Work is a Verb A newsletter by There is a message sitting in my LinkedIn inbox from someone I have never met. It is friendly. It mentions a post I wrote and says something reasonable about it. It asks for nothing at all. I already know what the second message says. So do you. Everyone has been on both ends of this, if not on LinkedIn then in every sales email that opened with a compliment before it got to the point. The friendly "loved your post" note does not read as a compliment. It reads...
11 days ago • 4 min read
Work is a Verb A newsletter by Last week, walking my dog Biba back from the mailbox, I found an actual letter. Handwriting on the envelope. It stopped me mid-step: that old warmth of being thought of by someone who wasn't in the room. Strange, because a letter is about as far from "being in the room" as communication gets. You write, you wait days, they read it alone... and it still did exactly what CEOs insist only an office can do. A letter takes real effort to produce. Someone sat down,...
18 days ago • 3 min read
Work is a Verb A newsletter by The Ladder Broke. Then It Got Longer. Landing a remote job in 2026 is genuinely harder than it used to be, especially if you're early in your career. Two new 2026 papers explain why, and together they make a case worth hearing: the fight is still worth having, and not just for the reason you'd expect. One team of economists found remote work is quietly closing the door on junior hires. A separate team found that once you're through that door, remote work is one...
24 days ago • 3 min read
Work is a Verb A newsletter by Your CEO Misses the Applause Someone actually measured it. For five years, the return-to-office (RTO) argument has been made in the language of output. Productivity. Culture. "The energy of being in a room together." Those explanations have always felt a little thin, and a team at Wharton decided to look underneath them. Marissa Shandell, Courtney Elliott, and Adam Grant studied more than a thousand leaders across three studies. They measured narcissism the way...
about 2 months ago • 2 min read
Work is a Verb A newsletter by Knowledge work has a problem. Remote work got the blame. One number went viral at the start of June. Remote work, the headlines said, explains 64 percent of the rise in unemployment for young college graduates. A companion paper tied remote work to a third of the post-pandemic rise in mental distress. The prescription floated through the coverage like a given: bring everyone back. Most of the coverage skipped the fine print. The 64 percent is a preliminary...
about 2 months ago • 3 min read
Work is a Verb A newsletter by Nothing earned is lost. A recruiter told me last month she almost messaged a candidate to ask for a cleaner resume PDF. She didn’t, because she could tell the application came from an AI apply tool. The candidate stopped being a candidate. Now flip the camera. Somewhere, in a kitchen, refreshing LinkedIn for a notification that isn’t coming, sits the candidate. They paid for the tool that sent that application. They paid for the next forty it sent this week....
2 months ago • 3 min read
Work is a Verb A newsletter by What do you do when you've blown your annual budget by May? A quick note before we get into it. Work is a Verb isn't an AI newsletter, and it isn't going to be one. But every week, readers tell me some version of the same thing. They're worried. They've been laid off, or they're watching their team get smaller, or they're reading another headline about how the role they spent a decade building is going to be automated by Christmas. The fear is real, and the...
3 months ago • 3 min read
Work is a Verb A newsletter by Most Interviews Measure Polish, Not Performance Long interview processes are exhausting. I’ve been on both sides of them, and I genuinely couldn’t tell you which is more stressful. As companies try to hire more for skill and make better judgment calls on motivation, communication, and working style, the instinct is usually the same: add more steps, more panels, more hoops to jump through. It feels rigorous. It also does not seem to work very well. Robert Half...
4 months ago • 3 min read
Work is a Verb A newsletter by Token use is the new seat time. At many companies, AI success is being tracked through usage dashboards: tokens consumed, seats activated, prompts per employee, weekly activity by team. Those numbers keep rising, and that growth is often presented as proof that a real transformation is underway. Usage, adoption, effectiveness, and leverage are different things.A company can have high usage without changing how work gets done. It can integrate AI into daily...
4 months ago • 2 min read