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Infographic: The Overworked American

American workers are putting in longer hours than ever, for even less pay.

Column Five
By Column FiveJul 22, 2011
Column Five
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A collaboration between GOOD and Column Five Media.

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Want new furniture for less money? The best spot is not a store or an online shop.

If you’re looking to spice up a room with some newer furniture or find replacements for old, broken down couches or chairs, there are many options available to you. Obviously, you could go to a store or find some furniture online at a shop, but it can get pretty expensive if you’re on a budget. You could go to used furniture stores or thrift shops, but many of the offerings might be as old as the furniture you’re trying to replace. If this sounds like you, the best place to get gently used furniture or some kitchen appliances might not be a store at all, but actually your local college or university during graduation season.

This might seem odd, but more and more people are heading to colleges and universities to find replacement furniture, appliances, and other goods. Every year, students are moving out of their dorms or apartments after graduation and many of them are discarding old-to-them-but-new-to-you furniture, much of which is less than four years old. Beds, dressers, tables, sofas, easy chairs, and many other household items are left on the street for trash pick-up or for anyone that wants to pluck them, including fellow students. However, this type of scavenging isn’t what’s being recommended (even though that is an option). You could show up just before graduation and move-out day to offer to take it off their hands and into your truck for cash or Venmo instead of dumpster diving.

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Brian Wilson was profoundly moved when Paul McCartney visited him and played a new Beatles song

Brian Wilson always had a special connection with Paul McCartney—particularly during the mid-1960s, when both The Beach Boys and The Beatles were at their most experimental, soaking in pivotal new influences. The two songwriters shared a lot of musical hallmarks: unusual chord structures, ornamental melodies, a knack for orchestrations and studio trickery. And their albums of this era engaged in a sort of cultural dialogue, each one inching popular music forward.

In his 2016 memoir,I Am Brian Wilson, the Beach Boys mastermind wrote about first meeting McCartney in the '60s. During that in-studio encounter, Wilson learned that the band’s 1966 classic "God Only Knows" was one of the Beatle’s favorite songs. "It’s the kind of thing people write in liner notes and say on talk shows," he reflected. "When people read it, they kind of look at that sentence and keep going. But think about how much it mattered to me when I first heard it there on Sunset Boulevard. I was the person who wrote 'God Only Knows,' and here was another person—the person who wrote 'Yesterday' and 'And I Love Her' and so many other songs—saying it was his favorite. It really blew my mind."

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The 74-year-old woman, whose story was reported by the BBC, had been gifted a home DNA kit by her son. She expected to learn more about her heritage. Instead, she discovered that she had been switched at birth in a U.K. hospital back in 1967—and had grown up with an entirely different family than the one she was biologically related to.

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Whether it’s on a TV commercial or on display at a grocery store, we’re bombarded time and again with the idea that “fresh is better.” While it’s a manner of taste, there has to be some truth to it, right? After all, fresh vegetables and fruits are usually pricier at the supermarket compared to frozen bags of them. There is very little processing done to them, so they just look healthier, too, right? But what if it was all hype?

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We all know that moment when the alarm goes off in the morning and you start thinking about who you wouldn’t murder for another five minutes, (another 10 minutes?!) of sleep. You hit the snooze button, and your eyes drift closed again, only to be thrown open as the alarm sounds one more time. While those extra few moments of sleep might feel wonderful at the time, they’re never as good as simply waking up and staying up and can even cause more harm than good.

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Without knowing that Bart was CC’d in the email, one of the initial panelists emailed a reply that read, “Bart is out,” chastised his fellow coworkers, and ordered the Zoom interview be canceled and an apology be sent to Bart for good measure. After seeing “the live show of their messy internal drama,” Bart considered himself lucky. “If your team can’t even handle email coordination or basic professionalism in a hiring process—why would I want to work there?” he said on Reddit. But Bart’s question to the Internet was simple: How should he respond to the email he was mistakenly included in?

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