On Hating Repetition And Trying New Things

On the eve of his first one-man show in New York, Jim Sutherland's Wall Street Journal profile of a man who refuses to be pigeon-holed captured my imagination. "IN THE CENTER of the Venn diagram that overlaps "artist," "philosopher," "designer" and "architect" sits Gaetano Pesce.

The 73-year-old Italian has spent more than a half century designing objects that defy description, furniture fraught with deeper meaning and buildings so visionary that most have never been built. He has crafted ashtrays in the shape of bleeding hands, doorways overhung by buttocks and sofas that pay homage to the Manhattan skyline. No color has been neglected, and no material has been safe: Rags and extruded polyurethane have been formed into armchairs; vinyl disks have been turned into shoes. Resin? It's to Mr. Pesce as teak was to the Danes.

Every Pesce project is a brave experiment, and he values humanity and expression over perfection. But amid the curiosities and eyebrow-raisers, there have been iconic achievements. His 1993 Organic Building in Osaka, Japan—its facade sprouting with a grid of planters—predated today's hanging gardens and living walls, and his 1969 Up5 chair is among the 20th century's most instantly recognizable pieces. A Manhattanite since 1980, Mr. Pesce is enjoying his first one-man New York show at Fred Torres Collaborations (through May 25). We recently talked with Mr. Pesce about Raphael as a pioneering multitasker, Darwin as exemplar and his love of unconventionally pretty feet. I am always evolving. I get tired of the way I think and so (to read more)

The architect and artist, Gaetano Pesce photographed by Adam Golfer for the Wall Street Journal

No More 9 to 5

Former Investment Banker, Christine Marchuska

At the height of the recession, Studio 360 interviewed scores of people transitioning from one career to another.  Many used the opportunity to follow their dreams.  Two former financial industry workers took the uninvited opportunity to reinvent themselves. Christine Marchuska, lived a real-life Up In The Air moment, getting pink-slipped in the conference room at her investment banking firm and immediately ushered off the premises.  Out but definitely now down, Marchuska went on to launch a thriving eco-friendly clothing line.  And Michael Terry, armed with a University of Pennsylvania MBA, became a full time comedian after years of work at Morgan Stanley.  Listen to more of their story here.

From Desktop to Stovetop

Thinking about reinventing yourself?  This Studio360 radio essay about  Marc Matsumoto's journey from being a tech industry marketing executive who, "basically lived at the company seven days a week, often until as late as 3:00 in the morning" to the founder of a website, No Recipes, might be just the inspiration you've been looking for.  Matsumoto's enthusiasm as he roams the earth seeking out good company, novel ideas, and delicious food to inspire his next kitchen adventure is contagious. Interested in experimenting with some fresh cooking?  Try an easy chicken teriyaki.  You never know where it might lead you.

The Perils of Working with Family

Candice Rainey's New York Times profile of couples who quit traditional 9 - 5 jobs to partner in the start-up of  passion-driven retail stores provides great insight into the all-in challenges of reinvention as a couple venture.

And the Boutique Makes Three

Robert Wright for The New York Times

Melissa Murphy and Chris Rafano at Sweet Melissa Patisserie in Park Slope.

By CANDICE RAINEY

GILLETTE AND ZAK WING vividly remember the day in 2009 when they were walking down Atlantic Avenue on the cusp of Brooklyn Heights, peering into an abandoned store front and casually fantasizing about opening an antiques business. A local real estate agent was walking by and noticed the couple. “He basically said, ‘You want it? It’s yours.’ ” Mrs. Wing said.

Three years and two babies later, they are now the proprietors of Holler & Squall, a meticulously edited furniture and oddities shop capitalizing on the neighborhood’s old-is-cutting-edge aesthetic (the store’s name is from a Jimmy Martin bluegrass song).

Mr. and Mrs. Wing are part of a new generation of mom and pops that has thrived in regentrified Brooklyn, doling out attainable indulgences (freshly baked vegan cookies, American-made chinos, really good cheese) to customers who prefer to know their proprietors by name. On the surface, these “co-preneurials” seem to be living a new American dream.

But not so fast. Behind these perfectly imperfect facades, there is often mold on the cheese, wrinkles in the chinos.

“Merchandising is probably where it gets the hardest because it’s more sensitive,” Mrs. Wing said. “It’s one thing to tell the other person they did the accounting wrong. But taste is a little bit different. I don’t think either of us is very delicate about telling each other we think something looks like ...” Well, let’s not stir up any more trouble.

“We’re both the bosses and we butt heads a little,” said Adele Berne, 32, who with her husband, Michael Kuhle, 35, owns a Smith Street clothing boutique, Epaulet, and a second store in Manhattan. “I’m like: ‘We should be happy. We’re working together!’ ”

In 2005 Dawn Casale, a former buyer at Barneys New York and founder of One Girl Cookies, decided to open a cozy bakery in Cobble Hill with Dave Crofton, a graduate of the Institute of Culinary Education. The two had met and married in a whirl of flour worthy of a Nancy Meyers movie.

But what Ms. Casale dubbed an “urban Mayberry” in the company cookbook soon became a thoroughly exhausting endeavor.

“We actually had a really great lifestyle before the shop opened,” said Ms. Casale, 41. “Because it was Monday through Friday. Then the brick and mortar happened and we were working like animals. We were a slave to the business.”

Mr. Crofton, 42, said it took the couple five years before they could take a three-day vacation.

“All we know is spending every day together, and

(to keep reading)

A Female-Dominated Workplace Won't Fix Everything

From the Harvard Business Review.

Men on the job must feel besieged. Two seismic shifts are underway that are irrevocably changing the ways in which we've believed work works.

On the one hand, new technologies have enabled neuroscience to discover that men and women tend to be wired differently in ways that incline men — can it be? — to behave more emotionally and irrationally in certain work situations, exploding the myth that women are the only emotional creatures in the workplace. Recent research, like that led by Cambridge University neuroscientist John Coates, suggests that surges in male financial traders' testosterone produce states of euphoria that cause them to understate risk, thus contributing to the overleveraged global financial crash. Since men naturally produce ten times as much testosterone as women, it's being suggested that a more gender-balanced financial workforce could be stabilizing for firms and for the system as a whole.

On the other hand, the metrics of 21st century female professional and economic empowerment have become a tide. As of the last two years, more American workers are female than male, and the postindustrial occupations in which women predominate — health and education, among others — are the growth sectors. Women today account for 57% of college undergraduates, 62% of graduate students, and majorities of those graduating from medical and law schools. Despite the continuing rarity of women at the very tops of large corporations (which will inexorably shift as the cohort of overwhelmingly male CEOs retires during the next decade) and in finance, a 2004 study by the women's group Catalyst, The Bottom Line: Connecting Corporate Performance and Gender Diversity, concluded that companies with the highest percentages of women in their executive ranks achieved 35% higher returns on average. What's more, according to the Center for Women's Business Research, women today own 40% of the private businesses in the United States and a study released last year found that (the relatively few) high-tech start-ups led by women fail less frequently than those led by men. After 40 years of feminist-era dues paying, women's moment has come. Hear us roar.

As a woman who came of age in the late 1970s and who has worked in sometimes unproductively male-dominated workplaces, I'm with the program so far. Two-income families are the new normal. Economic parity for women is a good thing. But I don't think we should rush into simplistically thinking that a female-dominated workplace will change everything and overnight make the world perfect. The bigger opportunity, and indeed an essential rethink if we are to reboot our economy, is finally to move beyond circa-1970s gender-centric ideology into a larger, more constructive conversation about how to reinvent workplace norms.

We humans, women and men alike, are hobbled by a gigantic evolutionary time lag. We have no clue how to handle 21st century cognitive threats, real life in the modern workplace. We evolved, survived, through our ability to respond to physical threat — is that a snake on the trail or a stick? Our bodies' stress hormones, adrenaline, cortisol and testosterone, among others, which raise blood pressure and send more blood to our muscles, historically made us more alert in preparation to fight or flee imminent physical threats. Whether I'm fleeing a charging lion or cowering before a screaming boss, the amygdala responds, on a basic level, in a very similar way. Deep inside we are all irredeemably super-old-school. But the reality is that emotion is far more complicated in a modern work setting than it was for our prehistoric ancestors on the savanna. Is the person in the next cubicle gunning for my job? How will I get my work done when the babysitter calls in sick? And this disconnect — this evolutionary delay in the development of more emotionally nuanced or sophisticated responses to psychological challenges — is a huge contributor to what makes navigating modern work/life so incredibly hard.

In a 2008 paper on gender differences, five psychologists — Kateri McRae and James Gross of Stanford, Kevin Ochsner of Columbia, Iris Mauss of the University of Denver, and John Gabrieli of MIT — reported that while men and women don't really differ in their basic "reactivity" to emotional provocation, they are quite different in the ways in which they respond. Based on both subsequent questioning and neural responses to aversive photos as measured by fMRI brain scans, the authors discovered no significant differences between the genders in the speed of their reactions to stimuli. But there are gender-based distinctions in how men and women were able to regulate and manage their emotional response to these stimuli. The amygdala was less activated in men's brains than in women's, and portions of the women's prefrontal cortex, the cognitive control center, were more active than those of the men. The relatively new science of emotion is beginning to pinpoint precisely the neurochemical differences between the ways women and men tend to approach and deal with emotion, and it is important neither to let PC feminist ideology or neo-Victorian "Ooh, ick" squeamishness blind us to the findings. A too-reductive men-are-from-mars-women-are-from-venus perspective serves no one.

Rather than stigmatize the characteristic emotional biologies of one gender or the other, it should be the goal of any person or organization to allow all emotion at work, in all of its gendered nuances, its full due. Understanding the truths that neuroscience is revealing will allow us greater awareness and thus control of the emotions that shape our decisions and behavior at work. Learning and paying attention to the emotions that motivate and/or hobble us and in what measure — anger, anxiety, fear, joy — can help us learn to manage and use those emotions more effectively. I'd like to think that today, with U.S. women irrevocably at work and the economy in such dire straits, that we can safely raise all kinds of questions without endangering progress. When it comes to emotions and work, we should start being more unflinchingly analytical and empirical than ever before. As science discovers, confirms, and refines new understandings of gender-based aspects of emotion, let's try not to react to them too emotionally.

Taking Your Feelings To Work

WHEN I graduated from college in 1977, the world was still neatly divided into two spheres: work and everything else. Work was supposed to be a hyperrational realm of logic, filled with timetables, organizational charts and returns on investment. It was only outside of work that emotions — so dangerously ill-defined and unpredictable — were supposed to emerge.

Anne Kreamer says that “home life, with all its messy, complicated emotional currents, has become inextricably and undeniably woven into the workplace.”

But from the first day of my first real job, as an administrative assistant at the Park Avenue headquarters of a commercial bank that is now defunct, I realized that emotions were simmering everywhere in the workplace.

My desk, on the hushed, deep-pile-carpeted executive floor, was a few feet opposite the restroom doors. (Clearly, I was lowest in the pecking order.) Every few days, one of the three executive women on my half of the floor would rush into the restroom and, after a little too long, re-emerge with the remnants of a good cry still visible on her splotchy face. I also watched men dash into the men’s room and leave a few minutes later, tight-lipped and ashen.

Even as a 21-year-old workplace neophyte, I realized that emotion is a force that underlies all of our behavior. For my book, “It’s Always Personal: Emotion in the New Workplace,” I spent two years exploring Americans’ attitudes toward emotion at work today, and my findings suggest this amended version of Descartes’s famous line: I think and feel, therefore I am.

In the old days — pre-Internet, pre-cellphones — it was a lot easier to believe “work equals rational” and “home equals emotional.” But now that work and home life constantly bleed into each other, that distinction has become anachronistic and probably self-defeating. People text and e-mail their friends and family members throughout the workday, and they receive messages from colleagues and clients on nights and weekends and during vacations.

The membranes between private life and work, especially office work, have always been porous, but today employers and employees expect accessibility and accountability pretty much round-the-clock. And whereas old-school office memos and business letters generally weren’t expected to be friendly or candid — that is, human — business e-mails most definitely are.

Conversely, what used to be considered private behavior can instantly reverberate at work through social networking. People fire off e-mails late at night, only to regret their tone and intent in the cold light of day. Facebook friends from work can stumble upon wild and crazy pictures from a bachelorette party. Tweets and anonymous mobile video uploads can instantly broadcast unflattering emotional displays by surly customer service employees or misbehaving C.E.O.’s.

The conventional wisdom used to be that we brought home the emotions we couldn’t express at work — snapping (or worse) at blameless partners and children. That is still true, but what’s new is that home life, with all its messy, complicated emotional currents, has become inextricably and undeniably woven into the workplace.

The rulebook for modern office etiquette has yet to be codified. How do we avoid hurting one another’s feelings if everything is supposed to be rational, yet also transparent and accessible? How can others understand the emotion behind what we’re trying to say in an e-mail if no one takes the time to read beyond the subject line and the first sentence?

And the more we relegate communication to the electronic realm, the greater our longing for face-to-face contact. Our new “flat” organizational structures at work might seem to promote a more hang-loose level of emotional expression. But, if anything, flatter organizations tend to require even higher levels of emotional competency and effort in order to navigate amorphous command structures.

NO one is sure where the lines are anymore. Should we high-five an underling? Is it cool to make jokes with the boss? What if we overhear the man in the next cubicle crying?

Clear rules for this new working world simply don’t exist. But one thing is certain. The Millennials, a generation raised with the 24/7 naked emotional transparency of texting and social networking, is now entering the work force by the millions each year. As they replace old-schoolers born in the 1940s and ’50s, there is no turning back to a compartmentalized world.

I like to imagine that if men and women were to express more emotion routinely and easily at work — jokes, warmth, sadness, anger, tears, joy, all of it — then as a people we might not feel so chronically anxious and overwhelmed. By denying the range of emotional expressiveness intrinsic and appropriate to the workplace, we find ourselves at a loss for how to handle this brave new boundary-less world.

Overtly acknowledging how and in what measure anger, anxiety, fear and pleasure color and shape our working lives can help us manage those emotions and use them to our benefit, both at work and at home.

E-mail: preoccupations@nytimes.com.