Abortion rights supporters and anti-abortion demonstrators rally outside the U.S. Supreme Court on Nov. 1, 2021. | Drew Angerer/Getty Images
The Supreme Court has voted to strike down the landmark Roe v. Wade decision, according to an initial draft majority opinion written by Justice Samuel Alito circulated inside the court and obtained by POLITICO.
The draft opinion is a full-throated, unflinching repudiation of the 1973 decision which guaranteed federal constitutional protections of abortion rights and a subsequent 1992 decision — Planned Parenthood v. Casey — that largely maintained the right. “Roe was egregiously wrong from the start,” Alito writes.
This week, I gave a talk at the CALM (Conference on Academic Library Management) Conference. I’m sharing it here because I’ve received several requests for a written copy, but also because I think you could substitute pretty much any passion job for “academic librarian” here and the descriptions (and advice) will hold. The librarians are not okay. The nurses are not okay. The teachers are not okay. The journalists are not okay, the clergy are not okay, the social workers are no okay. And we can’t start the long-term work of recovering from the burnout and demoralization of the last year until we acknowledgment as much.
So here’s the talk, which seems to start in the middle of the nowhere but that’s just because I did some normal casual intros and positioning in the beginning. Please forgive the more conversational tone (which is how I write talks), the repetition of phrases (again, how I write talks) and the abundance of dashes (an approximation of the way we often actually speak). I hope it’s useful to you in some way, regardless of whether or not you’re a librarian or work in a passion job — because writing it, and delivering it, was certainly useful to me. Real, enduring empathy demands that we understand some corner of others’ contexts. And this is the crucial context that I’ve seen missing from so many conversations about people leaving jobs and industries and fields, and struggling mightily to stay within them. As always, I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments below.
Your job has become incredibly difficult. And even though I can’t understand the very specific ways it has become difficult — what a life in your shoes feels like — I do understand the overarching ways it has become difficult, and think we should spend some time acknowledging them.
First: You work passion jobs, and passion jobs are prime for exploitation. Until I started writing about my own burnout back in 2019, I didn’t grasp why it would ever be problematic to pursue work that you love. I thought that’s what everyone should, in some way, be trying to do — and if they weren’t, I had some sort of quiet pity for them, like WHO WANTS TO BE AN ACCOUNTANT? THEY MUST BE SO BORED!!
This perspective was not, by any means, unique: for people on the college-track in the 1990s and 2000s, this was the air we breathed, passed down in maxims like do what you love and you won’t work another day for the rest of your life and in Steve Jobs’ oft-quoted 2005 commencement speech at Stanford.
To be able to follow that ideology felt so aspirational — like setting yourself up for a future of guaranteed fulfillment. But it also set up a whole lot of us to conceive of our jobs not as jobs, but as vocations, as callings — with the understanding that pushing back, in any way, on the conditions of our employment was somehow evidence of a lack of commitment to the work.
Editor’s Note: Read more, see link below for original item…
By Katie Hunt, CNN, Updated 12:13 PM EDT, Mon May 2, 2022
Flashpop/Digital Vision/Getty Images
The optimum amount of sleep is not too little but not too much – at least in middle and old age.
New research has found that around seven hours of sleep is the ideal night’s rest, with insufficient and excessive sleep associated with a reduced ability to pay attention, remember and learn new things, solve problems and make decisions.
Seven hours of slumber was also found to be linked with better mental health, with people experiencing more symptoms of anxiety and depression and worse overall well-being if they reported sleeping for longer or shorter stints.
“While we can’t say conclusively that too little or too much sleep causes cognitive problems, our analysis looking at individuals over a longer period of time appears to support this idea,” Jianfeng Feng, a professor at China’s Fudan University and an author of the study published in the scientific journal Nature Aging, said in a statement.
“But the reasons why older people have poorer sleep appear to be complex, influenced by a combination of our genetic makeup and the structure of our brains.”
By John Warner, Chicago Tribune, Apr 30, 2022 at 6:00 am
Thank goodness public libraries already exist, because if they didn’t, there’s no way we’d ever be able to establish similar institutions in today’s dis-United States of America.
from article…
The Carnegie Library in Waukegan, at the intersection of Sheridan and Washington, was built in 1903 as one of the many libraries built with Andrew Carnegie’s money. It was where author Ray Bradbury liked to read when he was young. Although it’s no longer a library, the building is slated to be the home of the Waukegan Historical Society. (Rob Dicker / Chicago Tribune / Chicago Tribune)
There are a number of reasons I’m skeptical. For one, belief in institutions, in general, is at an all-time low ebb. Government, schools, churches — the entities in which people are expected to come together and sacrifice some portion of their individual well-being for an overall increase in the common good — either have significantly less salience in today’s society (churches), or are under direct assault by forces that seem to not just be partisan politically, but actively anti-democracy.
Weakened institutions aside, there also seems to be an overall lack of communal spirit.
“I’ve got mine” could be the slogan of our age.
from article…
Our inability to act collectively to mitigate the worst effects of the pandemic is illustrative here. Inconvenience or discomfort, or worse, someone else getting something one thinks they might not “deserve” would all make libraries a difficult sell.
I can imagine the internet hot take: Why punish people who can afford to buy books by making them free to read for everyone?
Let’s assume Donald Trump runs again for president in 2024. Yes, I know, caveats, caveats. Republicans say it’s too early to discuss ’24. A lot can change between now and then. Maybe Trump won’t actually run. Maybe he’s just teasing the possibility to milk the attention. Apparently, he likes attention.But if Trump does decide to inflict himself on another race, he will enter as the clear Republican favorite, enjoying a presumption of invincibility inside the GOP.
This has engendered a belief that anyone who challenges Trump must tread lightly, or end up like the roadkill that his primary opponents became in 2016.
That notion is outdated. Trump’s bizarre and enduring hold over his party has made it verboten for many Republicans to even utter publicly the unpleasant fact of his defeat—something they will readily acknowledge in private. I caught up recently with several Trump-opposing Republican strategists and former associates of the president who argued this restraint should end. The best way for a Republican to depose Trump in 2024, they said, will be to call Trump a loser, as early and as brutally as possible—and keep pointing out the absurdity of treating a one-term, twice-impeached, 75-year-old former president like a kingmaker and heir apparent.
In other words, don’t worry about hurting Special Boy’s feelings.
“Why on earth would we hitch our wagons again to a crybaby sore loser who lost the popular vote twice, lost the House, lost the Senate, and lost the White House, and so on?” said Barbara Comstock, a longtime political consultant and former Republican congresswoman from Virginia. “For Republicans, whether they embrace the Big Lie or not, Trump is vulnerable to having the stench of disaster on him.”
Trump’s wasn’t an ordinary election defeat, either. Some nervy Republican challenger needs to remind everyone how rare it is for an incumbent president to lose reelection, and also that Trump was perhaps the most graceless loser and insufferable whiner in presidential history—the first outgoing commander in chief in 152 years to skip his successor’s swearing-in. And that he dragged a lot of Republicans down with him. As Comstock hinted, Trump was the first president since Herbert Hoover to preside over his party’s loss of the House, Senate, and White House in a single term. Said nervy Republican challenger could even (just for fun) remind the former president that he once called the person he lost to “the worst presidential candidate in the history of presidential politics.”
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