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How to Think About the Ukrainian Refugee Crisis, in Maps and Charts
In the weeks since Russia invaded Ukraine, almost three million of the country’s 44 million residents have left the country. The rate of the Ukrainian exodus is unprecedented in recent history. Europe’s response to the crisis has been similarly remarkable — both in its immediate generosity as well as in contrast to how poorly many European countries have treated refugees from Africa and the Middle East. ... The Syrian refugee crisis shows how quickly public sympathy can wane. In 2015, newspapers published a photo of Alan Kurdi, a 2-year-old Syrian boy who drowned while his family was trying to cross the Mediterranean Sea to escape the country’s civil war.
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COVID Changed the World of Work Forever
Hardly anyone has made it through the pandemic with their work life unchanged. Millions of people have lost jobs, been placed on furlough or switched to working from home. Essential workers have continued in place but often with major changes to their workloads, including additional safety procedures and an awareness of infectious disease as a new workplace hazard. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, employment dropped by 20.5 million people in the U.S. alone in April 2020. Service providers were hit most intensely: 7.7 million jobs were lost in the leisure and hospitality sector, with 5.5 million of them in food service or drinking establishments.
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2022 Spence Awards Mini Episode: Antonia Kaczkurkin on How We Internalize Disorders
Under the Cortex talks with 2022 Spence Award winner Antonia Kaczkurkin.
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Cowboy Culture Doesn’t Have a Monopoly on Innovation
What does culture have to do with creativity? The answer could be “a lot.” For decades, psychologists trying to understand the roots of creative imaginations have looked at the way two kinds of cultures affect artistic and inventive efforts. Individualistic (sometimes called “cowboy”) cultures encourage people to be unique and to prioritize their own interests, even if doing so costs the group overall. Collectivistic cultures are based on relationships and duties to other people, often sacrificing the individual’s wants for the needs of close others or the community. Individualism has long been thought to have a creative edge.
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Constellations Across Cultures
New research, as discussed by Charles Kemp and published in the journal Psychological Science, reveals that our visual processing system may explain the striking commonality of constellations across cultures.
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Managing a Polarized Workforce
One of the most difficult challenges leaders of all organizations face is managing diverse perspectives. Much has been written on the benefits for teams and organizations of engaging with opposing views, fostering productive disagreement, and creating “teams of rivals.” Yet anyone who has been involved in such work knows that disagreements on strongly held opinions, often related to personal identity, are always tough and frequently destructive. That’s truer today than ever before, as topics from the #MeToo and Black Lives Matter movements to environmentalism and remote work have elevated both the need for thoughtful discussion and the desire to avoid it.
