Wired, A Love Story (3)

(Third in a series)

Early in 1996 as our workforce at HotWired expanded, we outgrew the original office, which was adjacent to Wired magazine, so we moved a block south to another converted warehouse at 660 Third Street.

For me, if the parallels from my time at Rolling Stone two decades earlier weren't already in mind, they now became inescapable. From a window next to my desk at HotWired I could look directly into the office across the street at 625 where Howard Kohn and I had written our three-part series about Patty Hearst and the SLA in 1975-6.

One of many similarities between the two companies was the almost constant stream of celebrities who wanted to visit us when they came to San Francisco. At Rolling Stone, it had been rock stars, of course, but also journalists, professors, actors and politicians.

HotWired was no different, but the visitors now included future billionaires like Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos, as well as virtually every other aspiring Internet entrepreneur on the planet. Also there were tech-savvy musicians like Brian Eno and politicians like Bill Bradley, a former Olympic basketball player and senator who was running for president. 

Among those who wanted to speak with me specifically were reporters from the Washington Post, Newsweek, the L.A. Times, Wall Street Journal, Reuters, NPR and the major TV networks. They marveled at the scene as I sprinkled my newly memorized web terms liberally into sound bites that made me sound like an expert.

But many of the reporters also confided to me that this whole scene made them uncomfortable because if the digital revolution succeeded it seemed likely to threaten our profession. Not to mention what it would mean for our society at large.

I was hopeful they were wrong on both counts, but 30 years later, it’s clear my optimism was misplaced. The devastation to the media world is obvious for all to see. Just look around. So many newspapers have closed that in most cities it is a surprise to discover that one still exists. Thousands of once-important newspapers have closed their operations since the Web started disrupting their business models circa 1994.

Old media companies couldn’t just “give it away” when it came to content. They needed the revenue from subscribers and sponsors and newsstand sales and classified ads to keep operating. One of the early harbingers of their doom was the overnight success of Craigslist, launched across town in 1995 by an unassuming fellow named Craig Newmark.

San Francisco newspaper executive Phil Bronstein reminded me many years later that I had warned him when Craigslist first appeared that he should try to get the Hearst Corp. to buy it and that they they might regret not doing so later. That was an understatement.

Newspapers have not been the only victims. TV and radio have suffered greatly from the digital revolution as well, losing audiences and advertising share. As have magazines. Book publishing has been decimated.

Meanwhile, the new media world has splintered into a thousand shards of digital sites catering to niche audiences and even more niche opinions. Losing the media industry was one thing. Losing our democracy is another. Fringe theories, conspiracy thinking, extremist movements have all flourished in the Digital Age, ultimately threatening our most precious freedoms in the process.

But that was not the story as we envisioned it back at HotWired in 1996.

At that moment, a stock market frenzy was making Internet millionaires out of 26-year-olds right and left. It was widely known that Wired, too, was preparing for its own IPO -- initial public offering — later that year. 

One of the documents I carried around with me as a reminder of where we headed was the Wired prospectus for potential investors. It described how Wired Inc. would help lead the rise of an Internet economy to become a global media empire.

No small part of that vision hinged on the efforts of our team at HotWired, since the kinds of multiples envisioned in the prospectus could never be generated by an analog magazine alone.

So at HotWired we were experimenting with a wide range of content strategies, including a search engine (HotBot), advertising models (the banner ad was a HotWired creation), the earliest web blogs (like Suck), interactive bulletin boards, audio programs (presaging podcasts) and digital video, which included a fledgling TV program called Netizen TV.

We also foresaw the future of interactive broadband video. We were involved with Microsoft and NBC when they created MSNBC with that in mind. I was among a small group of Wired execs who flew to New York during the negotiations that led to the cable network’s formation — we ate steak and smoked cigars and toasted a future we thought might include Wired and by extension each of us.

They were heady times.

For the first time in my working life, I held options to purchase shares in a company that would vest over time — four years to be exact. And as a vice-president, my holdings were large enough to potentially make me a modestly wealthy man in the process -- a prospect that had never even occurred to me before.

But hey, I’m getting ahead of myself in the story, which is much bigger than the fate of any one person. Back in 1996 and 1997, pretty much anything still seemed possible. 

(To be continued.)

HEADLINES:

• Trump threatens 50% tariffs on India for buying Russian oil (BBC)

• Musk's X and the Indian government clash in court over content regulation. (Reuters)

• Trump says ‘everyone agrees this war must come to a close’ after Witkoff meets Putin (Guardian)

• Texas redistricting battle escalates as Abbott asks court to remove Democratic lawmaker (ABC)

• Trump and Johnson face escalating GOP revolt on redistricting (Axios)

• Trump redoubles attack on federal jobs data, calls numbers ‘political’ (WP)

• Trump's Hatch Act probe of former special counsel Jack Smith isn't just hypocritical. It could backfire spectacularly. [HuffPost]

• Gabbard overrode CIA officials’ concerns in push to release classified Russia report (WP)

• Citizen Lab director warns cyber industry about US authoritarian descent (TechCrunch)

• Can NPR do without federal funding? Its CEO says she’s optimistic. (WP)

• France’s biggest wildfire of the summer has eclipsed the size of Paris and is still spreading (AP)

• Trump threatens federal takeover of D.C. after attack on former DOGE worker (WP)

• The Most Nihilistic Conflict on Earth (Atlantic)

• RFK Jr. pulls $500 million in funding for vaccine development (AP)

• Public health experts dismayed by RFK Jr.'s defunding of mRNA vaccine research (NPR)

• Donald Trump Doesn’t Want You to Read This Article (Atlantic)

• OpenAI to Give Away Some of the Technology That Powers ChatGPT (NYT)

• ChatGPT gives teens dangerous advice on drugs, alcohol and suicide, study finds (AP)

• How Tech Firms Like Google and Meta Are Embracing the Military (NYT)

• Watchdog Group Downgrades U.S. From Democracy To Whatever Political System Lobsters Have (The Onion)

Wired, A Love Story (2)

(Second in a series.)

By the time I joined the HotWired team in late 1995, I'd already been working in media for almost 30 years. This was not necessarily a good thing in the eyes of my new colleagues, who were busily upending the analog media world I came from with a digital alternative they considered superior.

“Content wants to be free” was a standard rallying cry at HotWired, which was not yet two years old and was undergoing a massive growth spurt fueled by corporate advertising revenue. We were hiring people almost as fast as we could; I joked to friends that our interviewing strategy was to lock the door behind candidates so they couldn't leave once they were inside. 

In point of fact. nobody wanted to leave -- if you were Gen-X and into creative media work in the mid-1990s, this is exactly where you wanted to be.

As for me, I was twice as old as most of the other employees, and my career had been almost entirely in the alternativemedia, not the mainstream. From my days in the underground press to SunDance to Rolling Stone to the Center for Investigative Reporting and from New West to Mother Jones and public radio plus other stops along the way, I had pretty much remained outside of traditional journalism institutions.

But in all those jobs I did adhere strictly to the values and standards of traditional journalists.

My new colleagues were early-stage writers and reporters and editors and designers and photographers and engineers and interface experts and audience research specialists and several other categories of workers, almost all of them in their mid-to-late 20s.

I was sort of like their weird uncle.

They all used a techno lingo unfamiliar to me, with terms like web browser, domain name, interactivity, bandwidth, interface, pixels, TCP/IP, url, html, coding, style sheets, IP address, network domain and on and on -- so many strange words that I scribbled them down on a scrap of paper and kept it in my pocket exactly as I did with foreign language phrases when visiting non-English-speaking countries overseas.

After a few months, I finally got around to asking someone what all of these words actually meant. He smirked and quipped: "Don't worry what they mean; just sprinkle them liberally into your speech and your market value will triple."

As I pondered that, the daily political site my team produced called The Netizen began to flourish. We rapidly built a large audience during the early months of election cycle 1996, which attracted the interest of Wired's co-founder and CEO, Louis Rossetto. 

He had a reputation as an articulate visionary but a difficult boss; many employees seemed fearful of his intensity. He was a fierce advocate of libertarian political views, a lifelong Republican, pro-corporate and dismissive of leftist ideas. 

So when Rossetto first summoned me to a private meeting I really didn't know what to expect. Most of my previous work had appeared in left-leaning publications, and he probably assumed my politics were defined by that. Maybe he wanted to suss me out.

From our very first meeting, the Louis I got to know was quite different from his image. He was smart and opinionated, true, but also quiet-spoken, thoughtful and happy to debate the issues of the day with me. Most importantly, he was committed to remaining open-minded about how we covered those issues in The Netizen.

That kind of tolerance was essential if I was to remain part of the Wired organization, which I already knew I wanted to do. Louis and I quickly developed a mutual trust that allowed us to argue through the various sides of the issues we were covering and agree to disagree when we could not reach a consensus.

Meanwhile he never interfered in my actual editorial choices, though they often differed from what I knew he would have preferred.

The ultimate test came when one of our cantankerous Netizen columnists decided to write a piece savagely critical of Wired itself. He decided to lambast the institution and everything it stood for in his daily column. 

Talk about biting the hand that feeds you! This surely would be too much for Louis to handle, I thought.

As the hit piece was about to post, as a courtesy to Louis I let him know what was coming. His response was shocking and refreshingly direct: 

"Let him rant!" 

We ran the piece unedited. 

For me, that moment confirmed that Rossetto was committed to his principles, which started with free speech for everyone.

Looking back on that incident, I realize that by then dealing with bosses other people considered difficult was becoming something of a habit for me; after all, I'd studied under one the masters, Jann Wenner at Rolling Stone. Others may have feared these men and their outbursts, but I genuinely liked them and developed a deep fondness for both Jann and Louis that lasted well past my jobs with them.

A few months after the “Let him rant” episode, Louis suddenly summoned me to his office again for an unscheduled meeting. Again, I assumed there must be bad news of some sort, but instead he surprised me by saying he wanted to move me to the top of the org chart as V.P. of Content Management for all of the websites in the HotWired network.

I was content producing The Netizen and hadn't sought this role at all but of course I agreed to it, especially because it came with a hefty raise. (And at home we had another baby on the way.) 

In my new role, dozens of people now reported to me, including my former bosses who seemed stunned by the change. 

If I was going to head up this brilliant, unruly band of web revolutionaries, by acting as “the adult in the room” (as some called me), I was going to have to be always switched to “on.”

(To be continued)

HEADLINES:

• Gov. Greg Abbott asks Texas Supreme Court to expel House Democratic leader who left state (Texas Tribune)

• California could slash 5 GOP US House seats to counter Texas’ move to pad Republican margin (AP)

• Justice Dept. opens grand jury probe of claims Obama officials conspired in 2016 election (WP)

• Judges Openly Doubt Government as Justice Dept. Misleads and Dodges Orders (NYT)

• Clintons subpoenaed to testify in congressional Epstein investigation (BBC)

• Donald Trump’s attack on US labour statistics agency spooks investors (FT)

• Top Hegseth aide tried to oust senior White House liaison from Pentagon (WP)

• 4 European countries agree to buy a combined $1 billion in U.S. weapons for Ukraine (NPR)

• The Trump Administration Is Promoting Its Anti-Trans Agenda Globally at the United Nations (ProPublica)

• Inside Laura Loomer’s rise: ‘Obsessive’ research, Oval Office visits (WP)

• Brazil's Supreme Court put Bolsonaro under house arrest (Reuters)

• DeepMind thinks its new Genie 3 world model presents a stepping stone toward AGI (TechCrunch)

• A.I. Has Ushered in Silicon Valley’s ‘Hard Tech’ Era (NYT)

• Australia Admits All Those Animals Made Up (The Onion)

Wired: A Love Story

(Late 1995)

After helping a tiny group of entrepreneurs launch Salon, I was invited over to tour the headquarters of Wired magazine by one of the magazine's editors who knew me from my years teaching at U-C Berkeley.

The magazine’s office culture was casual with cubicles, computers, rock music playing in the background and a few dogs lounging around.

But the real attraction lay on the other side of a common kitchen area where HotWired — the online side of Wired magazine was located.

It was a striking scene. Row after row of 20-somethings sat working on laptops perched on doors balanced over sawhorses, with the Chili Peppers blasting and a whiff of marijuana in the air. A couple of my former interns stood up to greet me and showed how they were designing content for a wide range of websites.

Right after I left the office, I made a call home to say, "I've just found the next place I want to work." 

Several weeks later, a call came from a young HotWiredling offering me a job as producer of what would be the web's first daily political news site, called The Netizen.

Although the starting salary was barely half what I'd previously been making, and I did have the needs of a new family at home to consider, I accepted the offer without hesitation and said I could start the next day.

On day one, I was introduced to a small staff of producers and designers with hardly any journalism experience. But they were smart, highly motivated and ready to invent something cool.

I immediately hired two of the brightest young journalists (and former students) I knew from Berkeley and set out to work with the engineering team -- the head of which was a former colleague from Mother Jones, and we set a crash course to build The Netizen.

We launched the website in something like 28 days.

It was a presidential election year, so we hired three experienced political writers as our correspondents and they fanned out across the campaign trail to cover the re-election effort of incumbent Bill Clinton and his Republican challengers, including the eventual nominee, Bob Dole.

I had been assured complete editorial independence for the operation, and it quickly attracted a very large audience among the early adopters then flocking to the web. Day after day we published smart, snarky takes from all sides of the political spectrum with a decidedly libertarian streak, in accordance with the dominant philosophy of Silicon Valley.

For me it was exciting -- new ideas sprouted daily, young staffers were quickly developing editorial skills, and we were able collectively to generate controversy almost without trying.

Email was still a new phenomenon, and the feedback from readers that poured in upon publication included some that were outright abusive, often misogynistic, which disturbed me and was a harbinger of things to come.

Thinking back with the benefit of hindsight, I had an early glimpse of how hate, lies and conspiracies might flourish in this new environment, but I didn’t know what to do about that.

Free speech was free speech, I told myself somewhat naively. And outside of the negative stuff, I liked the chaotic two-way communication cacophony of the web.

Our readers blasted off at our writers in ways traditional journalism never had tolerated. Those of us from “legacy media” were used to being the last word on a topic. In this new media, we were only the first. It was a conversation, not a broadcast.

Everyone handled it in relatively good spirits at The Netizen as we quickly rocketed into position as one of the leading news sites on the web.

If I was the pilot, it felt like I was guiding a ship into open space, destination unknown.

(To be continued)

HEADLINES:

• The Bureau of Labor Denial (WSJ)

• Trump stokes conspiracies about jobs data, as White House defends firing BLS chief (CNBC)

• Trump has already put in motion his next effort to subvert upcoming federal elections in 2026 and 2028. This time the call is coming from inside the White House — and that should scare you more than anything. [HuffPost]

• 'Vote him out!': Town hall erupts in anger at Nebraska GOP congressman over Trump megabill, policies (ABC)

• Texas House Republicans vote to issue civil arrest warrants for fleeing Democrats (WP)

• Texas Republicans say 'hunt down' Democrats who are leaving state over redistricting (ABC)

• The vast majority of US adults are stressed about grocery costs (AP-NORC)

• China is winning the trade war Trump started (WP)

• Videos of Israeli hostages in Gaza increase pressure on Netanyahu for a ceasefire (NPR)

• Israel’s Last Chance (Atlantic)

• State Department may require visa applicants to post bond of up to $15,000 to enter the US (AP)

• Russia warns against threats after Trump repositions nuclear submarines (WP)

• A top aide to President Donald Trump accused India of effectively financing Russia's war in Ukraine by purchasing oil from Moscow, after the US leader escalated pressure on New Delhi to stop buying Russian oil. (Reuters)

• Trump Smashed an Obama Legacy Item—Harming Many and Pleasing Few (The 

  Bulwark)

• The Pentagon’s New Isolationism (Atlantic)

• The inside story of the Murdoch editor taking on Donald Trump (Guardian)

• Zuckerberg fired the fact-checkers. We tested their replacement. (WP)

• Los Angeles County has a new task taking care of dogs and cats after their owners were detained or deported in immigration raids that picked up this summer under the Trump administration. From June 10, the county has taken in 28 animals, 22 of whom are dogs. (Reuters)

• The AI job cuts are accelerating (Financial Times)

• How Small Business Can Survive Google’s AI Overview (Forbes)

• Big Tech’s hefty AI spending is reshaping the slowing economy (WP)

• Study: More Americans Converting To Mormonism In Hopes Of Getting Hulu Series (The Onion)

 

Telling Stories

One night recently, I was babysitting my two youngest grandchildren, ages four and six. Their parents were out for the evening and the kids wanted me to tell them a story at bedtime.

Now, I should explain that as a grandfather, I have a certain reputation as a story-teller to uphold, if only in my own mind, so I usually dig deep on these occasions.

“Once upon a time, far far away there was a village where everything was backwards and upside-down,” I started. “All of the people walked backwards, for example, and everything happened in the opposite ways from what we’re used to.”

Thinking quickly, I came up with another example. “Instead of a kid jumping on a trampoline in Backwardsville, the trampoline jumps on the kid!”

This elicited the reactions I’d hoped for as the kids’ eyes opened widely and they laughed delightedly at the thought.”

“What else happened, Grandpa?”

As I stumbled to provide more details, I realized that I had started this story with a strong lede, but I had no idea where the story was going.

After some scrambling, I resolved the story with a series of lame examples of villagers walking backwards, but as the kids settled in for a long summer’s nap, I was aware that my story could have been much better if only I had thought up an ending before getting started.

And that, dear reader, is my advice to young writers (or old ones) hoping to strengthen their story-telling skills. Know where you are going and avoid painting yourself into a corner like I did while babysitting.

The kids’ father (my son) came out with a quip the following day when I was recounting my dilemma that perfectly captures the point.

“Actually, you knew the ending of your story just fine, Dad,” he said, picking up on the backwards theme. “You just didn’t know how it all had started.”

HEADLINES:

• Democrats flee Texas to block Republican redistricting map backed by Trump (BBC)

• Trump and his allies mount a pressure campaign against US elections ahead of the midterms (CNN)

• The Justice Department seeks voter and election information from at least 19 states (AP)

• Trump's jobs data denialism won't fool anyone (Silver Bulletin)

• Larry Summers says Trump's accusations of manipulated jobs numbers are ‘preposterous’ (ABC)

• ICE crackdown imperils Afghans who aided U.S. war effort, lawyers say (WP)

• Inside the ‘Radical Transformation’ of America’s Environmental Role (NYT)

• The First Widespread Cure for HIV Could Be in Children (Wired)

• ‘Self-termination is most likely’: the history and future of societal collapse (Guardian)

• Palestinian activist who helped make Oscar-winning documentary 'No Other Land' killed in the West Bank (NPR)

• Yes, Gen Z Is Staring at You. The Question Is Why. (NYT)

• The uproar over Vogue’s AI-generated ad isn’t just about fashion (TechCrunch)

• Mark Zuckerberg Just Declared War on the iPhone (WSJ)

• A new trend in ‘death care’: AI obituaries (WP)

• 114-Year-Old Attributes Longevity to Sheer Random Chance (The Onion)

MUSIC:

Stop Draggin' My Heart Around - Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers with Stevie Nicks 

Letter from North Islington

The last night I was in London, I started loving the place. Why does it always have to be this way?

(Note: This was written way back in the past century when I was a world traveler.)

Of course, new places make new demands. We’re not all up to that, at least not every time. Certainly not me, not this time. Because I arrived in a deep funk, and not even London could rouse me from it.

Starting at Heathrow, therefore, I pretended I wasn’t here. This was a tested strategy of mine – since I wasn’t really here, then I didn’t have to be depressed or lonely.

A few nights into my visit, which can best be characterized as a miserably ill-timed, wasted week lacking any semblance of utility, I had already tasted all the ports and warm beers London has to offer the casual visitor, and I was getting mighty sick of my dormitory-like accommodations. 

Dormitory, you say? Listen, London is like a Third World country, once you get out of the five-star tourist district, and I was way out from there, stuck in North Islington, which supposedly is a happening place whenever the Labor Party is in power, but not necessarily for a guy down on his luck without any local connections in town to give a forgettable speech at a poorly attended conference..

The desk clerk in my dorm, whom I often visited to buy another minimum-level phone card to place calls back to my homeland, has a lovely way of enunciating “So it’s the two-pound card again, sir, is it?” I love the way she says that, so of course I never buy more than the bare minimum. She is, after all, my main contact with anyone outside of the voices pounding inside my own head during this mistaken week in what otherwise may well be an urban paradise.

Luckily, at this point, I remembered the one good reason to go walking all over the place with such resoluteness. I was there, I remembered somewhat unsteadily, on behalf of my son. The poor boy, survivor of my broken marriage, has always liked leaden soldiers, those wonderfully red-painted figures, with guns and hats that Robert Louis Stevenson arranged on his bedcovers into the Land of Counterpane.

Those leaden soldiers have become politically incorrect where I come from, with lead causing irreversible brain damage and all, but God Save the Queen, I’m sure I can find them here in good old London.

I am like a heat-seeking missile when it comes to finding something my dear son wants; ignoring the fact that he’s grown up now, long past the point of playing with soldiers. There’s no stopping me, a skilled shopper, a mercenary who knows how to penetrate the local culture seamlessly and emerge unscathed, prize in hand.

This, then, actually, is the story of how I found some of those antique leaden soldiers Stevenson wrote about well before they were antiques. It turns out that that miserably upscale neighborhood near my dormitory, the aforementioned North Islington, has a Saturday morning antiques fair. 

Yes! Sort of like a street fair, only the merchants are these craggy old people with crooked faces right out of a Dickens novel. Or maybe Hugo. I think I have found the Master of the House, and where he is operating these days: The back alleys of North Islington.

Well, crafty shopper that I am, I made my way through these twirling alleys, going shop to shop until -- presto! -- I laid my quivering hands on a prized set of truly antique-looking red British leaden soldiers. They had a strangely familiar look to them, in pose and garb, as if maybe my own deep English ancestry was perhaps coming forth, in the form of these charming little figurines, but I dismissed that thought to commence the bartering process. 

That night was to be my last in London. A couple other Americans from the conference showed up at my dormitory room uninvited, just as I was about to buy another phone card from the front desk clerk, and they invited me out to the nearest pub -- apparently for old times sake.

I carefully concealed my soldier treasures inside a ridiculous paper wrapper, under a book, inside my trashcan, and went off with my dear new colleagues to the pub. Once there, we drank ourselves silly. After all, it was out last night together, and though we’d just met, there’s something special about the prospect of separating from new friends such as these. With any luck you'll never see each other again; but if you do, you won’t remember any of the details anyway.

I studied my colleagues for signs of sentience. The hefty one, from someplace in the Midwest, was truly having a life experience here in North Islington. Turns out he’d never before been out of the States, not even out of the Midwest. He liked beer a lot, and he’d had enough in London to be prepared to deliver to all of his relatives and friends a decidedly prosaic trip report.

My other drinking pal reminded me of my younger self. He was thin, dark and brooding. Sophisticated, a world traveler, he knew we were just three castaways, alone for a moment in a place and a time that would never recur. While he was contemplating that, I suddenly noticed (about 3 beers in) how many really cute women there actually were here in this pub.

For example, those two Japanese girls, drinking and laughing and flirting nervously with some rugby types who had just showed up. Or, a table of English girls, one tall and slender, dark-haired and lovely, straight across in my line of sight on the patio of the pub where we were all happily congregating.

At moments like this, time slows to a pleasing crawl. We are serene, in the proper space at the proper time. My colleagues are babbling on, the first about the Midwest and its comforting regularity, the other on the darkness of the world overall. I squint over at my second mate. How is it that the weight of the world has found its way onto him? 

But then, back again, my eyes find the lovely dark-haired girl. Did I mention how much I like English women? With an elegant gesture, she orders another drink, so I buy a round for our table. Drink to drink, we share the evening air, across that crowded patio, she and I. Her voice rises above the others, drifting over to me, as a melody of fragments, note by note.

My drinking buddies are not aware of her, but I am in heaven, nodding to them, whilst observing her all the while, even as her inevitable boyfriend makes his bloody appearance. Slumping against her chair, sharing sloppy toasts with his obviously drunken buddies, he leans on her, with an air of propriety. She pretends to ignore this for a moment, then casts his hand away, but soon enough he resumes his entitled groping.

Across the patio, I am thoroughly sedated by now, vaguely aware the lights have flashed on and off, it’s closing time and my partners are beginning to rise for retirement to our mutual barracks somewhere off to the south. Chairs are being stacked, just out of my peripheral vision, but I am still focused on my angel, the dark-haired beauty with a singsong accent. 

Her motility-challenged boyfriend, so drunk he is peeing in the “bathroom” just beyond where the pub lights reach, will be back soon. Her eyes are dewy and lit, her posture that of a maid in waiting, happily anticipating that she’ll soon be wrapped in his muscled arms, staggering back somewhere, to an apartment here in North Islington.

I am (quite generously) happy for her.

My pals and I stagger home, too, and bid our final adieus. The hefty fellow promises he will eat hamburgers every day for a week when he hits his home ground, and I believe him. My brooding brother, meanwhile, is pondering the meaning of our trip, including all three of our speeches (I’d missed theirs.) 

The next day, floating high over Newfoundland, I retrieve the special leaden treasures from my briefcase and run my fingers lovingly over them, anticipating my boy’s delight, even though he is long past the age of caring about silly gifts like these.

My seatmate, a fellow built not unlike my Midwestern pal at the pub, lacks all discretion, and so breaks into my reverie. “Hey, aren’t those the Beefeaters figures -- you know, the guys on the liquor bottles? The ones they give out as promos?”

“Ah,” I murmur deftly, covering up my utter sense of deflation. “But hard to find in this condition, you know, since they are the pristine original issue. Limited editions. Mint. Straight from the source -- North Islington.”

Shrugging, he turned back to his wrestling magazine, and I to my reverie. 

One Day

(This particular day was in 2011, 14 years ago.)

Early morning in a heavy rain.

Phone call; you're suddenly alert. Nope, the baby, a grandchild, is not coming, not yet. But, after a couple of sick days, another one of your kids needs a ride to school.

Sure.

On the way to my car, I see a woman from behind in a black coat and black tights with a girl, probably 9, in a pink coat and pink tights, hurrying through the rain, no doubt also on their way to school.

As I drive up to and around Bernal Hill, a flood of brown water is flowing south. 

Back home, later, the phone rings again. I don't hear it; I'm deep into preparing to deliver a speech tonight on behalf of a program I care about.

When I catch up to the message, it is the third time in three days that one of my kids' schools is calling; this is the third of the three, which means now it's my daughter’s turn to be sick.

Back home, with her wrapped in a comforter and sipping tea, I start wondering what would happen if I actually got a real job?

A friend calls --"It's getting better out there," he says, "I'm seeing more jobs for people like us."

The cellphone company sends an urgent text -- apparently my bill is overdue again, a monthly occurrence. I have a family plan, which includes me, my three youngest kids, and someone I used to know. 

It’s funny about euphemisms — they just pop up when you need them. 

The rains continue. A tree goes down nearby. I post to my weekly blog about what the tech industry is doing in San Francisco. I put on a white shirt, nice slacks, and a sports coat (I don't wear ties.)

Checking how I look in the mirror, I ask my daughter, who's observing me from her sick bed. "What do you think, jeans or the nice pants?"

"I like those ones (the nice ones)," she says. That's it, a decision is made. She is not only my chief fashion consultant, at the age of twelve she is the main woman in my daily life, the one whose judgment I trust implicitly.

Soon enough it is time to take her back to her Mom's, back over Bernal Hill, where an even bigger brown river now heads south and an even bigger tree nearby has gone down, blocking Folsom Street.

As we are arriving, her brothers show up, home via buses from their high schools, with backpacks and wet sweatshirts.

She hugs me as I drop her off.

"'Good luck with the speech, Dad. You'll be great."

So I drive away, carefully avoiding the mess on Folsom, towards downtown to a hotel ballroom where a room full of adults is gathering. They’ll decide whether what I have to say matters or not. 

A song comes on the radio. It's Radiohead: "Creep.”

HEADLINES:

• Corporation for Public Broadcasting, funder of NPR and PBS, says it will end operations within months after federal budget cuts (CBS)

• Corporation for Public Broadcasting says it's shutting down (NPR)

• US employers slash hiring as Trump advances a punishing trade agenda (AP)

• Trump says sharper tariffs to take effect in a week but 35% rate for Canada starts immediately (WP)

• Trump fires commissioner of labor statistics after weaker-than-expected jobs figures slam markets (CNBC)

• This is what dictators do (Gavin Newsom/Twitter)

• The labor market is showing big cracks that were invisible just weeks ago (Axios)

• The job market is showing signs of weakness as Trump's tariffs take effect (NPR)

• How American Power Should Be Deployed (Atlantic)

• The EPA Just Issued Its Most Damaging Climate Change Move Ever (Slate)

• 'Fire clouds' over Arizona and Utah wildfires are creating their own erratic climate (AP)

• Federal Reserve governor to resign early, handing Trump an immediate opening on board (WP)

• The California Governor’s Race Was in Limbo. Now It’s Wide Open. (NYT)

• How the United Nations is funded, and who pays the most (Pew)

• As the United Nations lays off staff, can the world still come together to make a difference? (The Conversation)

• What humans can learn from some of history’s greatest zoo escapes (WP)

• Inside the Summit Where China Pitched Its AI Agenda to the World (Wired)

• A.I. Researchers Are Negotiating $250 Million Pay Packages. Just Like N.B.A. Stars. (NYT)

• Hundreds Of Years Of Race, Class Privilege Allow Man Extra Legroom (The Onion)

The Fisherman

Squirreled away in one of my boxes of old files I found a portfolio of papers left behind by my father. It must have fallen into my hands in the days following his death from a stroke in 1999.

There’s a small notebook that he took with him when he joined the Army Air Corps in October 1942. He reported to Fort Custer in Michigan, the shipped out to Keesler Field in Mississippi, on to the Tech School Squadron in Chicago, and ultimately to the Aviation Cadet Center in San Antonio before going overseas.

Although he didn’t see combat during the war, he served as a stenographer at the war crimes tribunal at Nuremberg.

In the inside cover of his journal, he documented his promotions from PVT to PFC to CPL to SGT, etc. On the very first page is a faded B&W photo of his Mom, then one of my big sister Nancy (10 years older than me), then the first of many shots of our mother — mainly of her taking golf swings — plus his own three sisters, a 1930s car, one of his his brothers, two of his brothers-in-law, and some Army buddies and their wives and a few of him fishing.

He must have thumbed through this many, many times while away from home.

Although he told me stories about his life, I never was fully able in imagine what it had been like for him, born in 1916, growing up on a small farm in Canada, the youngest of six kids, losing his father at the age of ten, then leaving the farm with his mother to live in town (London, Ontario) for a short while, before on to Detroit as “nickel immigrants.”

Five cents was the cost of crossing the river on the ferry in the 1920s, and therefore pretty much the cost of citizenship in the USA — for those of the right European descent.

Because he was the youngest, it turned out that my father outlived all of hIs siblings, surviving just longer than his sister Norma, who passed away a year before him. Accordingly, he ended up with many of his siblings’ official documents — birth certificates, an application for citizenship in the U.S., a social security card, wedding certificates, photos, and finally, their death certificates.

Two of his sisters died with no other surviving relatives, so he became the sole custodian of their life chronicles.

Now it’s all with me.

As far as I can tell, none of my Dad’s siblings left any writings behind to document their lives — no journals or letters, just a few faded photographs and those yellowed documents.

My Dad was another matter, however. Inside a manilla folder marked “Manuscript” he left a combination of handwritten and typed pages, apparently a short story or novel that he started to write. There are notes, an outline, and a certain amount of narrative.

Early in his manuscript, there is this: “The world is divided into two kinds of people, those who must fish and those who can’t understand.” 

HEADLINES:

• White House Announces Sweeping New Tariffs for Much of the World (NYT)

• Trump Sees Emergencies Everywhere. Judges Are Considering Whether to Rein Him In. (WSJ)

• Appellate judges question Trump’s authority to impose tariffs without Congress (AP)

• At least 91 killed seeking aid in Gaza as US envoy Steve Witkoff visits Israel (Guardian)

• Live updates: Mexico gets a 90-day extension as Trump’s tariff deadline looms (AP)

• Trump intensified his trade war with Canada, saying it would be "very hard" to make a deal after Canada gave its support to Palestinian statehood. (Reuters)

• ‘A Democrat bloodbath’: With Kamala Harris out of CA governor's race, an intraparty battle begins (Politico)

• The $87 Trillion Bill That Comes From Denying Reality (Bloomberg)

• Washington Post talent exodus fuels speculation about its future (Axios)

• The world’s most popular children’s entertainer took a stand online. Then came the backlash. (WP)

• Every Scientific Empire Comes to an End (Atlantic)

• Iranian president says country is on brink of dire water crisis (Reuters)

• Islamic State and al-Qaida threat is intense in Africa, with growing risks in Syria, UN experts say (AP)

• Can San Francisco Be Saved? (Atlantic)

• ChatGPT: Everything you need to know about the AI-powered chatbot (TechCrunch)

• Meta Shares Soar as Ad Business Continues to Fuel AI Ambitions (WSJ)

• ‘Superintelligence’ Will Create a New Era of Empowerment, Mark Zuckerberg Says (NYT)

• Study Finds Refreshingly Low Amount Of Shovel Violence (The Onion)

MUSIC:

ROY ORBISON "Crying" w/ K.D. LANG - 1988 Top of the Pops