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On one black-comically terrible Christmas

It's painful, but it's not lacking in its humorous elements. Scott had just gotten out of a three-year stint in prison for various drug offenses, and my mother — though I had warned her repeatedly — took him into her house, and I went home for Christmas. And, well, I was about to say that everything that could have gone wrong did, but it was pretty predictable: He wrecked his car ... on the way back from the liquor store, so he had a pretty healthy cache of liquor. The police obligingly drove him back to us. He got drunk, he terrorized my mother, the next day I took my mother to the police station, and we arranged to have Scott removed as a trespasser.

But what people may not know if they don't have a, you know, psychotic drunken brother, is it's very hard to get a restraining order. So all we could do was have the police remove him. He could come back. So as soon as the police removed him — and that was an interesting scene — we went and bought a gun, and stopped to have a martini at a Chinese restaurant, and I coached my mother: Tell him to sit down, and if he doesn't sit down, you're going to have to shoot him.

Author Interviews

Revisiting John Cheever's Suburban Unrest

пятница

When Pete Olsen talks about drought on his fifth-generation dairy farm in Fallon, Nev., he's really talking about the snowpack 60 miles to the west in the Sierra Nevada.

The Sierras, Olsen says, are their lifeblood.

That is, the snowmelt from them feeds the Truckee and Carson rivers and a tangle of reservoirs and canals that make this desert bloom. Some of the highest-grade alfalfa in the world is grown here. And it makes perfect feed for dairy cows, because it's rich in nutrients.

But like much of the far West, northern Nevada is in the grips of a historic drought. The federal government has declared much of the region a disaster area. Snowpack in the Sierra Nevada is at historically low levels. That means feed will be in short supply, which is a big deal, because the alfalfa that's grown here doesn't just stay local. There's demand for it in California, Asia and beyond.

"Depending on how bad it is, it could be daunting to try and find all the feed that we need," Olsen says.

Even As Dairy Industry Booms, There Are Fewer And Fewer Farms Feb. 6, 2014

четверг

Many people may think of a "remote worker" as a harried mom in her bathrobe or a 20-something at a coffee shop. But that image doesn't actually reflect who is working outside the office, according to a new study.

"A remote worker, someone who does most of their work outside of their employer's location, is not a woman, is not a parent and is not a Gen-Y millennial," says Cali Williams Yost, a workplace flexibility strategist and CEO of the Flex+Strategy Group.

A Remote-Working Gender Gap

In fact, the study she commissioned finds that three out of four remote workers are men — of all ages – and just as likely to have kids as not. Yost and others attribute part of this gender gap to the kind of work women are more likely to do: jobs that can't be done remotely, like teaching and nursing.

The study, a national survey of full-time employed adults, finds that 31 percent of full-time employees do most of their work away from their employer's location, like at home, at a business center, shared office space or coffee shop.

The study also finds women are much more likely to work in a cubby or open office space, rather than a private office.

"And those cubicle, open-office-space workers were significantly more likely to say they did not increase or improve their flexibility last year, for fear of being perceived as not working hard, and [out of] fear it will hurt their career," Yost says.

To unscientifically test all this, I ventured into a Starbucks near my home in Washington, D.C. There in the back I spot a middle-aged man with a grande drink and a laptop.

Turns out it's Michael Gerson, a columnist for The Washington Post. "I do have an office, but I do most of my writing in coffee shops," he says.

All Tech Considered

Does Working From Home Work? It Helps If You Like Your Teammates

When Ukraine President Viktor Yanukovych fled Kiev, he left a trove of documents at his estate; many were thrown into a large reservoir. Journalists called divers and spent the weekend going over soggy papers in a house they had long been forbidden from entering. With the help of volunteers, more than 20,000 pages are now online.

Before they came to the expansive estate last week, reporters "had only been allowed to the front door to receive cakes on journalism day," as Drew Sullivan writes for the Global Investigative Journalism Network.

Within hours of the president fleeing this past weekend, anti-Yanukovych activists from the Maidan group occupied his opulent estate, called Mezhyhirya. The images that emerged from that site depict excess, with gilded surfaces and expensive fittings.

Despite feelings of anger toward the former leader and resentment at his lifestyle, his estate hasn't been ransacked.

From the AP:

"The protesters' self-defense units were deployed inside the compound to maintain order and prevent any looting or damage to the property. One of them, a middle-aged man, could not hide his anger: 'Look how he lived, son of a bitch.'"

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