How to Use Stress to Your Advantage - Harvard Business Review   

You can’t go more than five minutes these days without hearing about stress: stress tests, stress management, how everyone’s eventual cause of death will probably be — you guessed it — stress. We humblebrag about stress, we complain about it, we take yoga classes and meditate to get rid of it. We’re obsessed.

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How False Shoplifting Charges Inspired Ron Shaich To Build An Empire - Forbes   

Make Ron Shaich angry and he might build a business to compete against you. He may even help fund an organization that will create a political party to defeat you.

As a political science student at Clark University in the early 1970s, Shaich was kicked out of a store near campus on false accusations that he and his friends were about to steal something. “They were vilifying us, and they actually were abusing us,” says Shaich, who then decided “we don't need them. We could do this on our own.”

As student body treasurer, he launched a campaign to raise money for a nonprofit convenience store on campus that Shaich ended up managing himself. “I discovered running the store was the most creative thing I had ever done in my life.”

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North Koreans deported from Chinese jails face torture, activists warn - BBC News   

Activists say up to 600 North Korean defectors, believed to be mostly women, have not been heard from since their deportation from China.

In October, China carried out the largest repatriation of North Korean detainees in years, after Pyongyang ended its Covid border lockdown.

This put the detainees' lives at risk, human rights groups said at that time.

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The Case for the 6-Hour Workday - Harvard Business Review   

The eight-hour workday harkens back to 19-century socialism. When there was no upper limit to the hours that organizations could demand of factory workers, American labor unions fought hard to instill a 40-hour work week. But so much has changed since then. The internet fundamentally changed the way we live, work, and play, and the nature of work itself has transitioned in large part from algorithmic tasks to heuristic ones that require critical thinking, problem-solving, creativity, and uninterrupted stretches of time to get into a state of flow. How can you foster a shorter, more productive workday for your own team? Make it okay for employees to not be in a hyper-responsive state. Encourage employees to turn off notifications and batch-check e-mails. Block off time in calendars to allow for several hours of uninterrupted work each day. Cut your default meeting time from 60 minutes to 30 minutes. By cultivating a flow-friendly workplace and introducing a shorter workday, you’re setting the scene not only for higher productivity and better outcomes, but for more motivated and less-stressed employees, improved rates of employee acquisition and retention, and more time for all that fun stuff that goes on outside of office walls, otherwise known as life.

The eight-hour workday harkens back to 19-century socialism. When there was no upper limit to the hours that organizations could demand of factory workers, and the industrial revolution saw children as young as six-years-old working the coal mines, American labor unions fought hard to instill a 40-hour work week, eventually ratifying it as part of the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938.

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