Elon Musk"s Brutally Honest Management Style

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Elon Musk’s Brutally Honest Management Style Like everyone else still left on Twitter—at this point, roughly 90,000 journalists and 14 bemused normal people—I was deeply skeptical about Elon Musk’s takeover of the social network. Was it a weed gag that got out of hand? Did he really want to make himself the main character of American intellectual life? Does it fulfill a deep psychological need to force serious media organizations to weigh in every time he replies “lol” to some crank, launders a conspiracy theory into the discourse, or makes a particularly obscure dirty joke? (Say “Ligma Johnson” out loud. You’re welcome.) I do have one small confession, though. I find Musk a compelling figure, and not in the disdainful, irony-soaked way that is barely acceptable in polite society. In a world of passive-aggressive rich people smiling through veneered teeth while withholding tips from minimum-wage staffers, I find his unabashedly-workaholic-maniac persona hugely preferable to the usual tech-bro smarm. Continued here

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The Emotional Labor of Being a Leader While leaders have always performed emotional labor, this demand has increased dramatically over the last few years. Organizations need to stop dismissing this substantial emotional burden. In this piece, the authors explain why organizations need to start offering more support and outline practical strategies to try: 1) Recognize emotional labor as labor. 2) Promote self-compassion from the top down. 3) Provide training on handling others’ emotions. 4) Create peer support groups. As the adage goes and the research proves, it’s lonely at the top. By recognizing emotional labor and providing proper education, training, and support, organizations can help leaders effectively handle this essential but often overlooked requirement of their role. Effective leaders have long managed the emotions they display at work. They project optimism and confidence when team members feel thwarted and discouraged. Or notwithstanding their skepticism about the company’s strategic direction, they carry the company flag and work to rally the troops. Continued here

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Cavities and Crowns: What Our Teeth Tell Us About Our Lives I was still lying on my back, the white nylon bib around my neck, the sour taste lingering in my mouth, when the hygienist said, “Oh honey, you’re beautiful. You should take care of your smile.” The dentist had just given me a twenty-five-thousand-dollar estimate to get all of the problems with my teeth fixed. “It’s like buying a car,” he said. And I wondered what kind of car he thought I owned. The most expensive vehicle I had ever bought was the nine-year-old Toyota Corolla that I scored for five thousand dollars. I was proud of myself, too, for finding that bargain with three months of saved up overtime cash and weeks of ad-scouring for a low-mileage number with front-wheel drive and working air-conditioning. But teeth are not like cars. There are no bargains to be found if you want a pretty smile. Continued here

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Ask an Expert: My Company Promotes People Who Work Overtime, But I Want Work-Life Balance. How Can I Ever Succeed? Do we need to work endless hours, over weekends, and during vacations to be seen as star employees? Short answer: no. What counts above all else is the impact you make in your job — it’s the quality of the work you do over the quantity of hours you put in. When your work is defined by the impact you make, not the output, it frees you from worrying too much about the optics or the hours you are “seen” putting in. To maintain boundaries at work, there are a few things to do. Continued here

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Tips for Acing Your First Job Interview Your first job interview will no doubt be your most challenging. But making sure you ace it is as simple as putting in a little time and practice. Whether you’re actively preparing for your first interview, studying up before starting your job search, or just curious about what you can expect throughout the hiring process, these tips can help. Continued here

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I Was Heartbroken by the News. Here's How My Colleagues Have Helped. Last week, I went to a Korean restaurant for dinner. Since moving to Boston, I’ve made it a habit to frequent the place, a cozy brick building on the side of the road that serves food just like back home. Most Sunday nights, the space is filled with people like me: South Koreans living in the U.S., looking to enjoy our favorite dishes, reminiscing on our home country as we eat. But on this day, something was different. Continued here

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How to Build a Better Content Strategy for Your Brand Small business owners or those who have a side hustle sometimes spend hours creaing the right kind of content to promote their brand or service only to be dishearted by the repsonse. The changing news cycle, along with content consumption habits and platform-specific factors all impact how much time social media users spend online, who our content is served to, and by default, how well it performs. But with a few simple tweaks, you can increase your reach and better connect with your audience. Continued here

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Don't Feel Guilty for Prioritizing Yourself Over Work When we’re starting out in the work world, we often equate the hours spent at work to our productivity. But it’s simple untrue. Not taking care of yourself early on can be a recipe for burnout. The author mentions four ways to prioritize yourself in a way that doesn’t hurt your career growth. Continued here

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3 Skills Every New Leader Needs As a new manager looking to grow your skills, you might be tempted to focus on becoming more authoritative or quickly driving results — traits typically associated with and driven by the behaviors of powerful men. But now, leaders are being called to develop skills like adaptability, emotional intelligence, and humility, traits that are particularly valuable to navigating uncertain times and that are more often found in female leaders. Continued here

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What's Wrong with Asking "Where Are You From?" Four years ago, I moved to New York to start pursuing my journalism degree at a graduate program in the city. I spent my first week researching and reporting an audio story about the local farmer’s market. When I handed it in, my professor looked down at the script I had written, looked back up at me, and said, “Your English is good. Where are you from?” Continued here

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Tap Into Your Creative Genius Simply put, to be creative is to use our imaginations, which most of us do every single day. At work, we use creative shortcuts to manage our time and productivity, design engaging presentations, and strategize plans for the future. At home, we are creative every time we try a new hobby, cook a new meal, or improvise dance moves to our favorite songs. Continued here

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Why Company Culture Matters: Our Favorite Reads The previous night he had emailed me at 9 pm looking for an update on a project that had been running for three months. At the time, I was enjoying my weekend, sitting in a dark theater, watching the new Transformers film while devouring a giant tub of caramel and butter popcorn. What kind of person checks their phone during an epic robot fight scene? Continued here

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Hip-Hop Needs an Intervention In the 1990s, hip-hop had a shocking moment with the loss of Christopher Wallace (Biggie Smalls) and Tupac Shakur—both shot to death in the street within six months. We carried that trauma for years. Biggie was an incredible storyteller and a budding entrepreneur. Tupac was making an impact as an artist, actor, and activist. After they died, many music lovers thought there would be an East Coast–versus–West Coast war, but thankfully a battle didn’t happen. Back then, you could expect a fistfight or a backstage brawl, but those incidents seem mild-mannered compared with the surge of violence in hip-hop now. In 2018, the rapper XXXTentacion, just 20 years old, was shot dead. Hip-hop has since lost an artist every year. The frequency with which we are losing rappers to gun violence is painful: Nipsey Hussle. Pop Smoke. King Von. PnB Rock. Young Dolph. And now Takeoff. These rappers were young, successful, talented individuals, millionaires creating generational wealth for their loved ones. Continued here

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What Is Contrition Without Reparation? Clint Smith discusses how Germany remembers the Holocaust—and why the process of atonement in America must look different. This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. Continued here

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Trump’s Running, and Republicans Have Only Themselves to Blame Donald Trump is not agreeing to vanish on his own. He has declared his candidacy for president in his familiar style: boastful, untruthful, sneering—but also charismatic and telegenic. In pursuit of power, he demonstrated in his announcement a rare degree of self-discipline, despite his Mar-a-Lago address devolving into rally-style riffing from which even Fox News cut away after about half an hour. Trump focused his attack on the serving Democratic president rather than fellow Republicans and potential rivals. He remembered to speak somewhat respectfully about racial minorities and women, and to position himself as something more than an aggrieved “victim,” even as he claimed that title. He refrained from praising Vladimir Putin or any other of his pet dictators. He did not repeat the lies about the 2020 election that he’s been telling for the past two years—and that did so much harm this year to the party upon which he foisted those lies. He even broke precedent and paid tribute to his wife, family, and supporters. He even admitted, reluctantly, to being a politician. Continued here

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What Joe Biden Knows About America He intuited that voters would rise above their economic self-interest to prevent election deniers from seizing power. On November 3, President Joe Biden delivered his closing argument for the midterm elections—and it bombed. One CNN analyst called it “head-scratching.” Politico deemed it “puzzling.” Analysts roundly declared that he had misread the mind of the electorate. Instead of addressing the issue that voters said they cared most about—the economy—he delivered a plea for them to rescue democracy from the forces of authoritarianism. Continued here

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America Is Pursuing Happiness in All the Wrong Places The U.S. is undergoing a crisis of our personal and shared sense of meaning as polarization rises and institutions erode. The solution is as simple as it is difficult: Love one another. This article was featured in One Story to Read Today, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a single must-read from The Atlantic, Monday through Friday. Sign up for it here.       Continued here

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NASA’s Overshadowed Moon Launch After a successful takeoff, a crewless capsule is on its way to the moon. Where’s the fanfare? In the middle of the night, while many Americans were sleeping, NASA launched the country into the next era of space exploration. Continued here

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Wait, Why Wasn’t There a Climate Backlash? A week out, that’s what’s most astonishing about the midterm elections. During previous administrations, voters penalized congressional Democrats for even trying to pass a climate bill. That’s what happened in 1993 and 2009. This time, Democrats actually did it with the Inflation Reduction Act, and then it turned into the best midterm performance for a party in power in a generation. As I wrote last week, that Democrats stopped a red wave is excellent news for climate policy itself. With control of the Senate, President Joe Biden will be able to appoint and confirm nominees and judges, allowing him to implement the IRA as planned. He will also have a stronger hand in budget negotiations. But I’m still wondering: Why was there no backlash? Continued here

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What Really Caused the Missile Explosion in Poland The precise chain of events doesn’t matter. Whether the missile that landed in the Polish border village of Przewodów yesterday was, as President Joe Biden, Polish President Andrzej Duda, and other NATO officials have suggested, the result of a Ukrainian antimissile defense barrage, or whether it was, as some initially suspected, a Russian targeting mistake makes no difference. The real cause of this explosion and the deaths of two people is the Russian invasion of Ukraine, an invasion that has already devolved into an advanced form of state terrorism. Usually, terrorist tactics are pursued by small bands of extremists or revolutionaries, not by established states that aspire to world influence. Russia is using them now because the Russian president knows he is losing this war, and in many different ways. Russia’s army is losing on the battlefield; Russia’s government is losing diplomatically. Russia’s leader is losing politically too. Vladimir Putin chose not to attend the G20 meeting in Bali this week, perhaps because he knew he would be shunned by many leaders there, and perhaps because he was afraid of what events might unfold in Moscow in his absence. The 19 other members who did attend issued the clearest possible condemnation of Russia’s war, declaring that the group “deplores in the strongest terms the aggression by the Russian Federation against Ukraine and demands its complete and unconditional withdrawal from the territory of Ukraine.” Continued here

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The Ruthless Clarity of a Woman in a Man’s World Many songs about cowboys double as warnings to the women left behind. Their lyrics speak to mothers and wives of “broken bones” and broken homes. They apologize, but refuse to yield. The songs summon the dusty mythology of the American West—supposedly empty expanses, giddy possibilities, manhood tested and proved—while admitting its cost: For the cowboy to have his freedoms, countless others will sacrifice theirs. Yellowstone, Taylor Sheridan’s TV juggernaut, is a new version of those old anthems. It is a show about a ranch that sprawls across southern Montana—the Yellowstone, owned for generations by the Dutton family—and the lengths the family will go to in their fight to keep the land for themselves. Yellowstone is also, as its central female character proves, a show about men: cowboys both literal and aspirational. Beth is the only daughter of the land baron John Dutton (Kevin Costner), and she is one of the three surviving children struggling with the inheritance John will—or will not—leave them. Played by the English actor Kelly Reilly, Beth is that too-rare figure in the world of prestige TV: an antihero who is also a woman. She is an agent of chaos. She is mercurial. She is cunning. She is funny. She is wise. She is cruel. Her father loves her dearly; he remarks, offhandedly, that she is “evil.” Continued here

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Is Trump Still a Viable Candidate? Yes and No. Even after a disappointing midterm election, the former president retains his grip on the GOP. Even before Donald Trump announced that he was seeking the presidency again, last week’s election results showed Republicans how difficult it will be to escape the former president’s gravitational pull. Continued here

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The Unsung Heart of ‘Black Panther: Wakanda Forever’ Angela Bassett’s character models a trait that’s rare amid superhero chaos and violence: self-restraint. Black Panther: Wakanda Forever is a film forged under immense pressure. As my colleague David Sims noted in his review, the Marvel movie had to set up the franchise’s many future story lines and also serve as a memorial to the late Black Panther star Chadwick Boseman and his character, T’Challa. For the most part, the movie juggles these divergent aims well. It establishes Shuri (played by Letitia Wright) as the new Black Panther, tracing her maturation from the goofy and gifted little sister to a hero in her own right. It introduces a complex new villain, Namor (Tenoch Huerta), the ancient ruler of a secret underwater civilization called Talokan. And it never loses sight of how grief operates—as an invisible, transformative pain that manifests in unexpected ways. Continued here

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The Sad Pragmatism of Inflation-Era Cuisine This is an edition of Up for Debate, a newsletter by Conor Friedersdorf. On Wednesdays, he rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here. What are your best tips––at this time of rapidly rising prices––for cutting costs in ways that meet your needs while depriving you of as little pleasure or convenience or comfort as possible? OR, looking back on your life, what do you consider to be your most wasteful spending? Continued here

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Meetings Are Miserable One of the most straightforward paths to happiness at work is to fight against the scourge of time-consuming, unproductive meetings at every opportunity. “How to Build a Life” is a weekly column by Arthur Brooks, tackling questions of meaning and happiness. Click here to listen to his podcast series on all things happiness, How to Build a Happy Life. Continued here

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The Midterm Maps Were Pretty Good, Actually The question we should be asking is not “did my party lose seats?” but “was the redistricting fair?” Republicans have gained control of the House of Representatives, but their majority will be tiny. Such close division has triggered many what-if discussions. Some have focused on New York, where Democrats performed poorly. The Democratic legislature had drawn a map in early 2022 that was designed to give the dominant party its best possible performance, even in a bad year. However, a court-ordered replacement map undid this gerrymander, shifting the outcome in multiple seats. Continued here

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Why Everything in Tech Seems to Be Collapsing at Once This is Work in Progress, a newsletter by Derek Thompson about work, technology, and how to solve some of America’s biggest problems. Sign up here to get it every week. The tech industry seems to be in a recession. Although overall unemployment is still very low, just about every major tech company—including Amazon, Meta, Snap, Stripe, Coinbase, Twitter, Robinhood, and Intel—has announced double-digit percentage-point layoffs in the past few months. The stock valuations for many of these companies have fallen more than 50 percent in the past year. Continued here

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Beware the ‘Storification’ of the Internet Recently, during an ad break in the episode of Frasier I was watching, two commercials played back to back. The first, for United, wanted to tell me “the story of an airline,” which the commercial characterized as sci-fi, romance, and adventure, starring 80,000 “hero characters” otherwise known as employees. The second ad, for ESPN, argued that college football has everything that “makes for a great story”: drama, action, “an opening that sucks you in, a middle that won’t let you go, and a mind-blowing, nail-biting ending.” There is a growing trend in American culture of what the literary theorist Peter Brooks calls “storification.” Since the turn of the millennium, he argues in his new book, Seduced by Story: The Use and Abuse of Narrative, we’ve relied too heavily on storytelling conventions to understand the world around us, which has resulted in a “narrative takeover of reality” that affects nearly every form of communication—including the way doctors interact with patients, how financial reports are written, and the branding that corporations use to present themselves to consumers. Meanwhile, other modes of expression, interpretation, and comprehension, such as analysis and argument, have fallen to the wayside. Continued here

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Don’t Let Crypto Bros Undermine Effective Altruism The swift downfall of Sam Bankman-Fried brings unnecessary suspicion on a valuable form of philanthropy. The spectacular collapse of the cryptocurrency trading firm FTX has raised a number of urgent questions. Why did the founder, Sam Bankman-Fried, get such fawning media coverage? Will his customers get their crypto back? Oh, and should wealthy philanthropists in the United States spend their money on buildings at their alma mater, mosquito nets halfway around the world, or the prevention of global catastrophes in the distant future? Continued here

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A Rare Win in the Fight Against Dark Money Last week’s midterm elections showed that the country remains deeply divided along partisan lines, but there was one exception that has been largely overlooked. Voters from both parties in all fifteen counties of the polarized state of Arizona came together and overwhelmingly approved a ballot measure that will require large anonymous “dark money” political donors to reveal their identities. Proposition 211, known as the Voters’ Right to Know Act, requires that any donor giving more than five thousand dollars to a nonprofit that uses the money on political advertising and spends more than fifty thousand dollars on a state campaign or ballot proposition must publicly disclose their name. In order to insure transparency, the new rule applies even if the contribution was routed through a front group attempting to screen the identity of the original donor. “Voters have a right to know who is behind ‘Americans for Peanut Butter,’ or whatever else,” Terry Goddard, Arizona’s former attorney general, who spearheaded the ballot measure, told me in a phone interview. “Everyone knows [shell organizations are] just a cover and they resent it. But without this, there’s no way to get the truth.” Continued here

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Joan Didion's Priceless Sunglasses At her memorial service, someone described Joan Didion as a rune: mysterious, remote, and indecipherable. All great writers are mysteries, but Didion's mysteries seemed particularly tantalizing because her writing seemed so simple, so clear. And she herself seemed so proximate, so accessible, through the tangible world of objects. Her own things were celebrated but familiar—the big sunglasses, the cashmere sweaters, the Corvette Stingray. These were things that we all understood, even if we couldn't all afford them. The things she owned and the way she used them were important. For Didion, style was not surface but essence. Glamour was to be embraced because it had power. This was both interesting and confusing, because it is risky for a woman to present herself as both beauty and brain. Beauty doesn't challenge men, but intelligence does. (The mother of Marina Warner, the beautiful and brilliant English cultural historian, used to ask her, "Why do you keep disagreeing with men? They don't like it, you know.") Women who are admired as beauties risk dismissal as brains. But Didion was both. It was non-negotiable: it was impossible to dismiss her words, and it was impossible to ignore her looks. Like her words, they were spare, elegant, and arresting. Continued here

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Are We in Denial About the End of Election Denialism? ​​Nearly four hundred election deniers ran in the midterms, and not only did the highest-profile among them lose their races, they even willingly conceded. Does this mean that Donald Trump’s Stop the Steal movement has run out of political steam? Or is it merely shape-shifting for a new era? Rachel Monroe, who has been reporting from conspiracy-ridden Maricopa County, Arizona, and Sue Halpern, who has written extensively about the fragility of our voting machines, join Tyler Foggatt to discuss the challenges of building public trust in our elections. © 2022 Condé Nast. All rights reserved. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement and Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement and Your California Privacy Rights. The New Yorker may earn a portion of sales from products that are purchased through our site as part of our Affiliate Partnerships with retailers. The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Condé Nast. Ad Choices Continued here

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Where I Was Each Time I Heard the News That Pete Davidson Was Dating a New Celebrity It’s the day of my wedding. My wife and I are exchanging our vows. I’m describing the first time that I truly saw her. All of a sudden, cell phones start vibrating and beeping. One of our guests goes to turn his off, but not before he sees the news. He gasps. Discreetly, more guests check their phones. My wife stares deep into my eyes, inhales, and says, “Pete Davidson and Cazzie David are dating.” Continued here

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Pristine ‘Witness’ from Deep Space Sheds Light on the Origin of Life On the night of February 28, 2021, a space rock slammed into Earth’s atmosphere and lit up the skies above the picturesque town of Winchcombe in the United Kingdom. The fireball was witnessed by more than a thousand people and was captured by numerous doorbell and dashboard cameras, sparking a social media frenzy that resulted in a hasty search for the remains of the extraterrestrial visitor.  Within hours, about 300 grams of the so-called Winchcombe meteorite were found scattered across a local driveway and another 200 grams were recovered over the next week, including an intact chunk found on farmland.   Continued here

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We Asked People About the Time They Literally Almost Died Death follows us everywhere. It’s the one guarantee, but it’s also the one we know the least about. The fact that we could die at literally any moment is kinda morbid to think about, but it’s simultaneously incredibly freeing.  Everyone has a story about the time they literally almost died. I have many. I don’t know if that’s normal. But even as every near-death experience is a lesson learned, new ways to almost die keep popping up in my life. I’m not even being dramatic. I’m just really clumsy and a little bit stupid. Continued here

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The Annotated Nightstand: What Anna Moschovakis is Reading Now and Next Anna Moschovakis is one of those unicorns in the literary world who manages not only to do it all, but do it well—more than well. She is a poet, translator, novelist, critic, publisher, professor, and community organizer. Her translation from French of David Diop’s At Night All Blood Is Black won the 2020 Booker Prize. Her poetry collection You and Three Others Are Approaching a Lake won the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets. She helped found the small press darling Ugly Duckling Presse, prized for its translations, experimental works, and beautiful letter-pressed covers. Continued here

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What is an Office, Really? How Ideas Take Shape in Analog Spaces What is an office? Is it simply a building where people do their work, or does it serve a deeper purpose? Continued here

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Three Poems by Will Alexander Say each eroded molecular cloudcontained uncountable solar massesnot typical but density per cubic centimeterwelling up across a million yearsnever speaking of the highest suns through a totem of errorsbut totemtaking from density no known erroralive as patternas irrational ascensionsans squared impalpable quantaits implacable windsteeming sub-flow as absentia Continued here

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The Model for America’s Modern Craft Beer Boom? Inside the Small-Brewer Scene in 1950s San Francisco As the 1950s wound down, the proliferation of mass-produced, heavily marketed light lagers took an increasing toll on America’s—and San Francisco’s—small brewers. But a number of local establishments still proudly featured Anchor’s signature product, in particular the Crystal Palace Market between Market and Mission at 8th Street. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, it was a “sprawling, pungent, cheap and exotic carnival of delicatessen and delicacy.” Continued here