Reporter's Notebook

Quitting your job is hot this summer. More Americans quit in May than any other month on record going back to the beginning of the century, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. For every 100 workers in hotels, restaurants, bars, and retailers, about five of them quit last month.

Low-wage workers aren’t the only ones eyeing the door. In May, more than 700,000 workers in the bureau’s mostly white-collar category of “professional and business services” left their job—the highest monthly number ever. Across all sectors and occupations, four in 10 employees now say they’ve considered peacing out of their current place of work.

Annie Lowrey: Workers should have the power to say ‘no’

Why the sudden burst of quitting? One general theory is that we’re living through a fundamental shift in the relationship between employees and bosses that could have profound implications for the future of work. Up and down the income ladder, workers have new reasons to tell their boss to shove it. Lower-wage workers who benefited from enhanced unemployment benefits throughout the pandemic may have returned to the job and realized they’re not being paid enough. Now they’re putting their foot down, forcing restaurants and clothing stores to fork over a higher wage to keep people on staff.

In November 2018, The Washington Post published a disturbing headline: “‘They Were Threatening Me and My Family’: Tucker Carlson’s Home Targeted by Protesters.”

The Post story quoted the prime-time Fox News host at length. “Someone started throwing himself against the front door and actually cracked the front door,” Carlson claimed. “It wasn’t a protest. It was a threat … They weren’t protesting anything specific that I had said. They weren’t asking me to change anything. They weren’t protesting a policy or advocating for legislation … They were threatening me and my family and telling me to leave my own neighborhood in the city that I grew up in.”

Even more alarming, according to the Post, “A woman was also overheard in one of the deleted videos saying she wanted to ‘bring a pipe bomb’ to his house, [Carlson] said.”

The worst things can happen on the most beautiful days. My family’s worst day was a perfect one in the summer of 2019. We picked my daughter up from camp and talked about where to go for lunch: the diner or the burger place. I don’t remember which we chose. What I do remember: being woken up, again and again, by doctors who insist on asking me the same questions—my name, where I am, what month it is—and telling me the same story, a story that I am sure is wrong.

“You were in a car accident,” they say. But this cannot be. We’re having lunch and then going on a hike. I had promised the think tank where I work that I’d call in to a 4 p.m. meeting.

“You are in Dartmouth-Hitchcock Hospital in New Hampshire.” Another ludicrous statement. I started the day in Vermont. Surely if I had crossed the river to New Hampshire I would know it.

This article was published online on June 21, 2021.

When I look out my window, a few floors up in New York City, I see Star Wars. Rooftop bouquets of dirty satellite dishes, jumbled architectural styles united by peeling paint, variously shaped (and largely face-masked) life-forms jostling on the sidewalk—each sign of shabby modernity feels like something I glimpsed in childhood while hypnotized by George Lucas. In the director’s 1977 space fantasy, wizards lived in what appeared to be crumbling stucco huts, and moon-size superweapons had onboard trash compactors. As a kid, I believed that Earth was just another planet in Lucas’s universe. Today, I’m still susceptible to that lovely illusion.

It’s so simple that it can be easy to overlook: In the commotion of daily life, people forget to thank their partner for the myriad things they do. During the pandemic, significant others have made even more sacrifices, picked up the slack, or gone outside their comfort zone, putting plenty of romantic relationships through the wringer. Now could be the ideal moment to step back and reassess how you show gratitude for it all.

This might be harder than it sounds. One fact of long-term relationships, in research terms, is habituation—the diminished response to your significant other’s actions over time. In other words: taking your partner for granted. Another challenge is the common inability to notice the everyday ways that loved ones make our life smoother. “We tend to overestimate our efforts [in] a relationship and underestimate the amount of work our partner is contributing,” Allen Barton, assistant professor in the department of human development and family studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, told me via email.

This article was published online on June 21, 2021.

In May 2020, Darnella Frazier, a 17-year-old with a smartphone camera, documented the killing of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer. Most Americans who watched the video of Floyd begging for his life, as Officer Derek Chauvin kneeled on his neck, saw a human being. Robert Kroll did not. The head of the Police Officers Federation of Minneapolis saw a “violent criminal” and viewed the protests that followed as a “terrorist movement.” In a letter to union members, he complained that Chauvin and the three other officers involved in Floyd’s death had been “terminated without due process.”

Kroll’s response was typical. In the apocalyptic rhetoric of police-union leaders, every victim of police misconduct is a criminal who had it coming, and anyone who objects to such misconduct is probably also a criminal, and, by implication, a legitimate target of state violence. Due process is a privilege reserved for the righteous—that is, police officers who might lose their jobs, not the citizens who might lose their lives in a chance encounter with law enforcement.

The 89 people who work at Buffer, a company that makes social-media management tools, are used to having an unconventional employer. Everyone’s salary, including the CEO’s, is public. All employees work remotely; their only office closed down six years ago. And as a perk, Buffer pays for any books employees want to buy for themselves.

So perhaps it is unsurprising that last year, when the pandemic obliterated countless workers’ work-life balance and mental health, Buffer responded in a way that few other companies did: It gave employees an extra day off each week, without reducing pay—an experiment that’s still running a year later. “It has been such a godsend,” Essence Muhammad, a customer-support agent at Buffer, told me.

On a recent day at Hong Kong’s Kerry Hotel, a few city dwellers escaped the late-spring heat by wading in the property’s shallow pool, which, with its infinity edges, gave the illusion of spilling into the harbor. A few others lay on chaise lounges under umbrellas, reading books and lazily scrolling on their phones. These guests were not staying at the hotel; they had purchased day passes to use its amenities.

The true guests, the ones sleeping in the rooms at night, were a few floors above—and they had not checked in for leisure. Their faint figures could be seen through wide windows, walking the short distances across their temporary residences or looking longingly down at the pool from the gilded cages where they were spending two, or in some cases three, weeks under government-mandated quarantine. The Kerry Hotel offers many trappings of luxury, but freedom of movement is not currently one of them.

When ProPublica published its report last week on the tax profiles of 25 of the richest Americans, jaws dropped across the United States. How was it possible that plutocrats such as Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Warren Buffett could pay nothing in income taxes to the federal government? What sneaky sleights of pen, what subterfuge, what acts of turpitude could have led to this result?

The shock stems, in part, from a disturbing reality: Nowhere does ProPublica assert that these men cheated, lied, or did anything felonious to lower their tax burdens. The naked fact of the matter is that not a single one of the documented methods and practices that allowed these billionaires to so radically minimize their tax obligations was illegal.

Divers who have seen the phenomenon firsthand describe many types of underwater sea snot. There are the “stringers,” which most resemble the sticky goo that might actually come out of your nose. But there are also floating “clouds,” white and ethereal, so delicate that they break apart in your fingers. Then there are the tiny flakes of “marine snow,” which begin as drops of mucus and accumulate organic debris as they drift slowly, slowly down to the bottom of the sea.

Then there is whatever is happening off the coast of Turkey—a downright “mucilage calamity,” in the words of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoǧan. The sea snot there has surfaced and turned monstrous, gelling into a thick layer of yellowing slime atop the water. For months, this foul mucus has blanketed the Sea of Marmara, which connects the Black Sea and the Aegean Sea in the Mediterranean. It’s smothering shellfish, clogging nets, and destroying the fishing industry.