Crisis Conversations with the Better Life Lab
Episodes of the Better Life Lab's 2020 Covid-19 Crisis Conversations
The Better Life Lab’s Crisis Conversations podcasts – recorded live and interactive throughout 2020 – explored how the global pandemic, the sudden economic downturn and reckoning with systemic and structural racism disrupted how we work, care, live and expect from businesses, policymakers and each other. Through the power of story and expert perspective, the episodes, which ran every Friday for the first six months of the podcast, then monthly through the end of 2020, created space for people to come together and make sense of the confusing and uncertain times. The episodes sought to create connection in isolating times, better understand what was happening in the moment and wonder what that meant for the future. As always, the goal is to understand and learn from present challenges and to seek out the bold ideas and solutions we need to create a more equitable and just society across race, class and gender in the future, with the opportunity to combine decent and dignified work with time for care and connection across the arc of our lives.
Setting Working Moms Back a Generation?
A Parents' Movement?
Care in the Campaign
Women and Leadership
Woke at Work?
Will COVID Kill Work-Life Balance?
Family Caregiving
Childcare Reckoning
Working Pregnant in the Time of COVID
Lifequake Now
Calling for a New Bailout — for Women of Color
The (Virtual?) Future of Medicine
Being a Dad in the Time of COVID-19
The Uncertain Future of Work
Anti-Blackness in America
To Have and to Have Not — Family Leave in the Pandemic
For Elder-Care Workers in the Pandemic, One State (Mostly) Gets It Right
Doing Essential Work in One of the few Countries that Resists Paid Sick Leave. The USA.
Parenting Alone in the Time of COVID-19
Is our childcare system nearing its breaking point?
The Transformation of Work
A New and Dangerous Enemy — Healthcare Workers Battle Coronavirus at Work and at Home
Living with Layoffs of Pandemic Proportions
Sand and Diamonds — The Pandemic Upends the Balance of Labor At Home
Family and Medical Leave in the Time of Coronavirus
Additional Resources
Below are additional resources produced by the Better Life Lab on some of the topics addressed in Crisis Conversations.
Why It Took So Long For Politicians To Treat The Child Care Crisis As A Crisis
The Care Report
The New America Care Report examines the cost, quality, and availability of child care across the United States.
The Puzzling Future of Child Care and School Re-openings
Engaged Dads and the Opportunities for and Barriers to Equal Parenting in the United States
The Better Life Lab Podcast on PodLink
This will take you to PodLink, a website that hosts links to episodes of the Better Life Lab podcast from a number of different platforms.
Listen to Seasons 1 and 2 of the Better Life Lab Podcast on Slate
The Better Life Lab podcast, explores how work shapes our lives, affects our health and wellbeing and impacts our relationships. We explore what isn’t working with work, and what needs to change so we can all live fuller, fairer healthier lives. On each episode, host Brigid Schulte weaves together deeply personal conversations – compelling stories of people’s struggles and triumphs with what we somewhat simplistically call work-life balance. Accessible discussions about science and research with experts help us see that we’re not alone in our struggles. That work-life balance is hard. And that it will take all of us – individuals, organizations, public policy and cultural norms shifting – to make work – and life – better. For everyone.
The podcast, a production of New America and Slate and sponsored by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, is available on Apple, Stitcher, Spotify, Slate, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Season One guests include talks with behavioral economist and bestselling author Dan Ariely on our obsession with busyness; Stanford business professor and author of Dying for a Paycheck Jeff Pfeffer on America’s overwork culture; a bank executive who took summers off as a young mother and still made it to the C-suite, and members of a Washington, DC chapter of Workaholics Anonymous struggling to overcome what they see as a life-sucking addiction to working all the time, even as they’re rewarded for it at work.
Season Two features Basecamp co-founder Jason Fried and Juliet Schor, economist and author of The Overworked American, on how America’s appetite for endless growth keeps us on the work treadmill; the stress not only of work-life conflict, but work-work conflict as jobs become more complex and demanding; Merlin Mann, productivity guru and inventor of the Inbox Zero concept on why we hate e-mail; hourly workers living impossible lives with unpredictable schedules set by an algorithm; workers in Japan who no longer want to work til they drop; and couples struggling to fairly share the load at both work and at home, and why it can be so hard.
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