When Millennials Manage the Work Office

Here's what you missed while you were finding out way too much about Ted Cruz Facebook:Julie Rubicon

Selected by Shane Snow, chief creative officer

This anonymous story sent to writer Robin Sloan immediately went viral regarding marketing in Santa Barbara. It describes how a couple of Facebook employees used Facebook data to predict destiny events and started trading stocks based on it. The story turned out to be a hoax, though its a chillingly plausible work of fiction that appealed to all my paranoia about a worlds largest social network and a destiny of how data is controlled and dispensed. ThisvSlate analysis sums up a brilliance of a story and why it sounded so plausible to us. The New York Times:What Happens When Millennials Run a Workplace?

Selected by Jordan Teicher, senior editor

Millennials are ruining a workplace by eating tuna fish sandwiches during early meetings! So entitled, so uncouth! They only smell a place up and do whatever they want!

Does Ben Widdicombe, who wrote this contentious trend piece, believe these exclamations? I doubt it. But his article, about Mics millennial office, still gives off a certain patronizing vibe. And as a millennial working at a company full of millennials, reading a story made me defensive.

I have nothing against trend pieces, and millennials do copiousness of weird, dumb stuff (like most people). But a biggest reason I hate-read this is because Widdivcombes byline is a equivalent of a guy who claims to be friends with you even though he spends most of his time making fun of you. Hes reporting a legitimate story and finding some good anecdotes along a waybut you can tell he wrote this entire narrative in his head before he conducted a first interview.

Essentially, theTimeswants to have its tuna fish sandwich and eat it too. And that doesnt smell right. Slate:In Defense of a Trend Piece

Selected by Sam Slaughter, VP of content

Like my esteemed colleague Jordan, I, too, read the Times piece on millennials, though found it absurd, hilarious, and entertaining. And as a non-millennial working in a company full of millennials, I agree with Leon Nayfkhs message on Slate to a scolds and haters: Have you no chill?

Its kind of an accepted thing to bash theTimes Styles section (@NYTOnIt , anyone) but I think a rush to judgement misses a point, which Nayfakh does a good job elucidating: Trend pieces are about a writer finding a humorous fold in a fabric of culture, and teasing out a story about it. TheTimesstory is built around a truly amazing anecdote about a millennial who lies to his boss about a genocide to get out of work and go build a treehouse. I mean, as a journalist, if youre given that kind of quotation, how could you notwrite about it?

Sure, a piece includes some quiescent tropes about millennials (Theyre needy! Sensitive! They like hoverboards!)but then again, so does every story created about baby boomers (Im not one, either). Neyfakh admits this, though he and I have come to a same counter-argument: Sure, fine, probablybut really, who gives a shit? Fusion:A trend story about millennials, by a New York Times

Selected by Joe Lazauskas, editor-in-chief

Every line of this is absolutely perfect, though here are three of my favorites:

They have stacked up record student loan debt, and nonetheless spend thousands on frivolous items like Beyonc concert tickets and groceries; they yearn for more than only a paycheck, and nonetheless go on to be employed in jobs that provide them with paychecks in return for their labor; and they enjoy watching television and movies, though also Vine.

Broad City is on, he explained, removing a selfie stick from his man-purse.

Delaney lives in a Empire State Building, which his parents bought for him; he often invites fellow millennials, whom he meets on relationship apps, to his bedroom, so that they can kiss. (Occasionally, they copulate.) Bloomberg:The War on Internet Piracy

Selected by Carly Miller, editorial intern

This Bloomberg Gadfly article examines how a most recent incarnation of a online piracy war, waged since a days of Napster, is a power struggle in between tech companies like Google and media companies in charge of policing copyright.

No one wants to be indicted of censoring a Internet, especially not giants like Google. But media companies, with staffs that scour a web for copyrighted material, credit Google of laissez-faire enforcement. While a public is certainly against any form of censorship (note a backlash against SOPA and PIPA in 2011), a U.S. Copyright Office is open to public suggestions as they evaluate a copyright-infringement complement (through April 1).

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