I have run my business from home since 1990, and all of my staff work at home. I’ve watched the debate over working from home avidly. It feels like a clear winner for me. I have crises at work like everyone else, and I do tend to work a lot. But I work a lot because I love what I do and I’m doing it from the comfort of my own home, with my three dogs and an international staff.

Bob Rubila

05/16/2025

An Australian study, conducted over four years and starting before the pandemic, has come up with some enlightening conclusions about the impact of working from home. The researchers are unequivocal: this flexibility significantly improves the well-being and happiness of employees, transforming our relationship with work.

The tangible benefits of working from home

The Covid-19 pandemic acted as an unexpected catalyst, propelling millions of people into the world of teleworking. What appeared to be a temporary constraint for many quickly turned into a revelation: the possibility of carrying out professional tasks outside the walls of the traditional office. Five years after this massive transition began, a team of researchers from the University of South Australia has come up with some valuable scientific insights. Their study, which was unique in that it began before the health crisis, tracked changes in the well-being of Australian workers over a four-year period, offering a unique perspective on the long-term effects of teleworking.

The conclusions of this large-scale research highlight that, despite the sometimes contradictory data inherent in the complexity of the subject, offering employees the flexibility to choose to work from home has significant benefits for their physical and mental health.

Sleep and serenity restored

One of the first things we noticed when we started confinement was an increase in sleep time: almost half an hour more per night for teleworkers. This gain is not insignificant. Before the pandemic, the average Australian spent around 4.5 hours a week travelling for work. Researchers point out that this commuting time is often correlated with poorer mental health and a poorer perception of one’s own health. According to this study, educing or eliminating these daily journeys, which are sources of stress and fatigue, therefore has a direct and positive impact. Although a slight increase in alcohol consumption was noted at the outset, the overall trend is towards greater well-being.

The time-saving equation: between productivity and personal life

What can be done with these precious hours saved on transport? The Australian study, like work carried out in Spain which suggests up to ten extra days of free time per year for teleworkers, shows that this time is reinvested in various ways. Some of it is devoted to more work, and some to family responsibilities or caring. Interestingly, around a third of this freed-up time is allocated to leisure activities. As the researchers point out, “by devoting more time to leisure when working from home, there are more opportunities to be physically active and less sedentary”.

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Healthier meals

Eating habits have also changed. The proximity of the kitchen may well have encouraged an increase in snacking. However, the study highlights a deeper trend towards healthier food choices. Consumption of vegetables, fruit and dairy products has risen, as has the preparation of home-cooked meals, a sign of increased attention to the quality of food.

Productivity and team cohesion: removing doubts

The transition to teleworking is not without its challenges and questions, particularly in terms of productivity and maintaining social links. The issue of teleworking productivity has long been a subject of debate. While some managers express fears about a drop in performance, sometimes pointing the finger at a lack of supervision, the Australian study, corroborated by other research, suggests that professional performance and productivity are maintained and even improved when employees work from home. Some experts also suggest that these assertions sometimes mask a lack of new management methods adapted to remote working.

One crucial point emerges from the study: the distinction between imposed and chosen teleworking. When working from home is imposed, as was the case during the strict confinements, mental health and well-being can suffer. On the other hand, when individuals choose to work from home, their well-being tends to improve significantly. This positive effect is all the more marked when employees benefit from the support of their colleagues and their company. Concerns remain about the impact on team cohesion, social ties at work and promotion opportunities. Although the connection between colleagues is more difficult to reproduce at a distance, the study tempers these fears by emphasising the stability, and even improvement, in performance.

Towards a new philosophy of work

The findings of this multi-year study call for a broader reflection on the organisation of work. Employees who work full-time from home or in a hybrid model report higher job satisfaction and well-being. This confirms the growing desire for greater flexibility and autonomy in managing one’s professional activity.

Working from home is not a universal solution, a one-size-fits-all model that can be applied to all situations. Rather, it appears to be a valuable option among others, capable of contributing to a better, more inclusive and flexible working environment. The researchers conclude that our approach to work must evolve, embracing the diversity of needs and lifestyles. It’s less a question of pitting face-to-face against remote working, and more a question of creating tailor-made solutions that benefit both employees and forward-thinking businesses.

What do you think?

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I’m not on Quora, but occasionally see grammar posts, and this one took me a minute to understand. This explanation is the best explanation I saw. It’s a good question, and once you understand the answer, I think it does contribute to “Grammar Mastery.”

If you’re on Quora, and you’re interested in grammar, you will probably find it interesting.

Grammar Mastery & Education Insights

Rick Coury

May 29

What is the best grammatical explanation for why “Give her her book” is considered correct, while “Give him him book” is not—aside from relying on how the sentence sounds to native speakers?

The first “her” and “him” in these sentences are indirect object pronouns.

Think of them as replacing nouns, e.g. “Give Mary the book.” “Give Jim the book”.

The second “her’ and “him” in these sentences should be possessive adjectives.

In the first sentence, the second “her” is a possessive adjective.

(We’re talking about her book.}

But the second “him” is not a posessive adjective. The possessive adjective needed is ‘”his”.

“Give hm his book.”

(We’re talking about his book.)

Q. Hello! In the examples in CMOS 8.48, can you clarify why Southern California, Northern California, West Tennessee, East Tennessee, and Middle Tennessee get capitalized, whereas western Arizona, eastern Massachusetts, southern Minnesota, northwest Illinois, and central Illinois do not?

A. Southern California and Northern California are capitalized because they have become recognized beyond their borders as the names of two geographic and cultural entities. East, West, and Middle Tennessee are capitalized as the names of the three “grand divisions” in that state, a usage that has become widely accepted; see, among other sources, the entry for “Tennessee” in Britannica. (Many sources style these as the Grand Divisions—with initial capitals—including this page from the Tennessee Historical Society. Tennessee’s state constitution, on the other hand, uses lowercase, and it doesn’t name the three divisions.)

As for the other examples in your question, each of those is more likely to be used generically (i.e., to refer to the western or other portion of a state) rather than as a proper noun. And though any of them might be capitalized in local usage (as in a travel guide extolling the virtues of a certain region), such usage shouldn’t necessarily determine your own (or that of your author). When in doubt, use lowercase for terms like western at the state level and caps for national or global regions.

Q. Would you use a comma after the verb read in fiction when written text is introduced by that word? Does it matter whether the text is presented as a sentence? For example,

The sign read Keep Out.

versus

The sign read, “Thank you for not smoking.”

As a copyeditor I am always unsure whether read is considered a variation of such terms as said, replied, asked, wrote, or the like. Perhaps I must consider whether the grammar and syntax of the quoted material is separate from the text that introduces it?

A. You don’t normally need a comma before words introduced by the verb read—or said, for that matter—used in the sense of “consisted of (or included) the word(s).” And though quotation marks are helpful in some cases, they can usually be omitted in favor of title case for shorter signs (see CMOS 7.64):

The sign read “Thank you for not smoking.”

or

The sign read Thank You for Not Smoking.

Use a comma only in the rare event that read is used as a speech tag (in which case the quoted words would be considered to be syntactically independent relative to the surrounding sentence; see CMOS 12.14):

I asked, “Could you tell me what that sign says?”

Squinting through the haze, she read, “ ‘Thank you for not smoking.’ ”

Note the nested single quotation marks, which clarify that the quoted speaker is quoting something in turn (see also CMOS 12.46 and 6.11).

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The Mind File

Miriam Reynoldson

Apr 19, 2025

So let’s get one thing out of the way: I think “AI literacy” is a dangerous device of neoliberal education and it deserves to be dismissed out of hand.

I don’t like that declaring this will immediately turn off half my audience, but I think it’s only fair to say it up front.

This has a lot to do with my feelings about generative AI technologies, their developers, their blood diamond genesis, and their ugly consequences for those who use them and those who are impacted by their use.

But it has a lot more to do with what literacy is.

Literacy: a potted history

Up to the mid-twentieth century, when people spoke about literacy they were talking about being able to use letters. It was an entirely mechanical concept that had everything to do with making and interpreting the marks of language:

Then, around the middle of the century, the concept of functional literacy was defined:

These definitions were developed for statistical purposes, in order to determine and track the scale of illiteracy in the world.

But although functional literacy brought with it the socio-cultural concepts of community participation and development, it was still itself defined by the narrow view of literacy as the skills of “reading, writing and calculation”.

In the fifty or so years since, we have begun to think of literacies in the plural, as a wide array of functionings essential to engaging in communication in the present world. Financial literacy, digital literacy and critical literacy are just a few of many examples.

The term multiliteracies was introduced in the 1990s by the New London Group, who argued that contemporary literacy education needed to account for:

Their point was that these forms were growing increasingly fragmented. In a global and multicultural present, reading and writing English words on a printed page simply wasn’t enough to claim literacy any more.

One of my favourite definitions of plural literacies is from James Paul Gee, who conceptualised literacy as discourse fluency. He wrote that:

Gee defined discourses as “saying (writing)—doing—being—valuing—believing combinations” (p. 6). In his view, a primary discourse is, simply, the one we’re born into: “All humans, barring serious disorder, get one form of discourse free” (Gee, 1987, p. 5). For him, that’s the oral communication between parent and child. It’s the first form of linguistic communication we learn. (For Helen Keller, who couldn’t hear or see, you could say that was hand-speaking.)

Every other discourse is somehow encrypted and must be unlocked to be read. Reading is an act of translation. Writing is the ability to synthesise that translation into new representations of the discourse.

Can you see how how in this view of literacy, “reading and writing” is a metaphor for all the ways in which communication can be culturally encoded?

• Academic literacy is the capacity to interpret and perform scholarly cultural signals to access and transmit academic knowledge.

• Financial literacy is the capacity to comprehend and engage with accounting terms, conventions and practices to manage and acquire money.

• Media literacy is the capacity to decrypt and encode messages through culturally-structured modes like news journalism, television, websites, this blog.

To underline this clearly, literacy is about communication.

So?

I’m giving this lecture because I am so, so, so utterly sick of the calls for embedding “AI literacy” in education and workforce development on the grounds that generative AI capabilities are somehow now essential for participation in the world.

First of all, they aren’t essential.

Second, they aren’t literacy.

Using AI is not about communicating. It’s about avoiding communicating. It’s about not reading, not writing, not drawing, not seeing. It’s about ceding our powers of expression and comprehension to digital apps that will cushion us from fully participating in our own lives.

Generative AI use is degenerative to literacy.

You could argue that what’s needed is “critical AI literacy”. We need to be able to recognise when this is happening, how, and why.

And I support what you’re trying to say, but pull the middle bit, please.

That’s critical literacy. That’s not new. And if it’s just occurred to you, I’m sorry to say you’re about half a century behind.

I’m happy to chat about how using generative AI doesn’t have to mean ceding all our powers of understanding and expression. Look, I’ve had students who have effectively used it as a scaffold to engage with a meaningful secondary discourse (academic literacy). And that’s wonderful. But it’s a scaffold, not the thing itself. My aim is for the student to achieve the actual skill. I’m genuinely ok with training wheels, but I ultimately want to see you ride without them. Because the irony is this: if you can’t ride without them, you can’t actually ride with them either.

Far more frequently, what I see is students attempting to integrate generative AI¹ into their workflows, and achieving regressive results. Demonstrating poorer critical literacy than before. Using poor judgement. In some cases, bordering on academic misconduct. And let me be clear, these uses are in good faith.

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The only thing that can remedy this is communication. Actual, non-outsourced communication. Banning AI is a way of communicating that this is bad and we don’t support it (although it’s entirely symbolic and unenforceable). Assigning poor grades is a way of communicating that the integration was unsuccessful (but punishes the student for earnestly trying to participate in a practice increasingly touted as essential).

There are all sorts of ways we can communicate with our students about generative AI.

But trying to sell them ‘“AI literacy” is a way that will actively hurt them.

The Sun-Times’ publishing of fake books shows what happens when media outlets hollow out their newsrooms and replace humans with tech.

Parker Molloy

May 20

The Chicago Sun-Times just published a summer reading list with one major problem: most of the books don’t exist. Titles like Tidewater Dreams by Isabel Allende and The Last Algorithm by Andy Weir sound plausible enough, but they’re completely fictional—fabricated by AI and published without anyone catching the error. Of the fifteen books recommended in the list, a full ten of them are entirely made up.

According to 404 Media, Marco Buscaglia, who created the content, admitted that the list was AI-generated. “I do use AI for background at times but always check out the material first. This time, I did not and I can’t believe I missed it because it’s so obvious. No excuses,” Buscaglia told 404 Media. “On me 100 percent and I’m completely embarrassed.”

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The article appeared in a 64-page promotional section called “Heat Index,” which wasn’t specific to Chicago but was designed as a generic insert for various publications across the country. Despite being published in the Sun-Times, it wasn’t created or approved by the newspaper’s editorial team. After the fake books were spotted and went viral on Bluesky, the Sun-Times posted: “We are looking into how this made it into print as we speak. It is not editorial content and was not created by, or approved by, the Sun-Times newsroom. We value your trust in our reporting and take this very seriously.”

According to Ars Technica’s analysis, only five of the fifteen recommended books in the list actually exist, with the rest being hallucinated titles falsely attributed to real authors. Books by Isabel Allende, Andy Weir, Brit Bennett, Taylor Jenkins Reid, Min Jin Lee, Percival Everett, Delia Owens, Rumaan Alam, Rebecca Makkai, and Maggie O’Farrell don’t exist, while a handful of others mentioned are real.

This is exactly the kind of thing that happens when AI gets deployed as a way to cut costs. And it’s going to keep happening.

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The most telling aspect of this story isn’t the AI failure itself — we all know AI hallucinates facts — it’s the context in which it happened.

The publication error comes just two months after the Chicago Sun-Times lost 20 percent of its staff through a buyout program. In March, the newspaper’s nonprofit owner, Chicago Public Media, announced that 30 Sun-Times employees — including 23 from the newsroom — had accepted buyout offers amid financial pressures. According to the Sun-Times‘ own reporting, this was “the most drastic the oft-imperiled Sun-Times has faced in several years.” Those leaving included columnists, editorial writers, and editors with decades of experience.

A copy of the Heat Index section, shared by Timothy Burke on Bluesky

Let’s connect the dots here. Media company cuts 20% of its staff, including experienced editors. Two months later, AI-generated nonsense makes it into print without anyone catching it. Are we really surprised?

This is the direct result of the continued hollowing out of the media industry. You can’t fire all your fact-checkers and editors and then act shocked when nobody catches glaring errors before publication. You can’t replace experienced journalists with AI and expect the same quality. And you certainly can’t expect overworked, underpaid freelancers to carefully vet every piece of content when they’re responsible for filling 64-page supplements basically on their own.

Buscaglia told 404 Media he did this as part of a “promotional special section” that wasn’t supposed to be targeted to any specific city. “It’s supposed to be generic and national,” he said. “We never get a list of where things ran.” That statement alone tells you everything you need to know about how little editorial oversight was involved in this process.

The part that really gets me is that this wasn’t complex investigative journalism. It was a summer reading list. If AI can’t get that right—and a human can’t be bothered to check if books actually exist before publishing—how can we trust these same systems and workflows for anything more substantial?

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Of course, some will use this incident to declare that the sky is falling and blame AI for everything wrong with journalism. But that misses the point. AI is just a tool — it’s the continued corporate disinvestment in human journalists, editors, and fact-checkers that’s the real problem.

As one angry Reddit user put it: “As a subscriber, I am livid! What is the point of subscribing to a hard copy paper if they are just going to include AI slop too!?” The sentiment is understandable, but the anger is misdirected. The issue isn’t AI itself — it’s media companies thinking they can fire their staff and replace them with technology, without investing in the human oversight needed to make that technology useful rather than harmful.

This incident at the Sun-Times is just a preview of what’s coming as more media outlets cut staff while simultaneously pushing AI integration. We’re going to see more hallucinated books, more fabricated facts, and more erosion of trust.

What happened at the Sun-Times is embarrassing, but it’s also a warning. This is what happens when you strip newsrooms of the human expertise they need to function.

Maybe next time, someone will at least Google the books before publishing the list.