Uneasy Rhetoric

Gerri Willis on CNN Money has a column called “How to manage your manager, 5 Tips: Improving your work life.” (via LifeHacker) The column lists five relatively common sense tips:

Ask: what’s the problem?
Have regular meetings.
Toot your own horn.
Learn from it.
Know when to bail.

I want to expand on the first one:
Is [your boss] a micromanager? [...]

I need to say what I’m sure has already been said. So Pat Robertson has called for the assassination of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. How is Pat Robertson any different than any radical Islamic Imam calling for violence against the West? Robertson and his ilk want to create a Christian version of [...]

Freakonomics by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner purports to use the tools provided to economists to reexamine some interesting life questions.
For example, Levitt ponders why the crime rate fell in the 1990s when most criminologists expected an increase. His answer? The children most likely to commit crimes had never been born. [...]

If you haven’t read it yet, Amelie’s comment on my post about hybrids in the carpool lane is worth reading.
The prius and the insight, while I disagree with those horrible names, both sell themselves quite nicely wihtout accessing the HOV lanes. These drivers should grab a coworker like any reasonable person in the carpool lane.

Marnie, who does deep thinking about how nonprofits can use blogging, social software, and their ilk, cautions about a trap in which it is easy to get caught:
I try to make the hook fundraising because I think that’ll pull people into the conversation. But utilizing social tools on the web—wikis and blogs and RSS—participating in [...]