MICHAEL MALONE WRITES that working at home isn’t as glamorous as you might think:

There’s a video of me, when my kids were young, sitting in a rented house in Oregon on vacation. Barney is on the television, my boys are having a pillow war all around me, my wife is vacuuming, and I am on the couch with my laptop writing a New York Times column, oblivious to the noise, flying objects and general chaos around me. Somehow, over the years, I learned how to focus — despite almost having flunked out of college because I was incapable of studying while wearing music headphones. Can you do that?

Read the whole thing. But the photo accompanying his article is certainly glamorous! Oh, wait, he addresses that: “In truth, real life working at home is to those glamor stories as real life home offices (empty coffee cups, magazines on the floor, overstuffed waste baskets) are to the photos that illustrate those articles.”