Colombian writer Pilar Quintana talks about her acclaimed novel The Bitch which explores themes of motherhood, loss, and the impact of violence on women's lives.
Set against the backdrop of the Pacific coast, the story revolves around Damaris, a young woman longing for a child but unable to conceive. When she discovers a pregnant dog near her home, she becomes obsessed with the idea of adopting one of its puppies.
However, her evolving relationship with the puppy becomes entangled with the violence of the society around her, revealing dark secrets and triggering a journey of self-discovery.
Through Quintana's lyrical prose, the novel delves deep into the complexities of human relationships, motherhood in particular, the scars left by conflict, and the resilience of the human spirit in the face of adversity.
We’re riding another wave of COVID-19 as we enter August. Cases and hospitalizations are on the rise, according to the CDC. Reset gets the latest on what we need to know moving forward with Dr. Mia Taormina, infectious disease specialist with Duly Health and Care.
Job Rietbergen lives in Amsterdam, which he says is awesome because there are so many types of amazing cuisine. He has always been a creator of things - art, photography, product and technology, to name a few. He finds its an odd trait to create art and be in tech, as there are not a lot of people who lead from a designers mind. He has been supporting early stage startups for the last 13 years. Outside of tech, he loves to do anything boarding, and mentioned he loves to snowboard in Austria every year.
In his last role, Job was in charge of marketing and growth, of an integrations platform in healthcare tech. He dreamt of a way to enable developers and users of this platform to easy understand and implement their system. Once he met up with his co-founder, who was passionate about solving the same thing, they set out to solve this problem.
While it seems intuitively obvious that good management is important to the success of an organization, perhaps that obvious point needs some evidence given how so many institutions seem to muddle through regardless. Enter Raffaela Sadun, the Charles E. Wilson Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School and co-leader of the Digital Reskilling Lab there. Working through several managerial mega-projects she co-founded, Sadun can both identify traits of successful management and even put a quantitative value to what good management can bring to a firm (spoiler alert – as Sadun will explain, it’s a big number).
In this Social Science Bites podcast, Sadun discusses her research findings with host David Edmonds, who open his inquiry with a very basic question: What, exactly, do we mean by ‘management’?
“It's a complicated answer,” Sadun replies. “I think that management is the consistent application of processes that relate to both the operations of the organization as well as the management of human resources. And at the end of the day, management is not that difficult. It’s being able to implement these processes and update them and sort of adapt them to the context of the organization.”
In a practical sense, that involves things like monitoring workers, solving problems and coordinating disparate activities, activities that ultimately require someone “to be in charge.” But not just anyone, Sadun details, and not just someone who happens to be higher up. “The most effective managers are the ones that are able to empower and get information and reliable information from their team, which is fundamentally a bottom-up approach rather than a top-down approach.”
If that sounds a little different from the adversarial relationship many expect between workers and managers, well, good management is a little different, she continues. “I can see how you can think of this as being a trade-off (profit versus well-being of workers), but if you look at the type of practices that we measure, as I said, they're not exploitations, but they are ways to get people engaged and empowered to sort of participate into the work. It’s always possible that there are organizations that push so much on one side of the equation that make people very unhappy. In my experience, these type of situations are not sustainable.”
Good people – the ones employers prize -- won’t put up with too much garbage. “Talented people are attracted--to the extent that they want to work for somebody else—they're attracted to places where their life is not miserable.”
Sadun came to her conclusions through projects like the World Management Survey, which she co-founded two decades ago. “We spoke with more than 20,000 managers to date—around 35 countries, [and ..] collected typically [by] talking with middle managers.” Other big projects include the Executive Time Use Study, and MOPS-H, the first large-scale management survey in hospitals and one conducted in partnership with the US Census Bureau. In her native Italy, Sadun was an economic adviser to the Italian government in the early 2020s, earning the highest honor possible from the government, the Grande Ufficiale dell'Ordine "Al Merito della Repubblica Italiana." In the United States, serves as director of the National Bureau of Economic Research Working Group in Organizational Economics, and is faculty co-chair of the Harvard Project on the Workforce.
The country is not new to seclusion, but under the aegis of the pandemic, Kim Jong Un tightened borders even more. His regime has enjoyed the extra control, but are things finally opening up? The world’s biggest rice exporter is banning rice exports and the developing world is going to feel the heat (10:13). And, a new approach to dairy – without cows (14:39).
For full access to print, digital and audio editions of The Economist, try a free 30-day digital subscription by going to www.economist.com/intelligenceoffer
We've hit 60 songs on our Official Playlist so it's time for another Catchup & Mustard with your favorite hosts, Tyler Snodgrass and Danny Maupin! We play "Country Trivial Pursuit" using some country music trading cards Danny found in a pawn shop, and play IS IT COUNTRY?? This week we deliberate about The Proclaimers, My Morning Jacket, Les Claypool, and some guy from Ringo Starr's band.
You’ve probably seen footage of a rocket launch. There is a bunch of smoke and fire as the rocket lifts off to begin its flight to achieve an altitude and velocity which will get it into orbit.
It works, but it requires a lot of energy to get even a small amount of mass into the Earth’s orbit.
What if there was a way to travel into space that didn’t require a rocket? What if going into Earth orbit could be just as easy as going up to the top floor of a skyscraper?
Learn more about space elevators and how they could revolutionize space travel on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.
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We're talking about what's become the largest wildfire in California so far this year and where other fires are forcing evacuations.
Also, we'll tell you how the Republican candidates rank in popularity and what Hunter Biden's old business partner had to say about the first son's dealings overseas.
Plus, what to know about a light bulb ban now in effect, how there could be new hope for long Covid patients, and why billion-dollar lottery jackpots are becoming more common.
A fascinating exploration of George Orwell--and his body of work--by an award-winning Orwellian biographer and scholar, presenting the author anew to twenty-first-century readers.
We find ourselves in an era when the moment is ripe for a reevaluation of the life and the works of one of the twentieth century's greatest authors. This is the first twenty-first-century biography on George Orwell, with special recognition to D. J. Taylor's stature as an award-winning biographer and Orwellian.
Using new sources that are now available for the first time, we are tantalizingly at the end of the lifespan of Orwell's last few contemporaries, whose final reflections are caught in this book. The way we look at a writer and his canon has changed even over the course of the last two decades; there is a post-millennial prism through which we must now look for such a biography to be fresh and relevant. This is whatOrwell: The New Life(Pegasus Books, 2023) achieves.
Charles Coutinho, PH. D., Associate Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, received his doctorate from New York University. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. He has written for Chatham House’s International Affairs, the Institute of Historical Research's Reviews in History and the University of Rouen's online periodical Cercles.
