50 oranges for some dental work

Give me some of this for some of that. Also, 7 other things worth your time.

A quick wish to our Canadian readers for a happy Thanksgiving and Indigenous People’s Day. And now, your regularly scheduled not-a-newsletter…

About a month ago, I realized (and wrote) about how academics will make careers in years to come, studying what you and I and everyone we know did in order to cope with life and adapt during the pandemic.

My first big example: remote work. Pre-pandemic, there were really only two big studies on remote work that got a ton of attention—one from Harvard, one from Stanford. Why so few? Because it was really hard to find big groups of workers where the researchers could divvy them up into Group A who worked in an office, and Group B, doing basically the same work, who worked from home.

So we got approximately 1,000 different articles talking about how productivity and happiness changed for (a) travel agents and (b) patent examiners working from home, but far fewer takes on how people in other fields—and particularly ones that involve teams as opposed t…