"Newsom was profoundly dyslexic.... By the third grade, he had worked himself into a panic over his trouble with reading and math."

"'I’m faking being sick, because I hate school and I’m stressed, and they’re always having to pick me up early,' he recalled.... He was a scrawny, shy boy with a bowl cut. 'He always called himself stupid,' his sister said, and other kids apparently agreed. 'The guys kept saying, "If you’re looking for your brother, he’s hanging from his underwear on a lamppost."'  In middle school, Newsom took steps to reinvent himself as an athlete. 'Rocky' had recently come out, and he emulated the main character—running up and down hills, drinking raw eggs, learning to box. His sister remembers falling asleep night after night listening to the sound of him relentlessly practicing basketball: shooting, shooting, shooting, shooting. Learning to read was a similar feat."

Writes Nathan Heller, in "Gavin Newsom Is Playing the Long Game/California’s governor has been touted as the Democrats’ best shot in 2028. But first he’ll need to convince voters that he’s not just a slick establishment politician" (The New Yorker).

"When I asked Newsom about his dyslexia in his office one afternoon, he showed me an overstuffed folder of printed material, his reading from the previous evening. Almost every word of text was underlined. He flipped through a galley proof of his memoir, in which the underlining covered whole pages—the only way, he said, that he could read any book, even his own. He produced another folder filled with lined paper and covered with his handwriting: he copies all the text he underlines onto writing pads...."

"The decision to publish the Steele dossier originated with the reporter Ben Smith, then the editor-in-chief of BuzzFeed News...

"In Smith’s telling, the laws of Web traffic, shaped by social media and their ability to disseminate material at exponential, 'viral' rates, unseated old power structures. An old news outlet held its authority by retaining a fixed audience and standing on its record of success. A new one, such as BuzzFeed News, won largely by being linkable and first. When it came to the Steele dossier, which a number of news organizations had in hand, Smith’s concern that someone else would beat him to the link made him feel physically unwell. His site wanted the traffic. And, when the CNN anchor Jake Tapper summarized the contents on air one day, Smith knew that viewers would be Googling for the goods. He and his colleagues, snatching the keyboard back and forth, composed a brief introduction that noted the dossier’s 'specific, unverified, and potentially unverifiable allegations' then posted the document itself, in PDF form. In his book, Smith recalls meditating on 'the viral power of an object... something that readers would fixate on and pass hand to hand.'"

Writes Nathan Heller in "BuzzFeed, Gawker, and the Casualties of the Traffic Wars/Ben Smith’s new book shows how the race for clicks spawned—then strangled—the new media" (The New Yorker).

So Smith had a temporary grip on clickbait, but can the man write a book? I see the hardcover, released last Tuesday, is #2,216 at Amazon. But who'd buy that in hardcover? Anyone interested in Smith's musings on virality would go with the Kindle, don't you think? I know I would, because I'd want to be able to cut and paste, using my own skill for presenting something you'd find delectable. But the Kindle version is at #5,107. I'm not interested in reading Smith's insights. Who wants the deeper thoughts of someone who figured out how to ride the moment for thrills? 

So I'm sticking with The New Yorker, which operates in the middle ground between clickbait and books. Nathan Heller pulls some quotation from the book:

Last Wednesday, we were talking about the use of the words "deadbeat" and "lambent" in a New Yorker piece about Norm Macdonald.

The author of the piece, Nathan Heller, emailed me and defended his language usage. I've added that to the post — with his permission — so go back here if you'd like to read it.

"Now, whether Norm Macdonald's comic persona was that of a loafer; a sponger and a loafer; a sponger, a loafer, and a worthless idler; or simply a man down on his luck is a matter I'll gladly turn over to the authorities...."

"No one was better at stringing out a joke between its setup and its punch line. The purest instance of the skill might be his famous 'moth' routine..."

"... in which he took a lame stock joke ('A moth goes into a podiatrist’s office . . .') and, by delivery alone, built a three-minute meta-gag on top of it, working his audience all the way. We weren’t far into our interview when I realized I had made the rookie mistake of taking Macdonald’s deadbeat persona as his real world view. It was and wasn’t. Early on, he charmed me by noting, in an offhand way, that he’d needed glasses all his life but, after losing his first childhood pairs, stopped bothering. ('I guess if I put on glasses now everything would be high-def,' he said—the description of normal human vision as a decadent TV feature being the Macdonaldian turn.) But I was caught off guard by how sensitive he was to creative work generally: he was a serious and studious reader, especially of the Russians, keen to get into the weeds with me about Tolstoy....."

From "Norm Macdonald Was the Real Thing/His persona was droll, but he cared seriously, even ebulliently, about what comedy could be" by Nathan Heller (The New Yorker). 

Here's the moth thing (and notice the Tolstoy influence):

FROM THE COMMENTS: Sean Gleeson said:

The bit about "Macdonald’s deadbeat persona" feels like an error to me. Did he really pose as a man who refused to pay his debts? Does "deadbeat" have some other meaning? Did he mean to write "deadpan"?

He couldn't write "deadpan," because he'd just used the word 3 sentences ago — "his zonked-seeming deadpan," in a paragraph I didn't quote. I'm dismayed when The New Yorker gets any language usage wrong. I subscribe in part because for half a century I have looked to it as an exemplar of high-quality writing. 

And there's this aspirational stretching toward words that the reader might not even know yet. For example, the very next sentence after what I quoted is: "And he gave off lambent joy about his art." That's asking us to trust them and to get better at language and not to call bullshit. There's a part of me that wants to admire the writer's way with words and a part of me that's about to blurt — to paraphrase George W. Bush — What the fuck are you talking about, lambent?

If The New Yorker is going to make gaffes like "deadbeat," I'm going to have a lot more trouble going along with things like "lambent."

"Lambent," from the Latin word for "licking," evokes a licking flame. It's a word you can use instead of "radiant"... if you want to seem fancy or you'd like to make less learned readers feel as though they don't belong here. 

In context, I'd say Heller wanted to sound effusive praising Macdonald — to give him a tongue bath. But if you want me to give a sympathetic reading to your pretentious usages, don't make mistakes like "deadbeat."

ADDED: Nathan Heller responded in email that he's given me permission to publish:

Dear Ann, 

I am an intermittent reader and a big admirer of Althouse, and am always thrilled to see something I've written mentioned there. I'm also a huge fan of pedantic posts about language usage, so I read your criticism of the way "deadbeat" and "lambent" were used in a recent New Yorker remembrance of Norm Macdonald with an enjoyment verging on glee. Imagine my surprise to find that I was the author of the offending text. I was about to write myself a sternly worded note; then I looked in the dictionary. 

Merriam-Webster's first definition of a deadbeat is a "loafer." This is also, in slightly different terms, the first definition in the New Oxford American and the second definition in the American Heritage. The Oxford English Dictionary—which has the disadvantage of being British but the advantage of being pretty comprehensive—defines "deadbeat" as "a worthless idler who sponges on his friends; a sponger, loafer; also (originally Australian), a man down on his luck." 

Now, whether Norm Macdonald's comic persona was that of a loafer; a sponger and a loafer; a sponger, a loafer, and a worthless idler; or simply a man down on his luck is a matter I'll gladly turn over to the authorities. (On the sponging charge, I might note that Macdonald has insisted, at the mic, that he goes to parties solely for the cocktail sandwiches.) What seemed clear to me when I wrote that sentence, however, is the same thing clear to me now, which is that "deadbeat" is an exact term for the family of qualities in question. It is true that many people know, or think they know, the meaning of "deadbeat" from the phrase "deadbeat dad." But the dictionaries are clear that debt-related concerns are a narrow sub-case, not the meaning of the word. The O.E.D. gives "deadbeat dad" an entry of its own. 

After identifying the "gaffe" of "deadbeat," you go after my use of "lambent." You fret that this term reflects "aspirational stretching toward words that the reader might not even know yet." (To say that in a less high-flown way: the reader might—of all things—have to look it up.) "Lambent," as you note, comes from the Latin for licking, but dictionaries make clear that it's most often associated with certain qualities of light. Here's Merriam-Webster: "1) playing lightly on or over a surface: flickering; 2) softly bright or radiant; 3) marked by lightness or brilliance especially of expression." Here's the O.E.D.: "1a) Of a flame (fire, light): Playing lightly upon or gliding over a surface without burning it, like a ‘tongue of fire’; shining with a soft clear light and without fierce heat. . . . 1c) By extension, of eyes, the sky, etc.: Emitting, or suffused with, a soft clear light; softly radiant. . . . 1d) Figurative: Of wit, style, etc.: Playing lightly and brilliantly over its subjects; gracefully sportive. . . ." 

I used it in the phrase "lambent joy." Joy is a bright thing normally, but I was trying to describe the joy of Norm Macdonald. As anyone with any exposure to Norm Macdonald knows, his joy was not of the blazing, luminous variety. (He was, in fact, a comic with a small repertoire of suicide-related jokes.) If you had to describe the quality of joy in Norm Macdonald, you might call it dim but pure, playful, gentle, flickering in and out of view. I didn't call it "lambent" because the word seemed passable. I called it "lambent" because the word is precise. 

I, too, am dismayed when The New Yorker gets any language usage wrong. Fortunately, there are a lot of us—writers, editors, and copy editors—living our days on high alert to make sure it happens as rarely as possible. In any case, thanks very much for reading, and, as ever, for your post. 

Nathan 

-- 

NATHAN HELLER 

Staff writer 

The New Yorker Magazine

"The Bullshit-Job Boom/For more and more people, work appears to serve no purpose. Is there any good left in the grind?"

By Nathan Heller at The New Yorker.

In “Bullshit Jobs” (Simon & Schuster), David Graeber, an anthropologist now at the London School of Economics, seeks a diagnosis and epidemiology for what he calls the “useless jobs that no one wants to talk about.” He thinks these jobs are everywhere. By all the evidence, they are. His book, which has the virtue of being both clever and charismatic, follows a much circulated essay that he wrote, in 2013, to call out such occupations. Some, he thought, were structurally extraneous: if all lobbyists or corporate lawyers on the planet disappeared en masse, not even their clients would miss them. Others were pointless in opaque ways....

Corporate lawyers? That doesn't sound right! How is a corporation supposed to stay on the right side of all the law? It would make more sense to say the law is bullshit. But I can see how a corporate lawyer might feel that the tasks he's stuck doing are bullshit, that his is not a spiritually rewarding way of life, but Heller wrote that the clients wouldn't miss their lawyers if they all suddenly "disappeared." Wishing mass death on lawyers is an old tradition, replete with Shakespeare quote. And it's common to think this murderous ideation is cute.

By the way, the oft-trotted-out Shakespeare quote is almost always misunderstood:

Shakespeare's exact line ''The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers,'' was stated by Dick the Butcher in ''Henry VI,'' Part II, act IV, Scene II, Line 73. Dick the Butcher was a follower of the rebel Jack Cade, who thought that if he disturbed law and order, he could become king. Shakespeare meant it as a compliment to attorneys and judges who instill justice in society.

Shakespeare quotes are often presented as if Shakespeare were not a playwright and the ideas expressed were Shakespeare's own opinions. The lines are spoken by characters, who can be evil, stupid, deceitful, or badly mistaken.

Back to Heller:

I do digital consultancy for global pharmaceutical companies’ marketing departments. I often work with global PR agencies on this, and write reports with titles like How to Improve Engagement Among Key Digital Health Care Stakeholders. It is pure, unadulterated bullshit, and serves no purpose beyond ticking boxes for marketing departments. . . . I was recently able to charge around twelve thousand pounds to write a two-page report for a pharmaceutical client to present during a global strategy meeting. The report wasn’t used in the end because they didn’t manage to get to that agenda point.

Hmm. That reminds me. One of the reasons I chose to retire is that the bullshit work spiraled upward over the years. When I started in the 80s, there was hardly any committee work and some of the required paperwork — e.g., progress reports on pre-tenure professors — wasn't even done at all. Toward the end, there were so many large committees taking themselves very seriously, producing reports and reporting orally on reports at faculty meetings that dragged on for hours. There was always another "self-study" report to be laboriously cranked out, and you couldn't even say: Come on, we know this is bullshit... can't we just admit it and get it done as efficiently as possible? No, we had to perform in the Theater of Utmost Seriosity in the production of mindnumbing paperwork. If it had been a committee of 3 or 4 tenured professors, we'd have laughed about the stupidity and done it as fast as possible. But in later years, it would be a much larger, much more inclusive group, and you'd seem like an obstructionist if you rankled at bureaucracy and insane if you cracked a joke.

A bullshit job is not what Graeber calls “a shit job.”... [B]ullshit work [is] “a form of paid employment that is so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence even though, as part of the conditions of employment, the employee feels obliged to pretend that this is not the case.”

Ugh! The pretense is part of the work.

Hollywood is notoriously mired in development, an endeavor that Graeber believes to be almost pure bullshit. One developer he meets, Apollonia, had been kept busy working over reality shows with titles such as “Transsexual Housewives” and “Too Fat to Fuck.”...

To be fair, those shows do sound interesting. But what is bullshit is working on them without believing that there's a chance they will become real shows.

In a famous essay drafted in 1928, John Maynard Keynes projected that, a century on, technological efficiency in Europe and in the U.S. would be so great, and prosperity so assured, that people would be at pains to avoid going crazy from leisure and boredom. Maybe, Keynes wrote, they could plan to retain three hours of work a day, just to feel useful.

Here we are nearly in 2028, and technology has indeed produced dazzling efficiencies. As Keynes anticipated, too, the number of jobs in agriculture, manufacturing, and mining has plummeted. Yet employment in other fields—management, service—grows, and people still spend their lives working to finance basic stuff.... “It’s as if businesses were endlessly trimming the fat on the shop floor and using the resulting savings to acquire even more unnecessary workers in the office upstairs,” [Graeber] writes.

Maybe the reason we don't have single-payer health care is that we need to preserve the bullshit jobs!

“Everybody who supports single-payer health care says, ‘Look at all this money we would be saving from insurance and paperwork,’ ” [President Obama once said]. “That represents one million, two million, three million jobs.” Graeber describes this comment as a “smoking gun” of bullshittization. “Here is the most powerful man in the world at the time publicly reflecting on his signature legislative achievement—and he is insisting that a major factor in the form that legislature took is the preservation of bullshit jobs,” he writes. Politicians are so fixated on job creation, he thinks, that no one wonders which jobs are created, and whether they are necessary. Unnecessary employment may be one of the great legacies of recent public-private collaboration.

Ugh! But look where this line of thinking goes, for Heller at least:

Under a different social model, a young woman unable to find a spot in the workforce might have collected a government check. Now, instead, she can acquire a bullshit job at, say, a health-care company, spend half of every morning compiling useless reports, and use the rest of her desk time to play computer solitaire or shop for camping equipment online.... 

"In Estonia, we don’t have Big Brother; we have Little Brother. You can tell him what to do and maybe also beat him up."

Says "a local" to Nathan Heller, author of "Estonia, the Digital Republic/Its government is virtual, borderless, blockchained, and secure. Has this tiny post-Soviet nation found the way of the future?" by Nathan Heller (in The New Yorker).

Also:

Today, in Estonia, the weekly e-residency application rate exceeds the birth rate. “We tried to make more babies, but it’s not that easy,” [Siim Sikkut, Estonia’s current C.I.O.] explained.

And:

Polling-place intimidation is a non-issue if people can vote—and then change their votes, up to the deadline—at home, online.

Vote and change your vote... That's an interesting innovation. We assume that early voters are locked in and therefore unaffected by late-breaking news.

Please read the whole article. I kept puzzling over whether this is the approach to life and government would spread all over the world and whether I should think it's very cool or how we ruin everything and can never get back out again.

In Estonia, we don’t have Big Brother; we have Little Brother....

If you want a picture of the future, imagine a fluffy slipper smooshing a human face — forever.

In "Is the Gig Economy Working?" The New Yorker digs up "The Greening of America."

I love seeing that crazy 1970 book pop up — click on my Charles Reich tag to see other posts about it — and here it is in a new article — by Nathan Heller — about how the gig economy is working:

In 1970, Charles A. Reich, a [Yale] law professor who’d experienced a countercultural conversion after hanging with young people out West, published “The Greening of America,” a cotton-candy cone that wound together wispy revelations from the sixties. Casting an eye across modern history, he traced a turn from a world view that he called Consciousness I (the outlook of local farmers, self-directed workers, and small-business people, reaching a crisis in the exploitations of the Gilded Age) to what he called Consciousness II (the outlook of a society of systems, hierarchies, corporations, and gray flannel suits). He thought that Consciousness II was giving way to Consciousness III, the outlook of a rising generation whose virtues included direct action, community power, and self-definition. “For most Americans, work is mindless, exhausting, boring, servile, and hateful, something to be endured while ‘life’ is confined to ‘time off,’ ” Reich wrote. “Consciousness III people simply do not imagine a career along the old vertical lines.”...

Exponents of the futuristic tech economy frequently adopt this fifty-year-old perspective. Like Reich, they eschew the hedgehog grind of the forty-hour week; they seek a freer way to work. This productivity-minded spirit of defiance holds appeal for many children of the Consciousness III generation: the so-called millennials....

Many dreamy young people... see unrealized opportunity wherever they go. Some, in their careers, end up as what might be called hedgers. These are programmers also known as d.j.s, sculptors who excel as corporate consultants; they are Instagram-backed fashion mavens, with a TV pilot on the middle burner. They are doing it for the money, and the love, and, like the overladen students they probably once were, because they are accustomed to a counterpoint of self. The hedged career is a kind of gigging career—custom-assembled, financially diffuse, defiant of organizational constraint—and its modishness is why part-time Lyft driving or weekend TaskRabbit-ing has found easy cultural acceptance. But hedging is a luxury, available to those who have too many appealing options in life. It gestures toward the awkward question of whom, in the long run, the revolution-minded spirit of the nineteen-sixties really let off the leash.

Read the whole thing. I'd click through just to gaze at the very nice illustration, by Janne Iiovonen.

ADDED: I highly recommend Roger Kimball's 1994 article (published in The New Criterion), "Charles Reich & America’s cultural revolution/A reconsideration of The Greening of America on its 25th anniversary." Excerpt:

"Are we all O.K. with this transfer of power? Have we lost faith in young people’s capacity — in your capacity — to exercise self-censure, through social norming..."

"... and also in your capacity to ignore or reject things that trouble you?... Is there really no room anymore for a child or young person to be a little bit obnoxious?”

Wrote Erika Christakis last fall, reacting to a Yale Intercultural Affairs Committee memo warning students about potentially offensive Halloween costumes. Christakis was an Associate Master of Silliman College— the word "master" has been changed since then — but her comments outraged some students. Protests ensued. And now the news comes that Christakis and her husband, Professor Nicholas Christakis, who'd been the master head of Silliman College, are stepping down from their position.

The NYT reports the news with the headline: "Yale Professor and Wife, Targets of Protests, Resign as College Heads." I'd like to protest the headline. It seems to me that it was the wife's trenchant speech that stirred up this controversy in the first place. The husband became involved in the controversy, and, it's true, the husband is the one whose tweet announcing the resignation appears in the NYT, but I think Ms. Christakis deserves better position than "professor's wife." She is the director of the  Human Nature Lab at Yale, and her statement was premised on her expertise in the psychological development of the young. The husband is a sociologist and physician. I admire them as a couple and would like to see them talked about as equals.

When I blogged about this controversy last fall, I noted the video of Yale students yelling at Mr. Christakis and saying:

“As your position as master, it is your job to create a place of comfort and home for the students that live in Silliman... You have not done that. By sending out that email, that goes against your position as master. Do you understand that?... Who the fuck hired you?”

This student told Mr. Christakis he should resign because his role as master is “not about creating an intellectual space” but about “creating a home.” At the time, I said:

To be fair, I'd like to know more about what representations Yale made to the students it lured into matriculating. Was a "safe space" promised?... A vibrant "intellectual space" sounds exciting to me, but is that what they were told they'd get if they came to Yale? Maybe some other schools offered a challenging intellectual environment and they passed on it, preferring a caring, nurturing setting. Were they deceived?

Yesterday on this blog, we were talking about Nathan Heller's excellent New Yorker article "Letter from Oberlin/The Big Uneasy/What’s roiling the liberal-arts campus?" The Yale disturbance appeared first on a list of incidences from the past year that showed liberal arts campuses were "roiling with activism that has seemed to shift the meaning of contemporary liberalism without changing its ideals." Heller writes:

Such reports flummoxed many people who had always thought of themselves as devout liberals. Wasn’t free self-expression the whole point of social progressivism? Wasn’t liberal academe a way for ideas, good and bad, to be subjected to enlightened reason? Generations of professors and students imagined the university to be a temple for productive challenge and perpetually questioned certainties. Now, some feared, schools were being reimagined as safe spaces for coddled youths and the self-defined, untested truths that they held dear. Disorientingly, too, none of the disputes followed normal ideological divides: both the activists and their opponents were multicultural, educated, and true of heart. At some point, it seemed, the American left on campus stopped being able to hear itself think.

I read that "true of heart" as sarcasm. Is "true of heart" an expression? I associate it with David Eggers, "A Heartbreaking Work Of Staggering Genius," which begins:

First of all:
I am tired.
I am true of heart!

And also:
You are tired.
You are true of heart!

"I’m thinking, Oh, God! I’m cast in one of my least favorite plays of all time, ‘The Crucible,’ by Arthur Miller!"

The laugh-out-loud line (for me) in "Letter from Oberlin/The Big Uneasy/What’s roiling the liberal-arts campus?" a great New Yorker article by Nathan Heller. The line is spoken by Roger Copeland, a professor of theater and dance who's been teaching at Oberlin since the 70s.

In the late fall of 2014, during rehearsals for a play he was coördinating, he spoke sharply to a student: a misfire not of language, he says, but of tone. The student ran out of the room. Copeland says that he wanted to smooth ruffled feathers and keep the production on track, so he agreed to meet with the student and his department chair. At the meeting, the student asked that he leave the room, and she and the department head spoke alone for about half an hour.

Later, the dean of arts and sciences asked to meet with him. He reported complaints that Copeland had created “a hostile and unsafe learning environment,” and that he had “verbally berated” a student—but said that it must be kept confidential which student or incidents were concerned. Then the dean asked Copeland to sign a document acknowledging that a complaint had been lodged against him.

“I’m thinking, Oh, God! I’m cast in one of my least favorite plays of all time, ‘The Crucible,’ by Arthur Miller!” he told me. He gave the dean a list of students he thought could confirm that he hadn’t “berated” anyone. He says the list was brushed aside: “They said, ‘What matters is that the student felt unsafe.’ ” Then he was told that, because gender could have been a factor, the issue was being investigated as a possible Title IX violation. That inquiry was later dropped; by then, Copeland had hired a lawyer. In September, 2015, the original inquiry was still going on, and Copeland said that the dean told him that if he wouldn’t meet without his lawyer he would be brought before the Professional Conduct Review Committee. Copeland and his lawyer welcomed that idea: the committee process would bring some daylight. They never heard back.

Much, much more in the article. Highly recommended. You should be able to read it without a subscription.

"Pie is an interloper trading on a false history and a tangle of confusion about its cultural role."

"Its past is unremarkable and un-American. As you may recall from your middle-school history books, many accoutrements of Western life first appeared in Egypt and then spread to the Romans via Greece. Prophylactics are a notable example. Pie is another one. The pies of the ancients, rather than being oozing desserts, were combinations of savory foods baked in a pot made of tough dough. (In our evolutionary tree of Western cooking, pies, tellingly, share a branch with the most hit-or-miss of all edible things, the casserole.) This crust-pot baking method spread through Europe and gained popularity through the Middle Ages, since the dough shell, called a bake-meat (later, just as appetizingly, a coffin), allowed meats to stew without losing moisture. It also helped seal off the meal and slow down spoilage. "For hundreds of years," Janet Clarkson points out in her jaunty account of pie development, Pie: A Global History, "it was the only form of baking container—meaning everything was pie." Pie culture grew with the advent of modern pastry dough during the 16th century, at which point cooks in more ambitious kitchens started to experiment with sweeter fillings. (Queen Elizabeth is said to have eaten some of the first fruit pies.) This is the true origin of our pie tradition. Early apple pies weren't American and sweet at all. They were unsugared, tough, and manufactured by the British."

The anti-pie rantings of  Nathan Heller.

Speaking of pie and tradition: "After I see a movie I like to go get a piece of pie and talk about it. It's sort of a little tradition I have."



"Do you like to get pie after you see a good movie?" "Yeah, I love to get pie after a movie."