longreads

Sheryl Sandberg and the Silicon Valley Culture

readingbyeugene 1 Comment

In the latest issue of The New Yorker, Ken Auletta writes a detailed profile of Sheryl Sandberg, the Chief Operating Officer at Facebook. She was previously at Google, and Auletta goes in depth describing how Mark Zuckerberg wooed her to join him at Facebook. The entire piece is meticulously researched (I’d say about three months of work went into it), and worth reading in entirety. Much of the piece deals with how women are perceived in the workplace (Sandberg “blamed them [women] more for their insecurities than she blamed men for their insensitivity or their sexism”) and the challenges Sandberg faced when coming over from Google to Facebook.

Sandberg’s familiar history is particularly fascinating:

Sandberg was born in 1969, in Washington, D.C. Her family moved to North Miami Beach when she was two. Her mother, Adele, gave up studying for a Ph.D. and teaching college French in order to raise Sheryl and her two younger siblings, David and Michelle. Her father, Joel, is an ophthalmologist. After a rabbi at their synagogue asked for volunteers, Adele and Joel helped found the South Florida Conference on Soviet Jewry. “Adele did most of the work,” Joel says, but he was the president. Their home became an unofficial headquarters for Soviet Jews wanting to escape anti-Semitism, and a temporary hotel for many who had finally won the right to emigrate. On weekends, Adele says, “we schlepped the kids to rallies.”

The Sandberg children attended public school, and Sheryl was always at the top of her class. “In public schools, for a girl to be smart was not good for your social life,” Adele says. She describes her daughter as “a mother’s helper,” aiding David in tying his shoes and Michelle in taking a bath. The only time she ever rebelled, Adele recalls, was when she was in junior high school. “One day she came home from school and said, ‘Mom, we have a problem. You’re not ready to let me grow up.’ ”

“I said, ‘You’re right.’ The minute she said it, I knew she was right.”

One point raised in the piece is the relationship between work and raising a family. Sandberg is a mother, and spoke with Auletta about the challenge:

One day this spring, I spoke with Sandberg about these issues. She had rushed to the office from her son’s school wearing sweatpants, a zippered sweatshirt, and white sneakers, with her hair jammed into a ponytail. She sat under a framed photograph of her holding her baby and pulled out a Baggie containing sugar-snap peas, which she began munching as we talked. She said, “The No. 1 impediment to women succeeding in the workforce is now in the home. . . . Most people assume that women are responsible for households and child care. Most couples operate that way—not all. That fundamental assumption holds women back.” The second impediment is guilt, she said. “I feel guilty working because of my kids. I do. I feel guilty. In my TED talk, I’m talking to myself, too. I’m not just talking to other people. I have faced every one of those things myself.” Later, I asked her directly about Hewlett’s critique, and she simply said, “I feel really grateful to the people who encouraged me and helped me develop. Nobody can succeed on their own.”

Finally, I enjoyed the part about where Sandberg was to give a graduation speech at Bard College and said the following:

She described a poster on the wall at Facebook: “What would you do if you weren’t afraid?” She said that it echoed something the writer Anna Quindlen once said, which was that “she majored in unafraid” at Barnard. Sandberg went on, “Don’t let your fears overwhelm your desire. Let the barriers you face—and there will be barriers—be external, not internal. Fortune does favor the bold. I promise that you will never know what you’re capable of unless you try. You’re going to walk off this stage today and you’re going to start your adult life. Start out by aiming high. . . . Go home tonight and ask yourselves, What would I do if I weren’t afraid? And then go do it! Congratulations.”

So, what would you do if you weren’t afraid? It’s such an important question in how we guide ourselves in life: fear tends to brings us back down to Earth…

###

Related: The Face of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg 

The Top Five Longreads of 2011 (So Far)

readingbyeugene 5 Comments

I am a huge fan of Longreads. I am a yearly subscriber and often use the #longreads tag on Twitter and Facebook to point out superb longform articles. At the end of last year, I published a post highlighting the top five longreads of the year. It is still the most popular post here on Reading By Eugene.

After  I published that post, some people commented that the list was too short — I could have easily made a top ten list, or at least included five honorable mentions. That is all true, and I will probably follow this advice at the end of 2011 with my (what I now hope to be) annual longreads round-up.

Until then, I’ve decided to highlight the best longreads of the first half of 2011. Here they are, in no particular order.

(1) “The Clock in the Mountain” [The Technium] — amazing story by Kevin Kelly of a clock being built in Texas, designed to last ten thousand years:

There is a Clock ringing deep inside a mountain. It is a huge Clock, hundreds of feet tall, designed to tick for 10,000 years. Every once in a while the bells of this buried Clock play a melody. Each time the chimes ring, it’s a melody the Clock has never played before. The Clock’s chimes have been programmed to not repeat themselves for 10,000 years. Most times the Clock rings when a visitor has wound it, but the Clock hoards energy from a different source and occasionally it will ring itself when no one is around to hear it. It’s anyone’s guess how many beautiful songs will never be heard over the Clock’s 10 millennial lifespan.

Kevin Kelly’s What Technology Wants was the last book I read in 2010. Highly, highly recommended.

(2) “The Man Who Played Rockefeller” [Wall Street Journal] – first highlighted in this post, I wrote: “riveting, at times unbelievable, account of how a German-born Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter came to the United States at the tender age of 17 and proceeded to climb up the ranks of society. But he did it through conniving tactics, playing cool, and always acting the impostor.” It is already on my short list for best long read of the year.

When he entered the magnificent Gothic church in early 1992, the former Christopher Crowe had a new name and a meticulously researched persona to go with it. “Hello,” he greeted his fellow worshippers in his perfectly enunciated East Coast prep-school accent, wearing a blue blazer and private-club necktie, which he would usually accent with khaki pants embroidered with tiny ducks, hounds or bumblebees, worn always with Top-Sider boat shoes, without socks. “Clark,” he said, “Clark Rockefeller.”

(3) “The Assassin in the Vineyard” [Vanity Fair] – what can I say? I am a huge fan of reads that involve mystery, espionage, and crime. This piece by Maximillian Potter, which I first highlighted here, is far and away one of the most thrilling short reads I’ve read in 2011. In that post I wrote:

The gist of the story: La Romanée-Conti is a small, centuries-old vineyard that produces what most agree is Burgundy’s finest, rarest, and most expensive wine. But when Aubert de Villaine received an anonymous and sophisticated note, in January 2010, threatening the destruction of his heritage, unless he paid a 1 million euro ransom, he did not treat it seriously at first. Who was the mastermind behind this crime? And did the criminal get caught? All is revealed in the article…

Thoroughly engaging and entertaining read.

(4) “The Blind Man Who Taught Himself to See” [Men’s Journal] — truly an incredible story of how one man, Daniel Kish, has learned to see. How? By learning echolocation (what bats use to navigate):

Kish was born with an aggressive form of cancer called retinoblastoma, which attacks the retinas. To save his life, both of his eyes were removed by the time he was 13 months old. Since his infancy — Kish is now 44 — he has been adapting to his blindness in such remarkable ways that some people have wondered if he’s playing a grand practical joke. But Kish, I can confirm, is completely blind.

He knew my car was poorly parked because he produced a brief, sharp click with his tongue. The sound waves he created traveled at a speed of more than 1,000 feet per second, bounced off every object around him, and returned to his ears at the same rate, though vastly decreased in volume.

But not silent. Kish has trained himself to hear these slight echoes and to interpret their meaning. Standing on his front stoop, he could visualize, with an extraordinary degree of precision, the two pine trees on his front lawn, the curb at the edge of his street, and finally, a bit too far from that curb, my rental car. Kish has given a name to what he does — he calls it “FlashSonar” — but it’s more commonly known by its scientific term, echolocation.

(5) “The Epidemic of Mental Illness” (Part I) and “The Illusions of Psychiatry” (Part 2) [New York Review of Books] — this two part series, written by Marcia Angell changed my perspective on depression, the medicine used to treat it, and the field of psychiatry in general. I point out both reads because they are meant to be read in order (Part I then Part II).

Reviewed in Part I are books by  Irving Kirsch, Robert Whitaker, and Daniel Carlat. A notable paragraph of skepticism from Part I:

Do the drugs work? After all, regardless of the theory, that is the practical question. In his spare, remarkably engrossing book, The Emperor’s New Drugs, Kirsch describes his fifteen-year scientific quest to answer that question about antidepressants. When he began his work in 1995, his main interest was in the effects of placebos. To study them, he and a colleague reviewed thirty-eight published clinical trials that compared various treatments for depression with placebos, or compared psychotherapy with no treatment. Most such trials last for six to eight weeks, and during that time, patients tend to improve somewhat even without any treatment. But Kirsch found that placebos were three times as effective as no treatment. That didn’t particularly surprise him. What did surprise him was the fact that antidepressants were only marginally better than placebos.

I thought I’ve read a fair amount of skepticism in Part I. And then I read “The Illusions of Psychiatry,” which totally transplanted my thoughts on psychiatry from one mindset to another.

While Carlat believes that psychoactive drugs are sometimes effective, his evidence is anecdotal. What he objects to is their overuse and what he calls the “frenzy of psychiatric diagnoses.” As he puts it, “if you ask any psychiatrist in clinical practice, including me, whether antidepressants work for their patients, you will hear an unambiguous ‘yes.’ We see people getting better all the time.” But then he goes on to speculate, like Irving Kirsch in The Emperor’s New Drugs, that what they are really responding to could be an activated placebo effect. If psychoactive drugs are not all they’re cracked up to be—and the evidence is that they’re not—what about the diagnoses themselves?

One of Marcia Angell’s conclusions in that piece:

At the very least, we need to stop thinking of psychoactive drugs as the best, and often the only, treatment for mental illness or emotional distress. Both psychotherapy and exercise have been shown to be as effective as drugs for depression, and their effects are longer-lasting, but unfortunately, there is no industry to push these alternatives and Americans have come to believe that pills must be more potent. More research is needed to study alternatives to psychoactive drugs, and the results should be included in medical education.

So that’s my top five list of longreads of the first half of 2011? I mentioned honorable mentions at the beginning of the post, and I’ll include three of them below.

Honorable Mentions

(1) “What Happened to Air France Flight 447?” [New York Times] – a spectacular recounting of the Air France flight from Rio de Janiero to Paris, which crashed in the Atlantic Ocean on June 1, 2009.

(2) “Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom” [Guernica Magazine] – a revealing look at what some call a slave business for interns on the campus of that magic place, Disney World:

“We’re not there to flip burgers or to give people food,” a fast-food intern said. “We’re there to create magic.”

(3) “The Brain on Trial” [The Atlantic] – my most recently featured long read, this piece by David Eagleman is a controversial read, in which, Eagleman argues that how the human brain is wired ultimately determines how people will act. There is no such thing as free will.

(4) “The Possibilian” [The New Yorker] – speaking of David Eagleman (see above), this is a fantastic profile of the scientist. What did a brush with death teach Eagleman about time, its perception, and the brain? Find out in this fascinating article.

Time isn’t like the other senses, Eagleman says. Sight, smell, touch, taste, and hearing are relatively easy to isolate in the brain. They have discrete functions that rarely overlap: it’s hard to describe the taste of a sound, the color of a smell, or the scent of a feeling. (Unless, of course, you have synesthesia—another of Eagleman’s obsessions.) But a sense of time is threaded through everything we perceive. It’s there in the length of a song, the persistence of a scent, the flash of a light bulb.

(5) “Wikipedia and the Death of the Expert” [Awl] – I love Wikipedia. It’s my primary source to look up facts and yes, even current events. In this piece, Maria Bustillos goes in depth discussing its merits. I like this paragraph:

There’s an enormous difference between understanding something and deciding something. Only in the latter case must options be weighed, and one chosen. Wikipedia is like a laboratory for this new way of public reasoning for the purpose of understanding, an extended polylogue embracing every reader in an ever-larger, never-ending dialectic. Rather than being handed an “authoritative” decision, you’re given the means for rolling your own.

###

So there you have it. Top five long reads of the first half of 2011, plus five honorable mentions. It’s been a great year for #longreads so far, and it was tough to weed this list down to five (and it will be even harder to do so at the end of the year!). At least one or two of the pieces I mention here will be in my top five list at the end of the year. Of the best long reads I mentioned here, which one do you think already deserves that recognition? If I didn’t include a longreads post which you’ve thoroughly enjoyed and think should have made my list, please, do not hesitate to leave a comment below.

Finally, if you enjoyed this post, please share it. There are five buttons at the bottom: email this post, like it on Facebook, tweet it, +1 it on Google, or share (via LinkedIn, StumbleUpon, etc.). Of course, I also encourage you to subscribe to this blog via email using the box on the right side of the page.

David Eagleman and The Brain on Trial

readingbyeugene 16 Comments

Imagine for a second that anything you know about the motivations behind criminal activity. For most of us, myself included, our assessment of burglars, murderers, and other deviants is that they have made a choice to act this way (to break the law).

In a remarkable, provocative piece by David Eagleman, he suggests that criminal activity is ingrained in our brains. In no uncertain terms, Eagleman argues that how the human brain is wired ultimately determines how people will act. There is no such thing as free will.

The piece is long (but a must-read in its entirety). I pull a few significant quotes below.

The piece begins about Charles Whitman, a student at the University of Texas at Austin and a former Marine who killed 16 people and wounded 32 others during a shooting rampage on and around the university’s campus on August 1, 1966. The question was why? Eagleman begins to make his argument here, after Whitman’s suicide:

Whitman’s body was taken to the morgue, his skull was put under the bone saw, and the medical examiner lifted the brain from its vault. He discovered that Whitman’s brain harbored a tumor the diameter of a nickel. This tumor, called a glioblastoma, had blossomed from beneath a structure called the thalamus, impinged on the hypothalamus, and compressed a third region called the amygdala. The amygdala is involved in emotional regulation, especially of fear and aggression. By the late 1800s, researchers had discovered that damage to the amygdala caused emotional and social disturbances. In the 1930s, the researchers Heinrich Klüver and Paul Bucy demonstrated that damage to the amygdala in monkeys led to a constellation of symptoms, including lack of fear, blunting of emotion, and overreaction.

Perhaps the paragraph that tells the whole story of the piece:

When your biology changes, so can your decision-making and your desires. The drives you take for granted (“I’m a heterosexual/homosexual,” “I’m attracted to children/adults,” “I’m aggressive/not aggressive,” and so on) depend on the intricate details of your neural machinery. Although acting on such drives is popularly thought to be a free choice, the most cursory examination of the evidence demonstrates the limits of that assumption.

It is fascinating to learn how changing brain chemistry affects our moods, emotions, and behaviors. A classic example:

Changes in the balance of brain chemistry, even small ones, can also cause large and unexpected changes in behavior. Victims of Parkinson’s disease offer an example. In 2001, families and caretakers of Parkinson’s patients began to notice something strange. When patients were given a drug called pramipexole, some of them turned into gamblers. And not just casual gamblers, but pathological gamblers. These were people who had never gambled much before, and now they were flying off to Vegas. One 68-year-old man amassed losses of more than $200,000 in six months at a series of casinos.

Through the mini stories that Eagleman provides in his piece, he explains the lesson: there is no such thing as free will. Human behavior cannot be separated from our brain chemistry:

The lesson from all these stories is the same: human behavior cannot be separated from human biology. If we like to believe that people make free choices about their behavior (as in, “I don’t gamble, because I’m strong-willed”), cases like Alex the pedophile, the frontotemporal shoplifters, and the gambling Parkinson’s patients may encourage us to examine our views more carefully. Perhaps not everyone is equally “free” to make socially appropriate choices.

Now, it’s a little hard to digest that paragraph above. Cleverly, Eagleman begins to question you, the reader, on how you feel about this hypothesis:

Does the discovery of Charles Whitman’s brain tumor modify your feelings about the senseless murders he committed? Does it affect the sentence you would find appropriate for him, had he survived that day? Does the tumor change the degree to which you consider the killings “his fault”? Couldn’t you just as easily be unlucky enough to develop a tumor and lose control of your behavior?

On the other hand, wouldn’t it be dangerous to conclude that people with a tumor are free of guilt, and that they should be let off the hook for their crimes?

As our understanding of the human brain improves, juries are increasingly challenged with these sorts of questions. When a criminal stands in front of the judge’s bench today, the legal system wants to know whether he is blameworthy. Was it his fault, or his biology’s fault?

At this point, Eagleman counters and perhaps worries that he is going to lose readers. Your ideas are crazy, you might think. But please read on, as Eagleman suggests:

If I seem to be heading in an uncomfortable direction—toward letting criminals off the hook—please read on, because I’m going to show the logic of a new argument, piece by piece. The upshot is that we can build a legal system more deeply informed by science, in which we will continue to take criminals off the streets, but we will customize sentencing, leverage new opportunities for rehabilitation, and structure better incentives for good behavior. 

Some overwhelming statistics about criminal behavior:

Who you even have the possibility to be starts at conception. If you think genes don’t affect how people behave, consider this fact: if you are a carrier of a particular set of genes, the probability that you will commit a violent crime is four times as high as it would be if you lacked those genes. You’re three times as likely to commit robbery, five times as likely to commit aggravated assault, eight times as likely to be arrested for murder, and 13 times as likely to be arrested for a sexual offense. The overwhelming majority of prisoners carry these genes; 98.1 percent of death-row inmates do. These statistics alone indicate that we cannot presume that everyone is coming to the table equally equipped in terms of drives and behaviors.

But what about the environmental effects? Surely someone growing up on the mean streets of Detroit would become more predisposed to crime than someone growing up in the quiet suburbs of Wichita, Kansas.

When it comes to nature and nurture, the important point is that we choose neither one. We are each constructed from a genetic blueprint, and then born into a world of circumstances that we cannot control in our most-formative years. The complex interactions of genes and environment mean that all citizens—equal before the law—possess different perspectives, dissimilar personalities, and varied capacities for decision-making. The unique patterns of neurobiology inside each of our heads cannot qualify as choices; these are the cards we’re dealt.

Eagleman further espouses on free will, and explains that it doesn’t exist with a striking example of Tourette’s syndrome:

The legal system rests on the assumption that we are “practical reasoners,” a term of art that presumes, at bottom, the existence of free will. The idea is that we use conscious deliberation when deciding how to act—that is, in the absence of external duress, we make free decisions. This concept of the practical reasoner is intuitive but problematic.

The existence of free will in human behavior is the subject of an ancient debate. Arguments in support of free will are typically based on direct subjective experience (“I feel like I made the decision to lift my finger just now”). But evaluating free will requires some nuance beyond our immediate intuitions.

Consider a decision to move or speak. It feels as though free will leads you to stick out your tongue, or scrunch up your face, or call someone a name. But free will is not required to play any role in these acts. People with Tourette’s syndrome, for instance, suffer from involuntary movements and vocalizations. A typical Touretter may stick out his tongue, scrunch up his face, or call someone a name—all without choosing to do so.

So what’s the purpose of this essay? What can we conclude? Comparatively speaking, we know so little of our brains, that the field of neuroscience can be said to be in its infancy.

Today, neuroimaging [editor’s note: I studied medical imaging both in undergrad at Georgia Tech and at the Brain Imaging Center at California Institute of Technology; I am familiar with the subject matter and for what it’s worth, agree with Eagleman’s assessment] is a crude technology, unable to explain the details of individual behavior. We can detect only large-scale problems, but within the coming decades, we will be able to detect patterns at unimaginably small levels of the microcircuitry that correlate with behavioral problems. Neuroscience will be better able to say why people are predisposed to act the way they do. As we become more skilled at specifying how behavior results from the microscopic details of the brain, more defense lawyers will point to biological mitigators of guilt, and more juries will place defendants on the not-blameworthy side of the line.

Further conclusions from Eagleman. The wrong question to ask: how can we assign a blameworthiness scale in our legal system? Eagleman explain:

Blameworthiness should be removed from the legal argot. It is a backward-looking concept that demands the impossible task of untangling the hopelessly complex web of genetics and environment that constructs the trajectory of a human life.

Instead of debating culpability, we should focus on what to do, moving forward, with an accused lawbreaker. I suggest that the legal system has to become forward-looking, primarily because it can no longer hope to do otherwise. As science complicates the question of culpability, our legal and social policy will need to shift toward a different set of questions: How is a person likely to behave in the future? Are criminal actions likely to be repeated? Can this person be helped toward pro-social behavior? How can incentives be realistically structured to deter crime?

Speaking of wrong questions to ask, Eagleman brilliantly defends here:

The important change will be in the way we respond to the vast range of criminal acts. Biological explanation will not exculpate criminals; we will still remove from the streets lawbreakers who prove overaggressive, underempathetic, and poor at controlling their impulses. Consider, for example, that the majority of known serial killers were abused as children. Does this make them less blameworthy? Who cares? It’s the wrong question. The knowledge that they were abused encourages us to support social programs to prevent child abuse, but it does nothing to change the way we deal with the particular serial murderer standing in front of the bench. We still need to keep him off the streets, irrespective of his past misfortunes. The child abuse cannot serve as an excuse to let him go; the judge must keep society safe.

And then we come to the meat of the essay, where Eagleman gives us an idea of a forward-looking legal system:

Beyond customized sentencing, a forward-thinking legal system informed by scientific insights into the brain will enable us to stop treating prison as a one-size-fits-all solution. To be clear, I’m not opposed to incarceration, and its purpose is not limited to the removal of dangerous people from the streets. The prospect of incarceration deters many crimes, and time actually spent in prison can steer some people away from further criminal acts upon their release. But that works only for those whose brains function normally. The problem is that prisons have become our de facto mental-health-care institutions—and inflicting punishment on the mentally ill usually has little influence on their future behavior. An encouraging trend is the establishment of mental-health courts around the nation: through such courts, people with mental illnesses can be helped while confined in a tailored environment. Cities such as Richmond, Virginia, are moving in this direction, for reasons of justice as well as cost-effectiveness. Sheriff C. T. Woody, who estimates that nearly 20 percent of Richmond’s prisoners are mentally ill, told CBS News, “The jail isn’t a place for them. They should be in a mental-health facility.” Similarly, many jurisdictions are opening drug courts and developing alternative sentences; they have realized that prisons are not as useful for solving addictions as are meaningful drug-rehabilitation programs.

A forward-thinking legal system will also parlay biological understanding into customized rehabilitation, viewing criminal behavior the way we understand other medical conditions such as epilepsy, schizophrenia, and depression—conditions that now allow the seeking and giving of help. These and other brain disorders find themselves on the not-blameworthy side of the fault line, where they are now recognized as biological, not demonic, issues.

But Eagleman closes spectacularly:

As brain science improves, we will better understand that people exist along continua of capabilities, rather than in simplistic categories. And we will be better able to tailor sentencing and rehabilitation for the individual, rather than maintain the pretense that all brains respond identically to complex challenges and that all people therefore deserve the same punishments. Some people wonder whether it’s unfair to take a scientific approach to sentencing—after all, where’s the humanity in that? But what’s the alternative? As it stands now, ugly people receive longer sentences than attractive people; psychiatrists have no capacity to guess which sex offenders will reoffend; and our prisons are overcrowded with drug addicts and the mentally ill, both of whom could be better helped by rehabilitation. So is current sentencing really superior to a scientifically informed approach?

Neuroscience is beginning to touch on questions that were once only in the domain of philosophers and psychologists, questions about how people make decisions and the degree to which those decisions are truly “free.” These are not idle questions. Ultimately, they will shape the future of legal theory and create a more biologically informed jurisprudence.

###

I’ve highlighted the major sections of the essay, but of course, I encourage you to read the whole thing. It will change your perspective on how you view and think about criminality and our legal system. If for some chance it did not change your course of thinking, why not? Shout out in the comments.

Jose Antonio Vargas: My Life as an Undocumented Citizen

readingbyeugene 1 Comment

In the lastest issue of New York Times Magazine, writer Jose Antonio Vargas (who wrote the sublime piece on Mark Zuckerberg last year) bares it all and reveals the incredible story of how he arrived to America and has been living here as an illegal immigrant.

This paragraph sets the stage, and thumps the heart:

One day when I was 16, I rode my bike to the nearby D.M.V. office to get my driver’s permit. Some of my friends already had their licenses, so I figured it was time. But when I handed the clerk my green card as proof of U.S. residency, she flipped it around, examining it. “This is fake,” she whispered. “Don’t come back here again.”

His approach to life is one of fear and hesitation:

On the surface, I’ve created a good life. I’ve lived the American dream…But I am still an undocumented immigrant. And that means living a different kind of reality. It means going about my day in fear of being found out. It means rarely trusting people, even those closest to me, with who I really am. It means keeping my family photos in a shoebox rather than displaying them on shelves in my home, so friends don’t ask about them. It means reluctantly, even painfully, doing things I know are wrong and unlawful. And it has meant relying on a sort of 21st-century underground railroad of supporters, people who took an interest in my future and took risks for me…

I can relate to the challenge of learning the language, English, as Vargas explains here (I used to watch Home Improvement as well):

My first challenge was the language. Though I learned English in the Philippines, I wanted to lose my accent. During high school, I spent hours at a time watching television (especially “Frasier,” “Home Improvement” and reruns of “The Golden Girls”) and movies (from “Goodfellas” to “Anne of Green Gables”), pausing the VHS to try to copy how various characters enunciated their words. At the local library, I read magazines, books and newspapers — anything to learn how to write better. Kathy Dewar, my high-school English teacher, introduced me to journalism. From the moment I wrote my first article for the student paper, I convinced myself that having my name in print — writing in English, interviewing Americans — validated my presence here.

Again and again, Vargas reiterates how difficult the deception was:

For more than a decade of getting part-time and full-time jobs, employers have rarely asked to check my original Social Security card. When they did, I showed the photocopied version, which they accepted. Over time, I also began checking the citizenship box on my federal I-9 employment eligibility forms. (Claiming full citizenship was actually easier than declaring permanent resident “green card” status, which would have required me to provide an alien registration number.)

This deceit never got easier. The more I did it, the more I felt like an impostor, the more guilt I carried — and the more I worried that I would get caught. But I kept doing it. I needed to live and survive on my own, and I decided this was the way.

So why come forward like this? Vargas explains:

So I’ve decided to come forward, own up to what I’ve done, and tell my story to the best of my recollection. I’ve reached out to former bosses­ and employers and apologized for misleading them — a mix of humiliation and liberation coming with each disclosure. All the people mentioned in this article gave me permission to use their names. I’ve also talked to family and friends about my situation and am working with legal counsel to review my options. I don’t know what the consequences will be of telling my story.

Good for him. I imagine a tremendous burden has been lifted. Earlier I wrote about liberation. I think Vargas feels so liberated now. Let’s hope he gets the chance to stay in America and continue doing great work in journalism. You should read his entire remarkable story, in which he reveals his progression from his work on a high school newspaper  to work at the Huffington Post and Washington Post, to where he stands today. Amazing.

 

David Foster Wallace: “Frightening Time in America”

readingbyeugene Leave a comment

A never before published (in the United States) 2006 interview with David Foster Wallace has appeared in The New York Review of Books. I enjoyed getting to know the genius of David Foster Wallace from this fascinating interview.

Two notable quotes. First, DFW on the state of America [emphasis mine]:

Speaking totally as an amateur and not any kind of government expert, I would say America’s now starting to face certain economic realities that we’ve been shielded from for many years. The price of gasoline is slowly becoming closer to what it is in the rest of the world. The awareness that the entire Earth’s climate is affected by all nations, and that the United States as far and away the biggest carbon dioxide producer bears some special responsibility for possible environmental collapse later. Americans are slowly waking up out of a kind of dream of special exemption and special privilege in the world. To use your term, this could result in some kind of volcano and America becoming some kind of nightmarish imperial force trying to take resources from other countries forcibly, or it could result, as I think it does in many countries in cycles, in a kind of slow awakening to the fact that having and consuming and exhausting resources is actually not a very good set of values for living.

So which way it will go? I don’t know. And it’s one reason it’s a very frightening time in America, particularly with the people who’re in power right now—many of us are in the position of being more afraid of our own country and our own government than we are of any supposed enemy somewhere else. For someone like me who grew up in the sixties at the height of the Cold War and whose consciousness was formed by, “we are the good guy and there’s one great looming dark enemy and that’s the Soviet Union,” the idea of waking up to the fact that in today’s world very possibly we are the villain, we are the dark force, to begin to see ourselves a little bit through the eyes of people in other countries—you can imagine how difficult that is for Americans to do. Nevertheless, with a lot of the people that I know that’s slowly starting to happen.

A good exchange between the interviewer, Ostap Karmodi, and DFW here:

OK: What do you think of the modern state of American literature?

DFW: Ugggggghhhhh. Somebody asked me this a couple of weeks ago. I think the truth is that it’s a very exciting period but it’s one that probably people in other countries won’t have as much access to. Because 30 or 40 years ago American literature mainly existed in ten or a dozen giant literary figures, and there are now probably more like 100 or 200 literary figures, all of whom are quite good and quite interesting, but none really of the stature and international reputation of, say, a Saul Bellow or a William Faulkner or an Ernest Hemingway.

The Man Who Played Rockefeller

readingbyeugene 3 Comments

Mark Seal’s “The Man Who Played Rockefeller” is far and away the best thing I’ve read all week. It is a riveting, at times unbelievable, account of how a German-born Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter came to the United States at the tender age of 17 and proceeded to climb up the ranks of society. But he did it through conniving tactics, playing cool, and always acting the impostor.

You must read the whole thing, but I highlight some notable passages below. If you’ve seen LOST, you remember the mention of the long con. I claim that Gerhartsreiter’s story can be dubbed The Long Con.

Gerhartsreiter’s ascendance followed discrete steps, beginning with his rise in California:

When he appeared in the wealthy, leafy town of San Marino, California, three years later, Gerhartsreiter, now 20, had transformed himself into Christopher Mountbatten Chichester, a self-proclaimed computer expert, film producer, stockbroker and the nephew of Lord Mountbatten. The new arrival was a whiz at Trivial Pursuit, the American pop-culture game, and proved especially popular with women, who were charmed by his royal bloodline and courtly manners. “He knew everything about everything,” one woman told me recently. “He was fabulous.”

His next move was toward the East Coast, where he took a new name, Christopher C. Crowe, which he’d taken from the producer of the series “Alfred Hitchcock Presents.”

For the freshly minted Crowe, the doors to an incredible new career opened at the Indian Harbor Yacht Club, an exclusive sailing organization that dates back to 1889. It is a picture-perfect setting, a white wooden building festooned with yachting flags looking out onto Long Island Sound. “Imagine hundreds of people here for a regatta,” said my local guide, a woman I’ll call Samantha. “Nobody would know anything. The guy could sneak in [easily], coming up from the shore.”

To me, one of the most astounding part of the story was his rise through the ranks on Wall Street, where he had to pass difficult tests to become a licensed broker dealer:

But Crowe not only had to get through a personal interview with the shrewd Phelps, he also had to pass difficult tests. Everyone who works at a broker-dealer company must take the Series 7 and Series 63 exams, which consist of more than seven hours of questions. The Series 7, which has 250 multiple-choice questions, takes about six hours to complete; Crowe most likely took his test at One Police Plaza in New York City. “Two three-hour parts, with a one-hour break,” said Samantha. “Some people have to take it two or three times. I’ve taken this test. It’s not easy. He might have been odd. He might have been arrogant. But he’s smart.”

Crowe let Samantha and everyone else at S. N. Phelps know that in addition to being a techie he was also the producer of a new series, “Alfred Hitchcock Presents.” “And if you looked at the credits, you would see Christopher Crowe,” said Samantha. “I asked him one time, ‘Christopher, it’s illogical to me. You’re a producer. And you’ve become a techie at a junk bond shop making $24,000 a year?’ He said, ‘I wanted to try something different.’ “

On Crowe’s lifestyle living someone else’s life:

Crowe was living the life of a Wall Street player: a six-figure salary, an office in the World Financial Center and an estate in Greenwich—or at least a few rooms behind an estate in Greenwich. A list of some of the charges on his American Express card (issued in the name of CCC Mountbatten) from 1987 to 1988 shows he dined in Manhattan’s finest restaurants: the “21” Club, Le Bernardin, the Quilted Giraffe and Bellini by Cipriani, among others. He was a regular on Broadway and at the opera, charging tickets to shows including “Phantom of the Opera” and “Madame Butterfly.” There were numerous charges for clothing, from such stores as Burberry, Church’s English Shoes and J. Press. He bought chocolates or flowers on almost a weekly basis—gifts, presumably, for people with whom he wanted to ingratiate himself.

And for the final, most ambitious metamorphosis, Gerhartsreiter became Rockefeller:

When he entered the magnificent Gothic church in early 1992, the former Christopher Crowe had a new name and a meticulously researched persona to go with it. “Hello,” he greeted his fellow worshippers in his perfectly enunciated East Coast prep-school accent, wearing a blue blazer and private-club necktie, which he would usually accent with khaki pants embroidered with tiny ducks, hounds or bumblebees, worn always with Top-Sider boat shoes, without socks. “Clark,” he said, “Clark Rockefeller.”

The newcomer had quite a tale to tell. “He intimated that he was from the Percy Rockefeller branch of the clan—not John D. ultrarich, but plenty rich,” said a member of the congregation I’ll call John Wells. “He claimed to have grown up on Sutton Place [the East Side enclave of some of the grandest townhouses in the city]. He claimed to have gone to Yale at something like age 14. He had the Yale scarf with the blue stripes on it. He said he had one of the J-boats from his grandparents—you know, the classic 1920s, 1930s sailing yachts.”

Read the rest of the story to find out how he was caught. I didn’t mention it above, but interwoven in the story is a murder… This story is a hell a lot more interesting than some of the movies I’ve seen recently, and I am sure you’ll agree when you read the story yourself.

###

Note: Mark Seal’s story is adapted from Mark Seal’s book, The Man in the Rockefeller Suit, which is slated to be released on June 2, 2011.

New Yorker Profile of Joseph Brodsky

readingbyeugene 1 Comment

In this month’s New Yorker, there is an interesting profile of Joseph Brodsky and the fortune of misfortunes.

If you aren’t familiar with Brodsky’s story and his exile from Russia, that piece is an excellent primer. I’ve previously profiled a conversation between Brodksy and a judge in this post (scroll down to the bottom), but this exchange (profiled in the New Yorker) was new to me:

Judge: Tell the court why in between jobs you didn’t work and led a parasitic life style?
Brodsky: I worked in between jobs. I did what I do now: I wrote poems.
Judge: You wrote your so-called poems? And what was useful about your frequent job changes?
Brodsky: I began working when I was 15 years old. Everything was interesting to me. I changed jobs because I wanted to learn more about life, about people.
Judge: What did you do for your motherland?
Brodsky: I wrote poems. That is my work. I am convinced. . . . I believe that what I wrote will be useful to people not only now but in future generations.
Judge: So you think your so-called poems are good for people?
Brodsky: Why do you say of the poems that they are “so-called”?
Judge: We say that because we don’t have any other idea about them. 

Of note is this paragraph about Brosky’s loneliness when coming to the United States:

Brodsky’s poems during his first years in the States are filled with the most naked loneliness. “An autumn evening in a humble little town / proud of its appearance on the map,” one begins, and concludes with an image of a person whose reflection in the mirror disappears, bit by bit, like that of a street lamp in a drying puddle. The enterprising Proffer had persuaded the University of Michigan to make Brodsky a poet in residence; Brodsky wrote a poem about a college teacher. “In the country of dentists,” it begins, “whose daughters order clothes / from London catalogues, . . . / I, whose mouth houses ruins / more total than the Parthenon’s, / a spy, an interloper, / the fifth column of a rotten civilization,” teach literature. The narrator comes home at night, falls into bed with his clothes still on, and cries himself to sleep…

I also thought the author’s conviction on Brodsky’s grasp of the English language was profound (I am reminded of Nabokov in this instance):

His [Brodsky’s] English was able to grant his parents a measure of freedom. But there was one thing it could not do: transform his Russian poetry into English poetry. Inevitably, Brodsky tried, and he wasn’t shy about it. Almost as soon as his English was up to snuff he began to “collaborate” with his translators; eventually he supplanted them. The results were not so much bad as badly uneven. For every successful stanza, there were three or four gaffes—grammatical, or idiomatic, or just generally tin-eared. Worst of all, to readers accustomed to postwar Anglo-American poetry, Brodsky’s translations rhymed, no matter what obstacles stood in their way.

###
Hat Tip: @openculture. 

One Year Later: Deepwater Horizon Explosion

readingbyeugene Leave a comment

Today, April 20, marks the one year anniversary of the Deepwater Horizon explosion in the Gulf of Mexico. Over the last year, we’ve seen hundreds of headlines depicting the disaster and BP’s recovery efforts to clean the oil. But there’s one article I want to highlight which strongly resonated with me since I first read it. It is “Deepwater Horizon’s Final Hours,” published in New York Times Magazine the day after Christmas, 2010. I didn’t highlight the article in my blog as I was traveling at the time, but it’s one of the most riveting pieces I read the entire year. The 2011 Pulitzer Prices were recently announced, and if I had any say in it, I think David Barstow, David Rohde, and Stephanie Saul should have won the prize for investigative reporting.

On paper, experts and investigators agree, the Deepwater Horizon should have weathered [a] blowout.

This is the story of how and why it didn’t.

It is based on interviews with 21 Horizon crew members and on sworn testimony and written statements from nearly all of the other 94 people who escaped the rig. Their accounts, along with thousands of documents obtained by The New York Times describing the rig’s maintenance and operations, make it possible to finally piece together the Horizon’s last hours.

What emerges is a stark and singular fact: crew members died and suffered terrible injuries because every one of the Horizon’s defenses failed on April 20. Some were deployed but did not work. Some were activated too late, after they had almost certainly been damaged by fire or explosions. Some were never deployed at all.

At critical moments that night, members of the crew hesitated and did not take the decisive steps needed. Communications fell apart, warning signs were missed and crew members in critical areas failed to coordinate a response.

The result, the interviews and records show, was paralysis. For nine long minutes, as the drilling crew battled the blowout and gas alarms eventually sounded on the bridge, no warning was given to the rest of the crew. For many, the first hint of crisis came in the form of a blast wave.

I hope you read it. This is truly a must-read piece, and I think it was (significantly) overlooked when it was published right after Christmas late last year.

The Assassin in the Vineyard and the Story of the La Romanée-Conti Vineyard

readingbyeugene 2 Comments

I’m not much an oenophile (or not at all). But I loved this story in the May 2011 edition of Vanity Fair, “The Assassin in the Vineyard.” Maximillian Potter does an astounding job of going behind the scenes to explain the history of the fabled vineyard, La Romanée-Conti.

The gist of the story: La Romanée-Conti is a small, centuries-old vineyard that produces what most agree is Burgundy’s finest, rarest, and most expensive wine. But when Aubert de Villaine received an anonymous and sophisticated note, in January 2010, threatening the destruction of his heritage, unless he paid a 1 million euro ransom, he did not treat it seriously at first. Who was the mastermind behind this crime? And did the criminal get caught? All is revealed in the article…

Previously, I had never even heard of La Romanée-Conti. But Potter describes it as a “mecca-Xanadu,” and explains the significance of the wine coming from this vineyard:

Indeed, whatever superlatives can be ascribed to a wine apply to the eponymous wine from the Romanée-Conti vineyard. It ranks among the very top of the most highly coveted, most expensive wines in the world. According to the Domaine de la Romanée-Conti’s exclusive American distributor, Wilson Daniels, acquiring or purchasing a bottle is as simple as calling your local “fine-wine retailer.” However, because D.R.C. is produced in such limited quantities, and because the high-end wine market is such an intricate and virtually impenetrable web of advance orders—futures—and aftermarket wheeling and dealing, it’s not as simple as the distributor suggests. Wilson Daniels’s own Web site points would-be D.R.C. buyers to wine-searcher.com, which is a worldwide marketplace for wine sales and online auctions. There, the average price for a single bottle from 2007 (excluding tax and the buyers’ premium) is $6,455—and that’s the most recent vintage available.

On the storied history of the vineyard (or how the Conti name came to be):

The Benedictine monks of the medieval Catholic Church were the original obstinate ones who civilized Burgundy’s Côte. They were the défricheurs, or “ground clearers,” who married the fickle Pinot Noir grape to the ostensibly inhospitable terrain. They discovered that a narrow strip of land about halfway down the gently sloping hillside produces the very best wines—the grands crus. “The Slope of Gold,” it was called. While the monks first cultivated the vineyard that would become Romanée-Conti, it was the Prince de Conti, centuries later, who gave the wine its name and infused it with nobility and naughty.

The worthless forest and fallow land that the Duke of Burgundy had deeded to the monks in the 1100s were by the late 1500s profitable climats, and the monarchy wanted in. Taxation compelled the priory to sell a “perpetual lease” on their finest climat, the first incarnation of Romanée-Conti: Cros des Cloux. Between 1584 and 1631, Cros des Cloux had three owners, before it was transferred to the Croonembourg family. Under this owner, Cros des Cloux blossomed in the marketplace. As it did, for reasons historians can’t fully explain, the family changed the name to La Romanée. By 1733 the Croonembourgs’ La Romanée was going for prices as much as six times those of most other reputable growths of the Côte. Still, when the Croonembourg patriarch died, in 1745, the family over the next 15 years slipped into debt and La Romanée was sold to Louis-François de Bourbon—the Prince de Conti.

There’s so much more in the piece, but I leave with this quote, describing the ransom letter. You now know that the mastermind of this devious plan knew much about La Romanée-Conti:

It was not so much a note as it was a package, delivered to his private residence. (A similar package arrived at the home of Henry-Frédéric Roch, who holds the title of co-director of the D.R.C. and represents the Leroy family’s interest in the Domaine.) Inside the cylindrical container, the type an architect might use for blueprints, was a large parchment. Unrolled, the document was a detailed drawing of Romanée-Conti. While the 4.46-acre vineyard is essentially a rectangle, there are nuances to its shape. De Villaine noticed that whoever had sent this letter and sketched the vineyard knew its every contour, and what’s more, the author had noted every single one of its roughly 20,000 vine stocks. In the center of the vineyard sketch this person, or persons, had drawn a circle. There was a note, too, which conveyed that the vineyard would be destroyed unless certain demands were met…

Continue reading the entire thing to find out what happens next. You won’t regret setting aside half an hour for this riveting read.

Paul Graham on Wealth

readingbyeugene Leave a comment

I can’t remember how I stumbled upon Paul Graham’s classic 2004 essay on wealth, but I am glad I re-read it last night. Excerpt below:

Wealth is the fundamental thing. Wealth is stuff we want: food, clothes, houses, cars, gadgets, travel to interesting places, and so on. You can have wealth without having money. If you had a magic machine that could on command make you a car or cook you dinner or do your laundry, or do anything else you wanted, you wouldn’t need money. Whereas if you were in the middle of Antarctica, where there is nothing to buy, it wouldn’t matter how much money you had.

Wealth is what you want, not money. But if wealth is the important thing, why does everyone talk about making money? It is a kind of shorthand: money is a way of moving wealth, and in practice they are usually interchangeable. But they are not the same thing, and unless you plan to get rich by counterfeiting, talking about making money can make it harder to understand how to make money.

Highly recommend reading the whole thing. It’s long, but it’s worth it.

###

Question of the day: What is wealth for you?