The Case for Filth

[ed. I have to say, there are some things in this article that sound like pure BS to me. I like a clean and orderly environment despite my sex, and am more than willing to expend the effort to make it like that. But there are other interesting observations here too, so take it for what you will.]

Despite its apparent banality, housework has always been an intellectually confounding problem. The idea that the chores are a series of repetitive tasks undertaken to preserve the health and hygiene of the living space is an easy assumption to make. Nothing could be further from the truth; housework is as complex as the connection between our emotional life and our material life, as subtle as all intimacy. (...)

You may have had this argument yourself: Should housework be measured by the time spent on the task, or by effectiveness? What is necessary work and what is puttering? Should work that is physically taxing, like yard work, count more than work that isn’t, like the dishes? Questionnaires and housework diaries generally deal only in repetitive tasks like sweeping, doing the dishes and mowing the lawn. What about planning summer vacations? What about figuring out which washer to buy? And what about that far more important but far vaguer business of caring? We all know families that are held together because a woman knows who likes what in their sandwiches, who can or cannot read on a road trip, who needs cuddles after a hard day at school.

The million tendernesses of “emotional work” all require effort, often thankless effort. In one Canadian study, “What Is Household Work? A Critique of Assumptions Underlying Empirical Studies of Housework and an Alternative Approach,” the researchers had the intriguing idea of asking women what they considered their chores to be. A surprising array of answers emerged. For one Iranian woman, it involved calling her sister every day because their mother couldn’t get a visa out of Turkey. Several nationalities mentioned prayer as a household task.

It’s not easy to tally up emotional support, in all its forms. But none of these methodological difficulties should let men off the hook. According to calculations from the Bureau of Economic Analysis, even the domestic tasks that can be replaced directly through hired labor amount to 25.7 percent of America’s gross domestic product, and the bulk of that inordinately falls on women. If anything, a more expansive idea of housework shows how much more women are doing and how much of it is simply not registered in the accounts of what goes into the day. But the “moral dimension” to housework, as some scholars have called it, complicates all merely economic readings of the situation.

Housework is intimate drudgery. Understanding its intimacy is at least as important as understanding its drudgery. In an essay in New York magazine on the subject of housework in his own marriage, Jonathan Chait defended male indifference to housework as a question of having different standards than women. The truth of the matter is that it’s far more complex and darker and more intimate than “standards.” Even the most basic housework proves ethereal on inspection. The mechanism of emptying the dishwasher in my house is typically elaborate. When I cook, my wife tends to be responsible for the dishes. But she hates removing the cutlery from the dishwasher. (To figure out why she hates removing the cutlery would require decades of deep analysis. I do not know.) Therefore emptying the cutlery is my responsibility. So if I unload all the dishes, it’s a gift to my wife, but the cutlery is not. It is my marital duty. Every well-managed household is full of such minor insanities.

These minor insanities can be general as well as particular. Here’s one: In some countries, women who make more money than their husbands tend to do more housework. An Australian study described a U-shaped curve: As women approach income equality in their relationships they do a smaller share of the housework, but past equality they do a larger share. It’s not just income that matters, either. A 2012 study published in the American Journal of Sociology showed that housework can be a reaction to “gender deviance” in the type of the work involved as well: “Men and women perform gender through the routine activities of male- and female-typed housework and this performance appears to be undertaken in part to neutralize the gender deviance created when men and women are employed in gender-atypical occupations.”

The natural question is how long this situation can last. Fifty years ago a “woman doctor” was a gender-bending phenomenon. Now not so much. Nonetheless compensatory performances, intimate, tucked away, continue to affect daily domestic life. Like everything in marriage, the division of domestic duties ultimately boils down to sex, the fundamental struggle to achieve regulated passion. In what seems like one of the most widely reported sociological studies in history, a team of researchers in 2012 discovered that men who do more housework have less sex than men who don’t — but that men who do more traditional male housework, like yard work, have more sex. That old chestnut of sex advice columns, that tidying up the kitchen will get your wife in the mood, is sadly inaccurate.

by Stephen Marche, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Golden Cosmos

via:

Democracy Born in Chains: South Africa's Constricted Freedom

[ed. With Nelson Mandela's passing this week it seems an opportune time to re-visit the events that led up to, and structured, a post-apartheid Africa. In Naomi Klein's monumental work The Shock Doctrine the case is made that key demands for economic justice were sacrificed in the name of a smooth transition - the effects of which are still being felt today.]

The talks that hashed out the terms of apartheid’s end took place on two parallel tracks that often intersected: one was political, the other economic. Most of the attention, naturally, focused on the high-profile political summits between Nelson Mandela and F.W. de Klerk, leader of the National Party.

De Klerk’s strategy in these negotiations was to preserve as much power as possible. He tried everything—breaking the country into a federation, guaranteeing veto power for minority parties, reserving a certain percentage of the seats in government structures for each ethnic group—anything to prevent simple majority rule, which he was sure would lead to mass land expropriations and the nationalizing of corporations. As Mandela later put it, "What the National Party was trying to do was to maintain white supremacy with our consent." De Klerk had guns and money behind him, but his opponent had a movement of millions. Mandela and his chief negotiator, Cyril Ramaphosa, won on almost every count.

Running alongside these often explosive summits were the much lower profile economic negotiations, primarily managed on the ANC side by Thabo Mbeki, then a rising star in the party, now South Africa’s president. As the political talks progressed, and it became clear to the National Party that Parliament would soon be firmly in the hands of the ANC, the party of South Africa’s elites began pouring its energy and creativity into the economic negotiations. South Africa’s whites had failed to keep blacks from taking over the government, but when it came to safeguarding the wealth they had amassed under apartheid, they would not give up so easily.

In these talks, the de Klerk government had a twofold strategy. First, drawing on the ascendant Washington Consensus that there was now only one way to run an economy, it portrayed key sectors of economic decision making—such as trade policy and the central bank—as "technical" or "administrative." Then it used a wide range of new policy tools—international trade agreements, innovations in constitutional law and structural adjustment programs—to hand control of those power centres to supposedly impartial experts, economists and officials from the IMF, the World Bank, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and the National Party—anyone except the liberation fighters from the ANC. It was a strategy of balkanization, not of the country’s geography (as de Klerk had originally attempted) but of its economy. (...)

What happened in those negotiations is that the ANC found itself caught in a new kind of web, one made of arcane rules and regulations, all designed to confine and constrain the power of elected leaders. As the web descended on the country, only a few people even noticed it was there, but when the new government came to power and tried to move freely, to give its voters the tangible benefits of liberation they expected and thought they had voted for, the strands of the web tightened and the administration discovered that its powers were tightly bound. Patrick Bond, who worked as an economic adviser in Mandela’s office during the first years of ANC rule, recalls that the in-house quip was "Hey, we’ve got the state, where’s the power?" As the new government attempted to make tangible the dreams of the Freedom Charter, it discovered that the power was elsewhere.

Want to redistribute land? Impossible—at the last minute, the negotiators agreed to add a clause to the new constitution that protects all private property, making land reform virtually impossible. Want to create jobs for millions of unemployed workers? Can’t—hundreds of factories were actually about to close because the ANC had signed on to the GATT, the precursor to the World Trade Organization, which made it illegal to subsidize the auto plants and textile factories. Want to get free AIDS drugs to the townships, where the disease is spreading with terrifying speed? That violates an intellectual property rights commitment under the WTO, which the ANC joined with no public debate as a continuation of the GATT. Need money to build more and larger houses for the poor and to bring free electricity to the townships? Sorry—the budget is being eaten up servicing the massive debt, passed on quietly by the apartheid government. Print more money? Tell that to the apartheid-era head of the central bank. Free water for all? Not likely. The World Bank, with its large in-country contingent of economists, researchers and trainers (a self-proclaimed "Knowledge Bank"), is making private-sector partnerships the service norm. Want to impose currency controls to guard against wild speculation? That would violate the $850 million IMF deal, signed, conveniently enough, right before the elections. Raise the minimum wage to close the apartheid income gap? Nope. The IMF deal promises "wage restraint." And don’t even think about ignoring these commitments— any change will be regarded as evidence of dangerous national untrustworthiness, a lack of commitment to “reform,” an absence of a "rules-based system." All of which will lead to currency crashes, aid cuts and capital flight. The bottom line was that South Africa was free but simultaneously captured; each one of these arcane acronyms represented a different thread in the web that pinned down the limbs of the new government.

A long-time anti-apartheid activist, Rassool Snyman, described the trap to me in stark terms. "They never freed us. They only took the chain from around our neck and put it on our ankles." Yasmin Sooka, a prominent South African human rights activist, told me that the transition "was business saying, ‘We’ll keep everything and you [the ANC] will rule in name. . . . You can have political power, you can have the façade of governing, but the real governance will take place somewhere else.’",  It was a process of infantilization that is common to so-called transitional countries—new governments are, in effect, given the keys to the house but not the combination to the safe.

Part of what I wanted to understand was how, after such an epic struggle for freedom, any of this could have been allowed to happen. Not just how the leaders of the liberation movement gave up the economic front, but how the ANC’s base—people who had already sacrificed so much—let their leaders give it up. Why didn’t the grassroots movement demand that the ANC keep the promises of the Freedom Charter and rebel against the concessions as they were being made?

I put the question to William Gumede, a third-generation ANC activist who, as a leader of the student movement during the transition, was on the streets in those tumultuous years. "Everyone was watching the political negotiations," he recalled, referring to the de Klerk–Mandela summits. "And if people felt it wasn’t going well there would be mass protests. But when the economic negotiators would report back, people thought it was technical; no one was interested." This perception, he said, was encouraged by Mbeki, who portrayed the talks as "administrative" and of no popular concern (much like the Chileans with their "technified democracy"). As a result, he told me, with great exasperation, "We missed it! We missed the real story."

by Naomi Klein, Naomi Klein.org/Chapter from the Shock Doctrine | Read more:
Image: Wikipedia

Uber Might Be More Valuable Than Facebook Someday

One of the odd things about traveling between the Bay Area and New York a lot is the asynchronicity of mass culture between coasts: That is, the things that get popular in the Bay Area (PostMates, Burning Man) don't always get popular in New York right away, and things New Yorkers think are a big deal (cronuts, Banksy) are greeted with shrugs in San Francisco.

Today, the inter-city hype gap I most experience is with Uber. In New York, most people who know about Uber see it as the fanciest of a handful of on-demand car services. (The way it works: You open the Uber app on your smart phone and choose one of several grades of cars — luxury SUV or Prius? — indicate where you want the vehicle to pick you up, and pay for your ride by credit card, with the rate varying according to distance and your choice of vehicle.) In New York, where the yellow cab market is functional and robust, Uber is seen as a good app, but not a life-changing one, and its use is still pretty much limited to young people with disposable income.

In San Francisco tech crowds, though, Uber is seen as the messiah. Other than Tesla Motors, there's probably no Silicon Valley company that has more insane expectations swirling around it. Plugged-in people in the Bay Area will tell you things that are hard to believe: Uber is the most exciting company in the Valley. Uber will be a $100 billion company in five years.

I assumed that most of this was tech-bubble hype. But in the past few months, after conversations with Uber employees, investors, and people familiar with the company's long-term plans, I started understanding the company's potential. And now, after a set of Uber financials leaked to Valleywag this week, I feel confident joining the bandwagon: Uber very well could be enormous someday, maybe bigger than Facebook.

I can sum up the bullish case for Uber in one word: Amazon.

Amazon began in 1994 as a bookseller, then quickly realized that the efficient warehousing and shipping infrastructure they'd built to sell books could be used to get all kinds of things to customers quickly. So they branched out, first to consumer items like kitchen tools and electronics, then to cars and art and all manner of other things, some of which weren't even sold by Amazon but used Amazon as a sales portal. Then, they started shooting up all kinds of other businesses – Amazon Web Services, a now-enormous cloud data service that hosts an insane number of websites, a Kindle e-publishing business, and a streaming-TV service to rival Netflix. Now, when you think of Amazon, you don't even think books, or any other single category. You think, "Here's a place I can go to get stuff."

Likewise, Uber's plan is to outgrow its car-service roots, and become, as investor Shervin Pishevar put it, "a digital mesh" capable of providing all kinds of transportation and logistical services to people in the cities it serves. Once it has you summoning cars from your phone, the logic goes, it can use that same back-end technology to hook you in for all other kinds of deliveries — food, clothes, Christmas trees. And eventually, like Amazon, it can become something akin to an all-purpose utility — it'll just be a way you get things and go places. There's a reason the company recently changed its tagline from "Everyone's private driver" to the much broader "Where lifestyle meets logistics."

by Kevin Roose, NY Magazine |  Read more:

Image: Shutterstock

via:

Playground in Havana
via:

Wittgenstein’s Forgotten Lesson

Ludwig Wittgenstein is regarded by many, including myself, as the greatest philosopher of this century. His two great works, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921) and Philosophical Investigations (published posthumously in 1953) have done much to shape subsequent developments in philosophy, especially in the analytic tradition. His charismatic personality has fascinated artists, playwrights, poets, novelists, musicians and even movie-makers, so that his fame has spread far beyond the confines of academic life.

And yet in a sense Wittgenstein’s thought has made very little impression on the intellectual life of this century. As he himself realised, his style of thinking is at odds with the style that dominates our present era. His work is opposed, as he once put it, to “the spirit which informs the vast stream of European and American civilisation in which all of us stand.” Nearly 50 years after his death, we can see, more clearly than ever, that the feeling that he was swimming against the tide was justified. If we wanted a label to describe this tide, we might call it “scientism,” the view that every intelligible question has either a scientific solution or no solution at all. It is against this view that Wittgenstein set his face.

Scientism takes many forms. In the humanities, it takes the form of pretending that philosophy, literature, history, music and art can be studied as if they were sciences, with “researchers” compelled to spell out their “methodologies”—a pretence which has led to huge quantities of bad academic writing, characterised by bogus theorising, spurious specialisation and the development of pseudo-technical vocabularies. Wittgenstein would have looked upon these developments and wept.

There are many questions to which we do not have scientific answers, not because they are deep, impenetrable mysteries, but simply because they are not scientific questions. These include questions about love, art, history, culture, music-all questions, in fact, that relate to the attempt to understand ourselves better. There is a widespread feeling today that the great scandal of our times is that we lack a scientific theory of consciousness. And so there is a great interdisciplinary effort, involving physicists, computer scientists, cognitive psychologists and philosophers, to come up with tenable scientific answers to the questions: what is consciousness? What is the self? One of the leading competitors in this crowded field is the theory advanced by the mathematician Roger Penrose, that a stream of consciousness is an orchestrated sequence of quantum physical events taking place in the brain. Penrose’s theory is that a moment of consciousness is produced by a sub-protein in the brain called a tubulin. The theory is, on Penrose’s own admission, speculative, and it strikes many as being bizarrely implausible. But suppose we discovered that Penrose’s theory was correct, would we, as a result, understand ourselves any better? Is a scientific theory the only kind of understanding?

Well, you might ask, what other kind is there? Wittgenstein’s answer to that, I think, is his greatest, and most neglected, achievement. Although Wittgenstein’s thought underwent changes between his early and his later work, his opposition to scientism was constant. Philosophy, he writes, “is not a theory but an activity.” It strives, not after scientific truth, but after conceptual clarity. In the Tractatus, this clarity is achieved through a correct understanding of the logical form of language, which, once achieved, was destined to remain inexpressible, leading Wittgenstein to compare his own philosophical propositions with a ladder, which is thrown away once it has been used to climb up on.

In his later work, Wittgenstein abandoned the idea of logical form and with it the notion of ineffable truths. The difference between science and philosophy, he now believed, is between two distinct forms of understanding: the theoretical and the non-theoretical. Scientific understanding is given through the construction and testing of hypotheses and theories; philosophical understanding, on the other hand, is resolutely non-theoretical. What we are after in philosophy is “the understanding that consists in seeing connections.”

Non-theoretical understanding is the kind of understanding we have when we say that we understand a poem, a piece of music, a person or even a sentence. Take the case of a child learning her native language. When she begins to understand what is said to her, is it because she has formulated a theory? We can say that if we like—and many linguists and psychologists have said just that—but it is a misleading way of describing what is going on. The criterion we use for saying that a child understands what is said to her is that she behaves appropriately-she shows that she understands the phrase “put this piece of paper in the bin,” for example, by obeying the instruction.

Another example close to Wittgenstein’s heart is that of understanding music. How does one demonstrate an understanding of a piece of music? Well, perhaps by playing it expressively, or by using the right sort of metaphors to describe it. And how does one explain what “expressive playing” is? What is needed, Wittgenstein says, is “a culture”: “If someone is brought up in a particular culture-and then reacts to music in such-and-such a way, you can teach him the use of the phrase ‘expressive playing.’” What is required for this kind of understanding is a form of life, a set of communally shared practices, together with the ability to hear and see the connections made by the practitioners of this form of life.

What is true of music is also true of ordinary language. “Understanding a sentence,” Wittgenstein says in Philosophical Investigations, “is more akin to understanding a theme in music than one may think.” Understanding a sentence, too, requires participation in the form of life, the “language-game,” to which it belongs. The reason computers have no understanding of the sentences they process is not that they lack sufficient neuronal complexity, but that they are not, and cannot be, participants in the culture to which the sentences belong. A sentence does not acquire meaning through the correlation, one to one, of its words with objects in the world; it acquires meaning through the use that is made of it in the communal life of human beings.

by Ray Monk, Prospect |  Read more:

Capitalism Redefined

Prosperity in a society is the accumulation of solutions to human problems.

For everyone but the top 1 percent of earners, the American economy is broken. Since the 1980s, there has been a widening disconnect between the lives lived by ordinary Americans and the statistics that say our prosperity is growing. Despite the setback of the Great Recession, the U.S. economy more than doubled in size during the last three decades while middle-class incomes and buying power have stagnated. Great fortunes were made while many baby boomers lost their retirement savings. Corporate profits reached record highs while social mobility reached record lows, lagging behind other developed countries. For too many families, the American Dream is becoming more a historical memory than an achievable reality.

These facts don’t just highlight the issues of inequality and the growing power of a plutocracy. They should also force us to ask a deeper set of questions about how our economy works—and, crucially, about how we assess and measure the very idea of economic progress.

How can it be that great wealth is created on Wall Street with products like credit-default swaps that destroyed the wealth of ordinary Americans—and yet we count this activity as growth? Likewise, fortunes are made manufacturing food products that make Americans fatter, sicker, and shorter-lived. And yet we count this as growth too—including the massive extra costs of health care. Global warming creates more frequent hurricanes, which destroy cities and lives. Yet the economic activity to repair the damage ends up getting counted as growth as well.

Our economic policy discussions are nearly always focused on making us wealthier and on generating the economic growth to accomplish that. Great debates rage about whether to raise or lower interest rates, or increase or decrease regulation, and our political system has been paralyzed by a bitter ideological struggle over the budget. But there is too little debate about what it is all for. Hardly anyone ever asks: What kind of growth do we want? What does “wealth” mean? And what will it do for our lives?

by Nick Hanauer & Eric Beinhocker, Democracy Journal | Read more:

Brenda Cablayan, Kahala Avenue, Couryard Cottages, Bay View.
via:

[ed. My favorite Hawaii artist.]

Los Lobos

via:

Clairy Browne & The Bangin' Rackettes

Hollis Brown Thornton - TV Room (May Day) (2011)
via:

Cargo Bikes Are the New Minivans for Cycling Families

[ed. Great. Count me in as someone not enamored with this new trend. It might be carbon friendly and good exercise but until cities are designed for real hybridized use of our transit corridors (and not just painted 'bike lanes' with no real barriers), forget it. This is just another step in ratcheting up the existing conflict of who gets to claim right-of-way. Good design would include automobile, bike, pedestrian... hell, even golf cart friendly options that are integated or separated from the start, depending upon their intended purpose. This isn't.]

One fisherman uses a bike to deliver hundreds of pounds of salmon to local markets. A mom who regularly shuttles her two kids around town once tried to haul a twin mattress home. And some companies are using the bikes to deliver beer kegs or pick up recycling.

Cyclists are pushing the limits of what they can haul on cargo bikes — sturdy two-wheelers built to haul lots of stuff. The so-called SUV of bicycles are increasingly popular in pedal-friendly communities, from Washington state to Massachusetts.

Families are using the bikes to do everything they did on four wheels — schlepping kids to school, hauling groceries or running errands — without the hassle of finding parking. Some do it to help the environment in a small way or get exercise, while others say it's an easier, more fun way to get around.

“(Our) bike has turned into our go everywhere minivan,” said Julian Davies, a Seattle physician who regularly hauls his two kids in a cargo bike. (...)

It's still in the early adopter phase, but “it's picking up steam,” said Andy Clarke, president of the League of American Bicyclists. “It's a reflection of the growing utility of cycling, and the propensity to use bikes for more and more activities. It's giving people more options and flexibility.”

Cargo bikes can refer to any bike that hauls heavy loads. Many models out now are built to handle multiple people or loads up to about 400 pounds on a single frame. They can be a foot or two longer than typical bikes, and are often outfitted with a wheelbarrow-like box or shelf, in front or back. Some cost between $1,000 and $5,000. (...)

Madi Carlson, 41, regularly schlepps her two young kids along with their bikes on her pink long-tail bike, which has kids seats mounted over the rear of the bike. The three usually cover about 10 miles a day, riding between school, home, playdates and errands.

The Seattle mom considers it a challenge to carry absurd loads. She once tried to haul a box spring mattress, and made it six blocks before she had to call her husband for a lift.

“That damn box spring,” she laughed. “That's one of the problems with cargo bikes. You just want to carry bigger and more exciting loads. You just want to see what you can do.”

As for safety, Carlson said she bikes slowly and defensively and sticks to dedicated bike paths where possible. “I worry a lot more about accidents in the car,” she said.

by Phuong Le, AP | Read more:
Image:Elaine Thompson/AP via Yahoo

Dylan's Electric Guitar Sells for Nearly $1M

Like Elvis' no-hips-allowed appearance on "The Ed Sullivan Show," or the Beatles' arrival in America, or Woodstock, it is considered one of the milestone moments in rock history: Bob Dylan going electric at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival.

On Friday, the Fender Stratocaster that Dylan plugged in at the festival sold for nearly $1 million — the highest price ever paid for a guitar at auction.

A buyer identified only as a private individual agreed to pay $965,000 at Christie's, including the auction house's fees, for the sunburst-finish electric guitar.

Dylan's legendary performance at the festival in Rhode Island 48 years ago marked his rupture with the folk movement's old guard and solidified his shift away from acoustic music, like "Blowin' in the Wind," toward amplified rock, such as "Like a Rolling Stone."

The raucous, three-song electric set was booed by some in the crowd, and folk purists saw Dylan as a traitor and a sellout.

But "his going electric changed the structure of folk music," said Newport Folk Festival founder George Wein, 88. "The minute Dylan went electric, all these young people said, 'Bobby's going electric. We're going electric, too.'"

Christie's had expected the guitar, which was sold with its original black leather strap and Fender hard-shell case, to go for far less, $300,000 to $500,000.

The previous record for a guitar sold at auction was held by Eric Clapton's Fender, nicknamed "Blackie," which sold at Christie's for $959,500 in 2004.

Dylan's guitar had been in the possession of a New Jersey family for nearly 50 years after the singer left it on a private plane.

The pilot's daughter, Dawn Peterson of Morris County, N.J., said her father asked Dylan's management what to do with the instrument, and nobody ever got back to him.

by Ula Ulnitzky, Yahoo News |  Read more:

Image: Christie's

Natsumi Hayashi
via:

Yahoo’s Geek Goddess

By now the headline-getting series of events has become business lore. In the fall of 2011, New York moneyman Daniel Loeb, who runs the $14 billion hedge fund Third Point Capital, staged a raid on Yahoo, the well-known but struggling Silicon Valley company. After a brutal fight to depose the company’s C.E.O., he helped raid Google for one of its longest-serving and most famous executives, Marissa Mayer, then often called “the face of Google” or “Google’s glamour geek.” Last summer, on the same day that Yahoo announced that Mayer would be its new C.E.O.—becoming the youngest woman, at 37, to lead a Fortune 500 company—Mayer announced she was pregnant, thereby completing her journey from nerdy small-town Wisconsin girl to Stanford-educated engineer to business superstar to cultural idol. (...)

But a glittering surface often deflects attention from a messier reality, and that’s true with Mayer and Yahoo. No one wants to sound as if they aren’t rooting for Yahoo or for her, and because Mayer didn’t cooperate for this article, even her friends were often unwilling to speak on the record about her. She’s anything but easy to categorize, in ways that are both interesting and possibly troubling for Yahoo’s future. “She is a confusing person,” says someone who has worked with her closely. “It is a mistake to paint her as an angel or as a devil.” Another executive who worked with her agrees that she is a hard person to understand. “There are some parts of Marissa World that are just inexplicably weird,” he says. “It doesn’t add up.”

There are two things about Marissa Mayer upon which everyone agrees. One is that she’s among the smartest people they’ve ever met. The other is that she has a superhuman capacity for work. Mayer says that she needs only four hours of sleep a night and that she pulled 250 all-nighters in her first five years at Google. “I don’t really believe in burnout,” she said in a speech last year at New York’s 92nd Street Y. “A lot of people work really hard for decades and decades, like Winston Churchill and Einstein.”

This superhuman energy seems to have been part of her from her earliest years in Wausau, a small city northwest of Milwaukee that is best known for the insurance company that carries its name. She told Vogue that she always had at least one after-school activity per day, from ballet to ice-skating, to piano, swimming, debate team, and Brownies; she was a standout debater whose team won a Wisconsin state championship, a member of the pom-pom squad, the president of the Spanish Club, and the treasurer of the Key Club; she has also said that by junior high she was doing ballet 35 hours a week.

At a talk at Stanford, when Mayer was asked what made her successful, her answer was simple: “I like to work.” She went on to say that, when her father, who was an environmental engineer, came to a talk she was giving at Google, people swarmed him to ask about his daughter. When they asked, “Have you ever seen Marissa talk before?,” he answered, “No. I’m Marissa’s dad. I like to work.”

Mayer doesn’t seem to have been a popular kid, but she shows no signs of having been tormented in the usual ways that smart, small-town midwestern girls can be. “I got to live in a bubble,” she said at the Y. “I was really good at chemistry, calculus, biology, physics in high school, and my teachers were genuinely supportive of that.” Wausau West yearbook photos show her in a science seminar discussing the Wausau Chamber of Commerce survey on students and working hours, performing a pom-pom routine for a Bush-Quayle rally, and, on the debate team, telling a judge why voting rights for the homeless weren’t needed. (The yearbook had a feature describing debaters as “nerds with attitude.”)

If she had any insecurities, Mayer didn’t manifest them outwardly. “In high school, Marissa was wicked smart and she knew it (not cocky, but very confident)” is how Lief Larson, who went to high school with her and is now a technology entrepreneur in Minneapolis, described her in a blog post. “She was always 100% business, all the time. She was not known as a ‘popular,’ but she was highly involved/diligent.” Larson added, “What ever she did, she tried to make it perfect.”

She applied to 10 colleges, including Harvard, Yale, and Stanford. After being accepted by all of them, she created a spreadsheet, ranking the schools by criteria such as median S.A.T. scores. It yielded Stanford, where she initially planned to major in biology or chemistry, with the goal of becoming a pediatric neurosurgeon “who taught at a medical school while taking exceptional cases,” as she described it. Upon realizing that she could do that with a degree from a state school, she changed her major to symbolic systems, a Stanford major that combines philosophy, cognitive psychology, linguistics, and computer science.

by Bethany McLean, Vanity Fair |  Read more:

Image: Darcy Padilla/Agence VU

via:

Albert Gleizes, L’Homme au Hamac (Man in a Hammock), 1913
via:

Stealing Time

[ed. See also: Dirty Dying.]

In late August, I got an extra day — just an average day — with my father.

At 82, my dad had a whole litany of ailments: a bad heart, inferior lungs, failing eyesight, some skin cancer and a pesky wound on his leg that just wouldn’t heal. So, at the last minute, a day after my mother’s birthday, I detoured from a business trip over to Tampa to see them.

We didn’t do anything special. I made a bunch of work calls, returned emails, even took a nap. Dad paid some bills, opening up a little to me about the state of his finances, which he never did. He had his Social Security, a small pension and the money that he worked hard to save in 47 years as a union butcher for the A&P. Looking through an old tin box, I came across his Army discharge papers and discovered he’d been awarded three bronze stars — something else he’d never bothered to mention. Then he sat in his chair, hooked up to the oxygen he didn’t wear as much as he should, occasionally dozing off between reruns of “M*A*S*H” and “Bonanza.”

I took him to the doctor, where he got (for him) a pretty clean bill of health, and we went to the grocery store. I bought wine and some half-and-half for my coffee. He bought scratch-off lottery tickets — one for him and one to bring home to my mother. On the way home, in a half-sentence conversation that only a father and a son could have, he confirmed that yes, he did want to be cremated someday, and yes, that veterans’ cemetery where they buried Uncle Bob seemed like a nice spot.

by Russell J. Schriefer, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Keith Negley