Essays on ✰Vicki Boykis✰

Favorite Books of 2025

Fri, 26 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Favorite books of 2025

Another year where my technical content consumption outpaced the non-technical, and as a result, as usually happens, I’ve been feeling a lack of inspiration in my technical work. I strongly believe that if you do anything with code, you should be reading more fiction than non-fiction. Hoping to break that chain next year!

In writing these up, Ialso realized that most of these books are also not happy or easy books to read. I generally struggle through serious books, but all of these were enormously important for me this year.

I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman - We are placed in a surreal, alien world, where there are no men. An unnamed narrator lives in a prison cell, surrounded only by women and their memories of the outside, the life before they were abducted and taken to the prison. The book chronicles their escape and life on the alien planet, but it’s less about the plot and more about the philosophy of what it means to live in a society. I was deeply moved after I finished the book and had many more questions than answers.
Chess Story by Stefan Zweig - This short story can be read in one sitting. I strongly recommend this edition of the book, it is beautiful and makes you feel like you’re reading real literature. It is about a chess master on a ship who encounters a passenger who plays chess as well as him. The reason why this rando is so good at chess turns out to be extremely sad and important. The writing is clear and the plot moves with enormous speed. Like with “I Who Have Never Known Men”, this book made me think less about the events of the book and more about what our role is in society as free, thinking human beings.
I Love Russia: Reporting from a Lost Country by Elena Kostyuchenko - I read this book when it was released by Meduza, and I’m so happy there’s now a translation. Since then, the book has been featured on a bunch of best-of lists in English. Kostyuchenko is an enormously skilled journalist, now in exile. She is surgically precise with details and connections and words, and moreover, she is extremely empathetic with her subjects. She describes Russia during the rise of Putin as an enormously complicated, cruel place that also happens to be her homeland, the place of her family, culture, and first experiences. There are no easy answers in her articles and essays.

The story that struck with me the most is the longform reporting she did about the Nganasan people who live in the deep Siberian north, in the small, remote town of Ust-Avam, which can only be reached by helicopter. They have gradually and curelly been disenfranchised, stripped of their hunting grounds and traditions by successive Soviet and Russian governments. I had to put the book down several times because of how hard it was to read, and yet I came out of it being very greatful I read it.
Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan - Everything Claire Keegan writes is simply a banger, I read two of her books this year and would recommend both of them. Every word she picks is the correct word at the correct time, about the correct person. From the first paragraph, we are immediately in cold, rainy Ireland in the fall, and we are just as uncomfortable as the book wants us to be.

In October there were yellow trees. Then the clocks went back the hour and the long November winds came in and blew, and stripped the trees bare. In the town of New Ross, chimneys threw out smoke which fell away and drifted off in hairy, drawn-out strings before dispersing along the quays, and soon the River Barrow, dark as stout, swelled up with rain.

Elena Knows by Claudia Piñeiro - Elena’s only child, her daughter Rita who lived with and cared for her, is found dead in the bell tower of their local church. Elena, who riddled with the ravages of Parkinson’s, must find Rita’s killer, even though she can’t walk more than a few steps most days. This book is about our obligation to care for others in our society, and a society that doesn’t make space for people who are alone, or older, or simply different. In addition, Elena is a hardened and wry narrator, someone you’d love to spend an afternoon with, which makes what’s happening to her all the more tragic.

Favorite Books of 2024

Wed, 01 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Favorite books of 2024

Like last year, I spent a fair amount of the year reading code and technical books. Every year I have this struggle. There is a lot going on in machine learning and engineering and I need to stay on top of it.

Yet, I also need to read fiction because if I only read tech books, they take away my creative energy rather than grant it, as fiction does. Fiction allows me to understand other points of view, transports me to universes of inner lives and dialogues of people who are so very different from me. Fiction empowers and gives hope. I consider reading fiction critical to a well-balanced and open mind.

So, what do? This year, I managed a pretty good balance of fiction and arts books to technical non-fiction by picking up a fiction book every time I finished a tech book. Hopefully this will continue in 2025.

Here were my favorite reads:

Cathedral of the Sea by Ildefonso Falcones - One of the biggest recent creative impacts of my life was a trip I took to Barcelona in 2023. After that trip, inspired by the general vibe of the city and a visit to the Picasso museum there, I finished both Viberary and my embeddings text. After I came back, I started reading a lot about Barcelona, Spain, and the people who lived there. I read Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia, Grape, Olive, Pig, the selected writings and art of Joan Miro, and Leigh Bardugo’s The Familiar.

Early this year, a friend gifted me Cathedral of the Sea, which is a sprawling historical epic about the construction of Santa Maria del Mar in Barcelona. While reading it, I realized I had visited the cathedral, and was profoundly impacted by both the story and the history of the church. Reading this book led me to writing the keynote I gave at PyCon Italia in May, so in addition to being an enormously juicy historical read, it also leaked into my real life in an incredible way.
A second complementary book was Life with Picasso by Françoise Gilot, which I strongly, strongly recommend to anyone looking to understand the complexity of human choices (also taking place mostly in Spain/southern France.) When Picasso met and courted Gilot, he had already been divorced a handful of times, had baggage, was a notorious womanizer and notoriously difficult as a human being while also being the greatest artist of his generation. Knowing all of this, Gilot decided to enter a relationship with him. This book is a testament to all of the consequences of living with history while at the same time trying to remain human. Gilot herself was a very, very talented artist, and the book chronicles what it’s like to become a mother, an artist, live with the consequences of a relationship with someone who is unforgiving and removed from the world, all with a wry sense of humor.

Françoise Gilot, Étude bleue

Our Share of Night by Mariana Enríquez - I was struck to the bone by this book. I thought about it for many weeks after I read it and even had several dreams about it. It’s hard to explain because there is a lot going on, but at its core, the book is about Argentina’s historical memory of repression, about the relationships and contracts we have as parents to children and children to parents, about the limitations of friendship, all cloaked with the horror of the occult. There is a secret organization, the Order, that practice the occult and try to ask of supernatural forces the things that people always want from the supernatural: money, success, and most of all, immortality. The means by which Darkness grants this to them are horrifyingly cruel, though, and almost no one survives them. Into the order is born a child, Gaspar, to a Medium of the order, Juan. The book is about how Juan navigates his powers as a medium, tries to protect Gaspar, and then, in turn, how Gaspar protects himself.

The book is sprawling, covering Buenos Aires, London, Africa, the Argentinan hinterlands, all the places of the earth where human ambition stretches and is shrouded in tension, mystery, magic, and some summoning scenes that I can’t get out of my head. The tension the author builds throughout the book is incredible and masterful, almost as powerful as the Order itself.
The Rattle Bag edited by Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes - In an age of LLM-generated poetry and machine learning curation (even coming from yours truly sometimes), it’s refreshing to have real people who love poetry curate it and show you what you need to read to touch grass. Seamus Haney, Ireland’s poet Nobel Laureate and Ted Hughes carefully curate a collection of poems that you need to read straight through to feel their effects. Or open a random page and read one whenever you want to feel human.
The Tombs of Atuan - My only regret is that I came to Ursula K. LeGuin so late in life, and this might be my favorite of all of her books I’ve read so far. A girl is picked to be a priestess in a decaying shrine to an old religion. What will she do when she realizes everything she has trained for is a sham? What powers does she have? I cannot emphasize how much power, meaning, and empathy is packed into this, which is supposed to be a YA book. Aside from everything else that had struck me, in the new afterward to the book, was the following quote.. “The word power has two different meanings. There is power to: strength, skill, gift, art the mastery of a craft…and there is power over: rule, dominion, supremacy, might, mastery of slaves, authority over others.” I’ll be thinking about this quote for a long time.
The C Programming Language - I’ve finally gotten to the point in my career where I can appreciate the elegance of this book. I took the summer to learn C and went through a course where the author (Dr. Chuck!) read through this book page by page. Everything that is good about technical writing and solid programming flows from this book, and while I don’t recommend it for beginning developers, there perhaps is a time in your career when it’ll be ready for you (and you for it), too.

Favorite Books of 2023

Tue, 26 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Favorite books of 2023

This year, I managed to read more than last year, but I was still pretty caught up in technical learning and unfortunately didn’t reach the fiction-non fiction balance I wanted (I always try to read more fiction than non-fiction.)

Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver - By far my favorite book of the year. The premise is, “What if David Copperfield, but set in the 1990s in Appalachia at the start of the opioid crisis, and narrated by a modern 10-year old?” The narrative voice is amazing and the plot manages to loosely cover David Copperfield and translate the issues of poverty and addiction to the modern day. It not only is sad, but contains humor, wit, and wry observations that are not cloying. I can’t stop thinking about this book and how skilled the author is to take us inside Demon’s mind.

The Outlaws by Javier Cercas - This book, translated from Spanish, covers the years of Spain after the Franco dictatorship but only obliquely hints at them. Instead, it focuses on the town of Girona. Girona is now famous for being one of the places that Game of Thrones was shot, but in the early 80s, it was the scene of a lot of crime and poverty. The book follows a group of teenagers who don’t fit in, for various reasons, and, as a result, turn to crime, and how the implications of that crime follows all of them over the course of decades. Lots of grappling with what it means to grow up, morality, and the role of the legal system in reforming or harming a human being.

Becoming a Technical Leader by Gerald Weinberg - I’ve read and recommended Weinberg before and recommend him yet again. He wrote about what it means to be a technical leader even before there was a technical leadership industry and his advice is both sharp and empathetic and carries through the decades.

The Last Interview by Anthony Bourdain - There are some people who I often wish were still alive so I could have their take on things. Anthony Bourdain is one of these. His observations about the world are razor-sharp and entirely spot on, and he doesn’t spare anything or anyone for the sake of the truth, but you come away feeling enlightened rather than chastised - he is in on the joke with you and you are sitting at a table together, chatting amiacably every time you read one of his essays.

Tomorrow and tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin - A gut punch of a book, beautiful and lyrical. It’s about two friends starting a video game company and I don’t know anything about video games but the author’s research and passion drew me in. It’s about a lot more: about what it menas to have creative agency, about friendship, about love, loss, and about our role as the hero in our lives.

The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue - Addie makes a deal with the devil in which she is immortal but in exchange people forget her almost as soon as they see her, which leads to all kinds of problems living in society. A wonderful idea for a book and brilliant execution as she lives from Medieval France to modern day. I found myself cheering for Addie the whole way.

Olga Dies Dreaming by Xochitl Gonzalez - Olga grows up in the Puerto Rican community in New York and becomes enormously successful as a wedding planner, but cannot manage her own relationships, particularly that with her absentee mother and her brother. A rich book brimming with life and imbued with both the flavor of New York and the American dream, and of the hopes and fears of Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria.

I also read a ton of technical books last year, but the most impactful one for me was Neural Network Methods for Natural Language processing by Yoav Goldberg. It covers all of the fundamentals of what is important in large language models today, fundamentals which, if you don’t understand coming into this work and the blur of the industry today, you will be lost.

Leggendo Wohpe

Fri, 06 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Leggendo Wohpe

You can buy Wohpe on iBooks, for now the ebook here, on Kobo here, and soon on Kindle.

There are very, very few people who are both excellent engineers and excellent communicators; so rare, in fact, that I can count them on one hand:

Paul Ford, whose writing about technology was my first hint that technology is something you could write about in both a thoughtful and not serious way
Paul Graham’s earlier works, don’t need to expound here, but I think about maker’s schedule on a regular basis
Ellen Ullman, whose elegance in writing about how humans and computers work together is something I can only aspire to
Maciej Cegłowski, the founder of Pinboard, whose essays convinced me that data is as much of a liability as it is an asset, and who taught me how to write for technical audiences

As someone who spends her life straddling writing code and prose, I am always on the lookout for technical people who are also writers, to see how they divide the time between technical work and writing, and honing this skill in myself as well.

Last year, antirez, who I consider to be one of the greatest developers I know, finished writing something - not code, but a novel, Wohpe, and he asked me to beta-read the English translation of Wohpe.

I spent the last few weeks of 2022 reading the English version of the book. We then tweaked it together, fiddling with words and sentences, sometimes even going back to the original Italian, until they fell into place.

antirez says about writing the book that,

I believe the most sharp difference between writing and programming is that, once written, edited and finalized, a novel remains immutable, mostly. There are several cases of writers returning on their novels after several years, publishing a bug fixed version of it, but this is rare and, even when happens, a one-shot process. Code evolves over time, is targeted by an endless stream of changes, often performed by multiple people. This simple fact has profound effects on the two processes: programmers often believe that the first version of a system can be quite imperfect; after all there will be time to make improvements. On the other hand writers know they have a single bullet for every novel, to the point that writing prose is mostly the act of rewriting. Rewriting sentences, whole chapters, dialogues that sound fake, sometimes two, three, or even ten times.

Collaborating with someone on writing is, in some ways, very similar to code: you have something, you want to refactor it. But the way you do it is very different from code. In code, you have to agree on the laws of physics: if you write non-optimal code, the computer will tell you, your network will tell you, and the people downstream from you will also tell you. There is some give and take between what “good” code means, but everyone agrees that good code looks a certain way.

In editing, things are more fluid. There is no version control. You work together in a game of give and take between your shared experiences of what “sounds” right, the flow and vision of the book, and the viewpoint of the author. Your job as an editor is to make the author the best version of themselves they can be, and as Bob Gottlieb puts it, get out of the way.

This glorification of editors, of which I have been an extreme example, is not a wholesome thing,” he once told The Paris Review. “The editor’s relationship to a book should be an invisible one,” he said then and believes today. “The last thing anyone reading Jane Eyre would want to know, for example, is that I had convinced Charlotte Brontë that the first Mrs. Rochester should go up in flames.” He insists editing is neither an art nor a craft. It’s just “what I do,” he says. “I’m not an abstract thinker. I don’t think, really — I just react, which is what editors are supposed to do.”

My contribution is tiny compared to the Herculean task of first dreaming it up, writing it in Italian, then translating it to English; nevertheless, I am so thankful to have been part of it. It was so much fun.

The novel itself is about the rise of neural networks far more complicated than those we see even today and how they shape the world of the future, and how people react to them. Here’s how it starts:

What’s even more interesting than the plot itself is that a novel is like an intimate conversation with someone and how they view the world. You get a first-row seat to their mental model of the universe, and that is immensely cool and gratifying.

antirez says, about writing code,

I write code in order to express myself, and I consider what I code an artifact, rather than just something useful to get things done. I would say that what I write is useful just as a side effect, but my first goal is to make something that is, in some way, beautiful. In essence, I would rather be remembered as a bad artist than a good programmer.

It is this level of thought and attention to beauty and the craft of writing that is evident throughout the book: the putting together of plot points and ideas that move the plot forward, of trying to really understand the impact of the actions we as humans are taking now and how it might impact our children, of the debate between whether AI is conscious or not, of what could be.

I’m so excited that the book is now out in English, and I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed reading and thinking about it.

Argentina Trip

Thu, 05 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Over winter break in 2022, my husband, my oldest daughter and I went to Argentina to see the country and visit my friend. We spent four days in Buenos Aires, the capital, and four in Bariloche, a small resort town that nestles the Andes foothills in Patagonia on the border with Chile.

Our Airbnb in Palermo, Buenos Aires

I wouldn’t describe the trip as relaxing: it was a really grueling flight: 2 hours’ drive from our house in Philadelphia to JFK, then 10-hour flight to Buenos Aires, and then another 2-hour flight from Buenos Aires to Bariloche, and all the way back again.

It was especially hard with an almost eight-year-old even though she is an amazing traveler and has MUCH more patience than I did at her age (and now, too!) But it was definitely one of the most interesting vacations I’ve ever been on, and I learned a lot about something that is entirely outside of my personal experiences, and that’s why I travel.

Vamos Argentina flag in Buenos Aires

I was surprised to learn that Argentina, like the United States, was founded and built by immigrants particularly from Italy. As a result, Argentinian culture is permeated with Italian influence in its food, its place names, its Italian-influenced Spanish, and culture.

Typical Buenos Aires cafe culture, amazing coffee and medialunas, a national pastry

If I had to describe Argentina in one picture, it would be this.

And, we also learned that it also has one of the largest Jewish populations outside of Israel and the United States (For those interested, I recommend this very good Buenos Aires Jewish history walking tour which for us came with piping-hot pumpkin knishes.) One of the constant themes of this tour was living memory, whether it was meaningfully remembering the 1994 AIMA bombing, which still has not been resolved, or talking about the tens of thousands of people who have been disappeared during the secretive cruelty of Argentina’s dictatorships.

Synagogue in Buenos Aires

Because of this fusion of cultures and flavors, Buenos Aires is an immense, sprawling metropolis that is Latin American at first glance, but an enormous combination of ethnic influences once you look slightly deeper. We walked over 14 miles and probably covered 20% of it in its entirety.

Recoleta Cemetery, where lots of celebrities and statesmen are buried, including Evita

There is plenty to do, including a children’s science museum (The Not Allowed to Not Touch Museum), a Japanese garden, and of course an entire museum devoted to Eva Peron. There are beautiful parks, including the Ecoparque where animals like maras roam free.

Empanadas, the national Argentinian pasttime

In between, there is an amazing food and coffee scene and it’s not entirely uncommon to find people sitting for hours talking about everything (in our case, we overheard mostly conversations about, of course, futbol.)

Because I love books, I also pleaded with my family to indulge me and stop by El Ateneo Grand Splendid, constantly rated as one of the best bookstores in the world because it used to be a beautiful theater.

Bariloche is a completely different city with a completely different energy. It was built by Swiss immigrants in the late 19th century, and stepping off the plane, it does feel a little like you’ve alighted on Zurich.

The air is cool, crisp and fresh, even in the summer, and, flying in, you can see the mountains even from the plane. There are lots of birds, both from the mountains and the nearby lake, Nahuel Huapi.

We were kind of dreading the flight, but to be honest the way there and back was one of the easiest trip experiences we’ve had, something that was made even easier by the fact that we flew in December, Southern Hemisphere summer, when the weather was perfect.

Bariloche is amazing for any kind of nature anything you want to do, and we did plenty of hiking around Bariloche and also walking around the Colonia Suiza., as well as driving around the lake and just oggling the scenery.

One of the coolest parts (and there were a lot) was that our visit coincided with Argentina winning the World Cup, so the energy in the country throughout our visit was off the charts. Messi’s face was plastered everywhere: on advertisements for banks, internet providers, on busses and in small bodegas. When we from Buenos Aires landed in Bariloche, the plane erupted in cheers, and then song. The whole country was on holiday.

The plane that we took back from Bariloche to Buenos Aires was apparently the plane that the Argentinian team took back from when they won the World Cup, and everyone in the terminal took pictures near it.

All of this was a particularly nice break since all the latest news from Argentina has been bleak and about its runaway currency, and the situation is, indeed, not great. Argentina has always been in inflation, but as I write this, the rate of inflation is about 92%. What does this mean practically? As a tourist, you are going to have to carry around a lot of 1000-peso notes and pay in pesos whenever possible so that you can get the best exchange rate, of which there are two, the official one you get at the bank and the unofficial one you get if you exchange elsewhere. The implications for Argentinians in navigating day-to-day economic life are much more stressful.

It’s impossible to understand an entire country in eight days, especially when you’re only a tourist, but if I had to describe my impressions of Argentina they would be, “Aggressively multicultural, loud, vibrant, independent, and a country that requires patience from everyone who visits and lives here,” and I strongly recommend you check it out (and send me some medialunas while you’re there.)

Sorrentino

Sun, 30 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000

I have been doing so much learning and growing at work over the past year that I have entirely neglected an important part of my life.

I am an avid reader, I love art, and I love thinking about technology as more than just code, but as an expression of humanity. At least, I used to. Every single brain cell I had went to learning this year. But in focusing purely on technical implementatation, I felt empty inside. It’s my belief that, in order to produce good, well-rounded knowledge work of any kind, we need to be connected to both the hard sciences and humanities, and I completely failed in that this year.

And so over the winter holidays, I closed my work laptop and I watched movies and read books and listened to music. Instead of producing code, I consumed art.

In doing so, I stumbled across the films of Paolo Sorrentino, an Italian director who became acclaimed when “La Grande Bellezza,” The Great Beauty, won the Best Foreign Film Oscar in 2014.

Sorrentino’s directorial style is very demanding on the viewer, in no small part because his films are 2+ hours long, and for me, with the extra work of subtitles so I can’t just zone out on my phone, as I do when I’m usually watching TV.

His movies are long and meandering and often centered on the main character going on a journey and finding a truth about themselves within the lens of the world.

Sorrentino is justifiably famous for his films’ consistent visual beauty, their combination of quirky narrative, oddball protagonists, and spectacular image. All of his films feature long mobile takes in which the camera swoops around for no apparent reason, with close-ups of unusual faces or objects cut into the flow.

There is, eventually a point to the movies, but it takes them a long time to get there. In the meantime, you can just enjoy the visual scope.

La Grande Bellezza is about Jep Gambardella, an aging journalist and theater critic in Rome, who essentially just wanders through the Roman social circuit for the entire movie.

Not much happens - he meets people he knows, interviews people, falls in and out of love, and eventually is inspired to write a new book. But just as important as the character of Jep is the character of Rome - lush, luxurious, quiet, ancient, grand, and demanding. I came away from the movie feeling like I had worked through something unspoken and latent but important, which is why I imagine it was so popular when it came out.

Sorrentino’s latest movie, “È stata la mano di Dio”, It was the hand of God, in reference to Diego Maradona’s 1986 FIFA World Cup goal against England as a part of Naples’ football club, where he scored an impossible winning goal using, accidentally, his hand.

It’s about a lot more than that, though, of course. Mostly, it’s about Sorrentino’s own childhood, Naples in the 1980s, growing up extremely suddenly, and making sense of random senseless acts of the heavens, aka “the hand of god”, in our own lives when it happens.

The movie opens with a mysterious encounter between a beautiful woman (Luisa Ranieri) at a bus stop, and a man who claims he is San Gennaro, the patron saint of Naples. (The other, unofficial patron saint of Naples is the Argentine soccer star Diego Maradona; the movie’s title refers to his description of a goal he scored in the 1986 World Cup.)

The surreal, hallucinatory images of that opening sequence, including the portrayal of a mythical figure called the Little Monk, which echo throughout the film, are techniques that are characteristic of Sorrentino’s work, but also, he said, tropes that are deeply true to his hometown.

More pictures here.

I can’t do justice to describing Sorrentino’s style. His movies are are extremely slow, atmospheric, touching, and elevate the viewer to a higher level.

In watching both films, something I realized was that one of the things I liked about them was that I didn’t entirely understand what was happening, or where the movie was headed.

I was watching these movies just as omicron was ramping up and schools were closing and events were being moved and half the people I knew and loved were sick, once again throwing the mental model I had created of how to navigate my world into confusion.

During this time, it was a comfort to have these works of art which were also puzzling and where the answer was, ultimately, just like the end of this plague, vague and unknown. But Sorrentino made me feel like, wherever we were headed, even if it was into the deep, mystical unknown, that we headed there with grace, beauty, and a deeper feeling of connection to the world around me, and for that, it was worth it.

My Favorite Books of 2021

Sun, 02 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000

This year, just like last year, I got pretty distracted, both with the panedmic, and with work, which I did a ton of technical reading for. As a result, I didn’t get to nearly as much fiction as I wanted to.. But I still found a few really high-quality reads that I’m still thinking about as the new year begins.

Piranesi by Susanna Clarke - I cannot overemphasize how good this book was. Clarke’s sprawling original fantasy classic, Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell is a book that has remained in my top ten books of all time decades after I’ve read it, so I was very, very, very excited to see this come out.

Piranesi is a wonder, a jewel of a book, suspenseful and sad and hopeful and interesting. It is extremely atmospheric. I don’t want to describe it without giving it away other than to say we meet the narrator as he is in a ruined castle with the tides coming in and going out, and as the camera zooms out, we learn more and more about him as a person, and why he is in this castle. I have zero personal time and I read this book in one day. This book is a testament to the true power of fiction over us.

The Pyschology of Computer Programming by Gerald Weinberg - This is a must-read for anyone working with computers and thinking about teams, team dynamics, and how to produce code. It covers every single thing we talk about in industry today. If you can get your hands on a hardcover, do it and mark it up.

Wool by Hugh Howey - I’m a little late to this one (like ten years late?) but this dystopian fiction about people living below-ground in an enormous silo takes a while to get started and then really gets going. I thoroughly enjoyed escaping to a dystopia different than the one we currently live in.

The Dutch House by Ann Patchett - If you have not read anything by Anne Patchett, this is the one to start with. She is an enormously skilled writer and has written so many different books about the dynamics of what it means to be human, differently. This is a lush, sorrowful, meaty deep dive into a family who buys a beautiful house and grows and shrinks with the house. If you like books where houses are characters (much like Rebecca,which I also DEVOURED this year), this is a wonderful read.

The Overstory by Richard Powers - Who knew books about trees could be so good? This is a saga about what it means for us to live with trees, and with ourselves. Trees are boring right? No, they talk to each other , they grow, they build, they learn. I learned SO MUCH about trees and began to view my external environment differently after reading this. And now I want to learn more about them before it’s too late.

The Pisces by Melissa Broder - This is such a fun, sarcastic, juicy read, about a woman who falls in love with a merman. It’s very sensual, and yet never takes itself seriously at all. I laughed out loud in more than one place. Broder is a very keen observer of the modern human, and moreover, the modern woman, and at the end of the book, you’re not quite sure who you should be rooting for, but you’re glad you came along for the journey.

Veggie Borscht Recipe

Thu, 30 Dec 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Every week, I make soup for the family and it usually lasts 3-4 days. This week while I was on break, I made borscht and a couple people expressed interest in the recipe, so here it is, as best as I can approximate it.

Most of the Russian recipes I make are very much based on guess work and basically watching my mom make them and then making them over and over again. This one is modified to be meatless, but you can add in meat to the pot at the beginning to cook and make it more flavorful and fatty.

Ingredients:

1 medium-sized beet
Halfish of a bag of baby carrots
One small head of cabbage
One small can of tomato paste
One onion
5-6 large potatoes
Some dill
2-3 tablespoons of Vegeta
Salt
Vegetable oil
Sour cream

Tools:

Soup pot
Small frying pan
Knives/cutting board
Grater

Process:

In a soup pot:

Take a large soup pot, fill it up about 3/4 with water, and set it to boil.
While the water is heating, take an onion, chop off the ends and peel it, and throw it into the pot to add flavor.
While that’s all happening, peel and chop the potatoes into fairly reasonable pieces (one piece should be the size of half a finger) and put them into the soup water.
Do the same with the carrots.
Take half the head of small cabbage, cut into thin strips, and also put into the soup.
Add 2-3 tablespoons of Vegeta and some salt and stir thoroughly.

In a small frying pan:

Take some vegetable oil (2-3 tablespoons?) and spread it around the bottom so that there is enough to fry in.
Open the small can of tomato paste, take half of it, and start frying it in the oil.
Take the beet, cut off the ends, peel it, and take the grater and start shredding it into the frying pan where the tomato paste is already frying. The pieces should be the size of shredded cheese pieces, and you can do the whole beet or 3/4 of it, whichever you get tired of first.
Mix the tomato paste and shredded beet together in the vegetable oil thoroughly.
after about a minute, transfer the mix from the frying pan to the soup pot and mix all together until your soup is nice and red.
Wait for the water to boil and then simmer for 15 minutes until all veggies are thoroughly cooked.
Chop up some dill and sprinkle liberally on the soup.

Serving:

Take the cooked onion out of the pot and throw it out.
Put some soup in a bowl and then mix in a tablespoon of sour cream for flavor.
Enjoy!

My Favorite Books of 2020

Fri, 16 Apr 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Reading was really hard going in 2020. I was home with two kids of a good chunk of the year and worried that the world was ending the rest of the time. When I did read, I wanted to read things where people who were competent solved problems. I didn’t want to read about (unattainable) travel or anything that felt like life moving foward, and I didn’t want to read anything about the apocalypse. So it was a slog.

I didn’t even meet half of my reading challenge.

All that said, here were my favorites for the year.

New Deal Photography by Taschen Press - Is it cheating to make my first book a photography book? I bought this at Barnes and Noble in January 2020, the last time I was at a physical bookstore, and got this unassuming volume on super discount. It showcases the work of the United States Farm Security Administration’s photography program, which hired a number of photographers to go out and take pictures of America. You can see all the pictures on the website, but the book does a great job talking about the historical context, the way the photographers worked, and then getting out of the way and letting you reflect on the pictures. I might have to now buy more photography books.

Thinking in Systems by Donella Meadows I am huge, huge on systems thinking and I strongly believe that, in today’s world, it’s the only way to navigate the news and explain what’s happening. In tech, especially, understanding how systems work is an absolute must. This book does an amazing job creating a framework helping readers understand how to think about a system, its inputs, what changes act upon it, and its outputs, and apply that mental model to things in the real world.

The Culture Map by Erin Myer - I read this right around the time I started working at Automattic, which is not only a distributed company, but also international in nature. To date, although I’ve worked with any number of different people, I’d worked predominantly in an American business culture.

This book, while overgeneralizing at times, has a good basis for understanding how different business cultures perceive, for example, punctuality, the ability of everyone to participate in decisions and reach consensus, and a lot more. The main takeaway is that different things matter in different business cultures and even just understanding that fact will help you communicate more clearly. I’ve lost track of the number of times I’ve recommended it this year.

Memories of my Childhood by Lidya Chukovsky - Kornei Chukovsky is arguably the most beloved Russian children’s author of the last 100 years and has been in heavy rotation at our house as we raise (now two!) young kids to be Russian speakers.

But when he wasn’t writing rhyming books for toddlers, he was a very serious literary critic, caught in the crosshairs of politics in the after-revolution years, carrying a very heavy mental load. Here, his daughter, Lidya, writes about what it was like to grow up with one of the premier literary giants of the Russian 20th century. Only, he wasn’t that for her, he was a dad, to her and her two brothers, and they grew up sailing in the Baltic Sea, climbing, reading, and going on adventures. She writes with love and reverence, but notes at the beginning of the book, “Everything in this book is true, but it is not the whole truth”, and I’ve been thinking about that phrase for a long time.

Very Important People by Ashley Mears - I’m not going to lie, I bought this book exclusively because of its cover, but man was it good. So, so good. It talks about the economy of club life, the role of women in it, how society props up this economy, how women both benefit and suffer as a result of it, and of course, about hip people at clubs. Strong recommend.

Lionness - Golda Meir and the Nation of Israel by Francine Klagsbrun - I’ve read a ton about Golda Meir at this point, but most of it has been overwhelmingly positive. What I love about this book is that it describes the enormous role that Meir had in Israeli politics and all the difficulties she overcame, while at the same time also acknowledging that she was a very difficult person herself, had a lot of imperfections, and made a lot of very hard tradeoffs (never seeing her family, having a bad relationship with her ex-husband, leaving her parents behind in America, ignoring the Israeli feminism movement and sacrificing her health) to get to the top. It also really describes the kind of qualities that are important in a leader, much better than any business book I’ve read.

What we've lost

Thu, 24 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

This started as a Twitter thread, but one of my long-time goals has been to not put stuff in Twitter threads, so here it is in longer form. Hopefully this is the start of a nice return to blogging for 2021!

A few days ago, I was putting together our physical photo album for 2020. I do this every year because I’m terrified that I’m going to lose all of our photos into the digital ether.

I usually am happily nostalgic when I put these albums together, but this year, I was filled with infinite sadness as I started on January and February 2020. I couldn’t bear to flip forward, knowing that everything from March onward would collapse.

A stream of photos that started out as normal - ringing in the new year with family, swim practices, nights out - ended with endless images of the four of us, at home, alone together. Making breakfast. Taking endless walks. Making lunch. Frantically trying new crafts. Passover, on Zoom. The baby’s birthday, with the grandparents in the backyard on a picnic blanket. (For my daughter’s first birthday, we had 50 people at a restaurant.)

A whole universe of options, collapsed and imploded.

What should we have done differently, had we known? Taken more trips? Scheduled more play dates? Laughed more?It doesn’t matter. 2020 is almost at an end and hopefully with it the beginning of the end of this hideousness.

The overarching theme of tragedy this year - and there are a lot of tragedies, multitudes, just universes of tragedies, of death, of job loss, of silent and unspeakable endless grief - is that we were all, one way or another, robbed of a year of our already impossibly short lives on this round blue sphere.

The ultimate loss is the loss of time, time with other people, time on earth. Because we can never get that back.

To not end on a negative note, there is this phrase in Russian, “черная полоса”, a black streak, a period of bad luck. I strongly believe that nature works in such a way as to always counteract these streaks, and we are not quite, but almost at the end of the lowest point of our current streak, the tunnel of 2021 weakly shining a small, but ever-growing light, up ahead.

My Favorite Books of 2019

Wed, 01 Jan 2020 00:00:00 +0000

This year, I knew I wouldn’t have a lot of time. The first half of the year, my pregnancy took a lot of time away from me in the form of body-numbing exhaustion. After working and taking care of my daughter all day, I simply collapsed into bed and fell asleep at 7 at night.

In the second half of the year, my baby was born, thus taking away all of the other time I had.

But in between those moments, I read like crazy. I squeezed in reading whenever I could. Lying in the darkness in bed near my phone. Listening to books in the car. Putting aside the laptop after work and reading. Laying sprawled out in my pregnancy pillow. Feeding the baby at 3 in the morning.

As a result, I read 106 books this year. I usually don’t recommend reading volume, instead going for quality, but what I’ve found is that the more I read, the more good books I find, and that only about 10-20% of the books I read in any given year are any good.

So, without further ado, here’s what I read this year and what I loved. Full reading challenge list here.

Permanent Record by Edward Snowden

Snowden is, in my mind, one of the most important thinkers about Modern Internet Things. He’s lived and understood what the architecture of the modern internet really means through painful experience. I’ve written before that his revelations have changed how I see the internet.

There is a lot to love about this book, including the revelations themselves, but mostly, the beauty of this book is learning about Snowden as a human being, his thoughts, beliefs, and formative experiences growing up, as well as his opinions on where we need to go, now that we’ve royally messed it all up. What I was impressed about most was the depth of his conviction in the fact that the internet ultimately can be used for good, if we let it.

I could not put this book down through the parts where he described how he got the data out of the NSA facility in Hawaii.

There’s No Such Thing as Bad Weather by Linda Åkeson McGurk

There is this whole genre of book that is on the rise after Bringing Up Bebe (which I also loved!) that details how different cultures do parenting, and I’m all about it, as long as you take them with a grain of salt.

McGurk grew up in Sweden, where kids play outside all the time, regardless of weather, and she wonders why that’s not the case in the United States, and how we can make it so. A lot of the concerns she outlines are things I think about all the time - how most American spaces aren’t walkable, how kids don’t go outside to play in the snow, how illness is perceived, and so on.

Of course, we can’t make America like Sweden, because it’s not Sweden. But there are a lot of good ideas we can take away, and that’s really all we can ask for from a book.

The Elephant in the Room by Tommy Tomlison

This was an extremely touching and realistic read about a man’s struggle to lose weight. To be clear, there are a LOT of weight loss books. A Lot. And the loser ends up being a Crossfit champion who runs marathons and eats healthy every day.

This book is not that. This is about a continuing struggle against both the author’s personal psychology of associating comfort with food, as well as pushing back on the enormous culture that tells us we need to be eating all the time, as well. Tomlison is an extremely skilled journalist who doesn’t elicit sympathy for the sake of sympathy - he is actively trying to change something here, and examines current America in the process.

Darius the Great is Not Okay by Adib Khorram and With the Fire on High by Elizabeth Acevedo

I’m not huge on YA in general because I feel like a lot of it is now just political for the sake of being political instead of actually telling a good YA story and, as a side effect, it takes a critical look at our culture, but these two books really hit the spot.

Both are, as YA usually is about outcasts. But they’re very different outcasts. Darius is half-Persian (Iranian) and gets made fun of for being Persian in America and American in Iran when his family has to go for an unexpected trip. He has a hard time dealing with his dad, and also with his own depression. In spite of what I just described, the book itself is not depressing, it’s full of humor and cultural observations and all sorts of good family stuff that teenagers usually deal with.

With the Fire On High is about Emoni, who had a teen pregnancy and is now trying to finish school on her own terms while living with her grandma in (my fair city!) Philadelphia. Emoni wants to be a chef, and the book is about her growing up and out of her problems while taking care of her daughter and learning how to be an adult. It’s full of spirit and -yep - heat.

Born a Crime by Trevor Noah

Honestly, based on all the clips I’ve seen of the new Daily Show, I haven’t been impressed with Trevor Noah as a host, so I’ve been avoiding this book because I thought it would be shallow and self-serving. I couldn’t have been more wrong. This book blew me away with nuance, heart, and an examination into a life that couldn’t be more honest and up-front with the reader. A strong recommend and candidate for discussion.

Things that Make us Smart by Donald Norman

This book was written in 1993, and it’s still 100% relevant today. Norman talks about what computers should do, and what people should do, and I have so many pages highlighted in quotes. I strongly believe that this (and every other book Norman wrote) should be required reading for anyone who gets paid to work with computers all day.

The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury

I’m kind of a hesitant Bradbury fan in general, because his work is really good, but really morose, and this is no exception. We’re dropped in the middle of a hypothetical trip to Mars, when humans finally figure out how to get to the Red Planet, and over the next 100 years or so of human trips to Mars, their impact on the local ecosystem, what it means for humans to travel, and so on. This book is weird, weird fiction, and it shouldn’t be taken as individual stories, but it’s excellent to look back on as a whole and reflect what it means for people to go to space, resources, privacy, and all of the stuff we’re thinking about now.

Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel

This is knock-out, immersive, good fiction, the way fiction is meant to be written. I was drawn in immediately and the book didn’t let me go for several weeks afterwards. We all know post-apocalyptic fiction. The zombie virus comes for everyone and the few survive. But this tackles an issue rarely seen in that genre: how fragile the chains creating modern society are, and what it means for them to be destroyed, and how we live with the memory of that society, and start to recreate it. If you read one fiction thing this year, this is it.

A Tale of Love and Darkness by Amos Oz

Amos Oz is a must-read if you’re at all into international literature and examinations of the human condition. I have been to Israel many times in my life, speak Hebrew, and have read a lot of about Zionism, Israeli history, and the first aliyot. I’m embarrassed to say that I have never read Oz until now (with the exception of small fragments of The Hill of Evil Counsel in Hebrew class), and I’ve come away from this beautiful, lyrical (extremely long and at times very hard to get through, at times hard to put down) book convinced that you cannot have a conversation about Israel without having read it. I can tell that the book has lost something in translation, but not enough for me to not give it 5 stars.

This book is the history of both Amos Oz, a lot of about his early childhood, and then, later, obliquely, his time at Kibbutz Hulda and in the adult world, and about the complicated family relationships of his family of first-generation immigrants from Eastern Europe to Israel. Everything he describes, though, is not cliche. Second, it’s the portrait of a country growing up and going through the same growing pains, the same Love and Darkness that he did. He paints a very complete picture of life in Jerusalem in the 1940s, and in Israel’s early years in the 1950s, and fully draws you into his world of intellectuals and common people, and his pleasures and sorrows.

This is the kind of thing a real book should do.

My Year of Relaxation by Ottessa Mosfegh

I wrote a lot more about it in this post, but basically this book takes the idea of, what if you were privileged enough to completely turn off the world? What would you do? and plays with it. You’d think a book about a self-absorbed college graduate in New York sleeping the day away would be boring, but it is assuredly not.

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep by Philip K Dick

Philip K Dick was new to me this year and it was an amazing discovery. He has a lot of good works but I think this is his best that I’ve read so far. Gets into the implications of AI, man versus machine, and what it means to be human. You know, all the good literary stuff.

Past Favorite Books:

Keeping the world away

Tue, 04 Jun 2019 00:00:00 +0000

One of the best parts of having a four-year-old is that she’s finally old enough to request her own bedtime reading. Usually Mr. B does the bedtime routine and reading, but some nights it’s me, and we’ll turn on her soft, yellow chicken nightlight, and I’ll pull up a chair right next to her bed and read.

She has her own tastes and preferences, and lately, she’s been requesting Daniil Kharms’s “Everyone runs, flies, and hops”.

The book itself is one of my most prized posessions: brought over carefully from Russia by my aunt, it’s beautifully laid out and illustrated,and contains whimsical poems about samovars who don’t give tea to children who are late, cats who turn down invites to have lunch, and boys who turn into trains, planes, and automobiles when they’re playing.

As was the case with many Russian-language writers in the politically violent Soviet Union of the 1930s and 1940s, Kharms was an extremely talented individual who turned to children’s literature when he couldn’t get his real, avant-garde work published due to Soviet censorship.

Here’s an example of his work :

The first story I listened to was called The story of Sdigr Appr. Just the name of it alone should give you some idea of the contents.

The story starts by two men greeting each other and one stealing the other’s hand and carrying it for some distance. The men go together until the one demands to see a doctor who might also be a professor. The men go to the doctor and the thief gleefully proclaims he won’t give up the hand. The doctor says there’s not much he can do for the handless man, and in the meantime, the thief steals the professor’s ear. This goes on for quite some time until the professor’s wife tries to sew the ear back on, but the professor wants it on his cheek, so there it goes. The play/story finishes with everyone’s ears being stolen. The police are vaguely involved, but they also have their ears stolen.

Here is part of a poem the thief recites at the beginning:

Sdigr app ustr ustr

I am carrying another man’s hand.

Sdigr appr ustr ustr

where is the professor Tartarellin?

His real work is dark and nonsensical: characters suddenly dying or falling or killing other characters, or turning into animals.

He died extremely extremely early, during the godawful Siege of Leningrad, of malnutrition. As I wrote in my first blog post on Kharms,

His wife recalled an incident when she was trying to take him food during the Siege:

She made two long treks from her apartment to the hospital bringing packages, which were accepted, indicating he was there. The third time she went, two starving boys along the snowy path on the Neva’s ice begged her for help but she clutched to herself the tiny package of bread she was holding. When she reached the hospital the person at the window took the package and told her to wait. A few minutes later he returned, pushed the package back at her, and told her that Kharms had died. Walking home she wished she had given the package to the boys, though it would have been impossible to save them.

If you don’t know anything about Kharms, it’s easy to read his whimsical poetry at face value. Which is what my preschooler does, delightfully laughing at the poem about the man who turns into a snowman, the samovar that doesn’t give out hot water for tea to kids who don’t bathe,

For me, everything I read in Kharms’s work is an echo of his tragic life in a cruel society. There is a darkness under the layer of children’s literature that obscures the hideousness that formed it. This is true for all of Soviet children’s literature.

Samuil Marshak, one of the most beloved writers, was not allowed entry to university due to being Jewish. He picked up writing for children when his daughter died. Kornei Chukosvsky, probably the father of all fathers of Soviet children’s literature, was originally arrested in czarist Russia for some of his writing, and eventually criticized by Lenin’s wife, as well as fellow children’s author Agniya Barto. Agniya Barto herself managed to avoid criticism by writing anti-Nazi poems and sticking to light children’s poetry that had nothing to do with politics.

As a significant side note, all of these extremely Russian childrens’ authors were Jewish in a country with rampant anti-Semitism, which explains why some of them, like Kornei Chukovsky, changed their names to sound more Slavic (his original name was Nikolay Vasilyevich Korneychukov.) Agniya Barto was originally Gitel Leybovna Volova.

Russian history, and particularly the history of Jews in Russia, has not been a walk in the park and is characterized mostly by fear, suffering, discomfort, revolution, hunger, and silence. I want and need my daughter to understand this, and appreciate and respect her background and history, but not just yet.

Not just yet when she’s four years old and full of games, jokes, laughter, pigtails, and beautiful, beautiful sweet innocence that I wish I could bottle up and keep forever.

There is nothing as horrific to me as reading Kharms’s beautiful, fun poems to my daughter, and, simultaneously, thinking about him dying during the Siege of Leningrad. As I kiss her goodnight and she settles into a deep, comfortable sleep under her thick, warm comforter, surrounded by her five stuffed animals in the quiet American suburbs, I keep quiet, and she remains far away from the horrific ghosts of history.

Maybe that part - of keeping the world away - is really where the divide is between being a child and being an adult, and it doesn’t exist for just Russian children’s literature, but for anything that we hide away from our children, any layer that we abstract and strip the darkness away from, to keep them happy, young, and innocent and in pigtails, with popsicle stains on their cheeks, just a little longer. In that place where the scariest thing for them is that their chicken night light accidentally turned off.

The luxury of opting out of digital noise

Thu, 25 Apr 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Recently, Ottessa Moshfegh released a new critically-acclaimed novel, “My Year of Rest and Relaxation”. The story is about a young, thin, and pretty (as she tells us herself many times) Columbia graduate in her mid-20s, in the year 2000. In the midst of a booming and glittering New York City, she’s still consumed by the deaths of her hideously neglectful parents, her abusive on-again/off-again boyfriend, and her meaningless job at an art gallery. She mopes, blocks out her “best friend”, and comes to the conclusion that she can’t really deal with the world anymore.

Armed with a bevy of prescriptions, and an insane psychiatrist (who never remembers that the narrator’s parents are dead), she decides to sleep for a year.

“I opened the medicine cabinet and took two Valiums and two Ativans, guzzled water from the tap. When I righted myself, someone appeared in the mirror as if through a porthole window, and it startled me.”, “I took a Xanax and an Infermiterol, pulled my soggy coat out of the tub, and ran a hot bath.”

About the logistics, she writes,

“I took a shower once a week at most. I stopped tweezing, stopped bleaching, stopped waxing, stopped brushing my hair. No moisturizing or exfoliating. No shaving. I left the apartment infrequently. I had all my bills on automatic payment plans. I’d already paid a year of property taxes on my apartment and on my dead parents’ old house upstate. Rent money from the tenants in that house showed up in my checking account by direct deposit every month. Unemployment was rolling in as long as I made the weekly call into the automated service and pressed “1” for “yes” when the robot asked if I’d made a sincere effort to find a job. That was enough to cover the copayments on all my prescriptions, and whatever I picked up at the bodega. Plus, I had investments. My dead father’s financial advisor kept track of all that and sent me quarterly statements that I never read. I had plenty of money in my savings account, too — enough to live on for a few years as long as I didn’t do anything spectacular. On top of all this, I had a high credit limit on my Visa card. I wasn’t worried about money.”

All of these mundane tasks secure, she delves into a cocoon of watching VHS tapes from the 80s, taking sleep aid drugs, sleeping for more than 12 hours a day, and walking to the downstairs bodega for sustenance.

When I first finished the book, I became angry. Who was the narrator to think that her problems were worse than anyone else’s? What right did she have to waste her wealth and spend a year in a narcotic trance? Many reviewers agreed, calling Moshfegh’s characters brilliantly-written, but immensely unlikeable.

But, as I was reading “My Year of Rest and Relaxation” on my Books app on iPad, I kept getting interrupted. Twitter notifications kept popping up, mercilessly, one after the other, on the top of my screen. Late-night work emails demanded clarifications. Friends and family texted, requiring an immediate response. Or, my racing mind remembered something I needed on Amazon and navigated away from the Books app, breaking my flow. In other words, I was bombarded by all the normal digital detritus that accompanies middle-class life in America these days.

And what I realized is that, instead of hating the narrator, I was immensely jealous of her ability to be selective about what information she exposed herself to.

Historically, privilege has always meant the ability to block out physical space. From Versailles, to California farmers, to Mark Zuckerberg, those with the means to do so have always carved out privacy, and, just as importantly, quiet.:

Vox did a video on how quiet has become a sign of quality. And people sell quiet. Bose has become a noise reduction company, and so has Miele.

The ability to have room for leisure has always also been an upper-class pursuit. Just ask anyone at Downton Abbey. What did people do there all day? Breakfast, chat, read, take walks, and by then it was time for dinner on large, quiet estates.

Today, the true signal of privilege and choice means not only the ability to block out physical distractions, but digital ones, as well.

The ability to carve leisure time away from never-ending work Slack notifications, work emails, from endless requests, likes, tweets, and urges to favorite and comment on things is something that few people can afford these days.

I'm not sure I know a single person in tech that's good at vacation.
— Nick Craver (@Nick_Craver) April 22, 2019

But those people who can afford it, are very good at it.

Whether be it through silent retreats:

For my birthday this year, I did a 10-day silent vipassana meditation, this time in Pyin Oo Lwin, Myanmar 🇲🇲. We went into silence on the night of my birthday, the 19th. Here’s what I know 👇🏼
— jack (@jack) December 9, 2018

or writing books about unplugging from technology, or the ability to send children to schools that don’t use technology,

But the school’s chief teaching tools are anything but high-tech: pens and paper, knitting needles and, occasionally, mud. Not a computer to be found. No screens at all. They are not allowed in the classroom, and the school even frowns on their use at home.

or the ability to pay away worries through services like Uber, Instacart, and TaskRabbit, or fancy noise-cancelling headphones (usually around $300 for the best) for the ubiquitous open workspaces that have popped up like unfettered mushrooms in tech over the past ten years.

All of these options to drive away distractions can be had for money or time exchange, and offer people who can use them competitive advantages. The higher up you get in the corporate ladder, the more you can afford to block off time to do quiet retreats, or hire personal secretaries, or afford to take all of your unpaid vacation or ignore emails, or, like most of our top political and business leaders, write terse ones..

Or, even, like Moshfegh’s character, to afford sleep. In “Why We Sleep”, the runaway best hit of the year, by the director of Berkeley’s Sleep and Neuroimaging Lab, the author writes that we absolutely need to get seven to eight hours of sleep a night, and what happens if we don’t sleep.

(Arianna Huffington, Bill Gates, and Jeff Bezos offer similarly helpful advice - just get some sleep.)

Walker does nothing to address how to actually get that sleep, and gives passing mention to the fact that new parents might miss out on this fact. Well, of course they do. What’s the solution, then? The obvious answer here would be extended maternity and paternity leave. How to get that? Work for a company that offers it - an elite tech company - or be plain out of luck trying to find six weeks to spend time with a baby.

What about school children, whose schedules are so out of sync with their Circadian rhythms? Yes, they should get sleep, but who will advocate for them when their needs are misaligned with corporations and school boards?

Below people like Matthew Walker,Jack Dorsey, Cal Newport, Hillary Clinton, Ben Smith, DHH, and Jeff Bezos, and others who can afford to unplug, to talk to real humans, to sleep, to quit Facebook, are the rest of us in the social hierarchy.

We, who need to be plugged into PagerDuty to check if something has gone wrong in production, Outlook we need to respond to an email from the CEO, to reply to tweets, to keep up with our Facebook feeds, and as artists and writers, to promote our content. There are very few authors who have the luxury of not being on Twitter.

We are all connected to the spigot, even if we want to opt out. Social media contains all of our news, our family’s baby pictures, extensions of our lives in one exhausting digital stream. One glaring example that comes to mind is Facebook specifically.

Although I’ve written extensively about how important it is to get off the platform as soon as you are humanly able, for the sake of our collective mental health, I find myself not being able to take my own advice.

Not because I’m addicted, but because Facebook, for better or worse, is still the platform where social events are planned. Where parent groups exchange information. Where family pictures are shared and discussed. To willingly walk away from Facebook and all of its needy notifications is to experience both immense relief and complete ostracism.

And yet, many men I know personally, and online, have been able to walk away from Facebook entirely.

It is time. #deletefacebook
— Brian Acton (@brianacton) March 20, 2018

As I’ve struggled with my own balance of this (which includes, grudgingly, checking into FB once a month and feeling emotionally terrible after each interaction there), what I’ve realized, even more than understanding how tied we all are to the attention economy, is that women have been distinctly asked shoulder the burden of this specific digital noise.

Just as they’ve always had to shoulder the record-keeping of household activities like thank-you notes, children’s activities and appointments, shopping lists, and social obligations. Arlie Hochschild, the sociologist who coined the term “emotional labor” (i.e. “The duties that are expected of you, but go unnoticed.”, wrote a seminal book, “The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling,” examining how women’s emotions are mined for profits. Her case study was airline stewardesses, and she notes that they performatively display their feelings (offering sympathetic assistance to angry passengers, calming babies, wishing everyone a pleasant meal, and much, much, more) in exchange for airline companies profiting off of these emotions.

The study was done in the 1970s, but this easily extends to the social media platforms of today, particularly Facebook, which has become the social watering hole of the middle class. Women are still expected to participate in wishing people happy birthdays, keeping tabs on who had babies and who went on vacation, liking photos, leaving comments, posting articles, and generally providing the social glue

Facebook is still where all the social groups I’m part of (including mom groups, parent groups, Russian groups, etc.) have and talk about their events. To be absent from these conversations is to turn into the “other” in a much different way than men can opt out.

In the same way that women in the corporate world struggle to find a balance between being friendly and perceived as overly assertive, women on social media tread a fine line between looking like social outcasts if they decide that they don’t want to give their information to social media, and oversharers if they fully participate in the medium.

As I’ve opted out of Facebook, what I’ve noticed is, first of all, that I don’t feel ragingly angry. I don’t know who went on vacation where, unless I talk to them via text message, and I don’t care. I don’t care about political articles that are specifically designed to infuriate me. I don’t care about people I went to college with ten years ago. My world is neater and quieter.

At the same time, I miss more and more events targeted at my daughter’s age level that we could have attended. I miss small observations that my friends wouldn’t make over text that they do via Facebook posts that I no longer discuss with them. I miss parenting conversations that are extremely relevant to my local school district. I miss birthdays that I should have written down in my paper calendar, but didn’t. I miss discussions the Jewish community at large, which I am connected to digitally instead of physically, is having. By opting out of performing emotional labor on Facebook and going into my own sort of media hibernation, I miss the steady background hum of “having my finger on the pulse” as it relates to me and my family.

But, did I also mention that I also became even more active on Twitter as a result?

To bring it back to some of the other books I discussed, I’d be much more interested in reading Cal Newport’s wife’s book about how she unplugged.

People have noticed these subtle trends in a sideways kind of way, and it’s been finally making its way into the public sphere. If mainstream media is any indication, it seems like we’re seeing a slow trickle away from social media, and a change in public opinion, that the noise of social media is just as dangerous in smoking, in different, intangible ways.

There is an urge to move to leisure as a modus operandi, and I’m all for it.

What I think will be great is when not only Jack Dorsey can afford to be away from Twitter for a long time - when the average person (and especially woman) can, and take a long, nice, digital hibernation without worrying about the consequences.

Meghan Markle's heels

Wed, 06 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000

A couple weeks ago, as Mr. B was putting our preschooler to bed, I was lying on the couch, balancing a container of creamy Icelandic yogurt on my lap, and scrolling through People.com. It’s something I do a lot these days because I’m four and a half months pregnant, and my brain has completely turned to mush.

In order to grow a human being, one of the first things you grow is a placenta, the protective sack of nutritious lifeblood that makes its appearance at the end of a pregnancy as an unimpressive blob.

But for nine months, the placenta is a living organ that needs to support the baby. to grow the placenta, your body takes that energy out of you to allocate to that task. Throughout the process, you feel like you are going through life trying to cut a never-ending fog with a dull butter knife.

All of your attention is immediately diverted to this process of growth and replication, and where once your brain was, happily thinking about emails and alerts and Kubernetes and agile, is now just a fuzzy void that wants to do nothing but sit on the couch and gestate quietly, away from the world and all of its demands.

During this period of quiet growth, I don’t want to read about global warming, or container architectural paradigms, or that email alert that just popped up on my phone again.

What I do want to read about is Meghan Markle.

Meghan is about three months ahead of me in her pregnancy - she’s due in April - and boy has she been busy. Since she announced she was pregnant, she’s travelled to Fiji, Australia, New York, and Morocco.

In between, while she was in Great Britain, she’s gone to community kitchens, the Fashion Awards, and even became the patron of a charity. She also wrote a cookbook.

Did I mention she also does prenatal yoga and is decorating her new house?

As I am sitting on my couch in my maternity sweatpants, brain wrapped in a gelatinous mound of goo, eating my whole milk Siggis, I am thinking about Meghan Markle in her high heels, in front of the cameras halfway across the world.

I’m feel a great deal of sympathy for her, and exhaustion on her behalf.

It’s true that, in some ways, she chose this life, but no one should have to wear heels after their first trimester.

Really, when I dig deeper into the bottom of my mixed berry yogurt, what I’m feeling sorry for is not just Meghan, but what she represents.

The Duchess is a living representation of what is approved and permissible in Western society for women during their pregnancies.

Whereas in centuries prior, women would try to conceal their pregnancies through physical means, today, in our Instagram-driven society, it’s fashionable to show your bump.

But, we want women to conceal the true effects of pregnancy through favorable images and elision of details of what pregnancy really entails. Today, pregnant women should be successful at work, at home, look stylish and put together, and carefully tuck away any physical indications that they are growing a baby into pictures they never post to Instagram.

I read an article recently, one of the fifty million I’ve read on the subject, about women in the workplace. The interview subjects were two female professors who did research into why women weren’t advancing in corporate America.

They were indignant about many things. One of the things they were angry about was pregnancy. “Employers make assumptions that women who are pregnant can’t do certain things. It’s such a visible indication of being a mother.”

This idea seems to come from the well-meaning thinking that women are equal to men in all ways, even when they are growing a placenta.

But as for me, personally, there are lots of things that I no longer can do. It’s hard for me to bend down to pick things up off the floor. I get winded going up the stairs.

During the early weeks of my previous pregnancy, I physically had to leave work and nap in my car (because there was no other place to do it), as I keeled over from exhaustion. Today, spending afternoons with my toddler after daycare is hard, and I gratefully check out with my laptop and yogurt as Mr. B takes over bedtime. I now have to always be on the lookout for a nearby bathroom, and to make sure it hasn’t been too long without a snack.

These limitations are different for different women. It’s true that some women run marathons.

But there are thousands, millions more of us, who are normal. Who are tired, have to skip months of work due to morning sickness, some of whom have to go on bedrest. We are doing are best, but we are also doing it carrying a growing human.

This side of pregnancy is extremely rarely portrayed. I was shocked when I read (On people.com, of course) that poor Jessica Simpson took a picture of her swollen feet, an ailment that is so extremely common and yet never, ever discussed.

Once, long before I became pregnant for the first time when I was watching the Olympics with my parents. I don’t remember the year or location, but I remember that a pregnant woman was part of the opening ceremony. She walked, alone, out into the middle of the stage, dressed in white, her bump visible, and the whole auditorium started clapping. I was incredulous. “Why are they clapping for her,” I asked my mom. “She’s not even doing anything.”

“Because she’s growing a life,” she said. It was something I didn’t understand then, but that I think about that moment all the time, now, and wonder how hard it was for her to walk, and whether she, too, had bloated feet.

The side that is portrayed is what Meghan Markle’s handlers want us to see, what they think is appropriate. In the corporate ranks, there is a symmetrical equivalent in the world of Sheryl Sandberg’s egregiously harmful Lean In, and Marissa Mayer’s glib “I’ll be taking two weeks of maternity leave”

Where are both of those women now? One, having lost her husband, continues to work insane hours defending a company continuously in the headlines for some of the deepest ethical violations of our time, and the other lost her CEO job at a company that no longer exists. Was it worth it for them to continue to push these power structures for an industry that’s grinding through them as much as they are grinding through it?

The story that pregnancy and early motherhood are special, liminal classes that need to be accommodated, and that pregnant women and mothers to newborns can and should lean out for a bit in society until they are physically and mentally ready for re-entry, is simply not a story that ever plays in the Western narrative of what it means to be a working mother.

If you ask any woman you know who was pregnant, she’ll have stories of having to throw up in random places, of having to board planes, of having to do 12-hour shifts in hospitals wearing leg supports, of being close to the breaking point.

Mothers of newborns will tell you that they went back to emails the next day, that they had to pump in bathroom stalls or server rooms, that they wept before depositing their six-week-old at daycare.

They’ll tell you this in private, though, at playdates and in whispers. What they say on LinkedIn, Twitter, and at board meetings is a completely different story. They are starting businesses, taking babies to board meetings, and generally leaning in all of the ways that new mothers exactly shouldn’t be.

In many cultures, pregnancy and particularly post-partum is considered a special time, when the limits of what is physically possible for women is acknowledged.

In modern-day America, all of this has been swept away, and lean-in culture is enabled and encouraged by the fact that we have no legal leave, and no legal recourse to let our bodies rest, either before or after delivery..

Is it any wonder that we don’t come back to work? Or that when we do, we find ourselves scrambling for care, stretched thin by multiple demands?

We, or at least I personally, don’t need to see women in high heels and power suits rocking a bump as they make their way to a case. We need to see Meghan Markle at home in her sweatpants. We need to see more pictures of swollen feet, of messy houses, we need to read more about early mother (and also fatherhood), and how it impacts us as a society.

We need more realistic expectations, and empathy for a process that is so normal and so common that it impacts 86% of women in the country, (with 70% of those mothers returning to work) but that no one ever talks about.

For several years after my first pregnancy, I was extremely sensitive to all the discomforts and indignities of pregnancy and the post-pregnancy body and mind. I scrambled to give pregnant women my seat. I was always extra-conscious of scheduling long meetings that bled into lunch. I asked how pumping was going, if I could get them water or a snack.

Then, I slowly forgot these habits, having integrated back into society from the hazy first year of being with a child. I forgot about the sweatpants, the frantic rush to the bathroom, the bottles, all of the small, private discomforts and indignities that encompass early motherhood.

If it was so easy for me forget, how can anyone, particularly people who have not yet had children, people who have not raised their own children, people who have not grown placentas, and the people putting Meghan Markle in high heels and on planes to Morocco even understand at all?

But now I’m (very happy and fortunately) back here again, in this vulnerable space, my back aching, my insomnia flaring up, my brain full of fog, laying on top of my pregnancy pillow, looking at poor Meghan’s heels. And, I want to talk about this feeling so that I personally don’t forget, and so that maybe someone reading this will talk about it, too.

My Favorite Books of 2018

Thu, 27 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000

This year, in reading, I was looking for an escape in great writing. It didn’t matter to me whether the writing was fiction or non-fiction, it needed to transport and inspire me. I read nearly 70 books, and for some reason, I had to put down quite a few of them because they weren’t getting to the point. Here are my favorites.

Educated by Tara Westover

It seems like everyone’s been talking about this book, and for good reason. I honestly wouldn’t be surprised if it winds up that some of the facts in the book have been exaggerated to fit a narrative, so unbelievable was it to me when I read it. The story of going from living, uneducated, on a mountain, to an Ivy League school is nothing short of breathtaking. But to me, it’s also more than that - it’s about what family means, and how to unlearn what they’ve taught you about the world in order to find yourself. An extremely compelling read.

Bad Blood by John Carreyrou

I read this in one sitting on a plane and it was just as good as Shoe Dog, which I loved last year. Again, the narrative here is, how do you convince yourself what the truth is, and how do you lead other people according to that mission? What was Elizabeth really thinking? We’ll never know for sure.

I remember the original glowing stories in the press about Theranos, and this book just made me more cynical about everything presented to me as technical journalism. In a way, the part where Carreyrou describes the Wall Street Journal’s negoatiations with Theranos regarding press are more interesting than the story itself in revealing the business of journalism.

Не жизнь а сказка Алена Долецкая (Not life, but a fairy tale by Alena Doletsakaya)

I read this as an audibook (in Russian only, unfortunately) and it was an absolute pleasure that I had to relisten to again and again. Doletsakaya is an extremely colorful, warm, sharp, and witty personality - all the traits necessary to start up and run Russian Vogue, which she did in the late 1990s.

Her stories about how to run a Western magazine in the heart of Eastern Europe, about her semi-famous family (her father was a renowned childrens’ pediatrician in the Soviet Union and her uncle was Yuriy Nikulin, the famous Soviet actor and clown,) are both hilarious, sharp, and heartbreaking at times.

Her profile of Naomi Campbell in Russia is honestly one of the best celebrity takes I’ve read. If you read Russian, do yourself a favor and read this book.

Annihilation by Jeff Vandermeer

I read the initial book at the end of 2017 and continued with the other two in the trilogy at the beginning of the year. The first two are the strongest, the third is just pure WTF. But Vandermeer is such an engaging writer in building the creepy atmosphere that you can’t stop thinking about all the grotesque semi-horrors that he invents. There are a lot of unusual things about these books, the most intersting one being that the first one is narrated by four female characters.This fact is not emphasized or played up in any way, which makes it even more perfect. By the way, if anyone has read this and genuinely understands what Area X is, please DM me because I’m dying to know. Skip the movie.

My Russian Grandmother and Her American Vacuum Cleaner by Meir Shalev

Meir Shalev is a prominent writer in Israel, having won many awards and honors. This is a beautiful memoir of his childhood, growing up in one of the prominent pioneer Zionist families that first came to Palestine, and, mostly, of his grandmother, who was extremely prickly, hard to love, but also held the family - and all of the dust that came into their house in the Jezreel Valley - on her shoulders.

Read for the elegant, humorous, almost dream-like prose, and also for the beautiful snapshot of Israel as it was in the early days of its youth.

Welcome to the Goddamn Ice Cube by Blair Braverman

I first learned about Blair from her Twitter feed, where she posts a lot of loving stories about her dogs. The book is even better. I knew nothing about dogsledding other than vague descriptions I’d read from Jack London aeons ago, but Blair’s description of the snow, ice, the frosted breath, and the endless nights near the Arctic Circle in Norway (but also in Alaska,) made me want to experience it for myself.

Peter the Great: His Life and World by Robert K. Massie

Sometimes you just need to read a big-ass history book. I took this 900-pager with me to an all-inclusive resort in Mexico, and I did not regret a single moment I spent cuddled in an easy chair near the pool, engaged in Peter’s world. Massie manages to weave a narrative from thousands of documents. He breathes to live the old boyar life of Russia when Peter was born, and chronicles both the growth of the country and the czar throughout the entire course of his life.

It’s meaty, long on personal descriptions and gossip, and has a plot. The only small minus is way, way too much time spent on military campaigns, but, after all, Peter did spend most of his time on earth fighting his way through life.

Close to the Machine by Ellen Ullman

We’ve had quite a year in tech lately. All of a sudden, it seems, people have discovered that technology is not magic, and will not offer any instant solutions. Ellen Ullman has been thinking about what technology means for over two decades with compassion, humor, historical context, and life experience. This book made me wish it was required reading before sitting down in front of an editor.

The People in the Trees by Haniya Yanagihara

This book just plain dumb blew me away. There is no other way to say it. This is a Novel. Yanagihara created an entire universe, a character who you hate but also can’t help but feel sorry for, a moral dilemma that has you wondering what you would do in the narrator’s shoes, and has wrought a sparkling Pacific culture almost rom the ground up. Please read this book to recognize the true power of writing.

A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin

I came to Le Guin very late, but damn was this book good. Real good. You can see the influence on Harry Potter and hundreds of other childrens’ books. This is a book for children, but it is not written to talk down to them. It speaks to all of us, and what it means to be human.

Beartown by Frederick Backman

I had no idea I was interested in hockey until I read this novel about small town Scandinavian life that revolves around a hockey team that’s the town’s only hope of survival. Extremely readable and extremely human.

A Russian Journal by John Steinbeck

It’s obvious that Steinbeck is a good writer, but you don’t really know for sure until a writer writes about something that you know a lot about. A Russian Journal is Steinbeck’s frustrated attempt to get past the sensationalism of Russia in the headlines (sound familiar?) 50+ years ago, and report honestly on what he sees there.

Past favorite lists:

How the headphone jack-less iPhone came to be

Mon, 05 Nov 2018 00:00:00 +0000

It so happened that one morning the devil was stuck in an Uber Pool down 101 from the city to Menlo Park (he was late for a meeting with the Facebook content moderation team,) when the driver suddenly took a huge detour and stopped at a leafy driveway in Atherton.

Phil Schiller emerged, wearing a slightly rumpled shirt and holding two iPhones in each hand. Another stuck out haphazardly from his back pocket.

“Oh, excuse me,” Phil said, opening the door. “I thought I’d ordered an Uber Black?” He referenced first one phone, then another, frowning. He put both in his pocket then took them out again nervously. “Guess my secretary didn’t book the right one.”

The devil frowned, looking at his watch. He would be late, and they would start the discussion on elections content filtering without him. But, it was Phil. Maybe he could kill two birds with one stone this way.

“No worries, I always press the wrong button all the time, too. Damn UI changes. So hard to keep up with. Hop in, " the devil smiled broadly and patted the heated leather next to him.

Schiller clambered into the Tesla, and sat down, wiping his forehead. “I’m Phil,” he said and frantically put three phones in his jacket pocket as he reached over to shake the devil’s hand.

“Jim,” said the devil, shaking firmly.

“What line of business are you in, " said Phil, looking at the devil’s pressed chinos and Allbirds. “VC,” said the devil, and handed Phil a business card. “Join the club,” Phil said, smiling, and pocketing the card without a second look. “One of those boys up somewhere on Sand Hill?”

“You could say I’m more of an angel investor,” Jim said.

Phil nodded, and the car merged back into the early morning traffic. Cars were slowly grinding their way on to Mountain View. In every car was a frazzled commuter typing frantically into an email client on a phone, or applying makeup on the go, or trying to get their Spotify to stop buffering. One woman’s eyes were half-closed as she drank greedily from a cup of coffee, as if trying to summon the life force through the plastic sealable lid.

The devil basked in the warmth of the collective cloud of human misery around him. Life wasn’t as bad as it was during the Middle Ages, but, things were trending positively again in that direction. Several of his demons had made great breakthroughs with ideas like banner ads and 24-hour news channels, but people were still really not as on edge as they should be. Not on edge enough to start a world war, in any case. Which was a shame because the last one had such stellar returns.

The devil took a sip of his Blue Bottle cold brew. He had Phil right here. Was there a way he could bring a large swathe of people rich enough to afford iPhones to the breaking point? It wouldn’t hurt to plant the seed.

“Say,” the devil said, “You’re the infamous Phil Schiller from the Apple demos, aren’t you.”

Phil flashed a smile full of teeth. “That’s right, just don’t ask me for an invite to the next one, or to say ‘innovation, my ass’ " he laughed.

“Don’t worry, I’m Android only,” the devil smiled and opened his blazer pocket to show his Pixel 3. “But I wanted to run something by you for a minute.”

“Well, sure,” Phil said, frantically typing on two of his phones and sliding a notification closed on the third with his elbow. “Phil, do you ever feel like your users have it too easy?”

Phil stopped and looked at the devil as if he had grown horns. “What do you mean? Apple’s whole goal is to make phone usage easy for everyone.”

“But Phil, do you ever feel like your customers have gotten used to having it easy? click, and there’s your email. Swipe, all your notifications. Easy upgrades. The ecosystem’s all in the Apple store. They’re so used to having everything handed to them that they don’t have to work for anything anymore. They’ve gotten lazy and entitled, and are demanding more and more from you.”

Phil frowned and thought. “Well, I’d say our big value proposition is to chew everything up and spit it out so our customers don’t have to. But now that you mention it, they have been angry over the past several years.”

“Right. The blog posts. The accusations. The phone leaks. Phil, it seems to me that you have to give your users something to work on. Only if they struggle will they appreciate how easy it was back in the old days.”

“Well, Jim, I’d say you’re right. We already have plans for a new laptop that makes it harder in the works.”

“Sure, sure, that’s great, Phil, but not everyone owns a MacBook. A lot more people own $1000 phones than a $1200 laptop.”

“Well, that’s true, too.”

“So, think, Phil, what’s something you could make the user really work hard for?”

“We could make the icons smaller? Stop the hard drive updates? Introduce tracking of your health that’s on by default?”

“Oh Phil, all those are small potatoes and you know it.”

“Well, what would you suggest, Jim?”

“Think bigger, Phil. What’s something that the user could never modify with software no matter how hard they try?”

“The…hardware? But we already have that locked down. If you don’t go to an Apple Store, you’re screwed.”

“Sure, but …”

Then it hit Phil. “Let’s kill the headphone jack.”

The devil’s eyes lit up.

“The headphone jack is the only thing that’s been reliable on every phone since the beginning of smartphones. It’s the one feature that’s there for the user regardless what headphones they have. They can plug it into the car, or into an audio for a quick jam session. They don’t need Bluetooth or any accessories. Let’s kill it. Let’s make dongles.”

“Hundreds of dongles. Thousands of dongles. So you need one for each car. One for each set of headphones. One for the aux cord. One for your house. Jim, they’ll be swimming in dongles. And they’ll lose those dongles. They’ll lose them at the very minute they need them, to take a conference call, or to play a song for a crying child in a car. That will make them think bad about Apple twice. We’ll get people good and angry, appreciative of the old days.”

Phil finished with a red flush on his cheeks.

“Damnit Phil, you brilliant son of a gun,” the devil said, leaning back and taking another sip of his cold brew. “You’ve done it.”

“But,” said Phil, pausing. “What if they try to find ways to get around it?”

“How do you mean,” said the devil.

“Well, I mean they could try to use Bluetooth or Air Pods -”

“And we know how well Bluetooth anything works, don’t we?” the devil smiled.

Phil nodded, pleased. “Yeah, it’s a pretty lousy proposition for the user, isn’t it? Even if it does work, who’s going to want to keep buying headphones they will ultimately lose for $150? Or countless dongles?”

Phil paused again. “But what if that’s not enough? What if they still like it?”

The devil picked an imaginary piece of lint from his chinos. “Pull the ripcord, Phil.”

“You mean, make Lightning incompatible with USB-C and everything else in the Apple universe?”

The devil nodded, almost imperceptibly. That did it. Phil reached for one of his phones. “Jony,” he said, “we need you down in HQ today immediately. I’ve got a banger of an idea.”

By this point, the traffic had cleared, and the devil got out at One Hacker Way. “Great sharing a car with you, Phil,” he said, shaking hands. “Great meeting you too,” Phil took out the business card, looking it over. “thanks for the brainstorm, Jim - "

The card didn’t have a last name.

“Memphis,” said the devil, and took out his Pixel to let an executive assistant know he’d arrived.

America Online and off

Thu, 23 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000

In December of 1777, after weeks of drawn-out fighting near Philadelphia, George Washington and his miserable, cowered soldiers, and their families, came to Valley Forge to nurse their wounds for the winter. The mood could not have been bleaker. Philadelphia was occupied by the British. Less than a quarter of the men had shoes. The rest left bloody footprints in the snow. With their little remaining strength, they built cramped, uninsulated, wooden huts for shelter. The conditions at camp that winter were horrendous. More than 2,500 men, 20% of the army at the time, died of disease and malnutrition as they shivered, bled, and passed disease from bunk to bunk. On Christmas, they ate rice and vinegar.

In February, Washington wrote,

For some days past, there has been little less, than a famine in camp. A part of the army has been a week, without any kind of flesh & the rest three or four days.

Today, the camp is the site of Valley Forge National Park, a somber tribute to the sacrifices of the men - and the families that came with them as part of the supporting army followers - to the cause of building the new nation.

The trail around the park starts at the gleaming new visitors’ center and makes its way through a congested intersection, navigating its way near a high-traffic road, until it finally becomes a quiet footpath winding its way amidst the low-slung hills and rows of Pennsylvania corn.

Valley Forge as an idea of what collective nationhood means is an extremely powerful one. It stands as a symbol of a group of people pooling their resources in order to overcome the adversity of the weather, medical indignities, and the lack of funds from the Continental Congress to further the war effort and create something large, together. And, as a national park, it’s free and open to the public. Most days, the path is full of couples, families, and local retirees taking in the views.

Outside of the park is the present-day municipality of King of Prussia. KOP, as it’s known in the Philadelphia metro area, is a soulless corporate monotony broken up only by highway arterials, grocery store plazas, and gas stations.

Not a mile from the entrance to Valley Forge is the sprawling King of Prussia Mall, the largest shopping center in the United States.. It’s with a high sense of poetic irony that one of the most important places in American history, is, of course, right next to a mall.

Additions to the area have included a casino, and, most recently, a brand new “lifestyle center” development project called King of Prussia Town Center. Although King of Prussia generates a fair amount of the Philadelphia region’s economic activity, it’s less of a place people live than a liminal transit location between work and the mall. Seeing an opportunity, a local developer bought a golf course near the mall in 2003, and fought numerous legal battles to build the town center, to which both township officials and local residents were staunchly opposed. After almost a decade spent in court, including a trial that reached the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania, the developer finally got permission and construction was finished in 2017.

The marketing materials for the Town Center enthusiastically promise:

A town square with a grassy park in the middle for community events, such as live music concerts, free movie-viewing, yoga, and a farmers market.
Seven full-service restaurants.
Up to 3,000 apartments and 132 townhouses.
One million square feet of commercial space (office and hotel).
Decorative water features and a 60-foot-long “wall of fire” to illuminate the park at night.

The town center itself is laid out in an architectural pattern mimicking a small town composed of several streets, with shops lining the streets, and a central square with a public fountain for kids to splash in.

All of the stores are upscale tenants like Ulta and Nordstrom Rack, and all of the restaurants have menus featuring “local” and “organic” offerings in green sans-serif fonts. There is a Wegmans nearby, and several sleek, brand-new gyms. There is an upscale beauty salon where overdressed stylists sit near completely empty chairs, playing on their phones, waiting for clients.

After the congested ultra-highways lacing through King of Prussia and the miles of parking lots, it’s a refreshing change to see people walking around, small gaggles of kids playing together and running around. But, on a deeper level, it becomes obvious that the Town Center, like many things built from the top down, is soulless.

At first, it’s fun to browse the stores, check out the overpriced yoga leggings and wheat grass shots. But, as you walk through the town center, you realize it was not built for people, but for corporations.

I initially wrote these observations after a visit to Valley Forge in the fall of 2017, but since then, it’s become increasingly clear that building for corporations has become a way of life in America. This July, a professor of economics argued that we should let public libraries yield to Amazon’s ruthless efficiency.. The backlash, thankfully, was swift, but the fact remains that we are yielding more and more of our public space to private undertakings, and only the lack of them can make us appreciate what they give us.

It’s worth appreciating just how extraordinary libraries are, why they matter, and what they can tell us about the kinds of institutions we should build. They’re spaces of absolute equality, where anyone can come, regardless of financial resources, to study, learn, and hang out. You don’t have to purchase anything in order to get to sit in them, you don’t have to be means-tested or background-checked. They give the same things to everybody, and there’s something beautiful (and increasingly rare) about that.

The King of Prussia Town Center is a fantastic example of what comes about when we get rid of public space built with public interests first in mind. It didn’t come about like most towns do - organically, first, with the original settlers planting roots, then establishing shops, the aforementioned libraries, places of worship, hospitals as the need for them arises. It was designed from the top down by developers whose goals were, first and foremost, to maximize revenue from retail space per square foot.

When the primary and overarching goal of a space is to maximize revenue, it automatically cannot be aligned to those of society’s needs that are not met by buying Lululemon and organic bronzer. The Current Affairs article above quotes some examples of societies that are further along that path than even us:

What would it really feel like to live in a society where almost every single thing is privately owned and priced? Walking around urban Japan, I feel like I am seeing a society that is several steps closer to that ideal than the United States. Many green spaces are private and gated off (admission is usually around $5). In cafes, each customer must order something promptly or be kicked out; outside your house or office, there is basically nowhere to sit down that will not cost you a little bit of money.

In the town center, there are no playgrounds, no libraries, and no civic centers. No public spaces. But, unfortunately, it’s exactly these kinds of public spaces that we as a society need more of. We need to be able spend time with each other in public parks, without the pressure of having to buy anything. We need to be able to spend time in libraries, in squares, in civic centers, talking to each other.

Which brings me to our online spaces. Over the past five years or so, the public places where we conduct conversations online have become landfills of burning trash heaps, dotted by a few freak accidental discussions of clarity where both parties come away having learned something.

How did our online spaces get to this point? There are many reasons that have to do with the economics of Silicon Valley and how human nature plays out at scale, but an important one is that we no longer have open public online spaces for discussion that are not geared towards revenue maximization.

The goals of our largest public spaces in America are orthogonal to what humans need for communication, the same way the Town Square is kind of for you, but mostly for the stores.

Both Twitter and Facebook, the largest offenders, have tried in half-hearted ways to make spaces more amenable to people staying in them by “increasing user engagement” for some vague definition of what engagement means.

Unfortunately, these attempts are initiated by product managers and C-suite executives, who, like the architects of the Town Center, don’t even use their own platforms in the same way most users do.

Twitter has, inexplicably, decided that instead of creating a community where most people feel comfortable sharing thoughts and not being attacked by spammers and harassers, it would increase the character count under the guise of “language flexibility”, thus breaking the main feature that made it so attractive in the first place.

Facebook is led by an executive who doesn’t seem to understand human emotions, as evidenced by both the memes comparing him to a robot and the fact that he thinks Facebook is a social net positive.

The funny thing is that both Facebook and Twitter already provide value to people. Just look at how many people have gotten jobs and met friends through Twitter, or been part of local communities on Facebook. But, the problem is that these things are intangible and extremely hard to measure, because they are extremely complicated, extremely long-tail, and extremely human. As long as success is measured by only the length of time people stay on the site and click on things, without any differentiation as to whether these things make people happy or sad, these platforms will not fulfill the basic human needs of real community 100%, and will continue to build towards empty, upscale shopping malls blaring music. Just look at Twitter. It already has a TV that no one watches in the sidebar.

How do we fix this? There must be a way to make these platforms work for people without dismantling the “late-stage” capitalism that so many denounce these days, and without having another revolutionary war to bring us all in alignment on civic responsibility.

It’s clear after the election and Facebook investigation, that there is a lot of the same type of energy that people want to channel into random acts of civic kindness. Unfortunately, we sure have spent a lot of it chasing Russian bots instead of larger systemic issues that too much time on social media causes: disengagement, alienation, and distance.

First, I think one of the largest issues today is that, instead of taking these things and talking about them in the real world, we’re still trying to fix the world by implementing 280 characters and feed improvements. Let’s channel that energy by investing in and supporting in existing physical public spaces, the ones that are local to us. In my own town, there is an effort to fundraise for a playground, and buying a couple painted plates that were put directly on the playground was more tangible and real than anything I’ve done online in the past couple months.

The offline action doesn’t have to be anything as drastic as quitting the internet forever and living in a yurt. It could be simple, little things like donating to local charities, going to local parks, making friends at local libraries. We’ve gone so far out into cyberspace that we now need to reel it in a little.

Second, we need our groups of engagement to get much smaller and more effective. To an extent, some people are solving this by moving to group chats, Slacks, and Mastodon. All of these are invite-only, which is important. But we also need to resurrect things that made small-scale, ad-free communication possible: RSS readers, forums, and blogs.

And, finally, we need to build from the ground up, not the top down online. This mean being vocal about what we want and don’t want in social media platforms, criticizing the media where they get things wrong, and building things on the internet that we want to see, that are not shaped entirely by what Google, Facebook, Twitter, and Amazon are ok with.

These are all tiny, tiny solutions to the hole we’ve managed to dig ourselves into. They’re not easy, and they’ll take as long to get going as it’s taken the ad-based internet to evolve.

In the age of media and internet oligopolies, where every media source is dependent on Facebook and Twitter clicks to continue fueling their content and everyone else is dependent on Facebook to remember birthdays, it’s unrealistic to expect that a small, grassroots movement can change a lot, or even anything, but that’s what they said about the Continental Army, too.

Dear Facebook user 752461218193242

Fri, 30 Mar 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Apologies to Roy Lichtenstein

According to my Facebook data dump, Mark Zuckerberg knows my birthday, all 40 of my interests, my wedding anniversary, and that time in 2011 that I checked in at a castle in Scotland.

I’ve been a Facebook user since it became available to public universities in 2004 - almost fifteen years of my life and countless hours of effort have been put into status boxes, photo updates, and checkins. Fifteen years of thoughts, feelings, fears, and hopes, produced and shared at the hands of some dude in a gray hoodie on the other side of the country.

But, in spite of Mark owning a company that has for years now tried to understand how and what people do online, and in spite of our long-standing “In a Relationship” status, it’s clear that he still doesn’t understand anything about me.

If he did, he wouldn’t have written me this letter.

To be fair, it was a letter to all of Facebook’s 2.1 billion active users (or at least those who read print versions of major US papers.) In the letter, he addressed the Cambridge Analytica controversy and closed by thanking us for believing in the community and promising to do better.

For sure, Mark has appologized many times before. In 2006, he appologized for breaches of privacy in the News Feed. In 2010, for calling his users dumb fucks. In 2016, on Yom Kippur, he reflected that he was sorry for contributing to divisiveness in the country.

You would think that, having done a lot of these apologies, Mark would be great at them. But his latest has done nothing to reassure me that he’ll change any of his behavior. And, in fact, he hasn’t.

I suspect from what he’s said in the media outside of the apology, that even he still doesn’t completely grasp the enormity of this thing that he built, and now absolutely cannot control it, even if he wanted to.

Because the problem is, that Mark started out building something to connect people, but instead what he ended up creating was a toxic platform to manipulate human thought.

How can he possibly assure us that he’s going to cut that out?

I’ve given this some thought, and I’ve realized that if he really did understand me, the following is the open letter he would have writen, instead.

Dear User 752461218193242,

In the early days of Facebook, when I couldn’t sleep at night, I would create fun polls featuring my dog.

Now, when I can’t sleep and since my laywers won’t let me write anything, I look at log files. Have you ever really looked at a log file? It’s so relaxing. And I have so, so many of them. And, grepping through code meets a personal goal of mine, to touch a piece of my users’ data every day.

I noticed when I was looking at your logs, User 752461218193242, that you haven’t been active lately. It looks like you posted some stuff about being hopeful for the country around July 4, 2017. Then, you liked a children’s event taking place at a pick-your-own fruit farm in August, and then, you promptly disappeared from actively writing statues. You didn’t even put up an ‘I quit Facebook’ status for pity.

I mean, yeah, ok. From the data Facebook has automatically scraped from your blog since you linked to it once, it looks like you have concerns. You wrote in 2011 that Facebook stressed you out.

I’ve come to the realization that Facebook makes me anxious. For example, I decided that Thursday last week was a beautiful fall night to smoke hookah with my husband. As soon as I decided it, I thought. Oh, I should post a Facebook update. Or take a picture of the hookah and then upload it. Why did I want to let people know that I was smoking? Because I wanted them to think that I was cool, exotic, to be jealous, and to leave lots of comments on my Facebook page, which I would later refresh to check.

All of this was perfectly normal inside my head, but it sounds perfectly stupid if you’re actually talking about it. Are all of us really living our lives for Facebook updates? So we can get a few likes on a status?

In 2013, after the Snowden revelations, you wrote that you were anxious about the government collecting all of our Facebook activity. (Don’t worry, they don’t collect it anymore. We just have them log in to Hive directly.)

In 2017, you wrote what was, frankly, a really long post outlining what we collect, which was great, because even we have absolutely no idea or control over how much stuff we keep.

But, you were still on Facebook, dude. Even writing and researching that post couldn’t keep you off, because that’s where all your friends and your events were. Like cigarettes, we were working as designed.

And then, one day, in the summer, I saw in the logs that you were refreshing your Facebook feed in the middle of the night on Firefox mobile. I know you don’t use Messenger because we collect all your contacts, scan your pictures, maybe use your mic, whatever. m.facebook.com is harder to navigate, anyway. Your loss. And then, I noticed that your browser crashed and wiped your login information. I haven’t seen you active on the site again. What gives?

What can I do to get you back on the platform, 752461218193242? How can I continue to monetize you? We’ve been through so much together, from the first time you posted on your wall

to when you got married,

to when you bought your house,

to that time you, for some reason, felt the need to check in at the BLO OUT Blow Dry Bar. We miss you meaninglessly adding “The Sopranos” to your favorite shows, your rants about open internet, your refusal to post baby photos so we can scoop them up in DeepFace.

Look, 752461218193242, do you think all of this has been easy for me?

I started out building systems that were interesting to me, and maybe useful to other people. Coming off my high of building Zucknet, a BASIC chat network not unlike AOL Instant Messenger, that worked in my dad’s dental office, I built a music player, and, then, as a college student at Harvard, an app that rated people based on hotness.. I was scolded by the administration. I already had a bunch of quick wins.

From the day I started Thefacebook,

I thought I could do whatever I want.

Zuck: Yeah so if you ever need info about anyone at Harvard

Zuck: Just ask

Zuck: I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS

[Redacted Friend’s Name]: What? How’d you manage that one?

Zuck: People just submitted it.

Zuck: I don’t know why.

Zuck: They “trust me”

Zuck: Dumb fucks.

Did I think through to the reprecussions? No, because no one could. (By the way, I totally absolve all responsibilty for that quote, and I can’t believe someone would log my chat history without asking. Rude.) I didn’t really have a plan.

In fact, when the Harvard Crimson interviewed me in 2004, I didn’t even know if I wanted to do ads.

Zuckerberg currently pays for the server space—which he said costs about $85 per month—out of pocket, but even that may change as thefacebook.com evolves.

“It might be nice in the future to get some ads going to offset the cost of the servers,” he said.

I loved that college kids wrote that they were addicted to it.

I’d stumbled upon the idea of ambient humanity, of everyone buzzing in and out around this one site like some kind of bee hive on steroids, and I definitely wasn’t going to give that up once investors came calling.

Look, 752461218193242, the people loved my product, and I needed to it grow. I quit Harvard and moved to Palo Alto, where I focused on doing keg stands, fielding interviews, and recruiting people to come work for Thefacebook.

In 2005, Thefacebook, opened to all colleges by now, and backed by Napster’s Sean Parker, rebranded to the more grown-up Facebook.

Things were moving fast. Companies came calling. Yahoo tried to make a purchase that fell apart, and I realized that I couldn’t continue to do kegstands. I was now a serious business dude, and my business was connection.

The striking thing about the real Zuckerberg, in video and in print, is the relative banality of his ideas concerning the “Why” of Facebook. He uses the word “connect” as believers use the word “Jesus,” as if it were sacred in and of itself: “So the idea is really that, um, the site helps everyone connect with people and share information with the people they want to stay connected with….” Connection is the goal. The quality of that connection, the quality of the information that passes through it, the quality of the relationship that connection permits—none of this is important.

We were moving fast, breaking things, pissing people off, and collecting data. To feed the growth monster, Thefacebook began to sell ads.

The earliest ads that Colleran remembers placing on Facebook were from PartyPoker.com, Cutco knives, a smattering of summer camps and, perhaps most notably, Apple. As it so happens, Colleran says he worked with Path founder Dave Morin, who at the time was on the college marketing team at Apple before getting hired to Facebook. Rather than simply throw up a banner ad, Apple invested in sponsored groups, a novel feature that let brands pay to drive traffic to their group pages on the social network. The Apple deal helped generate hundreds of thousands of dollars per month for Facebook, according to Kirkpatrick, and demonstrated the potential of moving beyond a simple banner ad.

I thought in 2005 that I hated ads, but really what it turned out I hated was not having money.

And, look, did you mind the ads? By that point, you were already fully hooked. Facebook became the medium that conferred reality of experience, an extension of the real world, a status symbol, a third place where the ambient hum of the internet reflected back into how we felt about real life.

Also, I was making a lot of money. A. Lot. Of. Money.

Look, 752461218193242, the money was good, but now we were competing with Foursquare, with Twitter, and most importantly with users. When we were small, it was easy. Whatever I said was the word. Word. But now, we had to do annoying things like explaining why we were tracking people across the web.

I’m not going to say I’ve gotten good at apologies, but I’ve gotten good at apologies. The way I see it, it’s kind of like pushing bad code. You push bad code, it breaks the build, you do a new pull request, refactor, and overwrite it. No harm done.

Yeah, we kept breaching privacy, And yeah, I had a pretty terrible interview with Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg at D8 in 2010.

But, like, it was fine, because we’d learned from our mistakes and moved on to make different ones. As time went on, 752461218193242, I became more and more legit. My 2009 challenge was to wear a tie every day..

I was supporting the needs of almost 1 billion users across the entire world. I visited Moscow, a trip that I now wish had never taken, seeing as to how I don’t ever want to have any relationship with anything Russian ever again. I shook hands with Obama. I married Priscilla.

Facebook was growing up, too. My company, initially started with a simple PHP site, was now an engineering powerhouse, creating tools like Hive, to store and analyze the growing amount of data generated by users of the platform.

A data science team, started in 2010, started analyzing things like user happiness and, funny enough, election turnouts.

It may be true that we crossed the line in collecting data about people, but I swear to you, 752461218193242, that I still have no idea what you as a human are interested in or what your motivations are. That’s why we continue to serve you ads for wedding dresses when you have a three-year-old.

In 2014, it got real. I turned 30. I bought a company that wasn’t making any money, for $1 billion and have been trying to figure out what to do with it ever since. And, most importantly, having siphoned off the world’s privacy, I needed my own. I purchased four houses surrounding my house, only because five weren’t available. I started renovating my original house. My neighbors were constantly complaining that they couldn’t park on the street, but to them I say, I haven’t even started to tear down those four houses to build my drone fighting ring.

But, the problem with being awesome is that now, everyone wants a piece of you. And you want to do more and more stuff. You want to buy companies for $2 billion, then $22 billion. You want to connect the entire world to the internet. Sometimes, you want to create a billion-dollar charity for your first-born.

How are you supposed to fuel all this growth? State-sponsored dinners with the Chinese don’t pay for themselves. By this point, our advertising model had shifted from a rinky dinky single server, to building big data tools hand over fist to get that advertising money.

You wrote that you felt trapped. I kind of did, too. I was trapped by growth. We had to grow or die.

Our 10-K even said it.

If we fail to retain existing users or add new users, or if our users decrease their level of engagement with our products, our revenue, financial results, and business may be significantly harmed.

More data scientists. More data engineering. More sketchy experiments to figure out how to better target to users. MOAR DATA.

Growth at any cost, even if, say, maybe someone dies in a terrorist attack coordinated by our tools (not my words, by the way, Boz’s. He’s a really controversial guy. I don’t stand with what he says. I did promote him last year, but I totally disagree. )

I’d started out Thefacebook just for kicks and giggles, but now I was stuck. I had to continue making the peons - I mean users - happy. At the same time, I had to make the advertisers happy.

I started out playing the machine, but the machine played me. Just like Facebook was now manipulating how people saw their world, capturing what they thought, shielding them from reality, running Facebook had put me in a filter bubble of my own, away from the norms of business and human behavior.

I mean, yeah, I took a tour of the United States where I tried to seem like a normal person, not a billionaire who face scans his parents as part of a side project.

Cut me some slack. I’ve never had to work as a direct report to anyone my entire career, and I’ve been running a company under massive public scrutiny for the past decade. I also spent a year taking walks in the woods with people. How normal do you expect me to be?

But like, yeah, 752461218193242. I’m sorry that you left Facebook. I really, really need you. We need to keep our numbers up. We need to keep growing, to keep eating the world, or we’re going to implode.

I get that you felt trapped and violated. Look, I can hardly leave my own house without suing the neighbors (don’t forget, totally unfair, haven’t even built that drone ring yet.)

But, really, the bad news for you is that leaving Facebook was not enough, because it’s still all around you.. Everything that I’ve created has impacted how the internet works today, from advertising, to clickbait, to the reaction buttons. I saw an article on some local newspaper site last week where they offered people to vote on smiley reactions to a story about a murder case.

Honestly, I wish I could leave, too. This whole thing is way too stressful. I have two kids. I have my house, my other four empty houses, my plots of land in Hawaii, and the plans for that drone fighting rink. I just want to tinker around, and write some code, maybe add some new, totally non-invasive face scanning features to Jarvis, see more of the country. Maybe think about my presidential campaign.

But, this thing is all around me now, completely out of my control. And 752461218193242, I have to tell you, I have no clue what to do next, and there is not a single predictive algorithm in my company that can help me.

Sincerely,

Zuck

On competence

Wed, 07 Mar 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Cosette Sweeping, Emile Bayard 1862

I’ve watched at least ten different versions of the musical Les Miserables, including the movie and a junior high performance in a middle school in nowhere, Pennsylvania. Ostensibly the songs and roles are always the same, but each production has its own energy, its own highs, and its own flaws.

The best and worst version of Les Mis is “Les Miserables in Concert: The 25th Anniversary.”, put on in London in 2010. Although it used to be all over the internet, it now only exists for rent or purchase on Amazon Prime, or as a very shaky Vimeo in multiple parts. I find myself coming back to it, time and time again, as a comforting re-watch.

First, the atmosphere is electric. The O2 Arena, with a seating capacity of 20,000, is packed to the brim. A twenty-five year anniversary is a big deal, and the audience knows it. The lights are dimmed. There is an full orchestra, the instruments gleaming and vibrating with pre-show tension. The etched cartoon Cossette with the sad eyes, the everlasting symbol of the play, fills the screens on the stage.

Next, there is a brief pause, and then, the orchestra launches into the main theme, thundering through the quarter notes, punch by punch. The orchestra is so, so good. You know you are in for a treat - an amazing show being performed by artists and musicians at the top of their game. The stage lights flare and rise, and you see a massive choir standing behind the musicians, radiating energy onto the stage. Wild applause breaks out across the

Finally, the convicts come out on stage, with Valjean, played by Alfie Bowe, his eyes flashing like a wounded animal, at their lead. Javert, played by an electric Norm Lewis prowlings at the back, and then steps up to the microphone. It is clear from the very beginning the stage belongs to them together, alone.

The rest of the cast is just as electrifyingly talented and amazingly suited for their roles. The quiet ferocity of Lea Salonga as Fantine, Matt Lucas and Jenny Galloway, perfectly ghastly as the Thenardiers, and Ramin Karimloo, whose galvanizing performance as Enjolras in “Red and Black” makes me want to stand up and give him an ovation every time, is so well-done.

It is an enormous, immense pleasure to watch someone who is good at something do their job.

So, why is the 25th anniversary concert also the worst version? Because, in spite of everything being aboslutely perfect, it has one flaw, and that flaw is Nick Jonas, because he can’t sing.

Nick Jonas, in this concert, compared to the Broadway stars with operatic voices and the ability to project and make the right facial expressions at the right time, sounds and looks terrible. He just cannot compete with the ranges and stage presence of the other actors..

Now, to be fair, he is seventeen years old at the time of the musical, and he had gone through a lot in life: a diagnosis with Type 1 Diabetes, a disappointing release of an album that was supposed to finally launch him out of Disneyville, and the whole purity ring incident.

I’m not the only one who was angry: People thought Nick Jonas was SO bad, that they made videos where they cut him out of Red and Black and put in Michael Ball, who did an amazing job in the 10th anniversary special (I told you I’ve watched a LOT of Les Mis.)

Competence is important. Competence is noticed and appreciated. Both in whitecollar jobs and in the arts, competence is one of the qualities I appreciate the most in individuals. But lately, incompetence feels like it’s everywhere in my life.

In the beginning of “House of Cards,” Frank Underwood said, “Competence is such an exotic bird in these woods that I appreciate it whenever I see it.” And it was as much of a pleasure to watch Frank Underwood undercut everyone as it was to watch Kevin Spacey act the part. Then Kevin Spacey turned out to be guilty of sexual harrassment and assault allegations.

The CEO of Equifax said he took full responsibility for the enormous data breach that compromised almost 150 million people’s personal information, and then made $70 million from shares sold around the time of the breach.

Email dumps from officials reveal that politicians are not any smarter or better than us, and, in fact, often dumber and completely incapable of operating technology that even interns are expected to master.

The real world is rife with incompetence and disappointment, as anyone who becomes an adult is bound to learn.

So why do I expect anything from a musical? Because the musical is important to me. Ever since I saw Les Miserables live on Broadway in seventh grade, I have loved the show, lived for the show, studied it, listened to it late at night. I’m angry because I expect art to be an escape from the grinding misery of daily incompetence for me.

And, what I’m mad about most, what I’m so mad about that, eight years after the concert I can’t stop thinking about it, is that the directors and casting agents of the 25th anniversary didn’t respect any of that or believe the audience was smart enough to demand good performance.

At first, I was extremely angry at Nick Jonas. But, upon reflection, I decided that, at that point in his life, the decision to be or not be in Les Miserables wasn’t even his choice to make. So who I’m really angry at is whoever decided that casting Nick Jonas and selling sex appeal was better than making a cohesive, beautiful show that served the true spirit of people who can sing the role. And that’s a bigger sign of their incompetence than his, that they put him in that position, that they made him carry a ball (or box, if you want to get technical) that he dropped, that they made him look bad. And that they shattered the illusion for so many people tuning in, hoping to tune out.

It didn't taste like Pamplemousse

Sun, 18 Feb 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Everyone I know has been talking about LaCroix. The hipster sparkling water has been everywhere lately, from tech startups, to the millennial female-oriented newsletter I subscribe to to pretend I’m still in my 20s and see what all the kids are up to these days.

Recently, I decided to try it and see if I could indeed ascend to a higher spiritual plane while drinking it. I went specifically to my local Whole Foods, where they are super-heavy on selling the stuff recently, picked out a six-pack, and brought it home.

Did it taste like VC funding, being 25 and having an Instagram, or, even avocados? Well…no. Imagine my surprise when I decided to try LaCroix and found that it tasted just like being five years old.

When I first came to this country as a preschooler, one phenomenon that was common in the Russian immigrant community was gathering around the table during the holidays. Everyone was poor as hell, but everyone still bought a salad, some pickled tomatoes, some chicken, and soon enough, there would be an entire meal cobbled together from what seemed like absolutely nothing.

One key element gracing these early nineties immigration tables was a bottle of blue Vintage Seltzer water, purchased at the local Acme for under a dollar a bottle . This was absolutely one of the lamest things on a table already laden with mayonnaise monstrosities.

No one really knows how or why “Zyeltser” became popular among the Russian immigrants. Perhaps it was a nostalgic fondness for газированая вода, carbonated water that would be available mostly at sanatorium resorts and at a searing five kopeks per glass that would set you back a good deal out of the 120 rubles of your monthly salary in 1988. Perhaps it was a desire to be American by drinking Coca Cola without actually purchasing Coca Cola, which was exorbitantly priced at over $1 per bottle.

Either way, seltzer water was the drink of my poor immigrant childhood, one that faded away the further we got from being beginner immigrants, soon to be replaced by lemonade, orange juice, and ten years after we left Russia, real Coca-Cola, right there on the table, sitting nonchalantly next to the Lay’s Potato Chips.

It amazed me how taking a sip of a drink now sold upmarket at Whole Foods made me feel like I was, again, wearing pigtails and tights, and sitting at the family table, everyone around me passing the blue and white bottle of seltzer like there was no tomorrow.

It didn’t taste like pamplemousse. It tasted like being made fun of for years because my parents couldn’t afford brand-name clothes, like the feeling of being an outsider, starting from scratch, of waiting for the chicken at Acme to go on super-sale. It tasted like my childhood.

I gently put the rest of the six-pack I’d gotten to sample back under my counter and let out a small laugh, one that may or may not have been caused by the carbonated bubbles.