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“Things happen, people change,” is what Amanda said. For her that covered it. You wanted an explanation, an ending that would assign blame and dish up justice. You considered violence and you considered reconciliation. But what you are left with is a premonition of the way your life will fade behind you, like a book you have read too quickly, leaving a dwindling trail of images and emotions, until all you can remember is a name.
In the top drawer you discover two empty rectangular packets. Actually, one of them is not quite empty; inside the black paper is a fine dusting of white. You scrape it onto the desk with a credit card, using the edge of the card to rake up two clean lines. You look over at Megan. She’s reading. You could quietly hoover the lines and she’d never know the difference. You extract a bill from your wallet and roll it into a tight cylinder between thumb and forefinger. One apiece isn’t going to do much for either of you. On the other hand, two won’t do much for you, either; one will make you want another, and another will only intitiate a chain reaction of desperate longings. Is this self-knowledge? In any case, you want to do something nice for Megan. For her it might be a treat, something out of the ordinary.
i like the 'is this self-knowledge' moment - MC has a similar feeling near the end?
You keep walking, thinking briefly about the Missing Person, the one who’s come and gone for good. Out into the sunlight of Fifth Avenue and the Plaza, a gargantuan white chateau rising in the middle of the island like a New Money dream of the Old World. When you first came to the city you spent a night here with Amanda. You had friends to stay with, but you wanted to spend that first night at the Plaza. Getting out of the taxi next to the famous fountain, you seemed to be arriving at the premiere of the movie which was to be your life. A doorman greeted you at the steps. A string quartet played in the Palm Court. Your tenth-floor room was tiny and overlooked an airshaft; though you could not see the city out the window, you believed that it was spread out at your feet. The limousines around the entrances seemed like carriages, and you felt that someday one would wait for you. Today they put you in mind of carrion birds, and you cannot believe your dreams were so shallow.
You are the stuff of which consumer profiles—American Dream: Educated Middle-Class Model—are made. When you’re staying at the Plaza with your beautiful wife, doesn’t it make sense to order the best Scotch that money can buy before you go to the theater in your private limousine?
love this
From the Met you walk to Tad’s place on Lexington. It’s a little after six. No answer to the buzzer. You decide to go for a drink and come back later. In a few minutes you are in singles’ heaven on First Avenue. You start at Friday’s, where you get a seat at the bar and finally succeed in ordering a drink. Prime time approaches, and the place is packed with eager secretaries and slumming lawyers. Everyone here has the Jordache look—the look you don’t want to know better. Hundreds of dollars’ worth of cosmetics on the women and thousands in gold around the necks of the open-shirted men. Gold crucifixes, Stars of David and coke spoons hang from the chains. Some trust in God to get them laid; others in drugs. Someone should do a survey of success ratios, publish it in New York magazine.
The candor was infectious. It spread back to the beginning of your life. You tried to tell her, as well as you could, what it was like being you. You described the feeling you’d always had of being misplaced, of always standing to one side of yourself, of watching yourself in the world even as you were being in the world, and wondering if this was how everyone felt. That you always believed that other people had a clearer idea of what they were doing, and didn’t worry quite so much about why. You talked about your first day of school. You cried and clutched her leg. You even remembered how her plaid slacks felt, the scratchiness on your cheek. She sent you off to the bus—she interrupted here to say she wasn’t much happier than you were—and you hid in the woods until you saw the bus leave and then went home and told her you had missed it. So Mom drove you to school, and by the time you got there you were an hour late. Everybody watched you come in with your little note, and heard you explain that you missed the bus. When you finally sat down you knew that you would never catch up.
When I asked Pratt why he had never shared his role in Lena's story, [...] He seemed nonplussed when I pressed him about the controversy that still surrounds the choice of this test photo. “I haven't paid attention to [the controversy] at all,” he said. "[...] It was just natural that we would use a good-quality image, and some of the best images were in Playboy. It was not sexist."
Besides, no one could have been offended, he told me, because there were no women in the classroom at the time.
obviously this needs to show up in pano. astounding
Ten years ago, the techies who became suddenly and extravagantly wealthy were were often self-conscious about flaunting their riches. It used to be that it wasn't cool, after your IPO, to pull up to the office in a Ferrari. But staying humble and empathic to those not in your rarefied circle or zip code becomes increasingly difficult over time. It is so much easier to tell yourself that you've worked harder than others - or were simply smarter than they - and that you therefore deserve all the prizes.
"Absolutely, wealth can change people," one former Google executive told me. "It disconnects you from average people. It's a big, big problem. You assume your experiences are everyone's experiences, and with wealth that becomes dangerous. Moral exceptionalism is disgusting, and Silicon Valley has tons of it, and it stems fro a lack of empathy. You assume the people who don't see the world as you do are uneducated or stupid."
I dont know how true the opening sentence is (what about like Elon??? or chamath???) but i agree w the analysis
With Trilogy still in start-up mode, and Microsoft ratcheting up the competition for talent, Liemandt made a decision about hiring that might have been the single biggest bet of his entire career. He wagered that talented, overachieving students with zero real-world experience - that is, people like him - would be the key to Trilogy's success. As a result of this decision, the vast majority of Trilogy's hires were new graduates [...] "We're elite talent. It's potential and talent, not experience, that has merit." With Liemandt's believing passionately that success could only flow from a meritoratic hiring process, "only the best" became the shorthand with which Trilogians described themselves and hte candidates they were looking for. [...]
good thing there's a totally rational, universal, unbiased way of determining who's "the best"
[...] Recall those brainteasers that Trilogy and other major tech companies used throughout the 1990s and into the next two decades. There has never been any evidence that they were useful in measuring who would be a good programmer. Yet it took until 2013 for Google to finally stop using them. "Brainteasers are a complete waste of time," Google's longtime former head of HR Laszlo Bock admitted to the New York Times in 2013. "They don't predict anything."
Well, maybe not anything useful, but they might have been good predictors of the sort of hyper self-confidence men are more prone to. [...] "We are going to ask you a question that has no relation to your job and one you've had no training in how to answer. Do you have the chutzpah to pretend that you can?"
this does select for myself tho lol
For Trilogy's tenth anniversary, in 1999, Liemandt flew hundreds of employees to the Bahamas, where they stayed at the Atlantis Resort, and gifted employees crystal vases from Tiffany and bottles of Dom Perignon. When the first tech bubble burst, Liemandt's net worth plummeted, and in 2001 hundreds of Trilogy employees were laid off. Today, Liemandt is quietly running a downsized Trilogy and keeping a low profile in Austin. He did not respond to multiple requests for comment.