One Friday afternoon 10 years ago, Andrew Heaton, then a cable-news writer, joined his colleagues for a meeting. The show's producer asked the staff to keep an eye on their email over the weekend in case they needed to cover a breaking news event. No one seemed to mind'working full days in person while remaining on call in the evening and on weekends has always been a standard practice in the news business'but Heaton had a simple request. He said he would be happy to go in but asked if his boss could call him on the phone instead of emailing him. He didn't want to spend his time off continually monitoring his inbox for a message that might not even come. 'It would have been just me, tethered to my phone all weekend, checking email for no purpose,' Heaton, who now hosts a political podcast, told me. 'I think it's a very valid request that you just call me so I don't have to dedicate 10 percent of my brain to this job forever.' Heaton was onto something. In the United States,...
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