This weekend, triggered by a few readers who disagreed with my assertion that socioeconomic status is a huge driver of educational attainment and performance, I decided to respond the way any nerd would in my situation: I made a chart. In a moment of Excel fervor, I took data from the College Board’s 2011 Total […]
In today’s Washington Post is another story about “merit pay” for teachers. But this one, by national education correspondent Lyndsey Layton, spends some space on my own thoughts on the topic. For those new to the issue, or coming to the Pink Blog from Tweets about the article, let me summarize my views as succinctly as
Emotionally intelligent signage! It’s everywhere — including at lunch and dinner. Stuart Ciske sends this example, which he saw at a Burger King in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin. Okay, maybe this time I won’t have it my way. Meanwhile, Jami Goldberg visited a Fuddruckers restaurant in Greensboro, North Carolina and spotted this — a nice touch
Last year, my pal Charles Fishman wrote a really smart book about a really big subject: Water. To research his topic, which is both monumental and barely noticed, he journeyed from Las Vegas to New Delhi to Burlington, Vermont, to rural Australia to report on the state of H2O. Fishman learned that we’ve been living
Kathryn, a reader in Canada, wrote to me last week asking for some advice. Since history has shown that your advice is always way better than mine, I’m posing her challenge to you, Dear Readers. She writes: “I’d just finished your book, Drive, when I was approached out of the blue about taking on a
If you have any interest in picking the brain of one of the top management thinkers of our times — and thereby cadge thousands of bucks in free consulting — tune in to Office Hours today at 2pm, EST. Our guest will be Gary Hamel. He’s the originator (with CK Prahalad) of the idea of
Comedian Louis C.K. garnered a lot of press — and made a ton of money — last month when he disintermediated the major television networks and released his latest special as a $5 download on his web site. Less well known is that the funny man (if you haven’t seen this bit, you need to)
Can a Presidential speech ever be a work of art? Not usually. But R. Luke Dubois is doing his best. As part of the “Mulitplicity” exhibit now showing at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, which I had a chance to see last weekend, Dubois reconfigured all the State of the Union addresses in an interesting way. In
Good news, folks. Office Hours is back for a new season! The madness begins this Friday, January 27, at 11am, EST, when our guest will be Susan Cain, author of the hot new book, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking. (That’s her on the right.) For those of you
Dedicated readers know that I’ve written a fair bit on how contingent rewards, including money, can go awry in all sorts of ways — resulting in poorer performance, diminished creativity, reduced interest in tasks that were once intrinsically interesting, and so on. But can the very idea of money also affect our behavior? In an
