The Wall Street Journal's Rachel Emma Silverman writes about office meetings held while standing:

Holding meetings standing up isn't new. Some military leaders did it during World War I, according to Allen Bluedorn, a business professor at the University of Missouri. A number of companies have adopted stand-up meetings over the years. Mr. Bluedorn did a study back in 1998 that found that standing meetings were about a third shorter than sitting meetings and the quality of decision-making was about the same.

Maybe stand-up meetings shouldn't be limited to the workplace:

Obie Fernandez, founder of Hashrocket, a Jacksonville, Fla., software design firm, says his team passes around a 10-pound medicine ball during stand-ups. For newcomers unaware of the practice, "it's pretty mean," he says, "but really the main thing you want is to avoid people pontificating."

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Mocking and vilifying attorneys has always been good sport. While Joseph Tartakovsky's Op-Ed piece in the New York Times celebrates Dickens's depictions of attorneys, he also points out that the very thing that is so galling to so many is actually a virtue:

But before we resign our bar licenses in shame (and I only got mine in November), let us call, for the defense, Judge Jed S. Rakoff of the Federal District Court in Manhattan. He tells me lawyers are scorned because “they think there are two sides to most stories, while many people think there is just one side: theirs.”

This reminds me of the F. Scott Fitzgerald quote: "The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function."

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It is taken for granted that sports build character. Mark Edmundson's piece for The Chronicle of Higher Education pulls apart the contradictions and forces us to face how the very nature of sports can foster the opposite of what we wish for in our children and ourselves:

Sports can teach participants to modulate their passions—sports can help people be closer to Hector than to Achilles—but they can foment cruelty as well. Athletes, as everyone who went to an American high school will tell you, can be courtly, dignified individuals. But they're often bullies; they often seek violence for its own sake. Some athletes take crude pleasure in dominating others; they like to humiliate their foes, off the field as well as on it.

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Franklin E. Zimring, author of "The City That Became Safe: New York's Lessons for Urban Crime and Its Control," argues in the Wall Street Journal that locking people up is not the key to crime reduction in NY or anywhere else:

This dependence on incarceration was linked to the belief that street crime is committed by persistent "high-rate" offenders who will continue to offend if they are not locked up. As the thinking goes, the police cannot prevent much crime because they can't be everywhere at all times. Persistent offenders will always find a place and a time to rob and assault. New York's success against crime over the past two decades has proved the wrongheadedness of the "incapacitation or nothing" strategy. As it turns out, when a police patrol prevents a robbery on 125th Street on Tuesday night, opportunistic robbers don't just find other victims on 140th Street, or try again on Wednesday night. The factors that combine to produce a mugging are situational and contingent, so if you prevent Tuesday's robbery on 125th Street, that's probably one less robbery for the year. From 1990 to 2009, while the rest of the nation increased its rate of incarceration by 65%, New York ...

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As our criminal justice system arrests, prosecutes, and incarcerates more than ever, teenagers and young adults are losing their futures before their brains are fully formed. Alison Gopnik, in the Wall Street Journal, describes how the teenage brain isn't ready for adult decisions:

How does the boy who can thoughtfully explain the reasons never to drink and drive end up in a drunken crash? Why does the girl who knows all about birth control find herself pregnant by a boy she doesn't even like? What happened to the gifted, imaginative child who excelled through high school but then dropped out of college, drifted from job to job and now lives in his parents' basement?

The more we learn about the brain, the more we discover that we are expecting too much from teenagers:

Recent studies in the neuroscientist B.J. Casey's lab at Cornell University suggest that adolescents aren't reckless because they underestimate risks, but because they overestimate rewards—or, rather, find rewards more rewarding than adults do. The reward centers of the adolescent brain are much more active than those of either children or adults. Think about the incomparable intensity of first love, the never-to-be-recaptured glory of the high-school basketball championship.

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