2 . The personal grievance provisions of New Zealand’s Employment Relations Act 2000 (ERA) prevent an employer from firing an employee without good cause. Instead, dismissals must be justified. Employers must both show cause and act in a procedurally fair way.

Personal grievance procedures were designed to guard the jobs of ordinary workers from “unjustified dismissals”. The premise was that the common law of contract lacked sufficient protection for workers against arbitrary conduct by management. Long gone are the days when a boss could simply give an employee contractual notice.

But these provisions create difficulties for businesses when applied to highly paid managers and executives. As countless boards and business owners will attest, constraining firms from firing poorly performing, high-earning managers is a handbrake on boosting productivity and overall performance. The difference between C-grade and A-grade managers may very well be the difference between business success or failure. Between preserving the jobs of ordinary workers or losing them. Yet mediocrity is no longer enough to justify a dismissal.

Consequently and paradoxically laws introduced to protect the jobs of ordinary workers may be placing those jobs at risk.

If not placing jobs at risk, to the extent employment protection laws constrain business owners from dismissing under-performing managers, those laws act as a constraint on firm productivity and therefore on workers’ wages. Indeed, in “An International Perspective on New Zealand’s Productivity Paradox” (2014), the Productivity Commission singled out the low quality of managerial capabilities as a cause of the country’s poor productivity growth record.

Nor are highly paid managers themselves immune from the harm caused by the ERA’s unjustified dismissal procedures. Because employment protection laws make it costlier to fire an employee, employers are more cautious about hiring new staff. This makes it harder for the marginal manager to gain employment. And firms pay staff less because firms carry the burden of the employment arrangement going wrong.

Society also suffers from excessive employment protections. Stringent job dismissal regulations adversely affect productivity growth and hamper both prosperity and overall well-being.

Across the Tasman Sea, Australia deals with the unjustified dismissal paradox by excluding employees earning above a specified “high-income threshold” from the protection of its unfair dismissal laws. In New Zealand, a 2016 private members’ Bill tried to permit firms and high-income employees to contract out of the unjustified dismissal regime. However, the mechanisms proposed were unwieldy and the Bill was voted down following the change in government later that year.

5 .

6 . Five years ago, Meredith Arthur, a 45-year-old San Francisco resident, arrived at a neurologist appointment. She spoke a mile a minute, explaining why she thought it might hold clues to her neck pain, frequent dizziness and headaches. “I was presenting my inexpert case to an expert, who stopped me and said, ‘I know what’s wrong. You have generalized anxiety disorder.’”

Arthur is one of the 40 million American adults who experience an anxiety disorder—the most common form of mental illness—every year. Its major factor is the uncertainty about situations in daily life.

“I describe anxiety as a future-oriented emotional response to a perceived threat,” says Joel Minden, PhD, a clinical psychologist. “We anticipate that something bad will happen. Maybe we have evidence. Maybe we don’t. But we have a belief that something catastrophic might occur.”

Almost immediately, Minden says, your sympathetic nervous system kicks into high gear. This leads to the release of adrenaline and cortisol, two of the crucial hormones (荷尔蒙) that drive your body’s fight-freeze-flight response and cause anxiety’s physical symptoms. Your heart races, your blood pressure rises, your pupils dilate, you get short of breath.

Meanwhile, cortisol curbs functions that your brain considers non-essential: It affects immune system responses and suppresses (抑制) the digestive system, the reproductive system, and growth processes. This was helpful for our ancestors trying to outrun tigers but is not so much when you can’t stop struggling with the problem whether you might have caught COVID-19 when the guy behind you in line at the grocery store coughed.

Anxiety can show itself in many ways. You might perceive something as threatening even when it isn’t or go to great lengths to avoid uncomfortable situations. You might constantly overthink plans or spend all of your time creating solutions to worst-case scenarios. Maybe you feel indecisive and fear making the wrong decision. Or you might find yourself restless, nervous, and unable to relax.

The good news is that anxiety is very manageable with some combination of medication, therapy, and lifestyle adjustments.

7 . Eight years ago, Nixon, 59, started each day from a bench of the St. Petersburg, Florida, waterfront. Watching a sunrise makes him feel ______.

“Seeing you ______ here, I know everything will be OK.” a woman’s words changed his perspective. Nixon ______. “That’s when I knew: I needed to pay attention to the people ______. I needed to ensure them we ______ to each other.”

______ watching sunrise, Nixon started smiling at people and ______ conversations. People began joining him on the bench, asking for advice.

“I wanted them to walk away ______ they didn’t have to feel alone.” said Nixon. “People feel their purpose hasn’t been ______ in their 50s. At this stage in life, this is definitely my ______.”

Weather permitting, Nixon will sit on the bench before sunrise every morning. His presence and ______ to listen have led some people to ______ him the Sunshine Mayor. No matter what problem a person wants to ______, Nixon lends an ear.

Once a couple talked about problems in their relationship. “The husband was ______ working, rarely home,” Nixon said. “It was ruining their marriage. I told him: ‘My friend, if your wife’s words didn’t scare you, then maybe the possibility of losing her will.’” Finally, the man agreed to slow down.

No topic is off limits, but some ______ want to sit next to someone and share the silence.

8 . I’ve tried a bunch of strategies to increase my intelligence. I’ve made flashcards to memorize words. I’ve subscribed to daily crosswords. What did I get for it? Average scores on standardized tests. A lot of unfinished puzzles. But I can’t say any of those strategies made me noticeably smarter.

Paul, a biology and social science writer, challenges us to rethink what we think about thinking. Our assumption that intelligence solely exists within the isolated organism of brain leaves us flummoxed by paradoxes like this one: how London resident Ben Pridmore can remember the order of 1,400 randomly shuffled playing cards but can’t remember his friends’ birth dates. Our bodies, our social networks and our surroundings, she argues, are “extra-neural” inputs that have a profound influence on cognition (认知).

To illustrate the impact of physical spaces on cognition, Paul tells the story of Montaigne, a 16^th century thinker who might have been the first to design a man cave and style it in ways to promote deep thought. She shares reflections on the transformative effect on mental well-being of the 150-foot ceilings in ancient Roman public baths, and the reasons why the large stone pillars (柱子) of the Salk Institute can foster expansive thinking.

She couples the experiences of Daniel Kahneman with contemporary neuroscientific studies to explain the benefits of physical movement for cognitive focus and memory. She uses this work to convincingly highlight how the daily routine at school—with its relative shortage of leisure time—is a drawback to the development of children’s attention span.

Paul does not offer do’s and don’ts for designing childhood education centers. She does not advise directly on how to prepare for a public address at a board meeting. However, the diverse and deeply researched information she presents about the impact of atmosphere, our bodies and the people around us on our thought process can certainly be translated into that. Our minds are bigger than our brains, and if we embrace that fact, there’s so much more we can accomplish.

9 . Women are still underrepresented in top academic positions. One of the possible explanations for this is the increasing importance of obtaining research funding. Women are often less successful in this than men. Psychology researchers Dr. Romy van der Lee and professor Naomi Ellemers investigated whether this difference also occurs at the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) and examined potential explanations.

The researchers were assigned by NWO to carry out this study as part of the broader evaluation of NWO’s procedures and its gender diversity policy. The aim was to gain more insight into the causes of the differences in awarding rates for male and female applicants for research funding. The analysis addressed an important “talent programme” of NWO, the Veni grant. “Whoever receives this grant has a greater chance of obtaining an important appointment at a university, ” says Naomi Ellemers.

Van der Lee and Ellemers investigated all the applications submitted by male and female researchers over a period of three years: a total of 2823 applications. Under the direction of NWO these applications were assessed by scientific committees consisting of men and women. The results demonstrate that the awarding rates for female applicants (14.9%) are systematically lower than those for male applicants (17.7%). “If we compare the proportion of women among the applicants with the proportion of women among those awarded funding, we see a loss of 4%,” said Ellemers.

The study reveals that women are less positively evaluated for their qualities as researcher than men are, “Interestingly the research proposals of women and men are evaluated equally positively. In other words, the reviewers see no difference in the quality of the proposals that men and women submit,” says Romy van der Lee.

In search for a possible cause for the differences in awarding rates and evaluations, the researchers also investigated the language use in the instructions and forms used to assess the quality of applications. This clearly revealed the occurrence of gendered language. The words that are used to indicate quality are frequently words that were established in previous research as referring mainly to the male gender stereotype (such as challenging and excellent). Romy van der Lee explains: “As a result, it appears that men more easily satisfy the assessment criteria, because these better fit the characteristics stereoty-pically associated with men.”

In response to the results of this research, NWO will devote more attention to the gender awareness of reviewers in its methods and procedures. It will also be investigated which changes to the assessment procedures and criteria can most strongly contribute to more equal chances for men and women to obtain research funding. This will include an examination of the language used by NWO. NWO chair Jos Engelens said, “The research has yielded valuable results and insights. Based on the recommendations made by the researchers we will therefore focus in the coming period on the development of evidence-based measures to reduce the difference in awarding rates.”