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The traditional 9-to-5 workday is a vestigial holdover from a bygone era. Like the pleated khaki, its time has passed. Let’s treat employees like adults and give them the freedom to work when they feel most productive. As a bonus, some of these newly freed employees can spend some of their flexible time making dank profits as part of a legal marijuana side business.
This week on the Game Plan podcast, we take a good, hard look at success. Does it mean money? Fame? Happiness? To do some good in this world? It’s a complicated question into which this week’s guest, actor Chris Gethard (who you might recognize from Broad City or The Office), gives us some insight.—Josh Petri |
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 Pro Tip of the Week |
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Devote an interrupted hour to reading something for pleasure today. And then tomorrow. Maybe even the next day. At the end of the week, take a minute to think about how that’s affected your brainspace. Lisa Lucas, the head of the National Book Foundation, told the LA Times that if you read an hour each day, that’s “enough to bang through a decent amount of material if you do that every week for 52 weeks.” Not to mention it’s good for the soul.
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It’s time to kill the 9-to-5. And the 8-to-6, too. This schedule doesn't conform to most people's lives, or their workflows. Plus, sitting in a chair for eight hours straight doesn't produce results; many studies have established the benefits of taking breaks during work. And workers find schedules dogmatic. We’re adults, and we like autonomy over our lives.  |
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Wall Street thinks it’s high time to monetize pot. Recreational weed is already legal in Colorado, Alaska, Oregon, Washington, and Washington D.C., and it's on the ballot in nine states in November. If California legalizes it, the industry could triple in size, to $18 billion. Analysts expect it to balloon to $50 billion by 2026. |
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Even if you’re earning more, you still may not be able to afford a house. Good news first: New federal data show the median American household income has surged for the first time in nearly a decade. Now the bad news: The median home price has surged as well. Despite fatter paychecks in many hot markets, it’s gotten harder for most workers to buy a home. In other depressing real estate news, tiny apartments around the U.S. are shrinking.
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Milo Yiannopoulos is the pretty, monstrous face of the alt-right. He’s the loudest defender of the new, Trump-led ultraconservatism, standing athwart history, shouting to stop immigrants, feminists, political correctness, and any non-Western culture. He was permanently banned from Twitter in July after the social media company said his almost 350,000 followers were responsible for harassing Ghostbusters star Leslie Jones. “Everybody is trolling everybody, and nobody knows who is winning,” he says. At least he’s enjoying it. |
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Make six figures? The odds are good you’ve got almost nothing in the bank. Close to half of those who earn from $100,000 to $149,999 a year have less than $1,000 in their savings accounts. Some 18 percent of them have socked away absolutely nothing. "It doesn’t matter if they are making $30,000 per year or $300,000—people don’t seem to know how to spend less than they make," financial planner Michael Hardy said in response to the study's findings. |
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| Getting Americans to switch from swiping to chip cards is a mind-numbing job. Illustration: Max Litvinov |
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 The Decoder |
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| Retirement Lost-and-Found |
Americans jump from job to job and, in the rough and tumble of daily life, forget what they’ve left behind. Employers don’t try to find missing retirement plan participants, or businesses are bought and sold or restructured so many times that they lose the records. In the haphazard U.S. retirement system, there’s no easy way to make sure your assets follow you throughout your career. Congress is working on a solution, but in the meantime, workers with 401(k)s at past jobs should think about rolling them into an IRA or into their current job's 401(k) to avoid losing their retirement money. |
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| Other stories we especially loved |
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$1 Million of Frugal Librarian’s Bequest to N.H. School Goes to Football Scoreboard, by Bill Chappell, NPR
Robert Morin worked for nearly 50 years as a cataloger at the University of New Hampshire’s main library. Over that time, he managed to amass a small fortune, and upon his death bequeathed an astonishing $4 million to the school. Just $100,000 of that money will go towards the library where he worked. The school decided $1 million of Morin’s gift should be spent on a video scoreboard for the new football stadium.
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The Great Fall of Chyna, by Jason King, Bleacher Report
Joanie Laurer made her WWE debut as Chyna in 1997 and eventually became one of its most popular wrestlers. But after leaving the company in 2001, “her life began a 14-year spiral peppered with arrests, porn films, reality shows, suicide attempts and videos on TMZ.”
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As Amazon Arrives, the Campus Bookstore Is a Books Store No More, by Arielle Dollinger, New York Times
More students are buying their textbooks online and colleges have begun to question the utility of the venerable campus bookstore. Some are partnering with Amazon to eliminate physical book sales altogether. Because all college students really want is bulk candy and sweatpants with their school’s logo.
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