Lengthening horizons

It often seems to me that my job is first and foremost to help people lengthen their horizons and then try to guide and coach them so their behavior aligns with that longer view. Which is complicated by the little bumps in the road that continually poke up. A wire that hasn't arrived on time. A marriage that's falling apart. Cancer. And so on.

Ideally all of these eventualities are anticipated and planned for, but in practice some of them just crop up. The worse people are at planning -- i.e. the more poorly I do this part of my job or the later I catch them in the arc of their lives -- the more of these things arise.

It's always instructive to look at people and organizations that have done better jobs at things. Amazon, for one. However much I resist the full Amazonization of our lives, one cannot but marvel at what Bezos and team have done over coming up on a quarter century. Like Buffett at Berkshire Hathaway, it turns out that Bezos has been publishing an annual letter since 1997, and somewhere on the interweb I came across one big pdf of them and printed it out. I've been trying to read one a morning on business days. In keeping with Bezos's philosophy of distillation (he is said to try to make one or two good decisions a day), they are very brief -- about two pages max per year.

In 2009 he focused on a lot of operational metrics -- number of products on platform, number of new reviews, new product lines launched on Amazon Web Services... Then he talks about Amazon's goal-setting practice, which takes months, and the goals are constantly revisited throughout the year, some of them measured, others jettisoned. He is at pains to point out that very few of their discussions or metrics are financial in nature, it's all about serving the customer better.

Like Buffett, even in - or perhaps particularly in -- years of financial crisis (2008, 2009, 2020) -- the crisis and its impact on the business isn't even mentioned. There is no excuse-making, no caveating of what went wrong and blaming it on external factors -- there is only the future. 

Lassitude

It was mild and breezy today, so I went for my second ride of the season, about 22 miles, out along Dairyland to Maple View then back, adding in a small loop. At this point in time, I'm not really feeling a whole ton of get up and go, but I don't have the delicious tiredness that I sought.

Truth be told, I'm mildly disquieted by Natalie's not having figured out her housing situation for the summer. She will be running a camp for housing-insecure children down near Silicon Valley. Little wonder that she's going to have to pay a non-trivial premium for housing of her own, given that it's in one of the most expensive places to live in the country. I've been trying to help out, pinging people, working the phones, but I've wrought no miracles, and wrangling with hosts on Airbnb has brought her mostly heartache thus far.

We could probably swoop in and buy her out of this mess by just paying up, but it's kind of an important moment for her to come to grips with what things actually cost out there in the world. I was listening to a podcast not long ago in which this woman who works with very wealthy families saying that one thing she's seen in decades of experience is that the families who let kids figure things out for themselves and learn to stand on their own two feet end up having the healthiest kids. Having parents swoop in to fix everything isn't really good for the younger ones. I have to keep telling myself that.

The Project

Like many, and like Natalie in her own way, Graham is a very self-directed kid. He spends copious amounts of time lying on his bed reading on his iPad, getting involved in all manner of the most interesting discussions on various fora in places like Reddit, SpaceBattles, Discord and Quora. If there is some question of something related to a current event, often we just need to mention it to him and he will be much more informed about it from various angles than we could ever hope to be.

But it's hard to get him to focus on other things with a future orientation, like college, or physical fitness or... So we are often in the position of nudging him gently and continually and of hiring professionals like a math tutor and an executive function coach to support him.

One night at dinner in recent months when I was nudging him on something (driving without us in the car, a haircut, studying for the SATs, taking a shower, strengthening his upper body like his doctor recommended, looking more deeply into colleges, I haven't the foggiest what it was) he pushed back a little, alluding to "whatever this 'project' is you have in mind for me."

First off, as male teenage space-demarcating goes, this wasn't bad. I was much worse and my methods were much worse.

But "the project" he alluded to, what is it? I guess it's just basic parenting, what we all want. We want him (and them) to be able to fly from the nest, to go out into the world and flourish, to embrace it and enjoy it while standing on their own two feet. To prepare for our eventual absence.

It's a complex project, no doubt, complicated in particular by the endless plethora of choices with which we are all faced. The behavioral economists have done a great deal of good work, no doubt, but the place where they have had the most concrete and immediate impact has been on the design of 401k plans. A couple of them (Richard Thaler and Shlomo Benartzi) discovered that people in 401k plans freaked out and couldn't make good decisions about investing when they had to choose between too many options. They discovered that the right number of options was 8 or 10 max.

This principle holds true for a lot of things in life. When faced with too many options, we can easily get caught up in "analysis paralysis." I think college choice and the general prospect of the future freaks the fuck right out of most teenagers, of course. I was terrified, myself, and retreated into a variety of self-defense mechanisms.

So our job is to help our kids narrow things down and make the decision-making process manageable on an ongoing basis. And the key is to help them figure out who they are, which we begin by helping them figure out who they are not.

Who not how

The days grind on. So much to do, so much to think about in each one. Clients. Kids. Markets. Mary's project. Boards. The house. My body.

I recently listened to the book "Who Not How?" by Dan Sullivan, a guy well-known (it seems) in entrepreneurial circles who focuses on the issue of continually finding bigger networks and experts of people to partner with and hand things off to. Really a hyper-generalized practice of delegation, which really closely aligns with the broader economic theory of highly granular specialization and division of labor and the way it facilitates productivity at a macro level.

One thing in the book that slightly rubbed me the wrong way was the insistence that people should "dream big and aspire high", which strikes me as a little egocentric and denies the virtue of the small. But I also kind of get it. If you have large or high aspirations, it forces you to engage in more things, which makes you learn your limits, which makes you look for others who are better at things then you are. And then it becomes magical.

Regime change

My rhythms are about to change. First off, my hip injury. I felt a twing late in my match with Z on Thursday, then yesterday it came back when we were playing and I had to retire after one set. It was like flipping a switch: my mobility was reduced, and all of a sudden I had to go for winners so that I didn't have to play long points with lots of running. In my mind's eye I could see myself as one of these older guys on the court with limited mobility, and it made me think back to a conversation I had with my friend Matt earlier in the week. He had just turned 60 and was talking about how his body just began to fall apart.

On the one hand, it's not a pretty vision. I prize the exceptional mobility I've been able to maintain well into my fifties. On the other hand, it is what it is, and I have to accept reality, though I can also make some adjustments (lay off it for a little while, stretch more, get more professional guidance on what I need to do to keep going....)

Secondly, I booked some tickets to fly to NYC in May and go from there to New Haven to get her out of her apartment. This means getting back on shared conveyances: planes, subways and trains. Rationally I'm pretty sure the risks are well-managed on them by now, and I have two shots under my belt and can wear a mask or even two when in metal tubes with others. But still it's a pretty big change.

More importantly, it means getting back on the road to go to other places, something I'm a little bit less excited about than I used to be. I have come to like it at home.

The gathering storm of Sunday

I heard Graham bounding around downstairs just before 8:30 and realized he had a Quiz Bowl tournament starting at noon so I had better get downstairs to make pancakes. I had half a can of sweet potato that I had promised Mary I would use Sunday morning (so I shouldn't freeze it), and I'll be damned if I was gonna get up late and have her say "I told you you should have frozen it."

Next up: tennis with Z at 11:30. Beyond which stretches a bunch of tasks, much of it related to travel planning for the next couple of months both for me going to the Northeast to see folx and get Natalie out of her apartment, but also finding a place for Natalie to stay in the Bay area. There's other stuff on there too, LFA tasks, Graham college stuff...

Meanwhile, the biography of Frank Ramsey which I am reading (which I had long awaited) is gathering steam. Ramsey, having translated Wittgenstein's Tractatus at the tender age of 19, has just met Wittgenstein, and the book is about to accelerate as Ramsey meets Wittgenstein in Austria and their dialogue takes off, which will move Wittgenstein off the time towards his more interesting thinking.

Gotta go put water in bottles and make the bed.

Work day

Naturally, I felt a sense of deep dread as I looked down at the lake park around 10 this morning. Once again, it was Community Work Day here in the neighborhood, when everyone gets together to shovel sand and do other crap around the park. As I have moved into ever more responsible roles on the Board -- culminating in my current chairpersonhood -- I have gotten ever less excited about going out for things like this, though I feel like I'm supposed to do them. This is compounded by the fact that I've gotten very accustomed to the rhythm of days spent alone under COVID. No more are my Saturdays consumed by taking Graham to martial arts and also perhaps soccer. I have more time to sit and read, get some basic exercise and perhaps nap and talk on the phone. Good livin.

But of course I remembered that I generally like seeing people when I do go out and that I like most of the people that I see, and even that, however much I dig my routines, I also tend to enjoy it when I break out of them. So I went down there. There was sand shoveling, but I was also able to martial troups for some of the projects that I had been thinking about, like recovering gravel which had washed off the side of the road and filling in trenches which rain running off the roof of the pavilion has pounded into the soil, creating a pretty serious tripping and/or ankle-breakage hazard.

But then I had the not too bright idea of alerting Mary to the huge pile of mulch cum soil from the pile of wood chips made from the tree we took down several years ago. Did she want it? I think you know the answer to that, fair reader. Of course she did. So my exercise for the day ended up being bringing many wheelbarrows of rich brown soil up the hill into our yard and dumping them in places where nothing grows from the barren red clay of the Piedmont. With considerable labor we (Mary did some earlier) were able to more than scratch the surface of the pile, but not much more.

And now I am hungry for my birthday dinner with my mom at Jujube.

Who should drive the public good?

Mitch McConnell was recently quoted as whining about big business functioning as a "woke parallel government." Frankly, if the legislature was more effective in passing legislation pertaining to public goods, it wouldn't be a problem. But we are where we are. For decades now, the Federal legislative branch has ground to a halt as legislators try to ram through one or two big things by reconciliation or some other means of budget brinkmanship while jockeying for position for the next set of elections. The two-year cadence of elections for the House emphatically does not help.

The Democrats do their part, no doubt, but the "cooling saucer" function of the Senate, perhaps most elegantly laid out in volume 2 of Caro's LBJ bio, has been leveraged to a hilt by the Republicans under McConnell, who have ramped up their "tyranny of the majority" rural white people as victims strategy to a hilt. Pity the poor country boy.

So if the legislature won't move things forward, the corporate sector has decided it will. After Citizens' United, after all, corporations are people too. And of course corporations are disproportionately located in blue places and employ Democrats, and are owned by people with money, who vote Democrat. So money ends up winning.

In some ways this is an extension of the "voluntary associations" that de Tocqueville called out as such a distinctive feature of the American political landscape, but it differs by now by the scale of the voluntary associations -- which make reasoned back and forth difficult and also by the fact that social networks are the loci of too much discussion so that people don't look one another in the eye while talking, associate primarily with the like-minded and so generally have a difficult time beginning to see where their opponents are coming from in an argument.

It would really be better in so many ways if public goods were debated and addressed in public fora like legislatures and town counsels. At least then there would be a greater layer of the disintermediation of money. Right now we're not there.

Success

At the end of a podcast I've been listening to with other financial planners, the host always ends the interview by asking his guests how they define success. It's a good question.

For me, the first thing that came to mind was something that happened a few years ago when Natalie and I were out looking at colleges. We were headed from Larchmont up to Cornell and then, since we were up there, Colgate. On the way we stopped in to see a friend and client who was at a Balkan music camp which is the highlight of her summer, which takes place in one of those towns along Route 17 as it winds its way upstate, as well as another friend, the son of my dad's best friend from law school (a well-known environmental lawyer). On that stop Natalie and I swam in cold rivers not once but twice in a short span of hours, with some barefoot soccer with my friend and his daughters in the middle. Good livin.

Anyway, Natalie and I spent the night in Binghamton at a Hampton Inn (on points, of course), then found a diner for breakfast. The diner had seen better days, and it was blazing hot out and the AC was straining a little, but we were there and it was breakfast time so we found a booth and ordered. After we got our food, the waitress checked back in and asked us how the food was. We said it was fine and she went on.

A few minutes later a woman from a booth near ours came over and said how nice it was to hear us interact with the waitress, how gracious we had been, "everyone around here can be so nasty, but you guys were so kind." That made me feel really good about how we had done raising Natalie, because in my mind we had done absolutely nothing out of the ordinary, it was like breathing, but we had made this woman's day.

One more sign of success: a weekend or so back, I was making breakfast on Sunday for Graham (pancakes, of course, since it was Sunday) and I said something to him about how he probably didn't need both a steak knife and a butter knife for pancakes. I was thinking about how the steak knife handles dry out and fall apart over time in the dishwasher, a point Mary likes to make. I said something else which bugged him because he then said to me: "Have you had an OK morning thus far? Because you've criticized me about two things already."

The fact that Graham is comfortable enough in his own skin to let me know I was bugging him like that, to have not stormed off and sulked, that is a sure sign of success. So I thanked him for letting me know how he felt and apologized and explained that I didn't mean to be critical of him.... Anyway, those are two instances that we have done well raising our kids, which is really the most important thing.

Bad mental day on the courts

Z took me 6-1, 6-4 yesterday. And it gets worse. I was up 4-1 in the second set, and then I just collapsed. Frankly it's not that I played that badly. The two sets took us almost two whole hours, because there were a lot of games that went to deuce and just kept going. It's just that Adam won most of them.

One thing I will say is that my mental state didn't help. Even in games where I was up, I'd let negative thoughts creep in and trip me up. Entirely unrelated negative stuff. For example, at lunch last week I heard that Sonya Manning, a Black woman in our high school class, had recently died of COVID. I'm pretty sure I have blogged about how poorly I knew that Black women in our class, since gifted tracking and then Honors and AP classes meant that I went effectively to a parallel segregated school within an integrated school. I knew lots of the Black guys because I was a striver on the basketball court. For years I played at lunch and went to gyms on weekend nights to work on my game, which made me a not bad but not great basketball player. So I knew the Black guys -- and Pam Clarke (but who didn't) -- but not Black women.

But Sonya Manning looked very familiar when I consulted the old Proconian. Why I let that thought creep into my mind on tennis games when I was up -- along with other similar negative things -- that's the question. It's a pattern of self-defeating behavior.

Generally, I was unable to consistently stick to a strategy of letting Adam make mistakes and beat himself. It just gets boring. He is better at that than I am. I give up and go for winners too quickly. The boring stuff works and makes for long rallies and lots of exercise benefit, but poor blogs.

Putting myself at risk

When at home, I spend a lot of time upstairs in one of two armchairs: one in my study, one in the bedroom. Really it depends on time of day and where the sun is, and whether I am reading a book or working on a laptop, which determines what kind of light I need.

But it does work out to me being up in a lair, away from Graham and Mary. This morning I decided to break the cycle of isolation and sit downstairs on the couch for longer to be less antisocial.

The problem was that I thereby put myself in harm's way. Mary is working under a tight deadline. I had done some editing work on her upcoming book yesterday, but I missed a couple of things and she wants me to do more. I was sitting on the couch and she started asking me questions: should I do this or that? And so on. So if I am in the same room, I am basically easily draftable at a moment's notice, whereas if I am upstairs and somebody needs something from me they have to make more of an effort to ask for help.

Still, I think it's good on balance to try to isolate less.

Back on two wheels

Got back out on my bike today for the second or perhaps third ride of the season. It was a perfect day for it. Being out on the bike got me back in a new mindset and lots of ideas came flooding back to me. I won't bore you with all of them, primarily because the main point is that the different way of being out in the world, biking, which offers its own rhythm.

Which was brought home to me when I turned left off of Eubanks onto old 86. It's a particularly narrow piece of road, which was brought home to me when I began to be passed by a bunch of super cars: A Porsche, then a Ferrari, then a Lamborghini, whose driver gunned his engine as he passed me and startled me off of the narrow shoulder onto the side of the road, where I stopped to let the line of traffic pass. And they kept coming, fancy Audis, souped up Mustangs, a Ford 308 GTO or whatever, about 20 of them, all going vroom vroom with their manly engines as they went 20-25 on a narrow country road. Clearly there was some sort of a rally going on. A bunch of fucking jackasses.

Once they had all passed, I continued on.

Making progress

As my business improves, I am making progress on a number of key fronts around the house. First off, the new couch for my study, long lobbied-for, has been ordered and should be here in 7-8 weeks. We have had a blinds guy come into the house and we have samples for blinds for my study. Now I just have to have Mary look at them and make a decision. I have a new to me -- and my first ever -- electric guitar, thanks to my friend Nick up in Brooklyn. I also have the software, doohickey, and headphones that allow me to play and mix it through my laptop. However, it takes a lot more effort to hook it up and get the software right (it's confusing) than to just pick up my acoustic, so the electric has not yet taken over.

What I really want to do is have somebody come in and clean our metal roof from the decade-plus of gunk that has built up on it. It should last longer and it will be really shiny! But getting somebody to do that has been a big fricking ordeal, mostly because Mary is skeptical about the impact of a bleach solution on her plants. Also, the house and deck just crave a good powerwashing.

I also need to wash our cars, particularly hers, which looks like a homeless person's car from just sitting in the driveway and not being driven.

Once I get the roof cleaned, I will be like Navin R Johnson from The Jerk. I won't need one other thing. Except for my paddleball.

 

The roots of the disruptive urge

A client of mine sells for a very high-growth, dynamic software company: a new type of service/product aligned with the growth of "edge computing": the fact that so much happens on the web, in the cloud, where consumers expect very fast response time to any query submitted to anyone. He gets paid a lot of money, and also has a non-trivial chunk of shares in the company. I was talking to him the other day and he expressed frustration with an old economy company with whom he was working and expressed a strong desire to support "disruptive" companies.

It's interesting that there is a tendency in the tech world and its boosters (and lately many have become boosters, to the extent that many have been enriched by tech) to celebrate disruption uncritically. On Silicon Valley the team joked that their company's goal was to "change the world," which really resonated, because a lot of tech companies do talk like that: "We're not about making tons of money, really (that's just a byproduct), we want to change the world!"

But of course a generic desire to disrupt and change the world is predicated on the belief that the world as it is is in bad shape, and that the type of change the company offers changes it for the better. In fact the solutions offered more often than not do provide services more quickly and often at lower cost, but at a cost to current employment, and result in displaced lower skills workers who often must take lower paid rolls and become somewhat unmoored in society, with risks to the social fabric and political stability -- as we have seen recently. Generically, better and faster service delivery sounds like a good thing in most individual instances. Destruction of the existing fabric of society is less desirable.

A lot of research has been done, and anecdotal evidence and lived experience support this, that above something like $75k of income, increases to income do not correlate to increases in happiness and life satisfaction for individuals. In aggregate the same should be true. Once a society reaches a level of wealth in that ballpark, it shouldn't get much happier on average when the majority of people get much richer.

None of this is to say that change, dynamism and creative destruction are bad. We all like new products, better cars, smartphones, new foods, etc. But nor should all of that be considered an unalloyed good.

Rocky Mount

For Graham's first shot of the Pfizer vaccine, we were able to get an appointment in Rocky Mount at a CVS. First off, let me note how well the process was designed and administered at this site, particularly in comparison to the Walgreen's I went to in Greensboro. I suspect it had more to do with CVS vs Walgreen's than the specific locations. All the questions were asked up front, in the app, so that when we got there we just had to check in on my phone, go up to a table in the front of the store and have Graham's ID checked and name marked off, and walk to the back of the store. Graham was vaccinated 5 minutes after walking into the store.

By contrast I had to fill out a couple of long forms and then wait for an hour or so for my turn to come up. It could be that everyone is getting better at managing the process, or any number of things. It's all good.

It was about 6 and I was tired, so I decided I wanted a fountain soda from the Sheetz next door to the CVS. Before we went in, Graham and I speculated on what portion of the people inside the store would not have masks on, and their demographic. Based on recent samples, I guessed 25%, mostly white men.

I was wrong. It was closer to 40%, all Black youth. A couple of them were clinically obese, buying a bunch of cookies and other shit. When they got up to the register, one of them, maybe 16 years old, argued with the woman at the register nastily about the price of something and then demonstratively whipped out a roll of bills to show how he was going to pay. The source of his funds is up for speculation.

I had never been to Rocky Mount, and downtown was only 8 minutes away, so Graham agreed to investigate. A town of about 54,000, Rocky Mount has a pretty large historic downtown, but it is particularly forlorn and abandoned. Maybe a quarter of the buildings are occupied by some sort of enterprise. From the exterior, it at least doesn't yet appear to be entirely falling down, but the forward-looking economics of the place are far from clear. There are a couple of clearly state- or municipally-supported events facilities. The biggest building in town, on one edge of downtown, is the municipal services building. On the other end of town, maybe a quarter of a mile outside of town, is an improbably shiny mini-skyscraper that says "DMV" on it. A little interweb sleuthing shows that NC has moved DMV headquarters from Raleigh to Rocky Mount, as of December 2020. Which is brilliant on a few scores

1. We are now in a work from home era. What's with the shiny new building?

2. It's off to the side of a dying downtown. If you're going to build a new building with 500 FTEs (theoretically), why not stick it in the middle of the downtown

3. Are these people really moving to Rocky Mount? All of them?

Again, this is why Republicans rightly question putting too many capital allocation and management decisions in the hands of bureaucrats. This doesn't seem to have been a smart one. Who knows, maybe it will work. Maybe the DMV move to Rocky Mount will bring some good jobs and spread income around the state, and support a small ecosystem of suppliers. But it doesn't look smart right now for anyone except the contractor who built the building, or whoever owned it.

Ramping it back up

After a week away, back in the saddle this morning and back in the fray: a client newly divorced who wants to sit down and talk budgeting, a client in Brooklyn starting chemo today, money to disburse to pay for a client's kid's college, a wire to Germany for Mary's book to check up on, etc. And then there are the markets.

It was a fine week away, getting on the road a little, seeing some towns and corners of America I'd never seen before. Lancaster, Pennsylvania was particularly interesting. Same population as Chapel Hill in the town proper, but three times as dense, so really it was a small city. Block after block of row houses in varying states of repair. It was clear there were some interesting businesses and stories in some of them. Amish in the surrounding countryside, a couple of small colleges, beyond that it wasn't clear who the anchor employer was. Maybe some people commute to Philly. I wouldn't be sad if Graham ended up there for college.

Finished an Alan Furst novel, moved forward in Andrew Solomon's Far From the Tree. 

But eating dinner in hotel rooms sitting on the floor got old, so I am certainly hoping that the vaccines outrun the variants and also looking forward to the approach of warm weather everywhere, which will let us eat and meet outside. 

Things left undone

Back in September, I posted about how I haven't undertaken many of the tasks others have during the pandemic, for example thoroughly cleaning out the basement, shredding old tax documents, etc. When I last wrote on this topic I speculated that the months of cold and short days and colder and longer nights might be a great time to do some of that stuff.

Indeed it might have been, but it wasn't to be. Admittedly I have done a few things and have made some incremental progress towards paring and being better organized. But not much. Who knows, today may be the day I get lucky.

But really what I want to do is finish reading this Alan Furst book so I can start something else and maybe get Graham to walk uptown with me to get burgers at Al's, since I have not had my statutory one serving of red meat per week and Al's is a great place to do it.

On Chinese Nationalism since Tiannanmen Square

Back from our trip, catching up on reading. The Journal on Monday had a story about the economic implications of Chinese nationalism and in particular recent aggression towards Taiwan after the draconian Hong Kong security law.

Per Ezra Vogel -- in his monumental bio of Deng Xiaopeng -- following the events on Tiannanmen Square in 1989, the Chinese Communist Party wrestled with how best to preserve its legitimacy and popularity after its pretty brutal crackdown on a fairly popular, organic, bottom up movement. The Party settled on nationalism as the best chord to strum on. And so Chinese history has largely been recast as a story of retuning to past glory after the humiliation of its fall from grace, first and foremost from the period of the Opium Wars forward. 

Once great, then humbled, now risen again. It's a classic narrative that's hard to resist. Hitler ran this play before WWII, white nationalists are running it now. There's no end to what it can't justify.

I would be interested to learn how the current spate of anti-Asian crimes in the US are being played in the Chinese state media. It's probably safe to wager that the fact of the crimes themselves is being foregrounded rather than the upsurge of popular sentiment condemning them from Western liberals. 

A dream of coffee

This morning I dreamt that a man had come into our hotel room around 6 and ground up rather a lot of coffee and made a fresh pot. I was pretty excited about this.

Lewisburg, PA

This evening finds us winding up our college tour at Bucknell in Lewisburg, PA, the county seat of Union County, which has voted Republican in every Presidential election since 1856 save one, when it plumped for Teddy Roosevelt and the Bull Moose Party in 1912. It is a very cute town, with 5700 residents and maybe 5 pizzerias right on the main street.

To get here we drove up the Susquehanna River, which really should be beautiful but was marred by pervasive economic decline, manifested in the wide range of porn stores ("lowest prices!") and gentlemen's clubs along the road. Not a happy place. Presumably internet service here is poor.

The contrast between the town and the surrounding area is pretty stark, not dissimilar to the radical break between Johns Hopkins and poor predominantly Black neighborhoods that surround it. Each is both an island in pretty hostile feeling territory and, presumably, an economic engine for the community around it. A heady brew.

Let the record show

At a Home2 Suites in Lancaster, PA, we just got run out of our room by a bunch of raucus Hasidic kids upstairs running up and down the halls. I went up at about 10 to see what was going on and there was the dad and an older kid wheeling in an enormous cooler, presumably full of all manner of juiceboxes. Apparently there is a wedding or suchlike going on.

The staff was very courteous, but they were a couple of kids in their 20s outgunned by the celebration. What were they going to do, through 40-50 paying guests out? Eventually they offered to move us to a couple of rooms down the hall. Now Graham is all alone in a hotel room, perhaps for the first time in his life.

Tomorrow we see Franklin and Marshall.

Sunday morning preparations

Headed out on a college trip with Mary and Graham and I need to get packed, but before doing so a few words. Headed to DC, MD and PA. Watching the coronavirus numbers rise in the Northeast makes me mildly apprehensive about the trip, but given that we will be in the Prius or on foot outdoors when not sleeping in hotels and that Mary and Graham will be there helping me enforce discipline (both of them are very mindful of rules) I think we should be OK. Though it will be tiresome to eat lots of meals in the car.

If only they were a little more proactive and imaginative in thinking up podcasts and books to listen to while we drive. Planning non-essential stuff isn't their strong suit (Mary is very good at the essentials).

A note on yesterday. With Z having taken Lucas to the beach, I was on my own for tennis, so I reached out to Ruchir, who was busy, but said that this guy Patrick was looking for someone to play at 11. So we played.

He played very well in warm-ups, hitting hard and deep ground strokes with topspin, mixing it up with some slices. So I'm thinking that I'm playing up and this will be a good growth opportunity. Then we start playing and he's slicing 90% of the time and I make a bunch of unforced errors and am down 2-0, and am very close to going down 3-0 before I realize that I'm playing him as if he were Adam, but he's not. I need to back off, run everything down and help him make mistakes. So I did that for the rest of the set and ended up losing 7-6 (something like 11-9 in the tiebreak).

Good times. It was a very good lesson in how not to beat myself mentally.

Worn down

Some days I wake up just flat out beat, today was one of them. I think it was the news yesterday that Joe Romweber died. It's not that Joe and I were close, in fact I hadn't seen him in more the 30 years, but it brings back memories of other people that have died from the old Chapel Hill music scene, first and foremost Akin but then also Tim Brower, and then others.

It is hard not to have been thrown into an elegiac mood by all the death and fear that has surrounded us in the last year. And now, at a moment of great promise as the vaccine circulates, but when the data day to day suggest that the battle is far from won, that vaccine hesitancy -- supported by conscious efforts on the part of anti-vaxxers -- combined with ill-informed complacency, ensure yet more to death and potentially complicate everyone's emergence from the tunnel of COVID.

And then there's this Jackson Browne performance I came across after a post Mary's brother George made of Browne doing a song inspired a little micro-renaissance here at my desk. Somehow Browne captures it all here, the wistful loss of and longing for youth, manifest even in the slight cracking of his voice as he himself approaches 70.

For me, Jackson Browne is always connected to my friend Dwight, the best man at my wedding, who got really pissed off at me some years ago and disappeared back down to Brazil. Not that it was all about me. I was just one of a long line of people that Dwight had fallen out with, for reasons absolutely not worth going into here. But this returns me to the question of emotional exhaustion. I miss the guy and want to reach out to him but know that to do so risks stirring up a psychodrama that I can perhaps ill afford myself, with clients to tend, kids to shepherd, and just my own damned self to get into bed each night and out of it each morning.

The Match King

Just finished listening to Frank Partnoy's The Match King in the car. It tells the story of Ivar Kreuger, the construction and match magnate who captivated the world with his financial shenanigans in the late twenties and early thirties, then killed himself when the shaky foundations of his empire fell apart during the Depression. It's a great story, sometimes rather nerve-wracking as the reader waits for the other shoe to drop.

Kreuger is often likened to Ponzi for having put together a pyramid scheme, and he was surely a shyster, but there were apparently very real assets within his enterprises even at the time of his suicide, enough so that investors were eventually paid out more than the average holders of stocks who bought and held through the same period. Partnoy makes a very good point that Kreuger had the misfortune of being the public face of a lot of very slack and questionable behavior by a wide range of actors. It's so much easier to hang systemic failures on individuals.

Not that he wasn't a shyster.

Process improvement amongst the machines

During the pandemic and in fact even leading up to it, lots of retail jobs have been replaced by jobs in the e-commerce ecosystem: warehouse jobs, delivery jobs, supemarket pickers, etc. There has been much hand-wringing and teeth-gnashing about this, including here on the Grouse. I think that service jobs, serving people while standing on your feat, speaking to them and looking them in the eye is incredibly important to skill and confidence development in both young people and in people seeking to improve their lot in life. So long as people aren't stomped on by reactive managers acting out their own fears and insecurities and so long as subsequent employers can look at a McDonalds or Jersey Mike's job on a resume and recognize the growth that might be had there for those that embrace it.

Yet despite all the retail blood-letting and store-closing, the pandemic also witnessed record new business formation in the US. I suspect that this may be because operating within the more formal process-driven value chain of logistics, where people are dealing with time and logic as key variables rather than the intersubjectivity inherent in retail, the sheer messiness of human relations, is an easier place to come up with new ideas which can be tried out. Dry and boring as it may sound, logistics is a really fertile territory for change.

Which may be why Shopify and the like are taking share from Amazon and letting a thousand flowers bloom on more fertile soil. We shall see how this plays out. For now, to work.

Steve Jobs

Just finished Walter Isaacson's bio Steve Jobs, which had been a big hit when it came out around the time the Apple CEO passed away in 2011. I resisted reading it then, just like I have resisted the lemming-like allure of Apple products all these years, though there are plenty of them here in my house.

It is perhaps odd that I have stuck with Windows and then Android devices all these years. A large part of it is that I'm cheap, I just don't want to pay the Apple premium. I am also fundamentally predisposed to open rather than closed ecosystems. And Jobs and his arrogance always just flat out rubbed me the wrong way.

But it is impossible not to have followed his story. I knew a bunch of what was in the book just because Jobs has been such a master at getting his message out all these years and because Apple has done so well, you can't ignore it. But I learned a fair amount reading the book, and there is much to reflect on in thinking about how Jobs ran his life, the central paradox of this control freak perfectionist who was impossible to work for, but everybody loved him because he made such great products and build an organization that was itself focused on making them. And how most everyone looks back at having worked for him and at Apple as a positive experience, by virtue of how good their products are and how they've changed the world. Nor should we forget Pixar.

Isaacson is a good if not great biographer. He is no Robert Caro, but who is? In this case he was hamstrung by the fact that so much of his story was well known already. I have his bio of Ben Franklin on the shelf and will doubtless read it.

Getting my shot

Got my first vaccine shot this week, the Pfizer-BioNtech variety. There were appointments up in Greensboro, so I drove there, no sweat. It was in a Walgreen's in a lower-wealth neighborhood, mostly African-Americans, it would seem.

In fact, I had the distinct impression, though I couldn't be sure, that there were more white people in that store than would be typical. Certainly the couple right in front of me were also from Chapel Hill. I heard them say it, but you could also just tell.

So I felt kind of bad that we -- the industrious fast-fingered lot, quick to pull out our cell phones and figure out where the shots were -- had swooped in and hoovered up the supply. One guy -- a Black guy in his 30s or 40s, was there picking up a prescription and asked about the shots. He was known to the pharmacy staff, and the woman who was taking care of him said: "Yeah, your girl Vandela has already been in here and gotten hers. You could be one of our 18" (I think they had a few extra). She then told him how to get the Walgreen's app on his phone (interestingly, she told him to go to the Play store, so she just assumed he had an Android phone -- like me). It was incredibly sweet.

Tough choices

On Saturday mornings I have a tough choice to make. There's an Al Anon meeting I've been attending regularly for about 8 years, but there's also an AA meeting. The Al Anon one has been very big in helping me get a handle on my life and manage through some challenges during this period, but I am increasingly drawn back to AA.

Here's why. I've said before that the task and the success metrics of Al Anon are more complicated than those of AA. To succeed in the latter, first and foremost all you need to do is not drink or do drugs for a day. If you do that for any given day, you get at least a B for the day. Since Al Anon is about disentangling more complex interdependencies in how we approach the world, it's harder. Learning and recognizing those complexities has been absolutely essential for me. But the very complexity of it makes it more difficult for people to really get and keep the message in their bones.

By contrast, the simplicity of AA makes for a more consistently grateful and happy group of people. Everybody gets it and can express it. Or, on the flip side, when somebody is angry and confused, everyone can see some of themself in the other person, recognize what's going on, and offer relatively simple support.

The contrast between the two is not unlike the problem of happy endings in movies and books. My sister Leslie more or less foreswore complex movies sometime around the time of her cancer because she just decided she had plenty of pain and complexity and didn't need it from her entertainment. I get that and am drifting towards her. Which doesn't mean that there's not a function to complex narratives and difficult books. It's just that maybe they are more appropriate to different lifestages.

Though I guess I did enjoy Knausgaard and Ferrante, so maybe it just comes and goes.

On gambling

Getting ready to talk to a client today who recently got his bonus for the year. A month ago, his company had a liquidity event -- an exit -- that is probably the most important factor for him in his financial life, aside from his ability to earn money on a month in month out basis. But he would really like to retire or semi-retire in the next few years, so the earned income will largely go away. But the dollar value of the exit isn't clear to him yet, for complex reasons. I tried to refocus the conversation to the long-term by focusing on the bigger question, but he insists that we talk about the investing of the smaller chunk of money.

Effectively, he wants to talk about "short-term investing". But there is really no short-term investing, there is only gambling. Trying to focus on short term things that will make money is a huge attention drain. The only other potential benefit is that it offers one the ability to learn a lesson if one fails, if only one can listen.

Yesterday evening I Zoomed with a couple of college friends, one of whom is a medical specialist who lives in the Northeast and makes a lot of money. He also plays a lot of poker. He said he's been playing every night of late, and that he made money for a few months but then the last couple of months have been less good. Later in the conversation, he said he had made around $20k the last year, which is nothing for him financially. The poker is just a hobby, it allows him to unwind at night.

But it also takes away time that he could be exercising. He's not obese, but he ain't all that cut. So, again, the short term detracts and distracts from the long term. 

He has, admittedly, also met some interesting folks while gambling and tells some good stories. So I guess it's social too.

The virtues of aging

After I finished lunch I needed to blow my nose. But I looked around and didn't see any tissues on my desk. "Hmmm" I thought to myself. "I should really get some more." Then it occurred to me to look to see if I already had any, and lo and behold I did, over there on the bookshelf. Nice soft ones.

This is one of the wonders of aging. If I think of something, often I have thought of it before and made provisions for it. Good living.

A grey day at my desk

In recent months I have begun to tot up the amount of time I spend on the phone or on Zoom each day. Today between 9 and 5 that came to 6 hours. Admittedly part of it was a webinar where I was just watching and listening (and also eating). But still. That's an awful lot of sitting and using the mouth and ears in a quasi-coordinated fashion. It left little time for anything else.

Plus, it is drizzly outside and chilly to boot. And here I was thinking it was almost springtime.

Still, I have to go out into it for at least a little walk because my butt is numb.

This is not one of those posts for posterity, honestly. Just hobbling through.

The cycle of life turning slowly

Has what has turned into a monthly Zoom call with some friends from college yesterday. It was kind of rough. Tony's dad Fulton had just passed away, in a particularly sad manner given where we are as a nation and planet right now. Eric was in New York trying to pack up the apartment on West End where his family has lived since, if memory serves correctly, 1962. His mom's physical condition has gone downhill and he needs to find a place for her to live out her days. He was particularly bumming because he thinks it may be July before he can get back to Rome where his wife is because they are seeing a 3rd or 4th (I lose count) of COVID as the British variant has taken root and they've struggled to roll out the vaccine. Maria has made the tough call to move her son, who has been living out in back of their house in northern Vermont and never coming out, to someplace in Texas where he can get some help. For my own part, I've been stressing out about Corinna's cancer up in New York and also Kelvin out in California. Also my cousin Neva's husband Tim out in Little Washington.

Meanwhile, nobody's kids are getting married. It is entirely normal for people to get old and die. It happens, and it probably beats the alternative. But for my peers right now it is not being adequately offset by a couple of other sets of events: weddings and births. We ourselves got married late by historical norms and then had kids late. There's plenty of data on this topic. So it's only natural and expected that we will have to wait longer for our kids to get married and have kids.

But it sucks when people are dying. It was very nice yesterday when Eric was able to reframe things momentarily in terms of his daughter Emily, who had spent a fair amount of the pandemic with him and Anna outside of Rome, is back and setting up a household with her boyfriend up on 191st St.

We are at least fortunate that we know more about health so we can manage our aging processes a little bit better than prior generations. For example, tennis! Z and I were out on the court yesterday evening and I had a good day. I had done some backsliding in recent weeks and he had been winning probably seven sets out of ten, something like that, but yesterday I slowed it down and played a more disciplined game, went for fewer winners, took speed off my first serve to get it in (and therefore had fewer double faults), and focused on helping him make mistakes. I took the first set 6-3 and was up in the second before he had to retire because, it turned out, the repetitive strain of a year of intense tennis has hurt his wittle awm and his wittle weg.

Walking

I've been reading Walter Isaacson's bio of Steve Jobs for the last week and change. It's a good book, though Isaacson is a far cry from Robert Caro. Much of the Jobs story I already knew just because he's just loomed so large as a pop phenom CEO for so long, such a big personality, such a master of media and marketing, etc. Also Apple makes good products I guess, though I'm not a member of the cult, I have surely benefited from a fast follower strategy as others have run with balls he put in motion.

In any case, one of Jobs' favorite things was to have walking business meetings. Which is a good idea. Walking gets the blood flowing and it also keeps me away from restaurants, where I am more likely to eat things like french fries. I have never mastered the art of ordering the salad.

So yesterday I went for a walk with a colleague with whom I've had the occasional kerfuffle and with whom I haven't spent as much time as would be optimal through the pandemic. We had a good and productive discussion. That's all you need to know.

And we continued to explore the portion of Duke Forest that can be accessed from the Hollow Rock Park lot off of Erwin Road. It's beautiful down there, along the stream, even rising up large hill to a spot where, with the leaves off of the trees, there's an actual overlook. Natalie and I had checked it out in late January before she went back to New Haven but I hadn't gone as deep into it as we did yesterday. Excellent spot.

And now it is morning

and, having fought through the urge to stay in my warm bed, fed the cats, meditated, done sit ups and push ups had coffee, read the paper, made my task list, done a couple of other routine daily readings checked email, realized I had a couple of connections I could make for somebody who needs a rental, finished the article in The Economist  I had been reading next to my other upstairs office seat (do the math), I'm almost ready to shower, shave and head out to the office. After I send an LFA-related email and make the bed.

I have a lot to do each morning, but I do love my routine.

Actually before heading out I also have the exciting opportunity to pick out the next book I'll be listening to in the car. Just listened to Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World by David Epstein. It was a good listen, probably is a good read too. 

By now, I can see I will make it to the office no earlier than 10, but that's pretty normal for me.

Must say I was pretty shocked this morning to see that Lina Khan is being nominated for a seat on the governing Board of the FTC. She is a very impressive figure and she did go to Mary's high school in Mamaroneck, which is cool, but she is awful young. I fear the Democratic establishment may be getting ahead of itself anointing her the anti-Zuckerberg. Then again, he got started young too. Maybe it's just part of the game for tech. 

Well, as long as I'm here

I've been making a concerted effort to blog more, which is something that happens most fruitfully early in the morning. Now it's night time, really it's time to be watching some TV, but I'm here so I might as well get something in.

Don't have a whole ton to blog about, though. Certainly I don't want to write about losing to Adam on the tennis court again today. I am in something of a funk out there. We had some epic back and forths, to be sure. The 9th game of the first set took maybe 20 points, it was just grueling. Then I just folded. Too may double faults, too much negative self talk.

But it was surely a beautiful day. Saw Daniel out by the lake and went out to say hello, ended up butt-dialing someone and a small, intensely localized scandal erupted. The guy should have hung up, really should never have kept listening in on our conversation.

Hearing owls out the window now. On Sunday I was sitting in the bedroom and I saw one owl fly up onto a branch and land next to another one. I think they were mating. Spring is in the air.

Getting help

I just had a peak at Graham's grades for the first time in months, which marks a lot of progress over last year, when we were unhealthily obsessing over some small challenges he had. Frankly, we got him coaching. He has an executive function coach and also a math tutor. Both are wonderful. It costs us about $700 a month, but honestly I feel like I've never spent money better.

First and foremost, it's because having people who know what they are doing frees me up to not be expressing my own insecurities all over Graham. It was kind of a neat challenge for me when I was helping Graham with his math, relearning the math, sitting with him, trying to convey what I had just relearned. But it was exhausting and I really wasn't good at it. What was good for me was not necessarily good for him.

Even more importantly, Mary and I are not all down in his business all the time in a counterproductive way, being total pains in his ass. It is much like the lessons I've had to learn when teaching him to drive, which has been more or less to chill the fuck out while he is driving and say as little as possible and also indicate as little as possible by my body language. Every time we got in the car it was more me relearning that lesson than him learning to drive.

I am fully aware that our ability to spend this kind of money helping our child is a tremendous privilege that most kids don't have, but what the hell else am I earning money for? I certainly don't need any more possessions. I'm supporting good people in the community. And, up in New Haven, where Natalie is participating in Yale's Education Studies program and does a lot of teaching and tutoring in the community, we are effectively paying it forward as a family unit.

More woods

Though I had planned to ride my bike today, I wimped out because of the cold and went running instead. I went out of my way to get in some big hills, and then I made my way via the trails by the public library across Estes and back onto the trails along Bolin Creek in the crook of Estes and Airport. I had been on them in late January and found it quite revelatory and then looked at a map and realized there was a whole area back in there I was pretty sure I hadn't hit.

Indeed I had not. There's a whole bunch of trails back there, pretty well used. I had to cede the trail first to a pack of teens and tweens on mountain bikes, trailed pretty far back by a mom who looked a good deal less sturdy on her bike than the kids. Then I went up a pretty big hill and saw something one doesn't see much of these days, a number of big branches leaned up against a tree. In short, a fort! Kids don't make those much any more. I was very happy to see that.

On the way back I saw from my shadow that there was a tuft of hair in the back sticking up. Apparently I had missed a spot when I cut my hair yesterday. So after I got home I started the shower running then grabbed my clippers to trim it down. I put on what I thought was the #3 attachment, which is what I had used for the back and sides. I hit the spot I had missed, and it took off what seemed to be an awful lot of hair. I trimmed a little more around the spot and it kept taking off a lot, so I looked at the clippers. By accident, I had put on not the #3 but the #1 attachment, which cuts to 3mm of length. An honest mistake, it could happen to anyone, but it did drive home the fact that one should really pay attention when you're cutting your own hair, even if you're in a hurry because you're hungry. So I had to cut the whole back and sides of my head down with the #1, so that it didn't look silly. My hair is now quite short, I'll have you know. Gotta love Zoom living, when nobody really sees you too close, and also the fact that hair grows back. 

Then I made fresh ramen with kimchi and sardines and of course a fried egg. One of the best meals of the pandemic.

Opening up

With mom having two shots of Moderna under her belt, she and I ventured up to Roxboro yesterday to meet with a broker and a contractor to look at some work that needs to be done at some rental units we own. Mom had said what a disturbing and crazy mess it was. It looked less bad than she had led me to believe it was going to be, but that's another topic best discussed between mom and myself. The woman has high standards!

It was interesting to get out there and see what's up in rural communities, to add the impressions of this drive to the one Mary and I took to High Point. First off, there's a fair amount of Trump and aligned stuff out there, but it's dialed back a little. Mary is utterly scandalized that anybody could still support him after what happened at the Capital, but honestly if four years of his craziness wasn't going to change people's minds, what on God's green earth could? The fact is that he represented his constituency fairly well and gave them a lot of what they wanted and still want, a need to feel validated and represented. I think we need to take heart from the fact that expressions of enthusiasm for him are moderated now. We just need to serve people, manage through, keep fervor down, save lives, create jobs, etc.

Friends and contemporaries are finding shots. Jonathan and Sharon heard some where available in Jacksonville and went down there yesterday for shot #1 of the Moderna. Somebody else got a JNJ shot in Durham. It is interesting that, with all the focus and hand-wringing about equity and access blah blah blah, how people will hustle off to grab whatever shot's available at the drop of a hat. While, on the one hand, we don't want doses to go to waste and maybe it's an efficient market function where the aggressive and informed are assuring that few shots get wasted, it's also a little funny. It's not unlike how liberals talk about how taxes should be higher but work hard to max out their mortgage interest and home office deductions, 401ks, IRAs, 529s, donor-advised funds, etc, before you even get started with complex tax strategies. People with money are the only ones who can afford CPAs who can study the tax Code and figure out how to make it work for them. This is the kind of thing that pisses off working class people and gives rise to terms like "liberal hypocrites," and it's not all wrong.

Stocking up

It's ironic that as we come towards what we hope to be the end of our COVID period of disciplined social and physical distancing, I continue to get so much joy out of the bounty in our cupboards. The feeling of fullness and warmth I get from gazing on them is really a little silly, harking as it does back to the by now clearly somewhat irrational fears of food scarcity that we had back in March and April when food supply chains had small buckles because everyone was panic-buying rice, flour, pasta, meat, frozen spinach, toilet paper... you remember that.

Right now we are chock full of food goodness. We just took delivery of 5 boxes of girl scout cookies, on top of a couple of boxes of cookies that were already there, some chocolate chips I could use to make some if I wasn't doing other things, half a Trader Joe's pecan kringle (the absolute bomb which we must not by any means forget to eat) in the freezer, and maybe something else. And that's just our desserts. We also have non-sweet food.

The fact is, right now we could probably make it a couple of weeks without going to the grocery store except for milk, orange juice, etc. But I am going to the office nonetheless and will have something delicious for lunch there, just because.

To High Point

I must keep today very brief, as it is a most special day. Mary and I are headed to High Point to buy some furniture to replace the stuff I have here in my study. A couch and a chair. I won't bother you with the history of what is here, suffice it to say that it is very old. I've probably written about it before anyway.

But once the stuff gets here, it will transform our household. No longer will I need to have Saturday naps in the living room or in our bedroom -- either of which is subject to great room noise -- or watch TV alone in the rec room, thereby disturbing Mary's peace and quiet in the living room.

It will be great. Time to get ready!

AA meetings

Just got done with my Saturday morning meeting. Sometimes I go to AA, sometimes Al Anon, both of them are excellent and well-attended, which really helps a meeting at this point in time. There is a certain critical mass of interconnectivity that having 20-25 people there facilitates, and it gets better up to about 40-45, at which point in time I think it gets unproductive because then the most insecure and the extroverts -- often the same people -- feel a need to pontificate, and they are often the most aggressive getting their hands up, so there's a negative feedback loop.

I got my hand up this time kind of late and didn't get to share, which is totally fine. But I did nonetheless have content already generated in my head, so you get to read it, dear Reader.

The topic was AA meetings and what they've done for us. For me, meetings not only got me sober, but basically opened the world to me. Until I got sober, I had an exceedingly narrow vision of people in the world. I was cool. I had cool hair -- both facial and atop my head -- cool clothes, I listened to cool music, read bad-assed books and philosophers, etc. Cool was a pretty major filter in my life, and I judged people on its basis.

Of course I had exceptions and I think that though I had a reasonable-sized log up my ass, it wasn't the sequoia that others had there. Also I knew that I wasn't nearly as cool as others with greater commitment to an aesthetic, but I could live with that.

When I walked into AA rooms in New York City I was exposed to lots of different kinds of people that I had never spent much time with. And the culture of it is that you sit there and listen while other people talk. I discovered I had a huge amount in common with people from very different backgrounds and that many of those I had previously scorned and felt superior to were in fact pretty deep and interesting.

It was, in essence, a rocket ship into adulting. As I realized how many other people weren't stupid (most of them) but just had different backgrounds, I imagined different paths for myself. Lather, rinse, repeat. 

Things Graham says

In the early days of the blog, one of the key things I tried to do was capture the adorable things the kids said so that we could look back on it later in life and remember it. As the years have gone on and the kids spend more time with more people and become ever more socialized and products of their environment, there's been less and less of that. Of course, this process is more pronounced in Natalie, the fully neurotypical, more outward-facing child, who brings up to date slang into the house. Trying to remember some recent instances, but am faltering for the moment.

Graham, being on the spectrum and spending somewhat less time out in the world, preserves some of his distinctive idiolect. For example, at dinner if we ask him: "Graham, have you had enough to eat?" he'll almost invariably answer: "I'd say so." 

He also says "indeed" a lot, but I know where he got that (yours truly). Actually, it's funny, the other day I was coming downstairs out of my office and I heard him talking to Mary. I was struck by how much he sounds like me. Which is no surprise, really, because of course our accent matches those of the people with whom we interact the most, plus he shares a lot of DNA with me. But it was very striking.

One habit it has been hard to break him of is getting the idiom of respond to a negatively phrased question with a no. So I might ask him: "So you wouldn't say that Donald Trump is an idiot?" He will respond "Yes", as in "Yes, that's correct, I wouldn't". As opposed to "No I wouldn't," which is more idiomatic.The irony is, of course, that logically he is kind of right, as we can tell from the opposite idiomatic response "No, I would say he is an idiot," with a heavy accent on the word "no." Or, even better, but still really a standard response, "No no, I would say he is an idiot."

Good fun.

Gifts keep giving

As I think I've mentioned, I've been playing more guitar during the pandemic. As I figured certain technical things out, I began to wonder what they would sound like on an electric guitar, perhaps with a little distortion, so I reached out to my friend Nick, who has made some wonderful music on his own over the years, and asked what kind of gear would be best if I just wanted to play through my computer, for myself, with no amp.

Nick got sort of excited, and asked what kind of guitar I had. When I told him none, he decided to send me one of his old ones, a banged up Telecaster with very nice Bad Brains and Dead Kennedys stickers on it.

Well, the floor of my study was pretty full of crap, including a couple of boxes of old journals from my dad that Leslie had asked for months and months ago and which I had scarcely peaked at. We also had all kinds of crap clogging up our mud room. So I decided that if I was going to be accepting a large object into my home, I needed to get rid of some. I shipped a box of journals to Leslie and set to work in other parts of the house.

Sometime during the day I walked out to the mailbox, where I saw our new neighbors across the street working on something: "We're putting in a new swing between these trees," the dad told me. They also have an outdoor trampoline for their super-friendly 8-year old daughter. Which gave me an idea. "Hey, do you guys want a little indoor trampoline?" I asked. We have one that Graham hasn't been using for some time, really he's just to big for it and it no longer provides an outlet for him. I had recently broached the topic of giving it up with him.

"You bet," said the dad, "she had actually asked for one for Christmas." So, after confirming with Graham that it was cool, I took it over there. Later that evening, as the neighbors were sitting around their fire pit in the driveway watching a Carolina game, I saw her in the garage bouncing on her new trampoline. 

Radical pancakes

Today is Sunday, pancake day. Since we are still having cold weather, autumnal pancakes continue to prevail, either pumpkin or sweet potato. Somehow, in all these years of making these pancakes, I had never thought to add cinnamon to them. So I broke it out, and it was pretty good. Then I realized that not only cinnamon was suitable to such a situation, but also cloves and other stuff. I started rooting through the spice drawer and discovered a bottle of "Pumpkin Spice," which had cinnamon, cloves, lemon peel, and a bunch of other stuff. I tried that on a round of pancakes and served some to Graham.

Then I started pressuring him for feedback: "Which one do you like better?" Graham can sometimes be a deliberate eater. He often gets up and paces around the room  between courses and sometimes even between bites. But I -- being in the throes of culinary creation, albeit of the most obvious and pedestrian sort -- really wanted to know his opinion.

But then I had to pull back from pressuring the boy, because he is taking the ACT on Tuesday, and he has been working pretty hard to get ready. He has been doing online practice. At mom's bidding, he has been adjusting his sleep schedule -- which can run pretty late these days, what with him being a 17-year old boy with limitless opportunity to play online chess or debate the fine points of any obscure topic that strikes his fancy. So there's a fair amount of pressure on him already, and I didn't want to ramp it up unnecessarily over my own breakfast food insecurities.

So I apologized, and Graham immediately began to speculate on how funny it would be if they added such a question to the ACT:

Which is a better spicing for pumpkin pancakes? 

A) Cinnamon

B) Pumpkin Spice

C) Plain

While at first we were envisioning as a right or wrong kind of question, we realized quickly that it would actually be more useful to recruiters from various universities for discovering which students are right for them, and we began to riff on the likely preferences of various institutions. 

Anyhoo, we kept ourselves amused for a goodly while.

Of course, when it came time for me to eat mine, I preferred the plain ones, the ones to which I have become accustomed over the decades. Mary was not shocked. 

The 3-Body Problem

Just polished off this 2012 novel by Chinese sci-fi writer Cixin Liu, which Graham had gotten as a birthday present from his friend Tyler and which has been enough of a sensation that it has a cover blurb from Barack Obama himself. It had been a while since I had read any sci-fi, it's not my go-to genre for sure, so it was refreshing in many ways.

I may go on and read the next two volumes in his trilogy at some point, but for now I'll be taking a break. Though it is a very inventive book, it still has many of the pitfalls of mainland Chinese novels I've read in the last couple of years, though admittedly my sample size of two is rather narrow, so I should read more. First and foremost, the characters are rather wooden and thinly sketched. They just don't grow much as people. At best they are like action movie characters that could be played by Bruce Willis.

Liu also gets a little too caught up in technical detail of protons and sophons and blah blah blah. Of the last 40 pages, maybe half of it is caught up in "unfolding a proton in 11-dimensional space". Is some of what he's saying plausible from a sub-atomic physics perspective? Could be. I could probably spend a bunch of time reading about it to figure it out. But I really don't care. It's not a good way to bring a suspenseful novel to a close. It just pissed me off.

June 2019 New Yorker article about Liu. Makes me want to read more.

Assortative huddling

For decades now retail commerce, along with so much else in our lives, has been "rolled up," as we say in business. It has become the province of ever larger and larger companies, selling goods out of ever larger and larger stores, employing an ever greater share of the workforce. Which makes for fewer small stores and more impersonal relationships at them. This is a commonplace, and many have spoken of their yearning for a return to a more personal relationship with their merchants. Here's a post I wrote about it a few years back.

At the same time, the media landscape has gone in the opposite direction. From 3 TV networks plus PBS and some syndicators we have gone to however many cable channels there are plus the web plus podcasters. Many have written about this too, I'm sure I have.

People do interact with one another out here in cyber land, but it tends to be entirely like-minded folks communing together, and without the superegoic guardrails that interacting with one another IRL imposes. People just pile on and say whatever the fuck they want out there on the internet because they know there's little chance of serious reprisal, which would have been less the case out there in the real world when you ran into people at the hardware and grocery store more regularly. It's not that I have any illusions about the degree of consensual repression that was present in small towns, but I think there was likely less vitriol.

People do still need to see each other and we create social contexts and institutions in which to do so, but the factor of randomness in bringing people together out there in meatland has been dialled down. And random interactions with Others in a situation where people are constrained by manners breeds a measure of tolerance and mutual understanding, when people are geared right.

The big C

Thrown off-kilter today by the news that a client -- someone who is very dear to me that I have known for almost three decades -- has colon cancer. I don't know how bad it is yet, we'll talk Saturday.

What I do know is that I never was able to get her to buy life insurance outside of what was available to her through her employer. I could never quite sit her down and get her to take it seriously enough. She carries a heavy load -- really too much of a load -- within her household.

I cannot let myself do the same. I know I did my best, she even talked to the best, most well-informed, most ethical life insurance person I know -- The Guy -- but her underwriting was complicated and it never moved forward.

Whatever happens, we'll get through it, but it will not be simple.

Groundhog Day

Everyone has been likening life under COVID to Groundhog Day, the Bill Murray classic, and I'm pretty sure there's a lot of substance to the comparison. The problem is that -- unlike so much of Murray's body of work -- I've only seen the movie once. Somehow it escaped me in the early days, it wasn't ranked up there with Animal House, The Blues Brothers, Caddyshack etc. as one of the classics in the canon of early SNL films in my brain. Maybe they just didn't play it enough on the Movie Channel and HBO while I still had subscriptions to them.

To make matters worse, despite her great love of all things Bill Murray, Mary is reticent to rewatch it with us as a family viewing option. She's just not much of a re-watcher in general. But I'd really like to watch it with Graham.

Speaking of family viewing, I know that over the course of the pandemic negotiating group viewing has been particularly difficult. Maty's just tough because she doesn't watch that much TV. Graham has his own challenges. But getting something for the three of us to agree on is really hard. In many ways it was worse with Natalie added, though having Community and then Bob's Burgers to watch as a family have been lifelines.

But I was really happy when I talked about the family viewing negotiation process with a friend and fellow board member and she said it was the same in their household, where they have two boys in their 20s home from grad school. Their TV negotiation process is equally arduous. It was good to know we are not alone. 

Democracy and consensus-building are just touch, even amongst the smallest and nominally most aligned groups of people. No wonder the macro processes are messy.

Presidents' Day

It had somehow escaped my attention that Presidents' Day was coming up, and that it was a market holiday, which means that I feel entitled to more or less not work. Except for responding to a couple of client emails and doing some Board stuff and working on some stuff around the house. I will take it.

Usually I feel like Martin Luther King Jr Day is that holiday that lets us get over the holidays, but this year I guess it's Presidents' Day, because what we are getting over is not just the holidays (which were tiring and stressful in a different way this year because of COVID [BTW I include that note only for when I'm checking this out in the future, just in case]), but also Trump's second impeachment trial and the unprecedented assault it has made on the democratic process.

Of course there's really no rest for the weary, what with the 2022 elections already peaking over the horizon. But I'm not going to go off on them, because really what I am celebrating is a brief moment of freedom and respite from all of that.

Yesterday was Valentine's Day and somehow I lost sight of that and neglected to even get Mary some flowers. I did make a fire for her and keep it going in the fireplace from about 2:30 till bedtime and I gave her a nice backrub too, but still I messed up a little. She got me a chocolate bar but forgot to give it to me till this morning, but that's OK. We will get through this.

Moment of clarity

Many days I have a moment of clarity right as I am finishing breakfast and am somewhere into my second cup of coffee. I am reading something and have particularly deep insight and I can see a short essay flow out of the thought.

Then I keep reading. On good days everything I read holds my interest, on bad days it's hard to concentrate because I am thinking about all the things I need to do later. But on all days the beautiful continuity of thought I had earlier is lost.

My friend Blue -- who used to read the blog frequently and also used to be a prolific and interesting Facebook poster, someone who really bucked the drift towards narrow topicality and/or lifestyle porn -- once said something like it's important to stop reading lest it interfere with our writing, and I totally get that. I think I may even have blogged about it before.

But it's not all about the writing. Really it's about being in the world. Today is Valentine's Day and I totally didn't pick up a heart-shaped treat or any special chocolate for Mary. I have promised her a very special backrub, but really I should also look for an opportunity to do something out of the ordinary for her, Like for example help her think through framing those couple of pictures for which the frames have been sitting on our island for a week or two. Or cleaning crap out of the cubbies in our mudroom. She has, after all, unintentionally (perhaps) given me a Valentine's Day treat already by clearing off the huge mound of shit on top of her chest of drawers which drives me crazy, though I know better than to say anything about it, except for on the very bluest moon. Pursuant to all this, I had better stop typing. 

Dissertation dream

Woke up this morning a little before six after having a dissertation anxiety dream. I've had more than a few of these. In these case I had chosen to write on this guy Chukovsky, who in my dream was famed primarily for a very thick tome of memoirs though I had a vague sense he had done something else too. In any case, I had read basically nothing of his and had selected the topic basically as a stunt. I was conscious of the fact that I already had a PhD and it was ridiculous that I was undertaking this project in the first place, but still I was doing it because it would have looked silly to back out, more or less.

I have had many similar dreams, but this one was long on detail.

Couldn't quite get back to sleep afterwards so I went ahead and woke up. It's sad to say, but after my friend Steve up in Princeton -- one of my sherpas into the world of finance -- told me he reads The Economist cover to cover every week, I kind of have it in the back of my mind that it's a good idea to do that and it was sort of goading me to get up -- even after I had that dream. Though I do of course have my standing 8:30 Saturday meeting plus my weekly appointment with an eagerly awaited cheese omelet.

Tweeterdum

The defenestration of Trump from Twitter was long overdue and has resulted in a sense of relative piece and quiet throughout the world. Having deprived the epochal bloviator for the ages of his megamegaphone lowered the overall tone and volume of discourse throughout society, depriving wingnuts of institutional imprimatur from the very highest level.

But a vacuum has also been left, and we all know what nature thinks of vacuums. Who has been the heir apparent, Tweeterdum to Trump's Tweeterdie? Why Elon Musk of course, who rolls elements of Steve Jobs and Donald Trump together, fulfilling society's need for a big-mouthed white male oracle. Like Trump, Musk is willing to do things off the cuff and thumb his nose at traditional authorities, whether by smoking pot on the air with Joe Rogan, drawing the SEC's fire by tweeting about taking his company private without following through, tweeting about buying a jokey cryptocurrency or using Signal a secure messaging service to undercut Facebook's model and thereby driving a frenzy of buying stock in Signal Alliance, an altogether different company that does biotech stuff.

Part of Musk's attraction, as with Trump's, is his regular guyness. He doesn't pretend to be perfect or above it all, so people can identify with him. The problem is that the volume of attention paid to him gives him huge power, so the predominance of ego and id over recessive superego creates a heady brew in the wrong conditions. He's like Kafka's Josephine the Mouse Singer, whose piping is indistinguishable from most everyone else's but in nonetheless regarded as the greatest.

Musk is the new Trump and also the new Steve Jobs. At least, on balance, he is doing good things. Driving forward the adoption of electric vehicles and also battery technology in general. But he misuses his megaphone at times and gets people to do things that have the tendency to hurt them in the short run, so I am in many ways not a fan. But he for sure doesn't have time to care. I hope at least that he matures a little and learns to be a little more careful with his mouth.

The assumptive close

"Hello, this is Bob calling from the American Red Cross. Is this Michael Troy?" "Yeah, that's me," I allowed. "We have opportunities every day next week for you to give blood. What day is good for you?" He didn't miss a beat. It was the perfect assumptive close. So I signed up.

Today I went in to their facility on University Drive in Durham. It was nice and spacious and, since I had come in early, I basically had the run of the place. The young lady (Alina, I think) who did my intake and then also took my blood was apparently fairly new to the process, because the guy who was overseeing her had her walk through the steps before she did it. She had it right. It all went fine.

While I was lying there with blood draining out of my arm, we discussed my need for some new furniture up here in my study. They agreed that it was entirely meet and right that I should have some new stuff and that it would be generally quite safe for Mary to accompany me to High Point on a weekday to shop for it, due to the large size of the showrooms.

Alina apparently was doing some furniture shopping of her own, because her roommate is a pig and it is high time for her boyfriend and her to be the hell out of there. Apparently Alina's dog had also chewed on a book containing the sole, handwritten copies of some of her roommate's poems (she fancies herself a poet), which didn't go over well with the roommate, though the poems themselves had gone down smoothly for the pup.

Afterwards, I was cooling out in the "lounge" having some water and NutterButters (followed by a few Cheez-Its), this other donor came in. She was from Mebane, a working class gal who apparently gave blood frequently out of gratitude for her daughter, who had overcome leukemia. When I heard she was from Mebane, I asked her feelings about Buc-ees having withdrawn its application for the world's biggest filling station/convenience store. She said she didn't know a whole lot about it, but had heard there would be jobs there. Gives a bit of a different perspective on the issue. I didn't like the looks of the place, but honestly it's not like I drive by there more than twice a year, so it wouldn't have been a ton of skin off my ass, personally, so I had stayed out of it.

The magic and logic of coincidence

One of the conceits of the 18th and 19th century novel -- and also TV these days -- is the unlikely coincidence which ties the plot together (the far-flung nephew who falls in love with the daughter of the protagonist's professor or whatever), but also produces the impression of order in the universe and safety in the world.

Over the course of the pandemic, one of the few ways I've been able to keep Graham's driving skills sharp is to have him drive me to pick up take out in the evenings. One evening a month or so back Graham had been working a Quiz Bowl tournament online all day: asking questions or scoring rounds. He gets paid for this, $5 an hour or so. He told me he had been paired with a guy named Sasha who, he told me, was a freshman at U of Illinois Champaigne-Urbana and had been in a dorm but had needed to move home after a few weeks because of COVID, and his parents lived very close to campus.

Little bells started going off inside my head. My friend Lilya, who was in my program at Columbia, had a boy named Sasha who had gone to Champaigne-Urbana but was forced home after a few weeks... I will spare you the play by play, but a couple of quick texts confirmed that of course it was her son who had been Graham's partner for the day.

Interestingly enough, the overall impression this coincidence left on me was that there is order in the universe and that I am safe. There's something nice about running into people somewhat randomly in the big world.

Which is the point -- at the end of the day -- of casting a wide net and engaging with lots of people in lots of different ways -- talking, listening, reading, observing, watching foreign TV shows and movies, etc. Even though Dunbar's Law remains operative at all times and limits our ability to go deep with lots of people, there's still a virtue to engaging with The Many, so that The One may show its face.

The size Materhorn

At the recommendation of this guy Michael Kitces, who's a true guru for financial planners in the sense that he and his team have built the best continuing ed platform and have really thought about how to do our jobs right, year over year, I started listening to a book called Who Not How by Dan Sullivan and Benjamin Hardy. According to the book, Dan Sullivan is a hugely influential coaching guru for entrepreneurs -- and he certainly talks a mean game and his company charges a lot for seminars. Hardy publishes a lot of columns and books and stuff.

They talk an awful lot about size, getting big, "going 10x", etc. And I guess that given that they are catering to entrepreneurs, that should not be surprising.*

But that does beg the question: to what extent is size or scale the best measure of achievement and attainment? It's hard to get away from it in American society, though at least we don't live in Texas. So often people are looking at the size of your house, how much money you have, how big your muscles, penis, or breasts are, etc. We love bigness. And of course size and scale need not always be interpreted literally. People also focus on rising high within prestigious institutions, government, etc. Accolades.

But is this all the real deal? How important is it? I remember at the beginning of the lockdown when I read Tom Brokaw's The Greatest Generation, how refreshing it was that a certain number of the people who were profiled in the book had come home from WWII and done modest things in small towns but were just all-around good community- and family-members, and how refreshing that was.

I suppose I must confess that I struggle with this personally because my own trajectory was altered somewhat coming out of the cannon. Had I gone off to Yale and focused on achievement and rising, I might have rocketed off like more of my classmates. I didn't. Part of it was substance abuse and mental illness related, but part of it also was just a sense that those people's values were kinda skewed. I was definitely a purist and still am. 

Yet I do see that there is a value to good that can be done in the world by people who build bigger platforms, that I see. The key thing would appear to be being centered around good values and focusing on scaling one's span of influence.

* In the book Sullivan waxes poetic about how the most important thing he has done and the thing he's most proud of is creating jobs, hundreds of them. He says he has large numbers of people who have been on his team for more than 20 years. I reasoned that, if that was the case, his firm's 401k should be really large, because people who have been working with a successful business should be making good money and saving a large chunk of it. So I looked up the 5500 (the Department of Labor annual filing on his 401k). In fact, there's not that much money in there. A little more than $2 million, with 33 participants or so.

Now, it's entirely possible and indeed even likely that an entrepreneurial enterprise like this is light on true W-2 employees and long on 1099 self-employed types. I get that. Even still, if you have 33 employees and you're paying them decently and they stick around for 5-7 years on average, your 401k should be bigger. If they're not sticking around that long, you're not really building a firm. If they're not saving enough, you're not giving them good counsel. Something smells odd.

Club living

With Z out with a sore arm, I was reduced to playing with someone else today. Someone I usually beat. I beat him again rather soundly, though in the second set he was doing pretty well. It was 2-2 when his daughter showed up with her rackets. I of course invited her on, showing that I was raised well, but I also was able to take away my opponent's momentum through this clever maneuver. Then some older fellow sauntered down and asked if we'd like a fourth for doubles. It was club living. Turns out she is in 8th grade and plays on the Culbreth team, which made it all the sweeter when we took a quick set from them before we were forced off by an older couple who had the court at 3. People aren't playing round with their court reservations these days. But the special joy of beating someone from our old nemesis Culbreth was not diminished by some decades of separation.

Then I came home and read my book and enjoyed my afternoon coffee before having a brief snooze on the sofa in the rec room, which is a particularly soporific piece of furniture.

(the next day)

Thinking about playing doubles yesterday, I must say it's remarkable how comfortable and confident I was. I play very little doubles -- this was my second time in a year, maybe my second time three years -- but I felt fine and played fine. This is a huge shift from a couple of years ago when I played in the "Raise a Racket" fundraiser at the Farm and about had a nervous breakdown, I was so self-conscious and fearful about my game. Mostly this is a function of just playing a whole lot more tennis and being in shape.

But it also opens a lot of doors, because I feel comfortable in changing tennis situations. And I also see the etiquette -- if there are three of you and a fourth shows up and asks, you play doubles. Then you meat somebody else and chat, etc. We never lived like that when I was younger, so I didn't know how that worked.

Harris Teeter, U Mall, 7 pm

"I'll bet that knocks you back a pretty penny," said the woman behind me in line at Harris Teeter, an older African-American woman, "that Pepperidge Farms Cinnamon Raisin bread. I'd just put some cinnamon on my toast, myself." "My wife really likes it, and there are raisins in there," I pointed out.

But the essential point about the vastly different places we lived in, just a mile or so apart, was brought home. For her, Pepperidge Farms was a premium brand, a luxury item. It of course had been that for me back in the 70s, when the Steins had it in their house and Leslie and I -- hailing from a family of Wonder Bread and perhaps even Roman Meal eaters -- marveled at the density of it, which spoke of the sparkling cosmopolitanism of the north and the great cities there. Now Pepperidge Farms feels rather downmarket to me, compared to the breads I can get at Whole Foods, Weaver Street, farmers markets, Loaf, Guglhupf, etc.

Different worlds. A client of mine, a Jewish woman from the Midwest, was recently telling me about how she has been accepted with open arms into an African-American church on Rosemary Street, one that she just happened past one Sunday and where she had struck up conversation with some well-dressed parishioners hanging out in the yard. When their pianist is sick, she has filled in, and she sings in a choir that performs every third Sunday. I assured her that she had enough money to give a thousand bucks or so to them annually.

So it is good to know there remain bridges between worlds and that more are sprouting, here and there.

The hot hand

Today I'll cheat slightly with a brief post, as in the early days of the Grouse, when I would sometimes slip in a sentence or two just to get something on the scoreboard.

Watched "Street Food: Asia" on Netflix last night, and episode about Osaka, Japan. Not a great show, fairly formulaic, but it does give you a sense of other places in the world. I guess this is pretty much a genre by now and Anthony Bourdain probably did it a whole lot better before he offed himself, but hey, Netflix isn't pushing Bourdain into my recommendations feed and by the end of the day I'll be damned if I'm gonna go out and do a bunch of research to figure out where I can watch it. And I am certainly not paying Amazon per episode to watch it. 

I guess I pretty much do have a gratuitous snack after watching these shows, and it's never quite as good as what they showed on TV.

Blowing in the wind

Yesterday was our first time back out on the court for a week or so, seemed like months. It also seemed like Siberia. The temp wasn't that cold, but the wind was ridiculous.

Z took me 6-3, 6-0, 6-2. Thank God nobody was there to see it. The wind was doing all kinds of crazy things with my shots and I just couldn't process it.

But of course, he was playing in the same wind as I was, which begs the question: what's the difference? Why did Z hold up better under those conditions than I did, when we are not that lopsided when the weather is not a factor? I have to believe it's a function of mental toughness and focus. I'll bet it even has something to do with him playing more poker and golf than I do, and also all the many hours he has logged on the basketball court. And more years under his belt as a business person. He just has more time in games under pressure than I do.

Current consumption

Finished James McBride's Deacon King Kong last night, the second of his books I've read during lockdown. A good, solid book about a changing neighborhood in Brooklyn in the late 60s, warmhearted and positive but not hokey, I see whey Oprah liked it.

I had made a fire already, which Mary appreciated when she came out of her meeting at 8. I had been listening to a little Miles Davis on the sly, since she can't stand the sound of jazz.

Then I watched an episode of The Good Place and one of Midnight Diner, my Japanese show, which continues to teach me things. In particular, it's stunning to see the Japanese's profound lack of judgement around matters sexual. There are strippers, hooks, trans people, teenages having affairs with teachers, but never a hint of judgement. It's all just who people are or something they're going through. Really different.

My officemate David tells me this extends to the scatological, that Japanese people will easily transition in conversation to discussions of the consistency of their stools. I guess I really haven't hung out with many Japanese people in my lifetime, it's just a fact.

Attention seeking, scale and personhood

With each day that I spend less (translated to "almost none at all" time on Facebook, I feel better). My attention is more focused, I am more able to interact with family members, read books, write, call people on the phone, etc.

My mind returns to the essential wisdom of the Dunbar Number, anthropologist Robin Dunbar's observation that human beings can maintain stable relationships with a maximum of 150 people, and that within that there is further narrowing, such that one can have only a few really close friends. Which makes sense. To have good and deep relationships you have to see and talk to people a lot and we all run up against the 24/7 constraint upon which I needn't elaborate to anyone. And then there's the fact that people narrow down their networks as the age.

So it is only to be expected that attempts to expand this range by use of social networks are immensely problematic: they are super unnatural and therefore we end up contorting ourselves within them in ways we scarcely understand. Some years ago in Princeton we had a "Topic Club" in which a bunch of us guys from the neighborhood got together and one guy made a presentation about something, which we then discussed. My friend Ted presented on the "attention economy," the idea that the web was all about people's eyeballs and attention and attracting them, and how if it was to be monetized we had a right to be paid for allocating our attention, and various constructs for doing so. But there is the obverse of that too. There is the distortive effect of everyone seeking attention all the time, what that does to us.