I gotta respect a business book writer who names a passage “Forget Best Practices.” Steve Pratt does just that in 2024’s Earn It, and his point is a good one: if everyone follows purported best practices in their messaging, there’ll be a sameness in what’s produced. Pratt’s career in marketing was built by being different (odd, even) and he implores…
Tune In to the Groovy New Sound
That college radio has endured over many decades is no small feat. The constant struggles are what should it be, who should it serve, and what is the point. All this and more is deeply explored in Live from the Underground by Fitchburg State University history professor Katherine Rye Jewell. Even at just 10 watts, these non-commercial, educational stations are…
Coming to Grips with Inequality
When you grow up with as little as Gary Stevenson (b. 1986) did, you have to claw to get ahead in life. Given the rules in advance to something called The Trading Game, he leveraged the chance to participate in the competition and destroyed his fellow participants, winning a plum internship at Citibank. Stevenson bares his soul in this memoir…
It’s Not the Journey, It’s the Destination
If I asked you (as I’m about to) to guess how many parking spaces Los Angeles County added on average daily between 1950 and 1980, what would sound like a wacky answer? A dozen? A hundred? Remember, this is every day for thirty years. It was 850. Slate writer Henry Grabar shares that lil’ nugget in the introduction to his…
Punch the Clock
“Work generally shares three formal characteristics: it is purposeful, effortful, and recognized by society as work – which often, though not always, means it’s worth getting paid for.” So say Christopher Wong Michaelson and Jennifer Tosti-Kharas in their new book, Is Your Work Worth It?. He’s a philosopher, she an organizational psychologist, and both are well-regarded professors skilled in challenging…