I realized I had absolutely no advice about job negotiations — I’ve never negotiated a position. Even this year, as for the first time I have been in a position of not-exactly-groveling, I find myself unable to ask my kindly employers for anything.

In this hyper-impossible job market, is there ever a reason to leave a job? Or decline a job offer? The uncomfortable reality is that to walk away from a job or job offer means to seek another – to run to another, and five cover letters in, it starts to feel like any new job will do.

In my nightmare, I got fired.
My boss confronted me: I had been getting into the office late and leaving early. It was clear that I had no passion for my job.
And if I did have passion, it was of the despairing variety. I was part of The System, but I sure as hell [...]

“You can’t be neutral on a moving train,” the title of historian and activist Howard Zinn’s memoir, has struck me as axiomatic since I first read it years ago.
I put it on a flier I designed to publicize a speech by Zinn at Northwestern University. The flier was unnecessary. It was late fall 2003, [...]