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Is it Tim or an AI?
I generated an audio file of my voice reading one of my articles. About half the paragraphs in the file are my actual voice, and about half are computer generated. Please listen to this and guess which paragraph is in each category. Thank you!
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In 2016, I started to feel I was struggling at work.
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Until then, my journalism career had been going well. I was one of five Washington Post writers who had followed Ezra Klein to Vox Media to help start Vox.com in 2014. The next year, Vox gave me a positive performance evaluation and a 14 percent raise.
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But in the fall of 2016 things started to go downhill. My editor started telling me I was too slow to cover important stories on my beat. In early 2017, after a management reshuffle, editors started asking me to change my beat altogether. Instead of writing about broad trends in technology and the economy, they wanted me to become a Silicon Valley beat reporter.
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I didn’t like this idea, in part because I had no idea how to get Silicon Valley scoops from my desk in Washington DC. Amid escalating tensions, I reluctantly started looking for a new job. I wound up back at Ars Technica, the publication I’d worked for before I went to the Washington Post.
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At the time, I wasn’t sure what had gone wrong. But in retrospect, I think an important factor was the birth of my first child in November 2015.
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On paper, Vox’s policies were very family-friendly. As a new father, I was offered 12 weeks of paternity leave. I had unlimited vacation time and no one ever gave me a hard time about leaving early for daycare pickups.
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Still, Vox had a workaholic culture. Almost everyone—including me pre-baby—worked a lot more than 40 hours per week. Back then I’d spend the workday writing short pieces about breaking news and interviewing sources for longer pieces. Then I’d spend evenings and weekends writing those longer stories.
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Our baby’s arrival changed everything. My wife is a doctor who frequently works nights and weekends, so my nights and weekends were usually devoted to child care. I managed to keep up with the piece-a-day pace Vox expected of all its writers, but I could no longer spend my off hours doing in-depth research and writing. The quality of my work suffered as a result.
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In the five years since I left Vox, I’ve increasingly “leaned out” of my career. Around the time our second child was born, I asked Ars Technica to cut my hours by 10 percent. Then last year, shortly after the birth of our third child, I quit that job to start Full Stack Economics. It meant a big pay cut, but being self-employed gives me unbeatable flexibility.
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In recent years, I’ve done the bulk of the child care, laundry, dishes, and other domestic chores. This has enabled my wife to work 50 to 60 hours per week and make three to four times as much as me.
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I’m far from the first parent to tell a story like this. But most of the time it’s the mom who steps back from her career when a baby arrives. Because of that, some feminists seem skeptical of the very concept of an unequal division of labor within households.
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But I think that’s a mistake. If we want a more equal society—and I do—we’re going to need more households like mine. Households where mom is the main breadwinner and dad does more than half the child care.
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