Connor Hughes

Send questions about the office, money, careers and work-life balance to workfriend@nytimes.com. Include your name and location, or a request to remain anonymous. Letters may be edited.Ethics of Self-PreservationI am in a senior position with a marketing agency that is in bad shape. Employees are on reduced hours and pay because our work has slowed substantially. The owners pledged to get new work but have not made any moves in that direction. I’m looking for a new job, and I’ve seen some very appealing openings with current clients. I’d be a great candidate, because I know many of the players,…

At the start of 2024, investors expected the Federal Reserve to cut interest rates substantially this year as inflation cooled. But price increases have been surprisingly stubborn, and that is forcing a rethink on Wall Street.Investors and economists are questioning when and how much Fed policymakers will manage to cut rates — and some are increasingly dubious that Fed officials will manage to lower them at all this year.Inflation was coming down steadily in 2023, but that progress has stalled out in 2024. The Fed’s preferred inflation index climbed 2.8 percent in March from a year earlier, after stripping out…

In her three decades of working with elephant seals, Dr. Marcela Uhart had never seen anything like the scene on the beaches of Argentina’s Valdés Peninsula last October.It was peak breeding season; the beach should have been teeming with harems of fertile females and enormous males battling one another for dominance. Instead, it was “just carcass upon carcass upon carcass,” recalled Dr. Uhart, who directs the Latin American wildlife health program at the University of California, Davis.H5N1, one of the many viruses that cause bird flu, had already killed at least 24,000 South American sea lions along the continent’s coasts…

“If workers in Chattanooga get a great contract, a big raise, better health benefits, and then the same thing at Mercedes, there will be a lot more good opportunities to win good contracts in short order,” said Madeline Janis, co-executive director of Jobs to Move America, a group that seeks to create good jobs in clean technology industries.Ms. Janis, whose group is involved in unionizing factory workers in the South, said the momentum could travel beyond the auto industry to other manufacturers because employees at different companies in the region often know one another and discuss these issues. “Their brothers…

Many more people are jumping from one streaming subscription to another, a behavior that could have big implications for the entertainment industry. More information