Editor’s letter

Since the end of the first Covid wave, we have heard from annoyed bosses about how important it is that we get back to the office. That demand finally seems to be ebbing. At this point, managers have passed through the first three of the five stages of grief—denial, anger, bargaining—and are somewhere between depression and acceptance. Many U.S. businesses have settled into a status quo of more or less hybrid work. Overall, that’s been great for workers, who save on commutes and child care. Full disclosure: It has certainly been great for me. But it has also, in some ways, been disappointing. One of the promises of remote work was that it would shrink the outsize role that a small number of cities play in American life. It didn’t. I live in one of those cities, New York, and have in some sense reaped the benefits of the growing power of the metropolis. Yet it still makes me deeply uncomfortable.

In this issue we highlight the story of the madcap efforts of

The Wall Street Journal’s Chip Cutter to commute weekly from his home in Ohio to the office in New York (see Best business columns, p.34). There is one thing noticeably missing from it: any recognition from his bosses that there are advantages to having a writer live in Ohio. This is not unique to the Journal.

The story would be much the same at most news organizations, most tech companies, most advertising agencies, and most publicpolicy think tanks. The communications revolution was supposed to bring about an era of decentralization. In fact, we’ve seen the opposite, and even the accelerants of Covid and remote work haven’t changed that. Many organizations are sending a message that it’s fine to work mostly at home, as long as home is in or very close to one of five or six cities on the coasts. Just about everyone in the country can see what’s wrong with that, except, oddly, the people who are supposed to be at the center of the action.

Mark Gimein

Managing editor