Watch: Break in Case of Emergency

The soul-crushing workplace is all too familiar for most people who have ever worked in an office. Never-ending meetings, narcissistic bosses, passive-aggressive coworkers, indecipherable jargon, and projects that never accomplish anything — for many employees, those are just the facts of office life. And that’s only what happens at work. For women navigating changing gender roles and the quest to have it all, workplaces from hell are only the beginning of their troubles.

Break in Case of Emergency, the new novel by Slate Features Editor Jessica Winter, tells a hilarious and incisive story about the struggle to survive a toxic workplace and build a meaningful life as a woman in 21st-century America. Join us for a happy hour conversation with Winter, along with panelists Latifa Lyles and Rebecca Rosen and moderator Josh Levin, on feminism and work-life balance in policy and pop culture. What can an office satire teach policymakers? How does popular culture complement, or undermine, policy debates? And how much can policy do to change workplace culture and gender roles — and make work a little more bearable? 

Follow the conversation online using #InCaseOfEmergency and by following @BetterLifeLab.

Participants: 

Jessica Winter 
Author, Break in Case of Emergency 
Features Editor, Slate 

Latifa Lyles
Director, Women's Bureau, U.S. Department of Labor 

Rebecca Rosen
Senior Editor, The Atlantic 

Moderator: