Lucid.

I'm reading "Without Senators in Sight, Christine Blasey Ford Retells Her Story/Her lucid memoir, 'One Way Back,' describes life before, during and after she testified that Brett Kavanaugh had sexually assaulted her in high school" (NYT). Excerpt:

Published more than five years after her 2018 congressional testimony, Blasey Ford’s new memoir, “One Way Back,” is an important entry into the public record — a lucid if belated retort to Senator Chuck Grassley’s 414-page, maddening memo on the investigation — but a prosaic one.

 The book is important, lucid, belated, and prosaic, we're told.

"Brennan-Jobs is a deeply gifted writer. Before I read her book, I wondered if it had been ghostwritten..."

"... like many such books. But from the striking opening — in which Lisa is drifting around her father’s house when he is dying of cancer, snubbed by everyone and pinching trifles from different rooms to appease her sense of exclusion — it is clear that this is a work of uncanny intimacy. Her inner landscape is depicted in such exquisitely granular detail that it feels as if no one else could possibly have written it. Indeed, it has that defining aspect of a literary work: the stamp of a singular sensibility. In the fallen world of kiss-and-tell celebrity memoirs, this may be the most beautiful, literary and devastating one ever written.... When Lisa is in high school, she persuades Steve and Laurene to accompany her to her psychiatrist for a meeting, where she confesses: 'I’m feeling terribly alone.' Then she bursts into tears, which she hoped 'would soften them.' Laurene finally breaks the silence. 'We’re just cold people'..."

From "The Father of Personal Computing Who Was Also a Terrible Dad," Melanie Thernstrom's review of the Lisa Brennan-Jobs memoir "Small Fry."

I'm a little interested in "Small Fry," but I don't trust Thernstrom's opinion of the quality of the writing because when I read "Lisa is drifting around her father’s house when he is dying of cancer, snubbed by everyone and pinching trifles from different rooms to appease her sense of exclusion," I was drifting around wondering who was pinching trifles — Lisa or Steve? I assume it was Lisa and she was stealing inconsequential items, but I was distracted picturing Steve squeezing little sponge cakes. I have a feeling Thernstrom and Brennan-Jobs share a form of humorless poeticizing that leaves me, like Laurene, cold.

"We were in [Jony] Ive’s black Bentley, which is as demure as a highly conspicuous luxury car can be."

"The hood barely sloped, and it met the car's front end at a tightly curved corner that mirrored the iPhone 6 in Ive’s left hand... Ive would prefer an unobserved life, but he likes nice things. He also has an Aston Martin DB4. He acquired his first Bentley, a two-door model, ten years ago, after an inner zigzag between doubt and self-justification. 'I’ve always loved the big old-school square Bentleys,' he said. 'The reasons are entirely design-based. But because of the other connotations I resisted and resisted, and then I thought, This is the most bizarre vanity, because I’m concerned that people will perceive me to be this way—I’m not. So I’m going to—' A pause. 'And so I am uncomfortable about it.' Jeff Williams, Apple’s senior vice-president of operations, drives an old Toyota Camry. Ive’s verdict, according to Williams, is 'Oh, God.'"

From "The Shape of Things to Come/How an industrial designer became Apple’s greatest product" by Ian Parker in The New Yorker.

Ive would prefer an unobserved life, but he likes nice things. Ha ha. Don't we all? Except that senior vice-president of operations with his.. Oh, God... Camry.

I had previously asked Ive about the rounded corners and edges that have long helped distinguish an Apple product from a ThinkPad or a book.... For each product, Jobs and Ive would discuss corners “for hours and hours.” [Laurene Powell Jobs] later noted that she and Ive share a taste for Josef Frank, the Austrian-Swedish designer of rounded furniture and floral fabrics, who once announced, in a lecture, "No hard corners: humans are soft and shapes should be, too."

"We use transgender as an umbrella term that includes people who are transsexual, cross-dressers or otherwise gender non-conforming."

A definition in the sidebar of an article titled "The Heart Wants What It Wants" — supertitled "We Are as We Are" and "Dating Trans?," which is teased on the front page of this new website Ozy under the heading "Tricky Topic: Dating a Transgender Person/Have attitudes about the fluidity of gender migrated much on the T in LGBT?"

For a website with a 3-letter name, that's an awful lot of titles, dragging us this way and that. What caught my eye — among the many things clamoring to catch eyes — was that side-bar definition that I used for the post title. That made me think: Who's not under that umbrella? Only people who are gender-conforming, which in my book — who wants to be a conformist, a gender stereotype? — is an insult.