Hasta La Gadget!

When it comes to ditching heavy makeup, Alicia Keys is putting her money where her lipstick-free mouth is.

Keys attended the BET Awards in Los Angeles Sunday night wearing a billowy black jumpsuit, strappy sandals and what appears to be very light makeup, if any at all:

It’s the first major red carpet event the singer has attended since announcing via a powerful Lenny essay that she’s going #nomakeup because she no longer wants to cover up any aspect of herself. 

“Not my face, not my mind, not my soul, not my thoughts, not my dreams, not my struggles, not my emotional growth. Nothing,” she wrote.

Many celebrities post the occasional “no makeup selfie,” but showing up makeup-free to an awards show proves Keys’ commitment to “a revolution” of women showing their “real and raw” selves. 

We’d say she’s on the right fresh-faced track.

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If you feel the constant pull of electronic leashes at work, you’re not alone. It turns out that many people are in the same boat while on the clock–and even off it it.

I recently sat down with consultant and columnist Vicki Salemi to discuss that topic. An excerpt of our interview ran on the New York Post. Here’s the entire conversation.

VS: Get this, a study from 2015 said that the average US worker spends 6.3 hours a day on e-mail. What are your thoughts on that? And what does it say about us in terms of productivity and a society (workaholics, anyone)?

PS: That number seems high to me and contradicts the research that I did for the book. In July 2012, the McKinsey Global Institute (MGI) released a report titled “The Social Economy: Unlocking Value and Productivity Through Social Technologies.” MGI found that knowledge workers on average now spend fully 28 percent of their work time managing e-mail.

Regardless of the actual number, though, it’s hard to dispute the assertion that we spend more time than ever on e-mail. On average, we receive 120 to 150 e-mails per day–and that number is increasing at a rate of 15 percent per year. (Source: the Radicati Group.) Because of smartphones, it’s never been easier to check our messages while waiting for coffee, on line at the supermarket, or even while in the bathroom. It’s completely out of control.

VS: Is it OK not to check e-mail on weekends and days off?

PS: In short, yes. All communication is contextual and personal. In Message Not Received: Why Business Communication Is Broken and How to Fix It, I stop short of issuing edicts such as these. You have to do what works for you. Understand, though, that every time you read and respond to a late-night or weekend message, you’re implicitly saying that this is acceptable.

Many organizations are starting to discourage or even ban off-hours e-mails. They realize that this constant frenzy of messages is causing employee burnout.

VS: Are we totally abusing and overusing e-mail? How so?

PS: Yes. We often prefer e-mail because it’s asynchronous. That’s just a fancy way for saying that we can respond to a message when it’s convenient for us. Both parties don’t need to be using it concurrently for it to work.

We also often opt for it in lieu of personal conversations. Sending a file or link via e-mail is fine. Far too many people, however, use it to conduct “conversations.” In the process, they invite misunderstandings and arguments. Consider a 2006 series of studies by two psychologists, Justin Kruger, PhD of New York University and Nicholas Epley of the University of Chicago. They demonstrated that text-based communication only works about 56 percent of the time.

VS: Should you put an “out of the office” (OOO) message on for the weekend if you know you won’t check your e-mail?

PS: Yes, but you have to do more; you have to stick to it. A Google programmer recently took a much more radical–and, I would argue, more effective–approach. He set his “out of office” message to read: “I’m deleting all of my e-mails when I return on [insert date]. If your message is really important, send it again after I return.”

VS: What if your boss expects you to be available at all times? Do you just have to deal with it?

PS: Great question and I address that at the end of the book. The short answer is no, especially in the long term. You can always express your desire to unplug from work. There’s a ton of research that cites the benefits of doing just that.

If your manager refuses to respect your limits, you can always look for another position somewhere else. Nowhere is it written that you have to be available 24/7. More and more workplaces are recognizing the drawbacks of these types of pressure-packed environments.

VS: What are the negative effects of constantly checking e-mail? For instance, greater anxiety and stress, plummeted productivity, etc.

PS: Constantly checking e-mail (or texts, Facebook, etc.) inhibits productivity. Put differently, this is what Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls flow or a state of “optimal experience” in his eponymous book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. To do your best work, you need uninterrupted time, not two minutes here and there.

Checking e-mail on vacation prevents us from unplugging and recharging our batteries. Many workers can’t stomach returning to work after a weeks’ vacation with 700 unread messages–with more coming all the time. As a result, their vacations aren’t really vacations at all. This is simply unhealthy.

Beyond that, e-mail induces stress–and not just among American workers. LexisNexis in 2010, the company conducted its second International Workplace Productivity Survey. Its findings confirmed what many have long suspected: e-mail is very distracting.

More than eight in ten (85 percent) white-collar workers in Australia and more than two-thirds (69 percent) of South Africa’s professionals say the constant flow of e-mail and other information is distracting, making it more difficult to focus on the task at hand. Six in ten workers in the U.S. (60 percent), U.K. (62 percent), and China (57 percent) echo this sentiment.

E-mail also gives the sender the appearance that all messages have been received when, in fact, nothing can be further from the truth. (This is one of the reasons that I titled the book Message Not Received.) From the same LexisNexis survey, a large majority of workers in every market admit deleting or discarding work information without fully reading it. Nine out of ten (91 percent) U.S. professionals say they have done this, as have eight in ten workers in China (84 percent) and Australia (82 percent), and almost three-quarters of professionals in the U.K. (73 percent) and South Africa (71 percent).

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This piece has run in newspapers in my conservative congressional District (VA-06).

For months, we have witnessed out how the political rise of Donald Trump has emboldened the forces of racism and bigotry in America.

The head of the nation’s largest white supremacist Internet forum — Don Black of Stormfront — says that Trump (whom he calls a “boon” to the white supremacist cause) is “creating a movement that will continue independently of him…”

David Duke, former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, notes how Trump is providing “cover” for people to proclaim their “white nationalism.”

Such “cover” is what Trump’s repeated rejection of “political correctness” accomplishes: the racism that America worked so long to declare unacceptable now again dares announce itself.

It may well be that most Trump supporters are not bigots. But one thing we know from the white supremacist and neo-Nazi groups themselves: they feel encouraged by Trump. They recognize in Trump’s speeches the same spirit that animates them.

It is a hostile spirit that seeks to dominate other groups whose humanity is deemed less worthy of respect than one’s own. And it is a spirit that has blighted human history.

It blighted the ancient world, where conquerors routinely turned vanquished peoples into property to exploit. It has blighted the past century, with the German “Master Race” exterminating Jews by the millions, with Rwandans from the Hutu tribe slaughtering members of the Tutsi tribe by the hundreds of thousands, and with Serbs in the former Yugoslavia creating camps for the systematic rape of Bosnian women.

It is a spirit that Americans, with our own histories of conquest and enslavement, have long worked to put away safely in a cage so that we might better fulfill our basic national ideals.

One of these ideas is the one that declares that “all men are created equal.” Another is the ideal that, despite our being a nation of people from many lands, “we are all Americans,” unified not on the basis of racial or ethnic uniformity but on the basis of a shared belief in the principles of liberty and democracy on which we were founded.

Having traveled so far toward building a society where different kinds of people can live together in peace, hold each other in a degree of mutual respect, and work together to achieve common purposes, are we now going to let the destructive beast of bigotry back out of its cage?

Are we to let this voice — that has emboldened the demons of bigotry — speak to us soon from the bully pulpit of the presidency?

One last note: while it is Donald Trump who has lately encouraged this bigotry to become bolder, the strengthening of this dark spirit has also been enabled by President Obama. In particular, our first African-American president erred when he failed to call out — or have others call out — the racist spirit behind the “birther” nonsense when it first emerged. This racist attempt to delegitimize the president was one of those things best nipped in the bud.

The racist nature of the birther movement could hardly be clearer. There could be no rational basis for believing Obama was anything but a natural-born American citizen, thus eligible to be president — not in view of the notice of Obama’s birth that appeared in Hawaiian newspapers in August 1961.

But racist feelings created a problem for many Americans, and believing the incredible birther fiction provided a solution. Obama’s election created a dilemma for those Americans holding two beliefs that suddenly were in conflict: 1) their belief that black people should be treated as inferiors, and 2) their belief that the President of the United States should be treated with respect.

Obama’s supposed African birth — or, to put it another way, his “African-ness” — allowed people in that dilemma to see him as no legitimate president, and therefore not requiring respect.

President Obama may have believed he should not dignify the absurd by taking it seriously. But, absurd or not, something serious was going on, and it was a mistake not to confront not so much the foolishness of the fiction about his being born in Kenya as the racism that fiction indulged.

By ignoring it, President Obama allowed the bigotry to feed and grow. And as the years have gone by, we have seen his political opponents emboldened to treat this president with a scorn and condescension to which no white American president has ever been subjected.

Meanwhile, left to themselves the passions of bigotry grew stronger. This year we see that they have created a political constituency powerful enough to nominate for president, in one of our two major parties, a man whom the white supremacist movement has embraced as one of their own.

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Photo by Photocreo via Fotosearch

Bernie Sanders has been a radical since the 1960s, but his influence has been extremely limited until now. Today he is the leader of a political revolution. Perseverance or block-headedness? Your cousin’s daughter has been going to auditions for years, trying to make it as a rock star. She hasn’t made it yet, but she’s still trying. Perseverance or denial?

Let’s look at ourselves. How can we tell when we should keep persevering and success is around the corner, or when we’re just pushing the boulder up the hill and ignoring the obvious? It’s not easy to distinguish until after the fact, but one thing is sure: The question is wrong.

We can’t know the result of our efforts in advance. But that is not the issue anyway. If we are guided by future success, then we’re making success God, and it’s not.

So Should We Persevere or Not?

Let’s talk about when we should persevere or when we’re being blockheads. First, the obvious: We can’t know if we’ll be successful until we are, so how can we know in advance when we’re being diligent, thinking positively and soon to be rewarded, or when we’re being misguided, delusional and out of reality? We don’t. That means that we can’t know which we are until “it” happens – we get a great chance on some TV talent show, or our daughter quits heroin for good, or our heartthrob who ran off with someone else returns to us with tears of remorse.

The truth is that we can’t know in advance whether or not we are going to have a sudden stroke of luck – no matter how great we are or think we are. So if that is true, success can’t be our guide. Beyond that, how do we know that even a stroke of luck will be so lucky? Maybe we get discovered by Hollywood and end up with a cocaine addiction and we’re dead of an overdose? Or maybe our heartthrob turns out to be an asshole in the long run or gets cancer in a year and dies on us, leaving us in debt and devastated emotionally? So did we win after all?

But beyond the fact that “success” is unpredictable, success in itself is no measure of quality. Just listen to the smashingly successful music that you think is garbage. Or examine your reaction to some other fad or some violent, exploitative film that’s raking in the millions. Success and quality don’t always mix, that’s for sure.

So if the end result is unknown, permeable or devoid of meaning, how can we know if we should persevere? We can’t, not if we are measuring ourselves by an end result. But what if there’s another way to determine whether or not to persevere?

What Does Ego Have to Do with It?

In a world dominated by ego, where it’s all about “me”, most of us are dominated by ego, too. Consciously or unconsciously we feel we must prove ourselves to ourselves or others. This is pure ego, and it’s a lousy motivation for persevering. I must send my daughter to her fourth rehab, because I am proving I am compassionate or I’m afraid someone will blame me if she overdoses. I must keep trying to succeed in the music biz to prove to others I have talent. I need to win the guy, woman, or prize, because otherwise I’m a loser. Inside we’re fighting negative judgments, comparisons, and negative self-talk. I’ve got to prove I’m right, and my mother won’t stop me. I’ll show them. I’ll make them eat their words.

This is guidance by the ego. It has nothing to do with acting for the highest good. So even if in the end we “succeed,” we are still being dominated by the wrong energies and we’ve succeeded in letting our egos boss us around. Which means that it really doesn’t matter whether or not success is around the corner. If we’re going after something for the wrong reason, our success is just another loss in disguise.

If, on the other hand, we are acting from guidance for the highest good of all, success is irrelevant. We are doing the right thing for ourselves and others, and if we are persevering to do right, no amount of failure or rejection will change that. After 300 rejection letters, I am still writing books because I feel guided to express certain feelings and hope that this will help others as well.

So How Do We Know What to Do?

So to sum it up, whether we are persevering or being a blockhead is not measured by end results. It is measured by motivation. Wow. NOW we have a way to evaluate our behaviors.

Here’s an example. For 50 years you’ve been trying to bring the attitude of Oneness to your religious congregation, trying to get them to drop racism or homophobia. If you’ve been doing it out of a prove-it energy, the whole adventure is contaminated. But if you feel guided to make that contribution to your world because it feels like it’s for the highest good, you are doing the right thing, regardless of the result. And you may never know what that result is, as people’s hearts change slowly or silently, or the hearts of their children may be impacted, even though that change might be outside the spectrum of what you can see.

So if you are struggling 6 months or 60 years, you may be right on, no matter the outcome, just as long as you feel guided for the highest good of all. And at the same time, if you keep persevering and “win,” you may actually be the real blockhead, feeding your ego, instead of your soul.

Like so many things in our world, we judge things from the outside and that’s upside down. Therefore, if you feel the call to work on your art, start a revolution or try to heal the world, do it without regard for your capacity for success. And on the contrary, if your determination is about puffing yourself up in an effort to look important or valuable, give it up. You are only being dominated by the ego, which will make your soul sick in the end.

Perseverance or being a blockhead? You can actually know. Just look within, check out your motives and love yourself for being willing to even ask the question.

Beth Green is founder of TheInnerRevolution.Org, host of Inner Revolutionary Radio on VoiceAmerica.com and creator of Beth Green TV & Radio on YouTube. You can download a free version of Beth’s book Living with Reality at www.theinnerrevolution.org. And follow us on Facebook and Twitter where we’re building an online community of people who are fighting for a revolution toward Oneness, Accountability and Mutual Support.

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BY RORY O’CONNOR

From Anderson Cooper to John Oliver, it’s become fashionable of late – even in mainstream media circles — to laud those daring enough to combine journalism with activism. That’s good news – but it wasn’t always that way…

For too long, any reporter who dared to combine journalistic endeavors with advocacy in support of causes for the social good faced near-universal scorn and professional opprobrium. The idealized pursuit of such myths as “objectivity” forbade “taking sides” or “expressing an opinion” when reporting events – even when those events were at times patently one-sided. Those working within major news organizations – including commercial and public media — knew that speaking out and stating the truth about certain topics was at least to court trouble, if not to purchase a one-way ticket to oblivion.

The late Danny Schechter was one of the first to fight against this sort of self-censorship. While at CNN and then ABC News in the 1980s, he pushed hard against the constraints of the mainstream broadcast and cable news media. In frustration, he left ABC to join me as what he dubbed “network refugees” to partner in the independent production company Globalvision. Together we began producing regular programming about such hot topics as apartheid in South Africa and human rights abuses around the world.

We knew from first-hand experience that the commercial world was not open to such coverage. So we offered it instead to public television – where both of us had started our broadcast careers and to which we felt a naive natural affinity. Rather than being welcomed at PBS, however, we were instead told by top media executives there that our acknowledged opposition to the racist regime in South Africa was “too controversial,” and later that a weekly series on global human rights was “an insufficient organizing principle for a television program.” The PBS reaction, combined with deceitful, highly organized right-wing protests against us, led to our being branded with a metaphoric scarlet letter – A for Activist – and told that our advocacy meant that we weren’t really journalists at all.

Such views, while they are eroding, are still somewhat prevalent in today’s media world. But as the pace of change within that world continues to accelerate at a dizzying pace, many within the field of journalism have begun to raise intriguing questions about the role of advocacy and the concept of reporter “objectivity.” It was a reporter for the American Civil Liberties Union, after all, who broke the news about the water crisis in Flint, Michigan. And the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting went to InsideClimate News, an environmentally-conscious site dedicated to coverage of global warming science and politics. More recently, independent journalists Jamie Kalven and Brandon Smith exposed the Chicago police cover-up of the killing of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald.

Increasingly journalists with strong points of view are giving us news and insights we can’t find elsewhere — particularly in mainstream journalism. Should we even bother any more trying to distinguish between so-called “objective” journalism and advocacy? Many knowledgeable observers now say no.

“We might have passed the point where we can talk about objectivity in journalism with a straight face,” says Patricia Aufderheide, University Professor of Communication Studies at American University. “Objectivity was always a shortcut. It was a useful little shortcut of a concept to say you should be fair, you should be honest, you should have integrity, you should tell people accurately and responsibly what you think are the important things about what you saw or researched. If what we’re doing is advocating for the public, that’s our job.”

And if a piece of journalism “isn’t advocacy, it isn’t journalism,” says media theorist Jeff Jarvis, professor at the CUNY School of Graduate Journalism. “Isn’t advocacy on behalf of principles and the public the true test of journalism? The choices we make about what to cover and how we cover it and what the public needs to know are acts of advocacy on the public’s behalf. Don’t we believe that we act in their interest? After all, what is a journalist, if not an advocate on behalf of the public?”

I couldn’t agree more. That’s why I am proud to announce today the selection of Jose Antonio Vargas as the first recipient of the Danny Schechter Global Vision Award for Journalism & Activism, to be awarded annually to an individual who best emulates Schechter’s practice of combining excellent journalism with social activism. The award includes a $3000 stipend to support future reporting and advocacy.

In 1993, when he was just 12, Vargas moved from his native Philippines to the United States. Four years later he learned he was an undocumented immigrant. By the time he turned 30, he had become a celebrated journalist: part of a Pulitzer Prize-winning team at the Washington Post, a top executive at the Huffington Post, a writer for the New Yorker, a documentary filmmaker. But even after this meteoric rise, Vargas was still running from his past. “I spent all of my 20s being scared of the government, scared of myself,” he recalls. “I didn’t know if I could keep going, if I could keep lying.”

So Vargas took a bold and dangerous step, going public with his status in a 2011 cover story in the New York Times magazine entitled My Life as an Undocumented Immigrant. “After so many years of trying to be a part of the system, of focusing all my energy on my professional life,” he wrote, ” I learned that no amount of professional success would solve my problem or ease the sense of loss and displacement I felt… I’m done running. I’m exhausted. I don’t want that life anymore. So I’ve decided to come forward.”

Vargas focused renewed attention to a volatile front in America’s ongoing cultural and political wars. His sudden flip from reporting to advocacy led to greater recognition — within a year he and other undocumented immigrants were on the cover of Time magazine – but also to increased scrutiny and danger. Nevertheless he embraced his new role as an activist, even while expanding his efforts to reach people through journalism. Vargas says he always viewed his activism “as an act of journalism.”

To that end, he has added another title to his resume: publisher. First came Define American, a non-profit “using the power of stories to transcend politics and shift the conversation around immigrants, identity and citizenship in a changing America.” Most recently, he launched EmergingUS, an online news organization aimed at exploring the “evolving American identity” and creating”a new kind of journalism that represents all of us.”

What kind of journalism can we expect to see in the future from Vargas? One that is both factual and empathic. “Facts are to me, a religion as a journalist,” he says, but quickly adds, “I traffic in empathy. I try to be vulnerable with people so they can be vulnerable back.”

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