"I was very impressed with myself to have the head of Apple calling to 'kiss my ass.'"

Writes Donald Trump, on Truth Social this morning:

I have always been a big fan of Tim Cook, and likewise, Steve Jobs, but if Steve was not taken from the Planet Earth so young, and ran the company instead of Tim, the company would have done well, but nowhere near as well as it has under Tim. For me it began with a phone call from Tim at the beginning of my First Term. He had a fairly large problem that only I, as President, could fix. Most people would have paid millions of dollars to a consultant, who I probably would not have known, but who would say that he knew me well. The fees would be paid but the job would not have gotten done. When I got the call I said, wow, it’s Tim Apple (Cook!) calling, how big is that? I was very impressed with myself to have the head of Apple calling to “kiss my ass.”

"The car project’s demise was a testament to the way Apple has struggled to develop new products in the years since Steve Jobs’s death in 2011."

"The effort had four different leaders and conducted multiple rounds of layoffs. But it festered and ultimately fizzled in large part because developing the software and algorithms for a car with autonomous driving features proved too difficult.... If it ever came to market, an Apple car was likely to cost at least $100,000 and still generate razor-thin profit compared with smartphones and earbuds. It would also arrive years after Tesla had dominated the market. The company held some discussions with Elon Musk about acquiring Tesla.... But ultimately, it decided that building its own car made more sense...."

From "Behind Apple’s Doomed Car Project: False Starts and Wrong Turns/Internal disagreements over the direction of the Apple car led the effort to sputter for years before it was canceled this week" (NYT).

"The circus as your grandparents or even their parents remember it, fell victim to changing times."

"Feld Entertainment, which owns the [Ringling Brothers] circus, discovered today’s audiences did not want to see animals performing. And today’s kids do not laugh at corny clown acts.... Now the plan is to up the game with human feats that dazzle, astonish, bewilder, while, at the same time, engaging audiences with interactive social media. At times, even during the show....The producers who are bringing the Ringling back to this stage is also the same group of producers who do Disney On Ice, Monster Jam, Sesame Street Live. So they kind of think that they’ve figured the audience out.... And it will not be our parent’s circus. It’ll very different, guys."

From "Ringling Brothers Eyes Comeback With Animal-Free Circus Show Transcript."

This sad transcript made me think of that famous Steve Jobs quote: 

Some people say, "Give the customers what they want." But that's not my approach. Our job is to figure out what they're going to want before they do. I think Henry Ford once said, "If I'd asked customers what they wanted, they would have told me, 'A faster horse!'" People don't know what they want until you show it to them. That's why I never rely on market research. Our task is to read things that are not yet on the page.

"On Twitter, the cloth has been fodder for jokes and even a parody account since Apple quietly put it on sale on Oct. 18."

"Later that week, when Tim Cook, Apple’s chief executive, posted a tweet promoting a new retail store in Turkey, Elon Musk, Tesla’s chief executive, needled him by replying, 'Come see the Apple Cloth' with a trademark logo. (Mr. Musk’s company is also not shy about testing the strength of its brand and the fealty of its customers. Tesla’s website offers a company-branded 'handblown' decanter for $150 and a $60 umbrella....)"

From "Apple’s Most Back-Ordered New Product Is Not What You Expect/It’s a $19 cloth" (NYT).

This is an example of the use of overcharging to buy publicity, like when a restaurant has a $1,000 hamburger on the menu.

But I'm also interested in the veneration of a scrap of cloth. I'm thinking Shroud of Turin and if I could just touch the hem of Steve Jobs's garment. 

"Steve Jobs would not be happy that his wife is wasting money he left her on a failing Radical Left Magazine that is run by a con man (Goldberg) and spews FAKE NEWS & HATE."

Tweeted Donald Trump, quoted in "Trump attacks the sixth-richest woman in the world for her ties to The Atlantic" (CNN).

I only read that because the headline was so odd — "the sixth-richest woman." Is that supposed to make him seem more sexist than calling her Steve Jobs's widow?

"'For men, the black turtleneck did it all. This garment was supposed to indicate the kind of freedom from sartorial convention demanded by deep thought...'"

"'... or pure creation (usually poetic)—with overtones, always carried by masculine black clothes,' fashion historian Anne Hollander wrote in her book Seeing Through Clothes. In spite of its long history, a backlash to the turtleneck followed [Elizabeth] Holmes’s explosive downfall. Will we think back to Ashton Kutcher as Steve Jobs when we think of the black turtleneck? Or will seeing Jennifer Lawrence scamming millions in the look forever taint it? As Vanessa Friedman wrote in the New York Times: 'In the same way that Gordon Gekko’s suspenders and Michael Milken’s toupee became symbols of their greed, Ms. Holmes’s black turtleneck is starting to seem less a brilliant frame than a false front; a carefully calculated costume that fooled everyone into assuming she was more brilliant than she was; a symbol of hubris rather than success.'"

From "Why the Black Turtleneck Was So Important to Elizabeth Holmes's Image/It has a long and symbolic history" (Esquire).

ADDED: Here's the most memorable opinion about turtlenecks:

"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.

"In passage after passage of 'Small Fry,' [Steve] Jobs is vicious to his daughter and those around her."

"Now, in the days before the book is released, [Lisa] Brennan-Jobs is fearful that it will be received as a tell-all exposé, and not the more nuanced portrait of a family she intended. She worries that the reaction will be about a famous man’s legacy rather than a young woman’s story — that she will be erased again, this time in her own memoir.... Ms. Brennan-Jobs describes her father’s frequent use of money to confuse or frighten her... When her mother found a beautiful house and asked Mr. Jobs to buy it for her and Lisa, he agreed it was nice — but bought it for himself and moved in with his wife, Laurene Powell Jobs.... Early copies of the memoir have circulated among family and friends. [Laurene] Powell Jobs, her children and Mr. Jobs’s sister, Mona Simpson, gave this statement to The Times: 'Lisa is part of our family, so it was with sadness that we read her book, which differs dramatically from our memories of those times. The portrayal of Steve is not the husband and father we knew. Steve loved Lisa, and he regretted that he was not the father he should have been during her early childhood. It was a great comfort to Steve to have Lisa home with all of us during the last days of his life, and we are all grateful for the years we spent together as a family.'"

From "In ‘Small Fry,’ Steve Jobs Comes Across as a Jerk. His Daughter Forgives Him. Should We?/Lisa Brennan-Jobs has written a memoir about her famous father. The details are damning, but she doesn’t want them to be" (NYT).

A fact that's easy to get confused about: Did Lisa inherit nothing from her father? Apparently, he threatened that, but (according to the NYT), Lisa got "millions — the same amount as his other children."

I'm interested in that phrase, "she will be erased again." It's Lisa's own book. She's choosing to tell the story her way, but that can't stop the people she's writing about from talking back and presenting their version of the events they too lived through. Otherwise, they are "erased."

"Erased" has been a vogue word for many years. Keep an eye on it. It's the visual equivalent of "silenced." These are sleight-of-hand words that are often used to get other people to disappear/shut up. It's the opposite of the old free-speech notion that the remedy for speech you don't like is "more speech." Those who deploy "erased" (and "silenced") this way are saying in order for me to be properly heard and respected, other people need to refrain from contradicting or challenging me.

ALSO: I need to question that headline: "In ‘Small Fry,’ Steve Jobs Comes Across as a Jerk. His Daughter Forgives Him. Should We?/Lisa Brennan-Jobs has written a memoir about her famous father. The details are damning, but she doesn’t want them to be." Brennan-Jobs wrote what she wrote. Why shouldn't we infer what she wants from what she did, which is write a memoir with "damning details" that cause he father to come across as "a jerk"?

My rule of thumb is that people do what they want to do. If they say they want something else, I'm skeptical. So I'd never write, "The details are damning, but she doesn’t want them to be." It would have to be, The details are damning, but she says she doesn’t want us to see them that way.

To take my rule of thumb further, I would assume that she's talking to the NYT and using it to get out the message that the forthcoming book doesn't mean what she's afraid it will be understood to mean, and she's proclaiming forgiveness because she wants her book to be well-received, not undercut by her siblings and by Laurene Powell Jobs and Mona Simpson. Simpson (Jobs's sister) is a highly respected writer, and Brennan-Jobs's expression of fear that her memoir will be regarded as not "nuanced" but just  "a tell-all exposé" suggests literary aspirations that Simpson has the power to easily crush.

According to Wikipedia:

While a student at Harvard, [Brennan-Jobs] wrote for The Harvard Crimson. She graduated in 2000 and subsequently moved to Manhattan to work as a writer. She has written for The Southwest Review, The Massachusetts Review, The Harvard Advocate, Spiked, Vogue, and O, The Oprah Magazine.

That's 18 years since graduation, without much of a literary career (even with "millions" to spare her the grind of day jobs that make life hard for so many writers and with the leg-up she has always had because of her name). The book title is "Small Fry," but "small fry" are "Young or unimportant persons (collectively or in a body); a crowd of such persons" (the original metaphor being little fish appearing in large numbers) (OED).

"... and a white man does not bring much 'wow' factor for Democrats these days."

From a NYT article titled "Who Might Hillary Clinton's Running Mate Be if She's the Nominee?," under the "Why he might not be the best choice" heading for Tim Kaine:

Mr. Kaine might be too moderate for the activist base, and a white man does not bring much 'wow' factor for Democrats these days. He might also be too obvious a pick to make a splash, and his support for trade deals could hurt the ticket, as well. 

I would like government that doesn't wow. I'd prefer to get my wows from things other than government officials.

In the larger scheme of things, life is better when government does nothing that makes you say "wow."

And I look forward to the day when the fact that someone doing something is a woman or a nonwhite person is no reason to say "wow."

And who says "wow" seriously anymore? Isn't "wow" much more likely to be said sarcastically? I have the feeling that if I just write "wow" in a few more sentences, you will perceive "wow" as an entirely idiotic word that can never be used — including in that pushback way that's popular amongst the censorious scolds. Wow... as in: I cannot believe you said that rather ordinary thing you just said. I've about had it with "wow."

I lived through the old hippie days when the range of vocabulary got very narrow and "wow" was one of the few remaining words. Steve Jobs, down to his last 2 words, said, "Oh, wow." In fact, 3 of his last 6 words were "wow" (the other 3 were "oh").

But we're not dying yet, not most of us anyway, and we need to keep our wits about us, and that means resisting the "wow."

Don't say "wow," and don't look for the "wow." We don't need "wow" in our politicians. Leave "wow" to the pop stars...

You never saw it coming 'cause I make no claims 'til now
You can call it the unexpected or you can call it... wow!
You can call it call it... wow!
You can call it call it call it... wow!
You can call it the unexpected or you can call it call it call it call it...
Gimme a minute.
Let me get myself together.
I'm never really out of control.
Really, I'm so much better.
Maybe it's your eyes, your stare lookin' like...
Lookin' like you wanna go somewhere.
You wanna go somewhere?

Yesterday, we were walking out on Picnic Point with our borrowed dog Zeus, and we crossed paths with a couple with a little toddler who was so interested in the dog that she started following us. We turned back and interacted with the parents and talked about "our" dog and their child's interest in dogs. English was not their first language, and the man, talking to the child about the dog, made the sound a dog makes not the way we do — not "bow wow" — but "how how."

And I'm thinking, you politicians, I don't want wow. I want how.

Bill Gates has a book reviews blog.

I learned about it from this miniature interview in the NYT, in which he said:

One of the main reasons I started my blog was to share thoughts about what I’m reading. So it is nice to see people sharing their own reactions and recommendations in the comments section of the site.

That's so sublimely bland. But that's presumably his speaking voice. Let's check out a couple reviews on the blog (which is called "gatesnotes"). I picked 2 that I've read. First, "Steve Jobs":

Driven by demons, Jobs could drive those around him to fury and despair. But his personality and products were interrelated, just as Apple’s hardware and software tended to be, as if part of an integrated system. His tale is instructive and cautionary, filled with lessons about innovation, character, leadership, and values.

I'm reading this, thinking Gates writes like the publisher's press release. Then I see the line at the top: "Here’s the publisher’s description of the book." It is the publisher's press release! So far, I'm not reading any blogging by Bill Gates.

Quite a few of the books are "reviewed" this way. For example: "Through circumstances that tend to preclude adult, secondhand description, [Holden Caulfield' leaves his prep school in Pennsylvania and goes underground in New York City for three days." Gates put that up in 2011, so it's not like it's a placeholder until he gets around to sharing his thoughts.

Okay, I found one with an actual Bill Gates write-up: "Hyperbole and a Half: Unfortunate Situations, Flawed Coping Mechanisms, Mayhem, and Other Things that Happened":

I don’t mean to suggest that giving an outlet to our often-despicable me is a novel form of humor, but [Allie Brosh] is really good at it.... I get why Brosh has become so popular. While she self-deprecatingly depicts herself in words and art as an odd outsider, we can all relate to her struggles. Rather than laughing at her, you laugh with her. It is no hyperbole to say I love her approach—looking, listening, and describing with the observational skills of a scientist, the creativity of an artist, and the wit of a comedian.

Bill Gates isn't self-deprecating (or self-effacing), but he's self-erasing. He speaks of "we" — "We can all relate..." — and "you" — "you laugh with her." So far, my working theory is that he has no "odd outsider" or other distinctive point of view. The writing is pretty close to that of the publisher's press release he's okay with allowing to speak for him much of the time.

I'll give him one more chance. Here's one for a book I have not read, "Thing Explainer: Complicated Stuff in Simple Words," a book by Randall Munroe (who does the comic "xkcd"). This book seems to be cranking humor out of taking the position of knowing very few words. "A dishwasher is a 'box that cleans food holders.'" You can decide for yourself if you're up for a whole book of that manner of foolery. To me, it seems like an idea for a game to play on a long car ride with children. Gates says:

[Munroe] draws blueprint-style diagrams and annotates them using only the 1,000 most common words in the English language... If I have a criticism of Thing Explainer, it’s that the clever concept sometimes gets in the way of clarity. Occasionally I found myself wishing that Munroe had allowed himself a few more terms—“Mars” instead of “red world,” or “helium” instead of “funny voice air.” Of course, that would defeat the purpose of the book....

I would have thought that the feeling of wishing that Munroe had allowed himself a few more terms is what's supposed to make you laugh, but Gates seems to treat the book as a sincere effort to explain things without annoying us with terminology.

I'm not intrigued enough by the Mind of Gates to read much more. But I am going to put Munroe's book in my Kindle and I want to remember more often to check out xkcd and the website Hyperbole and a Half.

IN THE COMMENTS: M Jordan said:

My son got me Munroe's book for Christmas. Actually, his goal isn't to amuse by using a limited vocabulary; it's to force himself to explain complicated things in hyper-simple terms.

As a former writing teacher I wish I had thought of this for a writing exercise. I may teach again (overseas, where I've taught university last) and, with a view toward that end, I cranked out a quick and dirty computer program which allows a person to test their writing against the 1000 most common English words list (I also added 2000 and 5000 most common English words filters). I've tried doing it myself ... that is, pasting something I've written into the program and then rewriting the words that failed the flyers. It's a very helpful and at times difficult endeavor. The result, like Munroe's book, is a strange, almost whimsical but not quite style that is quite arresting. A good exercise.

One last point: I think Donald Trump has a 1000- most common word filter in his brain. 

Great point about Donald Trump!

And great observation about foreign languages which force us to operate within a limited vocabulary. You never know enough nouns, but you can fairly easily get to the point where you can talk about the thing that does whatever it does.

"The iPad Pro will get a Smart Keyboard and a stylus, which has been dubbed Apple Pencil."

"Perhaps to make us forget that Steve Jobs once mocked the stylus?"

"David Galbraith, a Geneva, Switzerland-based tech entrepreneur and designer, tweeted an iconic black-and-white photo of Steve Jobs with the words: 'A Syrian migrants' child.'"

“I was prompted to post it after seeing the pictures of Aylan Kurdi. I could barely look as I have two beautiful young children of my own. It seemed to be that what the most precious thing in the world, a small child, was washed up on the sea shore like a discarded object of no value, when a child with a parent of the same nationality, given opportunity had created the largest company in the entire world. And here we are seeing an acrimonious debate, about stopping migrants.”

"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."

"How come I know you don’t write anything you don’t want broadcast in an email? How come I know that? Who’s advising people?"

Said the actress Lisa Kudrow, commenting on the leaked emails of Sony executives (in which, for example, Leonardo DiCaprio was called "despicable").

"It doesn't matter how many times [an email] says 'This is confidential, meant for just between the sender and the recipient,'" [Kudrow] said. "Why don't we know that there are no rules? Everything is broadcast and published. That's the part I just don't understand."

That tough reality has made Kudrow extremely cautious of what she says.

"I mean, I have almost no opinions anymore," she joked.

Kudrow asks a good question — and she seems to imply that the answer is that these executives were embarrassingly ignorant and out of touch with modern life. But there could be other explanations. I thought of two:

1. Email is an efficient way to conduct business, but only when the speech is sharp and clear and cuts through all the crap. The successful executives are the ones who can communicate like this, and for them, at least until now, it has been worth the risk. Email couched in pleasantries and euphemisms would waste everyone's time and make you look insufficiently hard-assed. The risk of leakage was far outweighed by the potential to succeed, and those who weigh the risk otherwise don't get to these positions of power in the first place. It's fine for an actress to cultivate her niceness image, but she's got a entirely different kind of career. And having "almost no opinions" is a good low-risk strategy for her.

2. The Hollywood executives actually don't mind if these opinions leak out. They won't come forward now and own up to actually thinking Leonardo DiCaprio was "despicable" to withdraw from whatever commitment he made to play the role of Steve Jobs in another Steve Jobs biopic or that Angelina Jolie, who was bothering them somehow over another biopic of Cleopatra, is "a minimally talent spoiled brat." Pressuring/controlling/manipulating celebrities is what these executives need to do, and creating anxieties about whether they will get their projects funded or will get work in the future is part of how they play their game. Maybe the executives want Leo and Angie and the others to know that the executives expect better compliance.

I'm not saying I'm sure either or both of those things are true. I'm just playing with alternate scenarios and trying to open up the discussion.

Sarah Silverman as Joan Rivers on "Saturday Night Live."

From last night's show:

[EMBEDDED VIDEO REMOVED]

And, yes, all the tags for this post are correct.

AND: Even better is the trailer for "The Fault in Our Stars 2: The Ebola in Our Everything."

"Fresh questions about Steve Jobs’ liver transplant have been raised..."

",,, after it emerged that the doctor who performed the surgery spent two years in the Memphis, Tenn., house Jobs bought for his recovery."

Shortly after it emerged that Jobs had the surgery in 2009, [Dr. James] Eason issued a statement saying that Jobs received the transplant “because he was … the sickest patient on the waiting list at the time a donor organ became available,” based on a scoring system known as the Model for End-Stage Liver Disease, or MELD.

"Cartoon characters wear the same clothes every day, because their animators are lazy."

"You are not a cartoon character."

From "6 Telltale Signs It's Time to Upgrade Your Style." [A "sponsored" article at Gawker.]

Does that mean Steve Jobs was lazy and needed to upgrade his style? And as long as we're doing lists, we might as well shift over to "18 Famous People Who Always Dress The Same": Jobs, Zuckerberg, Tom Wolfe, Michael Kors, Larry Page...

These people are so not lazy. They're style icons, projecting power. The same clothes every day projects industriousness, efficiency, and — if you pick the right stuff — style.

Will Scott Walker finally get his college degree?

Time Magazine calls attention to the (unnerving?) gap in Scott Walker's resume.

The missing bachelors may seem odd, but it’s one reason Walker’s appeal in the GOP is only rising. Unlike New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie or Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul, most Americans would have no trouble imagining sharing a beer with Walker, the age-old likability test. “I always thought I’d get back, and I may still do,” Walker said, explaining he recently helped establish a “flex option” at the University of Wisconsin to allow adults to complete their college education. “Someday, maybe in the next few years, I’ll embark on finishing my degree.”

More details! How many credits does he need? What has he already taken? Casual research indicates he needs 36 credits. Here's the flex option website. I can't imagine him putting time into a college course when he's got so much work to do. And not having a degree gives him some panache, putting him in a set with Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg... and George Washington.

But let's give him some advice anyway. What book learning would you like to prescribe for an American presidential candidate? Let's not burden him with material that duplicates what he's learned on the job. What do you think? Process of Legal Order & Disorder? The History of the American Suburb? Race and Sexuality in American Literature? French Philosophy: Existentialism?

"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.

"When we were an agrarian nation, all cars were trucks..."

"... because that’s what you needed on the farm."

That's an analogy from Steve Jobs, quoted in a NYT article about the newest iteration of the iPad. Is it really true that the earliest cars were truck-like? I didn't believe that. I Google. I get to Wikipedia. I'm amazed and call out this question to Meade (who is editing dog video in the next room): "When do you think the earliest thing that could be called a car — an automobile — was?" He says 1910, then re-guesses 1890. I say: "1672."