What Happened to Leaning In?

The ambition and focus that propel you to success
can also be your downfall. 

— Judy Smith

Schadenfreude is unhealthy, but I nonetheless relish watching the once high and mighty humbled.

This month's fallen angel is Elizabeth Holmes, wunderkind and Steve Jobs wannabe.

Once the the world's youngest female self-made billionaire, Holmes now stands trial for defrauding investors of $400 million and faces 20 years in prison if convicted.

In 2013—the same year she reached the top of the world by selling her company's fake blood tests to millions of unsuspecting consumers—Holmes' Silicon Valley neighbor Sheryl Sandberg popularized the phrase leaning in.

Facing a prison cell, it appears Holmes is no longer leaning in, but weaseling out.

While the Northern California DA alleges she committed fraud, Holmes is trying to walk between raindrops, claiming she was only following Silicon Valley's "playbook," and that an "emotionally abusive" boyfriend led her into temptation (he will also go on trial for fraud next year).

Hogwash.

Hey, Liz, now that you've been caught with your hand in the till, how about leaning into the truth a little?

Why dodge your actions and blame others—and why blame a boyfriend?

An op-ed in The New York Times insists Holmes is the innocent victim of the "male-dominated world of tech start-ups" and the "boys’ club that is the tech industry." No man would be put on trial for swindling investors.

More hogwash.

If you want to lean in, lean in. There's no in betweenin'.

UPDATE, NOVEMBER 30, 2021: Holmes testified yesterday that her boyfriend drove her to commit her crimes.

UPDATE, JANUARY 3, 2022: Holmes was found guilty of fraud. "The Svengali Defense didn’t work," said journalist John Carreyou.

Going to Pieces

We all could use a little mercy now.

I know we don't deserve it, but we need it anyhow.

— Mary Gauthier

No surprise here: a Gallup poll shows our esteem for Internet providers has tanked.

In the relentless pursuit of profits, these companies have turned a modern miracle into the vilest of cesspools.

Lies, vulgarity and stupidity are the rule, rather than the exception.

In a civil war of words, brothers fight brothers; sisters, sisters; husbands, wives. 

And everyone goes to pieces.

But there is a way to keep it together: do some good.

“I was once a fortunate man, but at some point fortune abandoned me," the Stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius wrote. "But true good fortune is what you make for yourself. Good fortune: good character, good intentions, and good actions.”

Don't just stand there: do something good. Today. Tomorrow. The next day. And the next. 

If you expect the trolls to surrender, don't hold your breath. 

If you hope to fix stupid, fuggedaboutit.

Just refuse to be implicated in the lies and the ugliness and do some good.

As the proverb says, "Let not mercy and truth forsake you; bind them about your neck, write them on the tablet of your heart, and so find favor and good understanding in the sight of God and man."

Souvenirs

Maine photographer Peter Ralston treated my wife and me last week to a half-hour's exploration on foot of Widow's Island, a 15-acre island in Pensobscot Bay.

We took home with us old bricks as souvenirs.

They came from the ruins of an asylum that once operated on the island, torn down by the WPA in 1935, long after it had ceased to serve its original purpose.

The US Navy built the asylum in 1888 to quarantine sailors sickened with deadly yellow fever. The brisk seaside climate was thought to aide recovery.

But the building never housed a single ailing sailor, because naval surgeons found a new treatment for yellow fever—inducing diarrhea with purgatives like mercury, coal tar, castor oil, and caffeine—the following year.

The Widow's Island Naval Sanitorium was another $50,000 federal boondoggle. 

The Navy donated the empty asylum to Maine in 1904, which turned it into a summer retreat for lunatics interned in asylums in Augusta and Bangor. 

As part of the land transfer, the state renamed Widow's Island after a local judge, and the asylum became known as the Chase Island Convalescent Hospital.

But locals continued to call the place Widow's Island.

The lunatic asylum only operated for a decade, after which the building was used as a school for the children of lighthouse keepers, and again as a naval hospital during World War I.

When the WPA tore down the building, it intended to recycle the thousands of bricks, and piled them neatly on the island's shore. 

That was a mistake.

Light-fingered lobstermen stole the bricks to weight their traps, pave the walkways around their homes, and line their chimneys.

Fortunately, they left a few for souvenir-hunters like us.

Just Dessert

I don't know what is to set this world right, 

it is so awfully wrong everywhere.

— Mary Merrick Brooks

"The most beautiful young lady in town," one bewitched bachelor said of her.

Mary Merrick of Concord, Mass., spent her youth waving away suitors, until, at 22, she finally chose one, marrying Nathan Brooks, Esq., a wealthy estate lawyer, in 1823.

Harvard-educated, Nathan was a polished and devoutly political animal. And Mary was his perfect match.

But they were different people.

Nathan, unwilling to risk his lawyer's reputation, elected to keep mum on the big issue of the day—slavery.

Mary did anything but.

She spoke out, and led the town's charge against the institution, founding the radical Concord Ladies' Antislavery Society, and organizing stops on the Underground Railroad.

Although divisive, slavery was flourishing in the 1820s, legal in half of the 24 states and the District of Columbia.

Slave-owning infuriated Mary (her own father had been a slaver in South Carolina before moving to Concord, so she knew the practice first hand).

She channeled her indignation into fundraising for the cause of Abolition—more accurately, for the cause of "Immediatism," which insisted that Black slaves everywhere be freed immediately, without national debate or compromise, or reparations to their owners.

The money Mary raised was used to pay for speaking visits to Concord by rabble-rousers like Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, and John Brown, and for subscriptions to radical newspapers like William Lloyd Garrison's The Liberator.

A hands-on fire-eater, the clever Mary searched for a fool-proof recipe for fundraising, hitting at last on sales of a tasty confection she named the "Brooks Cake."

The Brooks Cake comprised one pound of flour, one pound of sugar, half a pound of butter, four eggs, a cup of milk, a teaspoon of soda, a half-teaspoon of cream of tartar, and a half pound of currants.

Concord's society women ate it up. 

For decades, none would dare hold a lunch or afternoon tea without serving a fresh Brooks Cake—no matter her stand on slavery.

Let Go

Let go that which burdens you. Let go any acts of unkindness or brutality from or against you. Let go one breath into another.

— Joy Harjo

Known locally as "Massholes," they drive mostly black SUVs and oversize pickup trucks.

While driving in Massachusetts, I must remember Joy Harjo's poem.