An Arkansas Lawyer Bought 1,500 Pairs of Shoes From a Payless Going Out of Business. Now She’s Donating Them to Kids in Need

From Money authored by Olivia Raimonde:

“When Carrie Jernigan was doing some last-minute, pre-vacation shopping with her kids at a Payless ShoeSource near their home in Alma, Arkansa, she had no idea she would soon be taking home upwards of 1,500 pairs of shoes.

“What have I done?” the 37-year-old lawyer and mother of three says she initially thought to herself.

But this was possible because in February, Payless ShoeSource announced it would be shutting down all of its stores across the U.S. and Puerto Rico. It was the second time in two years the company was filing for bankruptcy — the latest casualty in what’s been dubbed over the years as the “retail apocalypse.”

Jernigan was taking advantage of the sweeping sales one day this past May when her 9-year-old daughter asked if they could buy Avengers tennis shoes for a classmate that needed a new pair. Inspired by her daughter’s act of kindness, Jernigan, jokingly, asked the clerk how much it would cost to buy the entire store. Hours later, she had purchased nearly 350 pairs of shoes with the intention of donating them all.

“We made a deal to buy almost all [that] was left on the shelves,” she says.

When she returned to pick up the shoes, she found out that a new delivery was coming in — days before the store was set to shut its doors. When her kids asked to take those too, she told them they could take a peek to see if there were any children’s shoes.

“Of course, the first box I opened up was JoJo Siwa shoes,” she says, referring to the mega-popular Nickelodeon star. “Pink glitter was everywhere.”

When it was all said and done Jernigan took home nearly $21,000 worth of merchandise — the majority of which she saved from the store’s blowout sale. She intends to donate roughly 1,100 pairs to kids, and local schools and give the remaining shoes to adults in need.”

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Yes, You Actually Should Be Using Emojis at Work

From The Wall Street Journal authored by Christopher Mims:

“At first, Marek Nowak, a 32-year-old engineer at enterprise cloud software company CircleCI, was skeptical of using emojis when communicating with colleagues. Now, whenever he posts the minutes of his team meetings in Slack, he precedes them with a custom emoji of a teddy bear giving a hug.

This isn’t just for funsies. It’s company policy to use certain emojis to indicate certain communiques, such as a meeting summary. If he forgot the bear, team members could miss important decisions.

“My favorite team value is over-communicating,” says Mr. Nowak, who is now a self-professed emoji fan. “If you hesitate to write a message because you think three-quarters of the team already knows, that’s not a problem, you just preface it with the ‘over-communicating’ emoji.”

This is how formality in business communications dies, not with a whimper, but with a parti-colored riot of modern-day hieroglyphics, denoting everything from collaboration to dissent. At Slack itself, employees use the “eyes” emoji to indicate they’re reading a just-posted memo. The “unamused face” or even the “nauseated face” are both acceptable in communications channels at Joyride Coffee, a Woodside, N.Y.-based beverage maker.

This trend is much bigger than the latest thing the youths are foisting on their crusty elders. It’s happening for deep neurological reasons, according to recent research, and can lead to better cooperation. But that doesn’t mean it’s always appropriate to use them, or that they can fully replace other forms of communication.”

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This Woman Was Charged $185,000 In Her Own Sexual Harassment Case

From The Huffington Post authored by Emily Peck:

“She’s paid $185,000 so far to have judges hear her sexual harassment and discrimination complaint against EY, a firm that pulls in billions of dollars of revenue annually, according to a complaint Ward filed last week in federal court.

“How many victims will even be able to afford to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to have their claims heard?” Ward and her lawyers ask in the court filing.

These bills have piled up because Ward’s harassment case is in arbitration, a private court outside the public justice system, where suits are heard by retired judges or lawyers who bill parties sometimes as much as $1,000 an hour to hear their cases. Ward’s case is being heard by a panel of three arbitrators

Ward’s employment contract with EY contained a forced arbitration clause, something companies often include in part to prevent allegations from former employees from becoming public.”

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Berkeley plans to remove gendered pronouns from its municipal code

From The Washington Post  authored by Kayla Epstein:

“In Berkeley, Calif., “man-made” will soon be “human made,” “chairman” will become “chairperson,” and “manhole” will change to “maintenance hole” — at least, in the city’s municipal code.

In an effort to make Berkeley more inclusive for its non-binary residents, the city council voted Tuesday night to make the language more gender neutral, following a city clerk review that found that the municipal code primarily contained masculine pronouns. That means many professions such as firemen and firewomen will simply be “firefighters,” and “brothers” and “sisters” will instead be “siblings.”

“Having a male-centric municipal code is inaccurate and not reflective of our reality,” council member Rigel Robinson, the primary backer of the terminology change, told The Washington Post via email.”

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Why It’s So Hard for Men to See Misogyny

From The Slate authored by Amanda Hess:

“When Santa Barbara police arrived at Elliot Rodger’s apartment last month—after Rodger’s mother alerted authorities to her son’s YouTube videos, where he expressed his resentment of women who don’t have sex with him, aired his jealousy of the men they do choose, and stated his intentions to remedy this “injustice” through a display of his own “magnificence and power”—they left with the impression that he was a “perfectly polite, kind and wonderful human.” Then Rodger killed six people and himself on Friday night, leaving a manifesto that spelled out his virulent hatred for women in more explicit terms, and Santa Barbara County Sheriff Bill Brown deemed him a ‘madman.’”

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OxyContin Made The Sacklers Rich. Now It’s Tearing Them Apart.

From The Wall Street Journal authored by Jared Hopkins:

“Jacqueline Sackler was fed up. HBO’s John Oliver would soon use his TV show to pillory her family, the clan that owns Purdue Pharma, the maker of OxyContin. In a nearly 15-minute Sunday-night segment, he joined a long line of people who blamed the Sacklers in part for the nation’s opioid crisis.

Before the show aired, Ms. Sackler, who is married to a son of a company co-founder, emailed her in-laws, lawyers and advisers. “This situation is destroying our work, our friendships, our reputation and our ability to function in society,” she wrote.

“And worse, it dooms my children. How is my son supposed to apply to high school in September?”

The Sackler family, with its competing branches, has long been fractious. The arrival of nearly 2,000 lawsuits accusing its company of helping to spark a public-health crisis in America has forced the family to a crossroads as it weighs the future of a company that helped make its members wealthy.

For years the Sacklers avoided being publicly linked to the opioid crisis and OxyContin, a prescription painkiller containing a morphine derivative called oxycodone. They cultivated an image as global philanthropists, donating millions to New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, Columbia University and scores of other institutions both in the U.S. and abroad.

The host of lawsuits, some of which name as defendants many individual Sacklers who served on Purdue’s board, has unraveled the family’s standing in philanthropic, academic and financial circles. Family members have been leaving the boards of nonprofits. Prestigious museums and universities are rejecting their donations. Some investment funds are returning their money.

The backlash has intensified infighting among family members, whose disagreements have threatened efforts to resolve the litigation, according to emails reviewed by The Wall Street Journal and to interviews with dozens of current and former Purdue employees and people who have spoken with the Sacklers.”

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An Epidemic of Disbelief

From The Atlantic  authored by Barbara Bradley Hagerty:

“Robert Spada walked into the decrepit warehouse in Detroit and surveyed the chaos: Thousands of cardboard boxes and large plastic bags were piled haphazardly throughout the cavernous space. The air inside was hot and musty. Spada, an assistant prosecutor, saw that some of the windows were open, others broken, exposing the room to the summer heat. Above the boxes, birds glided in slow, swooping circles.

It was August 17, 2009, and this brick fortress of a building housed evidence that had been collected by the Detroit Police Department. Spada’s visit had been prompted by a question: Why were police sometimes unable to locate crucial evidence? The answer lay in the disarray before him.

As Spada wandered through the warehouse, he made another discovery, one that would help uncover a decades-long scandal, not just in Detroit but across the country. He noticed rows of steel shelving lined with white cardboard boxes, 10 inches tall and a foot wide, stacked six feet high. What are those? he asked a Detroit police officer who was accompanying him. Rape kits, the officer said.

“I’m assuming they’ve been tested?” Spada said.

“Oh, they’ve all been tested.”

Spada pulled out a box and peered inside. The containers were still sealed, indicating that the evidence had never been sent to a lab. He opened four more boxes: the same.

“I tried to do a quick calculation,” he later told me. ‘I came up with approximately 10,000.’”

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At a Missouri Jail, Bras Set Off the Metal Detector (and a Heated Debate)

From The New York Times  authored by Jacey Fortin:

“The metal detector at the Jackson County Detention Center in Kansas City, Mo., beeped repeatedly when Laurie Snell, a lawyer, tried to enter the facility on May 31.

She was passing through security on her way to visit a client, but something she was wearing was setting off the detector. She removed her shoes, her jewelry and her glasses. Then she realized the problem was her bra.

So Ms. Snell ducked into a bathroom, removed the undergarment and put it into a bin for the X-ray machine. That got her through security. Then, in the privacy of an elevator cabin, she wriggled back into the bra as quickly as she could.

“Thankfully my client was on seven, which is the top floor,” she said.

Ms. Snell was among the first to point out that the metal detector at the detention center was reacting to women’s bras. She was not the last. Over the past two months, the issue has spawned a legislative debate, a public protest and a deadlock between a group of lawyers and the county authorities.”

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Serena Williams Poses Unretouched for Harper’s BAZAAR

From Harper’s Bazzar authored by Serena Willams:

“At 17, I won my first Grand Slam, and I knew I had more in me. In fact, I was so sure that when I packed up my life and left my dad’s house to move in with my sister Venus, I told him he could keep my US Open trophy. Don’t worry, I assured him. I would get another one for my house. Now that was confidence. I went on to win the US Open not one or two but six times.

Since that fateful victory in 1999, I’ve won 23 Grand Slam singles titles, 39 Grand Slam titles in all, and countless gold medals. I have been asked what keeps me motivated to continue playing tennis. To me, the answer is simple: I love the sport. When I’m giving speeches I always say how important it is to love what you do. If you don’t, then find something that speaks to you. Follow your passion. Of course, there are times when loving tennis is hard.

Fast-forward to September 2018. It’s the final of the US Open, and I’m competing to win my 24th Grand Slam against Naomi Osaka. It’s the beginning of the second set, and the umpire thinks he spots my coach signaling me from the stands. He issues a violation—a warning. I approach him and emphatically state the truth: that I wasn’t looking at my coach. “I don’t cheat to win. I’d rather lose,” I said. I walk back to the court and lose the next point. I smash my racket in frustration; he issues another violation and gives a point to my opponent. I feel passionately compelled to stand up for myself. I call him a thief; I again demand an apology. I tell him he is penalizing me for being a woman. He responds by issuing a third violation and takes a game from me. In the end, my opponent simply played better than me that day and ended up winning her first Grand Slam title. I could not have been happier for her. As for me, I felt defeated and disrespected by a sport that I love—one that I had dedicated my life to and that my family truly changed, not because we were welcomed, but because we wouldn’t stop winning.”

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Sunday Night Is the New Monday Morning, and Workers Are Miserable

From The Wall Street Journal authored by Kelsey Gee:

“Like many bosses, Chris Mullen found the final hours of the weekend ideal for decluttering an unruly inbox, sharing stray thoughts with staff on projects and requesting status updates to prep for the week.

His colleagues felt otherwise. All those emails were pulling them into the workweek the evening before, he said, triggering the pre-Monday dread many working Americans call the “Sunday Scaries.”

“I asked my staff, ‘How come you keep answering my emails late at night, when you’re probably out with friends or relaxing at home?’” said the former college administrator. He recalled one employee’s response: “‘Because you’re the one sending it!’”

Workplace experts say such job creep has become a prime contributor to burnout—a phenomenon getting renewed attention since the World Health Organization included a more detailed description of it in the most recent edition of the International Classification of Diseases in May. Though the WHO stops short of calling burnout a medical condition, it describes it as a syndrome brought on by ‘chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed.’”

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