Wallace is to literature what Robin Williams or perhaps Jim Carrey is to live comedy: a creator so manically energetic and amused with himself that he often follows his riffs out into the stratosphere, where he orbits all alone.
.. The smaller of his two dogs, a black Labrador retriever mix named Jeeves, keeps trying to climb into his lap and lick his lips, a gesture not unrelated to the fact that Wallace is eating a bologna sandwich. ”They pretend they’re kissing you,” Wallace says of his dogs, ”but they’re really mining your mouth for food.”
.. Jonathan Franzen, a fellow novelist and confidant, says Wallace is like many serious writers who, by necessity, spend most of their time alone. ”You tend to develop the personality that corresponds to that solitude,” Franzen says.
This helps explain why sudden fame is often more awkward for a serious writer than for a serious actor, who does his work in public and is accustomed to being the subject, rather than the agent, of observation. An actor can mug his way through a fairly long string of parties and fashion shows before he is accused of overexposure and ridiculed; a writer hits that threshold sooner. ”Then his subsequent work isn’t looked at directly, but through the glare of all that publicity,”
.. Think David Letterman with a postgraduate degree and diction, and you get at least some idea of the sensibility.
.. Wallace is intentionally vague on this period of his life, and what he divulges sometimes contradicts the recollections of friends. He says he never formally entered a recovery program; Alice Turner says he did. He mentions a single suicide scare and subsequent stay in a psychiatric ward; friends allude to more than one.
.. Before moving back to Illinois, he became involved for a time with the writer Mary Karr, author of ”The Liar’s Club,” and had her name tattooed on his upper arm. He blames himself for the brevity of his attachments. ”I’m massively selfish about my work, and I don’t seem to be able to be very polite or considerate about other people’s feelings,” he says.
.. Back in Illinois, he began to attend Sunday services at various churches around town — there is something about religious faith, which was missing from his rearing by two atheists, that entices and calms him — and he formed his closest social relationship with an older, married couple, Doug and Erin Poag. They met at a Mennonite house of worship.
Musical Memory and Alzheimer’s
But although barely able to identify their children, or even themselves, they could both clearly recognize familiar music. In church, ED joyfully led the congregational singing of less well-known hymns, and SB sang along with great enthusiasm to recordings of nursery rhymes that she used to sing to her children. Even more strikingly, their response to the music gave the impression that they were touched by something that was no longer accessible by looking at once-familiar faces, nor by reminders of autobiographical events, nor by involvement in often-encountered everyday situations. Music seemed to establish a secure connection and willingness to actively communicate that was hard to achieve by other means. The act of hearing and singing familiar songs perhaps induced a sense of security, confident social interaction, and simple pleasure that Alzheimer’s patients rarely experience. Their moments filled with familiar music could be their only times without great doubts and anxious questionings of their state.
The Sure Thing: Predatory Entrepenuers
they crunched the numbers, tinkered with logarithms and logistic functions, and ran different scenarios, trying to figure out what would happen if housing prices stopped rising. Their findings seemed surprising: Even if prices just flatlined, homeowners would feel so much financial pressure that it would result in losses of 7 percent of the value of a typical pool of subprime mortgages. And if home prices fell 5 percent, it would lead to losses as high as 17 percent.
This was a crucial finding. Most people at the time believed that widespread defaults on mortgages were a function of some combination of structural economic factors such as unemployment rates, interest rates, and regional economic health. That’s why so many on Wall Street were happy to sell Paulson C.D.S. policies: they thought it would take a perfect storm to bring the market to its knees. But Pellegrini’s data showed that the bubble was being inflated by a single, rickety factor—rising home prices. It wouldn’t take much for the bubble to burst.
What Paulson’s story makes clear is how different the predator is from our conventional notion of the successful businessman. The risk-taking model suggests that the entrepreneur’s chief advantage is one of temperament—he’s braver than the rest of us are. In the predator model, the entrepreneur’s advantage is analytical—he’s better at figuring out a sure thing than the rest of us.
.. At one point, incredibly, Paulson got together with some investment banks to assemble bundles of the most absurdly toxic mortgages—which the banks then sold to some hapless investors and Paulson then promptly bet against. As Zuckerman points out, this is the equivalent of a game of football in which the defense calls the plays for the offense. It’s how a nerd would play football, not a jock.
..
“I had no idea how I could afford it,” Turner told one of his biographers, although by this point the reader is wise to his aw-shucks modesty. First, he didn’t pay ten million dollars. He talked the Braves into taking a million down, and the rest over eight or so years. Second, he didn’t end up paying the million down. Somewhat mysteriously, Turner reports that he found a million dollars on the team’s books—money the previous owners somehow didn’t realize they had—and so, he says, “I bought it using its own money, which was quite a trick.” He now owed nine million dollars. But Turner had already been paying the Braves six hundred thousand dollars a year for the rights to broadcast sixty of the team’s games. What the deal consisted of, then, was his paying an additional six hundred thousand dollars or so a year, for eight years: in return, he would get the rights to all a hundred and sixty-two of the team’s games, plus the team itself.
You and I might not have made that deal. But that’s not because Turner is a risk-taker and we are cowards. It’s because Turner is a cold-blooded bargainer who could find a million dollars in someone’s back pocket that the person didn’t know he had.
.. Agency theory, Vermeulen observes, “says that managers are inherently risk-averse; much more risk-averse than shareholders would like them to be. And the theory prescribes that you should give them stock options, rather than stock, to stimulate them to take more risk.” Why do shareholders want managers to take more risks? Because they want stodgy companies to be more entrepreneurial, and taking risks is what everyone says that entrepreneurs do.
.. The failures violate all kinds of established principles of new-business formation. New-business success is clearly correlated with the size of initial capitalization. But failed entrepreneurs tend to be wildly undercapitalized. The data show that organizing as a corporation is best. But failed entrepreneurs tend to organize as sole proprietorships.
.. Ninety per cent of the fastest-growing companies in the country sell to other businesses; failed entrepreneurs usually try selling to consumers, and, rather than serving customers that other businesses have missed, they chase the same people as their competitors do.
.. The children who played the game in the riskiest manner, who stood so far from the pole that success was unlikely, also scored lowest on what he called “achievement motive,” that is, the desire to succeed. (Another group of low scorers were at the other extreme, standing so close to the pole that the game ceased to be a game at all.) Taking excessive risks was, then, a psychologically protective strategy: if you stood far enough back from the pole, no one could possibly blame you if you failed. These children went out of their way to take a “professional” risk in order to avoid a personal risk.
.. When the sociologists Hongwei Xu and Martin Ruef asked a large sample of entrepreneurs and non-entrepreneurs to choose among three alternatives—a business with a potential profit of five million dollars with a twenty-per-cent chance of success, or one with a profit of two million with a fifty-per-cent chance of success, or one with a profit of $1.25 million with an eighty-per-cent chance of success—it was the entrepreneurs who were more likely to go with the third, safe choice. They weren’t dazzled by the chance of making five million dollars. They were drawn to the eighty-per-cent chance of getting to do what they love doing.
Autistic Theology
I have been asked why having Asperger’s makes being Christian difficult and why 90% of adults with AS are non-religious. This is the best way I can describe it.
Imagine, as it were, a parallel universe much more wonderful than our own. A universe in which emotions were not expressed through facial queues and body language, but through music. Imagine that instead of simply smiling and laughing to indicate happiness, an orchestra played to the tune of your non-verbal communications. Sadness, anger, joy, anxiety, disgust, and any of the other plethora of human emotions were expressed through a music that seemed to ooze out of one’s being.