Most of us don’t choose our phone numbers, and unless you live at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, you probably picked your home first and the street number just came with it. However, you can choose your email address. As of last year, an Ipsos poll showed about 85 percent of people in the world use email. That might be even higher…
Timed to Cirque du Soleil bringing its new show, Zarkana, to New York this summer, the New York Times offers up a lengthy profile of its creative force, who is described as a “very nice bulldozer.” With the caveat “analyzing his character is challenging since he has few close friends, and even his longtime associates say they hardly know him,”…
I got my first job when I was 16, and before that, I’d been babysitting since middle school. Working for other people is something I’ve had decades of practice doing. Working for myself is new. So I was glad to stumble onto Lorena’s Epiphany, a blog by a Lebanese freelancer with good pointers on how to be successfully self employed.…
According to the National Committee on Pay Equity, Equal Pay Day was April 12 — which means women had to work three and a half months into 2011 to earn what men earned in 2010, because we earn about 77 percent of what men do. We talked a lot about the gender pay gap in one of my favorite business…
I have always been a girl with a plan. I lived life like a chess game, thinking through how my current move will ripple through three moves ahead: Getting good grades in high school would help me get into college Doing internships during college would help me land a job after graduation Taking a job at a small newspaper would…
It’s easy to see why Four-Hour Workweek is a New York Times, Wall Street Journal and BusinessWeek bestseller – working four hours a week and having a comfortable lifestyle is just short of winning the lottery in terms of fantasy freedom. After I heard author Tim Ferriss speak at MediaBistro Circus, where he shared many of the ways he’d marketed…
Earlier this week, I wrote about the most popular blog posts in the two-year run of Newvine Growing and about the most common search terms that bring people here. Studying those data points is part of some work I’m doing to refine my focus for 2011. I launched Newvine Growing in January 2009 with broad goal: to have a forum…
After a month of daily gratitude posts, it’s taking me a bit to regain my rhythm of regular content — but I do have some good stuff in the hopper: I sat down with Larry Kirshbaum, formerly CEO of Time-Warner Book Group and now head of LJK Literary, and he shared the unvarnished truth about moving from a corporate gig…
John and I walked home late Thanksgiving night, trying to walk off a few of the thousands of calories we’d ingested with friends, and our path took us past a big shopping center down the street where crowds were lining up for Black Friday sales. I’ve never felt compelled to get up in the middle of the night…
I’ve pretty much worked in the same field since high school — I got a job pasting up newspaper pages using X-Acto knives and hot wax when I was 17 and I’ve earned my paycheck from something related to writing or media ever since. This week I met a friend of a friend who is studying criminal justice after getting…
I think part of the reason I was drawn to journalism was the power of deadlines — you probably can’t work for long at a newspaper if you don’t understand that there’s no compromise in whether your story makes the paper or not. On time, it does. Late, you miss, and you probably get to enjoy a conversation with your…
Editor’s note: This is a fairly lengthy post. I suggest you fire up Preservation Hall’s live performance on World Cafe, maybe mix yourself a hurricane, and settle in. Ben Jaffe grew up with dreams of becoming a modern jazz musician, “really hell bent on moving to New York.” Family responsibility and appreciation of where he’d come from put him on…
More magazine, which bills itself as a “comprehensive resource and community for women over 40,” is hosting a Reinvention Convention Oct. 5 in New York. The Web site says: Are you ready to revamp your career? Tackle money management questions? Rev up your style, health and maybe your sex life, too? Then join the editors of More, top experts and…
Rick Field, founder of New York pickle concern Rick’s Picks, recently taught a dill pickle making class at farmers market in Prospect Park. As he waited for the brine to heat up in a kettle on a propane burner, Field talked about his unlikely transition from television producer to artisanal pickle maker. As the New York Press reported: Field wasn’t…
Thanks to Twitter, I learned about the Slow Money conference — I hadn’t heard of it until I saw Stowe Boyd’s 140-character updates Thursday. BusinessWeek writes: There’s a conference going on in Santa Fe this week about Slow Money. The idea behind slow money, modeled on the 20-year-old slow food movement, is to create an infrastructure for investing in local…
I met Rob Pasick years ago, when I was business editor at the Ann Arbor News and he was an interesting local character — a psychologist and executive coach and who was working the media not about his day job but about his book “Conversations with My Old Dog.” We’ve stayed in touch off and on over the years, and…
