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Outsourcing used to be something you heard about only big companies doing. “We just outsourced our help desk,” you might hear, or “We need to talk about outsourcing our design work.”
I didn’t write that paragraph. Because in the new economy, there is no need for me to ever do anything requiring any effort whatsoever. …
The observation that truth is the first casualty of war has been variously attributed to Aeschylus 2,500 years ago and to Senator Hiram Johnson during World War I, but it is no less true today. In modern warfare, journalists are among the first responders, seeking out truth in the turmoil and wreckage, wherever it takes them.
This has always been dangerous, difficult work; it requires courage, certainly, but also judgment, subtlety, discipline, humanity. Twenty-first century war adds new risks: more and more often there are no front lines, no central command, no rules of engagement–only a chaotic collision of politics, power, faith and bloodlust. Victims are as likely to be civilians as soldiers.
Steven Sotloff, the freelance journalist who was beheaded by ISIS militants, like reporter James Foley before him, was determined to tell that story. He had reported for TIME from Libya and Turkey, eager to explore the human side of global events. I did not know Steven, but many of my colleagues from TIME and other news organizations did. He was a generous peer; the best stringers are like that, passionate about the story they are covering and eager to help others get it right and tell it well. When U.S.-based editors and columnists parachute into a news storm, it is often the stringers who keep us out of trouble, helping us glimpse the complexity behind the headlines. “As a visiting bigfoot in dangerous places,” Time’s Joe Klein says, “I’d always meet these men and women at the hotel bar–or the military helipad, waiting for a lift–and I would ask them questions, and their enthusiasm and knowledge and humanity were extraordinary. I’d buy them drinks; they gave me wisdom.”
Steven Sotloff was typical of the breed in his love for the region he covered and his deep curiosity about its people and culture. On Twitter he called himself a “stand-up philosopher from Miami.” He was drawn to the Middle East not by the battles but by the opportunity, says his friend Barak Barfi, to “give a voice to the people who didn’t have one.” He went to Yemen to study Arabic, and to Egypt, Bahrain, Libya, Turkey and eventually Syria. TIME correspondent Aryn Baker recalls reporting with him in February 2011, when Bahraini citizens first rose up in protest against their government. He was generous with his contacts and eager to share stories of people he had encountered while reporting. Proficient in Arabic, he helped translate for reporters with rival organizations.
The Syrian civil war, which began in March 2011, has been even more dangerous than most, and at TIME we’ve been very careful about our coverage. Steven was not on assignment for TIME when he was abducted in August 2013, and his parents and supporters elected to keep his kidnapping out of the news, hoping that would aid his release. After Foley’s execution, Steven’s mother Shirley Sotloff issued a video plea to ISIS to “grant amnesty” to her son. “Steven is a journalist who traveled to the Middle East to cover the suffering of Muslims at the hands of tyrants,” she said. “He is an honorable man and has always tried to help the weak.”
That effort, along with a rescue attempt by U.S. Special Forces, was unsuccessful; a video of Sotloff’s beheading was released on Sept. 2. For America and the world, the brutality flaunted by ISIS like a twisted form of jihadist branding was a crime against humanity. It was also an attack on values that, in life and death, Steven ennobled for all of us. Decisionmaking in a democracy depends above all on knowledge, and not just the intel available to Presidents and policymakers. If we don’t have people on the ground, watching and working and reporting from inside these conflicts, we cannot understand and judge, as viewers, as voters, as citizens. But reporting up close has become ever more hazardous. “As both insurgent groups and the governments they fight have become more sensitive to how they are portrayed,” says the Committee to Protect Journalists, “journalists have been squeezed between threat of violent attack from one side and pressure of censorship or prosecution from the other.” Nearly three dozen journalists have been killed this year, with Syria and Iraq the most deadly countries.
We mourn and honor Steven Sotloff and James Foley and their colleagues around the world who have paid the ultimate price to defend the essence of freedom: the ability to question, to learn, to decide for ourselves.
Nancy Gibbs, MANAGING EDITOR
This appears in the September 22, 2014 issue of TIME.
Some days the to-do list seems bottomless. Just looking at it is exhausting.
We all want to know how to stop being lazy and get more done. I certainly want the answer.
So I decided to call a friend who manages to do this — and more.
Cal Newport impresses the heck out of me. Why? Well, I’m glad you asked. He’s insanely productive:
And yet he finishes work at 5:30PM every day and rarely works weekends.
No, he does not have superpowers or a staff of 15. Okay, let’s you and I both stop being jealous of his productivity for a second and learn something.
Below you’ll get Cal’s secrets on how you can better manage your time, stop being lazy, get more done — and be finished by 5:30. Let’s get to work.
To-do lists by themselves are useless. They’re just the first step. You have to assign them time on your schedule. Why?
It makes you be realistic about what you can get done. It allows you to do tasks when it’s efficient, not just because it’s #4.
Until it’s on your calendar and assigned an hour, it’s just a list of wishful thinking.
Here’s Cal:
Scheduling forces you to confront the reality of how much time you actually have and how long things will take. Now that you look at the whole picture you’re able to get something productive out of every free hour you have in your workday. You not only squeeze more work in but you’re able to put work into places where you can do it best.
Experts agree that if you don’t consider how long things take, you’re setting yourself up for failure.
I can hear what some of you are thinking: But I get interrupted. Things get thrown at me last minute.
Great — build that into your schedule. It doesn’t need to be perfect. Things will change. But you need to have a plan, otherwise you’ll waste time.
Want to stop procrastinating? Schedule. Here’s Cal:
Assigning work to times reduces the urge to procrastinate. You are no longer deciding whether or not to work during a given period; the decision is already made.
Does this sound too mechanical? Overly structured and not much fun? Wrong.
Research shows that it’s even a good idea to schedule what you do with your free time. It increases quality of life:
This study was designed to identify the relationship between free time management and quality of life, exploring whether the amount of free time or the way people using their free time relates to their quality of life… The result has found a positive relationship between free time management and quality of life.
(For more on the schedule the most productive people use, click here.)
Okay, the to-do list is in the trash and things are going on the calendar. How do you prioritize so you’re not at work forever?
Work will fill the space it’s given. Give it 24/7 and guess what happens?
You need boundaries if you want work/life balance. But this also helps you work better because it forces you to be efficient.
By setting a deadline of 5:30 and then scheduling tasks you can get control over that hurricane of duties.
Cal calls it “fixed schedule productivity”:
Fix your ideal schedule, then work backwards to make everything fit — ruthlessly culling obligations, turning people down, becoming hard to reach, and shedding marginally useful tasks along the way. My experience in trying to make that fixed schedule a reality forces any number of really smart and useful in-the-moment productivity decisions.
What does research say prevents you from getting burned out at work? Feeling in control of your schedule.
Anything that increases your perception of control over a situation — whether it actually increases your control or not — can decrease your stress level.
Over and over, scientists see that the perception of control over a stressor alters the stressor’s impact.
(For more on how to achieve work/life balance, click here.)
You’ve drawn a line in the sand and worked backward, giving all your tasks hours in your day. But how do you handle longer term projects?
I think you’ll agree that the last thing this world needs is more short term thinking.
You’ll never get ahead of the game by only looking at today and never thinking about tomorrow.
How do you write books, teach classes, meet with students, do research papers and be a good parent consistently? Plan the week.
Here’s Cal:
People don’t look at the larger picture with their time and schedule. I know each day what I’m doing with each hour of the day. I know each week what I’m doing with each day of the week and I know each month what I’m doing with each week of the month.
Are you rolling your eyes? Does this sound overbearing? It’s simpler than you think. What’s really necessary?
Just one hour every Monday morning. Here’s Cal:
Every Monday I lay out a plan for the week. I go through my inbox, I go through my task list, I go through my calendar and try to come away with the best thing to do with each day this week. I write it in an email and I send it to myself and leave it in my inbox because that’s a place I know I will see it every day and I’ll be reminded of it multiple times throughout the day.
And he’s right. Research shows you spend your time more wisely when you follow a plan.
Via What the Most Successful People Do at Work: A Short Guide to Making Over Your Career:
Preliminary analysis from CEOs in India found that a firm’s sales increased as the CEO worked more hours. But more intriguingly, the correlation between CEO time use and output was driven entirely by hours spent in planned activities. Planning doesn’t have to mean that the hours are spent in meetings, though meetings with employees were correlated with higher sales; it’s just that CEO time is a limited and valuable resource, and planning how it should be allocated increases the chances that it’s spent in productive ways.
Maybe you think it’s enough to run down the week’s duties in your head. Nope.
Studies show writing things down makes you more likely to follow through.
(For more on how the most productive people get things done, click here.)
So you’ve got a fixed schedule and a weekly plan — but the math doesn’t add up. There’s just too much stuff. Cal has an answer for that too.
Maybe you’re thinking: I just have too many things to do. I could never get it all done in that amount of time.
And Cal concedes that you might be right. But the answer isn’t throwing up your arms and working until 10PM.
You need to do fewer things. Everything is not essential. You say “yes” to more than you need to.
Ask “What’s creating real value in my life?” And then eliminate as much of the rest as you can.
Here’s Cal:
You’re judged on what you do best so if you want to have as much success as possible you’re always better off doing fewer things but doing those things better. People say yes to too much. I say no to most things. I’m ruthless about avoiding or purging tasks if I realize they’re just not providing much value.
You feel like you have no time but John Robinson, the leading researcher on time use, disagrees. We may have more free time than ever.
Via Overwhelmed: Work, Love, and Play When No One Has the Time:
He insists that although most Americans feel they’re working harder than ever, they aren’t. The time diaries he studies show that average hours on the job, not only in the United States but also around the globe, have actually been holding steady or going down in the last forty years. Everybody, he says, has more time for leisure.
So what gives? It feels like you have no time because it’s so fragmented with little annoying tasks that drain the life out of you.
So do less. And be amazing at those things.
(For more on what the most successful people do, click here.)
Your plans are in order and by doing less, it all fits on the schedule. But one question remains: what exactly should you be doing with your time?
All work is not created equal. Cal says knowledge workers deal with two fundamentally different types of work, Shallow and Deep:
Shallow work is little stuff like email, meetings, moving information around. Things that are not really using your talents. Deep work pushes your current abilities to their limits. It produces high value results and improves your skills.
And what’s the problem? Most of us are “drowning in the shallows”:
People who are the most busy often are getting a lot less done of significance than the people who are able to stop by 5PM every day. That’s because the whole reason they need to work at night and on the weekends is because their work life has become full of just shallows. They’re responding to messages, moving information around and being a human network router. These things are very time consuming and very low value.
Nobody in the history of the universe ever became CEO because they responded to more email or went to more meetings. No way, Bubba.
Cal has it right: Shallow work stops you from getting fired — but deep work is what gets you promoted.
Give yourself big blocks of uninterrupted time to make things of value. What’s the best first step?
Stop checking email first thing in the morning. Tim Ferriss, author of the international bestseller, The 4-Hour Workweek, explains:
…whenever possible, do not check email for the first hour or two of the day. It’s difficult for some people to imagine. “How can I do that? I need to check email to get the information I need to work on my most important one or two to-dos?”
You would be surprised how often that is not the case. You might need to get into your email to finish 100% of your most important to-dos. But can you get 80 or 90% done before you go into Gmail and have your rat brain explode with freak-out, dopamine excitement and cortisol panic? Yes.
(For more on how to motivate yourself, click here.)
So how do we tie all this together?
Cal’s five big tips:
Schedules and plans sound cold and clinical but the end result couldn’t be farther from that.
You’ll be less stressed, create more time for friends and family, and make things you can be proud of.
Here’s Cal:
Knowledge work is really just craftsmanship. It’s just that what you’re crafting is information and not carved wood. You’re crafting ideas. You’re crafting knowledge out of raw material and the more you think about it like a craftsman, the happier and more satisfied you’ll be, not to mention more successful.
The offices of the world could use a few less cubicle drones and a few more proud craftsmen.
A PDF of the extended interview with Cal (including his research on how geniuses work) will be in my next weekly email. Sign up to get it here.
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Related posts:
6 Things The Most Productive People Do Every Day
8 Things The World’s Most Successful People All Have In Common
How To Achieve Work-Life Balance In 5 Steps
This piece originally appeared on Barking Up the Wrong Tree.
When I first heard of the two-game suspension for former Ravens running back Ray Rice because of the assault on his then fiancée, I thought, Great, here we go again. No one cares, he can do anything. And then when I saw the second video of him actually punching Janay Rice unconscious, I thought, this is what happened to me. The only difference was that when I came to, a doorman was carrying me over his shoulder, out of my fiancé’s apartment, and into a car. I remember what my ex-husband told me later, which was that I bounced off two walls and I then was out. At the time, I was engaged to him and living with my mother, but I didn’t go home because I would have had to explain to her what happened. Instead I called a friend and went to her hotel room, but even then, I didn’t say, “He hit me.” I said, “He pushed me.” It’s even hard to admit it yourself. I was embarrassed.
People ask why I didn’t leave after the first time he hit me. But you feel such inner turmoil and confusion. You want it to be only one time. And for three days after that incident I did the right thing. I said: “Don’t call me. I never want to see you again.” But then you start taking his phone calls. Then he asks to see you in person, and you say yes to that. Then you have a big giant man crying like a baby on your lap and next thing you know, you’re consoling him. You’re the protector. One minute you’re running from him, the next you’re protecting him. And being a black woman you feel you want to protect your man. You think, the black man in America has it so difficult anyway, so now you’re turning them in. It feels like the ultimate betrayal. And maybe Janay Rice is feeling a little of that, though I don’t want to speak for her.
The release of this new video is a watershed moment. It’s very difficult for people to wrap their minds around the concept of a man actually balling up his fist and hitting a woman. They don’t mean to dismiss it, it’s just too hard to take in. But the video forces you to take it in. There’s no escaping. You can’t dance around it, you have to deal with it. That’s why video really becomes crucial for this cause, the fight against domestic violence. No matter what people are told, it’s hard for anyone to believe that a man could do this kind of thing unless they actually see it. People say: “That guy is so nice when he’s with me. What did you do? What did you say to him? He’s cool. I play golf with him. I can’t imagine him doing this.” Women are simply not believed.
But if there’s video, you can’t unsee it. It is so deep to actually see what happens to women. And we will see it now because there are cameras everywhere. I remember being dragged down a hallway in a hotel in the Bahamas on a night I thought I was really going to die. Today there would have been cameras in that hall. Someone would know. I would be believed. Now the story gets to tell itself.
Today we are in world where we are far more connected and involved in each other’s lives thanks to social media. Women who are abused can see they’re not alone. I only left my marriage when I felt like I was going to die physically or die emotionally. It’s just amazing what becomes your normal. One day you wake up with a knife at your throat. Another day, your shoes are all torn up. But I did leave and I didn’t take one dime from my husband. I left my house, and I even left my underwear. I just wanted my life. I was very confident that I could make my way on my own. And I did.
Twenty years later, it is different. We have made progress in this journey of empowerment for women. But we need men to be part of it. We need them to say there can never be hitting. Ever. I’ve always believed that when men stand up things will change, and now a football team is saying this behavior, this violence is wrong. We’re still in the middle of this fight, but this moment, this video, will change things. We just have to keep at it.
Givens is an actor, director, activist and author. She divorced boxer Mike Tyson in 1988. She has worked on behalf of women, children and families facing the challenges of domestic violence for more than 20 years. You can read more about her here. Follow her on Twitter @Therocknrobn.
Domestic abuse of any kind is violent and ugly, and today there is rightful public outrage over it, whether the perpetrators are famous athletes, college students, members of the military, or leaders of our institutions and communities.
On Tuesday, I joined hundreds of domestic violence survivors and advocates at the National Archives to commemorate the 20th Anniversary of the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) and to recognize a right that flows directly from our founding documents: the right of every woman in America to be free from violence and free from fear.
Twenty years ago, this was a right that few people understood and our culture failed to recognize. Kicking a wife in the stomach or pushing her down the stairs was repugnant, but it wasn’t taken seriously as a crime. It was considered a “family affair.” State authorities assumed if a woman was beaten or raped by her husband or someone she knew, she must have deserved it. It was a “lesser crime” to rape a woman if she was a “voluntary companion.” Many state murder laws still held on to the notion that if your wife left you and you killed her, she had provoked it and you had committed manslaughter.
That was the tragic history when, as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, I introduced the Violence Against Women Act in 1990. We started out believing that the only way to change the culture was to expose the toll of domestic violence on American families. And I was convinced, as I am today, that the basic decency of the American people would demand change once they saw the scale of violence and the depth of the ignorance and stereotypes used to justify it.
To paint an honest picture, I invited health professionals to testify on the long-term psychological effects of the violence. Advocates told of the desperate need for funding for shelters and centers. But what broke through were the stories of courageous survivors.
One woman testified ten years after being raped by her boyfriend as a 15-year-old, “It is not the gory details that you need to hear to understand, it is the suffering, the loss of feeling any control, the incredible self-blame, and the disruption of a survivor’s life that can’t often be heard.” She asked the committee a powerful question: “How did I get this message that…it was my fault?”
We heard more stories through a report detailing a single week in America where 21,000 women were victims of assaults, murders, and rapes. Women had arms broken with hammers and heads beaten with pipes by men who supposedly loved them.
But as more women — and men — spoke out, minds began to change. Terms of the debate shifted. And we forged a national consensus that something had to be done. Local coalitions of shelters and rape crisis centers led the way. National women’s groups and civil rights groups got on board. Brave women judges and lawyers stood up to Chief Justice Rehnquist, who opposed to the bill because it included a civil rights remedy. To get it passed with that remedy and more resources for shelters and advocates, I added VAWA to a crime bill I had been working on for years that had bipartisan support, put 100,000 cops on the streets, and provided more assistance for law enforcement.
On September 13, 1994, President Clinton signed the bill into law, and with each reauthorization over the years we’ve improved and included more protections for women, LGBT Americans, and Native Americans.
As a consequence of the law, domestic violence rates have dropped 64%; billions of dollars have been averted in social and medical costs; and we’ve had higher rates of convictions for special-victims unites and fundamental reforms of state laws. The nation’s first National Domestic Violence Hotline has helped 3.4 million women and men fight back from domestic and dating violence.
And along the way we’ve changed the culture. Abuse is violent and ugly and today there is rightful public outrage over it. It matters that the American people have sent a clear message: you’re a coward for raising a hand to a woman or child—and you’re complicit if you fail to condemn it.
That’s a monumental change from twenty years ago, and it’s why the Violence Against Women Act is my proudest legislative accomplishment. But we know there’s more to do. One in five women in America has experienced rape or attempted rape. Sex bias still plagues our criminal justice system with stereotypes like “she deserved it” or “she wore a short skirt” tainting the prosecution of rape and assault.
But twenty years after this law first passed, I remain hopeful as ever that the decency of the American people will keep us moving forward in the fight against this rawest form of violence and a culture that hides it. They understand the true character of our country is measured when violence against women is no longer accepted as society’s secret and where we all understand that even one case is too many.
Joe Biden is the Vice President of the United States.
The vehicle through which the Ray Rice drama unfolds is not a woman’s voice, nor an impartial justice system, nor the consistent, preemptive ruling of a major sports organization, but through a piece of technology that happened to be switched on. Video of Rice’s violent attack on his wife changed everything, even though the fact of the assault itself was always the same. Why should the footage matter at all?
It is human nature to have our outrage to many kinds of abstract wrongs waked up by vivid imagery. This has been the case from the impact of photographs of children fleeing the bombing in Japan at the end of the Second World War, to shots of the victims of the My Lai Massacre in Vietnam, to the iconic image of the hooded victim torture at Abu Ghraib. The power of images to awaken conscience has lead governments, institutions, and individuals to manage, limit, or even block their dissemination during times of conflict. Photographers are forbidden, for instance, from many areas of Guantanamo, even though documentation might simply convey the sadness of eternal imprisonment rather than pose any security threat; shocking images of civilian suffering during the conflict in Gaza were recently flagged on Facebook and removed.
The video of the Rice assault is a rare document. Domestic abuse is seldom captured, just as rape almost never is (despite a sick market for such images). Yet you can bet that seeing women who have been beaten or raped is a lot more significant and a lot less sexy than the normalizing discourse around of these kinds of assault.
Violent torment, laid plain to see, cannot be justified or downplayed. The intimate suffering that afflicts women (and men) in the context of domestic violence usually has no witnesses except the perpetrator, the victim, and, too often, their children. Without seeing what horror transpired, it is easy for the culture to erase the seriousness of such assaults—to diminish them as a private matter, a lover’s quarrel, an argument that got out of hand, but one that is essentially up to the couple to sort out.
But since domestic violence is still disproportionately men beating up women, this laissez-faire attitude to a crime that is usually hidden simply reinforces traditional male ownership of women, and excuses their relating to women as people they in some way own interpersonally. Accepting it as part of a man’s regrettable but not serious misbehavior in domestic life, as the NFL as well as both Ray and Janay Rice sought to do initially, also gets the police and judicial system off the hook.
The fact that the graphic video has finally shocked everyone enough for a meaningful penalty to come down on the assailant rather horribly confirms women’s worst fears. The abuse that comes our way most often—almost a third of women have reported physical violence at some time in their lives from an intimate partner; one in five college women has been a victim of rape—is nearly invisible, easy to trivialize, and all too often impossible to get justice for. Unless an audience happens to witness it live.
Naomi Wolf is the author of several books, including The Beauty Myth and Vagina, and is a co-founder of DailyCloudt.com, a citizen’s journalism startup now in beta.
LinkedIn Influencer Felix Salmon published this post originally on LinkedIn. Follow Felix on LinkedIn.
There’s a decent rule of thumb, when it comes to anything Apple: When it introduces something brand new, don’t buy version 1.o. Wait until the second or third version instead, you’ll be much better off.
Does anybody remember OS 10.0? It was a disaster, and even people who installed it spent 90% of their time in OS 9 instead. The very first MacBook Air? An underpowered exercise in frustration. The original iPad? Heavy and clunky. The original iPod? Was not only heavy and clunky and expensive, it was also tied to the Macintosh, and didn’t work either alone or with a PC.
The best-case scenario for the Apple Watch is that the product we saw announced Tuesday will eventually iterate into something really great. Because anybody who’s ever worn a watch will tell you: this thing has serious problems.
For one thing, Apple has been worryingly silent on the subject of battery life, but there’s no indication that this thing will last even 24 hours. A watch’s battery should last for months; even watches which don’t have batteries will last for a couple of days, if you have to wind them manually, or indefinitely, if they’re automatic and all you have to do is wear them.
Watches might be complicated on the inside, but they’re simple on the outside, and they should never come with a charging cable. (To make matters worse, even though the Apple Watch only works if you have an iPhone, the iPhone charging cable will not charge the Apple Watch; you need a different charging cable entirely.)
Of course, the Apple Watch is more than just a watch. But it’s also less than just a watch, which is a problem. It probably isn’t waterproof, for instance — don’t take it swimming, or use it during any other watersport. Its battery life means that you can’t take it camping, and that you’re going to have to remember yet another charging cable any time you leave the house for more than about 18 hours. (And yes, if you end up unexpectedly spending the night somewhere, your watch will be a brick in the morning.)
Behind all the shiny options (sport! gold! different straps!) the watch itself is always pretty much the same: thick, clunky, a computer strapped to your wrist. Which is great, I suppose, if you’re the kind of person who likes to strap a computer to your wrist.
Here’s my main beef with the Apple Watch: Apple has always been the company which makes products for real people, rather than gadgets for geeks. It’s the Less Is More company, yet the Apple Watch is overloaded with features. It pays for things! It measures your heartbeat! It controls your TV! It stores your airline boarding pass! It can show you a picture of where you are on the planet, in glorious high-def Retina resolution! Etc, etc.
Any one of these sounds quite clever: I like the idea, for instance, of being able to take a photo from my phone remotely. Useful for group selfies. But we’ve had watches which do lots of things for decades, and I can tell you that almost nobody actually uses those functions. By allowing thousands of different apps on its watch, Apple is buying into the More Is More mindset: make sure that the watch offers something for everybody. And in order to get there, it has had to create a whole system of twiddles and taps and swipes which you’re going to have to learn before you can really start using the watch. Put it this way: no one who only has one wrist is going to be wearing an Apple Watch.
Apple’s website is now full of language saying things like “to pay with Apple Watch, just double-click the button under the Digital Crown and hold your wrist up to the contactless reader,” or “Swipe up from the watch face for Glances that quickly show you information you care about, such as your current location, stocks or your next meeting.” This isn’t easy: if you need to swipe with your opposite hand, what you’re doing is much more than a Glance. Indeed, we need to take it on trust that you’ll be able to simply tell the time just by looking at your watch. To save battery life, Apple has engineered the watch so that it’s off by default, and only turns on when you turn your wrist a certain way.
In other words, Apple hasn’t solved the basic smartwatch dilemma, which is that smart watches use up far more energy than dumb watches, and that there’s nowhere to store that much energy in something the size of a watch. Indeed, Apple has made the problem worse, by combining a powerful computer with a very bright, ultra-high-resolution, full-color display. Either of those things would require a lot of energy; both together require a very thick watch and a limited battery life.
It’s possible that in an iteration or two, Apple will have solved this problem. It’s possible — but, I’m not holding my breath. The problem has been around a very long time, and no one seems to have come close to solving it yet. So my best hope is for some kind of NanoWatch: a thinner, less fully-featured version of the Apple Watch, with a much less versatile display.
If Apple manages to come up with a thin, waterproof watch which I can wear comfortably under a shirt cuff, one where I can tell the time just by looking at it, without having to recharge it twice a day, then I’ll be interested. I’d want it to measure my activity like the Apple Watch does, but I’d be happy with the visual feedback to come from my iPhone. Similarly, if my watch vibrates to alert me of something, I’d be OK with checking my phone to see what exactly it was. But what I don’t want is to start having to deal with as many watch charging cables as I have iPhone charging cables. Because that would drive me bonkers.
Felix Salmon is a senior editor at Fusion.
At the time, the ad campaign — modeled on efforts to curb drunk driving — was considered shocking. It was 1994, the year that OJ Simpson would be arrested for murder, his history of domestic abuse exposed. Yet even so, domestic violence was not a crime that anybody seemed willing to talk about back then. It was, as then Health and Human Services Secretary Donna Shalala put it, “our dirty little secret” — something that happened, and stayed, behind closed doors.
But Esta Soler, the president of a group called Futures Without Violence, was determined to get people talking. Under the banner, “There’s No Excuse for Domestic Violence,” she distributed a series of advertisements to 22,000 media outlets — including ones published in TIME and People. In one, the blurred image of a woman is pictured cowering under a man. “If we remain silent,” Soler told the Washington Post at the time, “our silence will breed even more fear.”
Twenty years later, domestic abuse is again making headlines (and again with a star football player). But this time women are talking about it en masse.
When TMZ released a damning video of Baltimore Ravens running back Ray Rice beating his girlfriend (now wife) unconscious on Monday, the response was swift: commenters called the NFL response an “epic breach of trust.” Rice was cut from the team. Cable news commenters began to question, in light of the revelation, why Rice’s wife would have stayed with him in the first place.
Beverly Gooden, a Cleveland HR manager, had had enough. Under the hashtag #WhyIStayed, she tweeted a staccato response:
“I stayed because my pastor told me that God hates divorce,” she wrote of her own abusive relationship.
“I stayed because I was halfway across the country, isolated from my friends and family.”
“I stayed because I thought love was enough to conquer all.”
It was the antidote to the simplistic view of many of the “experts” who’d weighed in, and it went viral in an instant. “You can feel voiceless,” Gooden told PolicyMic, as the hashtag collected thousands of women’s (and men’s) stories. “I want people to know that they have a voice.”
She was talking about domestic violence, and yet it could have been a metaphor for the way that women like her are using social media daily to make their voices heard. From #StandWithWendy to #HobbyLobby to #YesAllWomen, they are bypassing the gatekeepers, simply by sheer mass — forcing attention on the issues they deem important. “This conversation would have been impossible even 10 years ago,” says Soler, reflecting on more than 30 years as an advocate. “Social media has created space for people of all kinds to express themselves, and to see their voices amplified.”
The women’s social media revolution began some time ago — but reached its tipping point this year. In May, #YesAllWomen practically broke the Internet — a response to the misogynist killings at UCSB that turned into a three day global movement. Since then, the stream of hashtag causes has been hard to keep up with: #SurvivorPrivilege, the response to a George Will column that asserted being a rape survivor on a college campus was now a “coveted status” (he was dumped by the St. Louis Dispatch as a result). There’s #EverydaySexism, about daily harassment, #YouOKSis, to challenge street harassment, #AskHerMore, which calls out the questions we wish reporters would ask women on the red carpet. The list goes on. It’s no huge surprise that, according to data from Twitter, conversation about “feminism” has increased by 300 percent on the platform over the past three years. Women’s issues are everywhere, relentlessly spread by the women they impact. For the mainstream media, tracking the feminist hashtag of the moment has become a virtual sport.
In the 1970s, feminists often said “the personal is political.” It meant that the more women could connect with issues in their own life, the more attention they’d pay to the politics around them. But if consciousness-raising groups were the personal for thousands of women then, then the intimate personal stories curated in hashtags like #WhyIStayed are the modern-day equivalent. “What I think is most unique now is that we’re able to attach our own stories to elevate the issues beyond just a video of a man punching a woman,” says Tara Conley, an ethnographer who studies online media and the creator of a blog called Hashtag Feminism. “Social media can play an important role in opening up spaces for women — particularly those who’ve been marginalized.”
Social organizing has always existed in the women’s space — from word of mouth to letter-writing to telephone chains and flyers, methods of organizing has adopted to the times. And yet in a pre-Internet era, unless a woman accidentally stumbled into a protest, or a consciousness-raising group, she likely wasn’t hearing much about it. Which is why #WhyIStayed, and movements like it, are even more significant. They manage to take issues frequently confined to small circles — feminist circles — and bring them to the masses. “What is interesting to me is how these issues are going mainstream,” says Matthew Slutsky, who runs partnerships at Change.org. “It’s not feminists, or even activists, talking about rape, or domestic violence, or abortion rights, anymore. It’s just people.”
Those people happen to be women — mostly. Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Women’s power on the internet continues to rise: they now dominate every major social media platform but one (LinkedIn), they log in more often than their male counterparts, and they are more engaged when they do. When it comes to activism, they are ruling there, too: women are 2.5 times more likely to sign petitions than their male counterparts, and more likely to have successful organizing campaigns, according to data from Change.org. “Women don’t just dominate social media, they drive traffic,” says Elizabeth Plank, the executive social editor at PolicyMic. “That’s a massive game changer.”
It means that they don’t just have a voice, they are forcing institutions to listen.
Bennett is a contributing columnist at Time.com covering the intersection of gender, sexuality, business and pop culture. A former Newsweek senior writer and executive editor of Tumblr, she is also a contributing editor for Sheryl Sandberg’s women’s foundation, Lean In. You can follow her @jess7bennett.
You know it’s coming. While the sensible majority of parents has already decided the new $350 Apple Watch is too pricey, fancy, and much for a child, some kid with a generous grandma and a knack for ruining everything will turn up at middle school wearing one. She’ll flash the candy-colored apps, shoot the breeze with Siri, and show everyone her heartbeat in real time on the teeny-tiny, supershiny screen. It’s going to look so cool. Our kids may be irreparably dazzled. When this happens, what’s our plan? We’re going to need a plan.
First, we will point out to our older kids that they (probably) already have a perfectly good cell phone that makes calls, sends texts, and yes, tells time. It may even have GPS, WiFi, a browser, FaceTime calling—depending on your house rules and, perhaps, your generous grandma situation. No matter what the phone’s functionality, it will be easier to see and use on the phone they already have than on a wristwatch. That’s right, after fretting and setting limits on the amount of time our tweens and teens spend staring into the phone, we now may have to concede that their current phone is completely awesome. (And be thankful they keep it in their book bags some of the time instead of on their wrists all of the time.)
Next—and let’s just put our foot down and make this the final point, end of discussion—we say “Three. Hundred. Fifty. Dollars.” Don’t bother pointing out that use of an Apple Watch is only possible with an iPhone, so that the wearer must actually own both devices. Refrain from adding that it would be a great tragedy to lose such an expensive item at the park or in the locker room. Not necessary. He’s not going to lose it, because he’s not going to get it.
It seems to me that some of the functions that garnered the Apple Watch a standing ovation during its introduction on September 9 might be downright dangerous in the hands of kids. The constant biometric feedback regarding your activity level and fitness is a major feat of personal technology. But how might a young girl whose body image is in flux react to this information overload? Constant feedback of any kind could be a nightmare for kids with attention-deficit issues. Even the most focused among us may have to adjust to being “tapped” on the wrist by a watch every time we get a message, call, or hand-drawn picture from a friend’s watch. Kids who already have trouble concentrating might completely lose it.
That’s the plan, and I hope you’re in. Between us, though, and let’s whisper now: Could there be any upside to getting a kid this watch? Certainly, one could follow a kid’s whereabouts and stay in contact by calls and messages, but most of that is already possible with a phone. What about the kid whose imagination is set alight by new technology, who wants to understand everything about the latest developments in the digital world? We all know kids who outsmart us on our own smart phones, seemingly by pure intuition, and are experts on how digital devices work. If these kids are the inventors of tomorrow, maybe there’s a case to be made for letting them experience the Apple Watch up close. However, I’d say such kids might benefit from being allowed limited access to a grown-up’s Apple Watch, just to see how it works.
Most kids wouldn’t dare to ask for a $350.00 watch, and I hope that mine has the good sense to be among them. Perhaps she will remember the undercurrent of tension in our home while, for a full 48 hours, her smart phone was sealed in a jar of dry rice, recovering from having been “splashed at the sink”—a euphemism for “submerged in the bathtub,” I’m pretty sure. The pressure of keeping an even more expensive device from damage or loss just might be too much.
A year or two from now, when the newness of Apple Watch has worn off and the price has come down, maybe your kid will have saved up enough money to buy his own. By then, of course, there will be some new and more insidious gizmo in the spotlight, Apple Contact Lenses or Apple BrainChip. Let’s stick to the plan: No, you cannot have that because you don’t need it. Yes, please show me how mine works.
On 9/11, we are reminded of the dangers of the world, but also of the strength and mutual care exhibited by Americans in response to tragedy. It is appropriately both a day of remembrance and of service.
On this particular anniversary, we are seeing the revival of threats some thought, or hoped, were dormant. The images of brutality by the enemy are almost, once again, too difficult to bear, recalling the emotions of more than a decade ago.
Now, as then, we should be conscious and intentional about all the elements of American power and influence. One response (appropriately) is to oppose and preempt rising threats. But it is important, in the end, not just to demonstrate our capabilities, but also our values and identify – not just what we should do in the world, but who we are.
This is the typically American response to global challenge. The nation of Operation Overlord on D-Day was also the nation of the Marshall Plan. The country that conducted the Cold War also gave birth to the Peace Corps. Both elements of national power are real, practical and needed.
In the aftermath of 9/11, we witnessed the patriotism and courage of hundreds of thousands of young Americans who volunteered to serve in our military, and we watched in awe their dedication and bravery as they fought our enemies.
We saw the important role that committed volunteers played – in the Foreign Service, in the Peace Corps, and in private and religious organizations – in shaping the world’s perception of America. A program such as the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) – which has increased goodwill toward America across sub-Saharan Africa – was implemented by a partnership of idealistic people both inside and outside government.
This is sometimes referred to as “soft power,” but there is really nothing soft about it. America’s global image is a valuable national asset. And it is something that citizens of every background and belief, in very practical ways, can build and foster both abroad and at home.
A representative survey of the more than 200,000 Peace Corps volunteers who have served since 1961 tells a remarkable story. More than 9 in 10 said the Peace Corps improved the perception of the United States globally; nearly three-quarters believed it helped the U.S. adapt to globalization; two-thirds said it improved U.S. foreign policy; and more than half believed it improved our national security. Nearly every returning Peace Corps volunteer would recommend it to their child or other family member.
Americans could also use a larger dose of national service here at home. Over the last 20 years, for example, more than 900,000 people have served through AmeriCorps, a program President George H.W. Bush seeded, President Bill Clinton launched, and President George W. Bush expanded. Imagine what it could mean for the country if we had a similar number serving their communities each year.
A movement with this goal has emerged to make the idea of a “service year” for young people a normal, expected part of a successful life. There are advantages, of course, to a volunteer himself (or herself). At a time of stagnant social mobility and widening gaps in education and opportunity, service is a proven pathway to better skills and to a feeling of social contribution.
But there are clear advantages to America as well. As our military has become smaller and more specialized, fewer young people have the experience of uniformed service. And many have lost confidence in the ability of our nation to do big things together. American citizens risk feeling atomized, isolated and helpless. So General Stanley McChrystal and a group of leaders have signed our names to a plan of action to make a year of national service a common expectation and opportunity for all 18-28 year olds.
Service could be military or civilian, with groups like Teach for America, Earth Conservation Corps, Habitat for Humanity and Global Health Corps. A small living stipend would be paid to ensure any young person, regardless of background and income, could participate.
Youth from different backgrounds, regions, income and education levels, and political and religious affiliations would be brought together in common purpose to solve problems and restore some semblance of national unity. A service year would also translate into course credit in college and a service credential of value to employers.
America – with serious divisions at home and serious threats abroad – needs sources of healing, unity and common purpose. National service is a powerful idea whose time has come.
Condoleezza Rice served as Secretary of State and National Security Advisor to George W. Bush and is a professor at Stanford University. Robert Gates served as Secretary of Defense under both George W. Bush and Barack Obama and is former President of Texas A&M University. Both are members of the Leadership Council of the Franklin Project on national service at The Aspen Institute.
