WFH Is Corroding Our Trust in Each Other

About a third of the employees of a regional bank have returned to working onsite, and the president holds a weekly all-staff town hall meeting by videoconference. Employees are encouraged to submit anonymous questions for him or other senior leaders to answer. For the past six weeks, an increasing number of people have asked, “How do we know if the people who are still working from home are actually working?” Some employees have even suggested specific technology-based monitoring approaches to track remote workers’ onscreen time and activities.

Why So Many of Us Experience a Midlife Crisis

A mid-career crisis can happen to anyone. It can hit even those who objectively have the most fulfilling jobs. When it does, it inflicts pain on the individual suffering it and causes productivity losses for employers. Yet, the phenomenon remains stigmatized and under-researched, leaving crucial questions unanswered. What are the causes? Why does this malaise seem to strike in mid-life? And how can those who are stuck in its grips shake themselves loose?

How a robotics engineer accidentally upended child labor practices in the Gulf

Before he found himself on the Al-Shahaniya racetrack on the outskirts of Doha, Esan Maruff had never seen a camel race. It was May 2005, and Maruff’s robotics team was on-site for a Qatar-funded research and development project — to make human jockeys obsolete by building a camel-racing robot. It was not a career pivot Maruff had seen coming. “The job was very much an accident,” he said. “I never applied. I never gave my resume to anyone.” 

Facial Hair Is Biologically Useless. So Why Do Humans Have It?

There are really only two types of facial hair: beards and mustaches. Every style of facial hair you’ve ever seen is one of these two, or a combination of both.

Think about it like part of a Linnaean taxonomy of human traits that we just made up but totally makes sense, where facial hair is a family, beards and mustaches are each a genus, and their many varieties are individual species that could interbreed, as it were, to create hybrid subspecies like the duck-billed platypus of the facial hair family, the soul patch.

Quit Your Job And Live Abroad In 2021: 9 Places So Cheap You Might Not Need To Work

Now that 2020 is over, it’s time to start living for the future. What does that look like for you? Chances are it might involve quitting your day job, ditching it all and moving to paradise. While many people have been able to get a taste of this new reality by working remotely in 2020, that time will soon come to end. So there’s truly no better moment to start thinking about how you can live the dream by moving to another country where the cost of living is so low that you can stop working. Since 2017, I have been providing plenty of inspiration in this column by showcasing the cheapest places to live around the globe. (You can also see past reports for 2020, 2019 and 2018 here.) In this fifth annual report, I again tapped into the experts at InternationalLiving.com, which has just released its 30th Annual Global Retirement Index for 2021. And this list isn’t just for retirees: It’s a great resource for anyone who has ever thought of moving to a country where the cost of living is considerably cheaper than in the United States.

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