5 Things to Do When You Feel Overwhelmed by Your Workload - article by Alice Boyes in Harvard Business Review. "Practice your acceptance skills with healthy self-talk... Track your time to give yourself an accurate baseline... Check your assumptions about other people’s expectations... Examine your assumptions about what success requires... Start taking time off now instead of waiting for the 'right' time."
How to get away with financial fraud - article by Dan Davies in The Guardian, based on his book Lying for Money: How Fraud Makes the World Go Round. "Some places in the world are what they call 'low-trust societies'. The political institutions are fragile and corrupt, business practices are dodgy, debts are rarely repaid and people rightly fear being ripped off on any transaction. In the 'high-trust societies', conversely, businesses are honest, laws are fair and consistently enforced, and the majority of people can go about their day in the knowledge that the overall level of integrity in economic life is very high.... Commercial fraud is parasitical on the overall health of the business sector on which it preys. It is much more difficult to be a fraudster in a society in which people only do business with relatives, or where commerce is based on family networks going back centuries. It is much easier to carry out a securities fraud in a market where dishonesty is the rare exception rather than the everyday rule.... Fraudsters don’t play on moral weaknesses, greed or fear; they play on weaknesses in the system of checks and balances – the audit processes that are meant to supplement an overall environment of trust. One point that comes up again and again when looking at famous and large-scale frauds is that, in many cases, everything could have been brought to a halt at a very early stage if anyone had taken care to confirm all the facts. But nobody does confirm all the facts. There are just too bloody many of them. Even after the financial rubble has settled and the arrests been made, this is a huge problem."
The death of truth: how we gave up on facts and ended up with Trump - article by Michiko Kikutani in The Guardian. "Two of the most monstrous regimes in human history came to power in the 20th century, and both were predicated on the violation and despoiling of truth, on the knowledge that cynicism and weariness and fear can make people susceptible to the lies and false promises of leaders bent on unconditional power. As Hannah Arendt wrote in her 1951 book The Origins of Totalitarianism, 'The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (ie the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (ie the standards of thought) no longer exist.' Arendt’s words increasingly sound less like a dispatch from another century than a chilling description of the political and cultural landscape we inhabit today... For decades now, objectivity – or even the idea that people can aspire toward ascertaining the best available truth – has been falling out of favour.... The postmodernist argument that all truths are partial (and a function of one’s perspective) led to the related argument that there are many legitimate ways to understand or represent an event. This both encouraged a more egalitarian discourse and made it possible for the voices of the previously disfranchised to be heard. But it has also been exploited by those who want to make the case for offensive or debunked theories, or who want to equate things that cannot be equated.... In a 2016 documentary titled HyperNormalisation, the filmmaker Adam Curtis ... says in voiceover narration that people in the west had also stopped believing the stories politicians had been telling them for years, and Trump realised that 'in the face of that, you could play with reality' and in the process 'further undermine and weaken the old forms of power'."
The Monarchy of Fear: Martha Nussbaum makes the case for hope - review by Charles Kaiser in The Guardian. "We have a president who nourishes fear, enables hatred and hastens the disappearance of truth with almost everything he does. Americans who engage in hate crimes have been 'radicalized by signs of permission and approval'. The internet has made it easier for hate groups to find one another, social media encourages 'informational cascades' of dishonesty (much faster than television), and Twitter promotes the preposterous notion 'that everything worth saying can be said right away'. ... In the face of so many warning signs about the condition of the republic, [Martha Nussbaum,] professor of law and ethics [at the University of Chicago] is all about resisting visions of calamity. ... Despite all of its current traumas, America is a much better place today than it was in the much-mourned 1950s.... Nussbaum reminds us that three of the most effective leaders of modern times were fierce disciples of hope and forgiveness, and enemies of hate: Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, and Martin Luther King Jr.... Nussbaum’s fundamental idealism is undiminished by the coarseness of our time... She proposes two structural solutions to the nation’s problems, both as worthy as they are unfashionable: genuine integration of America’s public schools, and a requirement of three years of national service for all young Americans.... 'Hope really is a choice,' says the author, 'and a practical habit.'"
Dark money lurks at the heart of our political crisis - article by George Monbiot in The Guardian. "A mere two millennia after Roman politicians paid mobs to riot on their behalf, we are beginning to understand the role of dark money in politics, and its perennial threat to ... Dark money can be seen as the underlying corruption from which our immediate crises emerge: the collapse of public trust in politics, the rise of a demagogic anti-politics, and assaults on the living world, public health and civic society. Democracy is meaningless without transparency.... The problem is exemplified, in my view, by the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA).... What is this organisation, and on whose behalf does it speak? If only we knew.... The only hard information we have is that, for many years, it has been funded by British American Tobacco (BAT), Japan Tobacco International, Imperial Tobacco and Philip Morris International. When this funding was exposed, the IEA claimed that its campaigns against tobacco regulation were unrelated to the money it had received. Recently, it has been repeatedly dissing the NHS, which it wants to privatise; campaigning against controls on junk food; attacking trade unions; and defending zero-hour contracts, unpaid internships and tax havens. Its staff appear on the BBC promoting these positions, often several times a week. But never do interviewers ask the basic democratic questions: who funds you, and do they have a financial interest in these topics?"
What liberals (still) get wrong about Trump's support - article by Henry Olsen in The Guardian. "Liberals and progressives are forever predicting Donald Trump’s political demise. After each purported outrage ... they confidently contend that this latest event will finally force Trump’s supporters to abandon him. Yet not only does this not happen, Trump’s support has actually risen by 6% since late 2017. How do they keep getting it so wrong?... The data clearly shows that Trump’s political coalition is pretty much the traditional Republican coalition. And the often virulent behavior of anti-Trump partisans has made partisan Republicans especially unwilling to abandon their leader even when he stumbles.... Evangelicals are a case in point.... Their support for Trump now is highly transactional: so long as he nominates the judges they think will protect their beliefs and way of life, they will overlook virtually anything else he says or does.... Analysis by the libertarian Cato Institute’s Emily Ekins found that Trump’s general election support broke into five groups. Only one, the American Preservationists, contained a large number of voters who could be said to be generally hostile to racial and ethnic minorities per se. They were outnumbered by another group, the Free Marketeers, whose attitudes towards racial and ethnic minorities were as or more tolerant than the attitudes of Hillary Clinton supporters. Each faction’s continued support for Trump is based upon how he acts on their priorities, not on one overarching theme.That doesn’t mean Trump backers are blind. Polls show an unusually high share of Republicans do not say they 'strongly' approve of his performance; they are well aware of his many foibles and flaws. But in our bipartisan system, opposition to Trump means supporting the Democrats. Absent any indication that Democrats are open to Republicans’ views, these voters, sometimes reluctantly, remain in Trump’s camp."
Museums are not the proper home for our greatest works - article by Simon Jenkins in The Guardian. "Pressure to return items from museums is becoming relentless, especially in the case of Europe’s great historic collections. ... Museums are clearly facing an identity crisis. Most of the big London institutions are losing visitors. ... Museums protest that they are the last guardians of a fragile past. They hold and hoard the relics of the past for scholars to study and people to view, one day if not now. Their critics say museums are where art goes to die. The cult of authenticity is just that, a cult. The Victorians did not fuss over what was original. They replicated medieval statues and rebuilt castles and churches, much to our benefit. Facsimile reproduction is now so good that replicas can be made of almost anything. I want to see how Rocket worked, and stand on its footplate, not know whether each bit of its metal is original. I want to see the Parthenon marbles as Phidias intended, even if recarved by a computerised jig.... Sensible people would long ago have replicated [the Parthenon marbles] and sent the old ones back to Greece. If people mind so much, give Ethiopia back its hair, Manchester its Rocket and Lewis its chessmen. London can have copies. So many great works – not all of them – derive meaning from where they originated. Malraux was right: a museum is without walls, a place of the imagination. The wonder of an object lies not in its material antiquity but in its story and its appearance."
