The Wrap Up is my round-up of items about management, diversity and inclusion, public relations, and any other ephemera floating around the web. These links should inspire, provoke, interrogate, and challenge. At the least, you will get a laugh or make you curse. My link list, like Walt Whitman, contain multitudes.
Today is National Libraries Day in the United Kingdom. Laura Ingalls Wilder‘s birthday is today, and she’s the Google Doodle of the day. Celebrate your library by going to pick up a copy of Little House on the Prairie.
Bloomberg: Harvard told its professors to stop sleeping with undergraduate students. No one asked why graduate students weren’t included in that headline, but they are covered in the prohibition dictate. Profs are banned from having amorous and lusty relations with grad students under their supervision.
Fast Company: The Harry Potter Alliance turns fantasy into action. From the post:
Wizard fans learn that their love of fantasy can translate into real world good, with help from the Harry Potter Alliance, a nonprofit that uses Harry Potter fandom to get kids interested in real life issues.
“They get involved because they wanted to hang out with some people and geek out over Harry Potter,” says Lauren Bird, the Alliance’s communications director, “But now they’re becoming a community leader.”
i100/Independent: Coca-Cola drops campaign after being tricked into tweeting Mein Kampf. Whoa, this is brandjacking and hashtag jacking at its finest.
Coke’s official account tweeted a series of images, including a smiling burger, containing secret race hate messages at @MeinCoke, before realising what had happened and deleting all of them.
Harvard Business Review: A few takeaways from this post on what to do when a colleague comes out as transgender
- Chill. Keep your reactions to a minimum.
- Watch and listen to your colleagues’ responses.
- Check your pronoun usage.
- Above all, do your research.
I would like to add “Don’t be an ass” to that list as well.
NPR: A cool data visualization of Census data. What are the most common job in your state? What was the most common job? In 1978 Georgia, the most common job was a secretary. Now, it is truck and delivery drivers. The Grist notes that farmers were slowly erased from the common job category, and that’s a scary thing to think about.
Newsweek: Unpaid internships are a hot topic in many circles. Some cling to the idea that students need to knuckle up and gain experience. Others think that student labor deserves to be compensated. Sirius is now facing a class action lawsuit about its unpaid internship practices.
Her suit cited the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), which the Labor Department clarifies with a six-point test to determine if an internship may legally be unpaid. Such a gig, for instance, “is similar to training which would be given in an educational environment” and doesn’t displace paid employees. The complaint was clear: Sirius “wrongfully classified [Tierney] and others similarly situated” as unpaid interns in order to deny them wages.
The article lists several media companies that have been through or are going through unpaid internship legal woes. Read and learn.
The Daily Beast: And you thought your company’s social media policy had too many layers and checks and balance. The New York Police Department lets detectives catfish people, but you first have to clear the approval and clearance chain of command and get permission written on official letterhead.