My first encounter with missionaries—like that of so many children—involved presents. A Christmas bauble from Burkina Faso, given out to each child at a small church in Ohio. A stick of Juicy Fruit from the American woman in a burqa, for answering the Why Jesus Saves Us question. Growing…
Coming back from an academic conference, I’m reminded that the thing I love most about academics is how they ask questions. Normal people start out by saying: “I don’t understand,” or “That’s bullshit,” or “Uhhuh… what the hell are altmetrics?” All of which are valid statements. Academics, on the other…
I often snap a bunch of similar shots when out taking pictures, and although usually I delete the duplicates, sometimes I catch a nice effect when flipping through the pictures quickly: I’m sure you’ve seen it, but ‘wiggle GIFs’ create a sort of vibrating stereoscopic effect by combining two…
It’s a muggy day in July when my Kazakh teacher, Aryslan, promises that I’ll have a free day tomorrow — he needs to go home to his village and prepare for his brother’s wedding. “Toidyn bolganynan, boladysy qyzyq,” he says. Everything that happens at a wedding is interesting: the…
I’ve been studying knowledge management this term, and find ‘workplace culture’ intriguing: what do we attend do? what does a leader value and promote? how do leaders and followers, colleagues and loners, interact together to create organizational culture? And even more than before, I appreciate the opportunity that working…
“You want to be a writer? Schopenhauer said that you must not seek to be the most famous artist, you must just become the best that you can be. To draw the sound of flowers,” Mathéo says, clenching his fist passionately. Then he leans back, howling in French at…
My first embryonic manager experience was not my strong point. Working on a research team in Mongolia, I was suddenly set in charge of two feisty local girls while our leaders were out of the country on side trips (story). Hmm. Those two were a disaster, but I also wasn’t…
Having spent years in assistant roles, it has been intriguing recently to manage new assistants. Compared with prior posts, helping to manage has me seeing many ways that I could have improved as an assistant in the past. So if you’re trying to train your new manager, or yourself, here…
I used to have these daydreams where I would be the influential personal assistant to someone really powerful. But then I realized, good assistants to the rich and famous shouldn’t keep a blog. Or journal notes. Or private thoughts. Or anything evidential, really. So that may not be the…
Steven Gray’s article, Can the Black Middle Class Survive, has stuck with me. I remember his excellent work as a reporter on Detroit for TIME magazine. Yet after a painful layoff, he lays out the challenges that middle-class Blacks faced in the recent economic tremors of America: the average black household’s wealth fell by more than…