Tag: Workplace Environment

The Fear and Tension That Led to Sam Altman’s Ouster at OpenAI

Over the last year, Sam Altman led OpenAI to the adult table of the technology industry. Thanks to its hugely popular ChatGPT chatbot, the San Francisco start-up was at the center of an artificial intelligence boom, and Mr. Altman, OpenAI’s chief executive, had become one of the most recognizable people in tech. But that success […]

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WeWork’s Bankruptcy Tests Claims of a Co-Working Revolution

In its heyday a few years ago, WeWork said it would reinvent offices. But the company never created a sustainable business or changed how most people worked. The business of offering flexible office space on short leases to individuals and businesses, a model that WeWork hoped to make mainstream, remains a niche in commercial real […]

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The Fashion of ‘Selling Sunset’

“Selling Sunset” is anything but subtle. The Netflix reality show follows a cast of real estate professionals at the Oppenheim Group, a Los Angeles-based luxury brokerage. It features multimillion dollar listings and brief celebrity name-drops and appearances. Side eyes are even more abundant. But as viewers continue to binge the show season after season, chatter […]

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Sam Bankman-Fried’s Trial Reveals New Details of How FTX Died

On the morning of Nov. 6, Nishad Singh, a top executive at the cryptocurrency exchange FTX, sent a message in a group chat with two senior colleagues. Customers were rushing to withdraw funds from the exchange, he wrote. Within the last day, they had tried to move $1.25 billion off the platform, and $120 million […]

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Cities Foster Serendipity. But Can They Do It When Workers Are at Home?

There is a thing that happens in cities — that we think happens in cities — when people with lots of different ideas bump into each other on the sidewalk, or at the bar or the grocery store or the gym. Together, they think up things that would never come out of a conference room […]

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The Return-to-Office Movement Is Dead

Working from home is here to stay. I can prove it with data — lots and lots of data showing that returning to the office (RTO) is DOA. A telling data point is the number tracking how many Americans swiped and tapped electronic cards to gain entry into their offices. This month, occupancy rates were […]

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It’s Not OK to Police Co-Workers’ Pronouns

Some reading suggestions: “On Intersectionality: Essential Writings” by Kimberlé Crenshaw; “Feminism Is for Everybody” by bell hooks; “Women, Race & Class” by Angela Y. Davis; and “Hood Feminism: Notes From the Women That a Movement Forgot” by Mikki Kendall. Working With a Debbie Downer My colleague at work is a real downer. It’s impossible to […]

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What We Know About the Effects of Remote Work

When workplaces are remade by a tectonic shift — women flooding into the work force, the rise of computing — it typically takes some time for economists, psychologists, sociologists and other scholars to gather data on its effects. So when employers moved suddenly to adopt remote work during the pandemic, with the share of employed […]

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The New Plant Keepers

Felipe Gallegos used to work in fashion, designing store displays for Abercrombie & Fitch and Uniqlo. Now he spends his days with plants, helping them thrive in office buildings across New York City. On a recent morning, Mr. Gallegos and eight of his fellow plant keepers from Greenery NYC, which designs plant installations and maintains […]

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Workers Exposed to Extreme Heat Have Few Protections

Anthony Soto, a 22-year-old baggage claim employee at the Dallas Fort Worth International Airport, crumpled to the floor near gate C15 after a seizure last October that he attributed to hot indoor conditions and strenuous lifting. In record-setting heat in Texas this past summer, Mr. Soto, who has epilepsy, had four more seizures that left […]

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How Japan’s Salarymen Embraced Short Sleeves Through ‘Cool Biz’

It was the tail end of another long, hot Tokyo summer, and salarymen across the city were looking at their wardrobes with dread. Every year from May to September, Japan’s famously conservative corporate workers and government employees set aside their stiff, dark suits for more casual attire. Out go the neckties and starched shirts; in […]

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Tyson and Perdue Are Facing Child Labor Investigations

Tyson Foods and Perdue Farms, which together produce a third of the poultry sold in the United States, are under federal investigation into whether they relied on migrant children to clean slaughterhouses, some of the most dangerous work in the country. The Labor Department opened the inquiries after an article in The New York Times […]

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As DEI Gains Ground, Identifying as Religious at Work Does, Too

When Christy Childers moved from Austin to San Francisco in 2017 to start a marketing job at Facebook, she felt anxious about sharing her evangelical faith with her new colleagues. In Ms. Childers’s religious community, Silicon Valley has a reputation for being overtly secular and less than accepting of Christian beliefs. She now calls that […]

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Billionaire Ray Dalio Pushes for Return to Hedge Fund in Succession Clash

Less than a year after retiring, Ray Dalio, the founder of Bridgewater Associates, the world’s largest hedge fund, is threatening his former colleagues with the one thing they have worked hard to prevent: his return. Under the terms of his retirement contract, Mr. Dalio, who left the firm full time in October, has the option […]

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The Real Reason These Celebrity Talk Shows Keep Imploding

Last week’s accusations about a toxic work environment at “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon” ignited a thunderous round of celebrity gossip — disappointment and distress for his fans, sustenance for his critics and fodder for all students of entertainment-world scandal. The Fallon story, which appeared in Rolling Stone, echoed the news from just a […]

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Germany’s Oldest Hops Thrived for Centuries. Then Came Climate Change.

Generations of farmers in the sun-lashed green hills of Spalt have proudly tended to their hops plants, used for brewing beer, since the Middle Ages. Asked what makes the native breed of Spalter hops so special, enthusiasts rhapsodize about their delicate, spicy aroma; their lightness; and the harmony and hint of bitterness the crop imparts. […]

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