How workplace bullying went remote / BBC: “Workplace bullying is thriving in the remote-work era, as technology opens new avenues for unkind behaviour. At first, Joyce didn’t identify what was happening in her workplace as bullying. Her company had been largely remote for years, and she felt no physical threat from her colleagues. “I didn’t really think about that,” says the communications worker based in east England. “I still had in my mind the traditional idea of bullying as somebody getting in your face.” Yet over time a feeling grew that her boss, who was new to the company, was consistently singling her out in uncomfortable ways. “It would be a group email where I would say one thing and she’d come back with another, or she would put me on the spot in a Zoom meeting without any prior warning,” she says. Many incidents seemed small in isolation: one day her boss changed all of the work social media passwords so Joyce was no longer able to access the accounts; on another, Joyce got an email reprimanding her for “pushback” against her boss’ ideas. The incidents piled up. Despite having worked at her company for years, over a period of six months, Joyce says she went from loving her job to wanting to resign…Of course, bullying has long been an issue in workplaces, and encompasses a wide spectrum of behaviour, typically associated with in-person work. A familiar scenario might be a domineering boss publicly berating an employee to humiliate them, or a group of colleagues leaving the office for lunch together, deliberately leaving another behind. For some employees, remote work has provided relief and distance from the everyday distress of dealing with such incidents. Yet there is also evidence that, as companies have increasingly switched to remote and hybrid models, workplace bullying has not only continued but thrived, often in more subtle ways – especially as technology has opened new avenues for unkind behaviour…”
What If You Tried to Swallow a Whole Cloud?
Wired: Ask an absurd question, and xkcd’s Randall Munroe will give you a (somewhat) serious answer. An exclusive excerpt from his upcoming What If? 2. – “What does a star smell like? What’s the tensile strength of snow? How much actual dinosaur does a toy dinosaur contain? If you drove a car to the edge of the universe, how much gas would you use? What’s the market value of a shoebox full of LSD?
Are all the churches in the world big enough to hold all the bananas? “I like ridiculous questions, because nobody is expected to know the answer,” Randall Munroe writes in the introduction to What If? 2, his second book of serious answers to hypothetical questions sent in by fans. You may know Munroe as the creator of the web comic xkcd, which offers wry commentary (usually involving stick figures wearing various hats) on science, technology, history, politics, and the daily micro- and macro-follies of human life.
There’s a sincerity about his projects, a nerdy excitement that reminds you of talking to a 10-year-old—assuming you know a 10-year-old who can explain what a naked singularity is and why theoretical physicists hate them. Nerdy-kid excitement is what WIRED is all about. The following pages contain Munroe’s answers to two questions: What if some of outer space turned to soup? And what if you tried to swallow a cloud?…”
