March 14, 2021
The office happy hour is a survivor. Last year, as the pandemic began, it migrated online swiftly, just days after lockdowns began.
I remember feeling heartened by the quick regrouping, which I read as a sign of resilience and solidarity. Even a pandemic was not about to dislodge an office tradition. But Heather Lowe, the personal coach behind the consulting firm Ditched The Drink, saw “quarantinis” as more proof of alcohol’s hold on workplace culture.
That isn’t to say she was surprised. Before the pandemic, companies leaned on martinis, champagne, craft beer, wine, and cocktails to recruit potential hires, woo clients at business lunches, celebrate milestones, reward top performers, launch products, and mark the beginning of every weekend.
March 10, 2021
How much would you pay for a 3D rendering of a sofa? Last month, a line of “virtual furniture” earned its creator nearly half a million real dollars on Nifty Gateway, one of several online auction sites for blockchain-backed digital assets.
Conceived by Andrés Reisinger, a 29-year old Argentinian digital artist based in Barcelona, the collection includes blob-shaped couches, a discombobulating set of drawers, and one pink swivel office chair.
To be clear, these are mostly computer generated files not actual pieces of furniture. Winning bidders, however, can use them to furnish their virtual worlds and gaming environments. For instance, the person who paid $5,000 for a rendering of a gravity-defying table called Pinky can upload it to Minecraft.
March 9, 2021
In a study a few years ago about how people perceive facial movements, subjects were presented with photographs of pro tennis players who had just scored or lost a critical point, and were asked to guess whether the athletes were ecstatic or devastated, based on their facial expressions.
That sounds easy enough, but people were only able to correctly read the faces about half of the time. (The New York Times created an interactive quiz based on the study if you want to test yourself.) Shown the players’ entire bodies, however, participants were much better at distinguishing between happiness and pain.
March 2, 2021
With an economy in slow recovery, and the burden of education loans higher than ever, US president Joe Biden is facing increasing pressure from Democrats to wipe out $50,000 in student debt per borrower, and to do so via executive action. But Biden suggests more modest measures, saying the government shouldn’t forgive debt for students from “Harvard and Yale and Penn.”
On the campaign trail, Biden pledged to clear $10,000 of federal student loan debt per borrower a small dent in the more than $1.5 trillion of student loans issued or guaranteed by the US government.
Forgiving $10,000 in debt would completely wipe out the student loan burden for one-third of America’s 43 million federal borrowers, data from the US Department of Education suggests.