Author Archives: LouellaBenjamin

Where’s the Idealism?

by LouellaBenjamin Posted on May 19, 2016

Mother Jones

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It’s a funny thing: the usual take on Bernie Sanders supporters is that they’re a bunch of idealistic college kids who want a revolution. But whenever I write a post critical of Bernie, I sure don’t seem to get much criticism from the smart set. Here’s a random baker’s dozen tweets responding to my post from last night:

I know you can’t draw any conclusions from the cesspool of social media. And I’m not a woman, so I escape the worst of this stuff. Still, this is the kind of barely literate nitwittery that I get from the tea party types when I write about Benghazi or the IRS. Full of passion, for sure, but not a whole lot of idealism. Just rage and lame middle-school insults.

Would I get the same quality of stuff from Hillary supporters if I wrote something negative about her? In the past I haven’t, but my criticisms of Hillary have been more targeted. Plus she’s winning, and that makes it a lot easier to let criticism wash off your back.

I dunno. I suppose the lesson is not to draw any lessons from Twitter (though my inbox looked pretty similar this morning). But I’ll draw a lesson anyway: We’re no angrier than we’ve ever been, but social media sure does make it a lot easier to express our rage publicly. In the past all we could do was yell at the TV in the privacy of our own living rooms. All things considered, this probably isn’t such a positive change.

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Where’s the Idealism?

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Pope Francis Just Arrived For His First Visit to the United States

by LouellaBenjamin Posted on September 22, 2015

Mother Jones

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By Scott Malone and Philip Pullella

JOINT BASE ANDREWS, Md. (Reuters) – Pope Francis arrived on his first visit to the United States on Tuesday, bringing to Washington a message that its power and wealth should be made to serve humanity, and not the other way around.

An Alitalia plane carrying the Argentine-born leader of the world’s 1.2 billion member Roman Catholic church touched down at Joint Base Andrews after a flight from Cuba.

Schoolchildren who gathered on the tarmac to welcome Francis cheered as the plane descended. “We love Francis, yes we do. We love Francis, how about you?” they chanted.

In a sign of the importance that the White House gives to the visit, President Barack Obama took the unusual step of traveling to the air base with his family to welcome Francis.

The two men meet again on Wednesday at the White House, after which the 78-year-old pope will parade past Washington’s major monuments before a crowd expected to reach tens of thousands.

The pontiff has electrified liberal-leaning U.S. Catholics with his shift in emphasis towards forgiveness and concern for the poor. He has dismayed some conservative followers with comments of concern over climate change and a pivot away from messages focused on the church’s ban on birth control and opposition to abortion and same-sex marriage.

Francis was also expected to talk about immigration during his six-day visit, a top issue for him since his first days as pope in 2013.

He will make the first address by any pope to the U.S. Congress on Thursday, a speech to the U.N. General Assembly in New York on Friday and an open-air Mass in Philadelphia where 1.5 million people are expected to attend.

Francis spent four days in Cuba, where he urged a continued reconciliation between the Communist-run island and its superpower neighbor, building on a new detente he helped to broker earlier this year.

(Additional reporting by Roberta Rampton at Joint Base Andrews and Laila Kearney in Philadelphia; Writing by Alistair Bell; Editing by Mary Milliken and Grant McCool)

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Pope Francis Just Arrived For His First Visit to the United States

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Prior Experience Doesn’t Matter (Much)

by LouellaBenjamin Posted on July 11, 2014

Mother Jones

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Tyler Cowen points to yet another story today about how HR departments are using big data to hire and manage employees, and it’s fairly interesting throughout. However, my appreciation for the power of this approach was certainly enhanced when I read the following:

For Xerox this means putting prospective candidates for the company’s 55,000 call-centre positions through a screening test that covers a wide range of questions….The results are surprising. Some are quirky: employees who are members of one or two social networks were found to stay in their job for longer than those who belonged to four or more social networks (Xerox recruitment drives at gaming conventions were subsequently cancelled). Some findings, however, were much more fundamental: prior work experience in a similar role was not found to be a predictor of success.

This was something I always scratched my head about back when I was a hiring manager. Obviously you want someone with work experience that’s related to the job you’re trying to fill, but an awful lot of my fellow managers seemed pretty obsessed with finding candidates with almost identical experience. I understood the attraction of hiring someone who seemed like they could be slotted in immediately and hit the ground running, but it still seemed misplaced. Which would you rather hire? Someone fairly good with exactly the right experience, or someone really good who might take a month or two to learn some new things? I’d choose the latter in a heartbeat.

On the other hand, I suppose valuing experience highly might be a good idea if you really had no faith in your ability to distinguish good from really good. And the truth is that most of us probably don’t. So maybe finding perfect fits makes more sense than I gave it credit for. After all, back in the Middle Ages we didn’t have access to Xerox’s whiz-bang big data.

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Prior Experience Doesn’t Matter (Much)

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