Tag: Reading

I reviewed thousands of pages of documents and spoke with over 30 sources about Williams and Oomba, including investors, employees, and business partners. Most described him as narcissistic, a fast-talking salesman with a talent for separating people from their savings. He drank a lot of Red Bull and had a puerile sense of humor, asking an employee who brought her cat into work, “Can I pet your pussy?” again and again. Williams apparently didn’t like rules, couldn’t focus, and seemed unable to accept that he might ever be wrong. He could be volatile, swearing over text message (“if you don’t return my call by 5 PM you are fucking fired you fucking douche”) and chastising employees over the office PA system (“Come to my office now you dumb motherfucker”).

However, as reports of WeWork’s oddities began appearing in the media, board members who once had been willing to publicly defend Neumann started declining interview requests. In early 2019, when the Wall Street Journal was poised to report that Neumann had been personally buying buildings and then leasing them to WeWork—a form of self-dealing that would have been grounds for censure at almost any other firm—company executives pleaded with board members to defend Neumann in the press. All of them refused. “They were embarrassed,” a WeWork executive recalled. “They were a Vichy board, and there was obviously this tension between, like, upholding good corporate governance and frankly just saying, ‘I don’t give a fuck, because my investment is getting better every day, and so it doesn’t really matter what Adam does as long as I can get my money out at some point.’ ”

Vallejo, a postindustrial city of a hundred and twenty-two thousand people, is best known for its Six Flags amusement park and for its musicians: E-40, Mac Dre, H.E.R. Its per-capita income is less than half that of San Francisco, and its population is more diverse, split among whites, African-Americans, Latinos, and Asians. Its police force, however, consists largely of white men who live elsewhere. Since 2010, members of the Vallejo Police Department have killed nineteen people—a higher rate than that of any of America’s hundred largest police forces except St. Louis’s. According to data collected by the anti-police-brutality group Campaign Zero, the V.P.D. uses more force per arrest than any other department in California does. Vallejo cops have shot at people running away, fired dozens of rounds at unarmed men, used guns in off-duty arguments, and beaten apparently mentally ill people. The city’s police records show that officers who shoot unarmed men aren’t punished—in fact, some of the force’s most lethal cops have been promoted.

The ability to better visualize work would also enable smarter processes. If you notice that the influx of administrative demands from other parts of your company is overwhelming you and your co-workers, you’re now motivated to seek fixes. Such optimizations are unlikely to occur when the scope of the problem is hidden among in-box detritus, and when productivity is still understood as a matter of personal will.

“I was nowhere around no murder. … That’s not me,” he said. “I was a football player myself. I wouldn’t do that to nobody. … I never shot a person a day in my life.”

What the paper did have — in increasing numbers in fact — was a growing cohort of people who came to the paper with a different set of values. They were younger, which produced some of the division. A reporter who identified as “young Gen X” warned me about “toxic millennial workplace values,” while a millennial complained about the masthead’s tortured relationship to social media by arguing that “boomer is a mind-set.”

When Donald Trump came out to speak just before 2:30 a.m. on Wednesday, votes were still being counted in enough states—notably Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin—to make it impossible to say whether he or Joe Biden had won the Presidency. But, whichever of them does, what Trump said in his brief remarks was a reminder of why he does not deserve the office. Trump, standing in front of a phalanx of flags, claimed that the vote count had been “called off” because he won; that is not true on either count. He said that his lead in those swing states was insurmountable, which is also false, and that when “they”—he didn’t really identify “they,” except as “a very sad group of people”—realized that he was winning, they had swooped in to perpetrate “a fraud on the American public.” In saying this, he was lying to the American public. And when he told the country that there was a conspiracy afoot to “disenfranchise” people who voted for him—adding, “We won’t stand for it”—he seemed to be willfully prodding his supporters toward violence. Trump’s statement was squalid; if the country is lucky, it is just a last indignity before he is defeated. But, in those few minutes, he caused America’s troubles to multiply.

There have been many times, over the past four years, that covering Trump’s Washington felt like a foreign assignment to me, never more so than while driving around the capital these past few days and seeing boarded-up storefronts and streets cordoned off for blocks around the White House, in anticipation of unprecedented post-election violence. I have seen such scenes before, in places like Azerbaijan and Russia. This is Trump’s America. It is not the America I have known.