A historian friend once taught me the German word Zeitgenossen, explaining that it referred to one’s contemporaries, or members of one’s generation, but also more particularly connoted something like a “time-comrade.” Gabe Winant has become a great time-comrade to me, a thinker whose insights into questions of history and generationality, kinship and aging, have deeply enriched my own thinking on these subjects. His first book, The Next Shift: The Fall of Industry and the Rise of Health Care in Rust Belt America
, traces the transformation of Pittsburgh, the archetypal industrial steel town, into a city powered by the labor of hospital workers. It offers both a finely drawn portrait of working-class life in industrial and postindustrial Pittsburgh and a vision for how care work which has long divided workers along lines of race, gender, and generation could become the basis for a new kind of solidarity. In doing so, it also offers a profound look at how not just the workday
Tory Burch, Ruth E. Carter, Katie Porter and More on What They ve Learned From Their Mentors The starting point is never having to prove yourself. The significance of what you have to say or what you’ve experienced is never in question.
, women with professional guides are five times more likely to advance in their workplaces, but the benefits go both ways: Female mentors report better job satisfaction and performance for themselves too. That’s why this Women s History Month,
Harper’s BAZAAR approached leaders in style, art, science, and politics to share the lessons they’ve learned from their own mentors some famous, some family along with the advice they impart on the next generation of powerful women preparing to lead. (And, yes, that includes you.)
1. Bridgett Floyd The world knows him as George Floyd, but to me, he was my big brother, Bridgett Floyd says. His devastating death in May at the hands of the Minneapolis police ignited protests around the world. Floyd and her siblings have bravely turned pain into purpose, establishing the George Floyd Memorial Foundation to uphold their brother s legacy of mentorship and service, as well as to fight for nationwide police reform. Since its inception, the foundation has handed out hot meals to the homeless in Fayetteville, N.C. (where George was born), and also created an internship program geared toward Black men at his alma mater, Texas A&M University. Floyd insists these steps are just the beginning. I believe that s what it means to be a badass: remaining confident and standing in your purpose, she says. My brother would always say to me, I m for ya, and it s an honor to know that today and for the rest of my life, I m for him.
We posed the following question to 22 writers and public figures: “What book would you recommend Joe Biden read to inform his presidency?” Here are their answers.