There was great joy in Mudville this week: “Random Acts of Business,” the essay I wrote to launch Work Stew back in 2011, was re-published in The Huffington Post. It’s located in a section called ‘The Third Metric,’ which focuses on “redefining success beyond money and power.”

It’s been a great thrill to introduce Work Stew to a larger audience, and my main hope is that my ‘HuffPo bump’ will bring more voices into the mix.

New to the Stew? Not sure what it is?

Work Stew is a forum for frank talk about work, both at a personal level (‘What should I do with my life?’) and at a societal level (‘Why are things the way they are?’ ‘How do we want them to be?’).

For a taste, check out the essays and interviews that are already in the Stew. To add an essay of your own, or to suggest a guest for the podcast, please send me an email: kate@workstew.com.

In other news…

New essays are in the works. In the meantime, some Work Stew readers gathered around the water cooler (i.e. Work Stew’s Facebook page) to flex their writing muscles in a mini-contest that ran through the Thanksgiving weekend. (As many of you know, Work Stew holds one major writing contest per year, but that one—involving 800-word entries and $1,500 in prize money—wrapped up in September. This new contest unfolded over the last few days of November.)

This was the task: write a story (fiction or non-fiction) that uses the words “work” and “Thanksgiving”; keep it under 200 words; and post it as a comment on the Facebook thread announcing the contest.

A $50 prize for the story with the most ‘likes’ by 9pm (West Coast time) on Sunday, December 1 was awarded to…Helen Tosch. Congratulations, Helen. I loved your pathos-laced tale of a vegan Thanksgiving in Manhattan—and so did the voters.

To play in the next such contest, consider subscribing to Work Stew (by entering your email address in the field at the bottom right of the site). These informal writing exercises tend to be spontaneous affairs and, by getting an email alert, you’ll be less likely to miss out.

Unfamiliar with Work Stew’s Facebook page? Here’s a selection of the newsy tidbits you’ll find there:

• Using periods to complete your sentences is starting to look aggressive.

• Mandatory workplace cheer—it’s a thing.

• The mayor of Reykjavik has quite possibly the best ‘career path’ story of all time.

• A CEO is more likely than, say, a nurse to be a psychopath.

• Workplace dress codes can get so complicated.

• Buckyballs—”the world’s best selling desk toys”—are being discontinued.

• Seismologists in Italy were sentenced to prison for failing to predict an earthquake.

• You can make up to $100,000 a year diving for golf balls.

• Career re-entry after taking time to be a stay-at-home parent is in fact really, really hard.

• Aspiring to be a wide achiever may be more satisfying than aiming to be a high achiever.

• And Cal Newport says we shouldn’t sweat so much about following our passions.

These types of stories are posted (almost) every day on Work Stew’s Facebook page and via Twitter. I seek them out, because reading about other people’s work lives—no matter how distant they are from mine—helps me to ponder my own career conundrums in more creative ways.

Please feel free to chime in with your own finds and thoughts at any time. I stir the stew, but it’s the many morsels from far and wide that make it rich.