writing

Vancouver Newspapers in Crisis: Not Only the Industry’s Fault

This week, a shock went through the Canadian media world with the leak of an internal memo predicting a very dark future for Vancouver’s two daily newspapers, the Vancouver Sun and the Province. The memo, entitled “Next Steps”, was written by Gordon Fisher, the newly installed president and publisher of Pacific Newspaper Group (PNG) – the division of Postmedia which publishes the two papers. The memo called the business “unsustainable” because of declining revenues, announced yet another voluntary buyout program for employees, and warned that the new “audience-first, four-platform organization” would “continu[e] to aggressively cut costs”.

Full disclosure: I am a former employee of both the Sun and the Province (more…)

Daniel Pink’s ‘Drive’: A Short Journey on a Tiny Piece of Road

Daniel Pink’s book Drive: The Surprising Truth about What Motivates Us is being mentioned more and more as a good introduction to understanding workplace motivation. I’m not familiar with any of Pink’s other work, some of which has been fiercely criticized. But I was motivated (so to speak) to read this book because I teach about motivation in some of my classes, and some of my research deals with it as well. So I am always interested in what someone has to say about this particular topic.

Drive isn’t a textbook or an academic book. It’s a popular press book, and as such it’s clearly intended as a Malcolm Gladwell-style book – research experiments explained in an understandable way, and useful practical advice based on that research. The spare design of Drive’s cover even mimics the design of the covers of Gladwell’s books, and Pink’s writing follows Gladwell’s style of grandiose declarations and confident assertions. But, unlike Gladwell, Pink accurately describes the research he writes about, and I commend him for that.  I also applaud him for explaining how motivation is both intrinsic and extrinsic (and pointing out that each kind has different effects), and for emphasizing that just throwing money at workers isn’t going to make them work harder. These are realities of motivation that often get ignored and which are always worth talking about.

Unfortunately, though, there’s more wrong with Drive than there is right. (more…)

The Problems with Jonah Lehrer’s “Proust Was a Neuroscientist”

A few weeks ago, I wrote about Jonah Lehrer’s book How We Decide being removed from sale because some of its contents were plagiarized. This occurred just after Lehrer had made his first public appearance in several months, giving a speech apologizing for his previous journalistic misdeeds, including self-plagiarism and fabricated quotes.

In his story on How We Decide being pulled off the market, journalist Michael Moynihan – who uncovered the fabricated quotes which led to Lehrer’s book Imagine also being removed from sale – reports that How We Decide‘s publishers also reviewed 2007’s Proust Was a Neuroscientist, the first of Lehrer’s three books. The review “did not uncover any problems and…[the book] ‘will remain in print’ “.

After examining some parts of Proust Was a Neuroscientist more closely, I think that the book does have “problems”. (more…)

Another Critique of Malcolm Gladwell’s “10,000 Hour Rule”

I’m currently reading a very interesting book entitled Selling the Dream: How Hockey Parents and Their Kids are Paying the Price for Our National Obsession. (The “our” is Canada, if you hadn’t already guessed that from the reference to hockey.) If nothing else, this book has made me, as a figure skater, realize that participating in hockey can be almost as expensive as participating in figure skating, especially when parents put their kids into all kinds of additional hockey training and coaching.

However, the part of the book that I found particularly fascinating was its comments on Malcolm Gladwell’s “10,000 hour rule”, which I have criticized in another post.  (more…)

All About Work’s First Birthday
(credit: own photo)

(credit: own photo)

Today marks the first birthday of All About Work. In one year, it’s received over 10,000 hits, and working on it has been a lot of fun for me.

The five posts that received the most hits during the year are: (more…)

Academics Behaving Badly: Not Just Irritating, But Also Expensive

Around this time of the academic year, the enthusiasm of last September has been almost completely exhausted. Deadlines for big class projects are fast approaching, everyone is sniffling with a cold or has gigantic lack-of-sleep circles under their eyes (or both), crankiness is running rampant, and the end of the semester seems a looooong way away. So maybe that’s why my eye was caught this past week by two different discussions of academic bad behavior. (more…)

Jonah Lehrer’s 2nd Book Pulled by Publisher

Despite Jonah Lehrer’s very public and very lucrative apology last week for his plagiarism problems, those problems don’t seem to be going away.

Michael Moynihan, the journalist who uncovered Lehrer’s fabricated Bob Dylan quotes, has posted a story today that Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Lehrer’s book publisher, has removed How We Decide from sale. How We Decide was Lehrer’s second book, published before the (in)famous Imagine; I’ve written about some of the other problems with that book here.

The reason given for taking the book off the market was an “internal review” that uncovered “significant problems”. The “problems” weren’t specified by the publisher, but Moynihan points to a set of quotes in How We Decide allegedly from an interview conducted by Lehrer specifically for the book, but which bear a remarkable similarity to 20-year-old quotes on Wikipedia about the same issue.

The Knight Foundation, which hired Lehrer for the $20,000 speech, later apologized for the decision to pay him that much (although they didn’t ask him to return his speaking fee, at least not publicly). I’m thinking that right about now they’re probably really sorry…..

Books about Women and Careers: Is This Progress?

This year is the 50th anniversary of the publication of The Feminine Mystique, the revolutionary book by Betty Friedan that made many women in the 1960s realize they weren’t the only ones dissatisfied with their lives and with what society expected of them. (In this excellent interview,  sociologist Stephanie Coontz talks about her book A Strange Stirring which explores how influential The Feminine Mystique was.)

This week I read I Shouldn’t Be Telling You This, a career book for women written by Kate White, the former editor of Cosmopolitan magazine. (more…)

Jonah Lehrer Apologizes (And Gets $20,000)

Jonah Lehrer – the author whose misadventures in plagiarism I’ve written about in several previous posts – is back.

On Feb. 12, Lehrer gave a speech on “bad decision-making” at an event sponsored by the Knight Foundation. According to this story, for appearing at the event – his first major public appearance since last July – Lehrer received a fee of $20,000. The reaction to this news has not been positive. In fact, not very positive at all.

Following up on suggestions like this one, a writer for Forbes magazine phoned Lehrer to ask if he would consider donating the $20,000 fee to charity. Lehrer hung up on him.

You can read the transcript of Lehrer’s speech here. At least this time he gave full references for his sources.

UPDATE: The Knight Foundation has apologized for paying Lehrer $20,000 for his speech. However, it is not clear whether the foundation is actually cancelling the payment or asking for it to be repaid.

Creativity and Research, Part II: Cookbooks and Cancer

In my last post, I wrote about the #overlyhonestmethods discussion on Twitter and its insights into creative (and funny) ways that researchers deal with unexpected problems in their work. While I was following #overlyhonestmethods, I came across a mention of a creative-sounding study reviewing the research on whether specific foods can cause cancer. Since the media regularly covers cancer research – and often makes wrong or misleading reports about it – I found the text of the whole article to see what it had to say. When I saw that the article had the awesome title of Is Everything We Eat Associated With Cancer? A Systematic Cookbook Review, I knew I had to write something about it. (more…)