Bloomberg needs to chill out. Is he so driven by the Puritan work ethic (ie, not working is the primordial sin) that the sight of a game would force him to fire an office worker over Solitaire?!

This sad story pins together several threads from books I’ve been reading… In Daniel Pink’s A Whole New Mind: Moving from the Information Age to the Conceptual Age the argument is made that “play” (along with stuff like storytelling, empathy, symphony, etc) will be a critical attribute as we move toward a society driven more by right-brained sensibilities. Both, taking the time to play as a means to rejuvenate and as a means to gain new experiences/skills. Pink suggests that those who can master the sense of play will get ahead of those who don’t.

Further, in Work to Live: The Guide to Getting a Life, there’s extensive discussion of productivity myths and the need to get away from the mentality that working hard means you are suffering (like one Ford assembly line worker from the ’30s getting fired because he smiled)…

Finally, while I’ve yet to read it, I’m sure The Play Ethic: A Manifesto for a Different Way of Living will have a few interesting points to make on this topic…