Hitting The Links: 12/10/23
The Virtual Memories Show News
A 2x/week email about a podcast about books & life
Gates of Heck
It was a tiring week, but at least the podcast I had scheduled for today had to postpone to next weekend, so I can ‘relax’ (and just get in 2 workouts, write this email, edit this week’s show, try to finish reading a novel, and maybe make some art). I did receive a late invite (yesterday) to a Christmas Luncheon Feast at the Metropolitan Club in NYC today, but I just can’t, even though it’d likely be a fun opportunity to schmooze with all sorts of people I’d never meet in my day to day.
Lucky for me I got to do satisfy my schmooze-quotient on Thursday. The owner of one of my member companies owns a whole network of industrials and belongs to a bazillion clubs and social groups (in addition to being a trustee in my association), and he occasionally invites me to events like last Thursday’s Economic Club of New York dinner to honor Bill Gates. Before the event, my trustee held a get-together at the Metropolitan, so I headed out to the city that afternoon in “business elegant” attire. (Turns out this is code for the gap between business casual and black-tie, so suit-and-tie worked just fine.)
He was holding court in the club’s bar area, introducing us all, telling funny anecdotes of how he met each of us, and otherwise making it easy for everyone to gab, no matter what field we were in. I felt at ease enough to tell the story from last week’s e-mail about the cafe car server on the Amtrak, his collection of exotic currency, and his plans for world travel. They seemed charmed, and my trustee mused that we ought to set up an exchange program or something to get people out into the world.
The story came up because one of the attendees, Faanya Rose, whom our host introduced as “the first female president of The Explorers Club,” was also instrumental in building the Heathrow Express line, and has A Thing About Trains. So we bonded over that, and then talked about our family roots. She was convinced that we’re related, between our Ukrainian Jewish heritage and my resemblance to her dad.
I was mostly at ease throughout that part of the evening, never pushing too hard, trying to learn more about the other guests, not feeling too out of place. Of course, there are moments one realizes one is in A Different World, and mine came on the way out of the Metropolitan Club, when I asked one of our cohort if he had a few bucks I could use for a tip at the coat-check counter, as I only had $20s on me. He said, “Oh, you don’t tip here,” without any explanation, and while I was thankful not to commit a faux pas, I was reminded how out of place I was.
But I did my best. Over the course of the evening, I met and/or gabbed with a doctor at Yale, an M&A banker from Ireland by way of Switzerland, an economist from Charlotte who forgot to grab a tie when he left the house for this NYC trip, a CNBC anchor, and the president of that pharma manufacturing company that my trustee owns.
The Economic Club event was at a nearby Sheraton, where Bill Gates was presented with the Peter G. Peterson award, and then got interviewed onstage by one of the club’s trustees. She suffered The Interviewer’s Nightmare when Gates answered the first question with a 10+-minute response. The topic was climate change, and he went DEEP on it, with no room for her to interject. I felt bad for her, but at the same time, I was impressed that Gates had internalized so much on this topic, and that he wasn’t just spitting out bullet points, but had real thoughts on carbon emissions and where change has to occur if we want to avoid climate apocalypse.
From there, they had more of a back-and-forth, and I was struck by some of the stories he told about the global health successes of the Gates Foundation. He admitted their work on education in the US hadn’t yielded measurable improvement, but when he talked about the impact they helped make on malaria, rotavirus, and maternal mortality, and the multiple millions of lives that have been saved, I found myself thinking that he’s put the next generation of tech-billionaires to shame.
That is, when I read about this Effective Altruism movement that many of them subscribe to, and the idea that it’s better to make investments that will save TRILLIONS of future lives — by protecting the earth from asteroids or angry AI or something — it sure feels like a dodge from doing something for people and the world here and now. That is, Gates focused on saving humans, rather than “humanity.” And since a lot of the work the Gates Foundation has done has saved the lives of non-white people, maybe there’s a race-connotation in who the EA folks really want to save.
From there, Gates talked about AI, which is what most people want to hear about, but he also had a funny aside about the development of the internet, and how he & his peers thought it would usher in a new age of rationalism, where people could look up factual, scientific articles about their topics of interest, and learn via Socratic debate. He said that they didn’t reckon with people with ‘crazy ideas’: “There were a lot of them out there. They were just not finding each other. And now, with digital tools, they said: ‘Oh, YOU think that crazy thing? Me too! Let's get together and have a critical mass of crazy people. Let's, you know, call ourselves QAnon.’”
So that got a (nervous) laugh.
ANYWAY: I enjoyed the conversation, the dinner itself wasn’t bad (by hotel banquet standards), and I got to meet all sorts of neat people, although I regret not going over to the table next to ours and introducing myself to Hank Azaria (!), who was immersed in conversation with a neighbor.
I’d love to roll it back for today’s luncheon, but I’m just too beat, and it’s for the best: no one should ever have to watch me eat.
And now, let’s hit the links!
Links & Such
Recent Virtual Memories Show podcasts: Christian Wiman • Danny Fingeroth • Matt Bors • Phillip Lopate • Leslie Stein • Josh Bayer
RIP Norman Lear . . . RIP Denny Laine . . . RIP Benjamin Zephaniah . . . RIP Ryan O’Neal
My town got written up in the NYT Real Estate section, which is just weird. They repeat the creation myth that our town was the source of (some of) the iron for the chain that blocked British boats from coming down the Hudson during the Revolutionary War. When I mentioned this during a tour of West Point a few years ago, the retired general leading the tour assured me that was incorrect. (West Point being the west point from which the chain stretched across of the Hudson, is how it came up.)
Some of The Chain, from my West Point visit in Dec. 2021 In September, I heard a new single from Peter Gabriel on Sirius, then discovered he has a Bandcamp subscription page, on which he’s been releasing a song each month from his upcoming album (2 mixes of each song). The full album, i/o, came out Dec. 1, and I’ve been enjoying it (as well as a whole ton of other songs & live shows that subscribers get to download/stream). Anyway, here’s a profile of him & the record.
New short story in The New Yorker from Caleb Crain.
Neat comic by Jesse Lambert of his Art Fair Nightmare.
“We’ve done some focus testing, and I haven’t seen such a unanimously negative response since the Frasier spinoff Hey, Roz.”
This Elizabeth Bishop postcard exhibition sounds pretty awesome.
Speaking of, it’s almost 2 years since I started my postcard-a-day practice, and I’m still going strong with that. If you want to be among my recipients/victims, drop me a line w/your mailing address. For the paying subscribers of this Substack, I send a hand-drawn/-painted postcard, if that’s an incentive for you to send me money & Support The Cause. Just added a new paid subscriber this week, so I gotta go make their card for them.
I will try this addition to my coffee-making practice, but if it screws up my Baratza Encore grinder, I will never trust a volcanologist about coffee again.
Current/Recent Reading
Inherent Vice - Thomas Pynchon
The Book of Disquiet - Fernando Pessoa (Christian Wiman mentioned it when we were recording last weekend, & I had it on my Kindle, so that’s a night-time reading)
Sound Body, Fractured Mind
Things got weird with my workout routine last week, but I’m trying to get back on track this week. I missed last Saturday’s yoga because of a podcast-trip, so I doubled up on Sunday with yoga then weights. Monday, on little to no sleep, I ran 6.3 miles with the guys, but was so busy & beat that I didn’t do yoga that day. Tuesday was my yo-yo trip to FDA and back, so no time for weights that day. I was hoping to get in a run with The Guys on Thursday morning, but an accident Wednesday afternoon left me with maybe a mild concussion, so I decided not to risk it. Anyway, I got back to weights on Friday, missed yoga on Saturday because i was spending the day in Princeton with Everett Glenn to celebrate his birthday, so I’ll try to double up both workouts today, run + yoga on Monday, weights on Tuesday. Monday’s also my 6-month oncology check-in, or as I like to call it, my rebirthday, so we’ll see how the rest of the week/life progresses from there.
Until Next Time
Thanks for reading this far! I’ll be back Wednesday with a new podcast, maybe some art, & who knows maybe a little profundity or something, and Sunday with more great links, current reading, and this broken down ol’ body of mine.
The Earth, it moves too slow / But the Earth is all we know,
—Gil Roth
Virtual Memories
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