"The lack of women in tech is a complicated problem. Attacking or ignoring one book written by a misogynist won’t solve it."

"However, rejecting the book as a typical narrative of our industry might be a good start. The book tells the story of an uninspiring, morally questionable individual in tech, who stands out only for the way he disparages people of minorities. It’s not 'a guide to the spirit of Silicon Valley' as the author and his publisher try to present. Men don’t have to be like the author, and women don’t have to work with, even tolerate, men like the author to fit into the tech world." 

Wrote Chip Huyen, a writer and computer scientist, in "A simple reason why there aren't more women in tech - we're okay with misogyny" (at her own blog). She wrote that 2 years ago, criticizing Antonio García Martínez for his memoir, "Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley." It was March 2019, and García Martínez had just been hired to write at Wired. Huyen wanted people to know that he'd displayed himself as an out-and-proud sexist. 

Huyen quoted this passage from the book:

“Most women in the Bay Area are soft and weak, cosseted and naive despite their claims of worldliness, and generally full of shit. They have their self-regarding entitlement feminism, and ceaselessly vaunt their independence, but the reality is, come the epidemic plague or foreign invasion, they’d become precisely the sort of useless baggage you’d trade for a box of shotgun shells or a jerry can of diesel.”

I was reading that because I was sent there by Axios, in a new article, "Apple parts ways with employee amid backlash." García Martínez had moved on to a job at Apple, and some employees there put together a petition, stating "We demand an investigation into how his published views on women and people of color were missed or ignored, along with a clear plan of action to prevent this from happening again."

"What’s novel about 'Friends,' or what must seem so to a certain subset of New York teenagers of whom so much is expected, is the absence among the six central characters of any quality of corrosive ambition."

"The show refuses to take professional life or creative aspirations too seriously. What does Chandler Bing actually do? I was never entirely sure. In the series’ ninth season he is an advertising intern. On 'Girls' you have writers who are trying to be Mary Karr; on 'Friends' you have actors who want to be on 'Days of Our Lives.' The dreamscape dimension of 'Friends' lies in the way schedules are freed up for fun and shenanigans and talking and rehashing, always. 'In the back of our minds we know it’s unrealistic,' Maggie Parham, a 15-year-old who lives on the Upper West Side, told me. The characters 'have nice apartments and lots of free time but there is something about that perfect lifestyle that is fun to watch,' she said, adding, 'They all work, but they seem to be able to get out of work easily.'... [A 17-year-old girl said] 'All they do is hang out in a coffee shop or a really nice apartment... It’s the ideal situation.'"

From "‘Friends’ Has New BFFs: New York Teenagers" (NYT). That's from 2015, but I'm reading it today because it's linked in a new article in the Times, "Netflix Will Keep ‘Friends’ Through Next Year in a $100 Million Agreement," which notes that "the show has found an especially receptive audience on Netflix, where it became available in 2015."

And here's a New York Magazine article rom 2016, “Is ‘Friends’ Still the Most Popular Show on TV?”

The world of Friends is ­notable, to modern eyes, for what it encompasses about being young and single and carefree in the city but also for what it doesn’t encompass: social media, smartphones, student debt, the sexual politics of Tinder, moving back in with your parents as a ­matter of course, and a national mood that vacillates between anxiety and defeatism...  Which is why you might expect that Friends, like similar cultural relics of that era, would be safely preserved in the cryogenic chamber of our collective nostalgia. And yet, astonishingly, the show is arguably as popular as it ever was — and it is popular with a cohort of young people who are only now discovering it....

I myself am just watching the show for the first time, going at a rate of about an episode a day, and just getting to the end of Season 3.

"An ethical way to continue teaching Wallace, Hayes-Brady suggested, would be to rigorously study the latent misogyny in his work, for what it can tell us about 'the texture of the world Wallace lived in.'"

"She spent the last stretch of her speech demonstrating exactly how that might be done, rigging a blacklight to an excerpt from Brief Interviews [with Hideous Men] and forensically analyzing the stains — say, the double-silencing of its female protagonist, whose rape is described solely by a man, to another female character who is never heard in the text. You could also, Hayes-Brady suggested, defuse and enhance Wallace’s work by studying him in tandem with thematically similar works by writers he influenced, like Porochista Khakpour and Zadie Smith. I thought these concepts were compelling, and mostly persuasive, but then I would think that, as would everyone else in the room. Hayes-Brady’s talk gave us exactly what we wanted; perhaps what many of us came to Normal to find: a cogent and nuanced permission structure within which to a) continue reading Wallace (none of us were ever going to stop doing this, anyway) and b) justify our continued reading to others — others who, like anyone with a political conviction in 2018, are fundamentally unpersuadable, and who either way wouldn’t take well to being accused of neoliberalist sympathies."

From "Academics Explain David Foster Wallace to Me/A report from the 5th-annual David Foster Wallace Conference, where the author’s most devoted readers are wondering how to approach him in 2018" by Daniel Kolitz. Explaining what's so bad about DFW the man, Kolitz writes:

Wallace taught at ISU for nearly a decade; he wrote almost all his major works there, including the 1996 behemoth Infinite Jest. He also liked to sleep with his students, was abusive to his girlfriend at the time, the writer Mary Karr (whom he’d tried to push from a moving car not long before moving to Illinois in the summer of 1993, and also once hurled a coffee table at), committed statutory rape while away on book tour (or at least told a friend he did), and wrote to his friend Jonathan Franzen to say that he sometimes thought he was “put on earth to put his penis in as many vaginas as possible.”

The essay title "Academics Explain David Foster Wallace to Me" is a play on the famous essay by Deirdre Coyle, "Men Recommend David Foster Wallace to Me."

That reminds me of an obligation that's been hanging over my head all year. Remember, back in January, I wrote:

Will The Reckoning be the end of high heels?

Bonnie Wertheim wonders (in the NYT).

The whole beginning of this piece is about a lady in Palo Alto who objected to the emoji her phone suggested when she typed "shoe":

“It was the first time I noticed and stopped in my virtual tracks and stared at the stiletto heel that auto-populated,” [Florie] Hutchinson said. “It was the emoji that broke the camel’s back.”

I didn't know the word "auto-populate" or that there was something called the Unicode Consortium’s emoji subcommittee that you could write to about your objections to emojis. The Palo Alto woman recommended "a ballet flat, a shoe that reads as female but not seductive or sexualized." She was especially concerned about children seeing the stiletto shoe:

“My daughters are already being confronted by these gender-stereotypical norms, totally subconsciously,” Ms. Hutchinson said, “while all of us are having this very vocal conversation about gender biases.”

Anyway, let's scroll past the history of high heels — men wore them too* — and look at the end. Does it say that The Reckoning will cause high heels to become unwearable? They've always been hard to wear, because they are uncomfortable and hobbling, but they may become impossible to wear because they say something that — like sexy remarks in the workplace — you won't want to say anymore.

But that's not where the NYT article goes:

Last year, in The New Yorker, the writer Mary Karr called for the uninvention of high heels. It seems more likely that they will be reinvented. Two companies led by women have developed ergonomic high heels whose insoles are designed to promote stability and even weight distribution, and prevent heel-related hospital visits....

I clicked through both to the Mary Karr article and the supposedly "ergonomic" high heels. I didn't see any reason to believe "ergonomic" high heels are anything but somewhat less bad high heels, so let me try to end this with a bit from Mary Karr's piece:

Oh, womenfolk, as we once burned our bras could we not torch the footwear crucifying us?... Our feet and spines will unknot, and high heels will fade from consciousness along with foot-binding and rib removal to shrink your waist. The species may stop reproducing, but who the hell cares.

No question mark. Who the hell cares.

By the way, "The species may stop reproducing" makes me notice that no one says "Fuck-me shoes" anymore, or so it seems to me, but "Fuck-me shoes" has its own Wikipedia page. Excerpt:

Prominent feminist Germaine Greer brought what had been an "obscure" term to more mainstream notoriety when she used it in 1995. Greer used the term in referring to British journalist Suzanne Moore's alleged "hair bird's-nested all over the place, fuck-me shoes and three fat inches of cleavage." Greer made the remark in response to a column Moore had written about Greer in The Guardian, where Moore had mistakenly repeated an incorrect rumor that Greer had a hysterectomy as a voluntary decision to have herself sterilized....

Tripping into that female-on-female aggression makes me assume that the weapon, the stiletto,** will be kept as an option for a long time to come.

___________________________

* Would Prince be alive today if he hadn't worn high heels?

** The arm that is the foot.

"I’ve also never Googled myself. It wouldn’t occur to me to do so. It’s the same reason I don’t watch pornography."

"It’s not that I occupy some moral high ground. I just think: Down that road lies madness."

Says the memoirist Mary Karr, who also says "Narcissism is the bacterium infecting all bad writing."

It was almost Old Testament God day on the blog, but doughnuts edged Him out.

It's strange the way the blog plays out sometimes. When the first 2 posts by chance have a common element, you think a theme is striking. Old Testament God appeared in Post #1 today, and then, damned if the Old Testament didn't rear its head in Post #2. But a tiny frog rode into town on a beetle, and things were never the same. Next thing you know, Scott Walker was walkin' here, and we were ass-deep in doughnuts. And so doughnuts it was. I spent my afternoon pulling doughnuts out of the hot fat that is my Kindle collection. So here's the Krispy Kreme of my Kindle:

David Foster Wallace, "Up, Simba" (an essay about following the 2000 John McCain campaign, in "Consider the Lobster"):

About two-thirds of the way down the aisle is a little area that has the bus’s refrigerator and the liquor cabinets... and the bathroom.... There’s also a little counter area piled with Krispy Kreme doughnut boxes, and a sink whose water nobody ever uses.... Krispy Kremes are sort of the Deep South equivalent of Dunkin’ Donuts, ubiquitous and cheap and great in a sort of what-am-I-doing-eating-dessert-for-breakfast way, and are a cornerstone of what Jim C. calls the Campaign Diet.

Hunter S. Thompson, "The 'Hashbury' Is the Capital of the Hippies" (an essay in "The Great Shark Hunt"):

A 22-year-old student was recently sentenced to two years in prison for telling an undercover narcotics agent where to buy some marijuana. “Love” is the password in the Haight-Ashbury, but paranoia is the style. Nobody wants to go to jail.

At the same time, marijuana is everywhere. People smoke it on the sidewalks, in doughnut shops, sitting in parked cars or lounging on the grass in Golden Gate Park. Nearly everyone on the streets between 20 and 30 is a “head,” a user, either of marijuana, LSD, or both. To refuse a proffered “joint” is to risk being labeled a “nark”—narcotics agent— a threat and a menace to almost everybody. With a few loud exceptions, it is only the younger hippies who see themselves as a new breed. “A completely new thing in this world, man.” The ex-beatniks among them, many of whom are now making money off the new scene, incline to the view that hippies are, in fact, second-generation beatniks and that everything genuine in the Haight-Ashbury is about to be swallowed— like North Beach and the Village— in a wave of publicity and commercialism.

Mary Karr, "The Liars' Club: A Memoir":

The next day right after dawn, I pulled down my BB gun from the top bookshelf and went on a rampage that prefigured what Charles Whitman — the guy who shot and killed thirteen people from the tower at the University of Texas — would do a few years later. I stuck a can of hot tamales with a can opener in a paper bag and fixed myself a jelly jar of tea. While all the other kids were still sitting around in their pajamas eating their doughnuts with powdered sugar and watching cartoons, I was sneaking across the blackberry field behind our house . There was a lone chinaberry tree at the field’s center, and I shinnied up it, then pulled my BB gun after me to wait for the Carter kids. They’d planned to berrypick that morning so their mama could make a cobbler. I’d overheard talk about it.

Mary Roach, "Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal":

To experience taste, the molecules of the tastant— the thing one is tasting— need to dissolve in liquid. Liquid flows into the microscopic canyons of the tongue’s papillae, coming into contact with the “buds” of taste receptor cells that cover them. That’s one reason to be grateful for saliva. Additionally, it explains the appeal of dunking one’s doughnuts.

 J. Maarten Troost, "Headhunters on My Doorstep: A True Treasure Island Ghost Story":

I had always imagined your typical twelve-step meeting as occurring in some grim, darkened chamber full of cigarette smoke, bad coffee, and doughnuts, filled with fat, spiteful old men telling you to take the cotton out of your ears and stuff it into your mouth and listen for a change, why don’tcha, but these days, you’re more likely to find a meeting in a smoke-free hall serving herbal tea, filled with people discussing Bikram Yoga and their latest marathon time. This made sense to me, of course. Try as we might, the word moderation leaves many of us scratching our heads. Why run one mile when you can run ten? Why do half an hour of sun salutations when you can do ninety minutes of pretzel-like contortions in a 105 degree sauna? More is better. Always.

Mark Twain, "At the Appetite Cure":

"My system disguised—covert starvation.  Grape-cure, bath-cure, mud-cure—it is all the same. The grape and the bath and the mud make a show and do a trifle of the work— the real work is done by the surreptitious starvation. The patient accustomed to four meals and late hours—at both ends of the day—now consider what he has to do at a health resort. He gets up at 6 in the morning. Eats one egg. Tramps up and down a promenade two hours with the other fools. Eats a butterfly. Slowly drinks a glass of filtered sewage that smells like a buzzard's breath. Promenades another two hours, but alone; if you speak to him he says anxiously, "My water!—I am walking off my water!—please don't interrupt," and goes stumping along again. Eats a candied roseleaf. Lies at rest in the silence and solitude of his room for hours; mustn't read, mustn't smoke. The doctor comes and feels of his heart, now, and his pulse, and thumps his breast and his back and his stomach, and listens for results through a penny flageolet; then orders the man's bath—half a degree, Reaumur, cooler than yesterday. After the bath another egg. A glass of sewage at three or four in the afternoon, and promenade solemnly with the other freaks. Dinner at 6—half a doughnut and a cup of tea. Walk again. Half-past 8, supper—more butterfly; at 9, to bed. Six weeks of this regime—think of it. It starves a man out and puts him in splendid condition. It would have the same effect in London, New York, Jericho—anywhere."

Kurt Vonnegut, "Slaughterhouse Five":

“Go take a flying fuck at a rolling doughnut,” murmured Paul Lazzaro in his azure nest. “Go take a flying fuck at the moon.”

Lena Dunham, "Not That Kind of Girl":

Everything took on a hazy romance: having a pimple, eating a doughnut, being cold. Nothing was a tragedy, and everything was a joke. I had waited a long time to be a woman, a long time to venture away from my parents, and now I had sex, once with two guys in a week, and bragged about it like a divorcée who was getting back in the game.

Thomas Sowell, "The Thomas Sowell Reader":

At the heart of the affirmative action approach is the notion that statistical disparities show discrimination. No dogma has taken a deeper hold with less evidence—or in the face of more massive evidence to the contrary.

A recent story in the Wall Street Journal revealed that more than four-fifths of all the doughnut shops in California are owned by Cambodians. That is about the same proportion as blacks among basketball stars. Clearly, neither of these disparities is due to discrimination against whites.

Robert M. Gates,  "Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War":

When I walked in and saw coffee and doughnuts, I thought I would get along just fine with these folks. The traffic coming in from Midway Airport was awful, and Hillary Clinton was late. She had dispensed with a police escort complete with lights and sirens, clearly having an elected official’s sensitivity to ticking off everyone on the road. I did not have that sensitivity....

Andy Warhol, "The Andy Warhol Diaries":

I asked Reese how he started in crystals and he said that when he was little, “Mr. Morning” came to see him. When he was a baby. He saw “Mr. Morning,” but nobody else did. And then in the army he got interested in electricity and the body and all this stuff. Reese was talking about his trip where he went around sticking crystals all over the pyramids and the Wailing Wall. And he eats things like coffee and doughnuts. But he cures the coffee by passing the crystal over it ten times.... Reese is Episcopalian, so I feel better with him than with the Jewish crystal people, somehow, because knowing he believes in Christ I don’t have to worry that crystals might be somehow against Christ.

Tom Wolfe, "Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers":

Sixty strong, sixty loud, sixty wild, they come swinging into the great plush gold-and-marble lobby of the San Francisco City Hall with their hot dogs, tacos, Whammies, Frostees, Fudgsicles, french fries, Eskimo Pies, Awful-Awfuls, Sugar-Daddies, Sugar-Mommies, Sugar-Babies, chocolate-covered frozen bananas, malted milks, Yoo-Hoos, berry pies, bubble gums, cotton candy, Space Food sticks, Frescas, Baskin-Robbins boysenberry-cheesecake ice-cream cones, Milky Ways, M&Ms, Tootsie Pops, Slurpees, Drumsticks, jelly doughnuts, taffy apples, buttered Karamel Korn, root-beer floats, Hi-C punches, large Cokes, 7UPs, 3 Musketeer bars, frozen Kool-Aids—with the Dashiki Chief in the vanguard....

The young guy from the Mayor’s office retreats... Much consternation and concern in the lobby of City Hall... the hurricane could get worse. The little devils could start screaming, wailing, ululating, belching, moaning, giggling, making spook-show sounds... filling the very air with a hurricane of malted milk, an orange blizzard of crushed ice from the Slurpees, with acid red horrors like the red from the taffy apples and the jelly from the jelly doughnuts, with globs of ice cream in purple sheets of root beer, with plastic straws and huge bilious waxed cups and punch cans and sprinkles of Winkles, with mustard from off the hot dogs and little lettuce shreds from off the tacos, with things that splash and things that plop and things that ooze and stick, that filthy sugar moss from off the cotton candy, and the Karamel Korn and the butterscotch daddy figures from off the Sugar-Daddies and the butterscotch babies from off the Sugar-Babies, sugar, water, goo, fried fat, droplets, driplets, shreds, bits, lumps, gums, gobs, smears, from the most itchy molecular Winkle to the most warm moist emetic mass of 3 Musketeers bar and every gradation of solubility and liquidity known to syrup—filling the air, choking it, getting trapped gurgling and spluttering in every glottis— 

And it was here that Bill Jackson proved himself to be a brilliant man and a true artist, a rare artist, of the mau-mau....

 Barack Obama, "Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance":

“We’re interested in the best possible outcome for the residents,” Ms. Broadnax shouted over her shoulder. We followed her into a large room where several gloomy officials were already seated around a conference table. Ms. Broadnax remarked on how cute the children were and offered everyone coffee and doughnuts.

“We don’t need doughnuts,” Linda said. “We need answers.”

John Steinbeck, "The Red Pony":

“There’s two doughnuts in the kitchen for you,” she said. Jody slid to the kitchen, and returned with half of one of the doughnuts already eaten and his mouth full. His mother asked him what he had learned in school that day, but she didn’t listen to his doughnut-muffled answer. She interrupted, “Jody, tonight see you fill the wood-box clear full. Last night you crossed the sticks and it wasn’t only about half full. Lay the sticks flat tonight. And Jody , some of the hens are hiding eggs, or else the dogs are eating them. Look about in the grass and see if you can find any nests.”

James Thurber, "Writings & Drawings":

I got back to New York in early June, 1926, with ten dollars, borrowed enough to hold on until July in a rented room on West 13th Street, and began sending short pieces to the New Yorker, eating in doughnut shops, occasionally pilfering canapés at cocktail parties (anchovies, in case you don’t know, are not good for breakfast). My pieces came back so fast I began to believe the New Yorker must have a rejection machine.

Howard Zinn, "A People's History of the United States":

At Boston University, a thousand students kept vigil for five days and nights in the chapel, supporting an eighteen-year-old deserter, Ray Kroll....

On a Sunday morning, federal agents showed up at the Boston University chapel, stomped their way through aisles clogged with students, smashed down doors, and took Kroll away. From the stockade, he wrote back to friends: “I ain’t gonna kill; it’s against my will. . . .” A friend he had made at the chapel brought him books, and he noted a saying he had found in one of them: “What we have done will not be lost to all Eternity. Everything ripens at its time and becomes fruit at its hour.”

The GI antiwar movement became more organized. Near Fort Jackson, South Carolina, the first “GI coffeehouse” was set up, a place where soldiers could get coffee and doughnuts, find antiwar literature, and talk freely with others....

David Sedaris, "Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls":

I find a half-empty box of doughnuts and imagine it flung from the dimpled hand of a dieter, wailing, “Get this away from me.” Perhaps the jumbo beer cans and empty bottles of booze are tossed for a similar reason. It’s about denial, I tell myself, or, no, it’s about anger, for isn’t every piece of litter a way of saying “fuck you”?

Cass Sunstein, "Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness":

Self-control issues are most likely to arise when choices and their consequences are separated in time. At one extreme are what might be called investment goods, such as exercise, flossing, and dieting....

At the other extreme are what might be called sinful goods: smoking, alcohol, and jumbo chocolate doughnuts are in this category. We get the pleasure now and suffer the consequences later. Again we can use the New Year’s resolution test: how many people vow to smoke more cigarettes, drink more martinis, or have more chocolate donuts in the morning next year? Both investment goods and sinful goods are prime candidates for nudges. Most (nonanorexic) people do not need any special encouragement to eat another brownie, but they could use some help exercising more.

And then there's the choice of how to spell doughnut/donut. Isn’t the failure to pick one spelling and stick to it a way of saying "fuck you"? That question is me nudging Cass Sunstein. We'll see if he does better in the future.

And that's all the Krispy Kindle Kremes for now, so — as they say in the azure nest — Go take a flying fuck at a rolling doughnut.

"Mother — crazy as she was — had an exquisite sensibility. She read nonstop."

"Loads of history, Russian and Chinese particularly, and art history. There was nothing else to do in that suckhole of a town."

You go outside, you run around, people throw dirt balls at you, you get your ass beat. But reading is socially accepted disassociation. You flip a switch and you’re not there anymore. It’s better than heroin. More effective and cheaper and legal.

People who didn’t live pre-Internet can’t grasp how devoid of ideas life in my hometown was. The only bookstores sold Bibles the size of coffee tables and dashboard Virgin Marys that glowed in the dark. I stopped in the middle of the SAT to memorize a poem, because I thought, This is a great work of art and I’ll never see it again.

That's a random excerpt from an interview with Mary Karr in The Paris Review, which I found via Andrew Sullivan who excerpts a completely different section about why and how Karr prays.