What these [personality] tests tell employers about potential employees is hard to imagine since the 'right' answer should be obvious to anyone who has ever encountered the principle of hierarchy and...
What I wanted from people was simple enough. I wanted them to rush up to me and to each other and say, Oh my God, what is this? What is happening here? I wanted them to come pouring out of their house...
There seems to be a vicious cycle at work here, making ours not just an economy but a culture of extreme inequality. Corporate decision makers, and even some two-bit entrepreneurs like my boss at The...
There is a vast difference between positive thinking and existential courage.
That's what meaning is—a special additive like salt or garlic that could make even the most fetid piece of meat seem palpable, even delicious.
Some economists argue that the apparent paradox rests on an illusion: there is no real 'labor shortage,' only a shortage of people willing to work at the wages currently being offered. You might as we...
Positive thinking did not abolish the need for constant vigilance; it only turned that vigilance inward. Instead of worrying that one’s roof might collapse or one’s job be terminated, positive thinkin...
My religious friends - and my friends were almost all Catholics or Protestants or occasionally something more exotic like Jewish or Greek Orthodox - were convinced that God had a plan for us, and sinc...
My guess is that the indignities imposed on so many low-wage workers—the drug tests, the constant surveillance, being reamed out by managers—are part of what keeps wages low. If you’re made to feel un...
My aim here was much more straightforward and objective — just to see whether I could match income to expenses, as the truly poor attempt to do every day. Besides, I've had enough unchosen encounters...
Los sacerdotes que predican el pensamiento positivo en Estados Unidos seguramente se quedarán desolados si ven que se habla de ellos en el mismo capítulo (y hasta en el mismo libro) que de los censore...
It’s not only my work—forgive the pompous phrase—that I bequeath to my survivors but all the mental and sensual pleasures that come with being a living human: sitting in the spring sunshine, feeling t...
In Workers in a Lean World: Unions in the International Economy (Verso, 1997), Kim Moody cites studies finding an increase in stress-related workplace injuries and illness between the mid-1980s and th...
If we want developed societies with women doctors, political leaders, teachers, bus drivers, and computer programmers, we will need qualified people to give loving care to their children. And there is...
I had discovered that writing--with whatever instrument--was a powerful aid to thinking, and thinking was what I now resolved to do.
For most people, throughout most of the twentieth century, medical care necessarily involved an encounter with a social superior—a white male from a relatively privileged background.
Everyone, from software writer to accountant, was now subject to the same insecurities as the lonely salesman once targeted by Norman Vincent Peale.
Everyone in yuppie-land — airports, for example — looks like a nursing baby these days, inseparable from their plastic bottles of water. Here, however, I sweat without replacement or pause, not in ind...
En la Unión Soviética, igual que en los países del Este y en Corea del Norte, los censores exigían que el arte, la literatura y el cine estuvieran llenos de alegría, que los héroes fueran felices, que...
En esta cultura del cáncer de mama que se ha generalizado todo sirve (no a propósito, seguramente) para quitarle hierro a la enfermedad y para normalizarla: quizá el diagnóstico sea desastroso, pero p...