【推荐1】Dow (道琼斯指数) closes below 20,000, wiping out nearly all the gains of Trump’s presidency (总统任期)

Stocks nosedived (暴跌) on Wednesday following the fourth trading halt (跌停) in two weeks, with Wall Street spooked (惊吓) by the deepening economic impact of the coronavirus pandemic. President Donald Trump earlier in the day announced that U.S. and Canada will block “non-essential (不必要的) traffic” from traveling across the northern border (边界) to control the disease’s spread.

The Dow fell 1,335, or 6.3%, to close at 19,903. Earlier in the day, stocks tumbled more than 10%, triggering (导致) the market’s “circuit breaker” that halts trading for 15 minutes. Trading is stopped when stocks decline by 7%, 13% or 20% in a single session. The broad-based S&P 500 fell 5.2%, while the tech-heavy Nasdaq slumped 4.7%.

“Markets were quick to give back Tuesday’s gains, with equities (股市) returning to a sea of red,” TD Securities analysts said.

Wednesday’s slump wipes out roughly three years of stock market gains, with the Dow closing below 20,000 for the first time since 2017. On January 20, 2017, the day of President Donald Trump’s inauguration, the index closed at 19,827. The S&P 500, which ended Thursday at 2,398, is just 227 points above its level when Mr. Trump formally took office.

The decline is noteworthy for its speed, with the losses mounting over the course of four weeks. The Dow had hit an all-time record on February 12, a little over a month ago, with the S&P and Nasdaq peaking a week later.

The widening pandemic, which has led to at least 109 deaths in the U.S., is prompting cities and states across the U.S. to order residents to stay home and to shut restaurants and bars and other gathering places. Those measures are spiraling through the economy,leading to layoffs and sharp declines in revenue for many consumer-focused businesses. The U.S. is likely already in a recession, according to Oxford Economics.

“We now see a severe global recession occurring in the first half of 2020,” Deutsche Bank’s economists wrote in a research note. “The quarterly declines in GDP growth we anticipate substantially exceed anything previously recorded going back to at least World War II.”

【推荐2】The Financial Times app urged me to read the latest headlines. More disturbing, Google News installed itself and did the same thing. Most absurd of all, every single incoming email announced itself with a beep.

This was all simple enough to fix. Text messages and phone calls are now the only apps allowed to interrupt me. Still, it was annoying. I wondered: surely everyone switches off most notifications, right?

Perhaps not, I stumbled upon an essay by Guardian columnist Coco Khan marveling at how much calmer she felt after turning off notifications. She explained that WhatsApp alone had sent her over 100 notifications a day and that she had only silenced the apps because she’d been on holiday, and the phone was buzzing all night.

I read Khan’s account as a cautionary tale for all of us. Humans can adapt to a lot; it’s easy to sleepwalk into a state of chronic stress and distraction without ever reflecting that things could be different.

This seems common. One of the most important findings in behavioral science is that default(默认) settings have an outsize influence over our choices. App makers clearly believe we’ll put up with it, and they may be right.

One study, published in 2015 by researchers at the Technical University of Berlin, found that on average six out of seven smartphone apps were left in their default notification settings. Given how many notifications are valueless, this suggests that in the face of endless notifications, many smartphone users have learnt helplessness.

Of course we sometimes want to know immediately when something has happened. As I am fond of saying, a doorbell is more convenient than going to the door every 90 seconds to see if anyone is there. Although that trade-off would change if the doorbell itself were sounding every few minutes, day and night.

But most of us have too many notifications enabled. “ Notification” is a dishonest euphemism(委婉说法)，anyway. The correct word is “interruption”.

Oliver Burkeman puts it in his book Four Thousand Weeks: our attention is not just a scarce resource; it is life itself.“At the end of your life, looking back, whatever caught your attention from moment to moment is simply what your life will have been.“ Glance at yet another notification, and you are literally paying with your life.

【推荐2】If you work in a white-collar job in an office, it is likely that you will wear a uniform. Why do you need to wear one?

For employers who require it, there are several arguments in favour of uniforms. They help ensure a level of professionalism in appearance. They project a brand identity, from the red coats of Virgin Atlantic crew to the “Browns” uniform of UPS delivery drivers. They may have useful job-specific features.

A study by Robert Smith of Tilburg University and his colleagues asked people to imagine being on the receiving end of poor service when ordering a pizza. They were then shown pictures of the uniformed or non-uniformed employee. The person without a uniform who had treated them badly was circled. In this sense, if corporate clothing is a symbol of good service, the authors suggest that it may be a good idea not to give it to inexperienced workers, because, to some extent, it’s a representative of a profession.

Uniforms can also affect the psychology of employees. In 2012, Hajo Adam, a professor in Columbia Business School, coined the term “enclothed cognition (认知)” to describe the effect that specific clothes have on the way that people think and feel. Questions have been raised over the validity of enclothed cognition, but a new meta-analysis by Messrs Adam and Galinsky, along with Carl Blaine Horton of Columbia Business School, concludes that the phenomenon is real.

The obvious objection to uniforms, at least from people who do not wear them, is that they limit individuality and autonomy. But employees who do not have to wear a formal uniform often gravitate towards a costume anyway. Some coders (编码人员) seem to be under an unspoken duty to wear T-shirts. The combination of shirt, trousers and Patagonia gilet (马甲) is known as the “midtown uniform” for finance types in New York. Bosses build brands by wearing the same outfit day after day. Therefore, you may not be required to wear a uniform when you head off to work. You may still be in uniform.