to see if anything matches</li>
</ul>
<p>I’ve been thinking a lot about this category while writing the zine, but I want
to keep this post short so I won’t say more about it here.</p>
<p>The paper calls this “Strategic Knowledge”.</p>
<h3 id="5-get-experience">5. get experience</h3>
<p>The last category is “experience”. The paper has a really funny comment about this:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Their findings did not show a significant difference in the strategies
employed by the novices and experts. Experts simply formed more correct
hypotheses and were more efficient at finding the fault. The authors suspect
that this result is due to the difference in the programming experience between
novices and experts.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>This really resonated with me – I’ve had SO MANY bugs that were really
frustrating and difficult the first time I ran into them, and very straightforward
the fifth or tenth or 20th time.</p>
<p>This also feels like one of the most straightforward categories of knowledge to
acquire to me – all you need to do is investigate a million bugs, which is our
whole life as programmers anyway :). It takes a long time but I feel like it
happens pretty naturally.</p>
<p>The paper calls this “Experiential Knowledge”.</p>
<h3 id="that-s-all">that’s all!</h3>
<p>I’m going to keep this post short, I just really liked this categorization and
wanted to share it.</p>I went to a coffee shop2022-07-19T23:05:06.077000ZAnil Dashhttps://anildash.com/2022/07/18/i-went-to-a-coffee-shop/<table style="border: 1px solid #E0E0E0; margin: 0; padding: 0; background-color: #F0F0F0" valign="top" align="left" cellpadding="0" width="100%">
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pfctdayelise
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<img alt="I went to a coffee shop" src="https://anildash.com/content/images/2022/07/IMG_5714.jpeg" /><p>[cw: violence] I just wanted to capture this story here once so I don't have to tell it to anyone again. Because, while I am okay now, it is unpleasant to keep having to repeat the story to new people over and over. The short version is, I was violently assaulted by a man who was evidently going through a significant mental health episode, I am physically okay even though the experience was fairly traumatic in the moment, and we are going to try to get the man help if it's possible.</p><hr /><p>I was attending a professional conference in a small town in California that I had never been to before. I went for a walk around the area we were staying, since I always like to see a little bit about a new place I’m staying at. About a half mile from the hotel I was staying in, there was a small coffee shop on the main road, so I went in to get a drink and decided to sit at one of the picnic tables out front of the shop.</p><p>There had been a disheveled man sitting at another of the picnic tables when I had entered the coffee shop, but I hadnt really paid any attention. As I sat down, I noticed he had a cart with a lot of his stuff, so I figured he must be unhoused, but didn't otherwise have any thoughts about him. I set my drink down and got out my phone as usual when he almost immediately started walking over. I began to reach for my wallet, assuming he was going to ask me for a couple bucks, and he put his hand on my shoulder in a pretty heavy way, more than you would do to get someone's attention. </p><p>He started to say, "I'm sorry man…" and I assumed he was apologizing for being about to ask for money, but then he finished his sentence, saying "I'm sorry man, but I'm going to have to kill you." and sucker punched me in the face just near my left eye, then started screaming and swinging at my head.</p><p>My heart was racing immediately and I said “I think you’re mistaking me for someone else” or something similarly stilted (which in retrospect is pretty absurd) and I started to back away from him and tried to get up from the table when he tried to lunge at me where I was sitting.</p><p>I stood up from the bench and pushed him away (kind of a big shove) and said “I’m not trying to hurt you, leave me alone” and then fully lunged at me and fell on top of me and started punching and screaming. He was saying, “I am god and you are the devil, and you are going to die today!” and stuff like that. I was shoving him off and trying to grab his wrists because I had seen some kind of glint of metal and I was worried he had a weapon; I think in retrospect it may have been a carabiner or something like that clipped to his clothes. It was probably a full minute later until I knew for sure he didn't have a weapon in his hand, so this was the scariest part for me. (A minute is quite a long time in this kind of circumstance.)</p><p>We tussled on the ground and I kept trying to get control of his hands and I was yelling "Help! I don't know this guy!" because I have some vague recollection that you’re supposed to say that as it’s effective in engaging bystanders. That idea may be apocryphal, but it did work, as a man who had been sitting by the coffee shop came over and started yelling for the man to get off of me. I was also screaming "Help me!" because I was still pretty terrified at that point. I did not want to die or be seriously injured because I was too reticent to ask for help.</p><p>Once we got to the ground, the attacker was sort of slumped over me, and he probably outweighed me by 50-75 pounds, so when I would kick him off of me, he would sort of just drop onto me again, and I realized if I fully got up, I would have to disable or restrain him to stop him doing that. So instead, I just stayed focused on keeping his hands pinned to the ground. This had the unfortunate and disgusting side effect of being smushed up directly against someone who was extremely dirty and smelled terrible, but it significantly lowered my sense of immediate danger.</p><p>At that point, I started trying to de-escalate, as we were in something of a steady state and I could now see he had no weapon. He began sort of angrily looping through a couple of different angry ideas, screaming variations of refrains like "a girl put a knife in my face", "my money is no good here" and "you're Al Qaeda, you did 9/11" amidst general shouts of how I was evil. None of it was obviously very coherent, and I didn't catch it all because I had been also yelling a lot, but I just kept saying stuff like "I don't know you, man, and you don't know me" and "I've got no problem with you, we don't have to do this" and reminding him I'm just some guy from New York who was visiting and I have a wife and a kid back home. At one point after he said the stuff about 9/11 again, I said, "No man, I'm a New Yorker! I was there that day!" which really backfired in an absurd way because he heard it as me saying I was <em>there</em> for 9/11. The next time I am assaulted by a stranger, I will hire an editor.</p><p>In between his outbursts, the man had seemingly genuine looks of confusion and disarray and disorientation. Obviously, I am not at all qualified to make any medical diagnosis, but having seen people go through mental breaks, his behavior seemed consistent with that sort of episode. I figured this was probably not the first time he'd been through this, so I said "Let me up, man, you don't want to catch a case on this" and he responded that since I was evil, the cops would be taking <em>me</em> away. This gave me the idea to then to tell him "okay, let's just wait and do that" since I figured someone had already called the cops by that point, and so things calmed down a bit even though we were still lying in a sort of disgusting pile in the parking lot.</p><p>The nice helpful man who had come over (I later found out his name is Michael) was in my line of sight and I mouthed a thank you to him for staying with me and he said confirmed that the cops would be there soon, while he also kept exhorting the attacker to calm down and leave me alone. After a while, the guy was sort of just muttering at me while I still had his arms pinned, and one point when I said I just wanted him to back off because I'm trying to get home to my wife and son, he said "I got a wife too, had three of 'em" and I said "I can see why they don't stick around" and he actually laughed.  After that I focused more on telling him versions of, "this isn't you, man, we're gonna get you some help" and he scoffed at that but did let up a bit on struggling agains me trying to subdue him. At one point I even let go of one of the attacker's arms to take Michael's hand and say thank you again, because while I was still basically lying on the ground, I could see now that I was gonna be okay and I got a little emotional about it.</p><h3 id="afterward">Afterward</h3><p>The cops came after what was probably only a few minutes (though it felt like much longer) and pulled the guy off of me, and since they couldn’t really see me or know what was up, I just kept repeating “I’m staying down, I’m not getting up, I don’t have anything, I don’t know him” with my palms up and out. The cops grabbed me and frisked me while picking me up, but Michael kept saying “he did nothing and was attacked” and overall the cops were not violent or aggressive. They sat the attacker guy down on the ground and I sat a good distance away near the coffee shop. I caught my breath and the young barista very sweetly brought me a new drink. I absolutely reeked, and as I looked around on the ground I found my phone undamaged but my sunglasses were smashed, my shirt that I was wearing (one of my favorites!) was totally ruined with rips and dirt, and my fresh pair of white sneakers were absolutely filthy. Obviously none of that actually matters, but for whatever reason that's what bothered me in the moment, and what I noticed most as I gathered myself. I felt a little sore or bruised near my eye but otherwise felt physically fine. I figured I must have looked a lot worse than I felt because people were reacting to me like I was hurt.</p><p>The guy who attacked me was getting around okay as far as I could see, and I had only really kicked him enough to give myself space once we were on the ground, and I hadn’t hit him at all, so I don’t think he was hurt physically. The cops tending to him were fairly respectful and did not manhandle him at all. Based on how he had phrased some things (and frankly, due to his being unhoused and severely mentally ill), I think the man who attacked me was likely a retired veteran, which may have helped with the cops.</p><p>The cops started asking me questions, basic stuff like if I knew the man or what he and I had said to each other before the altercation, and then asked if I needed a medic. I said that I did not but paramedics soon came anyway and first they checked on the other guy, then checked on me and my vitals, and did basic tests to see if I had a concussion or anything. I just kept telling them I was fine so they finally stopped after I signed their iPad thing confirming that. The cops asked me four or five times if I wanted to press charges and I kept saying, “just help him, this man isn’t well, I don't need anything” and two younger cops at least seemed like they would try to do so. The third older cop I said it to was kind of rolling his eyes, and I think part of the reason I kept getting asked the same questions over and over was because at least one of them was in training. When they asked if I wanted to report this as a hate crime (I did not), they all asked in exactly the same phrasing, which suggests to me that they've probably all been trained on this relatively recently. When I kept repeating, "I'm going home to my family tomorrow, that guy isn't", they finally eased up on pushing me on that stuff.</p><p>Overall, about 6 cops in total showed up, along with 2 paramedics. Things calmed down with the staff and patrons of the coffee shop and nearby store, so by this time I was just sitting in front of the place catching my breath, and that's when I asked Michael his name. He responded and also offered a lot of very thoughtful forms of material support, everything from taking me his house to take a shower if I needed, to giving me a ride back to my hotel. I told him I had just gotten a gift of being reminded that there was kindness and courage all around us and I was grateful for him. We made small talk about how he was sorry I came all the way from NYC and had this experience. Later that evening, he emailed me and said he was going to a nearby K-pop festival with his family; I stopped by but we missed each other.</p><p>I went into a little clothing shop that was adjacent to the coffee shop to buy a new, clean shirt, and then used their bathroom to wash up. That was when I first got a good look at myself. I saw my eye had some broken blood vessels and I had blood on my face, especially near my chin, though I still don't know where that came from as I never found any cuts there. In general, I think I must have looked like I’d lost a fight. (Which is not how I had felt.) But my appearance in the mirror was jarring, so I washed my hands and face as best I could; naturally, there weren't any paper towels to dry off with.</p><p>When I came out, I saw an industry colleague who had been at the conference I had been attending. He had coincidentally decided to walk to the same coffee shop and had apparently arrived after the cops had already settled everything down. I asked him if he’d walk back to the hotel with me and he was super gracious about it. After getting his contact info and thanking him again, I told Michael that he was off the hook and he could go home since I had run into a friend who would walk me back.</p><p>I saw the cops loading the other guy into their car so I asked them if I could get his name as I wanted to see if I could help make sure he would get some support. They said they couldn’t give me his info since he was now in medical care and that would be a privacy violation, but they did take my name and number so the medical staff could offer it later. They also said I could contact them if my injuries ended up being worse than we thought or if I changed my mind about pressing charges.</p><p>As we walked back, I started to process the experience, noticed other cuts and scrapes and bruises that I'd missed, and caught more weird absurdities about what had happened. (My Apple Watch was giving me an alert that I had "taken a hard fall", a feature I had forgotten existed.) After a shower and some rest and talking to family, I pretty much felt like myself again. Notably, a number of friends and industry acquaintances, largely men with whom I'd only shared a professional relationship, offered me hugs and surprisingly sincere support. It's a minor takeaway, but seeing emotional vulnerability being so easily accessible and immediate did make me feel like that perhaps business environments don't have to be as heartless as they are by default.</p><h3 id="takeaways">Takeaways</h3><p>I don't, at least as of yet, have any great social lessons or grand pronouncements from this experience, except for the obvious ones. We are failing so many in society by not having a comprehensive, effective social safety net. The town I was in had just increased funding to their police department a few years ago for a "homeless outreach team", yet when I asked them how they would be helping this person afterward, there was no coherent or specific plan. If, as I suspect given that the area has the largest military population in the country, the man who attacked me is a veteran, we've increased military funding to record levels while failing our veterans more profoundly than ever. The decades of repeating destructive, demonizing narratives about vulnerable communities have a huge effect on people in crisis, becoming part of how an unhealthy mind lashes out at the world. </p><p>Our institutions have no capability for responding to crisis with compassion.</p><p>The municipality where this took place had <a href="https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/news/homelessness/story/2022-06-05/oceansides-bread-of-life-rescue-mission-permanently-closes">just closed</a> a facility a few weeks ago that had been serving unhoused people just a few blocks away, and the <a href="https://www.sdrescue.org/what-we-do/north-county-emergency-services/">new facility</a> that is supposed to take its place hasn't opened yet, and won't open for months at least. (I <a href="https://www.sdrescue.org/donate/">made a donation</a> in Michael's name to the organization that will be running the new facility; if you'd like to do the same, please let me know and I'll match your gift.) I am wealthy and privileged and have physical and mental health care, along with the resilience granted by having the support of family and friends and community who care, so I'll get past this relatively quickly. But someone else in this position, or even if this had happened to me earlier in life when I was less privileged and more vulnerable, could very easily be permanently thrown off track by trying to recover. I don't expect that the man who attacked me will ever have a stable life or be fully supported, and he deserves to be helped and healed, and I don't yet know what to do about that except try to support the institutions which are trying.</p><p>In short, I’m okay, but I’m really really sad. Everything about this makes me so sad, for reasons best encapsulated in what Michael later emailed me: “Our country faces so many problems—a lot of that seemed to come out at the cafe unfortunately” which I think is an eloquent and unfortunately apt summation. But I also saw a stranger show  love, compassion, courage and kindness in a moment of genuine fear, and I am hoping that's the part of this experience that endures.</p>The Bleak Spectacle of the Amber Heard-Johnny Depp Trial2022-06-08T10:53:00.182000ZAndy Baiohttps://michaelhobbes.substack.com/p/the-bleak-spectacle-of-the-amber?s=r<table style="border: 1px solid #E0E0E0; margin: 0; padding: 0; background-color: #F0F0F0" valign="top" align="left" cellpadding="0" width="100%">
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pfctdayelise
<a href="https://pfctdayelise.newsblur.com/story/the-bleak-spectacle-/3581:4d7053">shared this story</a>
from <img src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/icons.newsblur.com/3581.png" style="vertical-align: middle;width:16px;height:16px;"> Waxy.org.</b>
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Michael Hobbes debunks the conspiracy theory at the center of the "largest explosion of online misogyny since Gamergate" <a href="https://waxy.org/2022/06/the-bleak-spectacle-of-the-amber-heard-johnny-depp-trial/">#</a>Bertrand Fan installed a payphone in his house2022-06-04T13:28:01.799000ZAndy Baiohttps://bert.org/2022/06/02/payphone/<table style="border: 1px solid #E0E0E0; margin: 0; padding: 0; background-color: #F0F0F0" valign="top" align="left" cellpadding="0" width="100%">
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pfctdayelise
<a href="https://pfctdayelise.newsblur.com/story/bertrand-fan-install/3581:cf11d4">shared this story</a>
from <img src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/icons.newsblur.com/3581.png" style="vertical-align: middle;width:16px;height:16px;"> Waxy.org.</b>
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from 1990s credit card fraud to phone line simulators <a href="https://waxy.org/2022/06/bertrand-fan-installed-a-payphone-in-his-house/">#</a>DJ Cummerbund mashes up Lizzo and Linkin Park2022-06-04T13:27:49.706000ZAndy Baiohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tjsCu9bbOqE<table style="border: 1px solid #E0E0E0; margin: 0; padding: 0; background-color: #F0F0F0" valign="top" align="left" cellpadding="0" width="100%">
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pfctdayelise
<a href="https://pfctdayelise.newsblur.com/story/dj-cummerbund-mashes/3581:adb422">shared this story</a>
from <img src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/icons.newsblur.com/3581.png" style="vertical-align: middle;width:16px;height:16px;"> Waxy.org.</b>
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this goes the extra mile <a href="https://waxy.org/2022/06/dj-cummerbund-mashes-up-lizzo-and-linkin-park/">#</a>Tracking what happens after TikTok songs go viral2022-06-03T13:39:55.977000ZAndy Baiohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S1m-KgEpoow<table style="border: 1px solid #E0E0E0; margin: 0; padding: 0; background-color: #F0F0F0" valign="top" align="left" cellpadding="0" width="100%">
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pfctdayelise
<a href="https://pfctdayelise.newsblur.com/story/tracking-what-happen/3581:f59347">shared this story</a>
from <img src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/icons.newsblur.com/3581.png" style="vertical-align: middle;width:16px;height:16px;"> Waxy.org.</b>
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Vox's Estelle Caswell and The Pudding did a seven-month data investigation into how TikTok is shaping the music industry <a href="https://waxy.org/2022/06/tracking-what-happens-after-tiktok-songs-go-viral/">#</a>15 years of Ask a Manager2022-05-30T22:31:11.352000ZAsk a Managerhttps://www.askamanager.org/2022/05/15-years-of-ask-a-manager.html<table style="border: 1px solid #E0E0E0; margin: 0; padding: 0; background-color: #F0F0F0" valign="top" align="left" cellpadding="0" width="100%">
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pfctdayelise
<a href="https://pfctdayelise.newsblur.com/story/15-years-of-ask-a-ma/6233987:c04c5f">shared this story</a>
from <img src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/icons.newsblur.com/6233987.png" style="vertical-align: middle;width:16px;height:16px;"> Ask a Manager.</b>
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<p>This post, <a href="https://www.askamanager.org/2022/05/15-years-of-ask-a-manager.html" rel="nofollow">15 years of Ask a Manager</a> , was originally published by Alison Green on <a href="https://www.askamanager.org" rel="nofollow">Ask a Manager</a>.</p>
<p>Fifteen years ago this past Saturday, I launched this site. I wasn’t sure if anyone would read it, but I thought I had a few months of posts in me (little did I know the letters you had in <em>you</em>). A decade and a half later, here are some highlights year by year.</p>
<p>In 2007, highlights included:</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://www.askamanager.org/2007/09/reader-writes-im-working-at-my-first.html">an irritating manager reality check</a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.askamanager.org/2007/09/alternatives-to-firing.html">alternatives to firing</a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.askamanager.org/2007/12/mob-pressure-to-join-coworkers-for.html">mob pressure to join coworkers for lunch</a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.askamanager.org/2007/07/taking-criticism-gracefully.html">taking criticism gracefully</a></li>
<li>my very first set of <a href="https://www.askamanager.org/2007/12/office-holiday-party-tips.html">office holiday party tips</a> (including “drink things in small glasses”)</li>
<li><a href="https://www.askamanager.org/2007/12/update-from-reader-being-lowballed-by.html">the first update</a> the site ever got</li>
</ul>
<p>In 2008, highlights included:</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://www.askamanager.org/2008/07/job-rejections-and-vitriol-part-2.html">candidates who react badly to rejection</a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.askamanager.org/2008/04/offended-by-insufficient-training.html">someone taking things too personally</a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.askamanager.org/2008/09/reality-based-management.html">reality-based management</a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.askamanager.org/2008/08/when-your-manager-wont-manage.html">what to do when your manager won’t manage</a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.askamanager.org/2008/08/you-are-high-maintenance-and-full-of.html">an interviewer who told you that you were high maintenance and full of yourself</a></li>
<li>my very first rant about <a href="https://www.askamanager.org/2008/11/sound-of-silence-companies-that-dont.html">companies that don’t send rejections</a></li>
</ul>
<p>In 2009, highlights included:</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://www.askamanager.org/2009/03/when-you-disagree-with-your-boss.html">what to do when you disagree with your boss</a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.askamanager.org/2009/03/beware-overly-nice-manager.html">beware of the overly nice manager</a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.askamanager.org/2009/11/how-much-can-you-change-your-manager.html">how much you can change your manager</a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.askamanager.org/2009/11/coworker-moonlighting-as-prostitute.html">a coworker moonlighting as a sex worker</a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.askamanager.org/2009/09/can-i-be-written-up-for-spitting.html">whether you can be written up for spitting</a></li>
</ul>
<p>In 2010, highlights included:</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://www.askamanager.org/2010/02/combatting-unhealthy-power-dynamics.html">combating unhealthy power dynamics during a job search</a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.askamanager.org/2010/01/coworker-brushes-hair-with-fork-cleans.html">a coworker who brushed her hair with a fork</a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.askamanager.org/2010/01/employer-time-vs-candidate-time-2-very.html">employer time vs. candidate time</a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.askamanager.org/2010/09/my-boss-acts-like-im-on-call-day-and.html">a boss who thinks you’re on-call day and night</a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.askamanager.org/2010/05/reader-writes-i-work-as-supervisor-in.html">an employee who hit their boss</a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.askamanager.org/2010/05/boss-bans-coworkers-from-eating-lunch.html">a manager who banned employees from eating lunch together</a></li>
</ul>
<p>In 2011, highlights included:</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://www.askamanager.org/2011/04/someone-is-leaving-their-fingernail-clippings-in-my-desk.html">someone leaving fingernail clippings in your desk</a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.askamanager.org/2011/10/my-boss-keeps-stealing-my-food-after-ive-asked-him-to-stop.html">the boss who kept stealing your lunch</a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.askamanager.org/2011/11/my-interviewer-was-obsessed-with-anger-management.html">an interviewer obsessed with anger management</a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.askamanager.org/2011/08/vetting-job-candidates-based-on-undisclosed-qualifications.html">job ads that don’t list the true qualifications the employer is seeking</a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.askamanager.org/2011/08/is-referring-to-an-orgy-in-my-cover-letter-going-to-hurt-me.html">referring to an orgy in your cover letter</a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.askamanager.org/2011/12/my-new-employee-wanted-to-quit-and-now-wants-to-stay.html">a new hire who wanted to quit and now wants to stay</a></li>
<li>the very first <a href="https://www.askamanager.org/2011/12/the-worst-boss-of-2011-is.html">Worst Boss of the Year competition</a></li>
</ul>
<p>In 2012, highlights included:</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://www.askamanager.org/2012/09/our-employee-wont-stop-hugging-people.html">an employee who wouldn’t stop hugging people</a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.askamanager.org/2012/12/update-from-the-reader-with-the-farting-burping-coworker.html">a coworker who used flatulence as a weapon</a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.askamanager.org/2012/06/my-company-has-hired-a-pushy-dietician-who-wont-leave-me-alone.html">pushy dietician who wouldn’t stop harassing a body-builder</a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.askamanager.org/2012/08/what-your-interviewer-says-vs-what-you-hear-vs-what-they-mean.html">what your interviewer says vs. what they mean</a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.askamanager.org/2012/10/my-husband-emailed-my-manager-about-our-family-decision-for-me-to-resign.html">a husband who emailed his wife’s manager about their joint decision for her to resign</a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.askamanager.org/2012/04/what-does-it-mean-to-be-yourself-in-an-interview.html">what it means to “be yourself” in an interview</a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.askamanager.org/2012/05/how-to-appear-more-authoritative-at-work.html">ways to appear more authoritative at work</a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.askamanager.org/2012/09/do-what-you-love-is-not-great-advice.html">reasons “do what you love” is not great advice</a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.askamanager.org/2012/08/my-former-coworker-wants-my-company-to-sponsor-her-party.html">a former coworker who wanted to throw a party for some coworkers but not all and have the CEO pay for it</a></li>
</ul>
<p>In 2013, highlights included:</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://www.askamanager.org/2013/01/stop-thinking-youre-applying-for-your-dream-job.html"> the problem with dream jobs</a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.askamanager.org/2013/02/how-to-assert-your-legal-rights-at-work.html">how to assert your legal rights at work</a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.askamanager.org/2013/07/an-employee-is-putting-magic-curses-on-her-coworkers.html">an employee putting magic curses on her coworkers</a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.askamanager.org/2013/04/how-to-ask-for-your-old-job-back.html">how to ask for your old job back</a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.askamanager.org/2013/08/my-employer-wants-me-to-remove-a-sticker-from-my-truck-over-sharing-anxieties-and-more.html">someone outraged that his employer wanted him to remove an offensive sticker from his truck</a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.askamanager.org/2013/05/my-boss-is-always-making-out-with-his-girlfriend-at-work.html">a boss who was always making out with his girlfriend at work</a></li>
</ul>
<p>In 2014, highlights included:</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://www.askamanager.org/2014/03/my-coworkers-heard-my-roommates-having-sex-while-i-was-on-a-conference-call.html">coworkers who heard your roommates having sex while you were on a conference call</a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.askamanager.org/2014/01/i-had-to-prepare-a-meal-and-entertain-20-people-for-a-job-interview-and-so-did-39-other-candidates.html">the interview where 20 candidates all had to prepare a meal and entertainment for a whole office</a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.askamanager.org/2014/06/why-do-interviewers-ask-about-your-favorite-books-or-movies.html">why interviewers ask about your favorite books or movies</a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.askamanager.org/2014/07/manager-wants-to-buy-underwear-for-employees-and-wants-to-approve-it-first.html">a manager wants to buy underwear for employees</a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.askamanager.org/2014/08/how-to-make-your-boss-adore-you.html">how to make your boss adore you</a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.askamanager.org/2014/12/update-i-dont-want-my-coworkers-to-know-im-living-off-cupcakes-from-the-employee-kitchen.html">an update from a reader who didn’t want her coworkers to know she was living off cupcakes from the employee kitchen</a></li>
</ul>
<p>In 2015, highlights included:</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://www.askamanager.org/2015/06/i-racked-up-20000-in-personal-charges-on-my-company-credit-card.html">an employee who racked up $20,000 in personal charges on their company credit card</a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.askamanager.org/2015/04/i-walked-in-on-employees-having-sex-and-i-think-there-might-be-a-sex-club-in-my-office.html">an office sex club</a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.askamanager.org/2015/07/my-new-office-is-full-of-dogs-and-im-allergic.html">someone allergic in an office full of dogs</a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.askamanager.org/2015/01/my-boss-thinks-he-is-a-mayan-shaman.html">the boss who thought he was a mayan shaman</a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.askamanager.org/2015/07/i-dont-respect-my-managers-college-degrees-from-20-years-ago.html">a person who didn’t respect their manager’s college degrees from 20 years ago</a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.askamanager.org/2015/01/my-boss-is-making-threats-about-the-mafia-to-me.html">the boss who made threats about the Mafia</a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.askamanager.org/2015/03/how-can-i-stop-softening-the-message-in-tough-conversations-with-my-staff.html">how to stop softening the message as a manager</a></li>
</ul>
<p>In 2016, highlights included:</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://www.askamanager.org/2016/09/my-coworker-wants-us-to-call-her-boyfriend-her-master.html">the coworker who wanted everyone to to call her boyfriend her “master”</a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.askamanager.org/2016/07/a-coworker-stole-my-spicy-food-got-sick-and-is-blaming-me.html">the coworker who stole the spicy food, got sick, and blamed the person whose food they’d stolen</a> (and the <a href="https://www.askamanager.org/2016/10/update-a-coworker-stole-my-spicy-food-got-sick-and-is-blaming-me.html">update</a>)</li>
<li><a href="https://www.askamanager.org/2016/06/i-had-to-share-a-bed-with-a-coworker-on-a-business-trip.html">the coworkers who had to share a bed on a business trip</a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.askamanager.org/2016/06/i-was-fired-from-my-internship-for-writing-a-proposal-for-a-more-flexible-dress-code.html">the interns fired for writing a proposal for a more flexible dress code</a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.askamanager.org/2016/06/my-team-is-super-into-tarot-cards-the-secret-and-sharing-our-personal-visions.html">the team that was super into tarot cards, the Secret, and sharing their personal “visions”</a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.askamanager.org/2016/07/my-best-employee-quit-on-the-spot-because-i-wouldnt-let-her-go-to-her-college-graduation.html">my employee who quit on the spot because her manager wouldn’t let her go to her college graduation</a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.askamanager.org/2016/04/our-boss-will-fire-us-if-we-dont-sign-up-to-be-a-liver-donor-for-his-brother.html">the boss who threatened to fire people who boss didn’t sign up to be a liver donor for his brother</a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.askamanager.org/2016/08/my-manager-stole-a-family-heirloom-from-me-and-gave-it-as-a-gift-to-someone-else.html">the manager who stole an employee’s family heirloom</a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.askamanager.org/2016/04/do-you-have-to-control-your-emotions-to-be-professional.html">whether you have to control your emotions to be professional</a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.askamanager.org/2016/05/my-company-wants-to-sponsor-me-for-a-service-dog-but-im-not-sure-i-should-accept.html">the person whose company wanted to sponsor her for a service dog</a> (and the <a href="https://www.askamanager.org/2016/11/update-my-company-wants-to-sponsor-me-for-a-service-dog-but-im-not-sure-i-should-accept.html">update</a><a href="https://www.askamanager.org/2016/05/my-company-wants-to-sponsor-me-for-a-service-dog-but-im-not-sure-i-should-accept.html">)</a></li>
</ul>
<p>In 2017, highlights included:</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://www.askamanager.org/2017/08/i-ghosted-my-ex-and-shes-about-to-be-my-new-boss.html">the person who ghosted his ex and she was about to be his new boss</a> (and the <a href="https://www.askamanager.org/2017/09/update-i-ghosted-my-ex-and-shes-about-to-be-my-new-boss.html">update</a>)</li>
<li><a href="https://www.askamanager.org/2017/04/i-accidentally-insulted-my-bosss-daughter.html">the person who insulted her boss’s daughter</a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.askamanager.org/2017/01/i-yelled-at-our-intern.html">a manager who yelled at their intern</a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.askamanager.org/2017/07/i-bit-my-coworker.html">a person who bit their coworker</a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.askamanager.org/2017/10/how-do-i-work-with-someone-i-cant-stand.html">how to work with someone you can’t stand</a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.askamanager.org/2017/03/update-i-manage-someone-who-was-terribly-harmed-by-my-family-what-do-i-do.html">a great update from someone who managed someone who was terribly harmed by his family</a></li>
</ul>
<p>In 2018, highlights included:</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://www.askamanager.org/2018/05/my-dad-is-dating-my-boss-and-they-want-me-to-go-to-couples-therapy-with-them.html">the person whose dad was dating her boss, and they wanted her to go to couples therapy with them</a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.askamanager.org/2018/05/my-coworker-has-started-faking-a-british-accent.html">the coworker who started faking a British accent</a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.askamanager.org/2018/05/what-to-do-if-you-hate-your-job.html">what to do if you hate your job</a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.askamanager.org/2018/03/jane-has-lost-her-mind.html">the time when Jane lost her mind</a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.askamanager.org/2018/01/i-paid-for-fake-references-is-it-rude-to-shush-someone-and-more.html">the boss who wouldn’t let an employee born on Leap Year have her birthday off</a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.askamanager.org/2018/02/my-coworker-with-imposter-syndrome-actually-does-suck-at-her-job.html">the coworker with imposter syndrome who actually did suck at her job</a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.askamanager.org/2018/02/im-hypersensitive-to-criticism-how-do-i-fix-this.html">advice when you’re hypersensitive to criticism</a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.askamanager.org/category/podcast">the launch of the Ask a Manager podcast</a></li>
</ul>
<p>In 2019, highlights included:</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://www.askamanager.org/2019/02/we-have-twice-daily-mandatory-group-therapy-at-work.html">the twice-daily mandatory group therapy at work</a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.askamanager.org/2019/07/my-boss-pees-in-a-cup-and-dumps-it-in-the-kitchen-sink.html">the boss who peed in a cup and dumped it in the kitchen sink</a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.askamanager.org/2019/02/some-men-in-my-office-refuse-to-be-alone-with-women.html">the male coworkers who refused to be alone with women</a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.askamanager.org/2019/01/my-coworker-doesnt-want-me-to-have-a-communal-candy-dish-because-of-temptation.html">the communal candy dish</a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.askamanager.org/2019/03/can-i-use-dark-humor-at-work.html">using dark humor at work</a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.askamanager.org/2019/02/my-coworker-is-setting-toilet-paper-on-fire-in-the-bathroom.html">the poop barbecue</a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.askamanager.org/2019/10/my-coworkers-make-orgasm-sounds-while-im-on-the-phone.html">the coworkers who made orgasm sounds while others were on the phone</a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.askamanager.org/2019/11/coworkers-say-we-shouldnt-attend-a-work-party-i-feel-insulted-by-my-new-job-and-more.html">the cheap-ass rolls</a></li>
</ul>
<p>In 2020, highlights included:</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://www.askamanager.org/2020/02/my-boss-tapes-peoples-mouths-shut-during-meetings.html">the boss who taped people’s mouths shut during meetings</a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.askamanager.org/2020/02/i-ask-candidates-their-salary-expectations-and-dont-feel-bad-about-it.html">the manager who asked candidates their salary expectations and didn’t feel bad about it</a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.askamanager.org/2020/03/i-messed-up-at-work-and-im-so-ashamed.html">a person who messed up at work and felt ashamed</a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.askamanager.org/2020/01/is-it-okay-to-drink-before-a-presentation.html">the question of whether it’s okay to drink before a presentation</a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.askamanager.org/2020/02/intern-signs-emails-with-stay-gold-can-i-wear-black-jeans-to-a-job-interview-and-more.html">the intern who signs emails with “stay gold”</a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.askamanager.org/2020/06/i-went-to-a-job-interview-where-theyre-not-taking-covid-seriously.html">how to make a scene when you need to make a scene</a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.askamanager.org/2020/06/my-manager-named-joseph-stalin-employee-of-the-month.html">the manager who named Joseph Stalin “employee of the month”</a></li>
<li>and several epic updates: the <a href="https://www.askamanager.org/2020/03/update-my-coworker-is-blackmailing-me-not-to-take-time-off-for-my-honeymoon.html">person blackmailing someone not to take time off for their honeymoon</a>, <a href="https://www.askamanager.org/2020/06/i-went-to-a-job-interview-where-theyre-not-taking-covid-seriously.html">the </a><a href="https://www.askamanager.org/2020/12/update-my-employee-keeps-getting-deadnamed-by-a-coworker.html">employee who kept getting deadnamed by a coworker</a>, and <a href="https://www.askamanager.org/2020/05/update-my-needy-boss-wants-me-to-adopt-her.html">the needy boss who wanted her employee to “adopt” her</a></li>
</ul>
<p>In 2021, highlights included:</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://www.askamanager.org/2021/09/a-coworker-prayed-for-my-fiances-death-so-we-didnt-invite-her-to-our-wedding.html">the drama after a person who prayed for their coworker’s fiancé’s death wasn’t invited to the wedding</a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.askamanager.org/2021/08/my-employee-gave-me-an-its-her-or-me-ultimatum.html">the employee’s “it’s her or me” ultimatum</a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.askamanager.org/2021/10/my-employee-wasnt-respectful-enough-after-the-company-messed-up-her-paycheck.html">the manager who felt an employee wasn’t respectful enough after the company messed up her paycheck</a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.askamanager.org/2021/03/is-there-a-professional-way-to-call-bs.html">professional ways to call BS</a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.askamanager.org/2021/06/my-new-office-has-a-no-humor-policy.html">the office with a no-humor policy</a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.askamanager.org/2021/03/is-being-salaried-a-scam.html">being salaried is a scam</a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.askamanager.org/2021/11/im-working-2-full-time-remote-jobs-is-this-unethical.html">the person working two full-time remote jobs</a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.askamanager.org/category/mortification">Mortification week</a></li>
</ul>
<p>And in 2022 so far (we’re only partway though), highlights included:</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://www.askamanager.org/2022/01/the-new-hire-who-showed-up-is-not-the-same-person-we-interviewed.html">the new hire who showed up isn’t the person who interviewed</a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.askamanager.org/2022/02/our-phones-have-fewer-speed-dial-buttons-and-everyone-is-freaking-out.html">the freak-out over a new phone system with fewer speed dial buttons</a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.askamanager.org/2022/03/the-fake-crossing-guard-the-controversial-coat-rack-and-other-abuses-of-tiny-amounts-of-power.html">the fake crossing guard, the controversial coat rack, and other abuses of tiny amounts of power</a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.askamanager.org/2022/02/my-coworker-says-i-bullied-her-should-i-tell-her-boss-she-needs-more-of-a-backbone.html">the person accused of bullying a coworker who wants her to get more of a backbone</a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.askamanager.org/2022/01/dont-trust-the-answers-to-how-would-you-describe-your-management-style.html">why you shouldn’t trust the answers to “how would you describe your management style?”</a></li>
</ul>Is Management Burnout Inevitable?2022-05-29T22:28:16.522000ZMarco Rogershttps://marcorogers.com/blog/is-management-burnout-inevitable<table style="border: 1px solid #E0E0E0; margin: 0; padding: 0; background-color: #F0F0F0" valign="top" align="left" cellpadding="0" width="100%">
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pfctdayelise
<a href="https://pfctdayelise.newsblur.com/story/is-management-burnou/7704922:21e697">shared this story</a>
from <img src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/icons.newsblur.com/7704922.png" style="vertical-align: middle;width:16px;height:16px;"> Marco Rogers.</b>
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<p class="">I came across a thoughtful question about how to avoid burning out in the management role. This is <a href="https://twitter.com/polotek/status/1165099986318610433">my response thread from twitter</a> reproduced in full.</p>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p dir="ltr" lang="en">Real question: is burnout for management inevitable for people who actually care about the wellbeing of other people? If no, how does one combat the emotional toll of the job?</p>— Jeff Lembeck (@jefflembeck) <a href="https://twitter.com/jefflembeck/status/1164981672950956032?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">August 23, 2019</a></blockquote>
<p class="">Tweet text: “Real question: is burnout for management inevitable for people who actually care about the wellbeing of other people? If no, how does one combat the emotional toll of the job?”</p><p class="">This is complicated. It can be very difficult to make management into a sustainable role when you're trying to be the kind of empathetic and thoughtful manager that people deserve. I'm taking a break from it right now due to burnout. But here are a few thoughts.</p><p class="">The role of management is changing. I don't know how long this has been in progress, but the pressure on managers in tech has gone up sharply in recent years. Seemingly spurred on by the movement towards increasing diversity, equity, and inclusion in the workplace.</p><p class="">The thing that makes the new management difficult is that you're likely to be caught in the middle of parties that have competing and even contradictory incentives. Your direct reports, your executives and sometimes, your peer managers.</p><p class="">It's has always been the case that alignment between execs and individual contributors (IC) is hard to come by. There is too much lost in translation. But part of the job if the new manager is to facilitate that translation on both sides.</p><p class="">The leadership team often needs help really hearing and understanding the challenges that people in their company are facing. But ICs also have a hard time empathizing with the role of managers and executives. At various points, they will all blame you for things going wrong.</p><p class="">In a nutshell, that's why this role can be so draining. You want to care about people and help them be productive and happy. You also want to care about the success of the business and being successful by creating impact there. Those things will often feel at odds.</p><p class="">Execs are going to ask for ridiculous things. That's their job. Running a company is very hard. One of the hardest parts is that you can't actually be personally responsible for anything that needs to get done. You have to depend on others to do it.</p><p class="">Have you ever tried to get 10 people to try to do the same thing at the same time? imagine doing it for a company of 100, or 1000, or 10000. Most of the time, all they can do is give vague high level plans. The rest is up to the smart people they hired to figure out.</p><p class="">Conversely, as an IC, you will almost never feel like they have enough information to make smart decisions. Instead it feels like nobody has concrete answers to anything and nobody will take the time to find them. Yet you're still on the hook for being "productive".</p><p class="">There's a bunch of people in the middle who *might* have access to many different pieces of the puzzle. Both from those above, and those below. When asked what managers do, a friend of immediately snapped "absorb the cost of communication overhead".</p><p class="">That's you by the way. If you're a manager, you're gonna frequently find yourself in conversations with many different people who need to get things done. But none of them are talking to each other. They're hoping you'll make sure the right info gets to the right people.</p><p class="">I also mentioned your peer managers. Not everyone has gotten this memo about doing better for ICs. You'll also have to deal with other managers who care less about that. Instead they continue to respond to the same incentives as most people do. How to please their bosses.</p><p class="">While you're working so hard to find a way for everyone to collaborate, you should expect to be frustrated with other managers who aren't working as hard. Playing politics, or sacrificing their team to rack up wins will still get them ahead. And you'll have to deal.</p><p class="">So all of this being said, we can come back to the original question. Is there a way to make this job more sustainable? I think so. Many people I know and respect as managers seem to be able to keep doing it. Here are some things I'll probably do next time.</p><p class="">Accept that your job is not to "make people happy". This is tough, but you have to start here. It's not your role to make people happy. But it's also impossible. You can create an environment where they feel psychologically safe and productive. Happiness is up to them.</p><p class="">So tip number one is to give yourself a break. You can't win them all. Sometimes it will feel awful. But if you take too much responsibility for other people's decisions onto yourself, you're on the road to burnout. You'll get another opportunity to do better.</p><p class="">Tip number two is related to tip number one. You'll be more effective at this job if you find a way to let others share their problems with you. Obviously your ICs will tell you when they're unhappy. You can't always fix it. But listening and trying to help them matters a lot.</p><p class="">Execs will also complain to you. And it'll suck because you'll be thinking they have it all wrong. They don't know the people on the ground. They don't know the details. But resist the urge to try to correct them. Build trust and you'll get your chance to influence them.</p><p class="">If you spend all of your time trying to tell your bosses that they have it all wrong without taking responsibility, they're gonna start wondering why they need you.</p><p class="">The next thing you can do for yourself is to delegate more. Yeah you've heard this one before. But I bet you're not really doing it. We often have to fight against the instinct that tells us our ICs have to stay focused on their primary responsibilities.</p><p class="">The reality is that it's the modern manager who has way too much to do. Our role is often defined as "anything that is not the explicit responsibility of someone else". We can do it all. So you have to find *strategic* ways to either delegate, automate or drop things.</p><p class="">This is where a manager needs to develop a lot of unique skill and experience. Knowing who is appropriate to delegate to and how often. Knowing which things can be dropped without repercussions. This will do a lot to reduce your stress.</p><p class="">The last tip I have is to cultivate wins for yourself. Not to show other people, but to sustain yourself. One the hardest parts of this job is that you pretty much stop getting any positive reinforcement whatsoever. It's easy to start to feel like there are only problems.</p><p class="">But good managers do a lot of good. A lot of things that go well are because of what we do. It's okay to acknowledge that and feel good about it. We often have to give away credit publicly. But own your wins. Even if the only people you can tell are other managers.</p><p class="">My final tip. In order to cultivate those wins, you may need change your expectations of how long things take. Changing things for the better takes time. Just like anything worth doing. Good management is more about gardening than firefighting.</p><p class="">If you can change your expectations to really accept that things won't change right away, that'll create space for you to notice the *progress* that is being made. It happens little by little. Rarely do things change all at once. (Except for reorgs, which aren't your fault).</p><p class="">You'll also start to be able to change other people's expectations about how long things take. I've talked to a lot of managers who are making themselves feel awful. Because their reports are unhappy today and they're afraid they can't fix it before people quit.</p><p class="">But if you can start to convey to people how things can change over time, and why it *has* to work that way, you'll be doing yourself and them a favor. If you don't help people be okay with longer time horizons to see results, you'll continue to feel stressed.</p><p class="">I learned this lesson the hard way. I remember when I knew how to fix everything immediately and all people had to do was listen to me. The problem is they don't have to. Because who the fuck am I? Anybody can be right as long they ignore what other people need.</p><p class="">I hope this gives people some perspective on what this job is and how to prevent it from eating you alive. It's just a job. An important one to be sure. But you don't have to sacrifice all of yourself too it. Do your best. Get better at it. Don't forget to take note when you do.</p><script id="twitter-wjs" type="text/javascript" async defer src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js"></script>Angelheaded Hipsters Burning for the Ancient Heavenly Connection2022-04-29T11:37:24.381000ZAndy Baiohttps://www.emilygorcenski.com/post/angelheaded-hipsters-burning-for-the-ancient-heavenly-connection/<table style="border: 1px solid #E0E0E0; margin: 0; padding: 0; background-color: #F0F0F0" valign="top" align="left" cellpadding="0" width="100%">
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pfctdayelise
<a href="https://pfctdayelise.newsblur.com/story/angelheaded-hipsters/3581:843132">shared this story</a>
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Emily Gorcenski's "requiem for the Twitter that could have been" <a href="https://waxy.org/2022/04/angelheaded-hipsters-burning-for-the-ancient-heavenly-connection/">#</a>Panic! On the Editorial Page2022-04-17T23:23:22.740000ZMichael Hobbeshttps://michaelhobbes.substack.com/p/panic-on-the-editorial-page<table style="border: 1px solid #E0E0E0; margin: 0; padding: 0; background-color: #F0F0F0" valign="top" align="left" cellpadding="0" width="100%">
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pfctdayelise
<a href="https://pfctdayelise.newsblur.com/story/panic-on-the-editori/8339675:483ad1">shared this story</a>
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<p>I’m trying out a new video series where I break down the tropes of moral panic journalism line by line. The first episode is about the already-infamous <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/18/opinion/cancel-culture-free-speech-poll.html">“America Has a Free Speech Problem” editorial</a> in the New York Times. </p><div class="youtube-wrap" id="youtube2-inqOqgklH68"><iframe height="409" src="https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/inqOqgklH68?rel=0&autoplay=0&showinfo=0&enablejsapi=0" width="728"></iframe></div><p>If videos aren’t your thing, below is a text version of the script! </p><div><hr /></div><div class="captioned-image-container"><figure><a class="image-link image2" href="https://cdn.substack.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F340f9d8b-89d1-4052-b0e8-7b9e037724a7_2252x1488.png" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"><source type="image/webp" /><img alt="" class="sizing-normal" height="265.60714285714283" src="https://cdn.substack.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F340f9d8b-89d1-4052-b0e8-7b9e037724a7_2252x1488.png" width="402" /></a></figure></div><p>On March 18, the New York Times published an <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/18/opinion/cancel-culture-free-speech-poll.html">editorial</a> called “America Has a Free Speech Problem.” It was the third <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/07/opinion/campus-speech-cancel-culture.html">nearly</a> <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/03/writing-controversial-opinions-journalism/627014/">identical</a> article in national media in just two weeks and roughly the 10,000th in the three years or so since “cancel culture” became a <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RkVYvp_CumI">nationwide moral panic</a>.</p><p>The editorial engages in a number of tropes that show up frequently in moral panic journalism and I want to break them down one by one. Let’s dive in.</p><div><hr /></div><p>We begin with a howling fucking lie. The editorial tells us that Americans are losing hold of a fundamental right: “<em>the right to speak our minds and voice our opinions in public without fear of being shamed or shunned.”</em></p><div class="captioned-image-container"><figure><a class="image-link image2" href="https://cdn.substack.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fd849ae57-45f7-4b03-98cc-3abf462fa5f0_1304x304.png" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"><source type="image/webp" /><img alt="" class="sizing-normal" height="119.36196319018404" src="https://cdn.substack.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fd849ae57-45f7-4b03-98cc-3abf462fa5f0_1304x304.png" width="512" /></a></figure></div><p>This is a child’s understanding of free speech. It’s true that Americans are protected by the First Amendment, but that means the <em>government</em> can’t restrict what you say. Voicing your opinion in public has always carried the risk of being shamed or shunned. </p><p>In fact, both those acts are important elements of free speech. If a Senator says he <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/03/opinion/tom-cotton-protests-military.html">wants to shoot peaceful protestors</a>, you have the right to send him a letter telling him that he sucks. If you invite your neighbor to a BBQ and he says a bunch of QAnon shit that makes everyone else uncomfortable, you have the right not to invite him to the next BBQ. This is basic human behavior stuff and doesn’t violate anyone else’s rights.</p><div class="captioned-image-container"><figure><a class="image-link image2" href="https://cdn.substack.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F97ba3133-0d5b-4159-8cd9-84f21846ae80_1308x296.png" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"><source type="image/webp" /><img alt="" class="sizing-normal" height="110.434250764526" src="https://cdn.substack.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F97ba3133-0d5b-4159-8cd9-84f21846ae80_1308x296.png" width="488" /></a></figure></div><p>The second paragraph of the editorial includes another whopper: America’s epidemic of social silencing is hard to talk about. Addressing it feels dangerous, like a third rail. And that, in itself, is dangerous. Not only are we losing our fundamental right to speak without fear of shame, but we can’t even talk about what we’re losing.</p><p>This is obviously, hilariously, <em>screamingly</em> false. The “threat” of cancel culture is one of the most <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/projects/speech-wars/">over</a>-<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/search?query=%22cancel+culture%22">addressed</a> <a href="https://www.economist.com/leaders/2021/09/04/the-threat-from-the-illiberal-left">topics</a> in <a href="https://theweek.com/education/1009664/cancel-culture-comes-to-georgetown-law">American</a> <a href="https://harpers.org/a-letter-on-justice-and-open-debate/">journalism</a>. This editorial has appeared almost word-for-word in a dozen other establishment media outlets (and at least a hundred Substacks) on an almost weekly basis since 2015. The New York Times itself <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/column/david-brooks">employs</a> <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/column/bret-stephens">three</a> <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/by/john-mcwhorter">columnists</a> and a <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/by/michael-powell">full-time beat reporter</a> who write about almost nothing else. </p><p>This is, in fact, the worst kind of Controversial Idea™: A restatement of the status quo while pretending to challenge it</p><div><hr /></div><p>We then move into the false equivalence section of the editorial. </p><div class="captioned-image-container"><figure><a class="image-link image2" href="https://cdn.substack.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F5f3425bb-62d4-461d-a285-ffb5e6d21b1f_1270x656.png" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"><source type="image/webp" /><img alt="" class="sizing-normal" height="282.02834645669293" src="https://cdn.substack.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F5f3425bb-62d4-461d-a285-ffb5e6d21b1f_1270x656.png" width="546" /></a></figure></div><p>Many on the left, we learn, refuse to acknowledge that cancel culture exists. On the other side of the ledger, many on the right have embraced an even more extreme version of cancel culture by passing laws that will ban books and target teachers.</p><p>These are not equivalent phenomena. </p><p>Who exactly “on the left” says that cancel culture doesn’t exist? Nearly every thoughtful breakdown of this term (<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RkVYvp_CumI">including mine</a>) acknowledge that social media mobs are a genuine, and genuinely troubling, phenomenon. I do see people on Twitter saying cancel culture is fake pretty frequently but a) it’s Twitter and b) the term “cancel culture” has no fixed definition. </p><p>Right-wing moral panics often rely on concepts (“political correctness,” “critical race theory”) that contain true, false and outright conspiratorial elements. The statement “cancel culture isn’t real” could mean “social media mobs have never gotten anyone fired” I guess, but it could also mean something more like“there is no War on Christmas.” I don’t see why a specific reading of a shorthand statement is being held up as equivalent to Republican efforts to <em>literally ban books. </em></p><div><hr /></div><p>Speaking of definitions, the next problem with this editorial is that it never provides one. A few paragraphs down we learn that “However you define cancel culture, Americans know it exists and feel its burden.” The Times commissioned a poll that found only 34 percent of Americans think they enjoy complete freedom of speech.</p><div class="captioned-image-container"><figure><a class="image-link image2" href="https://cdn.substack.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fa1b25945-c16a-4c75-a71a-a6f40fc2a904_1298x536.png" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"><source type="image/webp" /><img alt="" class="sizing-normal" height="227.11864406779662" src="https://cdn.substack.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fa1b25945-c16a-4c75-a71a-a6f40fc2a904_1298x536.png" width="550" /></a></figure></div><p>There’s two flavors of chickenshit here. First, you can’t write an entire article calling something a threat to democracy without defining it. You just can’t. Fuck off.</p><p>Secondly, the fact that many people believe something does not mean that it’s true. In the 1980s, <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/4120669">more than a third of Americans</a> thought children had a 50-50 chance of being kidnapped by a stranger. Since the 1990s, large majorities of Americans have been convinced that <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/we-wont-see-you-in-court-the-era-of-tort-lawsuits-is-waning-1500930572">frivolous lawsuits are out of control</a>. In reality, stranger kidnappings are <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052748704013604576247021572489398">vanishingly rare</a> and the number of lawsuits was <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/five-myths/five-myths-about-lawsuits/2020/07/23/8006d532-c169-11ea-b4f6-cb39cd8940fb_story.html">steadily falling in the 1990s</a>. </p><p>This is how moral panics work: By amplifying <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/the-mcdonalds-hot-coffee-case/id1380008439?i=1000535147574">non-representative anecdotes</a>, the media convinces the country that rare, isolated phenomena constitute a pervasive threat. It’s frustrating that national-level editors are either unaware of this history or unwilling to consider whether they’re falling into this extremely consistent pattern. </p><div><hr /></div><p>The next section of the editorial provides more results from the New York Times poll on free expression. As with <a href="https://michaelhobbes.substack.com/p/students-self-censorship-lol?s=w">every other poll on “self-censorship,</a>” these results don’t hold up to the slightest scrutiny. </p><p>According to the very first question, we’re supposed to believe that 44% of Americans didn’t hold back from speaking due to fear of criticism<em> even once in the past year.</em> </p><div class="captioned-image-container"><figure><a class="image-link image2" href="https://cdn.substack.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fee1d9259-d563-4191-b071-acbda6a2ab68_1264x786.png" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"><source type="image/webp" /><img alt="" class="sizing-normal" height="310.9177215189873" src="https://cdn.substack.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fee1d9259-d563-4191-b071-acbda6a2ab68_1264x786.png" width="500" /></a></figure></div><p>According to the second question, more than three-quarters of Americans <em>have not harshly criticized anyone for their speech in the past year</em>. Never. Not even once. </p><div class="captioned-image-container"><figure><a class="image-link image2" href="https://cdn.substack.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F9d0e5d4f-7154-41dd-b094-04aee993accc_1258x804.png" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"><source type="image/webp" /><img alt="" class="sizing-normal" height="316.99841017488075" src="https://cdn.substack.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F9d0e5d4f-7154-41dd-b094-04aee993accc_1258x804.png" width="496" /></a></figure></div><p>It gets even more ridiculous in the crosstabs. Are we really supposed to believe that Democrats are almost <em>twice as likely </em>to harshly criticize someone for their speech? And that young people are more than twice as critical as seniors? </p><p>A far more likely scenario is that demographic groups are interpreting the poll question differently. Read it again: <em>Over the past year, have you <strong>retaliated against or harshly criticized</strong> another person because of something he or she said?</em></p><p>Again, these are not equivalent acts. Harsh criticism is a normal, maybe even essential, part of a functioning liberal society. Ideas like “women shouldn’t vote” or “gay marriage is a threat to civilization” are dumb and bad and harsh criticism is one of the ways we keep them from spreading. This is how the marketplace of ideas is supposed to work.</p><p>Retaliation, on the other hand, really does represent a threat to free speech. If people are losing their jobs or being physically attacked for their ideas, that’s something we as should indeed worry about.</p><p>So to recap: This poll is asking participants, <em>in the very same question, </em>whether they’ve done something normal and whether they’ve done something that makes them a huge piece of shit. </p><p>And it’s getting worse as we go along. Here’s the next question:</p><div class="captioned-image-container"><figure><a class="image-link image2" href="https://cdn.substack.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F71c4d30d-4db8-4b19-bb8c-1269862c13eb_1252x890.png" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"><source type="image/webp" /><img alt="" class="sizing-normal" height="352.5878594249201" src="https://cdn.substack.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F71c4d30d-4db8-4b19-bb8c-1269862c13eb_1252x890.png" width="496" /></a></figure></div><p>This is a pretty clear-cut example of <a href="https://www.maine.gov/ethics/political-activity/Push%20Poll#:~:text=A%20push%20poll%20is%20an,of%20conducting%20an%20opinion%20poll.">push polling</a>. The question isn’t asking participants <em>whether </em>holding their tongues in social situations is a threat to free speech. It’s <em>telling </em>them that refraining from speaking is a threat to free speech and then asking how concerned they are about it. </p><p>The editorial makes a big deal out of the fact that 84% of Americans said this is a very or somewhat serious problem, but of course they did. The phrasing of the question is telling them to. This is a Clever Hans clop-clop performance, not intellectual inquiry. </p><div><hr /></div><p>Now we come to my favorite section. </p><p>Freedom of speech, we learn, requires a commitment to openness as well as conscientiousness about how words can cause harm. We all need to come together to make the internet a more gracious place.</p><p>I’m gonna screenshot this next part because it’s fucking bananas.</p><div class="captioned-image-container"><figure><a class="image-link image2" href="https://cdn.substack.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fb4185363-1405-46e2-88f6-d1010bc3c1b2_1026x442.png" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"><source type="image/webp" /><img alt="" class="sizing-normal" height="442" src="https://cdn.substack.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fb4185363-1405-46e2-88f6-d1010bc3c1b2_1026x442.png" width="1026" /></a></figure></div><p>Do you see it? </p><p>Here:</p><div class="captioned-image-container"><figure><a class="image-link image2" href="https://cdn.substack.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fa462af63-f373-459f-ba85-dc43f28fd852_1018x256.png" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"><source type="image/webp" /><img alt="" class="sizing-normal" height="256" src="https://cdn.substack.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fa462af63-f373-459f-ba85-dc43f28fd852_1018x256.png" width="1018" /></a></figure></div><div class="captioned-image-container"><figure><a class="image-link image2" href="https://cdn.substack.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fb01a130c-244d-4242-88da-36f8e6b2a1c1_220x64.png" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"><source type="image/webp" /><img alt="" class="sizing-normal" height="64" src="https://cdn.substack.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fb01a130c-244d-4242-88da-36f8e6b2a1c1_220x64.png" width="220" /></a></figure></div><p><em>“Free speech demands greater self-restraint in face of words that challenge us.” </em></p><p>SELF-RESTRAINT.</p><p>The New York Times is telling you to hold your tongue before you respond to ideas that challenge you. This comes <em>immediately after</em> the same editorial board classified people holding their tongues as a grave threat to free speech.</p><p>This pulls the mask off of the project of this editorial and the entire cancel culture moral panic. </p><p>The New York Times editorial board is a group of reporters and opinion writers for the nation’s most prestigious outlet. They have a tremendous amount of power and, due to the rise of social media, receive far more feedback and criticism than they used to.</p><p>I know I don’t sound like it, but I’m actually quite sympathetic to the anxieties behind this editorial. I host podcasts and write stuff that has given people on the internet opinions about me. Some of the criticism I get is unfair, some of it is fair — that’s the kind that hurts the most — and some of it is fucking deranged. </p><p>Being a public figure in 2022 can feel like you’ve been walking around wearing a blue shirt every single day of your life and then you go on the internet and 500 people are saying you suck because you wear red shirts too much. I haven’t gotten internet criticism 1/100th as bad as my female and POC colleagues, but I feel like I understand how can get under your skin.</p><p>So I really do come to this issue from a place of human sympathy. It is a lot harder and more hurtful to be a journalist these days, especially (I imagine) if you work at an outlet that attracts a disproportionate amount of criticism.</p><p>However! </p><p>The phenomenon I’m describing, and what I believe the New York Times editorial board is experiencing, <em>is not a generalized problem</em>. It’s true that public figures receive more scrutiny and feedback than they used, but 99.9% of Americans <em>are not public figures</em>. </p><p>While I do sometimes get frustrated at the tenor of criticism about me online, I don’t spend much time ruminating or writing about it because the fact that my work is shared and discussed <em>is a profound privilege. </em>I am absurdly lucky to make a living sharing my thoughts with the public, and the (entirely expected, incredibly minor) cost of that privilege is hearing from people who wish my thoughts were different and better. </p><p>One of the most dispiriting aspects of this moral panic is watching prominent national journalists relentlessly conflate <em>things that annoy me </em>(people are mean on social media) with <em>things that threaten democracy </em>(Republicans are passing laws that restrict voting, speech and curricula). While I understand the conflation on a human level, on a journalistic level your literal job is knowing the difference. </p><div><hr /></div><blockquote></blockquote><p>The editorial starts to wind down by finally circling back to Republican efforts to restrict speech through legislation. It begins in the 25th paragraph of the story. We’ve gotten nearly 2,000 words about left-wing threats to free speech. We are about to get 300 words about right-wing threats.</p><p>So what are they? </p><div class="captioned-image-container"><figure><a class="image-link image2" href="https://cdn.substack.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F1948b5e8-785c-45f2-9711-a41eeaf5b395_1308x692.png" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"><source type="image/webp" /><img alt="" class="sizing-normal" height="280.3975535168196" src="https://cdn.substack.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F1948b5e8-785c-45f2-9711-a41eeaf5b395_1308x692.png" width="530" /></a></figure></div><p>Sounds bad! These efforts include Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill, which prevents teachers from mentioning LGBT issues in classrooms, and an anti-critical race theory law in Tennessee that aims to protect children against the “distress” caused by learning the basic facts of American history.</p><p>These laws are bad and I’m glad the editorial finally mentions them, but they’re just the tip of the iceberg. The New York Times doesn’t mention <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/21/us/politics/republican-anti-protest-laws.html">its own reporting on Republican efforts in 34 states</a> to restrict the right to protest. It also elides the Republican efforts in <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/elections/19-states-enacted-voting-restrictions-2021-rcna8342">19 states</a> to restrict the right to vote. Considering how much space they just spent arguing that holding back from saying a slur at Thanksgiving is a threat to democracy, it’s an incredible oversight not to mention <em>laws that directly threaten democracy.</em> </p><p>The editorial also, importantly, does not mention non-legislative efforts by conservatives to restrict speech and attack democracy. Remember: All of the progressive threats to free expression we’ve heard about so far come from random citizens: Uppity college students, salty social media users, un-strategic activists.</p><p>OK, so let’s compare apples to apples. If the actions of the left-wing fringe represent a liability for progressives, then the actions of the right-wing fringe should be the responsibility of the entire conservative movement.</p><p>The comparison demolishes the last shred of legitimacy for the “left-wing illiberalism” narrative. Over the last two years, the American right has implemented a nationwide, sophisticated and increasingly violent backlash to social change. </p><p>The run-up to the 2020 election saw numerous <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/2020-election-trump-supporters-accused-voter-intimidation-list-2020-10">incidents</a> of voter intimidation and even <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/24/us/michigan-whitmer-kidnap-trial.html">terrorist</a> <a href="https://edition.cnn.com/2019/08/05/us/cesar-sayoc-sentencing-monday/index.html">plots</a>. Conservative parents are organizing grassroots NGOs to <a href="http://www.pikecountycourier.com/news/local-news/latest-front-in-the-culture-wars-school-library-books-KL1973950">pull</a> <a href="http://www.pikecountycourier.com/news/local-news/latest-front-in-the-culture-wars-school-library-books-KL1973950">books</a> out of schools. </p><p>Progressive politicians across the country have experienced a <a href="https://www.latinorebels.com/2021/11/22/squadthreats/">dramatic</a> <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/05/us/politics/school-board-threats.html">increase</a> in <a href="https://www.newsweek.com/school-boards-staffs-face-threats-police-struggle-press-charges-1679543">hate speech</a>, <a href="https://www.monroecountyherald.com/stories/solberg-resigns-from-school-board,8175">doxxing</a> and <a href="https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2021-09-20/threats-members-of-congress">rape and death threats</a>. An Illinois school board member <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/illinois-school-board-member-resigns-dead-rodents-at-home-2021-10">resigned</a> after finding four dead rats in front of her home. Kshama Sawant, a <a href="https://www.thestranger.com/slog/2021/02/17/55307723/hateful-and-threatening-messages-filled-seattle-city-council-inboxes-last-year-especially-sawants">socialist woman of color</a> on the Seattle City Council, has received 109 pages worth of threats since 2020. Some allegedly came from IP addresses associated with retired police officers and Seattle firefighters.</p><p>And we haven’t even talked about the pandemic yet. It’s been clear for months that the <a href="https://www.kff.org/policy-watch/the-red-blue-divide-in-covid-19-vaccination-rates/">best predictor</a> of anti-mask and anti-vaccine beliefs is political ideology. For the last year, COVID deniers have <a href="https://www.webmd.com/lung/news/20220120/flight-turned-around-when-passenger-refuses-to-wear-mask">disrupted</a> <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2021/07/06/disputes-over-mask-mandates-comprise-75percent-of-faas-unruly-passenger-complaints-on-planes-.html">flights</a>, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jan/27/hospital-incursions-by-covid-deniers-putting-lives-at-risk-say-leaders">invaded</a> <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/55825480">hospitals</a> <a href="https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/09/health-workers-get-panic-buttons-as-covid-deniers-get-violent/">and</a> <a href="https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/clarissajanlim/workers-killed-fights-masks">physically</a> <a href="https://abcnews.go.com/US/incomprehensible-confrontations-masks-erupt-amid-covid-19-crisis/story?id=70494577">attacked</a> essential workers. They might not <em>all </em>be conservatives, but conservative media has <a href="https://www.foxnews.com/media/trucking-spokesman-simple-demand-protesting-drivers">systematically downplayed and even promoted</a> these efforts.</p><p>All these interrupted school board meetings and threatened city council members are just anecdotes, of course. It’s easy to write them off as rare, non-representative, nothing to worry about. </p><p>Perhaps that’s true, but why is the same standard not applied to college protests or social media dust-ups? Last month, Yale Law students <a href="https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2022/03/yale-law-school-laurence-silberman-free-speech-blacklist.html">loudly protested</a> the introduction of an anti-gay speaker and then walked out of talk. Despite being in compliance with the school’s free speech code (and a huge nothingburger in general), the story received <a href="https://freebeacon.com/campus/hundreds-of-yale-law-students-disrupt-bipartisan-free-speech-event/">days</a> of <a href="https://reason.com/2022/03/16/yale-law-school-students-disrupt-event-adf-aha/">catastrophizing</a> <a href="https://www.sltrib.com/news/politics/2022/04/11/utah-sen-mike-lee-ag-sean/">coverage</a> from <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/03/24/yale-law-school-silberman-protest/">national</a> <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/yale-law-students-for-censorship-silberman-shouting-panel-federalist-society-free-speech-hiring-11647793665">outlets</a>. </p><p>The same week as the Yale protest, anti-CRT activists <a href="https://www.leadertelegram.com/news/front-page/dozens-speak-about-equity-training-materials-at-school-board-meeting/article_0060fdd1-ba64-518e-b29d-8ab7a29455bc.html">interrupted</a> a school board meeting in Eau Clair, Wisconsin. One accused school board members of “grooming our children as human sex traffickers.” The board president later received a threat from a sender named "Kill All Marxist Teachers." The story received a few brief notices in national news pages but no op-ed condemnations nor feature treatments casting it as part of an anti-democratic trend. </p><div><hr /></div><p>The editorial ends, both bafflingly and predictably, by blaming liberals for the conservative efforts to restrict speech. </p><div class="captioned-image-container"><figure><a class="image-link image2" href="https://cdn.substack.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F25fd6634-5dd0-483d-9dbe-3d9bee670c04_1276x366.png" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"><source type="image/webp" /><img alt="" class="sizing-normal" height="167.51097178683386" src="https://cdn.substack.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F25fd6634-5dd0-483d-9dbe-3d9bee670c04_1276x366.png" width="584" /></a></figure></div><p>If I quoted this without screengrabbing it you’d think I was making it up. Conservative complaints about progressive speech — going back to Elvis shaking his hips and beyond — are one of the most consistent features of the 20th century. But today, the Times tells us, they wouldn’t be happening if libs hadn’t been so insistent about trigger warnings.</p><p>And that’s it, the cancel culture panic in a nutshell: Left-wing threats to free speech may not be backed up by any evidence and totally unconnected to any Democratic policy agenda. But! If we’re not careful, someday, the Democratic Party could be as dangerous as Republicans are now.</p><p>Can’t wait to read 50 more articles about it. </p><br><br><img src="https://cdn.substack.com/image/youtube/w_728,c_limit/inqOqgklH68" />All Cocktails Should Be Slightly Disgusting2022-03-27T00:19:24.382000ZChris Thompsonhttps://defector.com/all-cocktails-should-be-slightly-disgusting/<table style="border: 1px solid #E0E0E0; margin: 0; padding: 0; background-color: #F0F0F0" valign="top" align="left" cellpadding="0" width="100%">
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<b>
pfctdayelise
<a href="https://pfctdayelise.newsblur.com/story/all-cocktails-should/7960669:da3438">shared this story</a>
from <img src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/icons.newsblur.com/7960669.png" style="vertical-align: middle;width:16px;height:16px;"> Defector.</b>
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Several Defector idiots were recently made aware of the Paralyzer cocktail. The Paralyzer, which apparently is quite popular in Canada, consists of vodka and coffee liqueur, poured into a glass of Coca-Cola, and then fattened up with a half-shot of heavy whipping cream. At first glance this concoction seems chaotic, and possibly repulsive, but here […]<br><br><img src="https://lede-admin.defector.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/28/2022/03/GettyImages-107624930.jpg?w=564" />20 Men From 20 Different Countries Dressed In Their National Costumes For The Mister Global 2021 Pageant2022-03-27T00:16:13.009000ZSaumya Ratanhttps://www.demilked.com/national-costumes-mister-global-2021/<table style="border: 1px solid #E0E0E0; margin: 0; padding: 0; background-color: #F0F0F0" valign="top" align="left" cellpadding="0" width="100%">
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<b>
pfctdayelise
<a href="https://pfctdayelise.newsblur.com/story/20-men-from-20-diffe/591399:251b7e">shared this story</a>
from <img src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/icons.newsblur.com/591399.png" style="vertical-align: middle;width:16px;height:16px;"> DeMilked.</b>
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<p>Although women’s beauty pageants are more popular worldwide, it doesn’t mean that male beauty pageants don’t exist. There are many male beauty pageants out there that have been recognized for their amazing shows.</p>
<p>Recently, the Mister Global 2021 pageant was organized in Thailand, and many men from different countries participated in it. They were seen rocking various traditional outfits for the ‘national costume competition’ in the pageant. Check out some of the best attires that were exhibited in the competition.</p>
<p>More info: <a href="https://www.instagram.com/officialmisterglobal/" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" target="_blank">Mister Global</a></p>
<h2>#1 Bolivia</h2>
<p><img alt="" class="alignnone size-full wp-image-210374" height="875" src="https://static.demilked.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/national-costumes-mister-global-2021-1.jpeg" width="700" /></p>
<p>Image source: <a class="open-list-submission-source" href="https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=512058996952010&set=a.512060806951829&__tn__=%2CO*F" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">David Ryo</a></p>
<h2>#2 Hong Kong</h2>
<p><img alt="" class="alignnone size-full wp-image-210375" height="875" src="https://static.demilked.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/national-costumes-mister-global-2021-2.jpeg" width="700" /></p>
<p>Image source: <a class="open-list-submission-source" href="https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=512059236951986&set=a.512060806951829&__tn__=%2CO*F" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">David Ryo</a></p>
<h2>#3 Sri Lanka</h2>
<p><img alt="" class="alignnone size-full wp-image-210376" height="875" src="https://static.demilked.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/national-costumes-mister-global-2021-3.jpeg" width="700" /></p>
<p>Image source: <a class="open-list-submission-source" href="https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=512059266951983&set=a.512060806951829&__tn__=%2CO*F" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">David Ryo</a></p>
<h2>#4 Czech Republic</h2>
<p><img alt="" class="alignnone size-full wp-image-210377" height="875" src="https://static.demilked.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/national-costumes-mister-global-2021-4.jpeg" width="700" /></p>
<p>Image source: <a class="open-list-submission-source" href="https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=512058936952016&set=a.512060806951829&__tn__=%2CO*F" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">David Ryo</a></p>
<h2>#5 United Kingdom</h2>
<p><img alt="" class="alignnone size-full wp-image-210378" height="875" src="https://static.demilked.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/national-costumes-mister-global-2021-5.jpeg" width="700" /></p>
<p>Image source: <a class="open-list-submission-source" href="https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=512059856951924&set=a.512060806951829&__tn__=%2CO*F" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">David Ryo</a></p>
<h2>#6 Vietnam</h2>
<p><img alt="" class="alignnone size-full wp-image-210379" height="875" src="https://static.demilked.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/national-costumes-mister-global-2021-6.jpeg" width="700" /></p>
<p>Image source: <a class="open-list-submission-source" href="https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=512059756951934&set=a.512060806951829&__tn__=%2CO*F" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">David Ryo</a></p>
<h2>#7 Laos</h2>
<p><img alt="" class="alignnone size-full wp-image-210380" height="875" src="https://static.demilked.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/national-costumes-mister-global-2021-7.jpeg" width="700" /></p>
<p>Image source: <a class="open-list-submission-source" href="https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=512059363618640&set=a.512060806951829&__tn__=%2CO*F" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">David Ryo</a></p>
<h2>#8 India</h2>
<p><img alt="" class="alignnone size-full wp-image-210381" height="875" src="https://static.demilked.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/national-costumes-mister-global-2021-8.jpeg" width="700" /></p>
<p>Image source: <a class="open-list-submission-source" href="https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=512059053618671&set=a.512060806951829&__tn__=%2CO*F" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">David Ryo</a></p>
<h2>#9 Ecuador</h2>
<p><img alt="" class="alignnone size-full wp-image-210382" height="875" src="https://static.demilked.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/national-costumes-mister-global-2021-9.jpeg" width="700" /></p>
<p>Image source: <a class="open-list-submission-source" href="https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=512059003618676&set=a.512060806951829&__tn__=%2CO*F" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">David Ryo</a></p>
<h2>#10 Indonesia</h2>
<p><img alt="" class="alignnone size-full wp-image-210383" height="875" src="https://static.demilked.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/national-costumes-mister-global-2021-10.jpeg" width="700" /></p>
<p>Image source: <a class="open-list-submission-source" href="https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=512059356951974&set=a.512060806951829&__tn__=%2CO*F" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">David Ryo</a></p>
<h2>#11 Korea</h2>
<p><img alt="" class="alignnone size-full wp-image-210384" height="875" src="https://static.demilked.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/national-costumes-mister-global-2021-11.jpeg" width="700" /></p>
<p>Image source: <a class="open-list-submission-source" href="https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=512058796952030&set=a.512060806951829&__tn__=%2CO*F" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">David Ryo</a></p>
<h2>#12 Thailand</h2>
<p><img alt="" class="alignnone size-full wp-image-210385" height="875" src="https://static.demilked.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/national-costumes-mister-global-2021-12.jpeg" width="700" /></p>
<p>Image source: <a class="open-list-submission-source" href="https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=512059830285260&set=a.512060806951829&__tn__=%2CO*F" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">David Ryo</a></p>
<h2>#13 Mexico</h2>
<p><img alt="" class="alignnone size-full wp-image-210386" height="875" src="https://static.demilked.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/national-costumes-mister-global-2021-13.jpeg" width="700" /></p>
<p>Image source: <a class="open-list-submission-source" href="https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=512059073618669&set=a.512060806951829&__tn__=%2CO*F" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">David Ryo</a></p>
<h2>#14 Nigeria</h2>
<p><img alt="" class="alignnone size-full wp-image-210387" height="875" src="https://static.demilked.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/national-costumes-mister-global-2021-14.jpeg" width="700" /></p>
<p>Image source: <a class="open-list-submission-source" href="https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=512059163618660&set=a.512060806951829&__tn__=%2CO*F" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">David Ryo</a></p>
<h2>#15 Philippines</h2>
<p><img alt="" class="alignnone size-full wp-image-210388" height="875" src="https://static.demilked.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/national-costumes-mister-global-2021-15.jpeg" width="700" /></p>
<p>Image source: <a class="open-list-submission-source" href="https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=512059473618629&set=a.512060806951829&__tn__=%2CO*F" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">David Ryo</a></p>
<h2>#16 Cambodia</h2>
<p><img alt="" class="alignnone size-full wp-image-210389" height="875" src="https://static.demilked.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/national-costumes-mister-global-2021-16.jpeg" width="700" /></p>
<p>Image source: <a class="open-list-submission-source" href="https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=512058926952017&set=a.512060806951829&__tn__=%2CO*F" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">David Ryo</a></p>
<h2>#17 Cuba</h2>
<p><img alt="" class="alignnone size-full wp-image-210390" height="875" src="https://static.demilked.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/national-costumes-mister-global-2021-17.jpeg" width="700" /></p>
<p>Image source: <a class="open-list-submission-source" href="https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=512058723618704&set=a.512060806951829&__tn__=%2CO*F" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">David Ryo</a></p>
<h2>#18 Peru</h2>
<p><img alt="" class="alignnone size-full wp-image-210391" height="875" src="https://static.demilked.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/national-costumes-mister-global-2021-18.jpeg" width="700" /></p>
<p>Image source: <a class="open-list-submission-source" href="https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=512059193618657&set=a.512060806951829&__tn__=%2CO*F" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">David Ryo</a></p>
<h2>#19 Malaysia</h2>
<p><img alt="" class="alignnone size-full wp-image-210392" height="875" src="https://static.demilked.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/national-costumes-mister-global-2021-19.jpeg" width="700" /></p>
<p>Image source: <a class="open-list-submission-source" href="https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=512059626951947&set=a.512060806951829&__tn__=%2CO*F" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">David Ryo</a></p>
<h2>#20 South Africa</h2>
<p><img alt="" class="alignnone size-full wp-image-210393" height="875" src="https://static.demilked.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/national-costumes-mister-global-2021-20.jpeg" width="700" /></p>
<p>Image source: <a class="open-list-submission-source" href="https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=512059553618621&set=a.512060806951829&__tn__=%2CO*F" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">David Ryo</a></p>
<p>The post <a href="https://www.demilked.com/national-costumes-mister-global-2021/" rel="nofollow">20 Men From 20 Different Countries Dressed In Their National Costumes For The Mister Global 2021 Pageant</a> appeared first on <a href="https://www.demilked.com" rel="nofollow">DeMilked</a>.</p>
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</div>do whatever makes your heart sing2022-03-13T12:09:50.392000ZVisakan Veerasamyhttp://www.visakanv.com/blog/heart/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=heart<table style="border: 1px solid #E0E0E0; margin: 0; padding: 0; background-color: #F0F0F0" valign="top" align="left" cellpadding="0" width="100%">
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<b>
pfctdayelise
<a href="https://pfctdayelise.newsblur.com/story/do-whatever-makes-yo/4702576:8e5690">shared this story</a>
from <img src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/icons.newsblur.com/4702576.png" style="vertical-align: middle;width:16px;height:16px;"> @visakanv's blog.</b>
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<p>“Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.” – Howard Thurman A very common question I get from my friends in all sorts of contexts is “What should I do? What should I write? What should… <a class="more-link" href="http://www.visakanv.com/blog/heart/">Continue reading <span class="screen-reader-text">do whatever makes your heart sing</span></a></p>
<p>The post <a href="http://www.visakanv.com/blog/heart/" rel="nofollow">do whatever makes your heart sing</a> appeared first on <a href="http://www.visakanv.com/blog" rel="nofollow">@visakanv's blog</a>.</p>Titanic with a Cat2022-02-16T04:12:09.189000ZAndy Baiohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kEPfM3jSoBw<table style="border: 1px solid #E0E0E0; margin: 0; padding: 0; background-color: #F0F0F0" valign="top" align="left" cellpadding="0" width="100%">
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<b>
pfctdayelise
<a href="https://pfctdayelise.newsblur.com/story/titanic-with-a-cat/3581:df5a27">shared this story</a>
from <img src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/icons.newsblur.com/3581.png" style="vertical-align: middle;width:16px;height:16px;"> Waxy.org.</b>
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every <a href="https://www.youtube.com/c/OwlKitty/videos">OwlKitty</a> video is just sublime <a href="https://waxy.org/2022/02/titanic-with-a-cat/">#</a>the new hire who showed up is not the same person we interviewed2022-01-31T21:38:39.323000ZAsk a Managerhttps://www.askamanager.org/2022/01/the-new-hire-who-showed-up-is-not-the-same-person-we-interviewed.html<table style="border: 1px solid #E0E0E0; margin: 0; padding: 0; background-color: #F0F0F0" valign="top" align="left" cellpadding="0" width="100%">
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<b>
pfctdayelise
<a href="https://pfctdayelise.newsblur.com/story/the-new-hire-who-sho/6233987:bbf613">shared this story</a>
from <img src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/icons.newsblur.com/6233987.png" style="vertical-align: middle;width:16px;height:16px;"> Ask a Manager.</b>
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<p>This post, <a href="https://www.askamanager.org/2022/01/the-new-hire-who-showed-up-is-not-the-same-person-we-interviewed.html" rel="nofollow">the new hire who showed up is not the same person we interviewed</a> , was originally published by Alison Green on <a href="https://www.askamanager.org" rel="nofollow">Ask a Manager</a>.</p>
<p>A reader writes:</p>
<p><em>This is a situation currently unfolding at my husband’s office so I’m a very amused bystander and thought I’d get your opinion on this craziness.</em></p>
<p><em>My husband works in IT and is on the leadership team at a midsized private company. He was part of a panel that recently interviewed a number of folks for an open position on his team. They are entirely remote. They had a few candidates for a first and second round, and had one make it to a third final round before an offer. “John” accepted the offer and started last week!</em></p>
<p><em>Except … it’s not the John my husband remembers. My husband was confused and said the following things were odd:</em></p>
<p><em>– John has different hair and now wears glasses.</em></p>
<p><em>– John is talking extensively about working in a garage because his three children and wife are home. In the interview, he made references to being single and was visibly in an indoor desk area.</em></p>
<p><em>– John can’t answer a number of questions that they previously discussed in the interview, things pretty pivotal to the position.</em></p>
<p><em>– Husband describes John as being aloof and pretty timid whereas John was confident and articulate when they interviewed him.</em></p>
<p><em>He is convinced this is not the person they hired. I agreed that all those things taken together make this very odd but each one could have a valid explanation. I told him the most likely explanation is the hiring committee simply mixed up the candidates (or HR did) and the wrong John was offered and accepted. He agreed but said since only one candidate made it to the third round, that is really unlikely (other candidates had already been sent rejections before the third round even occurred). He’s confident they couldn’t have been mixed up.</em></p>
<p><em>All of this is a bit moot as my husband is in his notice period and will be moving to a new company in a few weeks … but he feels like he is going crazy. So my question is … is this a thing?! In a now mostly virtual world, are people perhaps paying people to conduct interviews for them?!?</em></p>
<p><em>The situation is actively unfolding so I’m sure I’ll have updates. The less mature side of me wants him to start planting fake references to the interview conversations they had to see if John bites, but I digress.</em></p>
<p>After receiving this letter, I got updates. Many updates (probably because I greeted each one enthusiastically and requested more)! So let’s do those first and then get to the question.</p>
<p><strong>Update 1</strong></p>
<p>11:57 am</p>
<p><em>A very quick update!</em></p>
<p><em>My husband just came out of his office and said he has a text from his boss “Holly” on his personal cell because she didn’t want it on the company network. She wants to know if he thinks John is acting a lot different than the John they hired. He responded and told her all of his suspicions with the caveat that he didn’t want to accuse him of anything but something is very off. She too thinks it’s unlikely candidates were mixed up because she has his resume and John claims all the same work history/credentials as the John they interviewed.</em></p>
<p><em>They are on a call with HR as I type this. Unclear if they are working out an error by the hiring committee /HR or unraveling fraud. More to come.</em></p>
<p><em>Alas, my planting fake call-backs idea had no time to come to fruition.</em></p>
<p><strong>Update 2</strong></p>
<p>12:25 pm</p>
<p><em>Husband just got off a call with Holly, their HR business partner, and the internal recruiter who sent the offer. They confirmed the right candidate was offered a job and agreed many things were odd. (Another oddity revealed on that phone call … John didn’t know who Holly was; she had to reintroduce herself and he asked about her role … Holly was on two of three rounds of interviews and they extensively reviewed their org chart and her role.)</em></p>
<p><em>They are currently speaking with their legal team to discuss options and when to bring John into the mix to try to explain.</em></p>
<p><strong>Update 3</strong></p>
<p>1:43 pm</p>
<p><em>It’s definitely been a crazy morning! They are waiting to hear back from legal — I think they are weighing whether they confront John and let him try to explain or let him go anyway. He either lied about his identity or lied about his experience since he’s unable to speak about the basics of the job now so regardless it seems like he will be gone. I will keep you updated on what he learns next!</em></p>
<p><em>Husband in a rabbit hole of research now and apparently this fake interviewing is a thing (the job in question is a mulesoft architect). Bizarre!</em></p>
<p><strong>Update 4</strong></p>
<p>3:13 pm</p>
<p><em>They heard back from legal … who are less than thrilled about the situation! They approved HR to have a conversation with John regarding what has been reported (more in the vein of “there’s been some concerns about performance and you overselling abilities” and less of the We Think You Are a Liar route).</em></p>
<p><em>In the meantime, legal approved security to put a trace on John’s computer to review if there have been outside messages or if his work is being completed with outside help or on a different computer altogether. My husband said the general consensus among the group on the call is that the talk with HR is going to send up a quick red flag and John is likely to resign claiming a poor fit rather than get caught committing or admitting fraud.</em></p>
<p><em>Hopefully another fun update soon! My husband is getting sick of me sitting against his office door eavesdropping :)</em></p>
<p><strong>Update 5</strong></p>
<p>5:07 pm</p>
<p><em>I think my last update for a while: as soon as HR got on the call with him, before they could get through their first question, John said the words “I quit” and hung up the calls. He has since been unreachable!!</em></p>
<p><em>So good riddance John. Their security teams are trying to discover what all he downloaded, if they’ll be able to get their equipment back, is John really his real name, etc. !!</em></p>
<p><em>Incredibly bizarre situation. Hoping it was a failed case of trying to get a job and not trying to steal company info but who knows — they may never!</em></p>
<p>First, thank you for this saga, which I found highly diverting.</p>
<p>So yeah, in response to whether this is a thing … as your husband found, the <a href="https://planet-technology.com/blog/fake-candidates-and-how-to-spot-them/">internet</a> <a href="https://www.focusgts.com/how-to-avoid-the-fake-candidate-scam-in-the-tech-industry/">claims</a> it’s <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/how-spot-fake-candidates-video-interviews-nick-shah/">a thing</a>, particularly in IT jobs and largely because of the increase in virtual interviewing. The idea is that one person interviews and another takes the job, or one person interviews while another person feeds them answers. You could short-circuit the first category by having people show I.D. at the start of virtual interviews, but the second category is harder and you’d need to address it by being forthright and direct if the person you hire doesn’t seem to have the skills they appeared to have in the interview … which is something good managers should do regardless, but it’s easy to fall into thinking maybe the person is just still adjusting to the role and then suddenly you’re two months in with someone who was never going to be able to do the job because they Cyrano de Bergerac’d their interview.</p>
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I like the way this man thinks <a href="https://waxy.org/2022/01/alex-falcone-has-nothing-to-hide/">#</a>You’re not doomed to get Omicron2022-01-10T03:58:14.379000ZAndy Baiohttps://calmcovid.substack.com/p/youre-not-doomed-to-get-omicron<table style="border: 1px solid #E0E0E0; margin: 0; padding: 0; background-color: #F0F0F0" valign="top" align="left" cellpadding="0" width="100%">
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<div><div><a class="external" href="https://www.bostonmagazine.com/category/news/" rel="nofollow">News</a><br/><div><p>Twenty months after a brilliant surgeon was killed riding her bike, a controversial police investigation ruled it a tragic roadside collision. But that’s just the beginning of the story.</p></div><p><img alt="" height="669" src="https://cdn10.bostonmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2018/04/bike-death-1.jpg" width="900"/></p><p>The services were starting to weigh on Reverend Laura Everett. <em>I don’t want to do these anymore</em>, she thought to herself on a warm evening in August 2015 as she prepared to mourn the passing of Anita Kurmann, a 38-year-old Swiss surgeon who was riding her bike through the intersection of Massachusetts Avenue and Beacon Street when a flatbed tractor-trailer crushed her to death. <em>I don’t want to stand by the side of the road and dedicate another ghost bike.</em></p><p>Everett arrived a few minutes before 6:30 p.m. to the intersection where Kurmann had died. She draped a golden stole over her black clerical shirt with a white collar, and ran through a mental checklist of the ceremony ahead: opening remarks; a brief history of ghost bikes, which are dedicated to cyclists killed on the road; a moment of silence; comments from friends and community members; and, lastly, the blessing of the ghost bike—in this case, an old city cruiser painted white with a wire basket and an engraved plaque commemorating Kurmann.</p><p>Several years ago, Everett didn’t know what a ghost bike ceremony was, let alone how to lead one. There were no references to them in the many prayer books she had studied, no official format to follow. Now, though, it seemed like she was performing one every few months and had, almost by accident, committed much of the service to memory. “You’re welcomed here if you bring your anger, your grief, and your sorrow,” she told the more than 100 people who gathered that evening. “You’re welcomed here if you bring your rage.”</p><p>Looking around, Everett could see that cyclists from all corners of the city had pedaled there to pay their respects. The owner of a nearby convenience store, whose security camera captured the grisly crash, had also joined the crowd, as had several officers from the Boston Police Department’s bicycle unit. “By being present here, you honor Anita’s life and her death,” Everett said, raising her voice over the blaring horns and rumbling diesel engines of passing traffic. “By being present here, together we will proclaim with our bodies and our bicycles that Anita’s death will not go unnoticed.”</p><div><img alt="" height="791" src="https://cdn10.bostonmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2018/04/bike-death-2.jpg" width="900"/><p>A representative from the Swiss consulate places flowers at the dedication of Anita Kurmann’s ghost bike. / Photograph by Olga Khvan</p></div><p>Other than a handful of colleagues, nobody at the ceremony had known Kurmann. It didn’t seem to matter, though, as strangers stood shoulder to shoulder in the summer heat, bowed their heads, and wept for a woman they had never met. A representative from the Swiss consulate placed a bouquet of white flowers in the bike’s basket. Boston Police Captain Jack Danilecki expressed his condolences, telling the crowd that as a bike cop he knew how dangerous the streets are and that he supported their activism. Then the ceremony circled back to Everett, who listed off the names of four other Boston-area cyclists who were killed in collisions during the year leading up to Kurmann’s death. The oldest, Marcia Diehl, was 65. “We who continue to ride these roads confess that some days we ride scared,” she said, “and some days we ride angry.”</p><p>As the ceremony came to a close, the crowd huddled around the bike and Everett asked everyone there to place their hands upon it. Her voice shook with tears while she led them in a final prayer. Some in the crowd clasped their hands and clenched their jaws, wondering whether the driver who killed Kurmann would simply get away with it.</p><p><strong>Friday, August 7, 2015, began</strong> like most weekdays for Anita Kurmann. She woke early, packed her MacBook, Kindle, blue Adidas jacket, and some work papers into a black Timbuk2 courier bag, and left her apartment in East Cambridge. Helmet strapped snugly to her head, she hopped onto her gray Trek Soho and pedaled through the sun-soaked streets toward work.</p><p>Boston was never meant to be a permanent stop for Kurmann. She’d grown up in the suburbs in Switzerland, and had steadily risen through the medical ranks, establishing herself as a compassionate and technically gifted surgeon. She completed her residency at the University Hospital of Bern, one of the oldest and most prestigious hospitals in her homeland, and developed an expertise in endocrinology. “She was friendly and had a very sensitive personality,” says Daniel Candinas, managing director of the hospital’s department of visceral surgery and medicine, who began working with Kurmann in 2008. “She could at times be funny, but she was not a joker. She was very serious, very professional, and quite firm when she had something in mind.” Plus, Candinas adds, “She was an enthusiastic biker.” Wind, rain, or snow, it was a safe bet that Kurmann had ridden to work.</p><p>After several years and thousands of hours in operating rooms, Kurmann was looking for new challenges. In particular, she told Candinas, she hoped to combine her surgical skills with research into stem cells in an effort to help the countless patients afflicted with thyroid cancer and genetic diseases of the gland. Candinas had little reason to doubt Kurmann’s abilities and threw his support behind the idea. Kurmann began looking for opportunities to pursue her dreams, and there was no better medical community in the world in which to do so than Boston’s.</p><p>In 2013, Kurmann rented an apartment and began splitting her time between a Boston University School of Medicine laboratory and a Beth Israel endocrinology unit. Doctors Darrell Kotton and Tony Hollenberg took her under their wing. “We worked beautifully together,” says Kotton, who leads a regenerative-medicine lab at BU.</p><p>Two years later, Kurmann’s work was finally paying off. <em>Cell Stem Cell</em>, among the most prestigious scientific journals in the world, had accepted her research paper and she was overjoyed. On July 22, 2015, she emailed Candinas at home in Switzerland to share the good news and discuss her return to Europe. Her plan was to finish out the calendar year in Boston and then rejoin the hospital in Bern, where she could run her own laboratory to continue her research.</p><p>Sixteen days later, Kurmann set out for work, steering her bike through Cambridge toward the Massachusetts Avenue Bridge, a flat, wind-whipped slab of road that spans the girth of the Charles River and empties into the Back Bay. As she pedaled down the bike lane, cars and trucks whizzed past her, including a Mack truck with a 48-foot-long flatbed trailer. By 7:03 a.m., she had cleared the bridge and rolled down the gentle hill toward the intersection of Massachusetts Avenue and Beacon Street. Traffic was light, but the one designated “shared lane” for bikes and cars was lined with sedans and box trucks moving at a good clip. Kurmann stayed to the far-right side of the road, hugging the curb in an unmarked lane that was delineated by a single stripe of white paint.</p><div><img alt="" height="608" src="https://cdn10.bostonmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2018/04/bike-death-4.jpg" width="900"/><p>Years later, Kurmann’s weathered ghost bike remains a stark reminder for bikers crossing the intersection. / Photograph by Ken Richardson</p></div><p>It is impossible to know what raced through Kurmann’s mind when she entered the intersection. She was side by side with the hulking truck that had passed her on the bridge when it suddenly swung wide, momentarily occupying two lanes on Massachusetts Avenue, before cutting a sharp right onto Beacon Street. As it rounded the corner, Kurmann disappeared under its wheels. A second or two later, her body and bike lay crumpled in the crosswalk. The truck never stopped.</p><p>The driver of an SUV that was traveling a few feet behind Kurmann slammed on the brakes and jumped out of the car. A pedestrian on the other side of the intersection sprinted toward her. They arrived at a gruesome scene: Kurmann’s face and skull had sustained massive wounds and it was clear there was no resuscitating her.</p><p>Police and ambulances screeched toward the corner and arrived within minutes. Officers secured the area with yellow crime-scene tape and alerted BPD’s five-person Fatal Collision Investigative Team. The owner of a corner convenience store spoke with a detective and provided grainy surveillance-camera footage of the crash. Meanwhile, other witnesses made their way to police headquarters to give statements, and the Regional Intelligence Center, the nerve center of BPD’s surveillance efforts, began gathering additional footage from nearby traffic cameras. Officers across the region were instructed to be on the lookout for a flatbed truck with a red sleeper cab.</p><p>News of the crash and the ensuing manhunt spread quickly, and soon tips started coming in to the police. One caller said the suspect vehicle was likely an entertainment truck bound for Fenway Park. Another said he saw a truck with Quebec plates “near the Galleria Mall” that matched the cops’ description. All were dead ends. As the hours passed, officers cleared the crime scene and traffic once again resumed rolling through the busy intersection.</p><p>Detectives got the break they needed at 5:09 p.m., more than 10 hours after Kurmann’s death, when Boston Police Sergeant Joseph Horton received a call from a man named Matthew Levari. Levari explained that a friend had told him police were searching for a truck that looked a lot like his. After turning on to Beacon Street, he told Horton, he drove to a construction site in the Fenway neighborhood, delivered his cargo, and then got on the highway. Now he was at a rest stop on the Pennsylvania Turnpike in Allentown, more than 300 miles from Boston. He inspected his truck, he said, and saw no sign of damage, no indication that he had run over Kurmann.</p><p>Horton told Levari to leave his rig where it was, stay put, and wait for a call. He then dialed up the homicide unit. It appeared the cops had their man.</p><p><strong>The relationship between Boston’s police</strong> and the city’s bicycling community has long been fraught. Many of those who gathered at Kurmann’s ghost bike ceremony already knew the score: When a professional driver operating a large truck kills a cyclist, there are rarely criminal charges. In recent years there have been nine such cases in Massachusetts, and not one of the truck drivers has been indicted, according to the Massachusetts Bicycle Coalition. Still, says Joel Feingold, a Brookline town meeting member and a cycling advocate, Kurmann’s case seemed different. There were public pressure, media interest, and troubling optics. After all, a truck driver ran over a world-class scientist in broad daylight and then drove to Pennsylvania. “We thought in all likelihood,” Feingold says, “that there would be charges.”</p><p>In the days, weeks, and months that followed, detectives aggressively pursued their investigation into Levari. They impounded the tractor-trailer, obtained a search warrant for Levari’s cell phone and GPS device, studied his driving logs, and reviewed the vehicle’s safety inspection history. Accident-reconstruction experts watched and rewatched video footage of Levari running over Kurmann, and the crime lab ran a DNA test that confirmed that a smear of blood on one of Levari’s back tires was from Kurmann, the type of fundamental evidence on which successful prosecutions are built.</p><p>It was anyone’s guess how long the investigation would take. As with most cases, the police and the Suffolk County District Attorney’s Office kept mum. Every so often, Feingold called the prosecutor’s office and asked for an update on the case. Three months passed. Nothing. Another three months. Not a word. A year later, still nothing. Feingold remained pleasantly persistent. Finally, after 20 long months, he received some news: The DA was not going to prosecute the truck driver.</p><p>Feingold was stunned. Officers had finished their investigation and concluded, according to their report, that “the primary cause of this crash is the action of the victim, Ms. Kurmann, when she failed to recognize the turning truck and was outside of the truck driver’s field of view.” In other words, in the BPD’s eyes, Kurmann was entirely at fault.</p><p><strong>Unfortunately, there’s nothing surprising</strong> about the way Kurmann died. Between 2009 and 2012, at least 14 collisions between vehicles and bicycles occurred at the intersection of Massachusetts Avenue and Beacon Street, more than anywhere else in the city. Nearly half of those collisions, as in the case of Kurmann’s death, involved vehicles turning onto Beacon Street from Mass. Ave. Crashes involving right turns are so common, in fact, that they’re known simply as “right hooks.” And more often than not, it’s a large commercial truck—not a car—that kills a cyclist. Such trucks “are not designed to drive in a city,” says Josh Zisson, a local attorney who specializes in bicycle law but was not involved in the Kurmann case. “They are not designed to interact with all the other forms of traffic, including bikes and pedestrians.”</p><p>From outdated infrastructure to congested roads to distracted drivers, the odds are stacked against Boston’s cyclists at just about every corner. There is one problem, though, that strikes Zisson as especially troublesome, particularly when it comes to litigating cases: a culture of victim-blaming by police. Though police vehemently deny it, he says that “there absolutely is bias among police officers when it comes to evaluating a crash between a bicycle and motor vehicle.”</p><p>As an example, Zisson tells me about a former client named Adrienne Naylor. In 2015, the same year Kurmann was killed, Naylor was riding through Allston when she approached the intersection of Cambridge Street and Harvard Avenue. The green arrow told her it was safe to make a left turn, but when she rolled into the intersection, a car collided with her. Naylor suffered a shattered femur and head injuries from being dragged along the pavement. Statements in the police report, however, pinned the blame entirely on her: “The driver of the vehicle which struck the victim stated that they were driving through the intersection on a green light and out of nowhere the cyclist appeared, and was on the windshield of the car. All the passengers in the car concurred with the statement.”</p><p>It took Zisson just a day of legwork, he says, to prove the police report was flawed. He obtained security-camera footage of the intersection, which showed Naylor had had the right of way, and then tracked down a motorist who had seen the entire accident. The man told Zisson he was sitting in his car when another vehicle blew clean through a red light and smashed into Naylor. The man also told Zisson that he’d tried to give the police a statement but was brushed aside. Furthermore, Zisson notes, the passengers in the car who corroborated the driver’s version of the story were the driver’s elderly grandparents—“not exactly disinterested witnesses,” he says—and police never interviewed Naylor before filing their report. “The officer,” Zisson says, “didn’t even think that he needed to speak with her.”</p><p>Ask any of the attorneys who regularly represent bicyclists, and they’ll likely share similar tales of frustration. Boston lawyer Andrew Fischer, for instance, has lodged several email complaints with city officials regarding the actions of police officers who respond to crashes between bikes and cars. According to a December 2016 email to police, Fischer claimed an officer declined to obtain the name, address, and insurance information of a driver who hit his client while she was riding her bike. “When he refused,” the email said, “one of the witnesses repeated the request. He was told by the officer to mind his [expletive deleted] business or he’d be arrested.”</p><p>In the Kurmann case, police officially closed the criminal investigation in 2017 and the surgeon’s family moved forward with a civil lawsuit against Levari. “One of the most difficult aspects of the case was that Anita’s family had to wait 20 months to obtain the video footage showing how the incident occurred,” says Ronald Gluck, who represented Kurmann’s family, adding that he “hounded” the district attorney’s office for information and video footage during the investigation, to no avail. He understands that police and prosecutors have concerns about evidence leaking to the media and corrupting an investigation, but he says this type of prolonged wait for video footage that police had from the day the crash occurred places an extraordinary emotional strain on loved ones. “Families,” he says, “should have the right to know the facts in these situations.”</p><p>In 2017, Kurmann’s estate and Levari reached a financial settlement, the terms of which are confidential. “The settlement didn’t represent a concession or an admission on the part of Mr. Levari that he was responsible for the accident in any way,” says attorney John Knight, who represented Levari in the civil case. “We never for a second questioned what a tragedy this was or how much the family was impacted…. I thought it was entirely appropriate to settle a case such as this. At the end of the day we could have litigated this case for three or four years, maybe it goes to trial, and regardless of what happens at the end of it, the Kurmann family still lost Anita.”</p><p>With the police investigation completed and the civil suit wrapped up, it finally seemed that the sad ordeal had come to an end. Kurmann’s family and Levari were poised to let go of the past and begin moving forward. Neither had any way of knowing, however, that Feingold and a handful of cycling advocates had an altogether different idea.</p><p><strong>Nearly two years after</strong> Kurmann’s death, on a seasonally warm July day, Feingold filed a public records request with the district attorney’s office to learn more about the BPD’s investigation. It took a few weeks, but eventually he received a trove of documents and video footage that had never been made public. “The first time I watched it, when the truck ran her over, I stood up and said, ‘Oh, my God,’” Feingold says. “The second time I watched it, it made me cry. The driver has his foot on the gas and accelerates through the turn. This wasn’t a driver saying, ‘I’m in the city, I’m in traffic, I need to make sure my blind spot is clear.’ He did the opposite. He got a green light and he put his foot down.”</p><p>After showing the surveillance tape to several fellow cycling advocates, Feingold wasn’t the only one steaming mad. Richard Fries, the executive director of the Massachusetts Bicycle Coalition; Fischer, the bicycle attorney; and Alan Wright, founder of RozzieBikes, joined him in examining the evidence. The four men pored over the police report line by line, and sorted, frame by frame, through video footage of Kurmann riding across the Mass. Ave. Bridge. The more time they spent looking at the material, the more certain they grew that the police had gotten it wrong.</p><p>In short order, the group began compiling their own report, disputing many of the facts and conclusions contained in the police investigation. They found it troubling that police asserted Kurmann was riding in a lane designated as a bus stop zone, despite any clear marker. For comparison, they looked at photos of other nearby bus stops, which were labeled with large white lettering. They also noted that for Levari to clear the corner, he first swung his truck into the left lane so that he could initiate the tight right-hand turn. This, they argued, was a clear violation of a law requiring that motorists make right turns from the right lane, not across another lane of traffic. Another point of debate was that while police emphasized that Levari had his turn signal on for a full eight seconds, the group argued that the video showed Kurmann was riding alongside his truck for at least 16 seconds and likely never saw his indication to turn.</p><p>Lastly, the group homed in on the fact that Levari first drove past Kurmann while she was pedaling across the bridge. From that point on, they argued, Levari had a legal obligation to be aware of and on the lookout for Kurmann. The law was clear in their eyes: A motorist who approaches and passes a cyclist may not make a right turn across the cyclist’s path where not safe to do so.</p><p>Few people knew that a ragtag crew of cycling advocates had their hands on the police investigation and were piecing through the evidence. In January, however, the Massachusetts Bicycle Coalition hosted a press conference to reveal their findings. The group also published edited video footage on YouTube of Kurmann being killed and called on police and prosecutors to reopen the investigation, recommending that charges of involuntary manslaughter be brought against Levari.</p><p>The startling call to action thrust the Kurmann case back into the spotlight, though not everyone in the cycling community supported the move. Some feared it made bicyclists look like they were hell-bent on revenge. Others questioned the tactfulness of publishing video footage of Kurmann’s final moments. Some worried that it would only heighten tensions between police and cyclists. Fries didn’t care. “The culture of enforcement is you blame the victim. <em>What the hell was she doing on a bike? What the hell was she thinking?</em>” Fries says. The footage of Kurmann’s death, he believed, was a powerful rebuttal to the official investigation and was impossible to ignore. “That video moved the needle,” he says.</p><p>Provocative as the video was, BPD stood by its conclusions and the district attorney’s office did not see any reason to revisit the case. Boston Police still won’t answer specific questions about the Kurmann investigation, except to say detectives pursued the case as they would any other potential homicide. Jake Wark, a spokesman for the DA’s office, says the cycling advocates provided no new evidence, just a reinterpretation of existing evidence. Thinking that the driver could see Kurmann in his side-view mirror is far different from being able to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that he could. “The burden of proof is the burden of proof. It doesn’t go up or down,” Wark says. “Prosecutors have an ethical obligation not to bring cases that can’t be proven.”</p><p>Gluck, the attorney who represented Kurmann’s family in the civil suit, declined to say much about the advocates’ investigation, but did tell me that many points raised by the group were first flagged by his own legal team, including an accident reconstructionist he’d hired and who proved essential in securing the settlement for Kurmann’s family. “Once we were able to obtain a copy of the video and have it analyzed by a highly qualified expert,” Gluck says, “that expert provided compelling evidence that the conclusion reached by the Boston Police Department was wrong. I have great respect for the Boston Police Department, but we believe they got it wrong in this case. The truck driver caused this fatality, ending the life of a talented surgeon and devoted family member.”</p><p>Today, the intersection of Massachusetts Avenue and Beacon Street is a far cry from what it was on the morning Kurmann was killed. The stretch of road she pedaled along is now a designated bike lane, with green paint and waist-high reflective poles that prevent automobiles from cutting the corner too close when turning right. There’s a sign that orders right-turning vehicles to yield to bicycles and pedestrians, and a second sign reminding drivers of the city’s recently lowered speed limit of 25 miles per hour. Still chained to a lamppost, just a few feet from the intersection, is Kurmann’s ghost bike. “I wish I had known Anita Kurmann,” says Laura Everett, the minister who led the ghost bike dedication. “I think about her every time I go past it.”</p><p>Like anybody who rides a bike in the city, Everett knows there is no foolproof way to make the streets safe. She talks about the need for policies requiring that tractor-trailers have side guards—safety devices that help prevent cyclists from being sucked into the massive wheel wells on right hooks—and the need for more protected bike lanes throughout Boston. Change is incremental, she says, and the city has made some positive strides in the years since Kurmann’s death to improve the roads for cyclists. Still, until there’s a fundamental shift in commuter culture, drivers and bicyclists will struggle to find common ground and peaceably share the road. “There is something about Boston roads and the culture of our city that gives us permission to be absolutely dehumanizing to one another,” Everett says. “We do things to one another on our roads that we would never do to each other in the aisles of a grocery store.”</p><div><img alt="" height="666" src="https://cdn10.bostonmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2018/04/bike-death-3.jpg" width="900"/><p>Reverend Laura Everett, a vocal advocate for the biking community, continues to dedicate memorials across the city. / Photograph by Ken Richardson</p></div><p>Every few months, Everett receives a message on Facebook or in an email asking her to help organize yet another ghost bike ceremony. In October 2016, it was for Bernard “Joe” Lavins, a pharmaceutical researcher who was killed by a tractor-trailer while riding through Porter Square on his morning commute. A few months later, in May 2017, it was for Rick Archer, a 29-year-old avid cyclist who was killed in a hit-and-run in the Back Bay, less than a mile from where Kurmann died. Three months after that, it was Dan Pimenta, a 53-year-old Peabody firefighter who was killed while riding his bike in Beverly.</p><p>It probably won’t be long until Everett is called on for the next ceremony. When it happens, she’ll don her black clerical shirt, white clerical collar, and golden stole, and attempt to comfort a crowd of mostly strangers who had no connection to the deceased other than a shared fondness for bicycling. “Some days we ride scared,” she’ll tell the crowd, “and some days we ride angry.”</p></div></div>The FDA Has Punted Decisions About Luvox Prescription To The Deepest Recesses Of The Human Soul2021-12-25T09:18:46.690000ZScott Alexanderhttps://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/the-fda-has-punted-decisions-about<table style="border: 1px solid #E0E0E0; margin: 0; padding: 0; background-color: #F0F0F0" valign="top" align="left" cellpadding="0" width="100%">
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<p><strong>I.</strong></p><p>Here’s my pitch for fluvoxamine (Luvox) for COVID. </p><p>In the midst of all the hype about ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine, scientists put together the giant 4,000-person TOGETHER trial, intended to test all these exciting COVID early treatments. You know what happened next: ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine crashed and burned. </p><p>But a different drug, the SSRI antidepressant fluvoxamine, actually did really well! It decreased COVID hospitalizations by about 30% - not the perfect cure rate the rumors attributed to ivermectin, but a substantial decrease. Given the size and professionalism of this study, and another smaller one that also got positive results, I and many others take Luvox pretty seriously. At this point I’d give it 60-40 it works.</p><p>Can you prescribe a medication when you’re only 60% confident in it? There’s some <a href="https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/pascalian-medicine">thorny philosophical issues</a> around this, but I think in the end you have to compare risks and benefits.</p><p>What are the risks? Like every medication, including Tylenol, aspirin, etc, Luvox has some common minor side effects and some rare major ones. But let’s step back a second. Fluvoxamine is a bog-standard SSRI. Its side effects are generic SSRI side effects. We give SSRIs to 30 million people a year, or about 10% of all Americans. As a psychiatrist, I’m not supposed to say flippant things like “we give SSRIs out like candy”. We do careful risk-benefit analysis and when appropriate we screen patients for various risk factors. But after we do all that stuff, we give them to 10% of Americans, compared to <a href="https://www.norc.org/NewsEventsPublications/PressReleases/Pages/half-as-many-households-plan-to-trick-or-treat-this-halloween.aspx">12% of Americans</a> who got candy last Halloween. So you can draw your own conclusion about how severe we think the risks are.</p><p>For some reason the same experts who don’t mind prescribing SSRIs when people have mild depression freak out about prescribing them when they’re the only evidence-based oral medication for a deadly global pandemic. “What about SSRI withdrawal?”, they ask. After a ten day course? On 100 mg imipramine-equivalent dose? Minimal. “What about long QT syndrome?” The VA system took 35,000 high-risk older patients off of an unusually-likely-to-cause-QT-syndrome SSRI in 2011, and were unable to find any evidence that this prevented <a href="https://sci-hub.st/https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27166093/">even a single case of the syndrome</a>, let alone any negative outcome! </p><p>The objection I take most seriously is actually the worry about post-SSRI sexual dysfunction, a very rare condition where people on an SSRI can have sexual problems for months or years after they come off. I would be <em>shocked</em> if you could get that from a ten-day course. But technically nobody has ever tested this - there’s never been a good reason to put someone on an SSRI for only ten days before - so I can’t rule it out. Still, the risk from adding a few extra Luvox prescriptions for COVID is still much less than the risk we incur all the time from having 10% of Americans on SSRIs for years at a stretch, so this seems like a weird time to get cold feet.</p><p>I conclude that the risk-benefit calculation probably favors using Luvox. And I’m not alone here. Johns Hopkins University’s COVID treatment guidelines <a href="https://www.hopkinsguides.com/hopkins/ub?cmd=repview&type=479-1225&name=30_538747_PDF">recommend</a> fluvoxamine for appropriate COVID patients. Some leading psychiatrists, especially the Washington University psychiatrists who helped discover the new indication, <a href="https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.12.17.21268008v1">support</a> fluvoxamine for appropriate COVID patients. Many of the epidemiologists and statisticians most instrumental in debunking the hype around ivermectin have spoken out in <em>favor</em> of fluvoxamine, saying this one is the real deal (<a href="https://twitter.com/GidMK/status/1471931916655808513">1</a>, <a href="https://twitter.com/boulware_dr/status/1469799433596555267">2</a>). The National Institute of Health hasn’t quite come out in support, but they <em>have</em> taken the unusual step of not <em>disrecommending</em> fluvoxamine the same as they disrecommend every other oral early COVID treatment, <a href="https://twitter.com/AngelaReiersen/status/1471995216047579140">saying </a>that the evidence "provides the sort of flexibility for the treating clinician to go either way".</p><p>Unfortunately, none of these bodies alone or combined are powerful enough to make the average doctor prescribe differently. That’s why all eyes are on the FDA.</p><p><strong>II.</strong></p><p>The FDA has a weird role here.</p><p>They already approved fluvoxamine as an antidepressant. That means it’s legal, pharma companies can make it, pharmacies can stock it, and individual doctors can prescribe it whenever they want, including for COVID.</p><p>But they approved it with a label saying “<em>For Depression</em>”. Doctors are kind of . . . well, “hidebound” is a harsh word, but they really hate doing weird new things that no one has explicitly given them permission for. It’s not <em>illegal</em> to prescribe fluvoxamine for COVID. It’s not even going to get you in any trouble. It might not get covered by insurance, but it only costs <a href="https://www.goodrx.com/fluvoxamine?dosage=100mg&form=tablet&label_override=fluvoxamine&quantity=10&sort_type=popularity">about $10</a> anyway. The problem is just that it’s <em>weird.</em></p><p>So in order to make doctors feel completely comfortable prescribing it, the FDA would have to add “<em>…And For COVID”</em> to the label. The scientists involved in the big study have asked them to do this.</p><p>I <em>hoped</em> that the FDA would say “Since the COVID pandemic is an emergency, we’ll do this right away”.</p><p>I <em>predicted</em> they would say “Please give us a year to figure out our opinion on this.”</p><p>I <em>feared</em> they would say “There’s just not enough evidence”.</p><p>What I <em>never imagined at all</em> was their actual response, which was “Sorry, we don’t understand our own bureaucracy well enough to figure out how to do this.”</p><p>But <a href="https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/22841852/covid-drugs-antibodies-fluvoxamine-molnupiravir-paxlovid">according to Kelsey Piper at Vox</a>, that’s where they are right now:</p><blockquote><p><em>[Professor Ed] Mills, who thinks that fluvoxamine and budesonide are both appropriate to prescribe to patients sick with Covid-19, compares public messaging on fluvoxamine to communications about Merck’s drug molnupiravir. The evidence for molnupiravir is in many ways weaker than the evidence for fluvoxamine, but molnupiravir was produced by a major pharmaceutical company that can shepherd it through the process of becoming a recommended drug. On a call last week, Mills said, the FDA told him “they don’t know how to deal with submissions where there isn’t someone to be responsible for it.”</em></p></blockquote><p>That is, FDA procedures usually assume there is a pharma company sponsoring a drug. But fluvoxamine is cheap and off-patent and no pharma company is involved in repurposing it for COVID. Nobody has a procedure for a drug without a sponsor, so they won’t do anything.</p><p>Kelsey’s article focuses on the systemic failure: the FDA, guideline-making agencies, and public health communicators have dropped the ball on this. I think that’s a perfectly fine thing to focus on. I’m not usually one to defend the FDA, and their actions here hardly seem defensible. I’m with Kelsey in hoping they find a way to solve their institutional dysfunction. </p><p>But I can’t help wondering if this is<em> entirely</em> on the FDA. Fluvoxamine is legal. The only reason we need the FDA to get involved here at all is because if it’s not on the label, doctors will feel uncomfortable prescribing it.</p><p>What if, in order to save thousands of lives and help beat back a global pandemic, doctors just did the uncomfortable thing?</p><p><strong>III.</strong></p><p>Am I being harsh in saying that the problem is doctors who don’t want to do something uncomfortable?</p><p>There are many reasons not to prescribe a medication for a new indication. Maybe you genuinely think the risks outweigh the benefits. If it were me, I would trust the Johns Hopkins guidelines team on this, but honest opinions can differ. I have no problem with doctors who are holding off for this reason, and look forward to arguing with them in the appropriate venues.</p><p>Or maybe you’re afraid of lawsuits. If you get sued for malpractice, it’s nice to be able to tell the jury “it says this drug is okay for this condition right on the label”. But this doesn’t usually stop doctors from doing off-label prescriptions. Gabapentin is the 18th most-prescribed drug in the US, almost always for nerve pain or anxiety, but its label only officially endorses use for seizures or shingles. Beta-blockers for social anxiety? Off-label and dirt common. Prazosin for PTSD nightmares? Off-label and dirt-common. How do doctors sleep at night, knowing they’re constantly at risk of getting sued for off-label prescriptions? Probably using trazodone, the #2 most popular sleeping pill in the US, whose label says it should only be used for depression. No, seriously, it’s because most doctors <em>don’t even know</em> these indications are off-label, plus their medical school professors all did it too so it doesn’t feel transgressive.</p><p>Or maybe you <em>suspect</em> the benefits outweigh the risks, but you have a principled heuristic of not trusting your own suspicions. Doctors are constantly meddling with systems we don’t fully understand, people die when we make mistakes, and hordes of scammers and profiteers are trying to exploit us at any given moment. “Never do anything that five government bodies haven’t enthusiastically recommended” is a great meta-level heuristic for staying sane in that environment, and one which I follow 95% of the time. If someone else follows it 99.9% or 100% of the time, and even a Johns Hopkins endorsement isn’t enough of a recommendation for them, I can understand that.</p><p>Or maybe you’re a coward.</p><p>I’m not saying doctors are <em>generically</em> cowards. My father is a doctor and he’s one of the bravest people I know. Every time there’s a typhoon or an earthquake in some terrorist-infested country on the other side of the world, he hops on a plane to go there and treat victims, sometimes before the rubble is even cold. If this was something simple, like treating river-blindness in war-torn parts of the Congo or containing an Ebola epidemic in Nigeria, I’m sure doctors would be all over it.</p><p>But the Devil knows the weaknesses that lurk in the hearts of men. When he wants to scare off doctors, he doesn’t threaten us with insanely hard acts of self-sacrifice. He knows we love that stuff! He threatens us with <em>the prospect of looking slightly weird in front of our colleagues</em>.</p><div class="tweet"><a href="https://twitter.com/jeremyfaust/status/1471939396140216334" target="_blank"><div class="tweet-header"><img alt="Twitter avatar for @jeremyfaust" class="tweet-user-avatar" src="https://cdn.substack.com/image/twitter_name/w_36/jeremyfaust.jpg" /><span class="tweet-author-name">Jeremy Faust MD MS (ER physician) </span><span class="tweet-author">@jeremyfaust</span></div><span class="tweet-fake-link">@GidMK</span> I literally gave fluvox for the 1st time recently. (And obviously have never given the others outside of their actual intended uses for other medical problems). Despite 2 RCTs, I almost felt dirty doing it, though I think was right call. The nurses were like wtf is fluvoxamine?!</a><a href="https://twitter.com/jeremyfaust/status/1471939396140216334" target="_blank"><div class="tweet-footer"><p class="tweet-date">December 17th 2021</p><span class="retweets"><span class="rt-count">1</span> Retweet</span><span class="likes"><span class="like-count">38</span> Likes</span></div></a></div><p>Here is a doctor who, if nominative determinism is any guide, knows a thing or two about diabolic temptation. Yet he talks about how he “almost felt dirty” prescribing fluvoxamine, even though he knew there was strong evidence supporting it. He worried the nurses were making fun of him (protip: if you are a doctor, the nurses are <em>always</em> making fun of you). He made the right decision in the end, but I wonder how many doctors in similar situations don’t.</p><p>There are lots of reasons to feel nervous and awkward when you prescribe a medication your colleagues won’t. Maybe they think you’re a loose cannon who doesn’t care about evidence. Maybe they they think you’re defecting against the team and going to get everyone in trouble. Maybe they’re remembering the ivermectin debacle and wondering if you secretly prescribe horse dewormer and vote Trump. Maybe they think you hold them in contempt for not being as up on the literature as you are, and only prescribing normal stuff.</p><p>You should always consider your colleagues’ opinions insofar as they are good smart people and you want to use their expertise as a check on your own fallible mind. But it’s hard to keep that separate from considering your colleagues’ opinions in the sense where it would be socially awkward to disagree. And that’s how the Devil gets us.</p><p>I faced the Devil last year and lost. In March 2020, when everyone was freaking out about ventilator supply, a team of very smart engineers asked me to prescribe them a medical-grade oxygen concentrator. I can’t remember the details, but something about trying to tinker around with a bunch of cheaper machines and jury-rig a budget ventilator, which they could pitch to people as a solution to the ventilator shortage. I punted. I said that this wasn’t really what the prescription system was for, you can’t prescribe things to healthy people just so they can tinker with them, and I might get in trouble with my clinic or the government or somebody. I told them to try to go through the proper channels for obtaining medical equipment, even though I was unsure whether those channels existed, and doubtful they would move with appropriate urgency.</p><p>Later I thought about this, and realized the choice before me was “You can contribute to a desperately important project that might save thousands of lives, but only if you do something kind of weird that might get you in a tiny amount of trouble”, and I had said no. Devil 1, Scott 0.</p><p>I faced the Devil the year before that, and I . . . well, let’s say it was a tie. I had a bunch of patients with treatment-resistant depression. Everyone knew ketamine was great for treatment resistant depression. But the only people using it were anaesthesiologists giving it IV, which was inconvenient and unaffordable for most patients. The FDA was trialing a new version of ketamine that could be given by psychiatrists via inhaler, and there was no reason whatsoever to think this wouldn’t work with normal ketamine, but nobody I knew was doing it and they all thought it seemed kind of weird. My severely depressed patients kept asking me for ketamine, and I kept saying “Sorry, I can’t prescribe that to you”, secretly ending the sentence with “…unless I use this one weird loophole I’ve never heard of anyone else using”. Finally I called up a compounding pharmacy near me and asked if anybody knew about this, and they said they knew a doctor who did, and did I want his phone number? I talked to him, and he said he’d been doing this for years and it had always gone well. For some reason, knowing that someone else was doing it was the permission I needed, I prescribed it to my patients, and it went well (I’ve since written up <a href="https://lorienpsych.com/2021/11/02/ketamine/">a guide for others</a>). But I still didn’t have the courage to do the weird thing without knowing other people were doing it first. </p><p>(When I finally got around to prescribing ketamine, one of my patients told me I’d given her her life back. Usually I love hearing that kind of thing. This time it was bittersweet, because I knew I could have given more patients their lives back if I’d done it earlier. There are a couple of people who had six months of terrible depression that I maybe could have prevented if I had more courage. That’s partly on the FDA for making poor decisions such that optimal treatment required virtue on the part of individual doctors. But mostly it’s on me, for not having it.)</p><p>I will face the Devil in the future and I’ll fail again. Medicine is too big and complicated and scary to stray from the herd most of the time, and the sort of person who <em>never</em> fails at this problem is probably crazy, and constantly gives his patients snake oil or ivermectin or whatever. Doctors should generally stay within their area of expertise and doubt any argument leading them away from consensus. Certainly if you’re my patient and you somehow find this essay and read it back to me and tell me I need to prescribe you the latest whatever, I’m going to nope out of whatever you’re offering (especially if opioids are involved).</p><p>Still, I do want to stress the “facing the Devil” aspect, where this is a difficult moral battle. I know that’s a weird way to frame a prescription decision. But CS Lewis is a leading expert on devils and <a href="https://www.lewissociety.org/innerring/">he was very clear</a> that moral battles generally don’t happen in war-torn parts of the Congo. They happen in ordinary decisions about whether to do slightly unusual things that we worry might affect our social status among people we respect.</p><p>(by the way, when the other psychiatrists in my clinic learned I was prescribing intranasal racemic ketamine, they all said that was cool, and a few asked me to walk them through the process).</p><p>So if you haven’t been giving fluvoxamine to patients, please take a second, sit down, and decide whether it’s because:</p><ol><li><p>You honestly think the risks outweigh the benefits.</p></li><li><p>You’re trying to follow some complicated meta-level heuristic that you need in order to practice good medicine or at least stay sane.</p></li><li><p>You’re scared.</p></li></ol><p>If it’s 1 or 2, you’re valid and I support you. If it’s 3, man up and write the prescription.</p><p>If you’d feel happier doing this after you talked to a psychiatrist who has experience with this medication, feel free to email me at scott[at]slatestarcodex[dot]com. I have no personal experience using it against COVID, but I can direct you to the studies and protocols that explain how.</p><br><br><img src="https://bucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com/public/images/43d0f151-fb15-468e-a6d8-86e1ce96ef3c_620x413.jpeg" />the best office holiday party date story of all time2021-12-14T11:45:21.486000ZAsk a Managerhttps://www.askamanager.org/2021/12/the-best-office-holiday-party-date-story-of-all-time-3.html<table style="border: 1px solid #E0E0E0; margin: 0; padding: 0; background-color: #F0F0F0" valign="top" align="left" cellpadding="0" width="100%">
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<p>This post, <a href="https://www.askamanager.org/2021/12/the-best-office-holiday-party-date-story-of-all-time-3.html" rel="nofollow">the best office holiday party date story of all time</a> , was originally published by Alison Green on <a href="https://www.askamanager.org" rel="nofollow">Ask a Manager</a>.</p>
<p>A couple of years ago, someone shared what I consider to be the best holiday date story of all time, and it must be shared here again. Enjoy:</p>
<p><em>When I was fresh out of college, a dude in my social circle invited me to his fancy work Christmas party. He was a teacher, so I’d kind of assumed I was there as friend to act as a buffer between well-intentioned female colleagues who wanted to set him up with one another, with their daughters, etc. I was wrong! This invitation to a work Christmas party was meant to be the first date of a magical relationship between two people destined to be together. Why a magical relationship? When I opened the door, he said he’d hope we’d have a magical night leading to a magical relationship. Then HE DID A MAGIC TRICK. I was… startled.</em></p>
<p><em>The party was at a country club, where he drove around and around looking for a space while I said “they have valet. it’s only valet” over and over. Inside there was a coat check. He didn’t want to leave his coat–because there were additional magic tricks secreted inside. We went in, got our drink tickets and our seating assignment. I sat down at a table that was mostly single women several years older than we were. He offered to get me a drink, and I asked for a glass of any kind of wine. He came back several minutes later with a mudslide because girls love mudslides, because they’re chocolate and girls love chocolate. I don’t. But he tried! That’s sweet! Right? Over dinner, I tried to make that sort of general polite conversation people make around banquet tables with strangers. He kept jostling my arm to get my attention to show me another magic trick.</em></p>
<p><em>At the beginning of the evening, I really thought we were casual friends, but I was single and kind of open to dating this guy if we got on well. Maybe that hokey line was a story we’d tell our grandchildren! But it was becoming increasingly clear that this guy was Not for Me. That didn’t mean I wanted to embarrass him in front of his principal, though. I finally said something like, Would you mind terribly saving those for after dinner? I’m really interested in hearing more about Harriet’s begonias, aren’t you?”</em></p>
<p><em>He pushed his chair back and stalked across the ballroom to a piano. He plopped down and proceeded to pound out an assortment of sad pop hits. There was Muzak-y Christmas music, but he was gonna play the piano anyway. At this point, I was embarrassed to have come with this guy. My tablemates were embarrassed for me. One of them left and came back with the glass of wine I’d asked for initially. I drank it while the middle aged ladies at our table told me all about their various bad dates. More wine showed up. Then someone asked if I like martinis and brought a martini. Apparently none of them drank, and, as my date played “You’re So Vain” while staring mournfully at me, I drank my way through pretty much all their drink tickets. I am an effusively nice drunk person. I told each and every one of these women that they were beautiful angels shaping tomorrow’s great minds to recognize the power of sisterhood and human kindness. Or something to that general effect. My memory is a bit fuzzy, for obvious, gin-based reasons.</em></p>
<p><em>My date wanted to leave, so I went to coat check. I tipped the coat check person, and he reached in the tip jar to fish out my money. I thought he was going to pay the tip. Nope. He told me coat check is free. I said I know. I put my tip back in the jar and sidestepped him when he tried to help with my jacket. His department chair and her husband appeared and said that my apartment was on their way and they’d be happy to drive me. I told them they were “hashtag relationship goals” and made an actual hashtag with my fingers.</em></p>
<p><em>I was driven home by way of Taco Bell by these very nice strangers. A week later, the guy called to say his work friends loved me and would I like to go out again. I would not.</em></p>
<p><em>A few years later, a friend was telling me about a legendary party her school hosted before she got a job there. A girl nobody knew got plastered and told everyone she loved and appreciated them while her boyfriend played the piano at her and drowned out the Christmas music. I did not reveal my identity. Maybe there’re two of us? I hope there’re two of us.</em></p>
<div class="crp_related "><h5>You may also like:</h5><ul><li><a class="crp_link post-16296" href="https://www.askamanager.org/2018/12/the-terrible-date-at-the-christmas-party-and-other-tales-of-office-holiday-mayhem.html"><span class="crp_title">the terrible date at the Christmas party, and other tales of office holiday mayhem</span></a></li><li><a class="crp_link post-16192" href="https://www.askamanager.org/2018/12/non-serious-dates-at-the-holiday-party-training-students-to-answer-the-phone-and-more.html"><span class="crp_title">non-serious dates at the holiday party, training students to answer the phone, and more</span></a></li><li><a class="crp_link post-14138" href="https://www.askamanager.org/2017/11/bringing-a-date-to-the-office-holiday-party-i-dont-want-to-donate-to-a-coworkers-gofundme-and-more.html"><span class="crp_title">bringing a date to the office holiday party, I don't want to donate to a coworker's GoFundMe, and more</span></a></li></ul><div class="crp_clear"></div></div>Ed Yong talks to health-care workers with long COVID2021-12-03T05:06:04.112000ZAndy Baiohttps://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2021/11/health-care-workers-long-covid-are-being-dismissed/620801/<table style="border: 1px solid #E0E0E0; margin: 0; padding: 0; background-color: #F0F0F0" valign="top" align="left" cellpadding="0" width="100%">
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pfctdayelise
<a href="https://pfctdayelise.newsblur.com/story/ed-yong-talks-to-hea/3581:4ba5a2">shared this story</a>
from <img src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/icons.newsblur.com/3581.png" style="vertical-align: middle;width:16px;height:16px;"> Waxy.org.</b>
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dismissed by their peers, some medical professionals are re-evaluating how they've treated their own patients <a href="https://waxy.org/2021/11/ed-yong-on-health-care-workers-with-long-covid/">#</a>That Funny Feeling2021-12-03T04:45:07.677000ZAndy Baiohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ObOqq1knVxs<table style="border: 1px solid #E0E0E0; margin: 0; padding: 0; background-color: #F0F0F0" valign="top" align="left" cellpadding="0" width="100%">
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<b>
pfctdayelise
<a href="https://pfctdayelise.newsblur.com/story/that-funny-feeling/3581:cfc05a">shared this story</a>
from <img src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/icons.newsblur.com/3581.png" style="vertical-align: middle;width:16px;height:16px;"> Waxy.org.</b>
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Bo Burnham's dystopian ditty is finally on YouTube <a href="https://waxy.org/2021/11/that-funny-feeling/">#</a>