Good morning. Hello. How are you? #384
SpaceX, Apple, Basecamp, god, this is like a tech newsletter today, sorry, Blake Bailey, Twenty-five years of Harvard Business Review, mom travel, and, despite everything, some gardening.
Good morning! Hello. How are you? I am good, thanks for asking. It’s 7:34 in the morning and I’ve just done my morning survey of the news and emails. SpaceX has to stop working on their lunar program that they just started, because Jeff Bezos doth protest. I wonder what happens to the workers. Did SpaceX hire people to start working on this already? It’s only been a few weeks since they won. If they did, will they just… keep paying them to do nothign? Re-assign them? Seems like it’d be nuts to recruit a bunch of literal rocket scientists and then turn around and lay them off and then hope you can hire them again, but, you know, plutocrats. Who’s to say. SpaceX also got permission from the FAA for it’s next three test flights of Starship. This is interesting because they’ve been bickering about the last one, with Elon whining that the FAA is, like, you know, going slow. It is worth noting that they approved three flights this time because SpaceX deigned to use the actual, approved safety risk calculation methodology. Imagine that.
A woman got arrested with a loaded gun at Laguardia. Happens a lot, really the most common hit you get on the relatively surreal Google search for Laguardia.
The EU is suing Apple for antitrust practices in its App store and I am very excited about this fact. Even if I didn’t happen to run an app. It is prima facie absurd that an app can’t say “oh also you can buy this book on the web for less money.” I am having a bit of trouble seeing how that improves security.
Meow Wolf in Denver is going to open this fall. I was a Meow Wolf investor. I exited before the pandemic. I look brilliant now, don’t I? Still, though, I remain a fan and I hope to go to the new Denver locations someday. It looks like it is going to be amazing. Here’s a picture from my first Meow Wolf trip in 2017 cuz this entry needs a little fun before it gets dark:
And a friend sent out an email apologizing for recommending the Blake Bailey Philip Roth autobiography. Well, not recommending it, linking to it. Because she had known Bailey since she was 15. I had read, the other night, one survivor’s story of her interactions with Bailey, and it was just so sickening, so sociopathic, so malevolent. The scale and breadth is devastating. Emma and I were talking about it last night and one thing that was really stuck out to both of us is how this supposedly brilliant man, in the end, committed his atrocities in the usual humdrum ways, thinking so little of his victims he didn’t really bother to think of anything unique or customized to say to each of them. He didn’t bother to try and actually, fully gaslight them, because that would have taken more work, because he didn’t actually want them to become too clingy, because he was doing this to so many of them, having them stick around after he was through with them would be too much of a hassle.
My mom is a retired educator — high school and middle school teacher and Vice Principal. She talks a lot about the past these days, tells a lot of stories. Some are the sort of embarrassing kind you don’t need your mom telling your wife, about your delayed potty training or whatnot. Some are stories that you’ve heard a million times before. But what’s unique this time is the number of stories that involve awful men in her workplace. Men she had to peel off of her. Men who they had to get fired for their predatory ways towards other teachers. Teachers who had to be told to not make out with students in the dark room. How the laws weren’t even on their side, how these people might be violating policies, but it was perfectly legal for a teacher to make out with a student in the darkroom, because there was no presumption that a student couldn’t consent. She told the story of a teacher who was dating a single mom, whose daughter was a student, AND the teacher was hooking up with the student too, and the mom was informed, repeatedly, and she just didn’t believe it.
Yesterday we were driving through this beautiful farmland, and she was sort of rambling on and on like she does, and she said “what day is it, Friday? Oh, Friday. Great. That’s the day that all the abused kids would come and tell us about their abuse at home. And our brilliant governor — I think it was Jack Coghill at the time — he had decided that all public employees needed to take Friday afternoons off.” She would have just sort of stopped there, but this one caught me. And I asked for details. “Oh so we’d have this kid who didn’t want to go home and you’d need to call the police to send over a detective, and you’d need to get someone from Child Protective Services over, but they all had the day off, and there was only one on call, and of course this was happening in every school in the district, so you’d have to wait hours?”
Why was it happening in every school in the district? I asked?
“Well, I don’t know. I think because it was Friday, and they were faced with spending two whole days alone with these abusers, and they wouldn’t have the school’s protection, and they just couldn’t handle the thought.”
These stories just flow out of my mom now. The craziest thing is it's not some… it’s not some large reckoning. If you don’t stop her and ask for details, she’ll just mention it in passing, like any other event in the workplace she’s reminiscing about. It’s an odd combination of #metoo processing (my mom is up on the times here) and normal prattling elderly nostalgia.
The most disturbing thing about it is how many there are. There are so many I only really pause and ask for details for the ones that happened in the high school I went to — my mom was Vice Principal at my high school for my freshman through junior year — or the ones where she was directly involved.
The most apt comparison the whole situation makes me think of is the Catholic Church scandal. And I am not just talking about my home school district — though I vividly remember realizing my senior year that well over half of the girls I knew had been sexually abused. That this was everywhere in my home town. I asked her what happened to these men and it sounds so much like the Catholic Church. They were guided to retirement, they were asked to resign and they moved on to another school district. It will never reach the same level of scandal, of course, because there are over 13,000 school districts in America, and there was no internet, and each one can plausibly claim ignorance.
But it feels very clear to me that Blake Bailey was by no means an aberration. A rarity. Perhaps he was in the sense that he was still doing this in the mid- and late- 1990s. And, of course, because his later fame got people to care. But this, I believe, was a constant presence in American life for hundreds of years. I suspect with the internet and #metoo it is a bit better now? But I doubt it’s completely gone.
Let’s not forget Random House had already received letters about Bailey before going to print. I wonder how big his advance was. Was it a million dollars? I made $90 off of my writing last month. I suspect that’s more than 90% of writers out there.
Whew well. That was cheery. Happy Saturday. Sorry. Better use the line tool here this is gonna get a lot cheerier.
Oh wait. No it’s not. I had one other depressing thing to say today. God, I had a really good day yesterday but the notes that made it to my scratch pad were grim. Anyway, the US is going to hit 600,000 covid deaths in about a month, probably. I was wondering yesterday — do we think the Republicans are craven enough to make a big thing about the deaths and try and lay them on Biden’s feet? They wouldn’t do something so craven, hypocritical and blatantly manipulative, right? No. Never.
Okay, sorry. Second line break.
So my big errand yesterday. Just before I wrote yesterdays’ GMHHAY, I read through my morning email, like I do, and the weekly Classifieds edition of the Chatham Chatlist came in. The Friday Classifieds edition is really long and I usually just skip it, but some weeks I skim through the index, at least. I did that, and one post was labeled “Harvard Business Review.” I scanned down and a guy was giving away every issue of the Harvard Business Review for the last twenty-five years. For free. Now, Chatham’s mostly a farm county, but there are a fair number of fellow respectable businessmen hiding in these words, especially retired ones in Star’s Hollow — excuse me, Fearrington Village. So I knew I probably had some competition. So I email the guy and I was the first, and he says they’re mine. The best part about this is the dude is also a fellow businessman, so unlike every single other person in Chatham County, this guy is, like, scheduled. He has a call now, he’ll get back to me in an hour, and I’m like “that’s okay I have meetings till three, would 3:30 work” and it’s, like, two businessmen scheduling things, unlike, say, when the PT just texts me “9 M and W” with no commentary or the HVAC guy says “I’ll come by someday Tuesday.” We are scheduled.
So, 3 PM rolls around, I get off of my (very exciting) 2PM call, and my mom wants to come along, and that’s actually a great idea because it’s a very scenic drive. Not on the highways but on Mt. Gilead Church road, down past Route 64. We looked at some houses down there, it’s nice. Big lots. Not a lot around, though there will be in another couple years. Also, this dude lives in a GEODESIC DOME. I am very excited. Geodesic Domes were very popular in Alaska growing up, but you don’t see a lot of them elsewhere. He says he’s moving out, though. They’re building a new house. Man. I wonder if he’s gonna sell that thing. SECRET LAIR.
Thusly, I am now the proud owner of 25 years of the Harvard Business Review. When I was working on Which Half is Wasted, I kept coming up on studies from there and I would have to pay, like $20 for a back issue reprint. Never again! I was thinking I could make a little site with a form on it, and if you needed a reprint, you could fill out the form and I’d take a few pictures of the relevant article and send it to you, free of charge, because that’s exactly the sort of pointless thing I love.
Speaking of business: A follow-up to the debacle at Basecamp. The owners doubled-down on their “no talking about societal issues or politics on company forums” stance, and offered a buyout to anyone at the company who didn’t like the new rules. It was a good buyout, too: six months severance. So, yesterday, after a what was described as a contentious company meeting, a full one third of the employees of the company decided to bail. Of course, two-thirds didn’t, and some component of the ones who did, did it just for the bailout. But I’m still feeling a bit of schadenfreude today. I wonder if they will turn all of this into their next book on brilliant management techniques, including, I shit you not, a book called It Doesn’t Have to be Crazy at Work.
I really like the metaphor I used in the comment section of that issue, to my friend Tom: the one of “good” companies being tornado shelters in the shitty storm of capitalism. They’ll keep you safe, but they’re no utopias, and they’re still structures sitting smack dab in the middle of a capitalistic nightmare storm. If I were a public intellectual or a thought leader you’d get a long, nice essay about that. But nope. You get a single paragraph. You’re welcome. I suspect you get the metaphor now.
My mom heads home today. I will take her to the airport at about 2:30 for a 5PM flight. She will get the wheelchair or the go cart. She’s going to fly on her own, which, well, I don’t know the last time she’s done that. Probably (maybe) when my dad was in that PT rehab clinic for several months four or five years ago. But she is ready and excited. She’s probably a little sick of me, to be honest. I had to teach her a million rules of living in a house with other people, people who have jobs and are busy and don’t have time to keep losing things. They were all reasonable on their own, but it was a lot, and it was probably overwhelming. I suspect she’s ready to be master of her own domain again. See friends. Get out of the house. Not that the pandemic is my fault. But, you know, uncertainty with kids, so we’re staying more safe than she would need to be living on her own? Maybe? I don’t know. I am on a tangent here. She’s ready to go.
SO I am going to try and get some gardening done this morning with Jane, after breakfast. Then I’ll get my podcast done before I take her to the airport, then home, and that’s the day used up. I’ll have my evening off, though — It’s Emma’s turn with Jane tonight — so maybe a little more done then, but, really. Tomorrow is the big gardening day. I doubt I’ll get the trellis up but I will get some stuff done. Next weekend, though. Friday is my birthday (49) and I am taking Friday and the following Monday off for a four-day recuperative gardening extravaganza. I am very excited.
All right. Let’s do a mix. A moody and quiet one, because right at this moment I am listening to a new (I think) Eric Bachmann album called Haxan that is gloriously moody and spare and ambient and quiet and it’s so good, but it’s not on Spotify, so I can’t put it on a mix, so you get different moody and quiet songs instead.
Kind of a double feature for the National here, but I don’t think the Taylor Swift one counts as a national song. The Graham Fitkin album has recently been re-mastered. Ian Broudie from the Lightning Seeds has put out a super mellow acoustic album that I quite like. And of course we have the amazing Anita Lane on here — she’s on a lot of the mixes right now. Versatile woman, Anita Lane. Anyway, I hope you enjoy.
Sorry about all the downer shit today. It’s a rough world out there. Can’t ignore it completely. Well, I can’t. Not every day, anyway. Some days. Maybe I should start some trigger warning sort of protocol up in that subhead area. Bummer-level between 1 and 5. Is that a good idea or a terrible one? We’ll sit on it. À tout à l’heure!