...Attempts to regulate office relationships are not just meant to avoid sexual harassment claims. Romance among colleagues can lead to unfair and unethical treatment, and to a poisonous atmosphere that affects many others. In a book to be published later this month, “Giving Notice: Why the Best and the Brightest Leave the Workplace and How You Can Help Them Stay” (Jossey-Bass), Freada Kapor Klein explains how unproductive, even hostile, a work environment can be if there is a culture of crudeness or rampant extramarital affairs, especially those that cross lines of power and authority.
Yet Ms. Kapor Klein, the founder of the Level Playing Field Institute, a nonprofit organization that promotes fairness in the workplace and in society, said that forbidding office dating, even between superiors and subordinates, is no solution. “The real issue is not that they’re sleeping with each other,” she said. “The real issue is that their emotional attachment to each other may get in the way of their business judgment.”
She advises companies to write policies stating that workers will not be fired for dating, but can be fired for not disclosing and mitigating it. If romances are outlawed, “you merely drive that situation underground,” she said. “It’s the dishonesty that poisons the work environment, not the relationship.”
Full disclosure: Ms. Kapor Klein is married to her former chief executive, Mitchell Kapor, the founder of Lotus Development Corporation and the designer of Lotus 1-2-3, the software application. Ms. Kapor Klein said she and Mr. Kapor did not begin dating until more than a decade after they met at the office (she was the director of organizational development and training).
“He indicated that if he weren’t married I was somebody he would be interested in,” Ms. Kapor Klein said. “I took that as a world-class compliment. Not harassing. Not coercive. And that was the end of it for 12 years.”
Today they are husband and wife. So is the woman to whom blue-chip companies turn for policy advice in favor of office love?
“Keep in mind the current success rate of marriage is about 50-50,” Ms. Kapor Klein said. “Just thinking purely in terms of probability, what do you think the odds are of an office romance working out? Has to be less than 50-50. So before you rush ahead, think about how it’s going to feel to sit in this weekly staff meeting with somebody who you had a miserable breakup with and who you actually wish didn’t exist on the planet. Think about it. And then take a reasonable risk.”
BELCHERTOWN - On a mild September morning on the Swift River, where it flows out of the Quabbin Reservoir, Lou Ureneck wades and casts a No. 14 grasshopper fly upstream. A 16-inch rainbow trout hurtles up and grabs it, dancing atop the bright water until it is brought to hand and released.
With its poetic fineness and almost mathematical detail, fly-fishing has a gestural language which links aficionados on a stream, even in silence. It's that language that Ureneck hoped would help reverse a widening gulf between himself and a teenage son. The hope played out in an eventful fishing trip on Alaska's lonely Kanektok River in 2000. The father-son link was reknit, if not right away, and not necessarily in the way Ureneck imagined. The story is told in his new book, "Backcast: Fatherhood, Fly-fishing, and a River Journey Through the Heart of Alaska." More than a fish story, it's an autobiography, and at the center are two broken families.
Anthony T. Kronman believes that in the '60s, just after he got out of law school, American liberal arts professors lost their nerve.
Back in the day, teachers engaged their undergraduates in serious classroom discussion about the meaning of life. They read the classics and talked about the timeless matters of philosophy. Young people experienced a variety of thought that, according to Kronman, over the past 40 years, academic fads and the institutionalization of multiculturalism cannot or will not communicate.
Today's race relations,” law professor Ford demonstrates, “are more complex and contradictory than those of the unambiguously white supremacist past.” In this journey through a political minefield, he examines dubious charges of racism and other kinds of bias, while acknowledging that exaggerated claims can piggyback on real examples of victimization. But the author's tenor is often more eye-catching than eye-opening. He revisits Tawana Brawley, Clarence Thomas, O.J. Simpson and Hurricane Katrina, along with Oprah's Hermès problem, Jay-Z's with champagne and Danny Glover's with New York City cabdrivers. Yet at its core, this book raises probing questions about the extent to which “the extraordinary social and legal condemnation of racism and other social prejudices encourages people to recast what are basically run-of-the-mill social conflicts as cases of bigotry.” By analogy, he addresses issues concerning animal liberation, gay marriage, “appearance discrimination,” “sex harassment law” and multiculturalism. In delineating the differences between formal discrimination, discriminatory intent and discriminatory effects, Ford also reviews thorny legal cases involving, for example, McDonnell Douglas and Price Waterhouse. Readers all along the political spectrum will find much to please, annoy and provoke thought about the thin “line between invidious discrimination and plan old unfairness.” (Feb.)
NEW YORK (Reuters Life!) - Chocolate chip cookies baking in the oven. Fresh cut grass. Your spouse's natural body odor. Smells can invoke memories, sexually arouse people, or even drive you mad.
Psychology professor Rachel Herz from Brown University in Rhode Island has spent 17 years studying the human sense of smell, finding it is the most emotionally evocative sense and the one most closely tied to mental health and happiness.
In a new book, "The Scent of Desire," she argues Michael Hutchence, frontman of Australian rock band INXS, may have been driven into a deep depression after losing his sense of smell in an accident which may have contributed to his 1997 suicide.
In the late 1930s, the Oxford classicist Hugh Last organized the defeat of a measure to make anthropology a degree-subject at the university. "An acquaintance with the habits of savages," he said, "is not an education." Behind Last's quip was a claim that anthropology is in no way formative knowledge of the kind that students require.
Exactly what students require -- what "an education" really entails -- is the subject of "Education's End," an impassioned defense of the study of the humanities by Anthony Kronman, a professor at Yale and formerly dean of its law school. "One cannot live a meaningful life," Mr. Kronman writes, "unless there is something one is prepared to give it up for. People's lives are therefore meaningful in proportion to their acknowledgment that there is something more important than the lives they are leading: something worth caring about in an ultimate way. The question, of course, is what that something is or ought to be."
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