Everybody goes to the theater in the U.K. because it’s accessible. Tickets are affordable. So many theaters are government subsidized, and there are all kinds of schemes where you get £5, £10, and £15 tickets. So there’s a kind of democracy to the whole thing. In New York, theaters are dependent on their subscribers, and everything is based around not losing them. Because without them, these buildings will shut down. The rent on a Broadway space is 10 times the rent of a West End space. The cheapest ticket you can get, even for Off Broadway, is $80. That means you go out for dinner, and you’re out close to $200 in a night. Nobody can afford it, and this makes it very exclusive. If you limit the audience to wealthy, older white people, it changes the type of play you can put on. Don’t get me wrong, the theater community in New York is beautiful—I absolutely love and adore it—but the commerce of it is just a different beast.

I think there’s a lot of pressure in the United States to become a famous person in a way that people in the U.K. don’t really give a shit about. You can work there and be a successful theater actor without having to have a big name. In the U.S., I felt like if I didn’t get some kind of TV visibility, those theater parts might dry up. Because they need to sell tickets, and famous people sell tickets.

Bill and Alec did such a nuanced job of writing a complicated female character who’s as nasty as the male characters on the Barry. But Sally’s not a bad person. She just learned the wrong survival skills. And her ideas of how to get ahead are bit misguided. We’re all so ready to forget that Barry literally kills people for a living and still root for him, and yet we’re challenged by an ambitious woman who has some irritating personality traits.

Another thing I can trace back to Peter is the idea of talent bat-signals. Having started my own company now (in stealth for the moment), I appreciate this a lot more: recruiting good people is hard, and you need a differentiated source of talent. If you’re just competing against Facebook/Google for the same set of Stanford CS grads every year, you’re going to lose. That means you need a set of talent that is (a) interested in joining you in particular, over other companies (b) a way of reaching them at scale. Palantir had several differentiated sources of recruiting alpha.

But doesn’t the military sometimes do bad things? Of course - I was opposed to the Iraq war. This gets to the crux of the matter: working at the company was neither 100% morally good — because sometimes we’d be helping agencies that had goals I’d disagree with — nor 100% bad: the government does a lot of good things, and helping them do it more efficiently by providing software that doesn’t suck is a noble thing. One way of clarifying the morality question is to break down the company’s work into three buckets – these categories aren’t perfect, but bear with me: Morally neutral. Normal corporate work, e.g. FedEx, CVS, finance companies, tech companies, and so on. Some people might have a problem with it, but on the whole people feel fine about these things. Unambiguously good. For example, anti-pandemic response with the CDC; anti-child pornography work with NCMEC; and so on. Most people would agree these are good things to work on. Grey areas. By this I mean ‘involve morally thorny, difficult decisions’: examples include health insurance, immigration enforcement, oil companies, the military, spy agencies, police/crime, and so on.

The critical case against Palantir seemed to be something like “you shouldn’t work on category 3 things, because sometimes this involves making morally bad decisions”. An example was immigration enforcement during 2016-2020, aspects of which many people were uncomfortable with.

I don’t believe there is a clear answer to whether you should work with category 3 customers; it’s a case by case thing. Palantir’s answer to this is something like “we will work with most category 3 organizations, unless they’re clearly bad, and we’ll trust the democratic process to get them trending in a good direction over time”. Thus: On the ICE question, they disengaged from ERO (Enforcement and Removal Operations) during the Trump era, while continuing to work with HSI (Homeland Security Investigations). They did work with most other category 3 organizations, on the argument that they’re mostly doing good in the world, even though it’s easy to point to bad things they did as well. I can’t speak to specific details here, but Palantir software is partly responsible for stopping multiple terror attacks. I believe this fact alone vindicates this stance.

This is an uncomfortable stance for many, precisely because you’re not guaranteed to be doing 100% good at all times. You’re at the mercy of history, in some ways, and you’re betting that (a) more good is being done than bad (b) being in the room is better than not. This was good enough for me. Others preferred to go elsewhere. The danger of this stance, of course, is that it becomes a fully general argument for doing whatever the power structure wants. You are just amplifying existing processes. This is where the ‘case by case’ comes in: there’s no general answer, you have to be specific. For my own part, I spent most of my time there working on healthcare and bio stuff, and I feel good about my contributions.

by making the company about something other than making money (civil liberties; AI god) you attract true believers from the start, who in turn create the highly generative intellectual culture that persists once you eventually find success.

Palantir does data integration for companies, but the data is owned by the companies – not Palantir. “Mining” data usually means using somebody else’s data for your own profits, or selling it. Palantir doesn’t do that - customer data stays with the customer.

Former and current staffers paint a picture of an erratic senator who has become almost impossible to work for and whose mental-health situation is more serious and complicated than previously reported. No one is saying every controversial position (for example, his respectful relationship with Trump) stems from his mental health — but it’s become harder for them to tell which ones do. When I spoke with Fetterman in April and shared those concerns, he denied anything was amiss. He told me that he felt like the “best version” of himself and later texted that the staff turnover at his office was typical of Washington. “Why is this a story?” he asked.

Those first days in the hospital were rough. Fetterman was experiencing delusions. He thought that if he took a bed at the hospital, he would be arrested. He told doctors that he believed members of his family were wearing wires to secretly record him. In one chaotic moment, Fetterman grew convinced that a political rally was being held in the hospital’s lobby and that he needed to break out of his room to attend. David Williamson, Fetterman’s doctor, told me that the main causes of the delusions were the lingering effects of the stroke, dehydration, and depression and that the original medication for the depression could also have been a factor. According to paperwork from Walter Reed, doctors then stopped all antidepressants and put him on other drugs. (Williamson declined to comment on the specifics of the medication plan.)

After six weeks in the hospital, the doctors determined his mental-health issues were in remission. Williamson said, “He expressed a firm commitment to treatment over the long term.” Doctors provided Fetterman with a multi-faceted treatment approach. He needed to stay on his medication and to get his blood checked regularly. It was also important that he stay hydrated, so staff made sure his office fridge remained stocked with Gatorade. He needed to eat healthy and get regular exercise (this was both for his mental health and for the underlying heart problems that had led to his stroke). It was also strongly suggested that he stay off social media, which exacerbated his mental-health challenges. “I’ve never noticed anyone to believe that their mental health has been supported by spending any kind of time on social media,” he said in 2023.

it wasn’t until October 7 that it became clear Fetterman was the most outspoken Israel hawk in his party, offering constant and unconditional support for the military action in Gaza. Early on in the conflict, 16 of his former campaign staffers wrote a letter — anonymously — saying they found his full-throated support for Israel to be a “gutting betrayal.” Jentleson had taken to defending Fetterman on X from such criticisms, posting, “The thing about being a staffer is that no one elected you to represent them.”

In early November, just weeks after the attack, Gisele arrived at her husband’s Senate office and, according to a staffer present, they got into a heated argument. “They are bombing refugee camps. How can you support this?” the staffer recalled her saying with tears in her eyes. “That’s all propaganda,” Fetterman replied. Later, a still visibly upset Gisele pulled the staffer aside. She asked him if members of Fetterman’s team were pushing him to take these stances for political reasons. The staffer told her that the opposite was true: Many of them were as upset as she was. “If you’re pushing back on this, there’s no hope,” the staffer recalled her saying. “This is horrible news.”

Gisele might have disliked what her husband was up to, but his father loved it. Karl Fetterman, an insurance executive, was way more conservative than his son. He used to have a magnet on his refrigerator that warned that his dog bites Democrats, and he watched Fox News constantly. When Fox would air segments about Fetterman’s strong stances on Israel or invite him on as a guest, the senator’s father would, according to former staff, almost always call to say how proud he was.

Gisele then texted that she had told her husband that his staff and doctor were worried about him but that he told her “that’s not true and I guess I am not talking to you today” before hanging up. The doctor had also “said that he was fighting to get access of the Twitter account,” she went on. “Please promise me that he’ll never have access.” The staffer said that Fetterman was asking for the passwords but that he would not give them up. “I told him I don’t want to talk to him until his blood is tested,” Gisele wrote.

There was also the possibility that Fetterman’s illness had drawn out or intensified his existing predilections. In some ways, Fetterman was being the guy voters sent to Congress. He keeps to himself? He cancels fundraising events last minute? He thinks a lot of his colleagues are morons? Make him president already! He was never a particularly easy person to work with — he’d had that reputation throughout his entire political career. So sometimes the staff would debate whether a fundamental change had occurred or they were just imagining things, particularly since there were stretches of time when he was lucid and together. “It got hard to know which way was up,” Jentleson told me. “Was he acting crazy, or were we overreacting? I asked myself that a lot.”

Years after the stroke, Fetterman continues to struggle with auditory processing. To chat with me, he had put an iPhone on the table that transcribed my questions to him in real time. Sometimes Fetterman wouldn’t finish reading a question before answering, and other times his sentences could come out a bit garbled. After a podcast taping earlier this year with The Bulwark, the interviewer Tim Miller came away feeling like Fetterman might not be all there. “He’s struggling,” Miller said in a separate podcast taping. “He’s, like, really struggling. And I just think coming off of the Biden thing, we should not be hiding the ball on this sort of stuff.”

But in my conversation with Fetterman, I didn’t find any indication that the stroke had left him cognitively impaired. Our interview lasted just over an hour, during the first half of which he seemed excited to discuss just about anything I threw at him. He had problems with the way Democrats had estranged themselves from the public, he said, but still had no intention of leaving the party to become a Republican or even an independent: “Same chance I’m going to end up with a beautiful head of hair.”

He said that no one in his staff would know about his personal health situation and that anyone who told me otherwise was simply misinformed. “There’s not really anything to respond when that’s just not accurate,” he said. “What they say,” I pressed on, “is that they’ve witnessed ups and downs that could be associated with kind of a relapse. And they also worry that the medication that you’re on is not just for depression, but more serious drugs that if you’re not on them would be a problem. Is there truth to that?” “I don’t have any comment on that,” he said. “I’m going to go off record. Go off record. Go off record.” I cannot report what Fetterman said over the course of the next four minutes, but I can say that after he was done talking, I found myself in the hallway outside his office making awkward small talk with one of his press aides. Five minutes later, the door opened and I was ushered back in. The office felt different now. Quiet and tense. Fetterman was still in the same chair but slumped into himself, like a deflated parade float. His shoes were now on, and he avoided looking at me. Finally, I broke the silence. “Anything to say about that?” I asked, hoping to pick up our conversation where we had left off.

Question 2: What does age teach you about love? Shannon: Oh my God. Oh, dear. Martin: Oh no. Is that a good "oh my God" or a bad one? Shannon: No, it just moved me. They're very linked obviously. I think when you're young, love can be very self-serving. You want love from other people. You want to have love. It's something you want for yourself because it feels, you know, wonderful to feel like you're loved. And then as you get older, you realize that it's probably ultimately more important to love others regardless of what you get in return. It becomes hopefully less transactional and more just a state of being, you know? Which is — can be hard to accept. It's actually kind of going back to that place that I was at when I was younger, where I was, you know, OK being alone — but with a new, with more, I don't know, more wisdom, some sort of wisdom that I've accrued along the way, hopefully.

You know, when you act, you create these little societies or civilizations to create some piece of art. And then you finish and they disappear. And it's kind of like the rhythm of my life. And there's certain relationships that carry on through those. Or people that you work with on multiple occasions. But for the most part, you get very accustomed to things not being stable or things changing.

Maybe, suggests the defeated interviewer, "Inland Empire" should be approached like James Joyce's "Finnegans Wake": Accessible as lyrical art, but filled with puzzles for those wanting to go deeper. Lynch nods, swigging one of his tepid cappuccinos. "Yes, with James Joyce, word combinations conjure things. He uses them as an art form and a language for abstractions. Cinema is its own language. As the sound and picture get going and things begin to happen, it can get pretty abstract, but it's a language that says something that can't be said in words -- or maybe could, by a poet."

"I like films that hold abstractions," he says. " 'Getting it' is a subjective thing, because we're all different, and each interpretation is as valid as another. The audience is putting things together as they go. If there's a bump in the intellectual understanding, let it happen. Have that experience, and then later mull things over. Let intuition kick in. It's a higher knowingness. If you try to put it into concrete terms, you're gonna block it."

Steve didn’t just read a script for the presentation. He’d been telling a version of that same story every single day for months and months during development—to us, to his friends, his family. He was constantly working on it, refining it. Every time he’d get a puzzled look or a request for clarification from his unwitting early audience, he’d sand it down, tweak it slightly, until it was perfectly polished.

He talked for a while about regular mobile phones and smartphones and the problems of each before he dove into the features of the new iPhone. He used a technique I later came to call the virus of doubt. It’s a way to get into people’s heads, remind them about a daily frustration, get them annoyed about it all over again. If you can infect them with the virus of doubt—“maybe my experience isn’t as good as I thought, maybe it could be better”—then you prime them for your solution. You get them angry about how it works now so they can get excited about a new way of doing things.

when I say “story,” I don’t just mean words. Your product’s story is its design, its features, images and videos, quotes from customers, tips from reviewers, conversations with support agents. It’s the sum of what people see and feel about this thing that you’ve created.

When you get wrapped up in the “what,” you get ahead of people. You think everyone can see what you see. But they don’t. They haven’t been working on it for weeks, months, years. So you need to pause and clearly articulate the “why” before you can convince anyone to care about the “what.”

That’s the case no matter what you make—even if you sell B2B payments software. Even if you build deep-tech solutions for customers who don’t exist yet. Even if you sell lubricants to a factory that’s been buying the same thing for twenty years.

If your competitors are telling better stories than you, if they’re playing the game and you’re not, then it doesn’t matter if their product is worse. They will get the attention. To any customers, investors, partners, or talent doing a cursory search, they will appear to be the leaders in the category. The more people talk about them, the greater their mind share, and the more people will talk about them.

A good story is an act of empathy. It recognizes the needs of its audience. And it blends facts and feelings so the customer gets enough of both. First you need enough instincts and concrete information that your argument doesn’t feel too floaty and insubstantial. It doesn’t have to be definitive data, but there has to be enough to feel meaty, to convince people that you’re anchored in real facts. But you can overdo it—if your story is only informational, then it’s entirely possible that people will agree with you but decide it’s not compelling enough to act on just yet. Maybe next month. Maybe next year.

So you have to appeal to their emotions—connect with something they care about. Their worries, their fears. Or show them a compelling vision of the future: give a human example. Walk through how a real person will experience this product—their day, their family, their work, the change they’ll experience. Just don’t lean so far into the emotional connection that what you’re arguing for feels novel, but not necessary.

And always remember that your customers’ brains don’t always work like yours. Sometimes your rational argument will make an emotional connection. Sometimes your emotional story will give people the rational ammunition to buy your product. Certain Nest customers looked at the beautiful thermostat that we lovingly crafted to appeal to their heart and soul and said, “Sure, okay. It’s pretty” and then had a thrilled, emotional reaction to the potential of saving twenty-three dollars on their energy bill.

everyone will read your story differently. That’s why analogies can be such a useful tool in storytelling. They create a shorthand for complicated concepts—a bridge directly to a common experience.

That’s another thing I learned from Steve Jobs. He’d always say that analogies give customers superpowers. A great analogy allows a customer to instantly grasp a difficult feature and then describe that feature to others. That’s why “1,000 songs in your pocket” was so powerful. Everyone had CDs and tapes in bulky players that only let you listen to 10-15 songs, one album at a time. So “1,000 songs in your pocket” was an incredible contrast—it let people visualize this intangible thing—all the music they loved all together in one place, easy to find, easy to hold—and gave them a way to tell their friends and family why this new iPod thing was so cool.

Because to truly understand many of the features of our products, you’d need a deep well of knowledge about HVAC systems and power grids and the way smoke refracts through a laser to detect fire—knowledge almost nobody had. So we cheated. We didn’t try to explain everything. We just used an analogy. I remember there was one complex feature that was designed to lighten the load on power plants on the hottest or coldest days of the year when everyone cranked up the heat or AC at once. It usually came down to just a few hours in the afternoon, a few days a year—one or more coal power plants would be brought on line to avoid blackouts. So we designed a feature that predicted when these moments would come, then the Nest Thermostat would crank the AC or heat up extra before the crucial peak hours and turn it down when everyone else was turning it up. Anyone who signed up for the program got a credit on their energy bill. As more and more people joined the program, the result was a win-win—people stayed comfortable, they saved money, and the energy companies didn’t have to turn on their dirtiest plants. And that is all well and good, but it just took me 150 word to explain. So after countless hours of thinking about it and trying all the possible solutions, we settled on doing it in three: Rush Hour Rewards.

Everyone understands the concept of rush hour—the moment when way too many people get on the road together and traffic slows to a creep. Same thing happens with energy. We didn’t need to explain much more than that—rush hours are a problem, but when there’s an energy rush hour, you can get something out of it. You can get a reward. You can actually save money rather than getting stuck with everyone else.

Quick stories are easy to remember. And, more importantly, easy to repeat. Someone else telling your story will always reach more people and do more to convince them to buy your product than any amount of talking you do about yourself on your own platforms. You should always be striving to tell a story so good that it stops being yours—so your customer learns it, loves it, internalizes it, owns it. And tells it to everyone they know.

A good product story has three elements: It appeals to people’s rational and emotional sides. It takes complicated concepts and makes them simple. It reminds people of the problem that’s being solved—it focuses on the “why.”

They are simply lovers who experience a passing connection. Their search for something deeper (which eventually takes them on an ayahuasca trip overseen by a shaman played by an unrecognisable Lesley Manville) is thwarted by what the director calls the “asynchronous” nature of their dynamic.

How loud was the conversation back then over authentic casting? “It was never even discussed,” Craig says, looking askance. Guadagnino is equally dismissive: “Sexuality is not one thing. Is it five things, is it seven? There is no such thing as ‘the gay’.” Craig has another thought: “Sexuality is a very modern idea,” he says. “People’s sexuality, or whatever they desire, is as individual as a fingerprint.”

Does sharing a vocation reduce the chances of being asynchronous? “No, it enhances them because film-makers are radical narcissists who just want to do their own thing. It’s a disaster.”

Guadagnino goes into splutter mode again. “I would never put myself on the same shelf as Daniel. Come on, he’s an icon! I’m a grey, balding Italian-Algerian director who’s made some movies. I’m boring.” Craig leans forward: “So am I. Let’s say I wasn’t famous, and I was a free agent. It either happens or it doesn’t happen. Those moments are magic. I think of moments like that from my life and, my God, they’re electrifying. Whereas if you’re out on the prowl, that’s really sad. And look, Lee sort of was on the prowl. But he wasn’t looking for what he found with Allerton. That’s what I’m interested in capturing as an artist. The moment where you go, ‘Oh fuck!’”

Guadagnino reminded me that as we come of age, we decide for ourselves what informs us, and spoke to the first time he read Burroughs. “You enter into the language of Burroughs and you understand, at 17 years old, that there are ways we can express ourselves that are so wide, sophisticated, complicated, and that you never have to adapt to a logic that is preordained.”

Burroughs in fact traveled there in 1952; The Yage Letters chronicles his experiments in his letters to Ginsberg. He was obsessed with the idea that yage could enhance telepathy. In the hallucinatory new scenes, the connection between Lee and Allerton goes to places the earthbound book could never take it.

When the screenplay is his own, firmly in Guadagnino’s hands, it’s actually fabulous — and a relief after the earlier conflict between the director and his material. At the same time, it makes no sense. That’s the most Burroughsian nod in this film: the sheer randomness and trippy outrageousness of the end. It’s very Naked Lunch — both the book and David Cronenberg’s 1991 film inspired by Burroughs, which was clearly on Guadagnino’s mind.

It’s paying more of a tribute to an adaptation of a different Burroughs book, a film that feels genuinely Burroughsian but has less of a basis in the underlying text than his own. Something is off, the essential is missing, and this may be why I didn’t feel Burroughs’s spirit.

still, I wept through scenes of Guadagnino’s film — including a hallucinatory reference to Joan’s death in which Lee does the same failed William Tell routine with Allerton — but it wasn’t for Joan or Burroughs; it was for James’s lover Michael Emerton, who  killed himself with a   gun. I wept as this beautifully designed movie, with gorgeous men in well-cut suits, gave me time to think about the karmic connections that both blessed and cursed me. I wept for Billy Jr., whose mother Burroughs had killed. Then I wept for Burroughs, and I wept for Joan.

I wept for the portrayal of transactional sex that was the “romance” the director referred to. I wept as I questioned notions of intent and integrity in transactional relationships: mine with younger, troubled men who lived on the fringes of gay culture; Burroughs’s with James; and James’s with me. Those relationships, for better or worse, follow the karmic path laid down for me 40-plus years ago. That karma, at least for me, as I flew through the past making sense of it, was neutralized by the acceptance of its very existence, its painful impact on me and those affected by it, and, finally, by releasing it. That was Guadagnino’s gift to me.

Most poignantly, I wept for James, who lives alone, unable to walk, with a brain injury that was inflicted during a gay bashing and made worse by his falls at home and sustaining further concussions. But there has been some nice news for him, as a double LP of his work as a singer-songwriter is being released on Lotuspool Records. And he told me he liked Guadagnino’s Queer — though he quibbled with the casting and look of Allerton — and that’s even better news. Guadagnino liked hearing that

On the Zoom with Guadagnino and Anderson, I wanted to ask about legacy. Are there responsibilities we who make art or work in the arts have to our elders, to the radical spirits who pushed open the doors? I mentioned the affluent gay men, usually heteronormatively married, who “rent a womb” and maybe buy an egg to drop in it so their children have their genes — all of which seems to me to be the furthest thing from queer. In response, some signifiers were mentioned. Anderson speaks to the look of the film, citing George Platt Lynes’s influence; they both chimed in about Powell and Pressburger (the Archers), of The Red Shoes; I mentioned Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s adaptation of Jean Genet’s Querelle, which Guadagnino said, indeed, influenced him. The point has been missed, and the clock is ticking. I move on, disappointed.

Will this film ignite a radical spark in younger viewers — be they queer or not? That’s what Burroughs did for me and for many, many of his readers

The craftsmanship of the film is sterling on many levels. But it is not the book I know by the writer I knew so well. It is stylish in the modality of fashion — having a “look”; it is beautiful in its entirety as a complete visual construction. It is, essentially, a gay location film. It is romantic, something of a travelogue — you might want to go where it is set, eat at the restaurants, while wearing the clothing, certainly in the company of some of the flawless boys cast. But it is not the world that the book conjures for most readers, certainly not me. This is the work of the director — as any film should be.

Still, a bad match of director and material renders confusion at best, emptiness at worst; I worried that this film could potentially misconstrue the importance of Burroughs’s role as a visionary queer writer for future generations. I was incapable of explaining this to Guadagnino and Anderson, in our 20-minute Zoom, not to mention it might have stopped the interview. But I tried.

It wasn’t just the peculiar casting of a beefy daddy like Daniel Craig as the Burroughs character, William Lee, or pretty Drew Starkey as the aloof, younger love interest, Eugene Allerton, who spends the film looking great in fabulous knitwear by Jonathan Anderson, Guadagnino’s friend and the film’s costume designer, but nothing like the image of the character I had in my head.

I don’t think we were clear enough by saying fewer people came in under President Biden than came under Donald Trump. It’s clarity of the message, and if that’s what Bernie’s talking about, and that’s what Joe Manchin’s talking about, we weren’t clear in our message as to what things are, then I agree with that. And that was one of the concerns I expressed about saying we haven’t put forth what was done. It’s our legacy, too. [Pelosi bangs on the table.] The rescue package. [Pelosi bangs on the table.] Infrastructure Bill. [Pelosi bangs on the table again.] The CHIPS Act. But that didn’t come across as well as it should have. So I think if you’re talking about messaging, you’re talking about communications, that’s one thing. If you’re talking about what we stand for versus what they stand for, the public’s in for a big surprise.

I think that any vice president is, like it or not, tied to the record of the president. I think what Biden did was great, and being tied to his record is a great thing but not the way the record was perceived. This is a record of job creation. Sixteen million jobs as opposed to the record of her opponent who had the worst job-creation record since Herbert Hoover. Yes, 16 million jobs, turning around inflation, all the things that we did to build the infrastructure of America, reduce the cost of prescription drugs.

President Trump has promised to use the Justice Department and the attorney general to go after his perceived enemies. He has said that over and over again, and you’re one of them. Well, you would think that that would be enough reason for people not to vote for him. But that’s what he said. So when people say to me, “Why do you think our democracy is in danger?” I’ll say, well, let’s define our democracy. What is democracy? Free and fair elections? Peaceful transfer of power, independence of the judiciary, the rule of law, all of those kinds of things are part of a democracy. So if he’s going after those things, and thank God, the only, shall we say, peace of mind that we have today is that we don’t have the assault on the system that would have been there had Kamala Harris won. That isn’t right. It shouldn’t be that way. And that he would say — maybe thought it, might even want to do it, but to say it and the American people will say, “That’s OK with me ”?

In the beginning, VFA was an institution beloved by many of its fellows. “It was a wonderful way to leave college and enter the real world because you’re surrounded by a community and there’s support from the organization,” says Jamie Norwood, co-founder of feminine hygiene brand Winx Health. Norwood and her co-founder, Cynthia Plotch, are a VFA success story. They met as fellows in 2015 and VFA eventually helped them launch their company with a grant and advisement. “We always say, Winx Health would not be here without VFA,” Norwood says.

Norwood and Plotch went through the standard VFA admissions protocol, which was rigorous. It required two written applications, a video interview, and in-person interviews at an event called “Selection Day,” many of which were held in New York City and Detroit over the years. By the end of each university term in May, accepted fellows would get access to Connect, VFA’s job portal, and have until November to land a job. For each fellow hired in a full-time job, VFA received a $5,000 placement fee, paid by partner companies. This fee became a crucial revenue stream for the organization—effectively wedding the professional success of its fellows to its bottom line.

Selection Day interviews were conducted by judges who often pitted interviewees against each other. Candidates were told to organize themselves in order of least to most likely to be successful, or according to whose answers had the most value per word. The format felt ruthless. “People cried” during the interview process, Plotch remembers.

The problems with the business bled into the fellows’ experience in 2023 and 2024, leaving them disenchanted, financially struggling, or expelled en masse from the program for reasons they believe were beyond their control. Despite a multitude of financial red flags, VFA leadership still insisted on recruiting for the 2024 class. “The talent team was traveling nonstop, using prepaid Visa cards since the corporate cards didn’t work,” explains a former director who worked closely with fellows.

Onboarding fresh recruits became increasingly crucial if VFA was going to survive. The organization asked companies for placement fees upfront in 2023, according to internal VFA documents and conversations with former employees. The policy change gave companies pause. Fewer companies signed up as partners, meaning fellows weren’t getting jobs and VFA was losing money.

In the spring of 2023, “there were 15 jobs on opening day,” for a class that eventually grew to over 100 fellows, the former director explains. Gabriella Rudnik, a 2023 fellow, estimates that when training camp began in July 2023, less than half of her peers had jobs, “whereas in previous years it would be closer to like 80 percent.”

Fellows were made to pay the price for the shortage of companies partnering with VFA in 2023. “We weren’t getting more jobs on Connect, and that’s what led to so many fellows being off-boarded,” explains a former director who worked closely with fellows.

Traditionally, VFA gave fellows a deadline of November of their class year to find a job, which typically meant a few stragglers were given extra help to find a position if they were late. In those rare cases during earlier years, fellows were offboarded by the organization, a former director says.

In previous years, expulsion was a much more serious and infrequent occurrence. “Removal from the fellowship was not something done lightly. During my tenure, we instituted an internal investigation process, similar to an HR investigation,” says the former executive who worked at VFA from 2017-20.  In total, at least 40 fellows from the 2023 class were expelled for failing to get jobs that weren’t available, according to research by former VFA fellows who tracked the number of fellows purged from a Slack channel. Records of their participation were removed from the VFA website, the fellows say.

Many fellows had made sacrifices to be part of the highly selective and prestigious VFA, which cited acceptance rates of around 10 percent of applicants. “There were fellows who turned down six-figure jobs to be a part of this program, and were told that the program that Andrew Yang started would live up to its reputation,” says Paul Ford, a 2024 fellow.

Though internal documents show that VFA was slowly imploding for months, in all external communications with fellows, the nonprofit still maintained that 2024 training camp would take place in Detroit.

“From an ethical perspective, it does reek of being problematic,” says Thad Calabrese, a professor of nonprofit management at New York University. “You entered into an arrangement with people who don’t have a lot of money, who believed that you were going to make them whole. Then you’re going to turn around and not make them whole.”

people mix up two very different types of pivots and that it’s important to differentiate which path you’re on: Ideation pivots: This is when an early-stage startup changes its idea before having a fully formed product or meaningful traction. These pivots are easy to make, normally happen quickly after launch, and the new idea is often completely unrelated to the previous one. For example, Brex went from VR headsets to business banking, Retool went from Venmo for the U.K. to a no-code internal tools app, and Okta went from reliability monitoring to identity management all in under three months. YouTube changed direction from a dating site to a video streaming platform in less than a week. Hard pivots: This is when a company with a live product and real users/customers changes direction. In these cases, you are truly “pivoting”—keeping one element of the previous idea and doubling down on it. For example, Instagram stripped down its check-in app and went all in on its photo-sharing feature, Slack on its internal chat tool, and Loom on its screen recording feature. Occasionally a pivot is a mix of the two (i.e. you’re pivoting multiple times over 1+ years), but generally, when you’re following the advice below, make sure you’re clear on which category you’re in.

When looking at the data, a few interesting trends emerged: Ideation pivots generally happen within three months of launching your original idea. Note, a launch at this stage is typically just telling a bunch of your friends and colleagues about it. Hard pivots generally happen within two years after launch, and most around the one-year mark. I suspect the small number of companies that took longer regret not changing course earlier.

ou should have a hard conversation with your co-founder around the three-month mark, and depending on how it’s going (see below), either re-commit or change the idea. Then schedule a yearly check-in. If things are clicking, full speed ahead. If things feel meh, at least spend a few days talking about other potential directions.

Brex: “We applied to YC with this VR idea, which, looking back, it was pretty bad, but at the time we thought it was great. And within YC, we were like, ‘Yeah, we don’t even know where to start to build this.’” —Henrique Dubugras, co-founder and CEO

These ribbons, upon closer inspection, appear to be two layers of machine-made fabric sewn together to form a single piece with one side puffed out like an arch in bridges, the “Alpine Loop” band that symbolizes the Apple Watch Ultra, which was just announced in the fall of 2022. The band is made of lightweight yet sturdy polyester fiber, the band is designed for outdoor activities by threading a metal hook through a hole in the fabric that expands in arch pattern, which prevents it from being pulled out in any direction. The fact that this intricate and delicate band is woven is astonishing.

The “Alpine Loop” uses 520 warp threads, which is far more than the number of threads used in ordinary fabrics, and this first process alone takes about six full days even for experienced employees.

After inspecting the heat treatment process on the first floor of the factory, I asked Tim Cook about his impressions of the company. “I love the the ability to scale something that is so intricate, something that is so detailed. And you know they’re making a lot of these as you can, tell but they’re doing it in such a high quality way. And the yields are very high.”

“They were very flexible, and willing to try new processes, new ways of doing things. This was the first time that this particular process was ever used. And so they have to be very nimble but that nimbleness has to be underpinned by great expertise. And they have that great expertise here. And I can’t stress enough the attention to detail and quality. These are the things that make the products look so great right out of the box.”

Apple prefers to use the term “supplier” over alternatives such as “subcontractor” because they believe in equal business partnership.

“What sets Apple apart [from other companies] is that they let us work as a team. If we have a problem, we spend time together to come up with a solution.” Seiji Inoue, managing director of Inoue Ribbon Industry, spoke from the opposite side of Cook’s statement.

In addition to bands for the Apple Watch, the company also produces handles made from woven paper for “Mac Pro” product packaging. Normally, nylon or other materials would be mixed into paper to give sturdiness, but Apple places importance on recyclability, so they need to make them from 100% paper. The team worked together with the Apple staff to find a way to meet these requirements, and when we introduced a manufacturer that could produce paper, they said, “Great,” and accompanied us to the manufacturer.

The first product they worked on was a band for the Apple Watch called “Woven Nylon.” It took four years to develop. At first, Mr. Inoue was fed up with the high quality requirements. Compared to other industries, the textile industry is not very strict about size control.

at some point the front-line workers became accustomed to Apple’s standards, and are now saying, “We have to do this much, don’t we?” and aiming for higher quality manufacturing. He added, “Apple taught me from scratch about quantification and other things. They taught me how to manage, how to make a table like this, how to do standard deviation like this, how to take data like this, and so on. You can’t learn so much even if you paid someone. But Apple shared all those knowledges sayin we are on the same team.”

Mr. Nobunari Sawanobori, the president of Teikoku Ink, which supplies white ink for the iPhone, once said, “The loss of learning through working with Apple is a bigger loss than the loss of orders from Apple.”

After working for so long with Apple, recently Inoue Ribbon Industry began to make proposal or provide supplement data when they work with other clients, Most of those clients are surprised and delighted.

“Facts. The reason why I blew up so fast is because I’m white, thin, privileged, and live in New York City,” she says, pointing out that her own content performed worse when she was living in North Carolina because there was nothing there to glamorize. She also shared how she worked to grow her account by making tons of different videos, privating the ones that didn’t perform, and replicating the ones that did until she nailed what TikTok wanted from her.  But “what TikTok wants” is still the most influential part of that, and as long as that’s still someone who looks like Victoria, there’s not one trick that can change it.

Wealthy tech executives spending their fortunes on real estate or more imaginative adventures is a staple of Silicon Valley culture. Some buy islands, others build yachts longer than a football field or fund quixotic flying car projects. Mr. Ive’s fixation on a single city block, by comparison, seems modest.

At LoveFrom, he has tried to trust his instincts. Buying one building led to buying another. A discussion about a new yarn led to his first fashion apparel. Work with one client, Brian Chesky, the chief executive of Airbnb, led to meeting Sam Altman, the chief executive of OpenAI.

He bought it for $8.5 million and discovered its backdoor led to a parking lot encircled by the block’s buildings. He wanted to turn the parking lot into a green space, but learned that he needed to own another building on the block to control the parking lot. So a year later, he bought a neighboring, 33,000-square-foot building for $17 million.

Mr. Weeks cringed. San Francisco’s commercial real estate market would crash during the pandemic, and more than a third of its offices remain vacant. “I don’t really think you need to do that,” Mr. Weeks told Mr. Ive. “I can get you office space.”

worries faded after neighbors met Mr. Ive. He offered to reduce some tenants’ rents, did free design work for others and won over Mr. Peskin, a frequent critic of development in his district, with his plans to preserve the existing buildings.

Over five years, Mr. Ive and Mr. Newson hired architects, graphic designers, writers and a cinematic special effects developer who work across three areas: work for the love of it, which they do without pay; work for clients, which includes Airbnb and Ferrari; and work for themselves, which includes the building renovation.

The project has given Mr. Elkann an appreciation for LoveFrom’s process. In January, he visited the firm’s studio for an hourslong meeting about the car’s steering wheel. He listened as Mr. Ive and others talked about the appropriate steering wheel length and how a driver should hold it. Ferrari’s chief test driver tested an early prototype of the wheel, which borrowed design elements from the company’s sports car and racecar history, to assess how it would perform. “Paying attention to the steering wheel in a car that you want to drive and what the physicality of what that means is something that Jony was very clear about,” Mr. Elkann said. He added that the result is “something really, really different.”

That it was complicated, he now understood, was “horseshit.” “Complicated” was how people had described slavery and then segregation. “It’s complicated,” he said, “when you want to take something from somebody.”

He had also been told that the conflict was “complicated,” its history tortuous and contested, and, as he writes, “that a body of knowledge akin to computational mathematics was needed to comprehend it.” He was astonished by the plain truth of what he saw: the walls, checkpoints, and guns that everywhere hemmed in the lives of Palestinians; the clear tiers of citizenship between the first-class Jews and the second-class Palestinians; and the undisguised contempt with which the Israeli state treated the subjugated other.

The most famous of Israel’s foundational claims — that it was a necessary sanctuary for one of the world’s most oppressed peoples, who may not have survived without a state of their own — is at the root of this complication and undergirds the prevailing viewpoint of the political-media-entertainment nexus. It is Israel’s unique logic of existence that has provided a quantum of justice to the Israeli project in the eyes of Americans and others around the world, and it’s what separates Jewish Israelis from the white supremacists of the Jim Crow South, who had no justice on their side at all.

“It’s kind of hard to remember, but even as late as 2014, people were talking about the Civil War as this complicated subject,” Jackson said. “Ta-Nehisi was going to plantations and hanging out at Monticello and looking at all the primary documents and reading a thousand books, and it became clear that the idea of a ‘complicated’ narrative was ridiculous.” The Civil War was, Coates concluded, solely about the South’s desire to perpetuate slavery, and the subsequent attempts over the next century and a half to hide that simple fact betrayed, he believed, a bigger lie — the lie that America was a democracy, a mass delusion that he would later call “the Dream” in Between the World and Me.

The hallmarks of The Atlantic’s coverage include variations of Israel’s seemingly limitless “right to defend itself”; an assertion that extremists on “both sides” make the conflict worse, with its corollary argument that if only Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Jewish-supremacist government were ousted, then progress could be made; abundant sympathy for the suffering of Israelis and a comparatively muted response to the suffering of Palestinians; a fixation on the way the issue is debated in America, particularly on college campuses; and regular warnings that antisemitism is on the rise both in America and around the world.

the overall pattern reveals a distorting worldview that pervades the industry and, as Coates writes in The Message, results in “the elevation of factual complexity over self-evident morality.” “The view of mainstream American commentators is a false equivalence between subjugator and subjugated,” said Nathan Thrall, the Jerusalem-based author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning A Day in the Life of Abed Salama, as if the Israelis and the Palestinians were equal parties in an ancient tug-of-war.

For Coates, the problem for the industry at large partly stems from the perennial problem of inadequate representation. “It is extremely rare to see Palestinians and Arabs writing the coverage or doing the book reviews,” he said. “I would be interested if you took the New York Times and the Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal and looked at how many of those correspondents are Palestinian, I wonder what you would find.” (It’s a testament to just how polarizing the issue is that many Jewish Americans believe the bias in news media works the other way around, against Israel.)

American mainstream journalism, Coates says, defers to American authority. “It’s very similar,” he told me, “to how American journalism has been deferential to the cops. We privilege the cops, we privilege the military, we privilege the politicians. The default setting is toward power.”

in the total coverage, in all of the talk of experts and the sound bites of politicians and the dispatches of credentialed reporters, a sense of ambiguity is allowed to prevail. “The fact of the matter is,” he said, “that kid up at Columbia, whatever dumb shit they’re saying, whatever slogan I would not say that they would use, they are more morally correct than some motherfuckers that have won Pulitzer Prizes and National Magazine Awards and are the most decorated and powerful journalists.”

When I asked Coates what he wanted to see happen in Israel and Palestine, he avoided the geopolitical scale and tended toward the more specific — for example, to have journalists not be “shot by army snipers.” He said that the greater question was not properly for him; it belonged to those with lived experience and those who had been studying the problem for years.

“I have a deep-seated fear,” he told me, “that the Black struggle will ultimately, at its root, really just be about narrow Black interest. And I don’t think that is in the tradition of what our most celebrated thinkers have told the world. I don’t think that’s how Martin Luther King thought about the Black struggle. I know that’s not how Du Bois thought about the Black struggle. I know that’s not how Baldwin thought about the Black struggle. Should it turn out that we have our first Black woman president, and our first South Asian president, and we continue to export 2,000-pound bombs to perpetrate a genocide, in defense of a state that is practicing apartheid, I won’t be able to just sit here and shake my head and say, ‘Well, that is unfortunate.’ I’m going to do what I can in the time that remains, and the writing that I have, to not allow that to be, because that is existential death for the Black struggle, and for Black people, as far as I’m concerned.”

I find it tremendously hopeful that “Stoner” is thriving in a world in which capitalist energies are so hellbent on distracting us from the necessary anguish of our inner lives. “Stoner” argues that we are measured ultimately by our capacity to face the truth of who we are in private moments, not by the burnishing of our public selves.

The story of his life is not a neat crescendo of industry and triumph, but something more akin to our own lives: a muddle of desires and inhibitions and compromises.

The deepest lesson of “Stoner” is this: What makes a life heroic is the quality of attention paid to it.

Americans worship athletes and moguls and movie stars, those who possess the glittering gifts we equate with worth and happiness. The stories that flash across our screens tend to be paeans to reckless ambition.

It’s the staggering acceleration of our intellectual and emotional metabolisms: our hunger for sensation and narcissistic reward, our readiness to privilege action over contemplation. And, most of all, our desperate compulsion to be known by the world rather than seeking to know ourselves.

The emergence of a robust advertising culture reinforced the notion that Americans were more or less always on stage and thus in constant need of suitable costumes and props.

Consider our nightly parade of prime-time talent shows and ginned-up documentaries in which chefs and pawn brokers and bored housewives reinvent their private lives as theater.

If you want to be among those who count, and you don’t happen to be endowed with divine talents or a royal lineage, well then, make some noise. Put your wit — or your craft projects or your rants or your pranks — on public display.

Our most profound acts of virtue and vice, of heroism and villainy, will be known by only those closest to us and forgotten soon enough. Even our deepest feelings will, for the most part, lay concealed within the vault of our hearts. Much of the reason we construct garish fantasies of fame is to distract ourselves from these painful truths. We confess so much to so many, as if by these disclosures we might escape the terror of confronting our hidden selves.

revelation is triggered by literature. The novel is notable as art because it places such profound faith in art.