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More broadly, some economists say, the lack of family-focused policies reflects the power imbalance between companies and workers in the American economy today. The share of economic output flowing to corporate profits has surged, while employee compensation has stagnated.

The technology industry is a striking example because it attracts some of the country’s smartest people, many of whom have far more bargaining power than most workers. Silicon Valley also has outsize cultural significance, as the face of American ingenuity and a magnet for global talent.

But it is also a place that often expects total commitment to work. That grows from the notion that in tech, unlike in other industries, companies become overnight successes, and believe their work is changing the world.

“People who give you millions of dollars for nothing but an idea at the very least expect your complete commitment to that idea,”

Start-ups are unlikely to have parental policies because they are more focused on growing as quickly as possible.

Though it’s off limits for interviewers to ask candidates whether they have children, tech companies use euphemisms to indicate that parents or older employees are not welcome, said a tech executive who would speak only anonymously. They say people are not a good “culture fit” and cannot “align on priorities” or make it in a “rapidly moving company.” The translation, he said: “People who are not exactly like us.”

“When people have kids, they have other priorities — and start-ups can be pretty brutal about not having other priorities,”

“Young people just have simpler lives,” Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s co-founder and chief executive, said in a talk to would-be entrepreneurs in 2007, when he was 23. “We may not own a car. We may not have family. Simplicity in life allows you to focus on what’s important.”

In some ways, an aging Silicon Valley is beginning to look more like the rest of corporate America, where most workers have families. The challenge is retaining the youthful optimism that they can do the impossible — while also showing their employees that working and having families is realistic.

Larger consumer inventories don't just increase variety. They reduce the wear and tear on each individual item, extending its useful life

My own view is that if you decide to go kill a bunch of innocent people, it’s a pretty safe bet that you’re not a picture of mental health. But that doesn’t sever the link between you and the people who inspired you, or insulate them from responsibility. Glenn Beck knows that there are lots of unbalanced people out there, and that his message reaches some of them. This doesn’t make him morally culpable for the way these people react to things he says that are true. It doesn’t even make him responsible for the things he says that are false but that he sincerely believes are true. But it does make him responsible for things he says that are false and concocted to mislead gullible people.

What’s not transient, unfortunately, is the technological trend that drives much of this. It isn’t just that people can now build a cocoon of cable channels and Web sites that insulates them from inconvenient facts. It’s also that this cocoon insulates them from other Americans — including the groups of Americans who, inside the cocoon, are being depicted as evil aliens. It’s easy to buy into the demonization of people you never communicate with, and whose views you never see depicted by anyone other than their adversaries.

one particularly cherished aspect of our diet might not just be an unhealthful indulgence but actually be toxic, that when you bake your children a birthday cake or give them lemonade on a hot summer day, you may be doing them more harm than good, despite all the love that goes with it.

I’ve spent much of the last decade doing journalistic research on diet and chronic disease — some of the more contrarian findings, on dietary fat, appeared in this magazine —– and I have come to conclusions similar to Lustig’s.

These two forms of inequality exist in modern America. They are related but different. Over the past few months, attention has shifted almost exclusively to Blue Inequality.

Red Inequality is much more important. The zooming wealth of the top 1 percent is a problem, but it’s not nearly as big a problem as the tens of millions of Americans who have dropped out of high school or college. It’s not nearly as big a problem as the 40 percent of children who are born out of wedlock. It’s not nearly as big a problem as the nation’s stagnant human capital, its stagnant social mobility and the disorganized social fabric for the bottom 50 percent.

For example, recent research by the Economic Policy Institute shows that men still outearn women at every rung of the income ladder. The higher up the ladder, the bigger the gap. In 2014, women in the 95th percentile of female earners made 79 percent of wages for men at the 95th percentile, while women in the lowest 10th percentile made 91 cents for each $1 earned by their male counterparts.

Men even make more than women in traditionally female occupations. Recent research led by the University of California, San Francisco, shows that male registered nurses outearn female registered nurses by an average of $5,100 per year across most specialties and positions — an earnings gap that has not improved over the past 30 years. Other research has shown that male schoolteachers tend to outearn female schoolteachers.

In 2010, 2012 and 2014, congressional Republicans blocked consideration of the Paycheck Fairness Act, a bill supported by President Obama that would have extended pay-equity rules that apply to federal contractors to the entire American work force, in addition to making needed updates to the Equal Pay Act. Obstructionism has only made the problem worse, and an even more pressing one for the presidential candidates to address.

His newfound interest in cars and racing, he said, was in some ways connected to his interest in tech.

“It’s a fiddly technological skill that you can always improve on,” Mr. Schachter said. “The same kind of guy who might be upgrading the video card on their computer for better performance might also be upgrading their car.” There’s also the visceral thrill. “When you make software, it’s an unreal product,” he said. “Building something physical is attractive in different ways.”

Then there’s the fact that cars are becoming much more like computers. Racecars now carry something like an automotive Fitbit, sophisticated sensors that precisely measure just about everything that’s happening on the track, from G-force to where drivers are braking and accelerating. All this data can be tracked and analyzed, turning racing into a sport of empiricism as much as of instinct.

At some point during every conversation I had with a tech guy who is interested in racing, there would come an awkward moment in which he would ask me not to paint him as an extravagant, sexist cretin. Mr. Schachter told me, “Try to tone down the rich guy hobby thing.

Mr. Bonforte said that many of his friends preferred to stay silent about racing because “the things that make us smell like the 1 percent, we’re very nervous about.” He added that while he has invited several women to come to the track, none had accepted his offer. The rise of a new boys’ club in Silicon Valley — one that was apparently leading to new deals and other business prizes — was “a totally valid concern,

Mr. Schachter pointed out that the most popular car for racing enthusiasts is a Mazda Miata, older models of which sell for less than $5,000. Renting a car for a day on the track costs a few hundred.

He reciprocated in kind. “How do you describe coming into a warm room from out of the cold?” he once said. “Never waking up bored? The only thing wrong is, she’s made a coward out of me. Whenever she’s out of sight, I’m a worrier about her.”

But this was a convention in a day when women were not encouraged to have careers outside the home. In his book “Reagan’s America: Innocents At Home,” Garry Wills disputed the prevalent view that Miss Davis had just been marking time in Hollywood while waiting for a man. She was “the steady woman,” he wrote, who in most of her 11 films had held her own with accomplished actors.

In the late 1940s, Hollywood was in the grip of a “Red Scare,” prompted by government investigations into accusations of Communist influence in the film industry. In October 1949, the name “Nancy Davis” appeared in a Hollywood newspaper on a list of signers of a supporting brief urging the Supreme Court to overturn the convictions of two screenwriters who had been blacklisted after being found guilty of contempt for refusing to cooperate with the House Un-American Activities Committee.Such newspaper mentions could mean the end of a career, and Nancy Davis sought help from her friend Mervyn LeRoy, who had directed her in “East Side, West Side.” LeRoy found it was a case of mistaken identity: another Nancy Davis had worked in what he called “leftist theater.” He offered to call Ronald Reagan, president of the Screen Actors Guild, to make sure there would be no problems in the future. Instead, Miss Davis insisted that LeRoy set up a meeting with Mr. Reagan.

From the first, Mrs. Reagan was part of the campaign planning. “They were a team,” said Stuart Spencer, who with Bill Roberts managed the Reagan campaign. New to politics, she said little at first. But Mr. Spencer found her “a quick learner, always absorbing.” Before long she was peppering Mr. Roberts and Mr. Spencer about their strategy and tactics.

The mansion episode, and Mrs. Reagan’s unalloyed preference for Southern California, aroused parochial resentment in Sacramento. She in turn disliked the city’s locker-room political culture, which required her to socialize with the wives of legislators who had insulted her husband. She bristled at press scrutiny, which became more intense after Joan Didion and her husband, John Gregory Dunne, wrote an unflattering article, “Pretty Nancy,” in The Saturday Evening Post in 1968. The article described Mrs. Reagan’s famous smile as a study in frozen insecurity.

Mr. Reagan decided to debate and did so well that he surged ahead in the polls and won convincingly a week later.

After the assassination attempt, Mrs. Reagan turned to Joan Quigley, a San Francisco astrologer, who claimed to have predicted that March 30 would be a “bad day” for the president. Her relationship with Ms. Quigley “began as a crutch,” Mrs. Reagan wrote, “one of several ways I tried to alleviate my anxiety about Ronnie.” Within a year, it was a habit. Mrs. Reagan conversed with Ms. Quigley by telephone and passed on the information she received about favorable and unfavorable days to Mr. Deaver, the presidential assistant, and later to the White House chief of staff, Donald Regan, for use in scheduling.

Mr. Regan disclosed Mrs. Reagan’s astrological bent in his 1988 book, “For the Record: From Wall Street to Washington,” asserting that the Quigley information created a chaotic situation for White House schedulers. Mrs. Reagan said that no political decisions had been made based on the astrologist’s advice, nor did Mr. Regan allege that any had been.But the disc

losure was nonetheless embarrassing to Mrs. Reagan; she and many commentators saw it as an act of revenge for the role she had played in forcing Mr. Regan out after the Iran-contra disclosures. Mrs. Reagan’s low opinion of Mr. Regan was well known; she had said tartly that he “liked the sound of chief but not of staff.”

Richard Nixon’s administration was also riddled with criminality—but in 1973, the Republican Party of Hugh Scott, the Senate minority leader, and John Rhodes, the House minority leader, was still a normal organization. It played by the rules.

The corruption I mean has less to do with individual perfidy than institutional depravity. It isn’t an occasional failure to uphold norms, but a consistent repudiation of them. It isn’t about dirty money so much as the pursuit and abuse of power—power as an end in itself, justifying almost any means.

Taking away democratic rights—extreme gerrymandering; blocking an elected president from nominating a Supreme Court justice; selectively paring voting rolls and polling places; creating spurious anti-fraud commissions; misusing the census to undercount the opposition; calling lame-duck legislative sessions to pass laws against the will of the voters—is the Republican Party’s main political strategy, and will be for years to come.

Republicans will remain securely entrenched in the legislative majority through their own hyper-gerrymandering—in Wisconsin last month, 54 percent of the total votes cast for major-party candidates gave Democrats just 36 of 99 assembly seats—so they will go on passing laws to thwart election results.

Nothing can stop these abuses short of an electoral landslide. In Wisconsin, a purple state, that means close to 60 percent of the total vote.

The fact that no plausible election outcome can check the abuse of power is what makes political corruption so dangerous. It strikes at the heart of democracy. It destroys the compact between the people and the government. In rendering voters voiceless, it pushes everyone closer to the use of undemocratic means.

there’s no obvious remedy for what the state legislatures of Wisconsin and Michigan, following the example of North Carolina in 2016, are now doing

During this first insurgency, the abiding contours of the movement took shape.

The Republican Party we know is a product of the modern conservative movement, and that movement is a series of insurgencies against the established order.

The first insurgency was the nomination of Barry Goldwater for president in 1964. He campaigned as a rebel against the postwar American consensus and the soft middle of his own party’s leadership. Goldwater didn’t use the standard, reassuring lexicon of the big tent and the mainstream. At the San Francisco convention, he embraced extremism and denounced the Republican establishment, whose “moderation in pursuit of justice is no virtue.”

the political opposition wasn’t just wrong—it was a sinister conspiracy with totalitarian goals.

Republicans have chosen contraction and authoritarianism because, unlike the Democrats, their party isn’t a coalition of interests in search of a majority. Its character is ideological.

conservatives nursed a victim’s sense of grievance—the system was stacked against them, cabals of the powerful were determined to lock them out—and they showed more energetic interest than their opponents in the means of gaining power: mass media, new techniques of organizing, rhetoric, ideas.

The new leader is like his authoritarian counterparts abroad: illiberal, demagogic, hostile to institutional checks, demanding and receiving complete acquiescence from the party, and enmeshed in the financial corruption that is integral to the political corruption of these regimes.

modern conservatism would never stop flirting with hostility toward whole groups of Americans. And from the start this stance opened the movement to extreme, sometimes violent fellow travelers.

It took only 16 years, with the election of Ronald Reagan, for the movement and party to merge. During those years, conservatives hammered away at institutional structures, denouncing the established ones for their treacherous liberalism, and building alternatives, in the form of well-funded right-wing foundations, think tanks, business lobbies, legal groups, magazines, publishers, professorships. When Reagan won the presidency in 1980, the products of this “counter-establishment” (from the title of Sidney Blumenthal’s book on the subject) were ready to take power.

But conservatism remained an insurgent politics during the 1980s and ’90s, and the more power it amassed—in government, business, law, media—the more it set itself against the fragile web of established norms and delighted in breaking them.

The second insurgency was led by Newt Gingrich

Gingrich liked to quote Mao’s definition of politics as “war without blood.” He made audiotapes that taught Republican candidates how to demonize the opposition with labels such as “disgrace,” “betray,” and  “traitors.” When he became speaker of the House, at the head of yet another revolution, Gingrich announced, “There will be no compromise.” How could there be, when he was leading a crusade to save American civilization from its liberal enemies?

Unlike Goldwater and Reagan, Gingrich never had any deeply felt ideology. It was hard to say exactly what “American civilization” meant to him. What he wanted was power, and what he most obviously enjoyed was smashing things to pieces in its pursuit. His insurgency started the conservative movement on the path to nihilism.

The party purged itself of most remaining moderates, growing ever-more shallow as it grew ever-more conservative

Jeff Flake, the outgoing senator from Arizona (whose conservative views come with a democratic temperament), describes this deterioration as “a race to the bottom to see who can be meaner and madder and crazier. It is not enough to be conservative anymore. You have to be vicious.”

The viciousness doesn’t necessarily reside in the individual souls of Republican leaders. It flows from the party’s politics, which seeks to delegitimize opponents and institutions, purify the ranks through purges and coups, and agitate followers with visions of apocalypse—all in the name of an ideological cause that every year loses integrity as it becomes indistinguishable from power itself.

The third insurgency came in reaction to the election of Barack Obama—it was the Tea Party.

In the third insurgency, the features of the original movement surfaced again, more grotesque than ever: paranoia and conspiracy thinking; racism and other types of hostility toward entire groups; innuendos and incidents of violence.

Finally, the movement was founded in the politics of racism. Goldwater’s strongest support came from white southerners reacting against civil rights.

In fact, it took more than a half century to reach the point where faced with a choice between democracy and power, the party chose the latter.

Its leaders don’t see a dilemma—democratic principles turn out to be disposable tools, sometimes useful, sometimes inconvenient. The higher cause is conservatism, but the highest is power. After Wisconsin Democrats swept statewide offices last month, Robin Vos, speaker of the assembly, explained why Republicans would have to get rid of the old rules: “We are going to have a very liberal governor who is going to enact policies that are in direct contrast to what many of us believe in.”

As Bertolt Brecht wrote of East Germany’s ruling party: Would it not be easier In that case for the government To dissolve the people And elect another?

A model-driven business is something beyond a data-driven business. A data-driven business collects and analyzes data to help humans make better business decisions. A model-driven business creates a system built around continuously improving models that define the business. In a data-driven business, the data helps the business; in a model-driven business, the models are the business.

Netflix beat Blockbuster with software; it is winning against the cable companies and content providers with its models. Its recommendation model is famous and estimated to be worth more than $1 billion a year in revenue, driving 80% of content consumption

Amazon used software to separate itself from physical competitors like Borders and Toys “R” Us, but its models helped it pull away from other e-commerce companies like Overstock.com . By 2013 an estimated 35% of revenue came from Amazon’s product recommendations. Those models have never stopped improving

Third, incumbents will be more potent competitors in this battle relative to their role in the battles of the software era. They have a meaningful advantage this time around, because they often have troves of data and startups usually don’

Looking to produce more-resilient crops, Monsanto’s models predict optimal places for farmers to plant based on historical yields, weather data, tractors equipped with GPS and other sensors, and field data collected from satellite imagery, which estimates where rainfall will pool and subtle variations in soil chemistry.

Lilt, a San Francisco-based startup, is building software that aims to make that translator five times as productive by inserting a model in the middle of the process. Instead of working from only the original text, translators using Lilt’s software are presented with a set of suggestions from the model, and they refine those as needed. The model is always learning from the changes the translator makes, simultaneously making all the other translators more productive in future projects.

First, businesses will increasingly be valued based on the completeness, not just the quantity, of data they create

Second, the goal is a flywheel, or virtuous circle. Tencent, Amazon and Netflix all demonstrate this characteristic: Models improve products, products get used more, this new data improves the product even more

inVia Robotics builds robots that can autonomously navigate a warehouse and pull totes from shelves to deliver them to a stationary human picker. The approach is model-driven; inVia uses models that consider item popularity and probability of association (putting sunglasses near sunscreen, for example) to adjust warehouse layout automatically and minimize the miles robots must travel. Every order provides feedback to a universe of prior predictions and improves productivity across the system.

Fourth, just as companies have built deep organizational capabilities to manage technology, people, and capital, the same will now happen for models

Fifth, companies will face new ethical and compliance challenges.

Each side complains that the others tip the scales. Ranked-choice voting can at least even the odds by forcing every candidate to reach out to all residents in the hopes of at least being their second favorite — rather than trying to run up the score in one’s strongholds.

Mr. Middlekauff said: “I’ve become more frustrated with politics. Moving to Illinois, I realized, I’ve lost a lot of political power.” He went on, “You don’t have a lot of choices. Things are decided by money.

The person who collects the most first-choice votes doesn’t necessarily win, a useful sticking point for critics

“Americans don’t really grasp how pollution impacts their lives,” said Drew Shindell, a professor of Earth science at Duke University and the study’s lead author. “You say, ‘My uncle went to the hospital and died of a heart attack.’ You don’t say the heart attack was caused by air pollution, so we don’t know. It’s still a big killer here. It’s much bigger than from people who die from plane crashes or war or terrorism, but we don’t see the link so clearly

The models calculated about 7 million deaths per year if governments fail to work toward zero emissions by the end of the century, starting today.

they “calculated the human health impacts of pollution exposure under each scenario all over the world — but focusing on results in major cities — using well-established epidemiological models based on decades of public health data on air-pollution related deaths,”

Shindell used an automaker’s problem with faulty ignition switches in 2014 to further illustrate his point. When the switches failed, more than 3 million recalls were involved and auto executives were summoned to Washington to testify before Congress. “But the combined tailpipes of automobiles kill dozens and dozens more people than faulty ignition switches,” the researcher said. “We should be far more worried about pollution than the things we actually worry about.

“There’s got to be a significant amount of progress within the 2020s or it’s too late,” Shindell said. Even for the researchers, it’s a pie-in-the-sky goal, given that South Asian nations such as India, where pollution is among the worst in the world, argue correctly that their per-capita use is small compared with historical use in the Western Hemisphere and that they should be allowed time to develop just as other countries did.

Mr. Yun predicts sales will remain flat for all of 2018, due to inventory shortages and eroding affordability, as both prices and mortgage rates rise.

A homeowner with a median-priced home in the San Francisco area will receive $4,500 less in housing-related tax benefits in the first year of a 30-year mortgage this year, according to real-estate data company Apartment List. A homeowner in the same position in the New York metro area would receive $1,500 less annually.

Weakness at the high end is being driven by stock market volatility and the $10,000 cap the tax bill placed on deducting state and local property taxes

“People are being a little more cautious than they were before,” Mr. Glazer said. “Buyers have a number in mind, and they’re willing to stick their ground more than in the past.”

Kalena Masching, a Redfin agent in Silicon Valley, said she has seen a pickup in activity in recent weeks as buyers and sellers have digested the implications of the tax bill. Buyers are putting down larger down payments to bring the size of their mortgages below the new $750,000 cap. But that could be a challenge if the stock market continues to fluctuate, because buyers might want to hold on to more of their cash

s. Masching said she is also hearing more from older buyers who are thinking about selling their homes and using the proceeds to retire out of state, prompted in part by the changes to the tax law

“I’m hoping it’s going to be better. We never got any inventory last year,” said Ms. Masching. “The big concern for our sellers is: Where are they going to go?”

Rhian Daniel, a 50 year old who works for a medical startup, and his wife have been looking for a home for about four years, both in the Bay Area and further afield. The couple have largely given up for the moment, and are considering eventually moving to a place like Dallas, with lower home prices and property taxes.

Mr. Daniel’s wife is a therapist, and they both have student debt that limits the size of the mortgage they can get.

Most of all, I realized my personal role as a consumer of news in our broken digital news environment.

And I’m embarrassed about how much free time I have — in two months, I managed to read half a dozen books, took up pottery and (I think) became a more attentive husband and father.

Now I am not just less anxious and less addicted to the news, I am more widely informed

We have spent much of the past few years discovering that the digitization of news is ruining how we collectively process information. Technology allows us to burrow into echo chambers, exacerbating misinformation and polarization and softening up society for propaganda.

With artificial intelligence making audio and video as easy to fake as text, we’re entering a hall-of-mirrors dystopia, what some are calling an “information apocaly

the experiment taught me several lessons about the pitfalls of digital news and how to avoid them.

I distilled those lessons into three short instructions, the way the writer Michael Pollan once boiled down nutrition advice: Get news. Not too quickly. Avoid social.

The Times has about 3.6 million paying subscribers, but about three-quarters of them pay for just the digital version. During the 2016 election, fewer than 3 percent of Americans cited print as their most important source of campaign news; for people under 30, print was their least important source.

What do you get for all that dough? News. That sounds obvious until you try it — and you realize how much of what you get online isn’t quite news, and more like a never-ending stream of commentary, one that does more to distort your understanding of the world than illuminate it.

On social networks, every news story comes to you predigested. People don’t just post stories — they post their takes on stories, often quoting key parts of a story to underscore how it proves them right, so readers are never required to delve into the story to come up with their own view.

the prominence of commentary over news online and on cable news feels backward, and dangerously so. It is exactly our fealty to the crowd — to what other people are saying about the news, rather than the news itself — that makes us susceptible to misinformation.

Real life is slow; it takes professionals time to figure out what happened, and how it fits into context. Technology is fast. Smartphones and social networks are giving us facts about the news much faster than we can make sense of them, letting speculation and misinformation fill the gap.

I was getting news a day old, but in the delay between when the news happened and when it showed up on my front door, hundreds of experienced professionals had done the hard work for me.

I was left with the simple, disconnected and ritualistic experience of reading the news, mostly free from the cognitive load of wondering whether the thing I was reading was possibly a blatant lie.

One weird aspect of the past few years is how a “tornado of news-making has scrambled Americans’ grasp of time and memory,” as my colleague Matt Flegenheimer put it last year. By providing a daily digest of the news, the newspaper alleviates this sense. Sure, there’s still a lot of news — but when you read it once a day, the world feels contained and comprehensible

What’s important is choosing a medium that highlights deep stories over quickly breaking ones.

And, more important, you can turn off news notifications. They distract and feed into a constant sense of fragmentary paranoia about the world

Avoid social.This is the most important rule of all. After reading newspapers for a few weeks, I began to see it wasn’t newspapers that were so great, but social media that was so bad.

The built-in incentives on Twitter and Facebook reward speed over depth, hot takes over facts and seasoned propagandists over well-meaning analyzers of news.

for goodness’ sake, please stop getting your news mainly from Twitter and Facebook. In the long run, you and everyone else will be better off.

Herbert said the extent of the damage is not yet clear. When clinic staff thawed a few eggs affected by the malfunction, they found that the tissue remained viable. Staff have not checked any of the embryos, he said.

For affected patients who are still eager to use their eggs or embryos to try to become pregnant, Herbert said the clinic plans to first thaw them and check for viability. If the tissue is not viable, he said, “we are going to make our patients happy one way or another.”

The emergencies mentioned in the guidance are fires, floods, power failures and terrorist attacks — but do not include instances in which a clinic’s own equipment fails.

Mr. Jobs didn’t trust third-party developers to offer the same level of aesthetically pleasing and stable experiences that Apple programmers could produce. He was convinced that the phone’s carefully designed native features were enough. It was “an iPod that made phone calls,” Mr. Grignon said to me.

Practically speaking, to be a minimalist smartphone user means that you deploy this device for a small number of features that do things you value (and that the phone does particularly well), and then outside of these activities, put it away

Mr. Jobs probably got it right the first time: Many of us would be better off returning to his original minimalist vision for our phones.

Under what I call the “constant companion model,” we now see our smartphones as always-on portals to information. Instead of improving activities that we found important before this technology existed, this model changes what we pay attention to in the first place — often in ways designed to benefit the stock price of attention-economy conglomerates, not our satisfaction and well-being.

This approach dethrones this gadget from a position of constant companion down to a luxury object, like a fancy bike or a high-end blender, that gives you great pleasure when you use it but doesn’t dominate your entire day

To succeed with this approach, a useful first step is to remove from your smartphone any apps that make money from your attention. This includes social media, addictive games and newsfeeds that clutter your screen with “breaking” notifications.

Turning our attention to professional activities, if your work doesn’t absolutely demand that you be accessible by email when away from your desk, delete the Gmail app or disconnect the built-in email client from your office servers.

Once you’ve stripped away the digital chatter clamoring for your attention, your smartphone will return to something closer to the role originally conceived by Mr. Jobs. It will become a well-designed object that comes out occasionally throughout your day to support — not subvert — your efforts to live well:

The iPhone is a fantastic phone, but it was never meant to be the foundation for a new form of existence in which the digital increasingly encroaches on the analog

“Owning one’s moment” is a clever way to rebrand “surviving the rat race.” In the new work culture, enduring or even merely liking one’s job is not enough. Workers should love what they do, and then promote that love on social media, thus fusing their identities to that of their employers. Why else would LinkedIn build its own version of Snapchat Stories?

Most visibly, WeWork — which investors recently valued at $47 billion — is on its way to becoming the Starbucks of office culture. It has exported its brand of performative workaholism to 27 countries, with 400,000 tenants, including workers from 30 percent of the Global Fortune 500.

hymns to the virtues of relentless work remind me of nothing so much as Soviet-era propaganda, which promoted impossible-seeming feats of worker productivity to motivate the labor force

Mr. Heinemeier Hansson said that despite data showing long hours improve neither productivity nor creativity, myths about overwork persist because they justify the extreme wealth created for a small group of elite techies. “It’s grim and exploitative,” he said.

Elon Musk

He tweeted in November that there are easier places to work than Tesla, “but nobody ever changed the world on 40 hours a week.” The correct number of hours “varies per person,” he continued, but is “about 80 sustained, peaking about 100 at times. Pain level increases exponentially above 80.”

This is toil glamour, and it is going mainstream.

Today’s messages glorify personal profit, even if bosses and investors — not workers — are the ones capturing most of the gains. Wage growth has been essentially stagnant for years.

the concept of productivity has taken on an almost spiritual dimension. Techies here have internalized the idea — rooted in the Protestant work ethic — that work is not something you do to get what you want; the work itself is all. Therefore any life hack or company perk that optimizes their day, allowing them to fit in even more work, is not just desirable but inherently good.

this is dehumanizing and toxic. “It creates the assumption that the only value we have as human beings is our productivity capability — our ability to work, rather than our humanity,

Jonathan Crawford, a San Francisco-based entrepreneur, told me that he sacrificed his relationships and gained more than 40 pounds while working on Storenvy, his e-commerce start-up. If he socialized, it was at a networking event. If he read, it was a business book. He rarely did anything that didn’t have a “direct R.O.I.,” or return on investment, for his company.

Bernie Klinder, a consultant for a large tech company, said he tried to limit himself to five 11-hour days per week, which adds up to an extra day of productivity. “If your peers are competitive, working a ‘normal workweek’ will make you look like a slacker,” he wrote in an email

Millennials, Ms. Petersen argues, are just desperately striving to meet their own high expectations. An entire generation was raised to expect that good grades and extracurricular overachievement would reward them with fulfilling jobs that feed their passions. Instead, they wound up with precarious, meaningless work and a mountain of student loan debt.

In 17th-century England, work was lauded as a cure for vice, Mr. Spencer said, but the unrewarding truth just drove workers to drink more.

“People aren’t going to stand for this,” he said, using an expletive, “or buy the propaganda that eternal bliss lies at monitoring your own bathroom breaks.” He was referring to an interview that the former chief executive of Yahoo, Marissa Mayer, gave in 2016, in which she said that working 130 hours a week was possible “if you’re strategic about when you sleep, when you shower, and how often you go to the bathroom.”

Ms. Mayer’s comments were widely panned on social media when the interview ran, but since then, Quora users have eagerly shared their own strategies for mimicking her schedule. Likewise, Mr. Musk’s “pain level” tweets drew plenty of critical takes, but they also garnered just as many accolades and requests for jobs.

The grim reality of 2019 is that begging a billionaire for employment via Twitter is not considered embarrassing, but a perfectly plausible way to get ahead. On some level, you have to respect the hustlers who see a dismal system and understand that success in it requires total, shameless buy-in. If we’re doomed to toil away until we die, we may as well pretend to like it. Even on Mondays.