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In its bid to reshape itself for the future, Yahoo is returning to a workplace culture of the tech industry's past. The Internet giant has reportedly notified its employees they'll no longer be allowed to work from home. According to an internal memo leaked to tech site All Things D, employees who previously enjoyed teleworking will have to start showing up at an office by June.

The move goes against a popular workplace perk among tech companies and a wider trend toward more work-from-home options across several industries. (Public media is included — NPR has a process allowing staffers to apply for remote-work arrangements.)

Technology has made collaboration easier for employees who aren't physically in the same space, and companies who back telework say it has helped cut costs and compete for wider talent pools.

"Ten years ago, it was seen more as an employee benefit. Today, businesses around the world are seeing telework as a necessity," said Ron Markezich, the corporate vice president of Microsoft's U.S. Enterprise and Partner Group. He led a 2011 Microsoft survey of more than 4,500 information workers that showed a rise in teleworking.

Having no central workplace certainly works for Automattic, the company that controls blogging behemoth WordPress. 120 employees work from their homes in 26 countries, and its leader, Matt Mullenweg, sees distributed employees as the future of work.

"I think it's difficult for a culture to transition from being reliant on in-person interactions to being just as effective in a distributed fashion — it's something you can't do halfway, and the change has to come from the very top," Mullenweg said. "Just because Yahoo can't do it doesn't mean there's anything wrong with being distributed."

Even the government sector, which isn't considered an early adopter of workplace culture change, has a star teleworking model in its ranks. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office boasts that 64 percent of employees work from home under various models.

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For Telecommuters, It's Not About Going To Work

MacFarlane opened with a perhaps predictably juvenile and overlong bit in which he sang about all the actresses he'd seen topless in movies, trying to have his cake and eat it too by framing it in a bit where William Shatner visited from the future to show him what it would look like if he were bombing.

Unfortunately, it was very difficult to tell the difference between pretending to bomb and actually bombing — the laughter he received seemed polite at best, and his conviction that saying "boobs" enough times would cause a room full of tuxes and gowns to quake with hilarity seemed misplaced. And then there were sock puppets. It's better forgotten.

Throughout the night, MacFarlane returned over and over to the topic of women and how silly they are — how Jessica Chastain's character in Zero Dark Thirty is an example of how women never let anything go, for instance — to the point where it seemed like his shtick would have benefited from a simple count of how many times he was returning to the well of "Women, am I right?"

“ The best hosts tease sharply but graciously; that's what made Johnny Carson a good Oscars host, and Jimmy Fallon at the Emmys, and recent Golden Globes hosts Amy Poehler and Tina Fey.

11 Flowers was inspired by an incident from Wang's youth. (Its title translates literally as Me, 11.) It is in part a portrayal of the deprivations, both material and spiritual, of the Cultural Revolution. But it just as expressively depicts the universal condition of childhood, a period of intense curiosity and profound cluelessness. Like most kids, Han can feel left out, even within his own family.

The director represents this keenly using point-of-view camera; we see through Han's eyes as he circles a table of gossipy grown-ups, peeking past arms and elbows. The director also simulates the kid's perspective through windows and steam, when hanging his head upside down and during the wooziness of a fever.

Sometimes, Wang employs the viewpoint of another character: Jueqiang (Wang Ziyi), a wounded fugitive who's hiding in the woods. He steals Han's shirt and uses it to stanch the bleeding from his side. The gesture has both practical and symbolic implications. How can the boy tell his mother he lost the new shirt? And how can innocence be restored to a bloodied China?

The movie doesn't dwell on the latter question, although the murder is followed by outbursts of teen-gang violence and Red Guard attacks on "conservatives." Like the whole country, Han's hometown is officiously governed yet prone to anarchy.

Maoism's oppressiveness is conveyed by the patriotic anthems that blare from loudspeakers — and are sung by people, including Han's parents, who prefer traditional tunes but fear being overheard singing them. The bombastic music disappears when the boys visit the woods along the river, where only rustlings and burblings can be heard. For children here, as elsewhere, nature offers both its own charms and a refuge from adult perplexities. (Recommended)

The movie Beasts of the Southern Wild is a fairy tale of a film. It might not seem to have much in common with documentaries about evangelical Christians in Uganda or the billionaire Koch brothers. But these films were all funded by a not-for-profit group called Cinereach. It was started by a couple of film school graduates who are still in their 20s. And now, with Beasts, it has a nomination for Best Picture at this year's Oscars.

Cinereach funded almost all of the $1.5 million budget for Beasts of the Southern Wild, the immersive art-house film about a child who's figuratively and literally adrift in Louisiana swamp country. Named Hushpuppy, and played by youngest-ever Best Actress nominee Quvenzhane Wallis, she vows to survive: "They think we're all gonna drown," she says. "But we ain't going nowhere."

The movie has earned more than $12 million, along with multiple awards and Oscar nominations.

Michael Raisler, at 27 years old, is one of the Best Picture nominee's producers and the creative director of Cinereach, which he founded with Philipp Engelhorn when the two were classmates at New York University's film school. They found that they shared a love for movies and a passion for social change. "Our key goal is to support what we call 'vital stories artfully told,' " he says.

As they learned about the film business, Raisler and Engelhorn learned that the money didn't go to the good movies; it went to the movies that would make more money. Engelhorn decided he wanted his film production company to be separate and apart from worries about commercial viability: "We're not protecting a potential upside or profit potential; we're protecting the vision."

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