I am thankful for these things (part 2)

Given that this post should appear directly above part 1 of this series, I am just going to jump into the second half of list.

I am thankful for these things (part 1)

In July, writer Joe Posnanski wrote a blog post about 50 things that make him happy. The concept of the post was to list 50 “non-cynical” things that, obviously, make Mr. Posnanski happy. I enjoyed reading the post a lot. Since imitation is the greatest form of flattery, here is my list of 50 things that make me happy. I am not going to say my happiness is cynical or non-cynical. Cynicism is in the eye the beholder, after all. What I will say, is that these things make me happy regardless of context.  Mr. Posnanski says his things are listed in no order. I suppose that is true for my list too. Mostly because I do not want to have to rate things that make me happy. But, it is fair to say that these things are generally listed in the order that they occurred to me. That may indicate a ranking of a sort. Reader(s)™ might notice that this list does not include many people I know and love. That is because most long-term relationships contain a mixture of emotions, sort of like we see in the movie “Inside Out.” Put another way, if you are not on the list, it is because you were 51.

Earth 1 and Earth 2.

So the New York Times published a story about how movie executive Harvey Weinstein has allegedly been sexually harassing women for many years. I could link to a number of other news reports about other powerful men allegedly doing similar things. Without resorting to Google, Bill O'Reilly and Roger Ailes lost their positions at Fox News recently for similar allegations. Moreover, I think everybody knows about the allegations against Bill Cosby by now.

Don't buy the myth

As is my custom, I did not look at the news Monday morning before I walked to work. So I was in a good mood when I passed the security guard in lobby of the building where I work. My mood got even better when I noticed the guard had set out sugar cookies with pink frosting. When I asked why the cookies were out, the guard said they were to remind folks that October is breast cancer awareness month. I took a cookie and ate it. It was delicious.

More nitwittery on Twitter, this time concerning the Supreme Court

If my post yesterday were not enough evidence that I need to stop looking at Twitter, I think today's post will provide proof beyond a reasonable doubt.

The People Who Want It All Are Hurting America

On Wednesday night, I read Anne-Marie Slaugher's thought-provoking and much-discussed Atlantic article, "Why Women Still Can't Have It All." I've been ruminating over it since, and figured I'd share my scattered thoughts here. 

Slaughter is of course correct that women still can't have it all. But no one can—at least not if you define "having it all" to mean achieving something more than tenure and deanship at Princeton without making significant personal-life sacrifices. Because it was only after Slaughter took a sabbatical from Princeton to work as a high-ranking State Department official that she had her epiphany that not every vector in life can be maximized simultaneously.

Slaughter makes clear that she is writing about only "highly educated, well-off women who are privileged enough to have choices." And what are their "choices"? Princeton or Yale? Nanny or au pair? Kidding aside, the choice is this: "Should I acknowledge that I have achieved enough, career-wise, and turn my attention to a more satisfactory personal life? Or should I attempt to absolutely maximize my career achievement, and hope against hope that somehow this will not involve significant sacrifices in my personal life?" 

When you spell it out, the answer seems rather obvious—and I think it is obvious to most women. The only people who get this question wrong are a small subset of robotic super-acheivers, almost all of whom are men. In other words, more men are career super-acheivers because only a buffoon would think that it is wise to make the sacrifices necessary to absolutely maximize career achievement—and almost all buffoons are men.

So men can't have it all either—they're just much more likely to think they can. The buffoon-robot-super-achievers end up going-for-broke, "achieve" the insane (literally) success they were seeking, and refuse to admit they've made a shambles of their life in the process. Since the human brain is essentially a machine that rationalizes whatever decisions we have made ("I have no regrets"), people rarely admit these kinds of fundamental errors in judgment ("Everything happens for a reason"). But from the outside, it's easy to see that most people who devote their lives to achieving maximum career achievement are absolutely wasting their lives. 

I espouse a mode of life that one writer has memorably called "the medium chill." The underlying insight is that maximizing achievement (or maximizing anything, really) is unwise, and not the route to the good life. I think most people (especially most women) actually agree. Most people (including most men) are unwilling to maximize career achievement at the expense of family life. The problem is that a majority of the buffoons who are willing to do so are men, so we end up being ruled mostly by men. Perhaps it would be better if more of these buffoons were women, but I tend to doubt it.

So how do we fix this? How do we change the world so that reasonable people are enticed to aspire to positions of leadership and high achievement? Slaughter argues that women have been able to achieve rather equal success at the highest levels of academia because of the flexible hours that an academic career permits, and points out that most other prestigious or powerful careers lack this feature. That's a great point, and it both explains the gender gap at the top of many professions and suggests a solution: flexibility and fewer hours. 

Especially fewer hours. Slaughter talks about "time macho," which is essentially the idea that he (always he, obviously) who puts in the most hours wins.  This is really the root of most of our problems. Even Slaughter sort of brags about how, as dean, she would tell student groups that she couldn't meet after 6:30 (because she had to go home to have dinner with her family) but that she was happy to come back after 8:00. That's still macho, Ms. Slaughter. The work day should just end at some reasonable point. If there's a job that requires someone to work 12 hours a day seven days a week, it doesn't take a mathematician to realize that that's actually two jobs. Two people should be doing it, not one.

The problem is that the buffoons are willing to work 200% of the hours for 175% of the pay. They're greedy—they want all that money. And they're arrogant—they think only they are capable of doing the work. Even though they are (supposedly) doing much of it at night after working all day, which is clearly not a recipe for good brain-based work. In fact, there's a real contradiction there: if these jobs are so mentally taxing that only the select few have the brain power to do them, then they are also too taxing for someone to do effectively for more than eight hours a day. On the other hand, if what really distinguishes these jobs is that currently they require a commitment to working very long hours, then it should not be a problem to simply split the job in half and have two people do it. Maybe we lose some efficiency, but probably not, and the other gains (increased employment, increased productivity) should more than offset the losses.

Culture is the problem. For example, in some professions people who try to work normal hours are thought by some people to be unserious about their work or lacking ambition. My response: "fuck 'em." When I worked at a big law firm, that was my advice to new associates wondering how to achieve work-life balance.  If you want a home life, you just have to go home at 6:00. If forces at the firm are pressuring you to stay later, you just have to accept that one of the consequences of having a life may be that you have to work at a different firm. Because if you don't, you end up sacrificing your personal life to keep working at a job you hate. The way to change the culture is for people, especially men, to stop making the idiotic choices that result in them sacrificing their personal lives in order to succeed at jobs they hate—choices that create a culture in which only the most insane can ultimately succeed. This really shouldn't be too hard. But it is!

Planting pornography on someone's computer.

An attorney in the Maine Attorney General's office was recently sentenced to sixteen years in prison for possession of child pornography. Although we frequently mention the crimes, foibles, and faux pas of prosecuting attorneys, this post is not about that attorney. The judge in the case summed up my views on the matter:

You were working in a position of authority and respect, and here you are not on the right side of the book but in the defendant's seat. ... A criminal,. . . You lost your job, your wife, your assets, your reputation, and your freedom. For what? To view images of children being sexually assaulted and abused. Images that are sickening and sad.

But the comment by Peter C. Lometevas caught my attention. According to his website, Mr. Lometevas is an attorney in New York specializing in criminal defense and family law matters. Mr. Lomtevas comments that he has represented men in what he calls “guilt by computer cases.” According to Mr. Lomtevas,

The common thread in them is a wife who wants to isolate children from the man. Family members obtain the computer and find child pornography on them. These searches are valuable because there is a federal law prohibiting possession of child porn so it pays to find – perhaps even plant – this stuff on a man’s computer.

Mr. Lometevas goes on to say, "Divorcing couples know this and now child porn appears on a prosecutor’s computer. An over zealous judge who knows nothing about how the internet operates craps all over the man.”

A disgruntled wife planting child porn on a prosecuting attorney’s computer as part of divorce strategy would be a horrific act. However the issue I have with Mr. Lometevas's comment is that it no one involved in the case seems to think that is the defendant's wife planted the evidence.

First, as this story makes clear, the child pornography was not discovered as a result of a search by anyone in the attorney’s family. Instead, Yahoo! reported finding child pornography in photos of an account holder later identified as the attorney’s wife. The article further explains, “The Yahoo! reports were made to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children in Alexandria, Va., an organization that works with local, state and federal investigators.” So, no family members made the report and the account holder was not the defendant (as one might expect if it were planted) but the defendant’s wife.

Still, given that it was in the wife’s account, we can assume the defense was that the wife planted the photos, right? Wrong. As the Kennebec Journal reports, the defense argued that “someone from outside his family's home in Hallowell might have been responsible for the explicit images found on their four computers, or that the images had been downloaded by his 12-year-old autistic son.” So while the defense was willing to blame strangers or a handicapped boy, it was not willing to blame the wife. Moreover, as this article notes, the attorney's (now ex)wife agreed to be responsible for him while he was on bail. Hardly the actions of someone wishing to isolate the defendant from his children.

While Mr. Lometevas is wrong that the this case right involves a disgruntled wife planting child porn on a hapless husband’s computer, it apparently does happen. A Westlaw search of all federal and state cases revealed three cases where the topic came up. In United States v. Starr, 533 F.3d 985, 999 (8th Cir. 2008), the defendant claimed his wife planted child porn on his computer. However, the victim testified that she sent the photos to the defendant. Based on this testimony, the Eighth Circuit rejected the defendant’s appeal that there was no evidence that he possessed the images prior to his wife providing them to the police. In State v. Sanders, 126 S.W.3d 5, 28 (Mo. Ct. App. 2003), the defendant claimed that his ex-wife planted the child pornography. He was allowed to present the defense but was convicted. Finally, there is one case where a court found that the wife did plant child porn on her husband’s computer. That happened in Tauck v. Tauck, FA054004889S, 2007 WL 3087962 (Conn. Super. Ct. Sept. 21, 2007), a Connecticutt divorce case. Lasting 86 days and generating more than $13 million in attorneys fees, the New York Post reports that the Tauk divorce trial was the largest and most expensive in Connecticut history.

It was good that Mr. Lometevas drew attention to this issue. I had never heard of it before. I just wish he would have done so without suggesting that the the wife of this particular defendant had done such a monstrous thing.