Meanderings, 4 September 2021
Have a blessed weekend my friends! I offer these links to interesting articles across the webs, and most of them — sometimes all of them — are passed on to me by family and friends and you, Tov Unleashed readers. So here goes!
Photo by Elena Mozhvilo on Unsplash
Because that’s what outfielders do, run ‘em down!
ST. LOUIS (KTVI) — It’s typically the catcher or the pitcher trying to catch someone stealing. But over the weekend, a Missouri softball outfielder took matters into her own hands in a situation her coach hopes never happens again.
The Eureka Wildcats were in a season-opening tournament Saturday in Sullivan, and in between games, senior Katie Schweizer was cooling off in the car when she spotted someone going onto the bus of one of the competing schools.
Her coach, Mark Mosley, said she saw the man grab a bag containing seven or eight wallets and purses while the School of the Osage, the competing team, was on the field playing.
As her father was calling the police, Mosley said, Schweizer ran after the suspect, confronted him and said “that’s not yours.”
The man dropped the bag and ran.
“Never ever chase down an adult man again,” Mosley said he told Schweizer. “Do not make that a habit.”
Eureka and School of the Osage didn’t face off in the tournament, but Mosley said the Osage coaching staff bought everyone extra sunflower seeds and bubblegum as a reward.
The swoosh got this one right:
(WFLA) – Amid high rates of burnout and quitting among the American workforce, Nike announced a move to prioritize employees’ mental health.
Last week, Matt Marrazzo, a senior manager at Nike, posted on Linkedin that employees at the sportswear company’s corporate offices in Oregon would have the week off from work.
“Take the time to unwind, destress and spend time with your loved ones. Do not work,” the post reads. “This past year has been rough – we’re all human! and living through a traumatic event! – but I’m hopeful that the empathy and grace we continue to show our teammates will have a positive impact on the culture of work moving forward.”
Nike already offers employees flexible schedule “Summer Hours.” Nike managers say the new move prioritizes the mental health of the company’s staff and leads to increased productivity at work.
Reading in the Fall, yes, I agree … and he’s got more:
With the approach of Labor Day weekend, the days are shorter. The heat and humidity of August has given way to cooler, drier days and crisp evenings and the bluest of skies.
I love reading in the fall. Actually, I love reading every time of the year but fall has its own pleasures. Here are a few of them that come to mind:
Being able to sit outside and read without becoming a sweaty mess.
Comfortably gathering outdoors with your book group.
Resting your eyes from reading on fall colors.
Walking in the woods, stopping at a bench or lookout and pulling Walden out of your pocket.
Pumpkin spice drinks to go with your books.
Pressing leaves in your books to remember the season when you re-read that book ten years later.
Those gentle, rainy days when we can sit by the window and nestle into a novel as the rain streaks the window.
Steve Potash, the bearded and bespectacled president and C.E.O. of OverDrive, spent the second week of March, 2020, on a business trip to New York City. OverDrive distributes e-books and audiobooks—i.e., “digital content.” In New York, Potash met with two clients: the New York Public Library and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. By then, Potash had already heard what he described to me recently as “heart-wrenching stories” from colleagues in China, about neighborhoods that were shut down owing to the coronavirus. He had an inkling that his business might be in for big changes when, toward the end of the week, on March 13th, the N.Y.P.L. closed down and issued a statement: “The responsible thing to do—and the best way to serve our patrons right now—is to help minimize the spread of covid-19.” The library added, “We will continue to offer access to e-books.”
The sudden shift to e-books had enormous practical and financial implications, not only for OverDrive but for public libraries across the country. Libraries can buy print books in bulk from any seller that they choose, and, thanks to a legal principle called the first-sale doctrine, they have the right to lend those books to any number of readers free of charge. But the first-sale doctrine does not apply to digital content. For the most part, publishers do not sell their e-books or audiobooks to libraries—they sell digital distribution rights to third-party venders, such as OverDrive, and people like Steve Potash sell lending rights to libraries. These rights often have an expiration date, and they make library e-books “a lot more expensive, in general, than print books,” Michelle Jeske, who oversees Denver’s public-library system, told me. Digital content gives publishers more power over prices, because it allows them to treat libraries differently than they treat other kinds of buyers. Last year, the Denver Public Library increased its digital checkouts by more than sixty per cent, to 2.3 million, and spent about a third of its collections budget on digital content, up from twenty per cent the year before.
More (non)reading:
Right now, there are 126 unread text messages on my phone. Some people see that number and gasp, but others, they know. Those messages aren’t the result of muted text threads or ignored ex-boyfriends. A few are appointment reminders (from my dentist, from the hairdresser). The rest are all business.
From Food52: 15 brag-worthy make-up ahead lunches!
From Target Circle: You’ve got $14.40 as your balance!
From FarmRio: Meet the NEW Maxi Flowers print and prove that it can be sunny in your wardrobe year-round ☀️ Come say hello now
From ThirdLove: What’s better than an unexpected T Swift album? Getting 25% just for being you. Surprise!
From BevMo: 3-Day Exclusive Online Only Offer! 10% all San Francisco Chronicle Award-Winning Wines. Discount applied at checkout.
Text messages have become the way my credit card asks me about a potentially fraudulent charge. It’s how I interact with Delta customer service. It’s, perhaps naturally, how my wireless provider alerts me of my monthly charges. It’s how my favorite place to get take-out tells me how many loyalty points I’ve accrued, and how my favorite brewery alerts me to what’s new on tap. For certain stores, I get a text when my package is out for delivery.
My text messages inbox is becoming my email inbox — which had previously absorbed the marketing overflow of my mailbox and landline. The reason? Over-saturation. Put differently: my inbox no longer offers the returns brands seek. I use Gmail Priority Inbox, which sorts messages from individuals directly to you (say, an email from my editor) into my ‘actual’ Inbox, and then everything else hangs out in the stew below. Here’s the stew from two and a half hours this morning…
This is after I spent a solid two hours last month deliberately unsubscribing from a number of emails, and after Gmail prompted me every few weeks to unsubscribe from senders whose emails I never open, and after I made liberal use of the “Mark as spam & unsubscribe” button, the efficacy of which, I know, is limited. Point is: I’m trying to bring the stew to a simmer, but the temperature keeps rising. (And yes, there’s a Talking Points USA email in there, when you report on weird things you sometimes subscribe to weird things).
But the stew doesn’t bother me. It doesn’t show up in my email inbox count to stress me out (if you have anyone in your life whose inbox is above five digits, it’s almost certainly because they don’t have this sort of sorting mechanism enabled). But the existence of the stew is a marketing nightmare, because every company feels like the celery that’s basically become invisible and no one wants to eat anyway. They try to figure out ways to become the piece of meat that people actually want, aka, how to get into your priority inbox. (Or, at the very least, how to evade the spam/promotions filtering).
Nice slot here for some good news:
"What has gotten materially better in America in, say, the last twenty years?" David Walsh, a University of Virginia postdoctoral fellow, casually asked on Twitter yesterday.
Hundreds of responses poured in, citing everything from consumer goods to medical treatments to cultural attitudes, laws, and Brussels sprouts.
The overwhelming number of responses and their variety provides a nice reminder that a lot of stuff really has been getting better over the past few decades and American society isn't really the perpetual motion fail machine many people make it out to be. In the interest of celebrating progress, here's a sampling (in no particular order) of those responses…
In all of my reporting on the future of work, one of the most interesting and potentially profound trends is the growing skepticism around ‘careers.’
‘Careerist’ has long been a dirty word in the working world — usually it’s meant to signify a cynical, ladder climbing mentality. A careerist isn’t a team player. They care more about the job title and advancement than the work. The current brand of career skepticism I’m talking about is different, more absolute. It’s not a rejection of how somebody navigates the game, it’s a rejection of the game itself. The idea isn’t limited to a specific age group, but the best articulation of it comes from younger Millennials and working age Gen Zers. Many of them are fed up with their jobs and they’re quitting in droves. Even those with jobs are reevaluating their options.
An August job-seeking survey found that 55 percent of respondents who were actively employed planned to look for a new job within the next year. Though millions are unemployed, at the end of June job openings surged to an all-time high. While labor protections are still weak and haven’t caught up to the parameters of modern work, the covid job reshuffling feels a bit like the beginnings of a changing power dynamic. Employees have a tiny bit of leverage right now and many are trying to use it to send a message about how the status quo of modern work feels exhausting and unsustainable.
People are quitting jobs across class and industry lines. Perhaps the most famous example is the “nobody wants to work anymore” meme that bounced around Twitter in April. The meme kicked off after a TikTok user named @BrittanyJade903 posted a video of a McDonald’s drive-thru sign which read, "We are short-staffed. Please be patient with the staff that did show up. Nobody wants to work anymore."It triggered a whole series of posts about low wages and worker exploitation that quickly grew beyond the service industry.
In May I ended up on Burnout TikTok, where every 5th video offered withering commentary on the futility and frustration of toiling away for long hours at a job they didn’t particularly like. I can’t find the video anymore but the one that sticks in my head was a TikToker venting about how the idealized career is — when you think about it — a raw deal. It went something like this: You devote the bulk of every day for 30-40 years in the prime of your life to various companies to make them and their shareholders money and then you get ten years near the end of your life to do what you please. Sounds like a bad arrangement.
John Smoltz and Al Leiter are not making in-studio appearances for MLB Network after refusing to get the coronavirus vaccine, according to multiple reports.
MLB Network's policy making it mandatory for all employees to be vaccinated took effect Wednesday. Smoltz and Leiter will still do analysis for studio shows, but it will be remote instead of from the network's Secaucus, New Jersey, studio.
The New York Post was the first to report the story. MLB Network declined to comment in an email to the AP.
Smoltz, 54, is also the lead analyst on Fox's coverage of the MLB, making the calls on the biggest games, including the World Series.
It takes a sleuth to figure this stuff out:
This March, readers of the New York Times were presented with the tale of Moses Shapira, an antiquities dealer from Jerusalem, who showed up in London in 1883 with 15 leather strips that he claimed were an ancient — maybe even Moses’s original — copy of the biblical book of Deuteronomy. He had acquired the strips five years earlier, he said, from Bedouin who had found them in a cave on the east side of the Dead Sea. The British Museum was interested in buying the manuscript — for a reported 1 million pounds (over 120 million pounds in today’s money!) — and commissioned an expert, Christian David Ginsburg, to study it. The British public was ecstatic and crowded around a display in the British Museum in an effort to glimpse even part of it. Just when it looked like the museum would buy it, Charles Clermont-Ganneau, the great French orientalist (and Shapira’s long-standing nemesis) showed up. After barely looking at the strips, Ganneau declared them a forgery. Every other scholar quickly fell in line behind Ganneau, including Ginsburg himself. Shapira fled London in disgrace, losing his mind and wandering the continent aimlessly for six months before he killed himself in a Rotterdam hotel. Now comes the stunning coda: a researcher claims that they might have been authentic.