Mothers of grown kids probably won’t get breakfast in bed or some kind of craft made out of macaroni  for Mother’s Day this Sunday, like they did when their kids were little.  But mothers of older teens and twentysomething deserve appreciation, too! Because parenting an adult can be hard work.

Diapers and tantrums come with the territory of motherhood.  But if you happen to be the mother of a twentysomething, you know that your mothering duties hardly ended when your child turned 18.  Today’s parents of millennials are helping their kids navigate college papers, job-hunting, finding a place to live, and all the other thorny issues that go along with emerging adulthood.  This is the stage of parenting no no one ever told you about.  Jeffrey Jensen Arnett and Elizabeth Fishel write about this stage, and how you can help your child through it, in When Will My Grown Up Kid Grow Up?.  Here are the top things parents of emerging adults worry about, according to a survey the authors conducted:

• Money: 48 percent (I’m still waiting for him/her to become financially self-sufficient)
• Occupational progress: 39 percent (Will s/he ever get off the couch and find a job?)
• Substance use or abuse: 36 percent (I wish s/he partied less)
• Educational progress: 27 percent (It seems as is s/he’s been in school forever)
• Romantic life: 19 percent (I think s/he could do better)
• Sex life: 9 percent (I prefer s/he not share a bed with a partner in our home when I am there)

Parents: they never stop being parents. This Mother’s Day, take a second to appreciate all your mother did to raise you…and everything she continued to do after you thought you were already raised.

Most cheery sign that spring is in the air? The Washington Post Magazine‘s seventh annual Peeps Show contest has named its winning dioramas.  Among the honorees are a recreation of Life of Pi, pointillist-style Peeps a la “A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte,” The Shining as reinterpreted in marshmallow, a glimpse into the Peep-Pope’s retirement… and a whole lot more.

Peruse these Peeps–especially the top five winners–at the Post website.  And if your sweet tooth craves Peeps, Peeps, Peeps all year long, check out Workman’s Peeps Show calendar, available for 2014, and featuring the best of Peep Shows I through VI.

Last week, reporter Nate Thayer posted an e-mail chain between an editor at The Atlantic and himself, in which The Atlantic asked if he would be willing to adapt a story he’d written for another outlet for their website, for free, and Thayer declined. The argument behind writing, or doing any kind of freelance work for free, is that it offers good exposure. But as Thayer pointed out, exposure doesn’t pay the bills. For more debate about freelance writing and payment, check out this Branch discussion, this GigaOM response, one writer’s explanation of why she writes for free, Alexis Madrigal’s editor’s view on the whole matter, and a whole lot more ruminations on the subject.  And what does Sara Horowitz, founder of the Freelancers Union and author of The Freelancer’s Bible have to say about working for free?  The answer is “it depends.”

Working for Free: Should You?

Let’s re-frame the discussion surrounding procrastination. Yes, it’s a bad habit, but if you’ve gotten this far as a procrastinator, chances are you’re probably not going to change.  Instead, let’s think about all the fringe benefits.  After all, procrastinators tend to accomplish quite a lot while they’re putting off other things, and meanwhile, tasks they don’t accomplish sometimes disappear.  John Perry, emeritus professor of philosophy at Stanford, delves into the hidden upsides of dawdling and dallying in his new book, The Art of Procrastination.

If procrastination is an art, like the painter who favors watercolors, we all have our medium of choice. Putting things off is tough at a deadline-driven place like Workman, but this is an industrious group, so we manage. Here’s how Workmanites procrastinate:

I make “to do” lists. I also spend a lot of time researching things that I don’t need to know about.
—Raquel

Favorite techniques include:

- organizing my desk
- cleaning out my personal email inbox
- commenting on my friends’ kids’ cute photos on Facebook
- cleaning out the refrigerator
- cooking pretty much anything
—Andrea

It’s really important to “check the news.” If I’m going to procrastinate, it has to be under the guise of work, so I’ll go to NYT, Daily Beast, Huff Po, Atlantic. Then I should really check in with my “authors” on FB. Just quickly. And then there’s always the AWESOME Workman blog. That’s my absolute favorite productive procrastination site.
—Mary Ellen

Snacking! Making lists including things I’ve just done and crossing out the latter to make me feel better!
—Carol S.

No question here. Watching “Say Yes to the Dress.” On TiVO, no commercials, 20 minutes tops.
—Suzie

I tend to procrastinate in ways that seem somewhat productive, so that I don’t feel horribly guilty about it afterwards. One of my vices is reading the news—I’ll read the same few stories as presented on multiple websites (everything from The New York Times or the BBC to io9). I also have a tendency to read whatever I’m organizing, so that filing or cleaning out the magazines under my bed can take ages!
—Sarah G.

Nothing beats touching each pile of paper in my office at least once, beginning with the hope that one pile can be dealt with, before the realization that the piles can always be productively moved from place to place. This can be repeated endlessly.
—Peter

I am a master procrastinator! I usually watch TV, even if it’s a rerun I have already seen. With Netflix, you can watch old shows and procrastinate for hours!
—Kate

I’m infamous for my to-do list, no matter how much I actually follow it. It doesn’t look like I keep my priorities straight…but it sure feels good when I get to check something off. But you want to know my poison, and it’s TV, because it doesn’t matter how many times I have seen the “WE WERE ON A BREAK” episode of Friends, or how many fat women Al of Married with Children has offended (after all he is a shoe salesman), they never stop being funny and making me laugh and what better distraction is there than laughter?
—Marisol

Thanks for your email asking about our procrastination techniques! I’m generally a pretty on-the-ball person, so I thought I’d go ahead and answer you straightaway. That may seem counterintuitive: I’m not generally one to procrastinate (as evidenced by my prompt response to your email), so what could I possibly have to say on the subject? Well I don’t know that this necessarily applies, but I thought I’d share regardless, in case you or your blog readers have some use for it. Often when I find myself without something to do—or at least without something pressing; there may be other things on my to-do list, but they’re typically not urgent, or I’d be doing them!—I like to check my email. I’m subscribed to a number of mailing lists, so I get countless email blasts throughout the day, each of them promising a few brief moments of entertainment, and a much-needed respite from work or whatever else I may be doing. Many of these emails are essentially ads, corporations touting their various products and services. But I don’t mind! I like to see what the ever-expanding online marketplace has to offer, preferably five to eight times a day. I’ve also put my name on a number of petitions supporting a particular political candidate, and his team sure has been sending out a lot of emails lately! I like to stay informed so I read each and every one of them top to bottom. Most of them end with “Would you consider making a donation?”, which I sometimes do (this is another favorite pastime), and sometimes I just click on the link to see how close they are to their fundraising goal. If I’m feeling really generous I click “Tweet this Link” so that my Twitter followers know whom I support, and can make a donation too, if they so desire. This reminds me that I also spend some of my non-essential time on Twitter. But mostly it’s just emails. Reading emails, deleting emails, and sending emails—especially sending emails. I have friends flung across the country—the world, even!—and email is a great way to keep in touch. One of my sisters lives in Tennessee and the other in Michigan, so I email them sometimes. Just the other day I got an email from a friend in France, so I answered him (promptly), and now we’re engaged in a very nice email dialogue. I check in on that conversation every hour or so, just to see if he’s responded. (It’s hard for me to keep track of the time difference—he could answer at any time of day, and I want to be there when he does!) And I email other people too, but I won’t go into that now. The point is that I read and write emails a lot. It’s a digital world we’re living in and I just think email is the way of the future!

That’s what you asked, right?
—Avery (who gets either a gold star or a scarlet P for this)

I suddenly get really, really conscientious about cleaning, organizing, and/or recycling anything in the vicinity of the work area.
—Bruce

It seems the only time I clean is when I have work to do. If I have a big project (a freelance project), I suddenly have time to dust, vacuum, organize my closets…
—Sarah S.

It feels good to admit it—everyone’s a procrastinator.  Well, almost everyone (this was the very first response I got, naturally):

Procrastination doesn’t even enter into the equation. There’s so much to do that every day is just an exercise in triage.
—Michael

And then there’s the next-level procrastinator, who puts off procrastination itself. A true master:

Can’t we discuss this next week?
—Eric

Happy procrastinating! New Yorkers, don’t miss author John Perry at The Strand later this month.

With August in full swing, soon it will be time for the school year, and for high schoolers, that means standardized tests!  Workman just published a new edition of Up Your Score: The Underground Guide to the SAT, the for-students, by-students strategy guide for kicking multiple choice butt.  Guest editor of the previous edition Alan Hatfield (now a Princeton student) talked to our new guest editor, JaJa Liao (soon to be a Yale freshman), about test taking tips and life after the SAT.

Alan: Congratulations on your new role as the next guest editor of Up You Score! I’m so excited to meet you and I know that you’ll do a fabulous job. I’ve been on the job for a couple years now and I’ve had a great experience, getting to do a host of promotional projects, such as a radio drive, managing the FB and Twitter pages, and making an appearance on network TV.

JaJa: First off, thanks! I’m really excited about the experience ahead of me, and hopefully I’ll do a good job. So, for the readers out there, tell us about yourself (aside from the perfect score)…

Alan: I just finished my freshman year at Princeton University, which kept me on my toes, and also gave me an amazing opportunity to meet fascinating people, most of whom have amazing SAT scores and are brilliant at at least one thing. I danced on the Bhangra team, wrote for a student magazine, and competed on the Model UN Team, all of which required a lot of time to balance with my classes and the Up Your Score stuff. Your turn!

JaJa: Congrats on finishing your freshman year while doing so many extracurricular activities. I’ll be entering Yale this fall and looking at double majoring in either Chemistry/Anthropology or Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry/Anthropology though I am open to other combinations. What’s your major and what are you up to this summer?

Alan: I’m planning on majoring in public policy with possible certificates in Near Eastern Studies, East Asian Studies, or possibly Computer Science. As for the summer, I’m going to Nanjing, China for two months to teach English.

But back to Up Your Score. I’ve had a blast working with the book and I realized that taking time to reflect on the test itself gave me some crucial insights that I think are important to focus on when helping guide people’s experience with the test. Practice is CRUCIAL. I can’t emphasize this enough. The test is constructed with a specific purpose and in a specific way, meaning that there’s a definitive structure to the questions that I think can be intuited after taking enough practice questions and practice tests.

JaJa: I totally agree with you that the SAT has a definitive structure that can be decoded once you become familiar enough with it after practicing. Adequate practice allows you to see the pattern of questions that occur on the SAT, which I find only has a few tricks up its sleeve with a few variations. Personally, I found it extremely helpful to answer questions based on the magic “if.” I thought of questions in my head like “if I were a test maker, which one of these options would I have put just to trick people?” and “if I were a test maker, what am I trying to test by asking this question?” etc. I also feel that on multiple choice tests such as the SAT, you don’t necessarily need to know the material 100% to get the question right, but you do need to have good strategies. I’d love to hear your testing philosophy.

Alan: I definitely agree with your thoughts on strategy over knowledge. The SAT isn’t a test of knowledge by any means, it’s more a pressure-under-fire type of endeavor. With enough time any student can eventually come to the correct answer on any question the SAT throws at them, the only obstacle is time. That’s why I’m a big advocate of thoughtful and deliberate first-runs through questions.

I feel like testing philosophies that advocate some kind of prioritization or “skipping” of difficult questions can sometimes be counterproductive to students, because they prompt the tendency to rush or at least only half-heartedly commit to questions that may look intimidating or difficult from the very first glance. I’m much more an advocate of a testing philosophy that focuses on self-confidence in the sense that starting from the idea that for every student taking the test the correct answer is definitely attainable, students should treat every question as do-able.

JaJa: Another tip that I think is pretty helpful is to not overthink the questions. If you think about it, the SAT’s difficulty is not high at all. This is especially true for the math section. If you ever took Algebra I and Geometry, you will know all of the concepts on the math section. A lot of people freak out when they see the math section for the first time because the ETS purposefully words questions awkwardly to make things a bit more challenging. In reality, there are only so many topics that the ETS can test you on, so what I recommend for the math part would just to go over the topics thoroughly if you find that you keep on missing the same kind of problems. For example, if you discover that you are always stumped by the probability questions, just skim through a short textbook lesson on probability instead of skipping over it. Over time, you will find that there is a kind of pattern that reoccurs. This way you will be ready next time to solve all kinds of probability problems.

Alan: That’s enough test talk for today. Nice to meet you, and good luck staving off the Evil Testing Serpent!

JaJa: Thanks, I’ll try to follow in your footsteps. Viva la Up Your Score!

April may be the cruelest month, but it’s also National Poetry Month. In honor of the month that’s almost lost and gone, let’s celebrate the art of losing before it’s too late:

One Art
by Elizabeth Bishop

The art of losing isn’t hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.

–Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident
the art of losing’s not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

When you were a kid, the first day of Spring-like weather probably meant it was time to dust off your bike and take a spin around the neighborhood.  But we’ve come a long way from those carefree days.  As cycling becomes more popular, especially in big cities, it brings with it some unexpected downsides, many of which Grant Petersen takes on in Just Ride, his book about opting out of racer culture and into enjoying your bike the way you did as a kid.  Petersen is the founder and owner of Rivendell Bicycle Works, and a well-known figure in the bike world.  His argument?  “A lot of the advice you’ve been getting ever since you became a bike rider is flat-out wrong and is actually bad for your health.”  Just Ride is against all of the following: helmets, carbohydrates, biking as a way to lose weight, and wearing silly riding outfits. Well, he’s not exactly against those things, but Petersen has some unconventional opinions about them.  If you’ve ever ridden in the bicycle lane, rode in a charity race, or watched the Tour de France (or, as Petersen calls it, the BORAF, for Big Old Race Around France), you’ll want to read what he has to say.  The book comes out in May, and until then, the Atlantic has an excerpt to tide you over.

Photo by Librado Romero/The New York Times

If you’ve ridden a New York City subway lately, maybe you’ve noticed an elongated illustration depicting a wide array of commuters. The print is by Sophie Blackall, our very own author of Missed Connections, and it’s part of the MTA’s Arts for Transit initiative. This weekend, according to news reports, one subway rider admired the illustration so much that he tried to steal it, with a screwdriver! He was quickly nabbed by a plainclothes police officer who happened to be standing nearby. Ms. Blackall was flattered by the attempted heist, but other fans should note that there are more lawful ways to obtain her work: the print itself is available at the Transit Museum’s store, and Missed Connections, a collection of illustrated love stories, can be found at bookstores everywhere.

Though it was much beloved around Workman’s editorial department, until recently To Marry an English Lord, originally published in 1989, was out of print, and, we feared, forgotten. Then, like like the appearance of a long-lost cousin or a wealthy American heiress on a soap opera to save the day, fate intervened. On January 19th of this year, the New York Times ran an article celebrating Edith Wharton’s 150th birthday as well as the cultural moment that, thanks in part to Downton Abbey, women like Wharton–late 19th century and early 20th century heiresses–seem to be enjoying. And right there in the article’s second paragraph was To Marry an English Lord, by Gail MacColl and Carol McD. Wallace, cited as one of Julian Fellowes’s inspirations for creating Downton Abbey.

Workman jumped at the chance to re-release the book, and now it’s available once more, with a redesigned cover and the same juicy stories of real American heiresses taking on the British peerage: women just like Lady Grantham, who left the nouveau riche-distaining Gilded Age United States for the greener pastures of England, and brought her fortune, which saved the estate of Downton Abbey, with her. The difference between an earl and a “mere sir,” a thorough explanation of entails, the roots of Anglomania–it’s all there, and more, in To Marry an English Lord, a sure-fire method of keeping yourself occupied until the third season of Downton Abbey airs next year. Find the book here, or check out an excerpt of the book here.

The dreaded March SAT test date is upon us this Saturday.  Whiz kid Alan Hatfield, who scored a perfect 2400 on the test and went on to guest edit the 2011-2012 edition of Up Your Score (that’s him in red on the cover), joins us with some tips in this guest post:

It’s the week before the SAT. You’ve spent weeks, if not months, poring through reams of vocabulary flashcards and meticulously reviewing your subsection scores on practice test after practice test. By now, you should have a good idea of which sections you’ve made the most progress in and which sections are your strong suit. So how do you make the most of the final sprint?  Over the course of the next few days, take some time each night to go through practice questions from your two weaker subsections. If you have or can find some practice tests, go through individual sections each night, focusing on simulating a testing atmosphere. This means you should be giving yourself just as much time as on the real test, just to make sure that you’re ready for the rigors of fast test taking. Focus on being comfortable while working in a rushed manner, since your most valuable weapon on test day will be a clear and focused mind along with confidence in your answers.

Once you hit Thursday night, spend a couple hours going through practice questions from all three sections. You don’t have to time yourself: Just focus on developing your unique pace, answering questions only as fast as you can confidently and completely. By this point, you will be able to predict the various kinds of questions you’ll encounter, so practicing with individual questions as opposed to sections will be your best option.

On Friday night, take a half hour to go through a few individual questions from your weakest section, but make sure you don’t take a full practice test. You’ll want to save your energy for Saturday morning, so eat a full, healthy dinner and after your short review session, blast your theme song to get yourself psyched. By the time you wake up on Saturday morning, you’ll feel comfortable and confident. The rest will be history.

For a more comprehensive study plan, check out Up Your Score!  Good luck to everyone taking the test Saturday–may you hit the triple-800 jackpot.