Check out these recent articles from around the web:

We’re making the wrong argument for a four-day workweek by Christine Emba: “When we focus on how a shorter workweek will make us better employees, we’re making the wrong argument to our bosses and ourselves. The four-day workweek shouldn’t just be about becoming more productive — the real benefit is that it would allow us to be fuller people.”

‘A Form of Brainwashing’: China Remakes Hong Kong by Vivian Wang and Alexandra Stevenson: “With each passing day, the boundary between Hong Kong and the rest of China fades faster. The Chinese Communist Party is remaking this city, permeating its once vibrant, irreverent character with ever more overt signs of its authoritarian will. The very texture of daily life is under assault as Beijing molds Hong Kong into something more familiar, more docile.”

For Americans struggling with poverty, ‘the safety net in the United States is very, very weak,’ expert says by Joe Heim with Mark Robert Rank: “We show that 60 percent of the population between 20 and 75 will experience one year below the official poverty line, which is very conservative. And three-quarters of Americans will experience either poverty or near poverty, just above the poverty line. So people ask me: Why are those numbers so large? And one of the reasons is: If you look over longer periods of time, what happens is that things occur to us that we didn’t anticipate. So things like losing a job or a family splitting up or getting sick or a pandemic occurring. When they occur in the United States there’s not a lot to protect people. The safety net in the United States is very, very weak. So when these things happen, folks are very much at risk of falling into poverty.”

We need a national paid family and medical leave program. Here’s what Congress can do by Rachel Lea Scott: “The pandemic has underscored the depth of human interconnectedness, particularly how our health is often impacted by that of our neighbors and co-workers. A robust paid family and medical leave program benefits all of us, whether or not we are ever in a position to need to use it. As people of faith, this is precisely what we mean when we talk about promoting the common good.”

‘You Just Feel Like Nothing’: California to Pay Sterilization Victims by Amanda Morris: “Under the influence of a movement known as eugenics, whose supporters believed that those with physical disabilities, psychiatric disorders and other conditions were “genetically defective,” more than 60,000 people across the United States were forcibly sterilized by state-run programs throughout the 20th century.”

How Catholic social teaching improves all ‘four Americas’ by Michael Sean Winters: “I would submit, however, that the best way to ameliorate the worst features of each of these four narratives is with the strong tonic of Catholic moral teaching, and our social teaching more specifically.”

U.S. Proposal for 15% Global Minimum Tax Wins Support From 130 Countries by Liz Alderman, Jim Tankersley and Eshe Nelson: “An effort to push the most sweeping changes to the global tax system in a century gained significant momentum on Thursday when 130 nations agreed to a blueprint in which multinational corporations would pay an appropriate share of tax wherever they operate.”

Biden’s child tax credit should be obvious. Yet the result is revolutionary. by Christine Emba: “There were sure to be fumbles in a rollout of this size, but the expanded child tax credit is a watershed movement in how we think about helping others — and a template for effective anti-poverty policy in the future.”

8 Hours a Day, 5 Days a Week Is Not Working for Us by Bryce Cover: “If everyone worked less, though, it would be easier to spread the work out evenly to more people. If white-collar professionals were no longer expected or required to log 60 hours a week but 30 instead, that would be a whole extra job for someone else. That would allow more people into positions with middle-class incomes, particularly young people looking to put college educations to use. We could even guarantee everyone a floor, a certain number of hours, at the same time that we lower the ceiling. That would push low-wage employers to fully use the people they have and not treat them as interchangeable cogs to be called upon or turned away whenever demand necessitates.”