The RTO War on Working Mothers
The Most Dangerous Place to be Pregnant Is Getting Worse
On days when Ellen went into the office, her mornings started around 6 a.m. She woke up with her 3-month-old baby and nursed him. Then she got him dressed. She got ready, too, and put on makeup. She packed a lunch, her breast pump, milk storage bags and anything else she needed. She said goodbye to her husband and son and drove 45 minutes in Austin traffic to get to her office.
At work she scheduled meetings around pumping sessions. If a meeting ran long, and they always did, she leaked through her shirt and had to change. At the end of the day, she drove another 45 minutes to get home by 6. She nursed the baby again. Coordinated dinner with her husband. Put her son to bed at 7:30 and prayed that he slept through the night—which, of course, he didn’t. She answered work emails, cleaned her pumping equipment, showered, prepared her son’s bottles for tomorrow and finally went to bed. All told, it was a 16-hour day, not counting her son’s middle-of-the-night feeding session. “It was nonstop,” Ellen says. “I was so depleted as a person, as a mom. And I only had to do it two days a week.”
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Once a week, Adrian Billings drives his white Chevy pickup from his home in Alpine, Texas, to Presidio, a city along the Mexican border. This summer he’s been taking his son Blake, who’s home from college, with him. The drive, through mountains and desert on a two-lane highway across which actual tumbleweeds roll, takes an hour and a half.
Billings is a family doctor, one of only a handful in this part of West Texas. He offers a one-stop shop for his patients’ ailments: heart murmurs, kidney stones, et cetera. Most of the time he works in Alpine or the nearby city of Marfa. But he makes the weekly drive to Presidio, because without doctors like him, it wouldn’t have medical care. There’s no hospital and no full-time doctor. His clinic, which opened in 2007 with the help of government grants, is the only access residents have to even a local pharmacy.
Read the full article at Texas Monthly or Bloomberg Businessweek
What Does Harper Lee Want?
On the porch of the Meadows, a small, canary-yellow nursing home along the Highway 21 bypass in Monroeville, Ala., a security guard called Officer Matthews keeps watch. Sometimes he sits in a wooden rocking chair. Other times he leans against the porch’s white posts. In the late afternoon, when the thermometer outside the nearby Trustmark Bank reads 108F and the summer air gets so humid it’s like trying to breathe through a wet towel, he’ll take off his company-issued black blazer and wipe his brow with a handkerchief. He tries not to go indoors.
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Deanna Cohen was 20 years into a career in the music industry when she realized it wasn’t going to work out. On paper she looked like a success: She’d worked her way up from college intern at a record company to vice president of music programming at a national TV network. She’d married, had a daughter, divorced, remarried. Then, in 2008, at age 44, she got pregnant with her second child.
Cohen and her family live in Portland, Ore., where the cost of caring for an infant runs as high as $2,000 a month. Preschool for her older child was cheaper, but not much, and most of the programs Cohen found ended at noon. To cover a regular workday, she’d need to tack on aftercare or a nanny. Cohen and her husband were looking at $45,000 a year or more in child-care costs—a figure they could barely afford. “I’m like, what am I going to do?” she recalls. She had a degree in education and had always loved working with children. “So I thought, ‘You know what? I’ll just open a child-care program myself.’”
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The Most Broken Business in America
Can the U.S. Ever Fix Its Messed Up Maternity Leave System?
One week into her new job, Letitia Camire learned she was pregnant. It was 2011, and she’d just been hired as the office manager for United Tool & Machine, a small, family-owned tool and die company outside Boston. Her salary was $30,000 a year. Camire clicked with her co-workers immediately. Her boss, the owner and president, started asking her about long-term career goals. “They seemed so family-oriented,” says Camire, now 32. So when her morning sickness became noticeable (“I just sat at my desk looking like death warmed over”), she felt she owed her new work family an explanation. She was only a few weeks along when she walked into the president’s office one morning, shut the door, and told him she was pregnant.
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The Silicon Valley Start-Up that Self-Disrupted
David Sacks walked into Dolores Park Café in San Francisco to talk to Lars Dalgaard, a venture capitalist, about what he should do with his life. Or rather, his money. Sacks, who is 43 and has thick gray hair and blue, protruding eyes, made his first fortune as an early executive at PayPal, then a second as the co-founder of Yammer, a social network for businesses, which he sold to Microsoft in 2012 for $1.2 billion. He played in poker tournaments, produced the film Thank You for Smoking, and became an early investor in Uber and SpaceX. But by the fall of 2014, he was sick of jumping from hobby to hobby. He wanted in on a startup again.
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The Weather Channel's Secret: Less Weather, More Clickbait
The writers and editors at the Weather Channel’s weather.com don’t often talk about the weather. They’re not meteorologists. They don’t mention the forecast or debate whether New York’s overcast sky means it’s going to rain. When they wheel their desk chairs together in the open-office newsroom for their morning editorial meeting, their ideas have nothing to do with storms or sunshine at all.
“A gallery of city skylines then and now?” suggests Stephanie Valera, weather.com’s travel editor.
“I’m finishing that thing on large castles,” says her assistant editor, Simone Scully. There are pitches for stories about sharks, whales, food allergies, and drones. The health editor wants to do something on how an apple a day can help with weight loss.
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Why Can't We Stop Sexual Harassment at Work?
"For two years starting in 2002, I worked a summer job at a horse farm. I was doing things like setting up jumps [and] putting holes in the ground for fence posts. I worked with farm laborers who were all illegal. They were an all-male crew. Hispanic. The guy who hired me, who paid me—in cash, by the way—was this older, 50-year-old guy named H. He is also sort of related to me: H. is married to my dad’s first wife.
One of the first incidents I remember was when we were washing off fencing for the steeplechase course. I was wearing Carhartt pants and a white T-shirt. H. came around to check on what we were doing. He made this comment: “I should require you to wear white shirts and always be wet while you’re working.” - Anonymous, age 34, Missoula, Mont.
This is a three-part package at Bloomberg Businessweek. Here are parts one & two and three
Living with Pain
Two days after my mother moved a concrete flowerpot from our living room to our patio, her feet went numb. A week later, she discovered that she couldn't straighten her back. She felt bowed, as if contorted into the beginning of a back bend. Then her lower back began to throb. She went to a doctor, who stuck needles in her calves and, perplexed by her lack of sensation, ordered an MRI. He showed her the results, explaining that 12 of her spinal disks — the soft jellylike cushions between her vertebrae — had degenerated, causing her spine to compress and pinch the nerves. An additional disk was herniated. Sometimes a degenerated disk can be removed through surgery, with the surrounding vertebrae fused. But 13 disks, more than half the total in a human spine, were far too many for an operation, her doctor said. So she went to another doctor — and another. Seven doctors said the same thing: Nothing could be done. That was in 1995. My mother has been on painkillers ever since.
Read the full article at TIME
The Man Who Cracked Halloween
J.J. Abrams needs a favor. It’s six weeks before Halloween and he’s in search of a very specific Star Wars costume, in a very specific size, that’s sold out online. Abrams may have directed last year’s Star Wars: The Force Awakens, but when a friend’s daughter wants to be the warrior Rey for Halloween, he still has to track down a costume like a normal person. But of course a normal person wouldn’t have an assistant who can call up Howard Beige, executive vice president of Rubie’s Costume Co., the largest costume maker in the world and the manufacturer of roughly half of all the Halloween costumes sold in the U.S., including all the Star Wars ones.
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Laura Wasser is Hollywood's Complete Divorce Solution
On a flight from Ireland to New York in June 2004, Britney Spears proposed to Kevin Federline, a backup dancer she’d been dating for about three months. “We were a couple hours into the flight and we’d been talking the whole time, stuff about life, wanting to have kids,” Spears told People magazine shortly afterward. “All of a sudden, I said, ‘What if you want to get married?’ ” She was 22 at the time, had sold 27 million albums, and had about $30 million, according to Rolling Stone. She had also been married before. Six months earlier, Spears had spent 55 hours wed to a childhood friend after making a 5:30 a.m. visit to a drive-thru chapel in Las Vegas. When Spears’s management team heard about her engagement to Federline, they set her up with a wedding planner, a jeweler—and Laura Wasser.
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The Big House
One October weekend a couple years ago, I drove four hundred miles from my apartment in New York City to an all-day diner near Niagara Falls, to meet a man to whom I might — we weren’t sure — be related. We’d found each other through an African-American genealogy group for people who live in, or come from, or have ties to Carroll County in the Mississippi Delta. The man’s name was Carlos and he’d introduced himself on the group’s Facebook page as the great-grandson of a former slave at a Delta plantation called Cotesworth. I wrote to him saying that my family comes from there too. We were the ones who owned Cotesworth.
Read the full article at Medium
Why Brooks Needs Runners Who Hate to Run
According to the people at Brooks Sports Inc., I’m not a runner. I’m what’s known within the company as a person who runs. “There’s a difference,” says Brooks Chief Executive Officer Jim Weber, who’s run three to five mornings a week, every week, for 35 years but apparently isn’t a runner either. When he says this, I give him a look, because, frankly, that’s ridiculous. I’ve been running for more than two decades. I run on business trips and vacations. I track my weekly mileage and voluntarily eat packets of electrolyte-enhanced goo that—why does no one talk about this?—tastes like mediocre cake frosting. In 2016, I ran my first marathon, an experience that melded transcendent euphoria and throbbing pain into an entirely new emotion I can’t really describe, other than to say it was both the best and worst thing I’ve ever felt. How am I not a runner?
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What if Everyone Got a Monthly Check From the Government?
One afternoon in the final days of 2016, Steffie Eronen got a phone call from her husband, Juha. The Eronens had spent Christmas with relatives in Savonlinna, Finland, and Juha had just made the two-hour drive home so he could return to his job as an electrician. The couple live with their 5-year-old daughter in a cozy, two-bedroom apartment in Mikkeli, a quiet, midsize city in the southeastern part of the country. Juha was calling to let his wife know he was home safe, and oh, by the way, an important-looking letter had arrived for her from the Social Insurance Institution of Finland—or, as everyone calls it, Kela.
“Open it,” Steffie said.
There was a pause as Juha tore into the envelope. Then he laughed.
“You got it!” he exclaimed.
“Got what?”
“Basic income,” Juha told her. “You’re in the program!”
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Is LuLaRoe's Leggings Empire a Scam?
Roberta Blevins likes to talk to strangers. If you’re next to her on an airplane or behind her at the grocery checkout, she’ll notice something about you that she finds interesting and ask you about it. “I’ll be like, ‘Oh, you’re buying apples? I love apples! What’s your favorite kind?’ ” she says. “My husband makes fun of me for it, but it’s like, ‘Sorry I’m so friendly, OK?’ ”
Blevins is 37 and lives with her husband and two kids in Alpine, Calif., a suburb of San Diego. Her chattiness is what led her, in October 2015, to ask a woman she knew through a motherhood-themed Facebook group about the leggings she was advertising online. “I was like, ‘What’s LuLaRoe? I’ve never heard of this company,’ ” Blevins says. The woman explained that she bought clothes wholesale from LuLaRoe and then sold them at roughly double the price. It was a multilevel marketing company, or MLM, sometimes called direct selling. Perhaps she’d heard of the most successful examples: Amway, Herbalife or Mary Kay?
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Harley-Davidson Has a Trump Problem
The first thing you should do when you meet a Harley-Davidson rider is check the back of his—or her, but let’s be honest, it’s probably his—jacket. The patches tell you who you’re dealing with. First, there’s the insignia. It might be a bald eagle atop the company’s logo to let everyone know this is a Harley guy—not a Honda guy, not a BMW guy, but a red-blooded, flag-waving American patriot. If this particular Harley guy belongs to one of 1,400 company-sponsored Harley Owners Group (H.O.G.) chapters around the world, the insignia will be coupled with a second patch that specifies which H.O.G. he belongs to: the Duluth H.O.G.s, the Waco H.O.G.s., or, today, the H.O.G.s of Long Island.
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The Day the Boy Scouts Let in Girls
The Case of the Missing Frames
One evening in early February, in the back room of a small Lutheran church in Blacksburg, Va., seven girls joined the Boy Scouts. They stood in front of an American flag, wearing the same khaki shirts and bandanna neckties as the 19 boys there with them. Together they recited the Pledge of Allegiance, followed by the traditional Boy Scout oath. As historic moments go, it was a quiet one.
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On the night of St. Patrick’s Day in 1990, Rick Abath was working the overnight shift as a security guard at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. While the rest of the city drank and partied and drank some more, he and another guard, Randy Hestand, took turns patrolling the empty rooms of what had once been the ostentatious home of a Victorian-era socialite who was really into art.
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