For some people, an out-of-office message is a simple one-line email. For others, it's an opportunity to make a grand statement about the relationship between work and life. In 2018, Marina Koren reported on the emailers who auto-delete all new messages while they're on vacation. When she first learned of the trend, she was indignant: The choice 'seemed to flout all the rules of email that we, as an internet-based society, had imposed on ourselves and others.' But that may not be a terrible thing, she realized. Others use their out-of-office emails to either apologize profusely for time away or highlight their indignation at being tied to work or the internet in the first place. In 2024, Lora Kelley argued for the 'goldilocks theory of out-of-office messages.' 'When it comes to sending a note informing people that you will not be available, it's okay to simply say that,' she wrote. However you decide to tell people that you're going away, transitioning between vacation and regular obligations can get complicated. Today's newsletter rounds up stories about stepping away from daily life and then coming back to it....

What makes work valuable' Michal Masny, the NC Ethics of Technology Postdoctoral Fellow in the MIT Department of Philosophy, investigates the role work plays in our lives and its impact on our well-being. Masny sees numerous benefits to work, beyond a paycheck. It's a space for people to develop excellence at something, make a social contribution, gain social recognition, and create and sustain community. 'Work is both necessary and positively valuable,' he argues, further suggesting that our lives might be worsened if we were to eliminate work completely. 'There can be optimal combinations of work and leisure time.' Masny is completing his two-year term in the NC Ethics of Technology Fellowship at the end of the spring semester. In addition to advancing his research, Masny has been working to foster dialogue and educate students on issues at the intersection of philosophy and computing. This semester, Masny is teaching an undergraduate course, 24.131 (Ethics of Technology). Masny advocates for an updated approach to educating complete, socially aware students. 'I want to create scientists who think about their projects and potential outcomes as lawyers and philosophers might, and vice versa,' he says. Masny argues for the importance of eliminating the 'wisdom gap' between these groups, citing scientist Carl Sagan's warning about the dangers of becoming 'powerful without becoming commensurately wise' as scientific and technological advances continue....

Philosophy majors rank higher than all other majors on verbal and logical reasoning, according to our new study published in the Journal of the American Philosophical Association. They also tend to display more intellectual virtues such as curiosity and open-mindedness. Philosophers have long claimed that studying philosophy sharpens one's mind. What sets philosophy apart from other fields is that it is not so much a body of knowledge as an activity ' a form of inquiry. Doing philosophy involves trying to answer fundamental questions about humanity and the world we live in and subjecting proposed answers to critical scrutiny: constructing logical arguments, drawing subtle distinctions and following ideas to their ultimate ' often surprising ' conclusions. Students who major in philosophy perform very well on tests such as the Graduate Record Examination and Law School Admission Test. Studies, including our own, have found that people who have studied philosophy are, on average, more reflective and more open-minded than those who haven't. Yet this doesn't necessarily show that studying philosophy makes people better thinkers. Philosophy may just attract good thinkers....

When a woman's clothes constrict her movement, squeezing her into unforgiving shapes, or her exercise regime is a punishing ordeal meant to winnow her down to the smallest possible size, the result is all too often an alienation from her body. This week, we published two book reviews that offer a different way to think about the physical self'one that replaces an obsession over surface appeal with an emphasis on functionality. My colleague Julie Beck's essay on Casey Johnston's new ode to weight lifting argues for seeing your body as a working object, rather than an enemy to be subdued; so does Julia Turner's article about Elizabeth Evitts Dickinson's new biography of the fashion designer Claire McCardell. This philosophy might seem, to some, like wishful thinking: Narrow standards of beauty, whether they dictate body size or one's fashion sense, remain powerful in many settings. But Johnston's memoir of her journey toward strength training describes how, as she built muscle, she also began rejecting a deeply ingrained internal voice warning her against gaining a single pound. Beck, who describes trading in punishing turns on the elliptical for lifting, writes that the decision transformed her relationship to her body. As she notes, lifting 'builds up instead of whittling away; it favors function over aesthetics'; strength training has changed the way she walks, erased nagging pains, and allowed her to lift her carry-on into the overhead bin on airplanes with ease....