Reading Italo Calvino

You might prefer to read the second part of this post first. It will seem more familiar, as its I is closer in voice and referent to the I in other posts on this blog. Or, you might prefer to read the first part first and see how you feel.    


It became possible when I noticed him noticing the quick assuredness of Agilulf’s hands arranging pine cones in an isosceles triangle at dawn. It was one of the early moments where he identified completely with nonexistent knight. Where they shared a feeling. Where his need to feel in Agilulf a presence more solid and concrete than the other paladins was met with and mirrored by Agilulf’s own need to count objects, arrange them in geometric problems, resolve problems of arithmetic, apply himself in any way possible to recover precision into a world faintly touched, just breathed on by light. In that hour in which one is least certain of the world’s existence. I was manically focused on Agilulf at the time, so focused that I was unable to recognize Raimbault’s sensitivity through the mask of his youth. But here, now, having come into my desire, the recollection changes. I am able to see that, had Raimbault not sought solidity, and, what’s more, not questioned this very act of seeking as he started to sense that the tiresome need to tuck himself into a ready-made belief system, a system retrofit with ritual and rules of conduct, might actually signal cowardice, he wouldn’t have felt oppression upon seeing the nonexistent knight counting trees, leaves, stones, lances, pine cones, anything in front of him. There was undeniable kinship when we first met, but it was hoplite kinship, the homoerotic, fraternal bonds Plato describes in the Symposium, the mute community born in battle. I stayed silent. Refrained from speech lest anyone, even he whom I protected, discern my womanhood. I’ve grown accustomed to the dull pain of absconding my identity. It rings in my ears like tinnitus. Reminds me that I will always be excluded because I am a woman. When I first entered the knighthood, I tried to be one with them, to participate in the fraternity that arises when they, we, together, act according to the oaths we have taken as knights. But my path is one of solitude. As woman, I am unable to fulfill their aching needs on the battlefield. I watch how they relive Gilgamesh’s love for Enkidu, recover Achilles’ love for Patroclus, how they seek a mirror self to offset the traits they now know they lack and therefore desperately seek to replenish in another. I can only feel this bond, this mute community, from a place of pretense, by covering my gender, a portion of my identity, so they see what they need see and so I can continue doing what I was born to do. What I love. This is where Raimbault, at first, was so mistaken. He reduced me to a caricature, assumed, because of the excellence of my practice, that I existed, that I was definite. He couldn’t grasp that what I sought was an entirely different way of existing, one that reached the apotheosis of form in the form only embodied by the nonexistent knight. That the vagaries of men tired me. Their slothfulness. Their corpulence. Their farts and burps. I wanted more. Would go so far as to enter a nunnery to learn the dark arts of sublimation, of esteeming the permanent above the fleeting joys of the world. It was a bold act of autonomy, a clamoring for existence so that I no longer had to endure the alienation. In retrospect, I’ve come to feel pity for Charlemagne. Like me, he has been rendered myth. Like mine, his story has been written and rewritten so many times. My entrance into the narrative space of play was set in stone epics ago, imprinted on sandstone by Virgil and twisted, like a variation on a musical theme, through Ariosto and Tasso. The Christians fight the Moors (or the Greeks the Turks, or the Romans the Celts). The damsel comes, our virgin Sophronia. She is abducted and flown on a hippogriph through farfetched twists and turns of fortune to a dragon’s den, her virginity kept sacrosanct so the knights have their way. Her skin is white as lilies, her hair long and flowing like the Nile for the privileged one (few?) who see it free from diadems and braids. And in the heat of battle, just when a hero is about to meet his fate at the brutal swords of the Moors, I appear, a man. I appear with mastery and skill, brandishing the enemy to save the hero. He then seeks me to express gratitude to his kin. But, of course, I’ve disappeared, to the riverside to wash my wounds and calves. When he stops looking (and, concomitantly, the reader has forgotten), he finds me. And discovers, what ho!, that I’m a woman. And since I’ve already forgone the stereotypes of that define my gender, so too might I forgo the innocence of idealized sexuality. At least in the freer times of Ariosto, I am naturally also the representation of homoerotic desire. The voice of the oppressed. For everyone who reads, including the knights, want nothing more than to watch as another, a woman, caresses my milk white breasts. And that is precisely why my path is solitary. Why I had no authentic place on the battlefield. Why, tired of this narrative, I entered the convent to subvert it. This time playing a different female role, that of a nun, of Sister Theodora of the order of Saint Colomba. But even here I found myself caught in a new nexus of alienation, bearing the weight of my elected verisimilitude. For what would a nun, who has no experience apart from religious ceremonies, triduums, novenas, gardening, harvesting, vintaging, whippings, slavery, incest, fires, hangings, invasion, sacking, rape and pestilence, know of battle and knighthood? Nothing. Of battles, I now feign to say, I know nothing. I must rid myself of my past precisely as I go about reconstructing it in my tale. But perhaps it is this distancing from my past that grants me freedom to create a new future? Perhaps it is this distancing that has granted me the ability to create worlds within from a pen stroke act of will, as here on the river’s bank I set a mill, and there, beyond the town I trace out a wood, and in this wood follow Agilulf as he scours it through and through, follow him to Priscilla’s palace where I live my own dream of chaste seduction as the nonexistent knight subverts all direct acts of concupiscence and sexuality. There was a rush to the power. A draw to a newfound ability, to a creativity absconded from the pressures and pulls of others, a place of repose. But I also felt fear at how precarious and coincidental the space available to my imagination turned out to be. One morning, for example, as I was writing I was constantly distracted by the clatter of copper and earthenware as the sisters in my convent washed platters for dinner. It reeked of cabbage. The smells infiltrated me. And when I went back the next day to observe my creation I was appalled to see I’d brought the convent to the book, describing the mess hall and how out of place Agilulf seemed at the feast. The contingent determinism of my environment, of a bunch of nuns making cabbage soup, seemed crass in contrast to the dusty aura of the epics that had grafted my existence before. So I stopped. Wrote more and more quickly. Abandoned the details. Didn’t retain the discipline required to recreate the scene, to help you, reader, live it, feel it, enter it fully. Jumped from France to England, England to Africa, and Africa to Brittany with utter disregard for the Aristotelian rules of time and place. I relaxed the constraint that weighed me down, the discipline of a cohesive third-person chronicle and even went so far as to address the book I was writing in the vocative like I did when I wrote in my journal as a child. Book, I wrote, now you have reached your end. And miraculously, at this moment of abandon and decadence, I heard a horse come up a narrow track. I recognized the voice of Raimbault. And while I’ll never love him ardently, never find in him the elision I seek with another to finally know the world, I know from what I’ve chronicled how much he loves me, how he has loved me since he noticed me peeing in the stream after I saved his life. I’ll rush to meet him, let him guide my pen as life urges along, and mount the crupper of my horse to find my future. Because no one would have expected it. It’s not the plot. Nothing I’d create. It could not be Bradamante. Therein, perhaps, I’ll find the possibility of freedom.

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Pino Zac’s depiction of the anagnorisis moment when Sister Theodora reveals that she is Bradamante (or vice versa).

What you’ve just read is an experiment. An attempt to become a better reader.

In the experiment of reading Italo Calvino’s The Nonexistent Knight, this meant a few things.

First, it meant engaging with the text actively-and returning to it a few times in a short time frame-to better register and remember it. This took effort, even emotional effort. Reading literature and philosophy passively is at once an indulgent pastime and an attempt to keep a former self intact and alive, a self who spent most of her time reading books and writing about books, whose job it was to say something about books that no one else had said before.[1] My professional success no longer hangs on my knowledge of literature and the artfulness and ingenuity of my interpretation. I changed. Moved to technology. Strive for excellence according to the standards and conventions of a different social circle and profession. But, pretend though I may, my transition was not a complete epigenetic phase shift. Reading still matters to me. And I experience unnerving discomfort when a passage I read just a week ago, a passage that was so alive and vivid while I was reading it, has disappeared like vapor on a car window or footsteps washed away by the sea. My emotional discomfort, therefore, stemmed partially from self-criticism, frustration that total recall wasn’t a given, didn’t effortlessly arise from passive consumption. It was a recognition that I had work do to, coupled with the desire to keep on doing the same because it was easier. So I had to make it fun. Do something creative. Trick myself into making engagement effortless to silence to lacerations of the superego.

Which lead me to fiction. Writing a companion piece that grappled with the question: who is the narrator of The Nonexistent Knight? I’d engage with the book by replicating it, adapting it, making it my own by assimilating it.

This is almost accurate. I actually started by composing a different blog post, one whose I was close in voice and referent to the I in most of my other posts. But I felt too exposed. Projected judgment around the triteness of my conclusions. Felt silly writing a post about trying to remember what I’d read. I needed fiction to protect myself. Needed Bradamante to exorcise my fear. Without her, I wouldn’t feel comfortable writing these words.

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Charlemagne informs that nonexistent knight that he has no choice but to rescind his knighthood if there is evidence that the virgin he saved wasn’t really a virgin.

Fortunately this cloak of fiction added a layer of reflexivity. The Nonexistent Knight is itself a kind of reading, where, like a medieval artist painting her version of the annunciation or the pietà, Calvino engages with the familiar stories of the Carolingian epics. His writing is a reading of Ariosto, of Tasso, of scenes and memes intimately familiar to his readers. Or at least to some readers. For us, today, there can be no presumption that people know those tales. No awareness of the tradition into which the stories fall. The text doesn’t have a shadow. It lacks the trappings of identity it would have had in a time where it was a given that people know Bradamante, knew Charlemagne, had grown up with the tales. We’re bid to ask what means it means to rewrite a Renaissance Romance in an age when people don’t recognize it’s a recapitulation, but are reading it for the first time. It kaleidoscopes the nonexistence of the protagonist in the text.

And there was more.

Why did I care about becoming a better reader in the first place? What did I seek? Why did my lack of recall create such a rabid sense of discomfort and shame?

The system of identity Calvino grapples with through the character of the nonexistent knight constitutes selfhood through the embodiment and application of codes of conduct and structures of belief. Knights do X in Y setting; one becomes a knight by passing through Z ritual. Take away a paradigm sanctioned by others’ recognitions that you fit into their code, that you act in a way that confirms how they view themselves, and all that remains is the raw encounter with experience. The constitution of self through and via an amassed collection of experiences. But this self as conversation with the world stands on precariously flimsy stilts unless one can recall with fidelity, unless there is a distancing from the vagaries of momentary subjectivity. In short, it mattered that I could remember things accurately because my very identity was at stake, an identity constituted from a series of encounters and experiences. I wanted, needed, to know the book for what it was, to love it for what it was, so I myself could stand on firmer ground. It’s a lesson I can apply elsewhere, a moral attitude for engaging with the world. An attempt to know the world and its people for what it is and who they are.

One final thought.

There are a few passages in The Nonexistent Knight that I’d remember without all this effort and alienation. The introduction of Gurduloo in chapter three, for example, is hilarious. Gurduloo is the foil of Agilulf, the man who exists but doesn’t think he does as opposed to the man who doesn’t exist but thinks he does. He’s marvelous. Sees ducks and joyfully becomes duck. Sees frogs and mindlessly becomes frog. Sees the king and impudently becomes king. It’s a variation on the joker from an opera di buffa, who speaks the truth no one else can tell. Like Gurduloo to his surroundings, the passages existed without needed to think they existed. They just were. There to be enjoyed without all the reflexive reflection. It feels cliché, but it’s too true not to acknowledge. It’s the bliss of the poet. The ability to be so engaged with the world that it sticks with us and shapes us.


[1] In retrospect, I wish I had been a more dialogical scholar of literature. I admire how my Stanford colleague Harris Feinsod, now a professor at Northwestern, wrote articles in response to and in dialogue with other active literary critics. Responding to someone wasn’t on my mind when I was a graduate student. I engaged with secondary literature, engaged with others’ ideas about the text I was working on, but felt I was arguing with an absent ideal rather than a person.

The featured image is from Pino Zac’s 1971 film adaptation of Italo Calvino’s The Nonexistent Knight. I presume (because I only skimmed the film) the man with his arms raised is the King of the Grail, who abdicates the moral weight and responsibility of killing innocent people in the name of fanaticism, which is too often guised as perverse form of Enlightenment. It is a paragon B film, weaving technicolor, black and white, and animation to visually represent the different ontological levels Calvino sculpts in the book (Agilulf and Raimbault as real characters in color; Charlemagne and the other knights as animations; Sister Theodora, the author of the work, imprisoned in her penance of black and white).  My partner Mihnea found its style to be unmistakably in the tradition of Federico Fellini. I saw hints of Alejandro Jodorowsky. It’s a fascinating artifact. I’m glad it exists. 

A Turing Test for Empathy?

On Wednesday evening, I was the female participant on a panel about artificial intelligence.[1] The event was hosted at the National Club on Bay Street in Toronto. At Friday’s lunch, a colleague who attended to support mentioned that the venue smelled like New York, carried the grime of time in its walls after so many rain storms. Indeed, upon entering, I rewalked into Manhattan’s Downtown Association, returned to April, 2017, before the move to Toronto, peered down from the attic of my consciousness to see myself gently placing a dripping umbrella in the back of the bulbous cloak room, where no one would find it, feeling the mahogany enclose me in peaty darkness, inhaling a mild must that could only tolerate a cabernet, waiting with my acrylic green silk scarf from Hong Kong draped nonchalant around my neck, hanging just above the bottom seam of my silk tunic, dangling more than just above the top seam of my black leather boots, when a man walked up, the manager, and beaming with welcome he said “you must be the salsa instructor! Come, the class is on the third floor!” I laughed out loud. Alfred arrived. Alfred who was made for another epoch, who is Smith in our Hume-Smith friendship, fit for the ages, Alfred who had become a member of the association and, a gentleman of yore, would take breakfast there before work, Acshenbach in Venice, tidily wiping a moist remnant of scrambled eggs from the right corner lip, a gesture chiseled by Joseon porcelain and Ithaca’s firefly summer, where took his time to ruminate about his future, having left, again, his past.

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An early 18th-century Joseon jar. Korean ceramics capture Alfred’s gentle elegance. Yet, he has a complex relationship with his Koreanness.

Upstairs we did the microphone dance, fumbling to hook the clip on my black jeans (one of the rare occasions where I was wearing pants). One of my father’s former colleagues gave the keynote. He walked through the long history of artificial intelligence, starting with efforts to encode formal logic and migrating through the sine curve undulations of research moving from top-down intelligent design (e.g., expert systems) to bottom-up algorithms (e.g., deep convolutional neural networks), abstraction moving ever closer to data until it fuses, meat on a bone, into inference.[2] He proposed that intellectual property had shifted from owning the code to building the information asset. He hinted at a thesis I am working to articulate in my forthcoming book about how contemporary, machine learning-based AI refracts humanity through the convex (or concave or distorted or whatever shape it ends up being) mirror of the space of observation we create with our mechanisms for data capture (which are becoming increasingly capacious with video and Alexa in every home, as opposed to being truncated to bilps in clickstream behavior or point of sale transactions), our measurement protocol, and the arabesque inversions of our algorithms. They key thing is that we no longer start with an Aristotelian formal cause when we design computational systems, which means, we no longer imagine the abstract, Platonic scaffold of some act of intelligence as a pre-condition of modeling it. Instead, as Andrei Karpathy does a good job articulating, we stipulate the conditions for a system to learn bottom-up from the data (this does not mean we don’t design, it’s just that the questions we ask as we make the systems require a different kind of abstraction that is affiliated with induction (as Peter Sweeney eloquently illustrates in this post)). This has pretty massive consequences for how we think about the relationship between man and machine. We need to stop pitting machine against man. And we need to stop spouting obsequious platitudes that the “real power comes from the collaboration of man and machine.” There’s something of a sham humanism in those phrases that I want to get to the bottom of. The output of a machine learning algorithm always already is, and becomes even more, as the flesh of abstraction moves closer to the bone of data (or vice versa?), the digested and ruminated and stomach acid-soaked replication of human activity and behavior. It’s about how we regurgitate. That’s why it does indeed make sense to think about bias in machine learning as the laundering of human prejudice.

A woman in the audience posed the final question to the panelists: you’ve spoken about the narrow capabilities of machine learning systems, but will it be possible for artificial intelligence to learn empathy?

A fellow panelist took the Turing Test approach: why yes, he said, there has been remarkable progress in mimicking even this sacred hallmark of the limbic system. It doesn’t matter if the machine doesn’t actually feel anything. What matters it that the machine manifests the signals of having felt something, and that may well be all that matters to foster emotional intelligence. He didn’t mention Soul Machines, a New Zealand-based startup making “incredibly life-like, emotionally responsive artificial humans with personality and character,” but that’s who I’d cite as the most sophisticated example of what UX/UI design can look like when you fuse the skill set of cinematic avatars, machine learning scientists, and neuroscientists (and even the voice of Cate Blanchett).

I disagreed. I am no affect expert (just a curious generalist fumbling my way through life), but believe empathy is remarkably complex for many reasons.

I looked at her directly, deeply. At not just at her, I looked into her. And what I mean by looking into her is that I opened myself up a little, wasn’t just a person protected by the distance of the stage (or, more precisely, the 4 brown leather bar stools with backs so low they only came up to vertebra 4 or 5, and all of us leaned in and out trying to find and keep a dignified posture, hands crossed into serenity, sometimes leaning forward). Yes, when I opened myself to engage with her I leaned forward almost to the point of resting my elbows on my thighs, no longer leaning back and, every few moments, returning my attention to the outer crevices of my eyes to ensure they were soft as my fellow panelists spoke. And I said, think about this. I’m up here on stage perceiving what I’m perceiving and thinking what I’m thinking and feeling what I’m feeling, and somehow, miraculously, I can project what I think you’re perceiving, what I think you’re thinking, what I think you’re feeling, and then, on top of that, I can perhaps, maybe, possibly start to feel what you feel as a result of the act of thinking that I think what you perceive, think, and feel. But even this model is false. It’s too isolated. For we’ve connected a little, I’m really looking at you, watching your eyes gain light as I speak, watching your head nod and your hands flit a little with excitement, and as I do this we’re coming together a little, entangling ourselves to become, at least for this moment, a new conjoint person that has opened a space for us to jointly perceive, think, and feel. We’re communicating. And perhaps it’s there, in that entangled space, where the fusion of true empathy takes place, where it’s sound enough to impact each of us, real enough to enable us to notice a change in what we feel inside, a change occasioned by connection and shared experience.

A emotional Turing test would be a person’s projection that another being is feeling with her. It wouldn’t be entangled. It would be isolated. That can’t be empathy. It’s not worthy of the word.

But, how could we know that two people actually feel the same feeling? If we’re going to be serious, let’s be serious. Let’s impose a constraint and say that empathy isn’t just about feeling some feeling when you infer that another person is feeling something, most often feeling something that would cause pain. It’s literally feeling the same thing. Again, I’m just a curious generalist, but know that psychologists have tools to observe areas of the brain that light up when some emotional experience takes place; so we could see if, during an act of empathy, the same spot lights up.[3] Phenomenologically,  however, that is, as the perceived, subjective experience of the feeling, it has to be basically impossible for us to ever feel the exact same feeling. Go back to the beginning of this blog post. When I walked into the National Club, my internal experience was that of walking into the Downtown Association more than 1.5 years earlier. I would hazard that no one else felt that, no one else’s emotional landscape for the rest of the evening was then subtly impacted by the emotions that arose during this reliving. So, no matter how close we come to feeling with someone when our emotional world us usurped, suddenly, by the experience of another, it’s still grafted upon and filtered through the lens of time, of the various prior experiences we’ve had that trigger that response and come to shape it. As I write, I am transported back to two occasions in my early twenties when I held my lovers in my arms, comforting and soothing them after each had learned about a friend’s suicide. We shared emotion. Deeply. But it was not empathy. My experience of their friends’ suicide was far removed. It was compassion, sympathy, but close enough to the bone to provide them space to cry.

So then we ask, if it’s likely impossible to feel the exact same feeling, then we should relax the constraint and permit that empathy need not be deterministic and exact, but can be recognized within a broader range. We can make it a probabilistic shared experience, an overlap within a different bound. If we relax that constraint, then can we permit a Turing test?

I still don’t think so. Unless we’re ok with sociopaths.

But how about this one. Once I was running down Junipero Serra Boulevard in Palo Alto. It was a dewy morning, dewy as so many mornings are in Silicon Valley. The rhythms of the summer are so constant: one wakes up to fog, daily, fog coming thick over the mountains from the Pacific. Eventually the fog burns and if you go on a bike ride down Page Mill road past the Sand Hill exit to 280 you can watch how the world comes to life in the sun, reveals itself like Michelangelo reveals form from marble. There was a pocket of colder, denser, sweeter smelling air on the 6.5-mile run I’d take from the apartment in Menlo Park through campus and back up Junipero Serra. I would anticipate it as I ran and was always delighted by the smell that hit me; it was the smell of hose water when I was a child. And then I saw a deer lying on the side of the road. She was huge. Her left foot shook in pain. Her eyes were pleading in fear. She begged as she looked at me, begged for mercy, begged for feeling. I was overcome by empathy. I stopped and stood there, still, feeling with her for a moment before I slowly walked closer. Her foot twitched more rapidly with the wince of fear. But as I put my hand on her huge, hot, sweating belly, she settled. Her eyes relaxed. She was calmed and could allow her pain without the additional fear of further hurt. I believe we shared the same feeling at that moment. Perhaps I choose to believe that, if only because it is beautiful.

The moment of connection only lasted a few minutes, although it was so deep it felt like hours. It was ruptured by men in a truck. They honked and told me I was an idiot and would get hurt. The deer was startled enough to jump up and limp into the woods to protect herself. I told the men their assumptions were wrong and ran home.

You might say that this is textbook Turing test empathy. If I can project that I felt the exact same feeling as an animal, if I can be that deluded, then what’s stopping us from saying that that the projection and perception of shared feeling is precisely what this is all about, and therefore it’s fair game to experience the same with a machine?

The sensation of love I felt with that deer left a lasting impression on me. We were together. I helped her. And she helped me by allowing me to help her. Would we keep the same traces of connection from machines? Should empathy, then, be defined by its durability? By the fact that, if we truly do connect, it changes us enough to stay put and be relived?

There are, of course, moments when empathy breaks down.

Consider breakdowns in communication at work or in intimate relationships. Just as my memory of the Downtown Association shaped, however slightly, my experience at Wednesday’s conference, so too do the accumulated interactions we have with our colleagues and partners reinforce models of what we think others think about us (and vice versa). These mental models then supervene upon the act of imagination to perceive, think, and feel like someone else. It breaks. Or, at the very latest, distorts the hyperparameters of what we can perceive. Should anything be genuinely shared in such a tangled web, it would be the shared awareness of the impossibility of identification. I’ve seen this happen with teams and seen it happen with partners. Ruts and little walls that, once built, are very difficult to erode.

Another that comes to mind is the effort required to empathize deeply with people far away from where we live and what we experience. When I was in high school, Martha Nussbaum, a philosopher at the University of Chicago who has written extensively about affect, came and gave a talk about the moral failings of our imagination. This was in 2002. I call her mentioning that we obsess far more deeply, we feel far more acutely, about a paper cut on our index finger or a blister on our right heel, than we do when we try to experience, right here and now, the pain of Rwandans during the genocide, of Syrian refugees packed damp on boats, of the countless people in North America razed from fentanyl. On the talk circuit for his latest book, Yuval Harari comments that we’ve done the conceptual work required to construct and experience a common identity (and perhaps some sort of communal empathy) with people we’ll never meet, who are far outside the local perception of the tribe, in constructing the nation. And that this step from observable, local community to imagined, national community was a far steeper step function than the next rung in the ladder from national to global identity (8,000,000 and 7,000,000,000 are more or less the same for the measly human imagination, whereas 8,000,000 feels a lot different than 20). Getting precise on the limits of these abstractions feels like worthwhile work for a 21st-century ethicists. After all, in its original guise, the trolley problem was not a deontological tool for us to pre-ponder and encode utilitarian values into autonomous vehicles. It was a thinking tool to illustrate the moral inevitability of presence.


I received LinkedIn invites after the talk. One man commented that he found my thoughts about empathy particularly insightful. I accepted his invitation because he took the time to listen and let me know my commentary had at least a modicum of value. I’ll never know what he felt as he sat in the audience during the panel. I barely know what I felt, as two and a half days of experience have already intervened to reshape the experience. So we grow, beings in time.


[1] Loyal blog readers will have undoubtedly noticed how many posts open with a similar sentence. I speak at a ton of conferences. I enjoy it: it’s the teacher’s instinct. As I write today, however, I feel alienated from the posts’ algorithmic repetition, betokening the rhythm of my existence. Weeks punctuated by the sharp staccato of Monday’s 15-minute (fat fully cut) checkins, the apportioned two hours to rewrite the sales narrative, the public appearances that can be given the space to dilate, and the perturbations flitting from interaction to interaction, as I gradually cultivate the restraint to clip empathy and guard my inside from noxious inputs. Tuesday morning, a mentor sent me this:

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[2] This is a loaded term. I’m using it here as a Bayesian would, but won’t take the time to unpack the nuances in this post. I interviewed Peter Wang for the In Context podcast yesterday (slated to go live next week) and we spoke about the deep transformation of the concept of “software” we’re experiencing as the abstraction layer that commands computers to perform operations moves ever closer to the data. Another In Context guest, David Duvenaud, is allergic to the irresponsible use of the word “inference” in the machine learning community (here’s his interview). Many people use inference to refer to a prediction made by a trained algorithm on new data it was not trained on: so, for example, if you make a machine learning system that classifies cats and dogs, the training stage is when you show the machine many examples of images with labels cat and dog and the “inference” stage is when you show the machine a new picture without a label and ask it, “is this a cat or a dog?” Bayesians like Duvenaud (I think it’s accurate to refer to him that way…) reserve the term inference for the act of updating the probability of a hypothesis in light of new observations and data. Both cases imply the delicate dance of generalization and induction, but imply it in different ways. Duvenaud’s concern is that by using the word imprecisely, we lose the nuance and therefore our ability to communicate meaningfully and therefore hamper research and beauty.

[3] Franco Moretti once told me that similar areas of the brain light up when people read Finnegans Wake (or was it Ulysses? or was it Portrait of the Artist? and the Bible (maybe Ecclesiastes?).

The featured image is Edouard Manet’s Olympia, unveiled in Paris in 1856. In the context of this post, it illustrates the utter impossibility of our empathizing with Olympia. The scorn and contempt in her eyes protects her and gives her power. She thwarts any attempt at possession through observation and desire, perhaps because she is so distanced from the maid offering her flowers, deflecting her gaze out towards the observer but looking askance, protecting within her the intimations of what she has just experienced, of the fact that there was a real lover but it was and will never be you. Manet cites Titian’s Venus of Urbino (1534), but blocks all avenues for empathy and connection, empowering Olympia through her distance. 

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Titian’s Venus of Urbino has a little sleeping dog, not a bristling black cat

The Poignancy of Growth

I don’t know if Andrei Fajardo knows that I will always remember and cherish our walk up and down University Avenue in Toronto a few months ago. Andrei was faced with a hard choice about his career. He was fortunate: both options were and would be wonderful. He teetered for a few weeks within the suspension of multiple possible worlds, channeling his imagination to feel what it would feel like to make choice one, to feel what it would feel like to live the life opened by choice two. He sought advice from others. He experimented with different kinds of decision-making frameworks to see how the frame of evaluation shaped and brought forth his values, curtailed or unfurled his imagination. He listened for omens and watched rain clouds. He broke down the factors of his decision analytically to rank and order and plunder. He spoke to friends. He silenced the distractions of family. He twisted and turned inside the gravity that only shines forth when it really matters, when the frame of identity we’ve cushioned ourselves within for the last little while starts to fray under the invitation of new possibilities. The world had presented him with its supreme and daunting gift: the poignancy of growth.

I’m grateful that Andrei asked me to be one partner to help him think about his decision. Our conversations transported me back, softly, to the thoughts and feelings and endless walks and desperate desire for the certainty I experienced in 2011 as I waded through months to decide to leave academia and pursue a career in the private sector. I wanted Andrei to understand that the most important lesson that experience taught me was about a “peculiar congenital blindness” we face when we make a hard choice:

To be human is to suffer from a peculiar congenital blindness: On the precipice of any great change, we can see with terrifying clarity the familiar firm footing we stand to lose, but we fill the abyss of the unfamiliar before us with dread at the potential loss rather than jubilation over the potential gain of gladnesses and gratifications we fail to envision because we haven’t yet experienced them.

When faced with the most transformative experiences, we are ill-equipped to even begin to imagine the nature and magnitude of the transformation — but we must again and again challenge ourselves to transcend this elemental failure of the imagination if we are to reap the rewards of any transformative experience. (Maria Popova in her marvelous Brain Pickings newsletter about L.A. Paul’s Transformative Experience)

I shared examples of my own failure of imagination to help Andrei understand the nature of his choice. For hard choices about our future aren’t rational. They don’t fit neatly into the analytical framework of lists and cross-examination and double-entry bookkeeping. It’s the peculiar poignancy of our existence as beings unfurling in time that makes it impossible for us to know who we will be and what knowledge the world will provide us through the slot canyon aperture of our particular experience, bounded by bodies and time.

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A slot canyon I found in April at Arches National Park in Moab, Utah. It was near the marvelous pictographs, off the beaten path.

As Andrei toiled through his decision, he kept returning to a phrase he’d heard from Daphne Koller in her fireside chat with Yoshua Bengio at the 2018 ICLR conference in Vancouver. As he shared in this blog post, Daphne shared a powerful message: “Building a meaningful career as a scientist isn’t only about technical gymnastics; it’s about each person’s search to find and realize the irreplaceable impact they can have in our world.”

But, tragically or beautifully, depending on how you view it, there are many steps in our journey to realize what we believe to be our irreplaceable impact. Our understanding of what this could or should be can and should change as our slot canyon understanding of the world erodes just a little more under with the weight of wind and rain to bring forth light from the sun. In my own experience, I never, ever imagined that just two years after believing I had made a binary decision to leave academia for industry, I would be invited to teach as an adjunct law professor, that three years later I would give guest lectures at business schools around the world, that five years later I would give guest lectures in ethics and philosophy. The past self had a curious capacity to remain intact, to come with me as a barnacle through the various transformations. For the world was bigger and vaster than the limitations my curtailed imagination had imposed on it.

Andrei decided to stay with our company. He is a marvelous colleague and mentor. He is  a teacher: no matter where he goes and what he does, his irreplaceable impact will be to broaden the minds of others, to break down statistics and mathematics into crystal clear building blocks than any and all can understand. He’ll come to appreciate that he is a master communicator. I’m quite certain I’ll be there to watch.

What was most beautiful about our walk was the trust I had in Andrei and that he had in me. His awareness that I wanted what was best for him, that none of my comments were designed to manipulate him into staying if that weren’t what he, after his toil, after his reflection, decided was the path he wanted to explore. It was simply an opportunity to share stories and experiences, to provide him with a few different thinking tools he could try on for size as he made his decision. We punctuated our analysis with thoughts about the present. We deepened our connection. I gave him a copy of Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet to help him come to know more of himself and the world. Throughout our walk, his energy was crystalline. He listened with attention rapt into the weight of it mattering. The attention that emerges when we are searching sponges sopping as much as we can from those we’ve come to trust. The air was chilled just enough to prickle goosebumps, but not so much as to need a sweater. The grass was green and the flowers had started to bud.

Yesterday was the first snow. There are still flowers; soon they’ll die. The leaves over Rosedale are yellow and red, made vibrant by the moisture. Andrei is with his dogs and his wife. I’ll see him tomorrow morning at work.


I found the featured image last weekend at the Thomson Landry Gallery in Toronto’s Distillery District. It’s a painting called “Choisir et Renoncer,” by Yoakim Bélanger. I see in it the migration of fragility, hands cradled open into reverent acceptance. I see in it the stone song of vulnerability: for it is the white figure-she who dared wade ankle-deep in Hades to hear Eurydice’s voice one more time-whose face glows brightest, who reveals the wrinkles of her character, who shines as a reflection of ourselves, unafraid to reveal her seashell cracks and the wisdom she acquired with the crabs. She etches herself into precision. She chisels brightly through the human haze of potential, buoyed upon the bronze haze of the self she once was, but yesterday. 

A Mother and her Daughter

My mom has done business in over 180 countries, her passport tattooed with stamps and fat with extra pages. Her vagrant soul never seems restless for stability; her vibrant energy never seems to dwindle into entropy. She seems at home anywhere, yet nowhere. She has instilled in me the tendency to notice commonalities before differences, teaching through her example how to speak and touch and look so that others may let down the walls of propriety and open the levees of expression and feeling. We see what peoples share, see what’s common across humanity more clearly than cultural differences.[1] She’s written emails from English manors, anxious to share what it felt like to hear the Goldberg Variations echo in a dewy church. Called us from hospitals in Singapore, worrying us that the Meningitis would reappear. Sent photos from dry tents in Arabian deserts, hookah smoke billowing her digital folds.

Since childhood, Mom brought me on her business trips. She took my brother too, but not as frequently as me. He loved it, but didn’t live for it as I do. We went to Sydney and the Gold Coast and Moscow and Johannesburg and Mombasa and Madrid and London and Paris. Most of the time, she’d work all day as I occupied myself either alone or with a tour guide. Mom insisted I have a guide in places that were more risky and harder to navigate. In Moscow, Tatiana, who, miraculously, had taught Pushkin at the University of Chicago (where I went to college), held my hand as we left behind the blaring March sun in the Red Square and walked down into the utter darkness of Lenin’s tomb, pulled me to the left so I wouldn’t attract attention from the guard as I fumbled my feet in the darkness, and pressed the small of my back to keep me walking, moving, steady, around the light radiating off this small little man who looms so large in the Russian imagination alongside the staccato lyricism of Prokofiev and Ivan Tsarevich and the Wolf.

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Most of Vasnetsov’s “Ivan Tsarevich riding the Gray Wolf,” which Tatiana showed me in the Tretyakov gallery in Moscow. The Russians have a remarkable ability to deflect what must be the cold reality of their existence into the most remarkable fairy tales.

In Johannesburg, I told my guide Mandla I was more interested in seeing how people live than visiting tourist attractions, so we walked through the streets of Soweto and picked up his daughter at daycare, and, upon seeing me, the woman who ran the daycare center threw down the clothes she was hanging on the line and screamed at me in Zulu, screamed, pointed, accused, and I had no clue what was going on until I learned that she mistook me for the girl’s colored mother, and scolded me for having abandoned the girl she thought I had abandoned because her skin was a shade darker than my own.

At night, I would accompany Mom at business dinners. Her colleagues metabolized the initial strangeness of having a 14-, 15-, 16-, 17-year-old girl around relatively quickly. For I’d grown up being in the company of technology executives and, given my proclivities for imitation, had learned how to behave. I’d absorbed the topics and mannerisms by osmosis and they sensed they needn’t adapt the topic of conversation to placate my interests; that I would listen, reason, and pose questions that, on a few occasions, enabled them to see problems they were working on in a new and different way.

It is only with the hindsight of moderate maturity that I appreciate how valuable these experiences were for my future career. I have never questioned my validity as a woman in business, for I had my Mom as a strong role model and example from the day I was born. She showed me what was possible. Showed that one could wake up at 3:45 am to catch the 6:00 flight to Chicago and nonetheless look stunning in a suit and stilettos, graceful in her power and resilience. Showed, on the flip side, that the second day of work, the family work, could start at 6:00 pm with laundry spinning and chicken dipped in egg yolk and flour, and the anticipation of saffron and bittersweet double-boiled chocolate for mousse at the weekend party. Showed that femininity and feminism need not be incompatible, that a woman could drink Japanese executives under the table and feel close to death when the 6:30 alarm went off and nonetheless have the wherewithal to get the deal done. And showed me that it’s ok to need silence, that we all need rest, that the energy required to sustain the ideal must fray, eventually, into daylong movie sessions on the couch so the synapses could recover. It’s because of her that I sit tall and grounded in the presence of C-Suite executives.

People meet her and say they understand where my dynamism and charisma come from. Meet her and are transfixed by her energy and presence. Meet her and are touched by the love she bleeds for her family.

It is only with the hindsight of moderate maturity that I was able to grow into loving myself enough to love her with ease. I’m happy about that, as I want to care for her, focus on her, give her more than I give to myself.

Yesterday was a remarkable day in the life of a mother and her daughter. The tables turned. This time, Mom accompanied me on a business trip.

I gave the opening keynote and was interviewed in a fireside chat at the INSEAD AI Forum in Paris. Asked to demystify AI, I spent 40% of the time explaining how machine learning systems differ from rules-based, deterministic systems (which boils down to reminding people what functions are and showing them how much more powerful it is to map Xs to Ys in 50,000 dimensions than 2 dimensions) and why this is cool, and 60% of the time walking step-by-step through the decisions interdisciplinary teams have to make when they build a machine learning system that solves a particular problem in a particular context (in this case, the revenue optimization application Kanetix is using on the integrate.ai platform). The most important thing to demystify right now isn’t what machine learning is or how it works, but what happens when people in businesses with processes honed over years to manage deterministic technology try to implement it.[2] To expose the friction all enterprises face when they grapple with the probabilistic outputs of mathematical functions that look like intelligent systems but are really narrow optimization tools (this doesn’t diminish the remarkable questions machine learning is forcing us to pose about our thinking, language, and being). I focus on these topics because I want to empower people. I want to change the incessant dialogue about the “scarcity of ML talent” and create a place for more heroes than the computer science PhDs. Because, and forgive the cliché, it actually does take a village.

During the fireside chat, Subi Rangan and I spoke about larger societal questions around AI. We discussed the interdependence between privacy and economic power (and I shared my thinking about why privacy should shift from the rights of the data subject to the obligations of the data processor to better address the privacy risks of machine learning systems), how MBAs need to get used to the persistent anxiety of switching roles and contexts as algorithms automate specific, narrow tasks, and why the simple act of participating in an on-the-ground proof on concept is the surest way to leave a mark in how technology will shape our future.

After our performance, I told Subi he has a gift: his demeanor evinces a grace that provides a safe space for an interviewee-or student-to think, to speak as clearly as possible, and allow her mind to creatively unfurl. He was not antagonistic. He didn’t threaten. He didn’t seek spectacle from jabs or irony. He sought to present a structural hierarchy of concepts that could unite the particular and the general, enable the concreteness of embodied experience to ladder up to the big questions policy makers and executives are grappling with today. It was helpful. It was a framing, but one that invited rather than constrain. He was touched by my comments and, off to see his own daughter for lunch, would share his pride at having done something meaningful.

It was energizing to have my Mom in the audience. I didn’t seek her approval. I didn’t seek her pride. I just wanted to give back. To mention to the whole audience how happy I was that she was there, to show her how much I love her, to allow her heart to smile in seeing that she had done well and that I had turned out ok. And that we will have many more business trips to share, but that we must savour the delicacy and uniqueness of each one as our allotted prism in love and in life.


[1] I’ve felt ashamed of the fact that I don’t seem to perceive differences like others do. I think it ultimately stems from a strong identification with assimilation. From what I’ve observed, most people have a more solidified identity than I do. They self-identify as a man, as an American, as a taxi driver, as a piano player, as an X, and therefore have a measuring stick against which they notice that Y thing around them is different from their normal habits of perception. They self-identify as visitors, as tourists. When I come to a new place, I self-identify in becoming the other as soon as humanly possible. I want to mimic their language, mimic their gestures, eat how they eat, change how I hold my fork, eat with my hands, change how I walk, mimic how they acquiesce or disagree. I suppose I do have the internal mental model of practiced habits, but I prefer to absorb the differences as opposed to recognizing them as other from myself. I am quite like that in many aspects of my life: writing in the style of what I’ve just read, aligning what I say to the context of a conversation, adapting the introductory description of what my company is and does to the demands of a situation, to fit the model I presume is most meaningful to my interlocutor. For that reason, it’s difficult for me to concatenate the many particulars into a static meme that can scale to rout repetition.

[2] Mihnea Moldoveanu and Martin Reeves’s cogent article about this is well worth the read. Aspects of my thinking on this topic appear in this post.

The featured image is of the Place des Vosges, tucked away in the Marais in Paris. It is one of my favorite places in the world. I remember the first time I visited it in 2002, a spry yet hypersensitive 18-year-old who had just spent 3 months living abroad in Burgos, Spain and was on vacation in Paris with four female friends. We bunked together in a boutique hotel with sea-green walls. I remember the weight of my friends’ hair, how their nipples looked so different from my own, remember how it felt to inhabit my thin frame. I remember when Nicolas showed up at the restaurant, at the end of the meal, just as we were preparing to leave, past the disappointment, past the acceptance, after the hope wafts were snuffed under the tannins on the back of my tongue. He arrived. My heart accepted the recognition of the desire it had pretended to put aside-out of self protection-like a napkin stained with tomato sauce. We just barely moved on the dance floor, siphoned inside blaring Haitian music and off from the world around us as if we’d reduced our dimensions to the sacred simplicity of a Rublev icon. How fascinating that dimensionality reduction betokens the sacred and the sublime; while in information representation, we covet higher dimensions as the promise land indexing knowledge. The next day, he took me to the Louvre. I could smell his body odor through his brown suede jacket as he showed me where to guide my eye along white marble arms and legs. I didn’t mind because it was him. 

Years passed. Friday was the first time my mom saw the Place des Vosges. We ate goat cheese and steak tartare and crème brûlée. She had a cold. She listened without judgment.

The AlphaGo Documentary

Our narratives of Man versus Machine focus on Machine becoming Man, then surpassing Him.

Man is something that shall be overcome. Man is a rope, tied between beast and overman-a rope over an abyss. What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not an end. (Zarathustra, thus imaginarily reported by Friedrich Nietzche) 

The AlphaGo documentary is about Man qua Man[1], or, more precisely, about one man by the name of Lee Sedol, who has a soft, high-pitched voice, a wife, and a daughter. In March of 2016, Sedol went from being well known to Go fans to being well known to everyone after losing 4 out of 5 games to AlphaGo, a computer built by machine learning engineers at Deepmind.

Here is what the film beckoned me to see, feel, and infer.

1. Fear eats Man’s mind

And thus the native hue of resolution/ Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought (Hamlet, Act III, Scene I) [2]

Sedol is a champion. He has cultivated excellence, put in his 10,000 hours of practice. Played game after game after game to get where he is today, working humbly and patiently with his coach. Playing Go the way he plays is an act of respect towards his elders, his nation, his family.

For Sedol, therefore, the match against AlphaGo was much more than a match. It was the appointed time to exhibit elegance, grace, and creativity above and beyond standard play. The moment when he left the hallowed halls of practice to squint into the harsh lights of the stage. When they applauded. When he bowed, and, lifting his as slowly as possible to protract time into the infinite dilation of Cantor’s continuity, pupils dilating into eye drop blurs, seconds half-lived to infinitesimals, further, until he couldn’t stop it anymore, until, as raised his head back up, he noticed his sense of self had changed, he observed himself being observed, knowing everyone was watching, rid himself of the caterpillar cloak called Lee Sedol to stretch his powdery wings as Man. He had become an allegory of human intelligence pitted against the machine.

No biggie. You got this. Just a little blip in history. Just a game. Underwear. Chickens in underwear with scraggly little legs hobbling under the weight of tubby guts bloated with donuts and Budweiser. Just like yesterday when no one was watching.

What a horrible place to be.

And yet, we honor it. We honor the resilience of the golfer who keeps his cool after a dud shot hooks way too far left. We honor the focus of the concert violinist who can make her way through the Mephistophelian haze of a Paganini caprice. We honor the ease excellent TED Talk speakers find when they share an idea they believe in. We honor it because we know how hard it is. Because we recognize that the difference between good and excellent is the fortitude of practice and the gumption to keep the mind in check, to settle its sabotage, to focus.

We are all Hamlet. Some of us more than others.

Sedol is also Hamlet. The documentary does a marvelous job eliciting our empathy as we watch him doubt, furrow, fear, apologize, strategize, wrestle with the pastiche reflection of what he could have done, who he could have been, how the narrative could have gone if only he had done this move instead of that move. We never hear the voices in his head but we can infer their clamor: “calm down, stay here, focus.” Sedol plays the game in context. He knows the stakes of the match and has no choice but to devote a portion of his brain to the everything else that is not the local task. It’s plausible that only 30% of his brain power could be devoted to the actual game.

AlphaGo has no voices in its head. It has no runaway probabilities. The only probabilities it calculates span the trees it searches to find the next move and win.

2. Man is a social animal who relies on nonverbal communication

Man is by nature a social animal; an individual who is unsocial naturally and not accidentally is either beneath our notice or more than human. Society is something that precedes the individual. Anyone who either cannot lead the common life or is so self-sufficient as not to need to, and therefore does not partake of society, is either a beast or a god. (Aristotle, Politics) [3]

AlphaGo has no hands. It has no face. Unless Deepmind decides to embody future versions in a robot somersaulting down the uncanny valley, it will never feel the silky lamination of a Go stone, never calm its nerves by methodically circling the stone between the pads of its right thumb and index finger as it contemplates its next move.

Like the infamous Godot in Samuel Beckett’s play, in the documentary, AlphaGo feels more like a prop than a character. It’s undoubtedly there, ubiquitous, but somehow also absent. Sedol engages with AlphaGo through a ventriloquist named Aja Huang, a Taiwanese computer scientist on the DeepMind team who is also an amateur 6-dan Go player. Sedol never engages with AlphaGo directly: only with its diplomat, its emissary.

Huang is no throw-away character. The ventriloquist could have been anyone: his task was to look at the digital display indicating AlphaGo’s move and translate this to the physical board by placing the stone in the right place. He could have carried out this task with zero knowledge of what it meant. Brawn without brains. Pure, robotic execution.

The positions of the stones mean something to Huang. He bridges two ways of seeing the game, like a computer scientist charting probabilities and like a Go player strategizing moves.

And this means that his face could have relayed emotional content back to Sedol, allowing the champion to plunder the emotional cues that are such an integral part of the game. In the first match, Sedol felt alienated because when he looked up at Huang to gather information from his temples, eyebrows, forehead, pupils, cheeks, lips, chin, elbows, freckles, arm hairs, face hairs, eyes, sweat beads, breath, aura, the signals were absent. Huang didn’t exhibit the weight of concentration or even the active restraint of a bluff. It was almost worse that he wasn’t just a robot man because he had enough knowledge to lead Sedol to anticipate emotional cues but fell short because his ego wasn’t engaged. He was, in the end, only an observer. The stage shifted to a theater of deliberate alienation, as in the movie The Lobster.

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Huang is like Colin Farrell’s character in The Lobster because his emotional response does not match the context.

This inverted uncanny valley tells us something about how we communicate. It’s cliché to underscore the importance of nonverbal communication, but it was quite powerful to see how much Sedol typically relies upon emotional cues as animal, as mammal, when he plays against a normal opponent, and how the absence of those cues threw him off. I suspect some of the reticence we feel around trust and explainability stems from our brains processing the world as animals. We don’t actually require explanations from people to trust them and obey them. Power and persuasion seep through different seams.

3. Computer scientists and subject matter experts see the same thing different ways

While Huang speaks neural network and speaks Go, most of the DeepMind scientists lack the same bilingual subject matter expertise (I may be incorrect, but I’m pretty sure not everyone who worked in AlphaGo knows the game). Indeed, one fascinating aspect of contemporary machine learning is that the systems can learn what aspects of the data are relevant for a prediction or classification task rather than having a person apply their knowledge to hand pick which aspects will be most relevant. This is not universally the case, and it’s not to denigrate the value of subject matter expertise: on the contrary, there is excellent research afoot to make it easier for people with subject matter expertise in some domain-be that cancer diagnostics or fashion taste or 50-years of experience tweaking knobs to offset the quirks of an office building in lower Manhattan-to represent their knowledge as distributions and parameters without needing to be a scientist do to so. But a characteristic of the deep learning moment is that a crafty scientist can consider a problem abstractly, move away from the particular details we observe as the problem’s phenotype (e.g., a move in the game of Go) and focus on the mathematical underpinnings of the problem (e.g., the number of hidden layers or some other architectural choices to make in a neural network). Add to this that what makes a machine learning problem a machine learning problem is that there is too much variance for us to deterministically write out all the rules: instead, we provide primers that enable the system to iterate fast (that’s where we need all the computational power) to map inputs to outputs until the mapping works well most of the time. It’s like selecting the yeast that will yield the best bread.

Programs for playing games often fill the role in artificial intelligence research that the fruit fly Drosophila plays in genetics. Drosophilae are convenient for genetics because they breed fast and are cheap to keep, and games are convenient for artificial intelligence because it is easy to compare a computer’s performance on games with that of a person. (John McCarthy and Ed Feigenbaum, Tribute to Arthur Samuel) 

The AlghaGo documentary did a wonderful job juxtaposing how computer scientists tracked the game’s progress and how Sedol and the Go commentators tracked the game’s progress. The scientists viewed the game mathematically, as a series of abstract scores and probabilities. The players viewed the game phenotypically, as a series of moves on the board. It was two fundamentally different ways of viewing the same problem, illustrating the silos of communication companies that quickly emerge like tectonic plates shooting mountain sprouts in any enterprise. The endgame for the opponents was also quite different. The AlphaGo team was fundamentally interested in using Go as a testing ground for computational possibility, the particular use case required to explore the larger problem of building a system that can act intelligently. Sedol was fundamentally interested in playing perfect Go, and potentially abstracting lessons from play to other aspects of his life. These conflicting endgames are often at work in the dialectic of innovation, yin and yang dancing drunk through the discrete step changes of technological progress.

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The movie did an excellent job helping the viewer appreciate the different ways computer scientists and subject matter experts view the same problem.

I do wonder if we could rewrite the narrative of Man versus Machine as one of two different ways of creating, encapsulating, and sharing knowledge. The documentary made this about Demis Hassabis and the AlphaGo Team versus Sedol, West versus East, traditional culture versus computer science, two ways of representing knowledge and viewing the world. It’s ultimately a more grounded narrative. In our HBR Ideacast episode, I suggested to host Sarah Green Carmichael that it’s helpful to reframe a supervised learning system as “one human judgment versus the statistical average of thousands of human judgments,” and then ask which one you’d rather rely on. Granted, the new AlphaGo Zero system is one of self play, not one that mines past human judgment. But the yeast primer is still coded and crafted by human minds with a particular way of framing problems as engineered mathematical models.

4. Algorithms change how Man makes sense of the world

In a 2011 TED Talk, Kevin Slavin explained how trading algorithms have reshaped the physical landscape (we build structures to transmit the fastest signal possible so our algos can outcompete one another by fractions of a second). In a 2018 phone conversation, my partner John Frankel at ffVC helped me crystallize my understanding that task-specific machine learning algorithms are poised to reshape-if not already actively reshaping-our cognitive landscape.[4]

Much of the language used to describe AlphaGo betokens alienness and strangeness, facets of thought that are not only not human but antihuman. From a 2017 Atlantic article:

Since May, experts have been painstakingly analyzing the 55 machine-versus-machine games. And their descriptions of AlphaGo’s moves often seem to keep circling back to the same several words: Amazing. Strange. Alien.

“They’re how I imagine games from far in the future,” Shi Yue, a top Go player from China, has told the press. A Go enthusiast named Jonathan Hop who’s been reviewing the games on YouTube calls the AlphaGo-versus-AlphaGo face-offs “Go from an alternate dimension.” From all accounts, one gets the sense that an alien civilization has dropped a cryptic guidebook in our midst: a manual that’s brilliant—or at least, the parts of it we can understand.

AlphaGo makes a few moves in the match versus Sedol that flummox him. As a non Go player, I couldn’t make sense of the moves myself, but relied upon the commentary and interpretation offered by the film. What I took away was the sense that AlphaGo did not rely upon the same leading indicator heuristics that are the common tropes of seasoned Go players. If we think about it, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that the search space of 10172 positions (according to 11th-century Chinese scholar Shen Kuo) contains brilliance that has to date evaded master Go players. But what’s even more interesting is the cultural significance of knowledge transfer from generation to generation. If Go is staging ground for life, then mastery can and should be measured by analogical transferability and applicability. It’s like a pedagogical philosophy that values critical thinking: teach them Shakespeare, teach them whatever nouns you want, but focus on enabling them to transfer the verbs so they can shape shift to solve problems as they arise.

What comes off as alien is a system that is optimized for one task, regardless of analogy and transfer. And, one only win Go by one point, not many. The move with the highest likelihood of winning by the narrowest of margins will look different than the move that betokens potentially less likelihood of success, but a larger cushion. Map this to making big choices in life: most people study the safe subject to keep options open rather than following the risky path of studying what they love. The tradeoffs are different. Their optimizing for different types of outcomes and using a different calculus.

So, following John Frankel, I’d like to propose that our heuristics will change as our minds increasingly engage with tools that optimize ruthlessly against one task. Machine Go is different than Man Go because it’s not designed as a pedagogical tool to teach life lessons. It’s designed to win, designed to exploit the logic of one search space and one game and one set of rules. But that need not be all that bad. There’s something lovely in coming to terms with the fact that success only requires one point, that we need not rely upon the greedy heuristics that are familiar as we navigate the world. What’s deemed as alien is a means of coming to terms with our own predilections to generalize, when it may not always (or often) be the best bellwether of success. It’s the inverse interpretation of Bostrom’s paper clip optimization monster. An invitation for us to ponder our values and ethical stance as we increasingly interact with algorithms geared to optimize without questioning if that’s ultimately what we want and need.

pythagoreancup

The Pythagorean Cup is at once practical joke, physics lesson, and moral chastiser. If you are greedy and put too much wine into the cup, a siphon effect kicks in and all the liquid drains out. This kind of analogical triple meaning is the opposite of algorithmic thinking in its current form.

Conclusion

The AlphaGo documentary left me feeling empathy and admiration for Lee Sedol. Not as a Go champion, not as an allegory of Man’s Intelligence, but as a man. His humility was beautiful. His striving was admirable. His kindness towards his daughter was noticeable. His Korean duty was evident. He was many features cobbled into a being, with feelings and a heartbeat, and a mind. He learned something from the matches and lost gracefully, shaking Hassabis’ hand as he left the press conference, cameras flashing in his wake.


[1] Gender warriors, please do forgive me. There’s implicit critique about who controls the AI narrative in keeping the reference to Man, and I find the capitalization lends a curious aura of allegory to this post, which is riddled with references to male heroes.

[2] Rainer Werner Fassbinder (whose name I always mistake for Rainer Maria until I remember that’s the other Rainer, the Rilke Rainer) has a marvelous film entitled Angst Essen Seele Auf, translated as Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (which I should be translated as Ali: Fear Eat the Soul to better capture the grammatical error Ali, one of the film’s protagonists, makes when he speaks broken German without conjugating verbs) about an “almost accidental romance kindled between a German woman in her mid-sixties and a Moroccan migrant worker around twenty-five years younger.” While released in 1973, the lessons are all the more relevant today. The other eating metaphor on my mind is Andreessen’s software eating the world, and now Steven Cohen and Matthew Granade saying that models will run the world. What Cohen and Granade get right in their article is that AI systems are about much more than just Jupyter notebooks with models. You have to put models into production, use them as hypothesis to build closed-loop systems that get better as they engage with the world. So, so, so, so, so, so, so many companies still seem to miss this part. It’s hard, and requires work that isn’t deemed sexy by the cognoscenti and the rockstars (how awesome is the word cognoscenti?).

[3] I’ve been thinking a lot about the social value of work and the workplace and have the early, what-my-mind-does-walking-and-running-level intuitions of a blog post about why work is an opportunity to experience positive, Aristotelian freedom (where self-actualization occurs through participation in a common, social goal) versus negative freedom (how we normally conceptualize freedom as the absence of constraint for the individual) and what that means for team and meaning and also the intrinsic value of work (for the leisure promised by some UBI pundits rubs me the wrong way; not all UBI pundits believe self-actualization is an individual project, and the most sober ones think it’s a bump needed to become more socially connected (including Charles Murray, which is interesting…). Stay tuned.

[4] John has an uncanny ability to understand and represent the heart of the matter in emerging technologies. It’s a privilege to learn from him. I’ve mentioned this before on the blog, but John also has the world’s best out-of-office emails, which have inspired my own (mine are far less sardonic and far more earnest, not by choice but by the ineluctable traps of my style).

The featured image is from an article the newspaper Korea Portal posted March 15, 2016. In the article, Sedol says: “I wanted to end the tournament with good results, but feel sad that I couldn’t do it. As I said before, this is not a loss for man, but a loss for me. This tournament really showed what my shortcomings are.” As in the documentary, Sedol interprets his loss as a personal failure. He doesn’t view himself as the representative of mankind. This isn’t man versus machine. It is one match. One man versus his opponent. But because the opponent doesn’t feel like Sedol does, doesn’t care if it wins, it becomes one man versus himself. 

Who’s allowed to write about technology?

I recently published an article about explainability in machine learning systems for the Harvard Business Review. The article argues that many businesses get stuck applying machine learning because they worry about black boxes; that they should think about what matters for a given use case, as sometimes other governance and assessment metrics are more relevant than an explanation (e.g., precision and recall for information retrieval); and that a close reading of recital 71 in the EU GDPR suggests that an individual’s right to an explanation applies to the procedures used to build and govern the entire system, not to which input features, with which weights, lead to which outputs.[1]

The article’s goal is to help businesses innovate. It seeks to empower people by helping them ask the right questions. The battle cry is: There’s no silver bullet. You have to think critically. Compliance and business teams should align with data scientists early in the machine learning system-development process to align on constraints required for a given use case. Businesses should be as clear as possible on what algorithms actually optimize for, as ethical pitfalls arise between what we can and can’t measure, what our data do and do not index about the world.[3]

The day it was published, I received two comically opposite responses from data scientists working in executive positions in technology companies. The first complimented me, mentioning that they were pleasantly surprised to see someone with my educational background writing so cogently about machine learning. The second condemned me, mentioning that someone with my educational background had no right to write about machine learning and that I was peddling dangerous hype.

I didn’t learn much from the compliment. My Mr. Peanut Butter labrador ego enjoyed being stroked.

I learned a few things from the critique. It helped clarify some of my own tacit assumptions, my ideology, my ethics, the grey matter between the words, the stuff that makes it hard to write because it feels vulnerable and exposed, the implicit stuff that signals community acceptance and alignment and that we rarely sit back, unpack, analyze, and articulate.

Here are some of the lessons.

1. Precision always matters

As with (close to) all tricky situations, I wonder if I did the right thing at the time. Upon being attacked, I chose to diffuse rather than ignite. I thanked the person for voicing their critique and disengaged. The only thing I mentioned was that it appeared that they drew their conclusion from the title of my article rather than its content. They stated that scientists have long had ways to interpret the output of neural networks and that I was peddling hype to write an article entitled “When is it important for an algorithm to explain itself?” I was surprised to see the narrow focus on algorithmic interpretability, as I felt the work my article did was to expand the analytical framework of explainability to systems and procedures, not just algorithm. So, underneath the amygdala’s attack response, my mind said “Did they even read it?”

It took me a few minutes to put (what I assume are) the pieces together. I don’t write the titles for my HBR articles and hadn’t taken the time to internalize how the title could be interpreted. When my editor suggested it, I quickly approved. Had I felt it was important that the title precisely reflect the content, I would have recommended that we say “an algorithmic system,” not an “algorithm” and say “when is it important for businesses to consider explainability in machine learning systems” versus implying that algorithms have agency. (Although it is a thought-provoking and crucial task to think about how we can and should design system front-ends to translate math-speak into people-speak, be that to communicate and quantify uncertainty or to indicate other performance metrics in a way that is meaningful and useful to developers and users.)

Let me be clear on the lesson here. I try to take as much responsibility as possible for outcomes, especially negative ones. I approved this title very quickly because I was excited to see the piece go live. Next time, I’ll think more deeply. I’m not blaming the HBR editorial team. They thought about the title and considered a few different options. I love working with my editor. He’s a wonderful partner. We bounce topics by one another. He’ll push back on stuff he’s not excited about; I’ll do the same for him. What I enjoy most is giving him feedback on questions unrelated to my writing. I like giving back, as he has done much to help me build my reputation as a writer.

The reason I wonder if I did the right thing is that I wonder if it is my duty to other writers, to other professionals, to have stood up for myself as opposed to stepping back and disengaging. But attacks beget strong emotions. For all of us. I needed time to think and let the lessons sink in. This is, obviously, my response.

2. Read things before sharing them and commenting on them

I’m guilty of having shared things without reading them, or having only skimmed an abstract. Mostly because I’m busy and can be impulsive. This is a good lesson about why that’s always a bad idea. I’d feel ashamed if people suspected I hadn’t read an article before critiquing it. There’s a lot at stake here, like democracy. It’s meaningful to engage deeply and charitably with another person’s ideas. To take the time to understand what they are trying to communicate, to find an opportunity to refine an idea, challenge an idea, improve the structure or flow. To teach one another.

3. Don’t judge someone based on their resume

The person who critiqued me seemed to draw conclusions about what I could and could not know based on my LinkedIn profile. That doesn’t reveal that much. You don’t see that much of my college education was funded by Siemens because I was one of 2 female students in New England awarded for having the highest scores on our math and science AP tests. You don’t see that I was a math major at U Chicago who always got straight As in math and struggled much more in humanities, but was ultimately more interested in literature so decided to pursue that path. You don’t see how much analysis, complex analysis, number theory, linear algebra, and group theory I studied. You don’t see how I came to understand how important that training would be once I ended up working in machine learning. You don’t see that I focused on history of philosophy and math in the 17th and 18th century in graduate school, and, while the specific math of that period is no outdated, have thought deeply about the philosophical questions associated with statistics, empirical science, and the diffusion of knowledge in the wake of new scientific discovery. You don’t see how my fellow literature graduate students told me reading my writing was like being in a prison because I was always trying to prove things, as in a math proof.

You might see that I’m not interested in competing with machine learning researchers in their own field. I want to drink in as much of their thinking as possible, want to learn everything they can teach me, want to understand why and what it means for the field, want to experience the immense joy of recognizing structural similarities between two disciplines or applications that can be the seat of innovation, that place where you realize that a mathematical technique originally explored for problem A comes into its own in the world in problem B.

You might see that the role I’ve come to accept is that of the translator, the generalist curious enough to dive deeply into whatever subject matter I’m working on, but will never be the disciplined expert. There will always be questions and gaps. Always more to learn and explore. Always people who can go deeper and narrower. Like Sheldon Levy, I viciously and vibrantly admire those whose creative minds will discover things, will reframe problems to uncover solutions stuck for centuries. They are the heroes. All we do is to sing their song, and help others hear its beauty.

4. Allow people to learn

This is the most important lesson. The one I care about. The one that puts fire into my heart and makes my fingers type quickly.

We must allow people to learn from experiences after school. We must not accept a world where the priests alone are allowed to understand, where the experts alone have the authority to write about, talk about, and share ideas about a subject. Technologies like artificial intelligence are already impacting us all. Work will change. Jobs will change. New jobs and new opportunities will arise. If people are not given the space to change, to learn, if the only people we deem qualified to do this work, to write about this work, are those who come with a certain PhD, a certain educational certificate, a certain type of social rubric of authority, we are fucked. We must trust that people can learn new things and find ways to give them opportunities. We must engage with one another so as to promote openness, to probe and push without the searing pain of judgment, to provide people with the confidence required to ask the simple questions needed to get to the heart of the matter, to give people the breathing room to embrace the initial anxiety of change so they can come to do something new.

No, I did not do my PhD in machine learning. It’s not impossible that I won’t go back and do a second PhD in reinforcement learning, as I find the epistemological questions associated with that subfield incredibly rich, incredibly akin to the perennial questions I have loved in the Greeks, in the early moderns, and again today. Time will tell. I have, however, worked in the field over the past few years. I was fortunate enough to have been granted the opportunity to learn a lot at Fast Forward Labs. I will forever be grateful to Hilary Mason for giving me a chance to help her build her business, and for believing that I could learn. I learned. I am still learning. I write about what I’ve come to learn, and accept criticism, feedback, refinements, all the stuff other people can share with me to expand my understanding and help us all grow. I’m decent at recognizing what I know with precision and where my knowledge starts to falter into fuzziness, and I tell people that. I have made mistakes, thought about them deeply, and try my best not to make them a second time (which I don’t always succeed it). I love enabling others to build sound intuitions about mathematical concepts and technology. To feel empowered, feel like they get it in ways they hadn’t before. And not because it’s dumbed down. Not because we resort to the Platonic blindfolds for the masses. Because we can all do it. It’s just that we have to break down the power walls, break down the barriers, break down our egos, and do our best to make something meaningful.

I will fight for it. There are too many people who hold themselves back because they are excluded from circles protecting themselves within elitism. Everyone deserves a voice. Everyone deserves a chance to understand.

5. Everyone should be allowed to write about technology

It’s not all going to be good. There is a lot of hype. I’m not sure hype is all bad, as it has the power to mobilize large groups of people who wouldn’t otherwise be interested. Nothing like the fine print of precise qualifications to dampen the mood of disruptive innovation. There is damage when the hype breeds unnecessary fear, rather than unbounded excitement. And there’s certainly lots of work to be done to help businesses bring expectations down to earth to capitalize on what’s possible. But there’s wonderful satisfaction that emerges when businesses start to get traction with a narrowly-focused, real-world application. And it takes different people with different viewpoints from different teams to make that happen, in particularly in established enterprises with their processes and people and quirks and habits and culture.

We may not all want to write, but we all have a part to play. And I’ll always subscribe to the Ratatouille philosophy: it’s not that everyone can cook, but that the greatest chef in the world may not necessarily have a resume our priors deem likely to succeed.


[1] Peter Sweeney has written many great articles about epistemology and AI, and argued that we should conceptualize the outputs of machine learning algorithms as observations, not explanations. He was responding to David Weinberger, who has argued that we should focus governance efforts on optimization, not explanation. I’m partial to that, but again think it depends on the use case. Nick Frosst, who wrote the capsule network paper with Sara Sabour[2] and Geoff Hinton, thinks that interpretability (I must admit that I use the words interpretability and explainability interchangeably, and should take the time to parse the two, both philosophically and technically) is important because those creating systems and those impacted by systems should have the right to intervene to change their behaviour or change the system to change outcomes. So, for example, if a system denies an individual a mortgage because they missed their last 3 credit card payments, then that gives the individual meaningful recourse to act differently to meet the requisite rules in the future. It does indeed get dicey if there are so many dimensions that end up correlated to some output that impacts big deal opportunities for real people living real lives. I analyzed a couple of examples in this podcast.

[2] I’m 99% confident that Sara wasn’t able to attend NIPS in Los Angeles last year because she is Iranian. Knowledge, and credit for new knowledge, is cosmopolitan.

[3] My company recently published a framework to help consumer enterprises develop responsible machine learning systems. It’s practical and breaks down the different privacy, security, governance, and ethics questions cross-functional teams should ask and address at different points in the machine learning system-development process. We worked hard on it. I’m proud of it.

The featured image is of Remy the rat chef. He has a heightened sense of taste and smell but is naturally overlooked as an awesome chef because he’s a rat. He ends up making a ratatouille that softens the curmudgeonly critique because it brings him back to his childhood like Proust’s madeleine. So worth watching over and over again. 

Facebook Portrait Project: Batch 2

About a month ago, I started the Facebook Portrait Project. On July 31, I came to understand the following:

The Facebook Portrait practice yielded an insight today. I didn’t know this before I started. I’ve come to learn it in and through the practice.

I frame the portraits through an anchor experience that is meaningful to me. They aren’t fashioned from some neutral, third-person perch. I unfold love by identifying the essence of the emotion my subject-my friend-invokes in me, and then unravel the acrylic streamers from this emotional kernel.

But I’ve noticed that each person evokes a different aspect of myself and my personality. One person shares the practice of meditation. Another shares my taste in abstract art. Another shares my childhood, my deep history with ninja turtles and home video cameras. Another shares the simple joy of a beet folded into a rose on the dinner table, the elemental goodness of a meal shared with friends.

The Facebook Portrait project, therefore, is also a means of showing the self as a kaleidoscope. Of showing how our narrative is that much richer when it is viewed not as a series of selfies but as a series of self-portraits inflected through the presence and inspiration of those who love us, each person amplifying a different parameter, a different feature. Each person activating a different potential.

The composite of all the portraits is a type of self portrait. But it shows a self in context. A social self. Not a self as monad.

The practice is indeed spiritual.

I do believe this. Our core philosophical task in the early 21st century to unravel the self, this construct we inherited from Humanism, and recover the fluidity of sociality and ecosystems and organisms big and small.

But it’s also overthinking it. I write the portraits because I like writing them. It’s joyful. I like touching people. I like remembering things I had forgotten as I unpack the intuitions that frame the portraits. I like how it’s a form of meditation. I like how it doesn’t hurt because I don’t feel pressure to perform.

Here is the second batch of portraits. I’m currently planning to share them in batches of 5.


Portrait 6: Alisa Wechsler

While not of my blood, you are my sister because we are both at our happiest eating smoked whitefish and sturgeon.

While not of my blood, you are my sister because we have walked the same path in life, both roll up our sleeves to share forearm scars, forever marks of creatives imprisoned, I muting me, you muting you, we together dampened by the cumbersome gaze of what we assumed would be expected, and was.

You are my sister because you left your scars in the backseat with the grocery bags and the milk spoiling in the muggy Jersey sun and walked into life with the kids.

My sister because you saw me for me. The situation begged skepticism, criticism, concern, but you allowed the apartment to silence the voices and clear space for compassion and connection. Perhaps it was the buffalo parchment embrace of the Wayang puppets Rama and Sinta in the alcove. Perhaps the still modernism of Albers above the dining room table. The white cowhide rug. You felt yourself in the design and this recognition of kinship peeled away the prior expectations of concern to see why it all made sense.

My sister because when we walked through the David Bowie exhibit, this proleptic funeral procession he prepared as his final act, we saw permission. We left the shame on the other side. We too were Pierrot in Turquoise, were Ziggy Stardust, were unleashed at last with Eno in Berlin in his screaming ode to the king and his queen loving one another ardently, free, finally, pure, if only for one day.

My sister because I will care for your daughters and be their sister, too. I will keep their seeking eyes in my mind as I make my own choices, know there are young women watching, young leaders in search of a role model to show them what the world can offer and that the world can never keep them down.

My sister because of the constancy. Because we can flake out and be busy and need to take care of 65,000,000 things when we’re on the east coast and christ the time gets away and we really wanted to actually connect this time and it’s just not going to happen but it doesn’t matter, there’s zero resentment, zero concern, because I will always be there for you and know you will always be there for me, we’re united inside the substrata, underneath the erosion of the world. We’re inside the rocks in Arizona holding little girl hands, while outside the parched sun sweeps the lizards and the peyote.

My sister because who would have thought you’d be stuffing meat into a grinder with blood on your hands and sitting up straight in the meetings with the investors unabashedly demanding one more check. And they trusted you. They took a bet on you. They knew with someone as solid as you at the helm, money would flow.

My sister because you play the drums and have that silly purple car and somehow embody the rusty spirit of mullets and hair bands in 2018, but somehow make it fashionable.

My sister because the world will teach you about itself for your whole life. Because you hear its song. Because Gunner will be there with the dogs and you’ll all transcend the wrinkles of time with Peter Pan minds. Because you no longer need a fountain of youth. You have freed yourself to be you, and come into love.

alisa
Alisa and I share a deep connection with the desert. We’re both at ease there.

Portait 7: Mike Hume

Should the ninja turtles (NTs) negatively impact one’s mental well being, Mike Hume is screwed.

The NTs weren’t a Saturday-morning cartoon in the Hume household on 27 Highland Drive, Apalachin, New York (spelling always tripped me up when we first learned geography at Tioga Hills elementary school, up the road past the Starners’ house and then down the road on the left; my hair would freeze walking to school in the winter but I kind of dug it. Still do.).

They were a way of being.

Dad and Mike used to make these home videos of NT adventures, you know, some plot with Shredder and Crang being up to some shit. Dad had a moany Crang voice that may or may not be anything like Crang’s cartoon voice. It was decidedly NOT anything like Pinky or the Brain’s voice (side notes: Mike’s and my favorite Pinky quote is, “I think I am Brain: his name would be far more politically correct as Jean-Claude van Darn.”; Dad DOES have a Brain voice that comes out at Red Sox games in Fenway Park when he puts all of himself into a YEEES, either after some shortstop play is made or he has just punched the beach ball floating around so hard it goes to another part of the stadium; and I do believe the world would be a far saner place if Crang were the mascot for artificial intelligence, not the horrendous cognitive robots that litter the internet.).

I remember Mike being Raphael, although IMHO it would make way more sense for him to be Michelangelo, given his personality. The best part of the videos was the Warp Pipe with which the NTs would teleport to Shredder’s lair. The Warp Pipe was a ceramic napkin holder in the shape of an owl. Raphael, expertly voiced by Mike, would stand inside and then we’d put in him front of the Macintosh Classic with the rotating laser screen saver, the kind that better damn well continue to illuminate the background of 2nd-grade school photos, or else the world really is descending into senseless chaos, and there must have been some voice over for the teleportation. Mike was way better than I was at NT simulation because he remembers EVERY SINGLE SOLITARY LINE FROM EVERY MOVIE OR TV SHOW HE HAS SEEN. It’s insane. Like total recall. Sarah McManus (the love of Mike’s life) can attest to this, and likely gets somewhat frustrated that Mike never says anything that isn’t a quote from some movie, or a comment on the day’s golf game.

The NTs in the home movies were the 6-inch-ish figurines. Then we had the 1.5-foot-ish figures that were a softer plastic and were more life size (calibrated to kid height). That means we didn’t film them; they existed in the plane of our own reality. So Dad was at work and Jeff Valenta was over and we’d concocted a scenario where the very same home video camera that Dad used to film the NT home movies became itself Crang’s vehicle (Crang is just a brain so he needed to be housed in something). Mike was Raphael, as always, and he took one of his golf clubs and like BEAT THE SHIT out of Dad’s home movie camera. That was the end of our time making NT movies.

(Side note: Mike was on television when he was 2. It was at the B.C. Open, a PGA golf tournament that took place at the En-Joie country club in Endicott, New York from 1971-2006. Mike was caught swinging his blue tiny tikes driver, the cameraman commenting that he was destined to be a pro. Mike does have a nasty good drive. Side note 2: tiny tikes rakes, hoes, shovels, and spades were prominently featured as air guitars alongside the ray bans in the other Hume-family home movie series where our cousins played back up to Eric Clapton in After Midnight, again and again and again.)

The culmination of Mike’s NT-centric childhood (besides Vanilla Ice teaching us life lessons about dancing, pants, and hair, BTW this song literally has a line that says “Lyrics, fill in the gap” - like he didn’t bother to write the lyrics and forgot to update the template from the producer) was a trip to Disney World where we met the NTs who weren’t just 6-inch figures, weren’t just 1.5-foot dolls, but were 6-foot-the-real-deal-holy-shit-we-are-meeting-the-NTs-in-real-life guys! We stood in the crowd. Mike was 3ish, perched atop Dad’s shoulders so he could have a better view when the NT van came around the corner. We have a photo of his face ANGUISHED with anticipation.

And then he disappeared. Mom was terrified - she’d lost her child in this huge crowd. But April O’Neil was clever enough to improvise. Mike appeared on stage in April O’Neil’s arms. He had made it. Went from directing movies about NTs to destroying the video camera that made the same movies to being up there on stage for everyone else to see. He had triumphed. He had become ninja turtle.

PS - I love Mike more than anyone in the world. He makes my accomplishments feel special in a way no one else does. There’s just something about his kindness. But he makes everyone feel this way. That’s why he’s like an addiction. People want to be with him.

It was his birthday yesterday. 31 and counting. Couple more greys. Love you, kiddo. So very much.

mike
Sarah took this photo of Mike on his birthday, the day before I wrote the portrait. He does that with his eyebrows.

Portrait 8: Donna Flanagan Gaspard

Just 28 minutes ago, I made a choice.

I had spent the morning hours working on my book and felt trapped inside an anxiety pocket, focusing on the outcome rather than the process, questioning the enterprise, the little anxiety homunculus in my brain clamoring to procrastinate, conjuring the self-broom brigade like Mickey in the Sorcerer’s Apprentice, brooms sweeping self-doubt, self-criticism, self-hatred with the waterfall cadence of a machine gone amok.

But even in such moments, especially in such moments, we are invited to love. To return to the beauty of the process, the joy of creating, the immediacy that is always there, offering itself, open, not asking for anything in return, not needing any outcome. Just there. Like a mother’s unconditional love, never requiring anything in return and patient through every foible.

I noticed it was Donna’s birthday. I knew she would be touched by a portrait. I gave myself permission to devote the day’s writing to her.

As I clicked open the dialogue box to start writing, I debated whether to take a moment to breathe, to meditate before diving in. A part of my brain resisted: “Get going. Write. Get to the outcome. After you have completed something, something, you can let yourself off the hook.”

But this was for Donna. The thought of her gave me permission to step back. All I needed to bring to mind was the LinkedIn post she recently wrote about the healing power of breathing.

So, now 45 minutes ago (I think it’s been about 17 minutes), I made a choice. I chose to breathe. To step back for a moment and observe the tension balled up on my quadriceps, in my hips, to release it as Donna sat there with me. And taking this time to step back helped crystallize what matters in our relationship. Helped me find her portrait.

Like Alisa, Donna is my sister. But our sisterhood is very old. It has had years to grow and change. Like all living things, it isn’t constant.

I must have been 15 when I met Donna. I can’t recall precisely. I do recall that the first time we met was at a dinner in San Francisco. My mother ordered a bottle of Pahlmeyer Chardonnay. There was an air of celebration that evening, if only because it was two women and an almost-woman experiencing life together. Donna sensed my dissonance. Saw a young woman who had power and strength, but who held herself back behind bars of pain. Without kids of her own, Donna had space to be the older sister I never had. Space to be my friend, my confidante, the person I could turn to to share thoughts and fears it would be wisest to hide from family and fair-weather friends. And being a sister to me would be an act of love towards my mother and, perhaps most importantly, towards herself.

So in the first phase of our sisterhood, Donna was the person I could turn to to explore the thoughts that hurt my mother and father, work through all the noise, all the tyranny of self-perfection and doubt. And she wasn’t a pushover: I remember her getting frustrated a few times when I droned on like a broken alarm clock about how fat I was. Again and again and again and again.

But she was always there. She came back. She loved unconditionally.

In the second phase of our sisterhood, Donna introduced me to meditation. And to courage. She had decided to walk away from the rat race of a corporate career, a rat race even more difficult for women like me and her who don’t have children of our own, and therefore often place even more of our self worth and identity in our professional success. Donna exudes a strength and grace at work. She holds herself tall (her posture is incredible) and has a slightly masculine energy that evinces power and reliance, resilience and cleverness. But she wanted and needed more from life. So she started to explore and her search led her to meditation. She had to courage to walk away from work and reinvent herself. And the wisdom to know that didn’t mean she would never work in Corporate America again, but that life is long, and we can walk away from the race and return later, refreshed, strengthened, wiser.

During this second phase, Donna was a teacher who helped me begin my journey as a meditator. In Costa Rica, we found a private room tucked away from the noise of the house and lay down on the floor with our feet up on the couch. Donna put her hand on my stomach and showed me where to focus my attention. She helped me find the depths of my belly, deeper than my lungs. Her voice shared the wisdom that only comes with experience, the wisdom of meaning it. It was light and sprightly, like a young girl sharing her imaginary world. It was a voice that had found a sister, that knew she was teaching someone who wanted to listen. Someone who wouldn’t judge. Someone who shared her pain and also wanted to find her joy.

And now, 20 years later, I have come to understand Donna in a way I couldn’t when I was 14. For I too have lived.

In this third phase of our sisterhood, I can sit down on my yoga block and meditate and feel deeply within my heart the resonance of a kindred spirit. For I too am not yet a mother, so I now understand how meaningful it can be to have a younger sister to love and know and care for. I have sisters in Toronto, women like Shems and Lauren who are so dear to me and who are the me that I was for Donna (just a little older and wiser 🙂). I haven’t spoken with Donna for a while, but her presence is a given. Constant, unconditional, yet growing and changing as we grow through our own experiences. She in Arizona, me in Toronto.

The constancy of our relationship provides a miraculous perspective on what has changed and what remains the same. Like breath. Unnoticed, until we realize it is a gift.

meditation
Donna featured this image in a recent post about meditation

Portrait 9: Lauren Deckelbaum

Encounter 1: I improvise my story. I conjure the nadir at the Women’s Lunch Place in Boston, right wrist greasing practiced fluidity as I chop onion after onion to keep myself alive. I expose the hurt to give them strength and show how life stories switchback from failure to success, and back again. That struggle apexing atop a mesa of ease is a parched mirage copied, facsimile, from Roman Epics and Saints Lives. They smile; they applaud; they approach. And then Lauren comes. “I’ve noticed how many successful people meditate, and yet I can’t seem to get into it myself.” I invite her to my house. There was something in her eyes, in her voice. “I’ll teach you.”

Encounter 2: Fuck fuck she’s like 10 minutes early and I’m still in my pijamas should I just open the door don’t want to make her wait but christ I don’t even know this woman oh well more awkward if she has to stand there outside my door waiting it’s only grey sweatpants and the gingham Victoria’s Secret sheath I stole from Mom like 5 years ago somewhat kitsch but whatever so “Welcome! So sorry I was just finishing up some writing when I heard you knock!” and she smiles wide and it’s like it was meant to be this way and we exchange a few pleasantries but get right to it legs crossed I upon the couch she in the chair next to me and she’s still not comfortable with meditating so she pulls the hat down over her eyes to block out the light and the world and I set the timer and we breathe and I feel ease next to her and I don’t know for sure what she feels because I can’t know can never know and that’s the beauty of it all but when she opens her eyes and asks what I heard and thought about her voice is crystalline and calm.

Encounter 4: I rush into the inky WeWork at Yonge and Bloor only to notice stilton, cheddar, triple-cream brie, cranberries, walnuts, honey, all delicately aligned. My colleagues say it was a gift from a woman I know who works here. From Lauren. How lovely. How perfect.

Encounter 7: I show her what my heart creates. We eat shrimp and arugula, and drink Marsannay. She helps me understand who the words are for.

It complements the haze. It deepens it. The lighthouse repetition in the background, the delicacy of the violin like cormorant staccato in the milk-washed sea sky.

For how could it not be the subject, its fate sealed under barn owl wax in the damp Sunday, as mermen brandished ping pong paddles on silk sleeves? Your precision poaching oatmeal into the winter light, capturing its hue like cupped hands handle butterflies, keeping the wings intact, unharmed, this being so different from you, while you take pictures of white oak on black, on leather, creating your space, your home, your eye creating beauty in its wake, leaving the traces of you, if only I take the time to watch?

Encounter N: She comes to dinner with my mother, my aunts, with Will. We sample the pizza and wood brick chicken. Our conversation deviates from the group, as it’s too hard to hear. But she is a deeper part of me now. A forever friend.

Encounter N+1: I come to dinner with her mother, her siblings, her friends. I sleep in her old bed downstairs, the house bleating kindness in its wake. We sit crosslegged and discuss how minds thwart intimacy. We hike the Montreal mountain. We talk about Carl Sagan on soggy cushions and slice Montreal bagels in time for the party. There is no judgment. It’s home.

Encounter N + N: She gives me the ring with the face on it over dinner. I cherish our differences. I see Lauren for who she is. She is not a reflection of me. She is not something I want her to be. It is her way that has cracked the opening. I love her for who she is because of who I am when I am in her presence. A forever friend. She permits a space for honesty. She is fertile like the ground. She brings forth life.

Encounter N*N: She’s in London this week. She’ll grow and collect stories, share them upon her return. I’ll think of her when I get stressed and my fists clench. I’ll remember her ease and relax my shoulders inside its grace.

And in the future we’ll watch our lives unfurl. I trust it.

hand
That’s the ring. That’s my hand. I put my fingers in silly places to make it look better.

Portrait 10: Allen Gebhardt

“To be exceptional is to be more god-like than most, whether that is a powerful deity of myth or the God who died on the cross of Christianity. Hume’s kind of exceptionality is the opposite: he was more fully human than most, nothing more, nothing less. The virtues he expressed were not extreme ones of daring or courage but quiet ones of amiability, modesty, generosity of spirit, hospitality. Lest this sound like little, consider how difficult it is to live our lives consistently expressing such virtues.” - Julian Baggini, in his recent essay on David Hume

Allen is like Hume: he is more fully human than most, nothing more, nothing less.

And for that reason-gosh, I’m hesitating as I’m quite overwhelmed by emotion-Allen is one of my most important friends. But that’s not quite right. He’s more like a guide, except that, because he is a Humean Human in its purest expression, he doesn’t seek the power a guide seeks. He needs no acolyte. He craves no connection to heal or help. He is far too ironic and cynical to slip into demagoguery. What he does is listen. Without judgment. With generosity of spirit. And he is there, consistently, when a friend is needed. And he celebrates the journey with its freckled growth. As he has done with his wife and his sons.

I met Allen at a Law Firm Information Governance Symposium in April, 2014 in Washington, DC. He was working at Cooley at the time, had helped the firm transition from paper-based records management to the brave new world of digital squalor. We had dinner recently in San Francisco and he reminded me that the seed of our friendship was his making ironic jabs at my self-righteous pseudo-Marxist idealism. I’d completely forgotten, as is my way. What I remembered was that, for Allen, work was primary about people. He cared less about the what and cared more about the how, about the dynamics that make or break teams. He acknowledged the fact that careers are important for dignity and self-worth in contemporary society, but that the self didn’t depend on professional success. That work is a means to stay busy and create value with others. And then it passes, fluid like time or the winding fragility of an Andy Goldsworthy installation.

Nonetheless, a connection was formed. And it grew.

One milestone was a dinner we had in the Castro in San Francisco. Classic diner-like American fare. Been around for years. I searched my email to find the name of the place only to notice a string of restaurants we’ve visited together since we met, Salero in Chicago, Vesta in Redwood City, AQ in San Francisco (now closed), most recently Heirloom Cafe, where I introduced Allen to Will. I don’t remember what we spoke about over dinner. I remember Allen drove me to SFO afterwards and I fell asleep in the car. I was embarrassed. But Allen was flattered: he thanked me for falling asleep because it showed I was completely comfortable with him. We’d passed the threshold to forever friendship, like shifting from vous to tu.

Later, in late 2016, Allen taught me how to love. What I mean is that he helped me navigate a difficult situation I was experiencing with a former partner: I had to learn how to allow someone else to feel what they feel, to make their own decisions, to live how they chose to live, and to not entangle myself in another’s self. I had to learn that if it all fell apart, it was ok, I would be ok. I had to learn that I, too, was able to feel what I felt, and could look at my emotions, observe them, take in their lessons, follow their footprints back to my childhood, know their source, see the habits they’d created, and free myself from them. I’d pace the Brooklyn streets, humidity curling my flyaways, Allen on the phone as my guide. I’d settle down. It was only a few phone calls, but they changed me. Now, each time I make a conscious effort to give space to another to be and feel and live and hurt and experience, Allen is present.

When I met Allen’s wife Julie, the kaleidoscope spun into vibrancy. These lessons Allen shared had been lived and grown through his partnership with his wife. They seemed like an idyllic pair, exemplars of giving and openness and wisdom. Julie showed me a few photos from her popular Instagram feed featuring doorways in San Francisco. Her Renaissance was birthed by curiosity and charity. By walks in the city. Today others join. Julie’s example gives others permission to be artists.

I have yet to meet Allen’s sons. I’m sure I will some day. They seem extraordinary.

Allen and I spoke yesterday. He recently retired and is looking forward to his own Renaissance. It will emerge from spontaneity, in the spacetime crevices that widen when the hustle subsides. When we allow the sub-optimal. When there are no next steps. When we can err and wander, noticing the concentric circles that widen in rain puddles. His voice was joy. He didn’t fear retirement in the least because he is at home in the world. He now has time unbound.

goldsworthy
An Andy Goldsworthy installation I sampled from Allen’s Facebook page

More to come…

The featured image is of my uncle Anthony, my brother, and me. That is the EXACT look Mike had on his face when the Ninja Turtles came around the bend. You can see how self-conscious I was at having my picture taken, even when I was 5 or 6 years old. 

Two lessons from giving talks

So I’m writing this blog post about why the AlphaGo documentary isn’t really about AlphaGo at all, but is squarely about Lee Sedol and the psychological pressure we put on ourselves when we strive to be top performers, the emotional connection we create with opponents, even when they bluff, and a few other things, and I (naturally) ended up down this rabbit hole about the absurd experiences I undergo as a public speaker-in particular a woman speaking about tech-and there are two things that are quite revelatory and meaningful.

The first is that my time with the AV crew before going on stage is priceless. They are always my talk angels, the perfect outlet for self-deprecation and humor and energy release before having to perform. I don’t know if they know this may be the most important service they provide to speakers, at least speakers like me who are introverts inverted into extroverts on stage, who crave the feedback of a smile or a vote of confidence or a pat on the back or a friend before the show. My slides are always ludicrous by design, so we laugh over their skepticism that the slide deck starting with an image of Osama bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan is the right one for a talk about machine learning. And then I NEVER have pants or pockets and we play the find-a-place-to-hook-the-microphone-jack game, be that on the back of my neck, the back of my bra, or even the back of my underwear (no joke, did that for the World Science Festival, THANK GOD it was a panel and I got to sit down after walking on stage because it was weighing down my underwear big time and I thought they would fall off right on stage…oh yeah, by the way, this is the stuff you have to think about as a performer, like, all the time, or at least as a woman performer, because I don’t think men have to deal with this kind of stuff).

The second is that having the AV break down may be the best theatrical device to deliver a great talk. I’ve had it happen to me multiple times now (Charlie Oliver thinks my business-card motto should be NO SLIDES NEEDED!) and have actually found that I prefer the energy when I’m screwed on stage. It seems best when the slides stop working two-thirds of the way in. That way, I have the luxury of communicating something using the props of images and memes on slides for a while (note to self: front load the deck with any mathematical concepts that are best explained with visual aids) and then have this magical moment where people are trailing off or looking at their phones or distracted by the rest of their busy lives, and they get surprised and it elicits first their confusion, then their empathy, and THEN, and here’s where the magic happens, their curiosity and their imagination! Because then I am forced to paint imaginative pictures of what the slides would have looked like if they were there, and my audience has a prior for how my talks tend to work, as they’ve seen the first two-thirds worth of images and can fill in the gaps. And the most electrified and engaged audiences I’ve ever addressed have been those whose attention perked up, who were with me, who followed me word by word after everything broke down. It elicits their compassion and, therethrough, their rapt attention. And it creates a virtuous feedback cycle. I have to work that much harder to ensure they understand, and they give me the nods or furrowed brows to show they do or don’t, and we communicate. It’s marvelous. They become actors in my story, part of the talk. Not just a passive audience.

Both of these lessons are about people being people. People connecting as people. Our identity as ruthlessly social beings. We abstract ourselves from our sociality in situations of performance, envisioning ourselves as brains in a vat who act on one plane only. But that’s not who we are. My delight in the absurd details surrounding the performance shows me otherwise. AlphaGo has a lot to say about that too (stay tuned…).

The featured image is of the Fillmore Miami. I gave this talk there, addressing an audience of industrial control systems security professionals. The lights glared in my face and I had no idea what people thought. I only had my own reflection in my mind, so I thought they hated it. After, many people told me it was the best talk of the conference.

The Facebook Portrait Project

I started a project. It’s called Facebook Portraits. It has three goals:

  • It’s like a sketch book, but writing. I practice my craft and procrastinate on my book.
  • It shows how Facebook can be a place for connection rather than narcissism. How we are free to choose how we use technology. How it’s up to us to channel it as a force to bring us together, not divide us. But we have to work at that.
  • It’s a contemporary twist on the age-old practice of epistolary correspondence. Just with the world reading what would have been a private letter now versus after the author dies. Which is kind of how the world works now.

Here are my first five portraits. Dear World, I offer you my sketch book.


Portrait 1: Sanita Skribe-Negre

We are hiring a head of people at my company, integrate.ai. The other day a candidate asked me (and the colleague interviewing with me) about past heads of people I’ve worked with and why I liked or did not like them.

I had the honor of telling the candidate why Sanita Skribe-Negre was the most talented leader I’d worked with. Why she was without a doubt a partner to the business, flying around god knows where and working alongside the C-Suite until 3 am to get deals done. How she navigated the tricky, delicate work of assimilating one culture into another post acquisition. How she dealt with the conflict, tension, anxiety of different business units growing awkwardly into adults. How she was thoughtful about creating company-wide performance management programs that could scale with growth, but did their best not to suffocate individuals under the strange, stifling weight of metrics and boxes and numbers.

And most importantly and meaningfully, for me, how she was a personal coach. How she put her own goal to eventually become a full-time coach into practice with a young, ambitious, emotional, self-critical, but good-hearted 28-year-old recent PhD turned entry-level Marketing Content Specialist (that’s me).

A glutton for mentorship, I like to work through things in dialogue with someone I trust. Someone to whom I can expose all the thoughts, all the doubts, and know he or she will leave loving me more, not less. Intimacy evaporating awareness from the dim fog of emotion like a slot canyon squeezing light. Very different from this refracted self I offer in my writing, this I shaped by verisimilitude or analogy, by whatever mood or tone the words dictate from the outset, this I you’re reading about right now (akin to the one that recently confused people in my profile picture. I was amused they thought I was upset. The picture was taken months ago, so doesn’t reflect any current state of mind or heart. And the ambiguity in my eyes, sitting somewhere between happiness, sorrow, and anger, aren’t native expressions, but my discomfort at being photographed, the charcoal symptoms of a fractured superego).

Sanita and I set up a cadence where we met once every three weeks to go over something that I wanted work on. Most of the time, we discussed local emotional nadirs, not goals or aspirations (admittedly the two are hard to parse, in particular when goals are inchoate, not SMART). It was a mutual arrangement: I benefitted from her presence and advice, from the confidence she gave me in shaping what I could trust was my horizon of possibility in the company (ambitious as hell, I felt perennially short changed, stuck, wanting to be VP of ANYTHING yesterday). She benefitted from putting her aspirations into action, getting early experience in the art of helping one person grow, rather than putting out fires, resolving conflicts, bringing on new hires, doing things at a system level, etc.

Here’s one lesson she imparted that I still think about almost every day (and have passed on to younger colleagues).

I came in frustrated that, once again, something I’d said months ago, and which, at the time, was brushed off as nonsense, had come full circle into execution — with the credit going to someone else! I felt a flurry of entangled thoughts and emotions: why can’t I communicate clearly? why does someone get credit for my idea? is this because I’m a woman so am not taken seriously?

Sanita’s advice was priceless.

“Do you want to be a leader someday?”

“Of course. I will be CEO of EVERYTHING!”

“Well, then, learning how to let go of ownership of ideas, untying them from your ego, letting them grow with the team, is critical to your future success.”

Why this rung of healing, of beauty.

Sanita continued, “The best way to marry accountability and autonomy for people who report to you in the future will be to plant subtle seeds and suggestions that inspire them to reach their own conclusions on what needs to be done, to shape their own goals, to feel like they have skin in the game. It’s a totally different emotional relationship to accountability than that which arises from top-down plans. Early practice in renting your ideas, in becoming the sounding board and mirror for others, even though it’s hard when you’re younger and crave recognition, is what you will accelerate you in your growth goals.”

I still struggle to communicate. I still seek recognition. But the satisfaction is dim in comparison to the immense pride in being the sounding board to help younger colleagues grow.

And Sanita will always be my coach. She’ll always be my mental model for a great head of people.

intapp
Sanita’s handiwork: The Intapp tile at the Nuthouse on California Ave in Palo Alto, CA

Portrait 2: Jaxson Khan

“…It is what is
Sequestered. Vasari says, ‘Francescco one day set himself
To take his own portrait, looking at himself for that
purpose
In a convex mirror, such as is used by barbers…
He accordingly caused a ball of wood to be made
By a turner, and having divided it in half and
Brought it to the size of the mirror, he set himself
With great art to copy all that he saw in the glass,’
Chiefly his reflection, of which the portrait
Is the reflection once removed.”

- John Ashbery, Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, 1984, referring back Parmigianino, Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, 1524

parma
The original portrait

How precious, how rare, to feel so connected to and so similar to another that writing his portrait is like writing a self-portrait, only refracted in a convex mirror.

Jaxson Khan and I became Facebook Friends December 2, 2017. A mere 7 months ago. We were friends in this virtual world once removed before we were friends in the real world (post-modernists be damned!), the world of flesh, blood, tears, the smell of camomile in the coffee shop, the sound of panting pawsteps as the dog scurries forth only to scurry back again on the ravine path near Saint Claire, the world where two humans sit across from one another in a coffee shop and, slowly-deftly, with cheetah grace spurred by trust and recognition-reveal heart-thoughts to each other.

Heart-thoughts and grand ambition. Jaxson and I went into our first conversation believing what connected us was our common role at work. I started my career as a Marketing Content Specialist at Intapp in 2012 and skipped and hopped around the professional jungle gym, from Principal Consultant at a security firm to Director of Sales and Marketing at an AI research consultancy, to end up nominally leading product and strategy for integrate.ai. Jaxson and I both wholeheartedly endorse the firefly flits of the generalist; it is our lot in life to lie on the horizontal axis of the T, buoyed by our drive and curiosity, our intense need to understand everything, everything, as deeply as we can while always knowing we won’t be the deepest in the group; we will be criticized; it will hurt me more than him; but I will turn to him for support and confidence as I march along this brambled path.

Jaxson is 10 years younger than I, but somehow already has the wisdom and maturity to confidently assess where he stands today and where he wants to go next. He, too, started in marketing but absolutely must test the waters of product management, if only to experiment and shape his path. To view each step in his career as data-gathering exercise to know himself, to grow not only his skills but his values and virtue as he explores. Life as a testing ground. A job as the sandbox to grow roots and shape the soul. But we learned we shared more than just marketing roles: we were both actively engaged in shaping policy around AI, doing our best to ground discussions around ethics in our daily hustle building products that used machine learning models. Yes, Jaxson, yes, it was the first shimmer along the rim of the mirror, the hint of similarity and recognition.

As the sun rose the shimmer expanded into a blinding glare. Almost too much, sometimes.

“The time of day or the density of the light
Adhering to the face keeps it
Lively and intact in a recurring wave
Of arrival. The soul establishes itself.”

After our first time coffee, Jaxson took the subway back to his home in the Annex to meet his girlfriend, the woman he was confident would be his bride. Less than two months later she left for Australia, and decided not to come back.

His world broke.

I am fortunate it did. We would be friends, but it would have taken longer to probe the depths of our connection. To feel ourselves in the other’s words. To be startled by the recognition.

I have watched him learn through his pain. He is extraordinary. He allows his emotions to have their place, gives them space to work and hurt as he mourns the loss of his love and gradually recovers the ability to love anew. He has taught me how to turn to friends when I am anxious, taught me that we need not ever be alone, that even when I feel that restlessness in the evening-wishing Will Grathwohl were back but celebrating his extraordinary accomplishments with the concentrated joy of us as future selves looking back upon and growing through our early time apart-I can call him and he will pick up the phone and talk with me on the train ride home, on the walk home, on the bike ride home, that he is there as constant support. That he too has felt alone. I have watched how he has solidified his brotherhood with Zachary Habayeb, benefitted from their vegan meals and the space they provide for acceptance, as if judgment didn’t exist. I have watched him thrive in his job, no one suspecting what lie beneath. I have admired how he embraces his emotionality as a hallmark of a new masculinity, and how it isn’t challenged for a second.

There is no possible world where Jaxson and I won’t be friends for life. I will be godmother to his children (right Jax?). If not in name, in spirit. I will care for them if anything happens to him. They will sleep well at night, and be ok. Know this.

“The soul has to stay where it is,
Even though restless, hearing raindrops at the pane,
The sighing of autumn leaves thrashed by the wind,
Longing to be free, outside, but it must stay
Posing in this place. It must move
As little as possible. This is what the portrait says.”

jax and me
Jax, Heather Evans, and myself after recording their first AskAI podcast

Portrait 3: John Alber

“Wait, you wrote a book about poisonous plants?”

“Sure I did. Dodie and I had just had the kids and we wanted to make sure they were safe with all the flowers around.”

“But like, how did you find the time to study baby-safe houseplants-and study them thoroughly enough to write a book-while you were practicing at Bryan Cave?”

“Curiosity, Kathryn, and sheer force of will. And efficiency. Which law firms sorely lack. That said there’s a cheshire cat joy in being a dog-headed Futurist in an industry as slow to innovate as legal services. I consider myself to have had a front-row seat in the amphitheater of human psychology. Where skeuomorphisms are an absolute must to get them to adopt anything. Where identities fizzle as the stolid edifice of white-collar prosperity quickly crumbles under cartoon anvils of outside counsel guidelines and alternative fee arrangements and Latent Dirichlet Allocation finally making it just about possible to go beyond expert systems and use machine learning for legal research, not only technology assisted review.

Did you see my article about Watson?”

“Loved it. Smart contracts make SO MUCH SENSE for tenant rights. OMG imagine how much traction we could make against access to justice issues by baking the commitment landlords have to their tenants, the commitment they have to provide a suitable, humane place to live, in this standing-on-the-precipice-of-third-world-despair of a ramshackle country we find ourselves in these days? But how would a firm like IBM overcome the innovator’s dilemma and solve a problem for a smaller market? C’mon, not so much different from law firms, in particular with their customer-centric ethos. Always drags them down the slippery slope of services and mangled customizations and tech debt.”

“Watson was metonymy. It’s a job for startups. Go build it. We’re counting on you.”

“I’m not ready to be a founder yet. I still have much to learn before I can do this myself.”

“Fair.

But not fair! Are you kidding me? You are starting to exemplify servant leadership. I love watching you explore it, tepidly, with the growing pains and braces of a stunning teenager. Probing the delicate balance between strength and vulnerability, finding it, making it your own, and by doing so, opening the space for expression, acceptance, healing, and growth for those around you. What’s holding you back?”

“John, you know how hard I am on myself.”

“There’s a wonderful book by Pema Chodron called When Things Fall Apart. The notion there is that when things seem most desperate, we experience the greatest opportunity to exert a kind of compassionate curiosity about our inner workings.

All of this difficulty, all of this uncertainty can be on the path. Rather, it certainly IS on the path; we just have the chance to see it as such.

I know what it’s like to be so very hard on myself. It was a condition of everyday existence. It still creeps in now and then to remind me.

Sometimes, I think we choose broken individuals as companions as a means of exercising the compassion we are so desperate for ourselves. We give THEM our hearts instead of opening up to our own humanity.

That’s what it was like for me. I wouldn’t acknowledge that I was flawed, that I was messily, beautifully human.

What we need for our own account is the kind of love a mother, or an aunt, would offer: unqualified, nonjudgmental, open and accepting.

Why, Pema Chodron asks, is it so hard for us to give ourselves that?”

“Because we servants we only have so much love to give, and it belongs to others. What do you remember most from your year on the boat?”

“Stillness is what I treasure most. I rise earlier and earlier to get that…try to see the sun come up down on the waterfront every morning, and be quiet enough to hear the noise it makes.

And, kittens are awwwwww…..damn!”

“Will you help me write my book? Will you be a reader?”

“I’m horrible at that. I use other people’s writing as a springboard. The best I can do with my writing friends is co-springboard.”

“Jesus, if my writing can spur something like this from you, I’ll take it. Incredible. Brings tears to my eyes. Thank you, thank you, thank you, for being one of my most cherished mentors, for being a beacon so clearly showing what freedom and joy can arise from having the courage to just be me. For you are so grounded in yourself. John, you are Odysseus.”

In response to my first blog post about love, John wrote the following:

“The love I wonder about most is what is sometimes described as the love emanating from God. Bare of religion as I am, I translate that as the love of the universe, and immediately come up against the utter brutality of the physical realms that surround us. Temperatures near absolute zero, profound vacuums, nuclear ovens…none of them in any way motherly or fatherly, nurturing or, in any human sense, loving. And then of course there is the brutality of our own tiny world, where the horrible and endless death of innocents is so ordinary as to be unremarkable. Where is the love in any of that?

Then again…

Is it love that inheres in the multiverse, that drives the eternal engine spawning new universes, that fertilizes forming worlds with the life-giving dust of exploded stars and thereby makes possible beings who speak of love? Is all love simply a derivative of that vast life-creating process? Is it really just a taxonomy of the vital forces that inhabit us all? When we say we love each other, are we simply connecting with that most fundamental imperative—the imperative to be? In some ways, I find that the most romantic love of all.”

This picture perfectly captures John’s spirit

Portrait 4: William Hume

If the last name didn’t give it away, William Hume is my dad. Imagine the laundry list of details I could include in his portrait.

I’ll tell one story. I suspect he’ll read it and wince just a little, concerned my writing exposes too much and baffled by how differently people reconstruct the past, especially one past moment heavied by symbolic gravity. Facts unraveled into kaleidoscope fractals, so difficult to calibrate, even though our ring size is only 4.5.

On November 23, 2016, I took my parents to the Metropolitan Opera in New York City to see La Bohème. My mom had just turned 60. This was my birthday present to her.

La Bohème is not just any opera in my family. It is a talisman. It represents a bond stronger than a wedding ring, locking together my parents’ fingers in trust at the lower phalanx. No matter what comes. In the music I hear what patience and unconditional acceptance sound like. I hear the work that goes into creating a lifelong partnership, to sustaining it, to outlasting the hurdles that came so close to shattering the old-world vase, a relic of the Austro-Hungarian Empire that fights, Darwinian, to preserve its chromosomes with the pierogi dough. I hear what one couple’s love looks like. My dad’s love for my mom.

My mom suffered when I was a child. She tried to protect me and my brother from the pain. Her will is of iron. But the pain seeped out in ways she couldn’t control, shaping my delicate limbic system, itself singed by my extremely sensitive senses (sounds are louder and smells are stronger for me than they are for most people). When her parents died, memories she had repressed for years bubbled up. They bit at her rugged ambition with the persistence of horseflies. She swatted them back and went to the meeting in stilettos and big silk bows. Only dad saw what her face looked like when she dreamed on the swing set, saw how far away she seemed under the cheerful dominants of Paul McCartney.

Her unravelling strained their relationship. It came perilously close to ending. I didn’t know that: I was 6 or 7 or 8. Young. I envision myself carrying silver polish around with my black bob, but that home video was from much earlier. My hair must have started to curl, just a little, when they reached the nadir.

Mom came home. I envision a cold winter night. Cold in the way that only exists in upstate New York, where I grew up, and Canada. 8 foot snow drifts. Grey that cloaks the sky for months, starving our happiness of vitamin D. The stuff of Russians, just it’s the east coast, so defaults to the caricature of the Mummers.

She came home from work, torn. He had realized that he loved her unconditionally. He was ready to communicate that.

He held her hands. He turned on Puccini. Che gelida manina.

What a frozen little hand. Let me warm it for you.

I don’t know how often my parents hear che gelida manina in their minds. I don’t know what emotions it incites in them when it comes on.

They must be powerful. For, at the very inkling of the chords, in the very cusp of Pavarotti’s tenor, time collapses for me. I go back to 27 Highland Drive. To the tiny little house they bought for $13,000, nothing to their name but the promise of the future.

I am grateful that he loves her the way he does. When my dear friend Julien Rosa met them in Paris years ago, he told me the image that left the strongest impression on him was how my father looked at my mother.

My father taught him something profound about what it means to love.

mom & dad
My dad loving my mom with every breath

Portrait 5: Michael D’Souza

I have this friend Michael. He and his wife Colleen just got back from a 14,317-kilometre drive around god-knows-where in Canada. They didn’t care how long it took. They didn’t watch the clock, for that would have compromised their rapt attention to their surroundings and their gentle awareness, like water by now, of the other’s presence. Their destination was Tuktoyaktuk, which means “looks like a caribou” in Inuvialuktun (Western Canada Inuit). They told me that hotel rooms in Tuktoyaktuk follow a peculiar supply and demand curve: as there are only 3 beds for rent in the city-not 3 hotels, 3 beds-they can be relatively pricey. During his trip, Michael populated his Facebook feed with stillness. Lakes and lines of bread and bears and prairies and hummingbirds and bison and mountains. All still. All gleaming.

I met Michael on July 28, 2018. I was a guest at one of his famous dinner parties, courtesy of the inspirational Charlie Oliver. “Do you have any food restrictions?” “Nope, omnivorous.” “That’s just the kind of people we love!”

I had just recently moved to Canada. Was still tiptoeing through the little hits of loneliness and bemusement at finding myself, once again, in a new city: I’ve lived in many places and self-identify as a cosmopolitan nomad, though I’d love to stay put for the someday kids. Being welcomed by Michael and Colleen, therefore, was extra special. I had somewhere to go on a Friday night.

I didn’t expect to meet a best friend. My Toronto Dad.

Michael is also close to enlightened as we mere mortals get.

He is a lover and creator of beauty. He rolls his beet petals into roses, pickles them mildly so they are sweet without turning acrid. He serves the sorpotel, spiked with Feni, a Goan cashew liquor, in elegant Korean pottery, basks it in matte grey. He walks miles to ensure the strawberries are crimson, the tomato skins burst with the right pressure, the fish isn’t fishy. He puts capers in the mashed potatoes and shapes them into leaves baked brown. He and Colleen prefer not to eat out. They have too much to create at home.

He is a lover of and fighter for people. When I say fight, I mean fight. Michael spent his career working at the CBC. He has seen all the people. But he didn’t document them: He learned about them, respected them, opened the curtains wide onto the uniqueness of their culture and their personhood. He regularly corrects my cultural faux-pas, my maladroit misspellings of languages and religions, my imprecision in attempting to write about others. Michael pays attention to cultures with surgical precision. He titrates myths and stories. The seats at his dinner table are filled with doctors and human rights advocates and journalists and AI researchers and ambitious, young, striving, wonderful women from all over the world, women like Anne T. Griffin, another one of Michael’s daughters, like myself.

He is a lover of deadlines. Having spent a career as a journalist, Michael knows that things remain akimbo in limbo unless we have a deadline to birth our creativity, the 9-month mark where it’s either through the canal or a C-section. He keeps me on track, perhaps unaware. He seems to read everything I write. He seems to appreciate it. I cannot express how meaningful it is to me to have a reader who cares, who takes the time, who engages and corrects me.

He is a lover of grace. He carries himself quietly, sipping his wine without garnering too much attention when he’s in public. The dapper elegance of someone who always wears a tie. His demeanor carries with it his long history, the childhood in Pakistan and Goa. But when he is at home, comfortable, free, he laughs out loud. Shrills in joy. The kind of laugh that emerges from a clear conscience.

July 28 is a Saturday, and unfortunately (though very fortunately!) I have dinner plans at Actinolite that evening. Michael, I trust you’ll have me for dinner on the 27th to celebrate the anniversary of what cannot but be a lifelong friendship.

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Michael being awesome

More to come…

The featured image is of my dad and me on Father’s Day in 2017. I had just come back from a conference in Paris. We were about to eat oysters with my brother and his girlfriend. 

Love 3 | A Countable Taxonomy

This is the third post in a series about different kinds of love. The first is an incomplete taxonomy and the second is an indefinite taxonomy. More taxonomies will follow.

This gem of a post popped up on my twitter feed this week. Tim Urban posted the original on his super-awesome blog Wait But Why on December 11, 2015.[1]

The post starts by laying out the human lifespan visually, in years, months, weeks, and days.

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Tim Urban’s depiction of the human lifespan in months.

Tim goes on to measure his life in activities and events rather than units of time. When he wrote the post in 2015 he was 34 and assumed he’d live to 90. That meant, he had around 60 superbowls left and, since he doesn’t love going to the beach and only goes around once a year, 60 more times he’d swim in the ocean.

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Number of superbowls left.

I don’t share Tim’s visualization skills (at least not yet!), but loved his post and figured I’d apply the methodology to my own life.


Axioms & Assumptions

Axiom 1: I am 34-years old. Ain’t nothing I can do about it.

Axiom 2: I am an early-stage startup person. My career will be spent founding companies and getting them through infancy and adolescence but when they become mature adults, it’s time for me to move on and have another kid.

Axiom 3: I am a writer. I will write books. Note this is an axiom, not an assumption.

Assumption 1: I will live to be 95 (two of my great grandmothers, one from Mom’s side and one from Dad’s side, lived to be 98 and 102. One smoked for 80 odd years of her life and trafficked bathtub gin during Prohibition, #badass. Genes indicate decent longevity).

Assumption 2: My parents will both live to be 95 (they’re in good shape).

Assumption 3: Will Grathwohl and I will continue to love one another and live happily ever after. He will also live to be 95, so I’ll die before him.

Assumption 5: We will not have completely destroyed the earth in the next 61 years, so  will still have things like oceans we, turtles, whales, fish, and coral can swim in, and cities that are not yet drowned, burned, or ravished by income inequality so stark that they look like the final fantasy scene in Rainer Werner Fassbinder‘s 15.5-hour, 14-part miniseries Berlin Alexanderplatz[2], adapted from the amazing novel by Alfred Döblin (which doesn’t get the international acclaim it deserves outside a small circle of people who read a lot of literature), sadly not a far cry from areas in contemporary San Francisco.

Frank Biberkopf, portrayed by Günter Lamprecht, in Fassbinder’s 1980 miniseries Berlin Alexanderplatz, with two angels of the Armageddon.

Deductions

24 rounds of golf with Dad

Dad loves golf. It’s not a hobby: he is (provisionally?) retired, so it’s become a job, an obsession, the thing he does day in and day out (Mom cringes every time she hears the thump of the 9 iron on the carpet upstairs as we practices not casting like EVERY morning). Let’s assume Dad will be able to play golf until he’s 87: that’s only 24 more seasons of golf. At the rate we’re going, I will play with him around once a year. That means, my Dad and I will only play 24 more rounds of golf together. That’s few enough to remember every single round. Dad will remember every shot, mind you, and dissect them post-round with my brother while Mom and I sit there befuddled. But I’ll remember the killer par 3, as well as the putrid embarrassment at just nearly throwing my club at the foursome out of self-disgust and frustration.

23 trips with Mom 

Mom and I made one of the better decision of our lives a few years ago: we stopped getting one another things for Christmas to instead split costs for a trip somewhere together, just me and her, at some point during the upcoming year. So far we’ve gone to Orange County (Laguna Beach is a geographical oddity, we swear all roads somehow lead back there and we hate the place with every inch of our being…), Jackson Hole, and southern Utah. We both work far harder than any sane human being should work and we both have tortured relationships to ourselves, so it can be hard for us to really talk to one another, to get under the surface available in a phone call and give and know and love. These trips are an opportunity to do that. So, Mom is dogged. It’s realistic to assume she could continue taking trips until she’s 90. That means, we have 28 more to go. I’m giving myself the benefit of the doubt and assuming I will have kids someday. That means, kids complications may make it so that we miss 5 trips. 23 is still a ton of trips. We’ll see a lot of the world together. Mom has already seen tons of the world because she travels for work. I have inherited her Bedouin spirit. I want to walk the world. I want to touch it and have my footsteps seep history and whispers and pollen like osmosis into my soul.

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John Frankel inspired me to write unorthodox out-of-office messages (his are way more creative than mine). I’ve gotten really into adapting the genre and making it my own. This was my out-of-office response when Mom and I took our mother-daughter trip to Utah in April. People respond well to these emails: they love being surprised, love learning something about you as a human rather than getting frustrated by boring-old business facts. I searched for “out of office Veerman” because Alan Veerman from the Vector Institute said he liked this response. I remembered that. An out-of-office email brought Alan and I closer.

102 opportunities to dance to Billy Ocean and Whitney Houston with Mike

The best (or worst, depending on your proclivities and perspective, which unfortunately tends to be how my boyfriends feel) part of being a Hume is that we dance. Like, at a Hume wedding, the whole wedding party is up dancing before we sit down to eat, all we want to do is drink and dance, we don’t care about the food. Thanksgiving is a dance party (for real). The song selection inevitably includes polka hits like the Too Fat Polka by Frankie Yankovic (thanks to Dad) and, without fail, Billy Ocean’s Get Outta my Dreams and Whitney Houston’s I Wanna Dance with Somebody (80s songs that have outta and wanna and gotta and stuff like that). It is impossible that I will ever tire of dancing to these two songs with my brother Mike. Impossible. So, I’ll be alive for another 61 years. Mike’s younger, let’s assume he lives at least as long (Mike, you gotta take care of yourself). Let’s cut off 10 of those years as times where dancing to Billy Ocean may be tough and let’s assume we average two opportunities to dance per year (weddings, 4th of July, Thanksgiving, etc…). That means we’ll do Whitney another 102 times! That’s too many times to remember, which is great.

1123 more books read

The good thing about reviewing all the books I read on my blog is I can count how many I read last year. I’m ashamed to admit that last year I only read 13. That sucks. I work too hard. I also use time I used to devote to reading to writing, which is a good thing. If I kept up at that pace, I’d read another 793 books. I don’t plan to retire until I’m in my mid 80s (for real, I love work). Say I retire at 87. That’s another 53 years of work. During many of those years I’ll be super-duper-can’t-see-straight busy with kids and my job and my writing. Those years I may even read less books! So let’s do:

  • Next 3 years = challenge self to read 18 books/year = 54 books
  • Following 15 years (kids in the equation!) = realistically read 10 books/year = 150 books
  • 52-80 = challenge self to read 18 books/year = 504 books
  • 80-87 (weaning career years) = challenge self to read 25 books/year = 175 books
  • 87-95 = more time without work, so I can read 30 books/year = 240 books

That’s 1123 more books. Lots more to learn! (Tim had a much smaller number of 300, limiting himself to five books a year, outside his research - which means he reads many more books).

12 books written

I am working on my first book (unless we count my dissertation as a preparatory book-writing exercise, although I never tried to publish it). Hopefully it will be published next year. It’s taken me time to come into my stride as a writer: I started my blog at 2:09 pm ET on January 2 of last year, timid and tepid, but committed to writing regularly. I’m happy I did. I now face the growing pains of shedding blog-writing habits, the Saturday- or Sunday-morning sprints that yield these 1500-5000-word posts, to cultivate book-writing habits. I’m writing every morning. The blessing of regularity is that it’s ok if there are off days, it makes it possible to fathom getting started. Michel Serres, one of my mentors in graduate school, inducted me into the sanctified club of daily writers: himself, Graham Greene, Balzac, Thomas Mann, Tolstoy, Henry James, Faulkner, gosh they are all men (my friend Lucy Alford endorses the practice too). Given that I anticipate working until I’m 87 years old, it’s irrational to expect I’ll write a book every two years. If I mean this-which I must, it’s an axiom-I could reasonably expect myself to publish a book once every 5 years. That means, I have 12 books to share with you, Reader. You may die before I do. I hope you have the chance to read some of my better work, or at least fall in love with the promise of future potential.

4784 meals cooked for Will 

I love to cook. My partner Will loves to cook. He’s great at it. He’s great at just about anything he does, however, including, in decreasing order of importance to him, theoretical machine learning, honesty, being a good friend, cooking, vibraphone, fashion, watching TV, mandolin, running, origami, fencing, etc.

So, let’s assume I cook for Will on average twice per week during our time together. If we stay together until I die, that’s 3172 weeks. I assume I won’t cook much from the ages of 90-95, that Will and I, given how ambitious we both are, will spend 3 years of our life living in different places (like right now, he’s in San Francisco doing an internship), that we’ll travel and eat out so let’s take off 2 years, and that for at least 5 years we will need help with childcare so may have someone who helps us cook. That’s 46 years of my cooking twice a week for Will, or 4784 meals. We can explore SO MANY RECIPES. I still want to make a pizza with bresaola and prickly cactus nectar; want to include braised dill in a panna cotta dessert; want ricotta and cardamon stuffed savory macaroons with burnt sage.

66,795 expressions of love

I am ridiculously affectionate. Cloyingly. Used to be ashamed of it, but age helps. Let’s say I utter the phrase “I love you” three times a day for the rest of my life. I will say it 66,795 times! Recall, love can encompass the many kinds in the taxonomy: friends, colleagues, mentors, parents, partners, the universe, myself, herb gardens, mentees, yoga teachers, dogs, cats, food, lots of things to love.[3]

What events and activities are worth counting in your life?

(Note that not all my axioms & assumptions were relevant for the deductions. Oh well. Stuff for a future post!)


[1] I’ve mentioned Tim multiple times on my blog, most recently criticizing a talk he gave at Google because he put forth what I consider to be a medieval, Judeo-Christian frame for assessing our future as shaped by artificial intelligence (this isn’t his fault, this is the posture shared by many big names in the field). His TED Talk on procrastination is one of my favorite things on the internet and his latest post on choosing a career is a must read for anyone who takes their career seriously.

[2] Note he made this movie in 1980, so long before HBO and Netflix series existed, which is cool. But there were also literature series that appeared in magazines in the late 19th and early 20th century: Emile Zola and Henry James both authored a few.

karina roulette
Fassbinder made a lot of interesting movies. His style isn’t for everyone: it’s like Hunter S Thompson meets Pier Paolo Pasonlini meets Günter Grass. I like some films better than others. This image is from Chinese Roulette. The woman is Anna Karina, best known as Jean-Luc Godard’s muse. I saw her speak in Paris once and left crestfallen. She was so pretty but wasn’t as clever as her characters led me to believe.

[3] I made a few edits on July 2, 2018, the day after writing this post. Now I only have 66,792 expressions of love left.

The featured image is of my Mom and me on our latest trip together. This is inside a rock called nautilus, given how it wove around like a shell. We rode horses out there in the dry Utah sun. It was a happy day, one of those days where there’s no place we’d rather be.