Friday, May 22, 2026

Genius Loves Company


By legend, Albert Einstein was a lone genius, coming up with ideas and concepts nobody else thought of. But according to a revealing article called “Not a Lone Genius” by CalTech professor Diana Kormos-Buchwald, the truth is more complicated. She based her article on The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein, a 16-volume series of books co-edited by numerous scholars.

“He was not the genius working in an attic with a pen and paper,” she says. “Einstein may not have been working with large teams, but he was deeply embedded in the science community. Colleagues gave him advice and encouragement, but also criticized his work. And he, in turn, was instrumental in guiding and challenging others.”

The article notes that Einstein developed his special theory of relativity in 1905 with help from his college friend Michele Besso and his first wife, Mileva Marić.

He later perfected his general theory of relativity in 1915 with help from both Besso and another college friend, mathematician Marcel Grossmann.

Perhaps most illustrative of all was his involvement in experiments with younger physicists to test the structure of radiation and matter, and ultimately the development of the ground-breaking field of quantum mechanics. When approached by one of his young colleagues about being listed as a co-author on an important paper on that topic, Einstein demurred:

“I just don’t know whether I should count as a co-author since after all you did all the work...”

Einstein was a tinkerer and inventor of gadgets, including a patented refrigerating system. And he was an original thinker, who indeed came up with brilliant ideas. But perhaps his true genius was as a synthesizer, a collaborator, and a mentor of younger people.

And there might be a lesson in that for the rest of us.

(I published an earlier version of this in 2021.)

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Wednesday, May 20, 2026

Becoming a Nurse

Tuesday morning was hot all over the Bay Area, which is something you can generalize about when you traveled back and forth between the mainland and the tip of the peninsula that we call San Francisco.

Hundreds of us gathered at the old Paramount Theatre in downtown Oakland for the pinning ceremony for nurses in the Samuel Merritt University graduating classes.

One of those honored was my son Aidan, seen in the photo above grinning and wearing a hat. (The others are his younger brother, Dylan, his younger sister, Julia, and his Mom, Connie.)

I’m in there too, messing up the shot as I tried to lean into the frame but appeared to be falling over instead.

From the speakers at the event, I learned that men now account for 11 percent of our nursing population. As far as Aidan’s career is concerned, the RN degree is a stepping stone on his way to becoming a nurse practitioner, which requires another year and a half of studies, clinical work, testing and the type of endurance that has gotten him this far.

Afterwards, at a cafe in San Francisco, he talked about the parts of the work that resonates for him. “We are with people on their happiest days and also at their saddest moments. It’s part of what gives this work meaning.”

Later in the car alone on the way back across the Bay Bridge, I thought to myself that I could not be prouder of my son for the profession he’s chosen.

HEADLINES:

  • There Has Never Been an Example of Presidential Corruption Like This (NYT Edit Bd)

  • Jan. 6 officers sue over $1.8B pot they call ‘slush fund’ for ‘insurrectionists’ (NBC)

  • Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche told lawmakers Tuesday that “anybody” can apply for payouts from the Justice Department’s new “Anti-Weaponization Fund,” after he was asked whether it would include people convicted of assaulting law enforcement. [HuffPost]

  • The End of Thomas Massie Is the Beginning of Something New (Slate)

  • The Trump paradox: What’s good for him is weighing down his party (WP)

  • Cracks are forming in US President Donald Trump's base. The latest Reuters/Ipsos poll shows Republican support softening - particularly on the cost of living. (Reuters)

  • US indicts former Cuban President Raúl Castro (CNN)

  • For communist Cuba, it’s the beginning of the end (The Hill)

  • U.S. crude oil falls below $100 per barrel after Trump says Iran talks in final stages (CNBC)

  • The oil shock is coming for America (FT)

  • How Iran Gained Leverage in the War (NYT)

  • Xi and Putin highlight their friendship and cooperation in Beijing visit (AP)

  • Russia and China warn of the 'law of the jungle' in world affairs (Reuters)

  • Kennedy fires heads of task force that sets insurance coverage rules (Axios)

  • The San Diego Mosque Shootings Were a Crime Made for and by the Internet (NYT)

  • Google’s AI is being manipulated. The search giant is quietly fighting back (BBC)

  • San Francisco turns to AI to avoid collisions between ships and whales searching for food (AP)

  • AI for Good? The Case Against AI Doomerism (YouTube)

  • OpenAI Prepares to File to Go Public in Coming Weeks (NYT)

  • Squirrel Unaware He Embroiled In Months-Long Feud With Homeowner (Onion)

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The Sixth Chick

On an otherwise unremarkable afternoon, I watched what appeared to be a lone quail pick its way down a hillside, turning first this way, then that, gradually charting a zig-zag course west to east, north to south across the field.

As I was wattching, five chicks came into view following their mother. They too turned from west to east, north to south, replicating her course almost perfectly.

I’m sure there were slight deviations in their paths but I didn’t notice anything dramatic. They were a team — one big one leading the way, five little ones following and learning in the process.

As they gradually snaked their way out of view, something else caught my eye. It was a sixth chick, far behind, lurching wildly from further up the hill. This one didn’t replicate the path of its mother and siblings.

Instead it forged its own route as it raced to catch up with the clutch.

That sixth chick, always somehow out of step. We’ve probably all known one.

***

The great tomato plant mystery came to its sad end when the sixth and final plant disappeared overnight. The camera we had trained on the plant ran out of batteries, so the thief got away undetected.

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Tuesday, May 19, 2026

The Painted Box

Among my possessions is a painted cardboard box. It’s pastel green and dates from the 1960s, when I went away to college. I guess my parents painted the box in an effort to strengthen it.

Inside were many copies of stories I wrote for the Michigan Daily. There also was a copy of Life magazine with a story about student protestors, which included a photo of me being arrested.

It was 1968 and the campuses were erupting with similar protests all over the country. This was one of the times I mixed my new role as a journalist with political activism, and wouldn’t you know, it ended up memorialized by Life magazine.

Of course, at the time, I was proud of what I’d done. The charges of trespassing on public property, to which I pled, carried no actual penalty beyond a day’s labor in a local park.

But I and my fellow convicts refused to cut down the trees as we were instructed to do, as part of an environmental protest. Thinking back on it, we must have been one big royal pain in the ass for the authorities.

They chose to ignore the fact we didn’t serve our sentence, turning instead to more pressing matters, such as the bombing of the local CIA office, which led to the indictment of John Sinclair, and brought John Lennon to Ann Arbor to sing in his support.

One thing led to another for me and within a few years I was somewhat improbably editing pieces Lennon and Yoko Ono produced for SunDance magazine out in San Francisco.

A few more years and I was a reporter at Rolling Stone.

At the bottom of the files in the box was my FBI file, which I obtained under the Freedom of Information Act. The Bureau kept track of me starting with that arrest in college and my work for an underground paper in Ann Arbor. It tracked me as I relocated to San Francisco to work at SunDance and throughout the years at Rolling Stone.

Including my stories on the FBI’s COINTELPRO illegalities.

Much of the information in that file is blacked out in the classic way the FBI redacted files prior to releasing them under the FOIA, but there was nothing in there of any consequence.

So that old cardboard box painted pastel green contains a lot of memories, too many, so I closed it back up and put it away for another day.

(I’ve published different versions of this one over the years.)

HEADLINES:

  • Trump says Iran attack on ‘hold’ (Al Jazeera)

  • Trump’s Approval Sinks Amid Unpopular War, Darkening G.O.P. Prospects (NYT)

  • Justice Department announces a $1.7B fund to compensate Trump allies in a deal to drop IRS suit (AP)

  • Elon Musk loses court battle against Sam Altman and OpenAI after 3-week trial (CNBC)

  • ICE Agent Charged in Shooting of a Venezuelan Immigrant in Minnesota (NYT)

  • Iran makes new proposal for deal to end war, regional officials say (Guardian)

  • Iran war live: Talks ongoing via Pakistan; Lebanon death toll tops 3,000 (Al Jazeera)

  • Sweeping the strait: the companies gearing up to clear the Gulf of mines (FT)

  • Three people were killed in the shooting at the Islamic Center of San Diego, and two suspects later killed themselves. (NYT)

  • Cuba accuses US of building ‘fraudulent case’ for military action (BBC)

  • Global scramble to contain new Ebola outbreak as US moves to limit entry from virus-hit region (CNN)

  • Can Hakeem Jeffries Lead a Democratic Takeover of the House? (New Yorker)

  • Over 100,000 Family Separations in Deportation Push, Report Estimates (NYT)

  • Everything You Do Is Being Recorded (Atlantic)

  • Why are most humans right-handed? Scientists may have found the answer (Earth.com)

  • Fast-Moving Southern California Fire Forces Immediate Evacuations (NYT)

  • AI Has Broken Containment (Atlantic)

  • AI won’t replace lawyers. It will create more of them. (WP)

  • Trump Requests $1.2 Trillion To Have (Onion)

 

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Monday, May 18, 2026

Go For It

I’ve been thinking a lot about careers lately, even though I no longer have one, because many of the people I care about still do. I don’t know that much about other professions, but in my field, it usually goes like this.

First you’re a rookie, maybe doing research or serving as an intern.

Then, at some point, you get to do a story and people discover you can report, you can write.

After you do this for a while, you become a much better reporter, reducing your mistakes and learning to better trust your instincts.

Somewhere along the way, you play a part in breaking a really big story -- the kind that makes the world sit up and pay attention.

Now you have started to make a name for yourself, so you win some awards, get some job offers, and discover that you had many more friends than you previously seemed to have.

If you’re good, you start repeating the whole process, breaking story after story, getting scoops and even occasionally having a notable impact on society. Now you have lots of friends.

Just about when this starts sinking in, you turn some age or another, say 40, and your whole world blows up -- personally and professionally. Maybe your marriage breaks up, maybe you change jobs, probably both, but people start treating you differently. You notice some of your friends have drifted away.

It’s not subtle. Employers are telling you it’s time to transition from worker to management. “Time to grow up, kid.” In journalism you go from reporter to editor, from telling stories to facilitating other people telling stories. Now you may have fewer friends but a new level of respect.

If you’re good at management, that new track of editor carries you higher in your field, you earn more money and they add more titles to your job description -- senior editor of this or that. Now you have a new set of friends (frenemies), and a growing list of outright enemies.

This second stage of your career probably will carry you straight through to retirement unless you mess up big time (which happens) or you’re the type driven to rise higher in management to the point you actually run things somewhere.

God forbid you become the boss, the person everyone talks about behind your back. Lots and lots of enemies and absolutely not a friend in the entire world

At this stage anything might happen, for better or worse. If you’re a good boss, you really impact some group of people somewhere, and they’re truly grateful for that. You may not exactly be able to be friends with your employees, but something pretty close to that comes into play.

Then one way or another, the day approaches when you retire, perhaps voluntarily or when circumstances (other people) make the decision for you.

And then it’s over. Completely. You are officially retired. Nobody controls your time, you no longer have to dance to anybody’s tune. And people start having trouble remembering whether you are alive still or maybe you have passed on. They’re just not sure.

But assuming you survive, you finally may change direction altogether, and try doing something you always wanted to do, but never quite got around to when you were on the clock. And at this stage you discover you really did have a few real friends all the way along, because they are the ones who show up in your new life.

And now younger people ask your advice as they hit the various turning point stages of their careers. “You’ve been there, what do you think I should do next?”

So you hear them out and then answer something like this, “You already know what you want to do, my friend. Otherwise you wouldn’t be asking me.”

“Just go for it.”

(This one is from five years ago.)

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Sunday, May 17, 2026

Repairing Ourselves

Accurate birth and death records are a relatively recent phenomenon and they still don’t exist in much of the world. But they do in France, where when she died in 1997  Jeanne Louise Calment was 122 years and 164 days old. That makes her the oldest verified person to have ever lived.

Numerous reports suggest that there may be a natural cap on the human lifespan at about 150 years old. One particular phrase in a recent study struck me -- that after that much time, the human body simply is no longer capable of “repairing itself.”

The concept that we repair ourselves appeals to me on many levels. It captures the truth that we stumble and hurt ourselves a lot along the way, not just physically, and we need to be able to pick ourselves up and get going again.

I’m a big fan of organized sports for kids because they learn this lesson well by an early age.

As a society we need to learn this skill as well. For example, how can we possibly recover from the divisive elections in 2016, 2020 and 2024 to come together to forge the kind of national consensus to tackle our true challenges, which have nothing to do with partisan political parties, and everything to do with survival of our species?

One thing is clear. We are not going to accomplish this by furthering the divide between the two political parties. 

Inspirational books by sincere commentators like Dan Rather (What Unites Us) remind us that we are much more powerful when we join together, but no one to my knowledge has been able to articulate a workable plan for how we can currently do that.

Meanwhile, in lieu of collective progress, we can still fall back on our own individual situations. How can we continue repairing ourselves and live on? Mortality is a certainty, but the vast majority of us would prefer that our demise be delayed and our existence extended.

I’m fully cognizant of how hard it is from time to time to endure depression, anxiety, and other mental states, including suicidal thoughts -- especially when things go bad in life.

But the best choice should always be life, with all of its complications, disruptions and disappointments, because you never know what sweet moments you are going to miss otherwise.

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Saturday, May 16, 2026

Origin Story: Salon



The journalist and author David Talbot is best-known as the founder of Salon, which from a journalistic perspective was one of the more important startups to emerge in the early days of the web.

Talbot had been an editor at Mother Jones and the San Francisco Examiner, where he ran the Sunday magazine, but he had a bigger dream -- to start his own publication.

I’d talked this over with him for some years until finally in 1995 he got his chance. Richard Gingras, then an executive at Apple, staked him with a small pot of money and with that, David gave notice at the Examiner.

There wasn’t very much funding at all but Talbot somehow convinced three colleagues -- editors Gary Kamiya and Andrew Ross and designer Mignon Khargie -- to give up their steady jobs and join him in his quest.

The group was rounded out by publisher David Zweig, bringing the staff to five and they settled pro-bono into an architect’s office down on the waterfront.

At Talbot’s invitation, I joined them too, not on the creative side but on the business side. That made sense because I had just left my job as EVP of KQED, the large public broadcasting company in Northern California, and I knew my way around Bay Area financial circles.

While Salon’s other journalists, none of whom had a clue about business, developed an editorial plan, I helped Zweig establish a business plan, which proved to be a daunting task. First and foremost, the team needed much more money, so I set about meeting with potential investors in San Francisco bars with a Mac laptop furnished by Gingras. It was loaded with a prototype of the magazine.

What made all of this complicated is that Salon would be on the web, at that time a nascent, unstable platform that as yet was devoid of any real journalism.

While I was able to convince a few investors to kick in $25,000 apiece, much more significantly I told an old friend and former writing partner, New York Times tech reporter John Markoff, what Talbot & crew were up to and he saw that this could make a good story.

Meanwhile, we were able to find two major investors -- investment banker Bill Hambrecht and Adobe co-founder John Warnock. They both agreed to get involved, more because they shared the magazine’s progressive political vision than any hope they would recoup their multi-million dollar investments.

But Markoff’s article was the key. When it launched, Salon proved to be an instant sensation, and over the years through many ups and downs it has persisted, though it has never to my knowledge actually turned a profit.

But profits aside, the reason Salon mattered is it was one of the first sites featuring original content, proving that traditional journalism could compete with the free-for-all that characterized the early Web. (Microsoft launched a similar site called Slate the following year.)

After Salon launched, I left to join HotWired and return to my first and true love -- journalism. But then I rejoined Salon a few years later as Investigative Editor/Managing Editor and Washington bureau chief and finally SVP during its heyday of the Clinton impeachment drama, including Talbot’s historic Henry Hyde story.

Over the 30 years since Salon launched, several people have mistakenly referred to me as one of the founders of Salon. I was more like what in basketball is known as the Sixth Man during that launch period in the fall of 1995.

So I played a key role.

A whole slew of other talented people joined Salon’s team early on. But recently as I was cleaning out my possessions I discovered a relic from the earliest days of Salon. It was what must have been one of its first phone directories, a plain piece of paper with the staff’s phone extensions in the architect’s office down by the Bay.

On it were eight names -- one Gary, one Andrew, one Mignon and three Davids -- Talbot, Zweig and Weir. The other two were Laura Miller and Cynthia Joyce.

Oh, and there was also a printer called Gingras, but that burst into flames, a harbinger of what was to come.

HEADLINES:

  • Senior IS leader killed in joint operation, US and Nigeria say (BBC)

  • Israeli strike kills Hamas’ military wing leader, who Israel says was an architect of Oct 7 attacks (AP)

  • Trump departs China touting deals, but little clarity on Iran or Taiwan (Al Jazeera)

  • Pentagon halts deployments to Poland and Germany to cut troop numbers in Europe, AP sources say (AP)

  • C.I.A. Director Visits Cuba as Tensions Rise and Island Runs Out of Oil (NYT)

  • Texas high court rejects removal of Democratic lawmakers who led quorum break over redistricting (AP)

  • House Again Blocks War Powers Vote to Halt Iran Conflict (NYT)

  • Patel Still Hasn’t Released Alcohol Test After Promising He’d Take One—White House Defends Him (Forbes)

  • Trump Administration Weighs $1.7 Billion Fund for Allies Investigated Under Biden (NYT)

  • Demonstrations to sweep the South over voting rights and redistricting (Axios)

  • Supreme Court Rejects Virginia Democrats’ Effort to Reinstate New Voting Map (NYT)

  • China braced for heavy rains (FT)

  • What to know about new Ebola outbreak that has killed 65 people in Congo (AP)

  • Judge Declares Mistrial in Weinstein Rape Trial (NYT)

  • Who are the Japanese? Huge DNA discovery rewrites history (ScienceDaily)

  • 2028: Two scenarios for global AI leadership (Anthropic)

  • Too Much Is Happening Too Fast (Atlantic)

  • In northern Ukraine, it was boy vs. Russian drone. The boy won. (WP)

  • Why A.I. Safety Controls Are Not Very Effective (NYT)

  • Everyone In Conversation Under Different Impression As To Which Horrific News Being Discussed (Onion)

 

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