Writes Jay Caspian Kang, in "Tony Hsieh and the Emptiness of the Tech-Mogul Myth/A new biography of the Zappos executive depicts him as a narcissist and an addict who tossed around half-baked ideas and rarely saw them through" (The New Yorker).
Is there a "journalist’s need to humanize everything in sight"? I hadn't noticed. Once you decide to write a whole book about someone, you're committed to "humanizing" that one human being, I suppose. There's always the question: Why write a book about this person?
A biographer has got to feel pretty sensitive as he struggles with the dullness of the facts he's got to inflate to book length. This is the story of a shoe saleman! He took drugs, but drug stories are basically alike. Why read about a tech exec on drugs when there are so many episodes of "Behind the Music" to watch?
There is one extraordinary thing about Hsieh, his fiery death. I'm guessing the book puts that scene in the beginning so the reader — the creepy reader — doesn't get impatient waiting for it. Is that humanizing — waiting for a man to be consumed by flames?
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17 comments:
"Is there a "journalist’s need to humanize everything in sight"
Of course not.
“Used his Harvard connections….”
Harvard is the problem.
I had two HS classmates that went to Harvard. One ended up completely broken.
I couldn't resist. I Googled for "Tony Hsieh - Fiery Death" right away.
The life of an atheist. And it’s dull.
Makes loving a wife for life and raising three talented children sound like heaven can be on earth.
Whatever happened to “afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted?”
I should add that my other HS classmate who went to Harvard wrote the novel, "Frankenstein, Part II."
He told me that Harvard wasn't really that great.
After Harvard, he started City Sports in Boston. He later expanded it to other East Coast cities. I doubt he took a single business class while at Harvard. He figured it all out for himself. Remarkable guy.
Is there a "journalist’s need to humanize everything in sight"? I hadn't noticed. Once you decide to write a whole book about someone, you're committed to "humanizing" that one human being, I suppose.
I think the reference was to journalism in general, not biography. Writers are certainly encouraged to frame public policy debates by highlighting people not policy points. (Humanizing those who illustrate the progressive position and dehumanizing those who challenge it.)
I couldn’t find much to admire about Hsieh in Wonder Boy
Spoken just like a journalist who has no idea whatsoever how capitalism works. Hsieh revolutionized business by taking an old idea — the customer is always right — and empowering every one of his employees to deliver it online at scale. As a result his company grew from $1 million to $1 billion in sales. A journalist who’s incurious about that isn’t really a journalist.
"The journalist’s need to humanize everything in sight can be useful, even revelatory, but it can also obscure."
Right. As in the ledes of many newspaper articles: tear-jerking to justify prog policy.
"He slept with his employees and terrorized his closest friends."
Who in turn slept with him and stuck around to be terrorized.
"[We never learn] how and why so much of the press and the public got suckered in by Hsieh’s generation of tech evangelists."
"The public"?
"Is there a "journalist’s need to humanize everything in sight"? I hadn't noticed."
Surprising (no snark). Just about all major issues are "reported" through human-interest stories. Most articles in the local newspaper start with a "humanizing" lede. They serve to jerk tears from a certain segment of the audience, produce an isn't-that-awful reaction, and thus justify some new prog policy (more money! gun control! don't be so cruel!).
"drug stories are basically alike."
Correct. Everyone knows, but no one learns.
NPR tells the news by anecdote - which allows them to pick the anecdote. "We asked Kasemchai, owner of a bicycle repair shop in Bangkok, what he thought of the new trade regulations..."
If Kasemchai doesn't echo the narrative, it's on to the next market stall. It's amazingly dishonest, while technically telling the truth. So I guess that journalists "need" to do that these days, yes.
There is a journalist's need, au courant, to humanize favored populations. To wit: Neely, guy killed by accident on the subway. A mentally ill homeless often thug with a very long rap sheet and frequent assaults is being spun as a sweet Michael Jackson impersonator.
Same thing happened to George Floyd and Michael "Gentle Giant" Brown.
Elizabeth Holmes is trying a new shtick as "Liz Holmes" in an attempt to "Humanize" her crimes.
ChatTNY publishes a handmade tale of a baby... fetal-baby and the butterfly effect under a nominally "secular" ethical religion underwritten by diversity and political congruence.
Silly article. The public liked Zappos because it made buying shoes really easy. People around Hsieh out up with his weirdness because they were making a ton of money.
I've started clicking away when they start in with the emotion in "news" reports. I click then clickaway even if I know they will do that especially on Youtube so the algorithm knows that the content drives away traffic instead of thinking it just isn't interesting. The only way to stop this "journalism" is to make it costly.
In like a Lion, out like a Roman candle!
Death of a Shoe Salesman. Haha. It's been done.
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