The great English mathematician John Littlewood wrote an essay called “The mathematician’s art of work,” published in The Mathematical Intelligencer in 1978. (Here's a link, though it's behind a firewall.) It's full
In her essay on the meaning of leisure, Washington Post editor Christine Emba notes that Uber recently announced that it would debut self-driving cars in Pittsburgh later this fall. This, she argues, marks another step
Washington Post editor Christine Emba has a good essay on our need to rethink the meaning and use of leisure. Americans "have lost our understanding of what leisure
One of the most surprising discoveries I made while writing REST was how many of my subjects-- Nobel laureates, famous novelists, artists, scientists, and others-- were athletes. I had
We all know that periods of sleep deprivation have an adverse effect on mental performance. Particularly when you're young, you can tolerate an all-nighter or weeks of sleep
People find old postcards of sling chairs and send them to you. This is one from the 1980s that an aunt just found, scanned, and sent me. The chair from
One of the strategies that companies and countries use to try to reduce "work-to-family interference" (a term sociologists use for a concept that's fairly close to work-life balance)
I talk briefly about it in REST, but I'm planning a piece that's a deep dive into thinking about working hours in the tech industry, and how some
This is the cover of REST. I wasn’t involved in the design: authors usually aren’t, unless they have design backgrounds, otherwise they’re a lot more likely to mess
This weekend I finished reviewing the index and page proofs of my next book, REST. It now goes off to the printer, and the next time I see