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Lauren Ambrose Just Wants to Go to French Clown School

by www.nytimes.com Leave a Comment

“What creature is that?” Lauren Ambrose asked, craning her neck during a video interview from her home in the Berkshires. “I see this, like, crazy hawk sitting on a tree outside my window. It just caught my eye.”

The setting was fitting, since Ambrose is about to become bonded with, and haunted by, the natural world. Joining the cast of “Yellowjackets,” Showtime’s thriller about a girls’ soccer team stranded in the wilderness and pushed to the extremes, she plays the adult version of Van, short for Vanessa, one of the lucky and savvy few to make it to middle age.

Ambrose, who also stars in the Apple TV+ series “ Servant ,” was excited by the opportunity to help create a character (played in her teenage years by Liv Hewson) and by the women she said she’s grown up watching.

“I love looking at the call sheet and seeing that the top chunk is all of these incredible women who I’ve admired and whose careers I’ve followed — who’ve influenced me so much as actors,” she said.

“I’ve also never had the experience of being the fan of something and then going in and joining it,” Ambrose added.

Before the show kicks off its second season on Sunday, she talked about what moves and comforts her, including crying at the French circus, her love of gardening and the podcast that puts her at ease. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.

1

‘Be: An Alphabet of Astonishment’

There’s this guy Michael Lipson who’s one of the smartest men alive — a true sage. He worked with Mother Teresa in Calcutta and worked at Harlem Hospital in the pediatric AIDS unit. He’s a scholar and a teacher and he wrote this book “Be: An Alphabet of Astonishment,” which synthesizes his lifetime of wisdom and learning. It’s sort of this miraculous little thing. It’ll fill you.

2

Domi and JD Beck

They’re both young, both prodigies. My son just turned 16 and he’s a very serious jazz guitar player. We had a blast at their concert. In this attention economy, what I love about them is to see young people who have obviously logged so much practice. And that they’re making the music they want to make.

3

‘The Trip’

This British sitcom gives me a feeling of being backstage or being at the bar after the play. I love it. It’s got everything I want. It’s got impressions and big ideas and ego. The egoism of being an actor is wonderful to laugh at. And it’s just painful and funny and sublime. There are people in my life who I speak to almost exclusively in lines from “The Trip.”

4

Cirque D’Hiver

We were just in Paris and went to the French circus, and it was the best thing we did. The band was unbelievable, the acts were unbelievable. The clowning was, like, the greatest I’ve ever seen in my life. I’m such a nut, I was the only one there crying because I was so moved by the clowns, who are such geniuses in their silent storytelling. I’m like, I have to go to French clown school. Basically, it’s all I want to do, to be a clown in the French circus.

5

Gardening

It’s a big part of my life, and of my year. There were times last year while I was working on “Servant” when I was racing home and planting seeds with a headlamp at night. I was like, I’ve got to get this stuff in! It’s been a humbling venture, maybe the most humbling there is. Just watching the garden change throughout the seasons is an amazing thing. That first day when you get salad is kind of a holy day because there’s really nothing like it. It’s like a whole other food, salad from the garden.

6

Krista Tippett

I basically can’t imagine my life without “ On Being .” She’s such an inspiration to me, and I love that her brand of journalism, her brand of interviewing, is a conversation. Krista holds the space and lets there be silences. For me, with traveling for work, it’s been really important. I get really carsick, and sometimes I’ll play the same episode over and over and let it drift in and out of my consciousness.

7

Children’s Books

Our kids are a little older now — 10 and 16 — but there are books that we’ve read thousands of times in our house. Some of them are so deeply in our DNA that sometimes we speak in children’s books, to the point where we have a game of who can guess what book that’s from? “Pippi Longstocking” by Astrid Lindgren, “Frog and Toad” by Arnold Lobel, “In the Night Kitchen” by Maurice Sendak — these are essential in our family, not only the words but the imagery as well.

8

The Center for Humane Technology

The people behind this organization have an optimism that we can have a healthier relationship as a society to tech, which can be unhealthy and destructive to people’s lives and democracies. I am just so grateful for the work that they’re doing, especially as a mother of a teenager and a soon-to-be teenager.

9

Grateful Living

As much as I eschew technology, there are some pretty great things out there. The top is grateful.org , which was started by an Austrian monk who purports that gratitude and noticing all of the small, tiny moments is the key to life. There are all kinds of wonderful practices and videos and blessings and mediations. A morning ritual for me, or as close to one as there is, is looking at the word for the day. It’s one of the great interweb experiences.

10

Cats

We’ve always had cats; they’ve taught my children and me gentleness. I love that a little tiny house cat has the exact same behaviors as a lion or tiger. I love the idea of living with a predator. And they’re just so funny. Each cat has such a distinct personality. I’m so grateful that life on earth includes the ability to inhabit the world with kitty cats.

The Reigning Queen of Pandemic Yoga

by www.nytimes.com Leave a Comment

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T he last stranger Adriene Mishler hugged before the pandemic was a woman who may or may not have sideswiped her car. It was Friday, the 13th of March, and Mishler, a YouTube yoga celebrity with more than eight million subscribers, was driving back to her house in Austin, Texas. It was exactly a week after the city canceled the annual South by Southwest festival. A female driver in a tan or gold sedan scraped the side of Mishler’s vehicle and, instead of pulling over like a decent person, raced off. The yoga guru gave chase.

“I was not going to chew them out,” Mishler said a few weeks later, reflecting on the incident. “I didn’t give a [expletive] about exchanging insurance or anything — well, obviously I did.” But that wasn’t the point of catching the driver. The point was to have a conversation with that person about the importance of goodness and accountability at a time of global and local turbulence, and as Mishler pursued the driver, she plotted out the interaction in her head. She lost the car, then found it again as it turned into a parking lot outside a thrift store. Mishler parked and got out to examine the other car, which had damage in a location that aligned with where the accident occurred. She followed the woman inside.

“Hi, I’m so sorry to bother you, and this is going to sound really weird, but did you just hit a car 15 or 20 minutes ago?”

The woman’s eyes grew big, which Mishler initially took for a sign of guilt. But the woman denied it. And as soon as she spoke, Mishler could tell this person wasn’t the perp; she had accidentally followed someone else driving a similar car into the parking lot. Mishler was mortified and apologized. As they parted, the woman stopped her and said that she loved doing Mishler’s yoga videos. This is something that has happened with increasing regularity as the videos have exploded in popularity. The two women embraced. “Damn,” Mishler said in late April, reliving the hug. “Outside of my boyfriend, that’s probably the last person I was less than six feet away from.”

Mishler started posting yoga videos under the name “Yoga With Adriene” on YouTube in 2012 as part of a project with her business partner, Chris Sharpe, whom she met on the set of a horror film. (Mishler trained as an actor.) The two shot some low-key sessions and uploaded them. She continued posting videos over the next eight years: “Yoga for Seniors,” “Yoga for Skaters,” “Yoga for Suffering,” “Yoga for Core (and Booty!),” “Yoga for Diabetes,” “Yoga for Weight Loss,” “Yoga for a Dull Moment,” “Yoga for Winter Blues” and many more, including a pose to help you fart. She has yoga videos aimed at food-service workers, PTSD sufferers, nurses and teachers. Today — or not today, but in the recent past and hopefully in the future — she goes on international tours where she leads classes for thousands of people. She is an Adidas ambassador and runs an online shop where you can buy a T-shirt or a camping mug that says Find What Feels Good, which is her motto — as in: Don’t worry if you can’t nail the Split-Leg Handstand or Killer Praying Mantis; no one’s keeping score. Her top video has more than 30 million views. She’s the most popular instructor on YouTube, which means she’s probably the most popular instructor in America and arguably the most prominent yoga figure this country has seen since Ram Dass.

Mishler doesn’t fit neatly into either the booming category of YouTube influencers, who are mostly young and annoying, nor the booming category of wellness influencers, who are also mostly young and annoying. She is 36 and not annoying. Most of her content is free and requires nothing more than a mat. Unlike some of her mainstream YouTube influencer peers, she has not mocked suicide victims or appeared in blackface or consumed a Tide pod or faked a kidnapping for attention. Her Wikipedia page does not have a “Controversies” section in it. She has recused herself from the kind of behavior — inflammatory, mercenary, exploitative, self-exploitative — that social media platforms are designed to generate. In an online world where everyone else seems turned up to 11, Mishler hovers at a room-temperature two or three.

Her most-watched video, which is from 2013, opens with a cheerful Mishler seated before a few windows that look out onto leafy trees. Her top and bottom are slightly different shades of black. “Today we have a sequence for the complete beginner,” she says. “All you need is your body and an open mind.” The sequence is easy (even for a novice) and sprinkled with words of reassurance. Nothing fancy here. No worries. No biggie. Remember, there’s no right or wrong here. Take your time, no rush. As Mishler guides a viewer through poses, her voice is that of a kindergarten teacher: patient and encouraging; a confident guide to an unfamiliar landscape filled with obstacles and wonders. “Congrats to you for making it this far!” she exclaims warmly at the end of 23 minutes. Two unprecedented events occurred as I followed along with the video. One, I enjoyed doing yoga. Two, I — a cranky adult — had unwittingly engaged with an influencer. And when I finished, I felt better about myself.

Yoga can refer to a philosophical tradition or to an hourlong class of slow calisthenics with a devotional gloss. It has been endlessly invented and repackaged and revised over at least two millenniums, though what we would recognize as yoga is largely a product of the past 150 years. The stereotypical American yoga-doer is female, white and coastal, and beyond that, slender, flexible and capable of decoding instructions like “Draw your navel toward your spine” and “Lengthen your tailbone.”

One of Mishler’s value propositions is gentleness, which places her in contradistinction to girl-boss mills like Y7, which has trademarked the phrase “We Flow Hard” and describes itself, alarmingly, as “sweat dripping, beat bumping, candlelit yoga”; or CorePower Yoga, which offers intense Instagram reminders like “WHAT YOU SWEAT IS WHAT YOU GET” and “FRIENDS DON’T LET FRIENDS SKIP YOGA.” She is also a wholesome holdout in a landscape that has been marked for years by skeevy revelations. There have been sexual-assault accusations against yoga instructors, reports of inappropriate touching in classes, the closure of a nationwide chain called Yoga to the People in the wake of alleged misconduct and a 2019 Netflix documentary about hot-yoga impresario Bikram Choudhury with the sinister title “Bikram: Yogi, Guru, Predator.” But above all else, Mishler offers privacy; specifically, the freedom to suck at yoga without judgment.

For this reason, perhaps, she seems to attract people outside the accepted profile of a yoga-doer. Beneath a video called “Yoga for Manual Labor,” there are comments from people identifying themselves as a pipe fitter, a miner, a janitor, a dishwasher, a mason, an electrician, a mechanic and a landscaper, as well as several farmers and construction workers. “Just what I needed after a day of demolition work,” wrote one person. Another wrote: “I am a 47 yr old Handyman in Dallas. I can’t believe how this helps me through my day. Every morning so far. Does this get better and better?” He returned later to reply to his own comment: “It keeps getting better and better.”

By definition Mishler’s content attracts people seeking refuge, but the exceptional malignance of 2020 has colored both her videos and the attitude of her fan base. According to Mishler’s team, the first three months of the pandemic this year saw a jump in numbers: from an average of 500,000 to 1.5 million views a day. Requests have poured into the comments for videos about working from home and dealing with insomnia. For Halloween, Mishler applied corpse paint to her face and made a video called “Yoga for When You Feel Dead Inside.” The comments functioned as a kind of worldwide emotional thermometer. Someone named Joel posted that he currently felt dead inside “most of the time” but looked forward to trying out the video. Another commenter explained that she was newly released from a Covid hospitalization and was also, in fact, “literally feeling dead.”

Mishler became certified as a yoga instructor after leaving high school early and getting her G.E.D. The decision was less about disliking high school than about wanting to be taken seriously as an actor and a person, in that order. It was during this period that she internalized lessons that would later become key to the YouTube videos. To be a good actor, for example, a person needed to know her body and psychology. She needed to develop a practice of introspection, so that when it came time to play Lady Macbeth, or whatever, she could extract relevant Lady Macbeth emotions from her inner mine. “It’s the body; it’s the breath,” she says. “It’s vocal. Using your voice. Awareness.”

One of her early teaching gigs took place in the lobby of the little theater in Austin where she was a company member. She would arrive early, let herself in, sweep up, unload a tub of mats from her car and grid them across the floor. Pupils paid for the class in donations; one woman paid in vegetables. Right when things were starting to take off — when people were driving in from San Antonio and asking for photos after class — the theater company lost its lease, Mishler’s teaching space evaporated and she was forced into virtual entrepreneurship. The first “Yoga With Adriene” video is still up on Mishler’s channel, and it features both a “West Side Story” reference and the first of many invitations for viewers to “find what feels good.” By late 2014, the channel had surpassed 150,000 subscribers. In 2017, it was at 2.4 million. Four million the year after that. (This notoriety hasn’t translated into status in the yoga establishment; she has never been featured, for example, in the pages of Yoga Journal.)

In some ways, Mishler’s practice aligns with the greater trends of Western yoga. It is athleticized and somewhat despiritualized; it magically reconciles the paradoxical yearnings for decadence and asceticism. Taking time for yourself, honoring your body, luxuriating in a moment free of responsibilities: decadence. Focusing the mind, toning up, sweating out the “toxins”: ascetic. But her deviations from the norm are significant, and they start with her presence. Though Mishler describes herself as “white-passing,” her mother is Mexican and was the first of 12 siblings to attend college. And her business is — to put it in the terms of the industry — not optimized for monetization.

Mishler’s director of operations told me that they turn down $250,000 to $500,000 a year in ads. Mishler does earn a comfortable living from YouTube ads, but unlike many influencers, she refuses to run them in the middle of her videos, which might leave you learning about competitive rates on car insurance while stuck in extended puppy pose. She has supplementary courses for sale and the online T-shirt shop, but there’s also enough free yoga on the channel to keep most people going for a lifetime. It’s the internet equivalent of a roadside farm stand with an honor-system box, albeit a pretty lucrative one.

In spirit, Mishler’s version of the internet harks back to the days of primitive message boards and GeoCities, when everyone was still innocently dazzled by the ability to connect with random people over shared interests and nobody was disseminating revenge porn or buying Uzis on the dark web. The “Yoga With Adriene” community receives her services with a kind of expansive gratitude and positivity that is freakish in the context of social media. Scrolling through the comments under a video of a gorgeous woman in tight clothing is usually a recipe for suicidal ideation, but there’s an eerie lack of trolling in Mishler’s realm. A part of this, she said, was because YouTube allows creators to filter out certain words — profanity and anatomical language, for example. But most of it is organic, and even the oddballs play nice. “The foot-fetish community,” Mishler said, by way of example, “is very respectful, very polite.”

On a Wednesday evening this spring, we had dinner together on Zoom, with Mishler enjoying a bowl of yellow curry cooked from scratch and me not enjoying a bowl of oatmeal (I’d run out of groceries). The connection was bad and froze often, leaving out chunks of conversation. Interacting with a partly redacted person felt like an appropriate metaphor for what then constituted socializing. The vegetables in Mishler’s curry came from local farms, but she was looking forward to cooking with the ones she’d planted in her garden: lettuce, peppers, squash. “Dude,” she said, “I’m enraptured by my seeds.” Sunshine poured through the window. Benji, her dog, meandered in and out of view.

In an effort to be a helpful interviewee, she’d been thinking about the purpose of “Yoga With Adriene.” “We’re creating a space where it’s not just safe but encouraging people to commit to the practice of self-discovery, versus just doing something that’s good for you because you’re told it’s good for you. Am I getting too weird here?” She wasn’t getting too weird. Actually, she was extinguishing one of the lingering reservations I had about doing her videos, which was that they made me feel too good. The most recent iteration of “self-care” — the one co-opted by companies that sell sweatpants and keto cereal — has been so successfully branded as an act of courage that it’s easy to forget “self-care” can also be a strategy of abdication. Surely the rational response to the events of 2020 is not to unroll a yoga mat and check out for 10 minutes. Unless, as Mishler sees it, the yoga is a means to an end.

What she meant, she went on, was that her videos weren’t only about self-love. They reject the idea that sitting in front of a computer is the fastest route to becoming ruinously estranged from your body, like those gamers you occasionally read about who are found dead after going days without food or water. “When I think of the yoga industry or the wellness industry,” she said, “I think of a culture that intentionally or unintentionally markets to your weakness.” Mishler sees her practice as a welcoming, loving alternative. In one of her videos, she shows viewers how to hug themselves. The view count on this sequence only makes sense if you accept the premise that most people feel profoundly alienated from themselves.

Nine months into the pandemic, Mishler told me that she still hadn’t hugged any strangers since that woman in the thrift store. When we spoke on the phone in November, she’d just taken a road trip to West Texas with her boyfriend, where the two had gone for walks, ignored the internet and watched what she called “Sky TV,” which is just … the sky. “It’s constant programming,” she said, with customary Mishler sincerity. “We were there on the full moon.” The visit was part fun and part work, because she was also preparing for the next batch of videos. Mishler thinks in terms of themes, and January’s theme is breath. Under the West Texas stars she ruminated on respiration: “Breath is a tool for calming. Breath is fuel that moves us. Breath is a birthright.” But then, she said, she had to pause at the word birthright, as her mind turned to the killing of George Floyd.

Recalling this on the phone, she began to cry softly. It was an odd moment. Floyd’s death ignited not only one of the largest waves of protests in U.S. history but also the most depraved behavior in the history of influencers, who did things like pose in front of protests wearing beachy blond waves and a bold red lip — trying to help, maybe, but also capitalizing on a moment of mourning and fury. For someone who isn’t Mishler, the leap from yogic breathing to state violence might be unconvincing, or worse, cynical.

But on the phone, it came off as wholehearted, and it’s this quality of hers — a level of empathy so forceful it almost seems like brain damage — that people love about her. It’s what allows her to speak to so many through laptop screens that are otherwise inert or oppressive. Mishler has plucked the underlying assumption of yoga — the idea that everybody on earth needs help with something — and rejected all the elements that can be off-putting: the crystals, the perfectionism, the ego, the expensive clothes, the competitiveness. She has even got rid of the studio. The benefit of teaching over YouTube is that it coaxes people to find solace by themselves — not in a class surrounded by other students, not with an audience, not under the eye of an instructor. Because these things can vanish overnight, as we’ve seen, leaving us to grapple with what Mishler has been getting at this whole time. “Who are you when you’re not performing?” she asked me on the phone. “What are you doing when no one’s watching?”

8 Tips To Make Working From Home Work For You

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8 tips for how to work from home, from NPR's Life Kit.

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Updated Monday at 2 p.m. ET to reflect new guidance on play dates during school closures. This is an evolving story and guidance from health authorities is evolving quickly.

Never before have workers telecommuted on such a broad scale. Millions of people are trying to work from home — if they can, of course. Life Kit wants to help WFH work for you, especially if you’re doing so for the first time.

We’ve also got episodes on health precautions you can take (like washing your hands!) and one about keeping kids entertained and active during all the school closures .

Here are some pro-tips for working remotely, possibly for an extended period of time.

1. Get your technology in order.

Technology is what enables remote work in the first place.

So make sure to take your laptop home, and don’t forget your charger. Also, take home your mouse and keyboard — anything that might make working on your laptop from home a little easier.

If you don’t have a work laptop and you’ll be spending a long time remote, ask if your supervisor wants you to take your desktop computer home. If you don’t drive and it’s too much to carry on public transport, ask your employer if you can expense a taxi or rideshare.

Then there’s the software. Make sure you have the right applications. Lots of remote workers are leaning heavily on Slack, Microsoft Teams, Skype, Zoom or GoToMeeting. Iron out what your team is planning to use ASAP.

Of course, you’ll want to make sure all your technology actually works from home. Do you need a secure line? Are those applications accessible from your home Wi-Fi? Do you need a security key to log in? These are all questions to ask your supervisor or IT department.

Listen to Life Kit

This story comes from Life Kit, NPR’s podcast with tools to help you get it together. Listen to the podcast episode at the top of the page, or find it here .

2. Make sure you have bandwidth.

Another thing? Internet access — is yours robust enough at home to allow you to video conference? Many conferences and almost all nonessential work travel are being canceled right now, so people want to use online video conferencing, which requires a good Internet connection.

If your bandwidth is low and you’re on a video call, try shutting down other programs to lighten the load on your connection. If your connection is really choppy, you can often shut off the video portion of a call and participate with audio only, which defeats the purpose of seeing your team but will still allow you to participate in the conversation.

Another Internet hog? Kids.

If your connection is not robust, set some ground rules about when kids can’t be online because mom is on a conference call, or stagger your video meetings with your partner or other family members if possible.

3. The kids are alright — but they’re home too.

With school closures and concerns about putting kids in day care, as well as staffing those places up, parents are faced with a challenge, especially parents who have to physically go to work because they have no remote work option.

If you are working from home with kids in tow, you’ll need to make a plan for education and entertainment. Stock up on books and puzzles. Also, it’s OK to use streaming services (Common Sense Media has good recommendations for kid-appropriate content).

One note on play dates, though, since school closures are designed to limit contact among kids. Our Life Kit parenting hosts, Anya Kamenetz and Cory Turner, reported on managing parenting in the time of coronavirus , and cite this advice from Maria Litvinova, a scholar who has published several papers on school closures in epidemics:

“If the school is closed for a certain amount of time, even if it’s long and difficult for parents to organize the care, it’s important that they do not regroup children again because the effect of the school closure will be much less.”

Families across the country are getting very creative with virtual play dates using video chat as well as platforms like Roblox , which allows kids to chat while playing a video game together.

Also, be flexible about how much work you might realistically be able to get done if you’re balancing child care. #WorkLifeBalance. Just not the kind you were hoping for.

Here are more tips on managing parenting in the time of coronavirus , including ideas for working from home with little ones.

4. Manage expectations.

It’s wise to have a discussion with your boss about what can actually be accomplished from home.

Ask your manager what the priorities are, and discuss how tasks will get done.

How are teams going to track projects they’re working on? How will they meet to discuss this? Will you all be connecting on Slack or email? Will there be standing meetings at a certain time to get everyone coordinated?

This should be an ongoing conversation. Remember, going fully remote is a new experience for many companies and their workers. Be honest about what isn’t working or can’t get done in these circumstances. More overall communication is going to be necessary.

5. Know thyself (and thy WFH weaknesses).

If you’re distractible, get ready for work every morning like you are going to physically go into work. Dress up, do your hair — whatever you’d normally do. This puts you in a professional mindset.

It’s hard to draw a sharp distinction between home and office when you’re at home. But to the extent possible, create a space at home that looks and feels like your office to you.

If you’re the type of person who never takes a break at home, set a timer to take time for lunch, and turn off your work. Or go for a walk. If you don’t change your venue at some point during the day and take a breather, it can make the claustrophobia worse. Try to maintain normal work hours, and shut things down when you would normally leave the office.

Try to appreciate the benefits that do come with remote work. You’re not commuting. You’re able to make your own lunch and save money doing so. You have more control over your schedule and more time with family. Focus on whatever positives you can find.

6. Embrace the webcam.

Conference calls are tough — there are time delays, not knowing who’s talking because you can’t see the person, people getting interrupted on accident.

Webcams can solve a number of these issues: the sense of isolation and that confusion.

“To be able to see the person you’re talking to I think is important,” says Matthew Hollingsworth, who heads operations at Tiny Boards, a company that has several job boards for remote work.

And also, he says, because we miss cues when we aren’t working together in person, make doubly sure all colleagues understand their marching orders.

“I tend to overcommunicate, and I think that’s a good default setting,” he says. Don’t be afraid to ask, “Is this clear?”

You can even try repeating back what you heard the other person say, to make sure you interpreted the person’s meaning correctly.

7. Stay connected.

One undeniable loss is the social, casual “water cooler” conversation that connects us to people — if you’re not used to that loss, full-time remote work can feel isolating.

To fill the gap, some co-workers are scheduling online social time to have conversations with no agenda. Use Slack chats and things like that if you miss real-time interaction.

Again, embrace video calling and webcams so you can see your colleagues. Try an icebreaker over your team chat: What’s everyone’s favorite TV show right now? What’s one good thing that someone read that day?

8. Do what you can; discuss when you can’t.

Before the spread of the coronavirus, roughly half of American workers were doing at least some telework.

But about a third of American workers cannot work remotely — fast-food and factory workers, people who are stocking the shelves in grocery stores and warehouses, nurses and doctors on the front lines of health care. They can’t work from home.

If you really can’t work remotely, ask your employer what you can do to make sure you’re not losing pay. That said, this is a shifting landscape. It’s not clear that hourly workers or workers who can’t do remote work will be paid if they can’t work.

The lack of paid leave or sick leave is certainly in the spotlight because of this virus. Some companies, including McDonald’s, Walmart and Amazon are now saying they will offer paid leave or sick leave to protect the health of customers as well as their workers.

Airlines are paying flight attendants who signed up for shifts and are quarantined, for example. And some unions are trying to negotiate the issue of missed pay.

So the best thing is to ask your manager or human resources department. If you cannot do your work remotely and you cannot come to work, what is the compensation? Or if you can work, what are the precautions they’ve prepared for you? And finally, if you do get sick, will your employer pay for your leave or workers’ compensation?

We’d love to hear from you. If you have a good life hack, leave us a voicemail at 202-216-9823 or email us at [email protected] . Your tip could appear in an upcoming episode.

If you want more Life Kit , subscribe to our newsletter .

The audio portion of this story was produced by Meghan Keane and Sylvie Douglis.

15 Industry Leaders Talk About Tech Teams’ Biggest Upcoming Tests

by www.forbes.com Leave a Comment

Technology never stands still, and nor does the global economy—and tech leaders and their teams are dealing with uncertainties in both areas in 2023. From trimming budgets to tackling ever-changing and growing cybersecurity threats, tech leaders are facing a challenging year ahead.

While every organization will have its own, unique slate of concerns, knowing what others in the industry are bracing for can help tech leaders ensure they’ve considered all possible contingencies to prepare for. Below, 15 members of Forbes Technology Council share some of the new and significant challenges their departments are facing this year and how they are planning to overcome them.

1. Leveraging Technology To Do More With Less

2023 has been the year of tech layoffs, and with an uncertain economy and shrinking budgets, companies may be grappling with the aftershock for months. To survive, businesses need to do more with less and will rely on technology to fill the gaps. One efficient and cost-effective way to do this is to leverage existing capabilities within your IT service management provider to streamline business operations. – John Milburn , Clear Skye

2. Scaling Through Uniformity And Synchronization

Bringing uniformity and synchronization to our website as well as across our products and departments is something that we need to put more effort into, as it will help scale the business. We’re overcoming this challenge by hiring more product managers, each devoted to a certain product or part of the website, to work under the management and supervision of our head of product. – Peter Abualzolof , Mashvisor

Forbes Technology Council is an invitation-only community for world-class CIOs, CTOs and technology executives. Do I qualify?

3. Adapting To New Technologies And Ways Of Working

A significant challenge we are facing this year is the need to rapidly adapt to new technologies and ways of working. To overcome this challenge, we’re focusing on clear, honest communication and transparency at all levels of the organization. We’re sharing information on our goals, challenges and progress and encouraging everyone to ask questions, provide feedback and contribute their ideas. – Avani Desai , Schellman

4. Preparing For Increasingly Sophisticated Cyberattacks

A significant challenge financial services companies face is the increasing sophistication of cyberattacks. Attackers are using advanced tactics such as social engineering and ransomware to gain access to sensitive data. To overcome this challenge, companies should implement advanced security technologies and invest in regular cybersecurity training for employees and a robust incident response plan. – Perry Menezes , MorganFranklin Consulting

5. Hiring Onsite Talent

Hiring onsite talent is a major challenge post-Covid. People have become accustomed to the comfort of working from home. We as a company are working to adapt to this change and adjusting to the fact that remote work is here to stay. More polished tools need to be adopted to ensure security and privacy. – Bhavna Juneja , Infinity, a Stamford Technology Company

6. Supporting Collaboration Among Remote Workers

To ensure we maintain a high level of collaboration and communication while supporting telework, we invested in new tools and technologies to facilitate employee interaction, including virtual meetings, instant messaging and project management tools. By addressing these challenges, we aim to maintain high levels of productivity and job satisfaction for our team. – Shelli Brunswick , Space Foundation

7. Fostering A Strong Culture While Maintaining Rapid Growth

A challenge we are facing is fostering a positive company culture that aligns with our mission while maintaining fast growth. To achieve this, we are clarifying our company’s objectives and improving the communication between leadership and contributors. – Paulo Carvalho , Avantsoft

8. Identifying New And Creative Ways To Boost The Bottom Line

With the chances of a recession hitting this year, companies in our industry are tightening their belts. It’s essential to be prudent in terms of financial investment decisions and to identify different and creative ways to add more to the bottom line. This could include identifying new areas where we could cross-sell and being client-obsessed and employee-focused. Customer experience is key for each department. – Shiboo Varughese , CirrusLabs.io

9. Avoiding Layoffs Through Cross-Training

One significant challenge our tech department is facing this year is cross-training. We never want to lay off our employees as many tech companies are doing right now. The best approach is to ensure each team is as well-versed as possible. Our cross-training program allows us to shift employees to other departments when and if things start slowing down. – Thomas Griffin , OptinMonster

10. Taking A Closer Look At Vendors

Economic uncertainty is having a big impact on budgets, including cybersecurity budgets, making it difficult for individuals and organizations to plan for the future. As a result, every team needs to take a hard look at incumbent vendors—particularly those providing overlapping capabilities. More cost-effective alternatives do exist and can be highly leveraged across the organization if you look! – Claude Mandy , Symmetry Systems Inc.

11. Keeping Up With Conversational AI

2023 started with the interesting paradigm of ChatGPT and other AI engines—they will change the entire IT and tech ecosystems. It will be a challenge and opportunity for every IT organization to build and enhance their ecosystems to provide conversation-led, structured responses. We have multiple initiatives with our clients and employees to leverage conversational AI to improve our services and products. – Rishi Agrawal , 3i Infotech

12. Transitioning From An Innovation Mindset To A Protective Mindset

The economy (and people’s reaction to the economy) has changed the game, and this is felt both at the business and departmental levels. As a product leader, my focus is always on anticipating and responding to changes both in the market and the psychology of our users. Transitioning from an innovation-based mindset to a protective mindset requires reframing how you communicate with your users. – Lewis Wynne-Jones , ThinkData Works

13. Bridging The Gap Between Sales And Development Teams

As we scale, expand and grow our customer base, there is an immediate need for more processes to link customer-facing and software development teams to deliver on time and within budget. The challenge is bridging two mindsets: sales and delivery and software development. I am fostering improvement by having customer-facing teams do product specs and a software development team get closer to the customer side. – Fernando Gutierrez , Tachyus Corp.

14. Staying Ahead In Mobile Technology

One of the most significant challenges this year is staying ahead in mobile technology. To overcome this challenge, we are investing heavily in research and development, hiring top talent from around the world and leveraging existing relationships with industry leaders. These strategies will help us continue creating innovative solutions while remaining competitive. – Marc Fischer , Dogtown Media LLC

15. Raising Funds And Managing Debt

​​In the current high-interest-rate environment, raising funds has become more challenging, and outstanding debt has become more worrisome. Therefore, managing the budget is more important than ever. Evaluate your workforce. Can you transition any full-time resources to contractors? Evaluate your objectives. Which ones are delivering revenue? Which ones are lagging? Cautiously invest for the future. – Nicholas Domnisch , EES Health

What Is A Design Institution Today? London’s Design Museum Director Tim Marlow Considers

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“I’ve always been attracted to the momentum of institutions,” begins the art historian Tim Marlow. “I like a busy place. I want to bring different audiences and for them to have communal experiences in a shared space.” He clarifies: “This is what museums do best.” As director and chief executive of the Design Museum in London, a position he’s held since 2019, he’s in a prime spot to achieve this.

I’m meeting Marlow at the museum west of the city in Kensington, housed in the former Grade II* listed Commonwealth Institute. A curious building with its place in time, it opened in 1962 to inform and educate about the Commonwealth of Nations. The listing notes say its founding came “at a critical moment in the evolution of the modern Commonwealth out of the old Empire.” Meanwhile, the design and displays conveyed a “sense of idealism and a new start.” It, therefore, feels like a fitting place to be occupied by a museum also attempting to define a nation finding its place in a very different era.

Opened in 2016, the Design Museum was reimagined and redesigned by the architect John Pawson. It is tucked away on the side of Holland Park but without direct access or views into one of London’s loveliest green spaces. Still, the building is impressive, vast, inviting, and a stone’s throw away from some of our other significant collections of past and contemporary treasures at the V&A.

Marlow’s office has expansive views over a bustling workplace where, today, his young team are busy at work. “The sheer energy that comes from different projects with different approaches, and all existing in the same building, this is what interests me,” he says as his assistant brings in a couple of double espressos.

Design — how we engage with it as a concept and understand it as a discipline — has transformed dramatically since 1989. That was the year when the late Sir Terence Conran and Stephen Bayley opened the original Design Museum in its more modest Shad Thames site in a former 1940s banana warehouse on the other side of London. A space dedicated to contemporary design, showcasing what many would have viewed as everyday objects, was a radical concept. Then, museums and galleries were reserved for the high arts, the visual arts, not the applied arts and certainly not objects with little historical value.

The efforts of Conran and Bayley paved the way for teaching design theory and history at the university level. The discipline felt so fresh and exciting, less formal than the teachings of art history at the time — something that I got to experience first-hand, and it was all so thrilling.

Marlow agrees with the impact of that first museum space dedicated purely to contemporary design. Yet he is acutely aware that what was relevant in the 90s may not be so now. “On the one hand, the complexity of design offers us massive opportunities to tap into different audiences with each exhibition. Then, on the other hand, with the subject being so vast, how do you select what to show? It comes down to resonance, relevance, opportunity and a personal belief that this is the right thing to do at this moment.” Warming to the idea, he continues, “both the pragmatic and ideological drive our ideas; the key is in presenting them in a way that takes the audience with you. I believe in design affording us the chance to look at familiar things in different ways.”

“Football: Designing the Beautiful Game,” staged last year at the museum, did precisely that. Football/soccer is a global game, a subject most can identify with. “Design underpins football: from its kit to technology, graphic and stadium design. It, therefore, allows us to survey the game in new ways. The same could be said of music, which is why we looked at Amy Winehouse from the lens of design,” he says, referring to the 2021 exhibition “Amy: Beyond the Stage.”

Marlow wants to be expansive, offering exhibitions that address as many facets of our contemporary life as possible. A current show, for instance, looks at surrealism’s impact on design. Soon artist Ai Weiwei will take over the museum with his first show focusing on design, inviting us to meditate on value and humanity, art and activism. Meanwhile, an exhibition this summer celebrates the contemporary Indian sari.

Marlow insists he’s not too concerned with gaining a mass audience. “If you chase a populist rather than a popular agenda, you can get found out in the museum world, and it can be dangerous. Design is such a broad subject that it can attract disparate audiences. My aim for the museum is to make it a design hub, which means looking at all different audiences, be it age, social, political and racial.”

On the day of my visit, the museum is surprisingly lively for a drizzly Monday afternoon, with visitors of all ages, including lots of uniformed kids on a school outing. I’m pleasantly surprised, as on previous expeditions, the Pawson building had been a quiet, underwhelming space, dare I say a little clinical for my taste which is more attuned to wondrous spaces like the V&A.

I tell Marlow of my earlier observation. “This is music to my ears,” he beams. “This is what I want to generate more of. Museums have their own histories and trajectories, and I understand the ambition to scale up. When Terrance (Conran) came up with the idea, the nation didn’t have a design museum. The V&A deals with the past and present; we look at the present and future.”

Marlow is in an exciting position to assess how best to do this. In his previous role as artistic director of the Royal Academy of Arts, he helped the historic London gallery evolve to bring in younger audiences through a more expansive curational project. He also led the extension by another leading architect David Chipperfield which, when completed in 2018, helped expand the RA’s reach.

I comment on how much I admire Chipperfield’s subtle intervention that connects the two buildings — 6 Burlington Gardens and Burlington House — and offers a new auditorium and galleries so the RA can now have an exhibition space permanently dedicated to architecture. It’s helped make the building so much more alive.

“I need to rough up this elegant John Pawson conversion, too,” Marlow muses. “There is the opportunity to put more in this space.” And bringing in new audiences and engaging with diverse groups emotionally and practically is at the top of his agenda. “We have one of the youngest and most culturally diverse audiences in any institution in London, 50% are under 35, but we have to build on this.”

Initiatives such as “Entrepreneur’s Hub ,” where those with fewer opportunities are mentored and funded on their design projects, and “Design Ventura,” a program that works closely on design education with schools, will certainly help towards this goal. Yet, Marlow is also acutely aware of the lack of diversity in the field of design in this country. Unlike in music and fashion, where there are visible role models, with industrial and product design, and in architecture, the scene is “very monocultural,” he suggests. “Liberal institutions like universities and museums cannot change the landscape, but maybe we can help.”

The Design Museum is largely a charity organization, with profits from ticket sales going directly back into the exhibitions. The space has worked with themed exhibitions as well as single-brand retrospectives. I ask Marlow how he gauges the commercial side while maintaining an independent voice. “It must be a balanced program. Compared to the visual arts, design offers the opportunity to work more broadly with individuals, brands, entrepreneurs, and even venture capitalists. And so it is part of the brief to explore these areas because design never happens in abstraction. The great designers have always been commissioned by or have worked with an organization.”

Marlow landed the Design Museum role only months before the closure of public spaces due to the pandemic. And, like so many, it had been a reflective time for him. “We came out of lockdown with a renewed purpose,” he concedes. “I realized how much design holds the key to how we deal with catastrophes and opportunities. Design is responsible for so much of the environmental damage, but it can also be the way out of it.

“I’d like to get to a position where I can raise enough funding so we can be the museum that examines and showcases all sorts of different ideas. We are the national design museum and should be doing this. This is what I mean by being a design hub.”

See why industrial designer Chris Bangle makes a compelling case for a truly radical rethink of car design here . And take a look at Norman Foster’s ode to the automobile at the Guggenheim Bilbao here .