Tag: bad things
What’s at Stake for Election Workers
Poll workers serve an essential, if usually uncelebrated, role in American democracy. Organizing and tabulating is the basic business of elections. Or, it was until 2020.
When then–President Trump refused to accept his loss and spread falsehoods about a stolen election, vote-counters were among the first people to face blowback. Poll workers endured combative protestors, threats, and harassment while completing their work. In the two years since, the Big Lie has only grown more central to the Republican brand. In
‘What People Don’t Get About My Job,’ According to Workers
This is Work in Progress, a newsletter by Derek Thompson about work, technology, and how to solve some of America’s biggest problems. Sign up here to get it every week.
Several weeks ago, I asked readers to tell me what people don’t get about their jobs. I thought we might receive several dozen replies. Instead, we received several hundred. We heard from teachers and professors; from opera singers and orchestra musicians; from corporate executives and tech workers; from screenwriters, playwrights,
Why So Many COVID Predictions Were Wrong
Updated at 12:13 p.m. ET on April 7, 2022.
As many prominent policy makers reckon uncomfortably with persistent inflation after months of forecasting that the phenomenon would be transitory, I’ve started making a list of other pandemic predictions about the economy that never materialized. There was the eviction tsunami and the “she-cession” and the housing-market crash, and you can’t forget the state- and local-government deficit explosion. In each case, expectations set by economists, policy makers, advocates, and businesses have