Archive for March, 2009

My column on the benefits of free agency, “Laid off? Here’s a silver lining” ran in this morning’s USA Today. You can read it here.

According to Kelly Services, the proportion of American workers who are “free agents” (freelancers, contractors, small business owners, etc.) has risen from 19% in 2006 to 26% now. You can blame the economy for the spike, though this is part of a long-term trend, as you can see by my recent article on the Promise and Peril of the Freelance Economy in City Journal.

Broadly, though many people do not choose to become self-employed, most like the lifestyle once they are. They report in surveys that they are happier than onther workers. And since, broadly, free agency makes the labor market less sticky, I think this is one of the few upsides coming out of this recession.

I am seeking avid fiction readers to test read my novel manuscript for me. The novel, called PROMISED LAND, is about 90,000 words. If you email me, I’ll send you a PDF of the manuscript and a short questionnaire designed to elicit critical feedback. If it’s returned in a timely fashion (I’m trying to get as many of these by the week of April 6th as possible) I have a small gift for you as a token of my appreciation. Here’s the novel pitch below; let me know at lvanderkam at yahoo dot com if you’re interested.

PROMISED LAND/Celebrity journalist Riley Vasquez found the story of a lifetime in media magnate Oscar Vesveld, the man who wanted to live forever. He found a way to preserve his brain and exist indefinitely as an avatar in a virtual world called Paradise — just a few upgrades better than the Second Life and World of Warcraft games people play now. For a fee, he’d preserve anyone else too. Soon a handful of rich souls joined him in cheating death, and remaking their lives as idealized images of their former selves. But when Riley introduces her next profile subject — a pious tent revival singer turned reality television star — to Vesveld’s world, this mystic’s different vision of Paradise threatens to destroy everything he’s worked for. Starting with his reasons for wanting to live forever in the first place.

Written by an award-winning journalist, and as fast-paced and steeped in religious imagery as The Da Vinci Code, PROMISED LAND jets from game preserves in Africa to the slums of Delhi, from Philadelphia in the midst of a summer trash strike to the Pacific coast of Nicaragua. Riley — unsure of what she believes and reluctantly caught up in manifestations of the divine — starts to ask what it means to be human. In a world where technology can destroy death but can’t change human nature, how do we get to the Promised Land? This is a book for suspense fans who like their prose colorful — and who like to think while they read.

I am seeking people to profile for my new book, 168 Hours, to be published by Portfolio (Penguin’s business imprint) in 2010.

This book is about how people spend their time. We all have 168 hours (24 x 7) to spend each week, but some people manage to do a lot more with their time than others. From preliminary interviews, I’ve found that people who get the most out of their time tend to focus on their “core competencies” — the things they do best at home and work, and that other people cannot do as well — and ignore, minimize or outsource most other things. At work they focus on high-impact projects that get them where they wish to be going. At home they focus on nurturing loved ones — and less on housework. In their personal lives, they focus on things that make life better — exercise, sleep, hobbies, volunteering, etc. — and less on things like TV which don’t correlate with happiness.

So how does this all fit into 168 hours? I’d like to find out! I’d like to hear from people who have big careers and big families — how do you make time to be fully engaged in both? I’d like to hear from parents (moms and dads) who spend time with their kids in really cool ways — and maybe have some creative ways to spend less time on chores. I’d like to talk with people who maintain extensive volunteer commitments even in the middle of very full lives. I’d like to talk with people who’ve found the time to get in great shape — training for half-marathons and the like — without sacrificing other important priorities.

Do you or someone you know fit the bill? I’d like to talk with you about how you allocate your 168 hours like a puzzle to make this all fit. While we live in a culture that talks a lot about the “time crunch,” when you think about it, 168 hours is still a lot of time — if you fill it with things that are important, and not with things that aren’t. I’d like to interview people who put this philosophy to work in their lives. Please email me a bit about yourself, and we’ll set up a time to talk. Thanks so much– Laura

You can catch me doing eight video interviews with finalists in the 2009 Intel Science Talent Search on the Scientific American website here.

Bear in mind that these young people are 17 years old. Since I write about education topics a lot, I’ve done a number of interviews with teenagers over the years. It’s often a challenge, but not in this case — these young scientists were remarkably composed.

My column on new publishing business models — and the future of the printed word — ran in USA Today this morning. You can read “Books from, and for, the people” here.

In addition to 4 new pieces up on Scientific American’s website, two other pieces — long in the hopper — finally went online yesterday.

At City Journal, you can read my article on The Promise and Peril of the Freelance Economy.

At Doublethink, you can read my article called The Household is Flat: The Rise of the Core Competency Mom.

Both are favorite topics of mine, so I was happy to be able to explore them at length — 4,000 words and 5,000 words respectively. So, if you’re looking for some massive Laura Vanderkam reading, enjoy!

Every month when the Department of Labor announces the unemployment rate, it makes front page news in papers nationwide. That means it must be illustrated, preferably with an eye-catching photo that will sell papers. One of the iconic images from the Great Depression was that of the breadlines, with men in overcoats (or at least non-casual-looking clothes) queued up solemnly. Newspaper editors and photographers would like to give a nod to these images.

The problem is that there aren’t a whole lot of lines generated by economic woes these days. Your unemployment checks are either mailed to you or direct deposited in your bank account. Food stamps often come in the form of electronic benefits transfer (EBT) cards. These are all fairly massive advances in customer friendly government service, but that’s a different matter. The point is, if you want to illustrate rising unemployment with a photo of a line of reasonably well-dressed people (preferably in overcoats, preferably a reasonable number of men), you have to find such a situation. Where do you look?

Career fairs! I swear, every article on unemployment has been illustrated with a photo of people lining up to enter a career fair. The obvious question, of course, is whether there were lines to enter career fairs when the economy was good as well. I suspect so — there are always new grads and people looking for new jobs in our high-churn economy — but no one ever started snapping their photos until unemployment rose about 6%.

I was fascinated to see an article in USA Today this morning in which White House press secretary Robert Gibbs attempted to define what the White House sees as the American Dream: “That you could get a job that pays a living wage, that if you got sick you wouldn’t go bankrupt, that you don’t have to be rich to send your kids to college, that you could have a secure retirement.”

I kind of thought it was more about having the freedom to pursue your goals in life through hard work — with an emphasis on the idea that anyone could become rich. You could start a business and make millions (which is emphatically still true — certainly many self-made millionaires grew up solidly middle class). Now it’s more about protecting yourself from disaster? No wonder people have accused the Obama administration of talking the Dow into the tank with its gloom and doom.

I took the train to Princeton on Monday night for a dinner date with about 25 college journalism students. Walking across the icy Gothic campus always brings back memories, in this case particularly of cold mornings spent delivering newspapers my freshman year to make book money and the like. I was joined by US News & World Report reporter Katherine Hobson (a 1994 grad) who asked the assembled young folks who read a newspaper in print form. A few admitted to doing so on vacation at their parents’ homes, but if there were lingering hands when asked about their on-campus days, it was definitely fewer than 10%.

Yes, print newspapers are probably doomed, though, as someone who lugged the darn things up four flights of stairs, staining my hands, I have to say that may not be a huge loss. Paper, ink and fuel for delivery trucks are all resources that we spend in a much more profligate fashion than we should. I recently purchased a Kindle, which can receive daily newspapers in a readable form, and if people want paper copies, they can probably print their own.

But this, of course, doesn’t mean journalism, or any form of print writing, is doomed. Hobson and I agreed on the walk from the train that we would not preach gloom and doom to 20-year-olds hopeful enough about building a career in the field to spend their evening with us. And I really don’t think there’s reason for despair. For starters, about half my writing now is appearing solely online, and my income hasn’t gone down. There are no journalism “jobs” to be had, but there are plenty of freelance opportunities — more now than probably ever before. Business models are changing. Given the short shelf life of many publications, it probably makes sense to think of all of them as projects, with teams of free agents assembled to make a great product, then disassembling when required. If things show a shelf life, then you can start creating longer-term contracts. But still, this changing industry needs flexibility — something that’s a lot less possible with large payrolls. Some people bemoan the lack of payroll employment in the field, but I track what people with similar tenures to me make as reporters and editors, and I’m definitely doing OK.

Plus I get to work in my pajamas, which rocks.

So I think I gave a fairly hopeful talk. After all, music has survived the transition from records to casettes to CDs to mp3 files, and we still use phones, though they’ve transitioned from rotaries to text messaging gizmos the size of a deck of playing cards in one generation. Likewise, unless this recession brings about another Dark Ages, literacy is going to survive. Which means people will want to read — one way or another. All in all, things could be worse.