Half Changed World

Jen said she liked my wonkish take on work-family issues, so here's a post for her.

On money.com, I found this survival guide to keeping your job in a recession, which includes the following recommendation:

I agree with the second half of this — being indispensable is definitely a good way to keep your job — but not necessarily the first.  If you're as productive in 8 hours as your colleagues are in 10 hours of sitting at their desks goofing off, you should be ok.  As long as your boss knows that you're productive, that is.  And if your boss doesn't know how productive you are, you've got problems, regardless of the economy.

That said, I suspect full-time telecommuters are somewhat more vulnerable to layoff than people who show up to an office, in part because it's a lot harder to tell someone you see every day that you don't need their services.

This blog post from the Sloan Work-Family Network suggests that people are pitching work-life flexibility as a way to reduce costs and boost productivity in a recession.  Juliet Bourke worries that this could cut both ways (e.g. employers might cut people's hours involuntarily — and BLS data supports that there's a lot of involuntary part-time work out there), but concludes that it's probably a positive thing if it gets more employers used to the idea of workplace flexibility.

I also think there's another argument to be made, that if companies can't afford to give workers raises, but want to reward them and keep their loyalty, things like flexible hours or telecommuting can be a cheap way to make workers happy.  The downside of that argument is that it reinforces the idea that workplace flexibility is a perk for your best workers, rather than something that should be generally available.

What are you all seeing in real life? I can't seem to find the specific post, but Laura at 11d has
said that she sees a lot more wall-street types catching the 5pm train
instead of the 7 or 9 pm one, and seeing more of their kids as a result.

I nearly forgot to do my annual meme where I post the first line of the first post of each month:

• Happy New Year!  I was offline for a while because we took the boys to Florida to see their grandparents and aunt.
• I'm really not a football fan, but D's teacher got him all excited
  about the super bowl, even though he's never watched a football game,
  so we're letting him stay up and hanging out watching it with him.
• I'm starting to do my taxes, so I've been looking at my Prosper statement.
• In skimming today's Washington Post, I saw a short blurb that says that women's careers are responsible for one-third of corporate relocations, up from 15 percent in 1993.
• I took the BoltBus up to NYC and back this weekend, so thought I'd post a review.
• The recent discussion of budgeting and how we're dealing with rising prices inspired me to revisit my experiment of trying to stick to the thrifty food plan for a month.
• Back from the camping trip with my college friend.

• I've got several long thoughtful posts that I'd like to write, but I've just been crashing before I get to my blogging time.

• In response to my initial post about Palin, Beth posted a comment questioning her judgment as the mother of a child with Down syndrome choosing to take on the responsibilities of being VP.  
• I seem to have fallen out of the routine of doing regular weekly book reviews. 
• Since I think I'll be a bit distracted on Tuesday night, I'm posting this week's book review tonight.
• I knew that December 1 is World AIDS Day, but I hadn't realized that it was first observed 20 years ago. 

I'm shocked at how few political posts made this list, given that it feels like I spend the year obsessing about the election.  (To be fair, the line about the super bowl comes in a post about how this is an easy post to write while I was waiting for the caucus results.)

I see there were lots of personal posts.  In part this is because after 4+ years of blogging, I feel like my regular readers know me fairly well, and care about what's going on in my life.  And in part it's because my energy for blogging was lower this year (due to the demands of work, family and politics), and the personal posts are easier to write than the deeply analytic ones.

What would you all like to see more of here in 2009?

For Hanukkah, T gave me an audiobook of World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War.  I must have looked at him skeptically (I was pretty skeptical), and he said, "It's like This American Life, but with zombies!"

That's actually a pretty good description of the book.  It's a series of "interviews" with different people — politicians, doctors, soldiers, civil servants — about their experiences in combating a massive global epidemic of the living dead.  It's published as a regular book as well, but it's perfect for an audiobook, with different actors playing each of the characters.  (Alan Alda was immediately recognizable, but I missed Mark Hamill, and all of the actors playing non-American characters were unfamiliar to me.)

We drove to Florida and back for the holidays, and this was about the perfect thing to listen to driving down I-95 at 3 am with the boys sleeping.  (I also listened to parts of it with the boys watching videos with headphones on — the content of this is definitely not appropriate for small children — it's about zombies for pity's sake.)

Apparently there's a movie being made of it.  It will be interesting to see whether they manage to keep the sly political commentary, or if it just becomes a shoot 'em up (or rather, slug them in the head with something heavy and pointy) movie.  The audiobook doesn't have a hero or a plot in the conventional sense, and I'm pretty sure that they will feel compelled to have one in a movie.  And two of the narrators are wildly unreliable, and I'm not sure how that works in a movie.  (Although it seems that Waltz with Bashir makes a go at it.)

The other audiobook that I brought down with me is Eat, Pray, Love, and I'm clearly going to get my chick license revoked, because I hated it so much that I didn't get through the first disk.  I found Gilbert whiny and self-obsessed.  And I'm fundamentally not impressed by traveling around the world to find yourself — I'm far more interested in people who stay home and build buildings or wipe snotty noses and still manage to find themselves.

What does it say about me (or modern life) that when I read Judith Warner's column last week about the use of brain-enhancing drugs my first reaction was to wonder how one goes about getting some Provigil?  (It's an anti-narcolepsy drug, which apparently allows one to maintain brain functionality in spite of sleep deprivation.  And for the record, the only drug I'm actually taking is claritin.)

I'm not a scientist, and I don't know what the side effects of these drugs are.  But a few months ago, after being up most of the night with one of the boys, I went to work, and was pretty fuzzy around the edges.  And then I realized that I had spent a good two years or more in that kind of a fog every single day.  And if someone had offered me a drug to make it go away (other than caffeine), I'm pretty sure I'd have jumped for it.

If asprin were invented today, it would probably require a prescription — between its blood thinning action and the potential for Reye's syndrome, it's easy to make the case that it's too dangerous to be available without control.  Caffeine is ubiquitous, but I could argue that it's as much of a mind-altering substance as Provigil or Ritalin.  I think the editorial in Nature arguing for legalizing these drugs for people who aren't "ill" is pretty convincing.

*If you're wondering about the title, it's a reference to Nancy Kress' excellent sci-fi novel Beggars in Spain, where she explores what happens if some people are genetically engineered not to need sleep, and thus have an advantage over the rest of us.  Pills are certainly more egalitarian than genetic modification.

After two years of making really complicated cakes for the office dessert contest (a golden cage and then a 7 layer cake), this year I decided to do something easy.  I made the eggnog variation of the New York Times' Brandy Alexander Pie.  And no, I still didn't win, but I didn't feel like I should have.

Happy Hanukkah, Merry Christmas, and a Joyous Solstice.  I probably won't be posting again until after the New Year.  Stay warm, have fun, don't spend too much, take lots of photos, and I'll be back next year.

I'm not a fan of Rick Warren, and I'm not thrilled with Obama's choice to invite him to give the invocation at his inauguration.  But, you want to know what my main response is? 

Obama really meant it when he said he wasn't going to be president of the red states, or blue states, but of the United States of America.

On the plane last week, I finally had the chance to read Paul Tough's Whatever It Takes: Geoffrey Canada's Quest to Change Harlem and America.  Tough is a reporter for the NY Times Magazine, and this is his expanded coverage of the Harlem Children's Zone, which he's reported on over the years.  Obama has said he wants to create 20 Promise Neighborhoods, modeled after the HCZ, so I thought it was important to read the book.

HCZ is an attempt to change the odds for kids in a poor neighborhood by providing an extensive range of services, everything from parenting classes to preschool to charter schools to summer programs.  What makes it different from most other attempts is:

• it tries to cover kids from birth through college, on the assumption that no program lasting just a few years is going to keep kids on the right track in the face of overwhelming obstacles.  This is in many ways an implicit rebuke to the extravagant claims sometimes made for  Head Start or  home visiting  programs.
• it tries to reach enough kids — ideally it would be at a scale to reach every kid in the target neighborhood — to change the culture of the neighborhood for the better.  Canada explicitly argues that the well regarded KIPP charter schools encourage students to separate themselves from the community as a whole

Tough doesn't hide that he's a believer in the HCZ approach.  In general, the book is overwhelmingly positive about Canada and the HCZ, although a long section is devoted to the struggles at the charter middle school they operate, and the choice to give up on the first class of students after two years of disappointing results. 

I think HCZ is a fascinating experiment, but Whatever It Takes isn't quite a fascinating book.  It's a solid book, well-reported, with a decent popular summary of the academic literature behind the theory.  But, fundamentally, the story of HCZ is really only in its first chapter, with no one knowing how it will turn out.  Geoffrey Canada's personal story is quite intriguing, but Canada himself has already written that book.

If you like to listen to the radio, I might suggest the coverage of this book on This American Life or Talk of the Nation instead.

I got a kind email asking if I was ok, since I hadn't posted in a while.  Thanks for asking – I'm fine.  I had a business trip from Monday to Thursday, and then have been catching up with sleep, household chores, and hanging out with my family.  D had a sinus infection, which is responding well to antibiotics, and I've got a low-level cold.

Some odds and ends from the week:

• The meeting I attended was a conference of people working on economic policy from a social justice angle, mostly at the state level.  I came away even more depressed than I had been.
• The meeting was in Las Vegas, where I had never been.  I spent about $5 on slot machines, but otherwise avoided the gambling.  Someone told me that the hotels were at about 10 percent of their usual occupancy rates.  It ticked me off that the hotel we were at (Bally's) charged for both internet access and the gym.  My room had a view of the "Eiffel Tower."
• At home, we started getting Netflix on Tivo.  Very nice.  Watched The King of Kong thanks to Flea's review.
• Went to the local "Plan for Change" meeting this afternoon.  There was much confusion/disagreement about whether we were supposed to be picking national level issues to work on, or something local (and within our control).  Needed to leave before the end in order to pick up the boys from their playdate, but can't say I was overwhelmed by what I saw.

The New York Times gave a heck of a review to The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For. I love Bechdel's reaction. Dang is right.

I'm watching the movie of Sex and the City while I write this.  It's truly awful, and I say this as someone who was a fan of the series.  (I'm still watching it because I've got a pile of laundry to sort.)

I wonder who else falls into the intersection of people who read DTWOF and watch SATC.  While the characters are at close to polar opposites of the cultural spectrum (crunchy politically obsessed anti-materialist lesbians in Minnesota vs. fashion obsessed consumerist heterosexuals in search of true love in New York), the stories actually have a lot in common.  Both are soap operas, and both portray worlds where friendships between women endure over time in spite of relationships, jobs, kids, and everything else that life throws at you.  And, in spite of name of the show, most of the time SATC passes the Mo Movie Test — women talk to each other about things other than men (usually shoes, but I still think that counts).

So, now that the 2008 election season is officially over, it must be time for the Virginia Governor's race to get started— we're one of the few states that does governor's elections on the odd years.  I have absolutely no idea which of the three Democratic candidates I'll support — anyone reading here want to make a case for your favorite?

Since we've got a single term limit, Kaine can't run for reelection.  And since both Senate seats are now held by Democrats, he can't run for Senate, which has been the main goal of former governors in recent years.  No idea what he'll do next.