I was reared on cyberpunk fiction, I ended up spending 25 years at my EFF day-job working at the weird edge of tech and human rights, even as I wrote sf that tried to fuse my love of cyberpunk with my urgent, lifelong struggle over who computers do things for and who they do them to.
That makes me an official “post-cyberpunk” writer ™. Don’t take my word for it: I’m in the canon:
One of the editors of that “post-cyberpunk” anthology was John Kessel, who is, not coincidentally, the first writer to expose me to the power of literary criticism to change the way I felt about a novel, both as a writer and a reader:
It was Kessel’s 2004 Foundation essay, “Creating the Innocent Killer: Ender’s Game, Intention, and Morality,” that helped me understand litcrit. Kessel expertly surfaces the subtext of Card’s Ender’s Game and connects it to Card’s politics. In so doing, he completely reframed how I felt about a book I’d read several times and had considered a favorite:
This is a head-spinning experience for a reader, but it’s even wilder to experience it as a writer. Thankfully, the majority of literary criticism about my work has been positive, but even then, discovering something that’s clearly present in one of my novels, but which I didn’t consciously include, is a (very pleasant!) mind-fuck.
A recent example: Blair Fix’s review of my 2023 novel Red Team Blues which he calls “an anti-finance finance thriller”:
Fix – a radical economist – perfectly captures the correspondence between my hero, the forensic accountant Martin Hench, and the heroes of noir detective novels. Namely, that a noir detective is a kind of unlicensed policeman, going to the places the cops can’t go, asking the questions the cops can’t ask, and thus solving the crimes the cops can’t solve. What makes this noir is what happens next: the private dick realizes that these were places the cops didn’t want to go, questions the cops didn’t want to ask and crimes the cops didn’t want to solve (“It’s Chinatown, Jake”).
Marty Hench – a forensic accountant who finds the money that has been disappeared through the cells in cleverly constructed spreadsheets – is an unlicensed tax inspector. He’s finding the money the IRS can’t find – only to be reminded, time and again, that this is money the IRS chooses not to find.
This is how the tax authorities work, after all. Anyone who followed the coverage of the big finance leaks knows that the most shocking revelation they contain is how stupid the ruses of the ultra-wealthy are. The IRS could prevent that tax-fraud, they just choose not to. Not for nothing, I call the Martin Hench books “Panama Papers fanfic.”
I’ve read plenty of noir fiction and I’m a long-term finance-leaks obsessive, but until I read Fix’s article, it never occurred to me that a forensic accountant was actually squarely within the noir tradition. Hench’s perfect noir fit is either a happy accident or the result of a subconscious intuition that I didn’t know I had until Fix put his finger on it.
The EU’s General Court on Wednesday blocked the registration of the name “Pablo Escobar” as a trademark, upholding a ruling from the Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO).
A Puerto Rican company linked to Escobar’s family had filed to trademark the name of the notorious Colombian drug lord in the EU in September 2021.
The applicant argued that names such as Bonnie and Clyde, Al Capone and Che Guevara have already been registered as EU trademarks and that, “Pablo Escobar, because of his many good deeds for the poor in Colombia, has become a mythical figure in mainstream popular culture.”
Escobar, a narco-terrorist who was killed in a shootout in 1993, was the leader of the infamous Medellín Cartel and over decades of drug-trafficking became one of the world’s leading cocaine barons.
Wednesday’s court decision came after EUIPO previously refused to accept the registration as Escobar’s name, and what the European public associates with it, contradicted EU values.
“EUIPO rejected the application for registration on the ground that the mark was contrary to public policy and to accepted principles of morality,” a press release from the Court of Justice of the European Union said Wednesday, adding that EUIPO had relied on the perception of the Spanish public.
According to the court, “reasonable Spaniards, with average sensitivity and tolerance thresholds” who shared European values “would associate the name of Pablo Escobar with drug trafficking and narco-terrorism and with the crimes and suffering resulting therefrom.”
In its original decision in February 2023, EUIPO also referenced a ruling in which the registration of a restaurant chain called “La Mafia se sienta a la Mesa” (“The Mafia sits at the table”) was refused in 2018 because it could be perceived as immoral by the average citizen.
The General Court added that, “Pablo Escobar’s fundamental right to the presumption of innocence has not been infringed because, even though he was never criminally convicted, he is publicly perceived in Spain as a symbol of organised crime responsible for numerous crimes.”
The applicant argued that names such as Bonnie and Clyde, Al Capone and Che Guevara have already been registered as EU trademarks and that, “Pablo Escobar, because of his many good deeds for the poor in Colombia, has become a mythical figure in mainstream popular culture.”
Last month, critics of Eric Adams who’ve wanted the camera-friendly, hard-partying mayor to publicly answer for his tough-on-crime agenda got some catharsis. Adams appeared on the popular hip-hop morning radio show The Breakfast Clubalongsidean activist and political commentator named Olayemi Olurin. She held Adams verbally captive from the jump, needling the mayor for bragging that New York City is safe while also using “fearmongering” rhetoric to justify a bigger police presence. “Is it safe or is it not?” she asked. The mayor, so used to deploying charisma or bluster to evade criticism, instead stuttered, squirmed in his chair, and turned his back on Olurin to face the show’s hosts. “You would realize how I turned the city around if you follow everything I do,” Adams told Olurin. “I would say ‘no,’ but we can get to that,” she snapped back.
Olurin had been preparing for this moment for years. Since Adams’s election she’d used every available platform, from social media to op-eds to media appearances, to attack his handling of Rikers Island, the migrant crisis, homelessness, and bail reform. (AOC is a “big fan” and John Oliver once gave her a shout-out on his show.) For the better part of 50 minutes, she forced Adams to explain his support for policies that criminalize poor Black New Yorkers. Any time he questioned her facts, Olurin, a former public defender, cited reports and statistics to back them up. The dressing-down came at a particularly vulnerable time for Adams, with his approval rating in the toilet, a federal investigation into his campaign looming, and a sexual-assault lawsuit to fight. “Someone call in a wellness check on the Eric Adams comms team,” one reporter wrote on X after the interview aired. The former editor-in-chief of Rolling Stonecalled it “the most important interview of Eric Adams in a long, long time.”
On a sunny Friday afternoon the following week, I meet up with the 30-year-old to take a walk in Flatbush, one of the Black working-class communities Adams claims to represent and where Olurin lives. We pass the bodega where they know her sandwich order (Salsalito turkey with Sazón, jalapeños, and cheese) and a boutique filled with mannequins wearing colorful head wraps where she recently got her measurements taken for a dress. “It’s so Caribbean and it reminds me of home,” the Bahamas native tells me. She says “hi” to strangers as she bounds down the street. “I literally walk my neighborhood any time of night,” she says. “Never has any crime happened to me, I’ve never felt unsafe, none of that.” In just five minutes of walking, we see six cops. Olurin points out a police van and two officers standing guard outside a playground where three boys are playing basketball. “He becomes mayor and this is what we get,” she says. “This is a Black neighborhood. And so we have an exorbitant amount of police.”
When I say I hate Eric Adams, it really means I hate what he stands for. If Eric Adams resigned tomorrow, you would never hear me say his name again.
Lately, Olurin feels like she has a target on her back. The NYPD’s top brass have been going after her on social media since the interview, in which she’d said Adams seems to care more about a cop who was recently killed during a traffic stop than the “at least seven” civilians killed by NYPD officers this year. “This ‘Movement Laywer’ [sic] epitomizes everything that true NYers are against !” the NYPD’s chief of patrol wrote on X; the deputy commissioner piled on. Watching the NYPD lose “the fight in the court of public opinion online,” she says, “makes me nervous. Are these people gonna retaliate and do something in real life.” As an attorney, Olurin is well aware of her rights. But as a Black woman, she also knows that officers could violate those rights at any time. For two weeks, Olurin didn’t go out on her daily five-mile walk. Her doctor told her she was under high stress and gave her a heart monitor. She took down the Bahamian flag hanging outside of her apartment window, worried that officers would find out where she lives. “They’ll probably identify me,” she says. “How many Bahamian Nigerians are there?”
Inside her apartment, though, Olurin is at ease. Wearing a shirt that says “May all the motherfuckers who spite me burn in hell for all of eternity,” she sits cross-legged on a purple couch, the walls around her covered with images of Tupac, Malcolm X, and characters from Dragon Ball Z and The Boondocks, all made by Black artists. She tells me she was raised by strict parents who saw three career options for their five children: doctor, lawyer, or engineer. Olurin was the natural debater of the bunch. To watch a Harry Potter movie, she had to convince her grandmother via PowerPoint presentation that the film wouldn’t corrupt her brain. She also coaxed her parents into letting her attend high school in the U.S. so that she could more easily become a lawyer. At her West Virginia boarding school, Olurin was voted “most opinionated,” which came as something of a shock. Bahamians tend to be boisterous, so “I never thought of myself as a loud person that has this animated personality,” she says, raising her hands.
She was also the only Black girl in her high-school senior class. Olurin remembers one of her classmates saying that “Black people can’t swim and that we like chicken and watermelon or whatever.” Bahamians are always in the ocean and have no preference for either of those foods; she was confused. “I hadn’t figured out the word racist yet,” she says. “I knew something wasn’t adding up, but it was hard for me to navigate.” She went on to Ohio University, where she minored in African American studies, watched the Ferguson protests unfold, and decided to become a public defender so that she could help fight systemic racism.
Photo: Chris Perez
Once she moved to New York for law school, Olurin was so broke that she struggled to afford subway fare. “I understood deeply what it was like to be poor in the city,” she says, “and to have that be received so negatively.” After graduating in 2018, she got a job with the Legal Aid Society, where she spent her days arguing that her clients didn’t deserve jail time for petty crimes like jumping a subway turnstile. In 2021, she posted a video that appeared to show an NYPD officer kneeling on one of her client’s necks to Twitter. She got the charges dismissed, and the media attention made her realize she could have more of an impact on the criminal-justice system by becoming an advocate. She was also becoming disenchanted with Legal Aid. “It’s incredibly stressful. It’s incredibly underpaid,” she says. Olurin quit at the end of 2022 to become, as she puts it, a “professional loudmouth.”
While paying her bills with a full-time jobhelping criminal-justice reform advocates to craft their messaging in the media, she started a YouTube channel last year. It hosts lively podcasts where she and guests debate topics like, “Are More Black People Becoming Republican?” as well as political deep-dives, including a two-hour-long magnum opus branding Adams “the Worst Mayor in America” over his support for racist policing policies like stop and frisk. She has a loose-lipped, energetic style in these videos that’s a stark contrast to the talking heads on cable news. She swears, wears bright-red lipstick, and calls herself “a bitch who’s chronically online.”
Olurin first appeared on The Breakfast Club in 2022 to talk about criminal-justice issues. After she criticized the program for platforming Candace Owens in March, co-host Charlamagne tha God called Olurin and invited her back to square off with the mayor. She doubted Adams would actually show up to their interview — “I think I am his loudest critic” — but threw herself into prep anyway. She sourced every stat she planned to quote, from the 31 people who have died on Rikers Island on Adams’s watch to the $17 million he cut from the jail’s programming budget. A defense attorney “has to be in tune with the facts,” she says. “A cross-examination is basically being able to call out the discrepancies.”
I understood deeply what it was like to be poor in the city, and to have that be received so negatively.
It still came as a surprise to Olurin when Charlamagne told her Adams was en route to the studio. “Don’t hold back,” he told her. “Ask him whatever you want.” She viewed this as permission to go scorched-earth, a luxury she knows many members of the City Hall press corps don’t have. “I went into it with the recognition that this is never happening again,” she says. She did her best Olivia Pope impression — “I had to give all Black people the version of a lawyer they like to see” — and though the left praised her for delivering a knockout, Olurin thought she was “nice and polite” to Adams. “In a normal world, I wouldn’t let you shout over me,” she says. “This is me giving grace.”
Olurin hasn’t gotten any of the agent, book-deal, or pundit-contract offers that can come with viral fame since the interview aired, though. “That says a lot to me about what the media is really invested in seeing.” While she’d love a plush commentator job at a big network, Olurin’s not surprised that her phone isn’t ringing; she says “it’s often the media helping steer this ‘copaganda.’” (Olurin is, however, doing a one-off CNN appearance to analyze the Trump hush-money trial.) She feels the biggest payoff from the appearance has been attracting tens of thousands of new followers. “I feel like I always had a large white audience by virtue of being a lawyer,” she says. “But this allowed a lot of Black people who weren’t previously familiar with my work to see it.” Her ultimate goal is to have “an advocacy version of Issa Rae’s career,” she says. “I want to have my own production company and have my own platform that’s big enough to garner the traffic.”
Olurin stresses that her beef with Adams is not personal. “When I say I hate Eric Adams, it really means I hate what he stands for,” she says. “If Eric Adams resigned tomorrow, you would never hear me say his name again.” That said, it may be just a little bit personal. She and Adams exchanged numbers after the interview at Charlamagne’s urging, and the mayor texted her a few hours later to ask about the origins of her name. She told him it’s Nigerian and means “affluence befits me,” to which he responded with a yellow-skin-toned prayer-hands emoji. She found the detail “incredibly telling,” given that Adams “uses his Blackness as a convenience to sell us on, but who has no real attachment to it or community.” “I’ve never in my life seen a Black person not change the color of this emoji,” she says. “That tickled me greatly. I laughed.”
Amy Casciani, a longtime real estate developer whose corporation built housing across seven states, watched her local community struggle for years to add new homes.
Casciani grew up in upstate New York, in a suburban town outside Rochester. She eventually started a family and raised her children there, and in the early 1990s, a new mall opened up, bringing over 100 new stores including anchor retailers like Sibley’s, J.C. Penney, and Sears.
The mall was a proud boon to the town of Irondequoit, and a go-to spot for teenagers to hang out. “Hands down the most attractive shopping mall in the area,” an editorial for a newspaper serving Albanydeclared. “From its blue Legolike entrances and splashing fountain to its light-trimmed glass roof, columns and carousel, the mall exudes carnival gaiety.”
But in a few short years, retail patterns across the United States began to change. Mall foot traffic slowed and online shopping ticked up. Stores in the Irondequoit Mall began to close, and by 2016, the last major anchor, Sears, called it quits.
Casciani ached for her town, which not only was dealing with the eyesore of the abandoned mall but also lacked enough vacant land to develop desperately needed affordable housing. Her nonprofit development group, PathStone, embarked on a complex but meaningful project: They retrofitted the Sears department store into 73 rental apartments and built a new four-story multifamily building with 84 rental units on the adjacent parking lot.
PathStone connected the two buildings by a raised pedestrian walkway, and the Skyview Park Apartments now serves adults 55 and up who need subsidized housing. Half of the units are reserved for seniors at risk of homelessness, who can receive on-site supportive services.
“As affordable housing needs and costs keep going up and a shortage of available vacant land is growing, why not use what we already have?” Casciani said. “Why not creatively turn it around from being a blight on the community to an asset?”
Across the country, policymakers, researchers, and real estate developers are paying more attention to mall conversions like the one in Irondequoit as they grapple with their own shortage of affordable housing. While the Irondequoit Mall was a traditional mall, strip malls in particular offer some unique advantages, like big empty parking lots, that could make housing redevelopment an easier task.
A report last fall from Enterprise Community Partners, a national nonprofit focused on increasing housing supply, estimated that strip mall conversions could create more than 700,000 new homes across the United States.
There’s so much broken in our discussions about the housing issue, mostly which has to do with everyone having a single talking point that is far too simplistic. One thing that connects a lot of these issues is issue of space. When a person buys up 5 old New York apartments and turns them into his personal fiefdom, that’s a lot of housing that is taken off the market. When everyone wants 2,000 square feet of housing, that really limits what we can do. But also, we have often struggled to retrofit previous disastrous uses of space (and the endless decaying malls, both traditional and strip), is a great example of this.
Here in Rhode Island, where what was once a state of density, the postwar housing boom turned huge parts of what is today Warwick and Cranston into completely unplanned strip malls that are today are decrepit, empty, or just look like shit because they are 50 years old, were poorly planned in the first place, and are half or less full. And yet, for all of our very real housing problems, none of this so far as I can tell has been converted into housing. It’s right there!
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During an April 5 speech in Philadelphia previewing the new regulations, Regan said, “I’m excited to say that in the coming weeks, we’re going to announce a really strong regulation addressing those chemical plants in Cancer Alley," using the nickname for an infamous 85-mile industrial corridor between New Orleans and Baton Rouge where cancer cases are far higher than in the rest of the nation. Fifty-one of the 200 plants that will need to clean up are located in Louisiana, and about that many are in Texas, next door.
A normal politician might celebrate the EPA’s estimate that the new regulations will reduce elevated cancer risk by 96 percent for people living near chemical plants that emit dozens of carcinogenic chemicals, particularly ethylene oxide and chloroprene. Instead, Higgins wanted to send Regan away to Louisiana’s maximum security prison, Angola.
Gee, we wonder what part of this screenshot of the Times-Picayune story set Higgins off so badly?
Could it have been the headline, “'Really strong' pollution reduction measure planned for Louisiana, EPA head says”? Or maybe the fact that an announcement that will affect Louisiana was made in the Yankee enclave of Philadelphia? Or possibly the fact that the photo, from 2023, shows Regan, who is Black, speaking in front of one of the state’s worst chemical plants as if he had any kind of authority?
Wow, Higgins was steamed! He tweeted,
“This EPA criminal should be arrested the next time he sets foot in Louisiana. Charge his ass with extortion. LARS 14:66. I’d charge him a count for every Louisiana employee he’s threatening. Send that arrogant prick to Angola for a few decades.”
Rep. Higgins, a cancer ally who has been in Congress since 2017, has apparently not yet been briefed on the EPA’s authority to regulate harmful pollutants under the Clean Air Act. Worse, he appears not to know that even Black men are allowed to serve as agency heads these days, even if he thinks they look “arrogant” in a photo.
To be sure, the new regulations will have an economic impact in addition to causing less cancer, and that’s the other reason Higgins is so mad. Sure, there may be fewer cases of cancer among the poor Black people living in Cancer Alley, but what about all the money that chemical companies will have to spend to bring their operations into compliance? Are a few tens of thousands of unimportant people’s lives and health really worth the disruption?
As NPR reports, the regulations will be especially terrible for one good decent job-creating polluter, Denka Performance Elastomer in St. John the Baptist Parish, right in the middle of Cancer Alley. The company is America’s sole producer of chloroprene pollution, from its production of neoprene, “a synthetic rubber used in things like beer koozies and wetsuits.”
Won’t someone think of the beer koozies and wetsuits?
Chloroprene exposure levels near the plant are some 400 times the amount the new rules allow. A 2016 report determined that the Denka plant’s emissions contributed to the highest cancer risk anywhere in the USA.
In addition to the new rule, the EPA and Justice Department sued Denka last year, alleging its emissions present “an imminent and substantial endangerment” to people in surrounding communities. That suit has not yet gone to trial, and we can’t determine whether Rep. Higgins called for any of the prosecutors to be sent to break rocks on a chain gang.
Community activists have praised the new rules as long overdue; Sharon Lavigne, fonder of the environmental action group Rise St. James in a neighboring parish, said the federal government largely ignored pollution in mostly-Black communities before Regan became the head of the EPA:
"In St. James Parish, there is a 10-mile radius where a dozen petrochemical facilities operate near the homes of Black residents," Lavigne said. "This is environmental racism."
The new rules will also require real-time air monitoring along the boundaries of chemical plants, which Lavigne said will improve notification of the nearby communities, allowing “the opportunity for us to have input on the steps taken to ensure compliance and reduce air pollution.” As of yet, Ms. Lavigne remains free, despite this clear threat to extort chemical plants into not killing her family with toxic air.
While plants that emit ethylene oxide will have two years to meet the tougher standards, which will require significant improvements to their equipment, Denka faces a 90-day compliance order, with a chance to apply for an extension. Pity poor Jason Hutt, an attorney who represents Denka, who is very sad about the prospect of reducing carcinogenic pollution that’s been harming residents for decades:
"It would be really nice if we could get back to the science and not the politics of the situation," Hutt said, "because there's a lot of people's livelihoods and jobs that are at stake in this outcome."
The EPA's rule, Hutt said, would shutter the Denka plant because the company won't be able to comply with the standards fast enough. That translates, he said, to more than 100 local jobs lost, as well as tax revenue. Denka has also been in a long battle with the EPA, disputing the health impact of chloroprene, arguing the agency is regulating based on "faulty science."
Honestly, it’s really arrogant and selfish of people in St. John the Baptist Parish to think that their children’s health matters more than 100 jobs, to say nothing of the potential damage to the beer koozy industry.
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Honestly, it’s really arrogant and selfish of people in St. John the Baptist Parish to think that their children’s health matters more than 100 jobs, to say nothing of the potential damage to the beer koozy industry.
This post was written by Alison Green and published on Ask a Manager.
It’s five answers to five questions. Here we go…
1. Our intern was working two full-time jobs
I work at a nonprofit and manage our internship program. I handle the administrative side of things, while our program teams handle the day-to-day/substantive work assignments and management.
I received a message from one of those teams this morning sharing that, through social media, they found out one of our paid interns has had another full-time internship this semester on top of her classes. She did not share this with us previously, to my knowledge. The director is very disappointed and wants to remove her from the internship.
The internship is hybrid (in office 2-3 days a week). She’s committed to working a set schedule for us and has been working those hours. I have less insight on the quality of her work day-to-day: she’s always responsive to and thorough with me on the admin side, and her team hasn’t given me any hints of performance issues. My understanding up to this point is that she’s been doing a good job in helping the program keep things on track for the semester (they’re very events-based and do a ton of planning and logistics).
While I’m concerned about the lack of disclosure, I’m wondering if there have been other performance issues I’ve been kept out of the loop on that are fueling the suddenness of this. I’m surprised she’s managed to balance two full-time internships and a full class load without anyone noticing prior to this, which is partly on me. Our program has three weeks left, and I’m unsure if this warrants a full removal given that we don’t have an explicitly stated policy against it. I’m new to both running this program and managing generally, so trying to get a sense of if I’m reading this right.
If she worked the hours she committed to working and there haven’t been concerns about her work quality or responsiveness, and if she hasn’t violated any policy about second jobs … why on earth does your director want to fire her? If there have been concerns about her work quality or responsiveness, by all means address those — and if they’ve been severe, this new info feels like it explains them, and it’s just the last straw, then sure, end things. But otherwise, there’s nothing here to be upset about, let alone to fire an intern over. If your organization doesn’t want people working other jobs, it needs to say that when it hires them— and it definitely needs to say that to interns, since it’s not uncommon for interns to have a ton of things going on. But based on what’s in your letter, it doesn’t sound like she’s done anything wrong, other than apparently violate an unwritten secret rule that lives in your director’s head.
2. Employee makes patients feel unwelcome
I have an employee who comes to get her clients from the waiting room and it’s hit or miss on how she greets them – with great enthusiasm or, more often and more likely, as Eeyore. She’s going back to school to get a terminal degree and, having done it myself, I know that’s draining, and she’s got some medical issues so I know there are days she doesn’t feel great. However, clients are asking to switch off of her schedule because they feel she is disengaged and uninterested in their care. It’s definitely affected our business – and it’s worse when she’s enthusiastic with one client and then dragging the next. Because of the nature of our business, there is some overlap between clients and they see how she acts with someone else and then comes so begrudgingly to them, like her feet are made of lead and her dog just died. (This is not always the case, sometimes she’s just an Eeyore all day.) This understandably makes the client uncomfortable and feel like they are unliked and/or a burden. Overall, we try and have a fun, positive environment in our office.
We’ve discussed this before, but is there anything we can do? I don’t want to tell anyone to “smile,” but how can we handle this when it’s affecting our business?
If clients are asking not to see her, that’s a serious problem. I agree you shouldn’t order anyone to smile, but it is reasonable to say that clients need to be greeted warmly and made to feel welcome and appreciated. How she achieves that is up to her; some people do that by being smiley and bubbly, but plenty of non-bubbly, more reserved people also manage to make clients feel welcome. She can adapt her approach based on her own style, but the outcome — that clients feel welcomed — shouldn’t be negotiable. (I’m also wondering what she’s like with her clients after she takes them back from the waiting room. I’m guessing you don’t see that part, and who knows what’s happening there.)
It sounds like it’s time for a heart-to-heart where you say that you know she’s juggling a lot but clients are experiencing her as gloomy and unwelcoming, and that can’t continue. Does she need time off? Fewer hours? Be open to hearing her out on what might help. But if she continues to make clients feel unwelcome, you’d need to treat it as a pretty serious fit issue.
3. My manager is upset that I’m paid more and get a benefit she doesn’t get
I work for a large international company and am one of the 20% remote associates. I am based in a high-income area, which most employees are not. I recently got a pay raise and a new manager. The raise pushes me over the high earner threshold to where I now get unlimited PTO. This pay discrepancy makes sense, as the cost of living is approximately double in my area.
My manager only was aware of this benefit because I brought it up to her, and it is clear she does not have it — she was totally blank-faced. She looked extremely upset on the call, and has repeatedly expressed how unfair this is. I agree with her and am actually being negatively impacted by this (it means I lose my banked PTO I wanted to use in addition to maternity leave), but don’t know how handle this with her.
Your manager shouldn’t be complaining about this to you! If she has a problem with it, she should escalate it to someone with the power to do something about it, not put someone she manages in the awkward position of hearing how unhappy she is about a perk they receive.
As for what to do, if she brings it up again, you could say, “I’d support you in pushing for it for everyone” (or if true, “If you decide to advocate for a policy change, you’d have my support”). And if she keeps bringing it up, it’s reasonable to say, “You’re putting me in a tough position since I didn’t choose this. Is there something you want me to do differently?”
4. I’m taking an extended break from work and my dusty LinkedIn profile is haunting me
I unexpectedly fell extremely ill in March 2023. I was a new grad (just got my MSW!) working a few part-time roles and searching for a full-time position when I totally dropped off the map to deal with my new fangled health mystery and profound disability (think daily cardio routine to a wheelchair overnight level of intensity). It’s a year later and I’m doing much better! I have a diagnosis and I’m improving every day, but it’s going to be a while before I’m back to full strength, probably another year or more.
My LinkedIn has just been sitting untouched this whole time and it’s haunting me. I’m still listed as “currently employed” at places I haven’t worked since the onset of my illness and that feels … So. Icky. Not being able to contextualize why I left my jobs so abruptly makes me feel absolutely batty. Even if I could get my head around that, I genuinely don’t know what cessation date to put down. Should it be the day I went on sick leave, or six months later when I finally resigned? Truly, there are more important things I could be thinking about I’m sure, but this is bugging me SO MUCH. Please help.
You are overthinking it! LinkedIn is a cesspool anyway and we should all deeply resent its existence. You don’t need it update it at all until you’re ready to start job-searching, but whenever you want to, your end dates can be the dates your employment formally ended (so not when you went on sick leave, but when you parted ways with the company; that’s what their records will reflect and yours can too).
5. Speaking Spanish in front of someone who doesn’t know the language
Is it legal for a boss to speak Spanish to someone who can speak English in front of someone who knows no Spanish, especially if there is a issue in hand?
Yes. No law requires people to use any particular language in their workplace.
In fact, legally, employers can only prohibit employees from speaking in another language if it’s justified by a business necessity, like when they’re waiting on English-speaking customers or doing team projects where an English-only rule will promote efficiency, or to allow a manager who only speaks English to monitor the performance of employees whose job involves communicating with others.
That doesn’t mean it’s polite or smart to speak in a language someone else doesn’t know, particularly in a small group where only one doesn’t know the language. But it’s certainly legal. (And there are times when it might make perfect sense, like when it’s the fastest/most efficient way to communicate something.)
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