A hypothesis about how you might discover the next Twitter. pic.twitter.com/ral5ns6S7p
— Paul Graham (@paulg) August 19, 2017
A hypothesis about how you might discover the next Twitter. http://pic.twitter.com/ral5ns6S7p
— Paul Graham (@paulg) August 19, 2017
The threat of widespread violence and unrest descends upon the country, thanks again to a collection of actors viciously opposed to civil rights, and in many cases, to the very existence of people who are different from them. They have been given aid and comfort by very powerful enablers. Veteran activists swing into action. Young people on college campuses turn out by the hundreds week after week. But for many ordinary people with jobs, kids, mortgages, etc. the cost of participating in constant protests and civil actions may seem too great to bear. Yet, given many awful examples in recent history, the cost of inaction may be also.
What can be done? Not all of us are Rosa Parks or Howard Zinn or Martin Luther King, Jr. or Thich Nat Hanh or Cesar Chavez or Dolores Huerta, after all. Few of us are revolutionaries and few may wish to be. Not everyone is brave enough or talented enough or knowledgeable enough or committed enough or, whatever.
The problem with this kind of thinking is a problem with so much thinking about politics. We look to leaders—men and women we think of as superior beings—to do everything for us. This can mean delegating all the work of democracy to sometimes very flawed individuals. It can also mean we fundamentally misunderstand how democratic movements work.
In the video above, Noam Chomsky addresses the question of what ordinary people can do in the face of seemingly insurmountable injustice. (The clip comes from the 1992 documentary Manufacturing Consent.) “The way things change,” he says, “is because lots of people are working all the time, and they’re working in their communities or their workplace or wherever they happen to be, and they’re building up the basis for popular movements.”
In the history books, there’s a couple of leaders, you know, George Washington or Martin Luther King, or whatever, and I don’t want to say that those people are unimportant. Martin Luther King was certainly important, but he was not the Civil Rights Movement. Martin Luther King can appear in the history books ‘cause lots of people whose names you will never know, and whose names are all forgotten and who may have been killed and so on were working down in the South.
King himself often said as much. For example, in the Preface of his Stride Toward Freedom he wrote—referring to the 50,000 mostly ordinary, anonymous people who made the Montgomery Bus Boycott happen—“While the nature of this account causes me to make frequent use of the pronoun 'I,' in every important part of the story it should be ‘we.' This is not a drama with only one actor.”
As for public intellectuals like himself engaged in political struggle, Chomsky says, “people like me can appear, and we can appear to be prominent… only because somebody else is doing the work.” He defines his own work as “helping people develop courses of intellectual self-defense” against propaganda and misinformation. For King, the issue came down to love in action. Responding in a 1963 interview above to a critical question about his methods, he counters the suggestion that nonviolence means sitting on the sidelines.
I think of love as something strong and that organizes itself into powerful, direct action…. We are not engaged in a struggle that means we sit down and do nothing. There’s a great deal of difference between nonresistance to evil and nonviolent resistance. Nonresistance leaves you in a state of stagnant passivity and deadening complacency, whereas nonviolent resistance means that you do resist in a very strong and determined manner.
Both Chomsky, King, and every other voice for justice and human rights would agree that the people need to act instead of relying on movement leaders. Whatever actions one can take—whether it’s engaging in informed debate with family, friends, or coworkers, writing letters, making donations to activists and organizations, documenting injustice, or taking to the streets in protest or acts of civil disobedience—makes a difference. These are the small individual actions that, when practiced diligently and coordinated together in the thousands, make every powerful social movement possible.
Related Content:
Noam Chomsky Defines What It Means to Be a Truly Educated Person
Read Martin Luther King and The Montgomery Story: The Influential 1957 Civil Rights Comic Book
‘Tired of Giving In’: The Arrest Report, Mug Shot and Fingerprints of Rosa Parks (December 1, 1955)
Henry David Thoreau on When Civil Disobedience and Resistance Are Justified (1849)
Saul Alinsky’s 13 Tried-and-True Rules for Creating Meaningful Social Change
Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
The Portsmouth High Patriots, like almost every high school baseball team, kept a trick play in their pocket.
Theirs was called the "phantom pickoff throw": The pitcher would spin as if making a pickoff attempt but keep the ball tucked in his glove. His fielders would act as if the throw had gone wild, make a lot of noise and chase after it, and the runner -- tricked -- would start to run to the next base. The pitcher would casually throw him out.
This play worked. Pitcher Brendan Solecki remembers using it twice, once when he was on the freshman team and once as a sophomore on the varsity. Both times the runner fell for it. "Against Woonsocket, the parents were not very happy," he says. "Like, 'That's not baseball, that's bush league.'"
But high school baseball, and maybe only high school baseball, is built for trick plays. At levels lower than high school, everybody is just trying to have fun, trying to learn, and it seems cruel to try too hard to humiliate your opponent. At higher levels, a play like that would never work. High school is the intersection between childhood and adulthood: The young men on the field are good enough to throw in the high-80s, strong enough to play on full-sized fields in front of major league scouts, polished enough to speak in clichés. They're also young enough to fall for a trick play straight out of "Little Big League."
In 2005, a parent approached Portsmouth coach Dave Ulmschneider about an interesting book he'd found. It turned out to be more of a pamphlet:
There were 16 plays, with a page or two of explanation for utilizing and defending each. A lot of the plays were clearly cheating, such as the runner going from second to home, skipping (or "cutting") third base when the umpires were looking the other way. Some were just plain baseball, stuff every team did, like a delayed steal. Some didn't seem likely to work, and some didn't seem realistic. Then there was a play called "skunk in the outfield."
That's how it came to be that a Portsmouth sophomore named Johnny Pedrotty stood in right field in Game 2 of the Rhode Island state championship series, that a crowd of a thousand fans erupted into profane chaos, that a star infielder almost blacked out from the stress, and that Ulmschneider found himself unsure of how to stop what he'd unleashed. It's how, for two minutes and 32 seconds, baseball broke.
LET'S DEFINE A baseball play like this: It is a sequence of actions during which events in progress cannot be stopped by a timeout. A runner is actively attempting to advance or retreat, or he is exposed and the defense is chasing after him. The ball is live. The only way for the play to end is for the runner to advance, retreat or become the next out.
Click here to listen to Bobb Angel's classic radio call of the "skunk in the outfield" play.
A play can take only so much time. The physical space of the field is confined, and baserunning is a closed circuit that takes about 15 seconds to complete. Barring a rundown -- when a baserunner goes backward -- it takes only that long before the runner scores or is tagged out, and is no longer advancing or retreating or being chased. A baseball game has no clock, but a baseball play has its own internal countdown, as the sprawl of defenders progresses toward order, funneling all the wide-open ambition of a baseball field into an ever-smaller space.
A typical stolen base is over within four seconds; a typical single within eight; a typical triple within 12. The most elaborate and disorienting plays might get to 20 seconds. I have found a play that took 26 seconds, and one that took 29 seconds, but I have never seen a play that took longer. But I've heard one, and it sounds like this:
"Bracey checks his runners. From the stretch, he delivers and gets that outside corner again and gets ahead of Jimmy Ayars no balls, two strikes."
The East Greenwich Avengers knew the Patriots well. In 2002, Portsmouth's Little League team had won the state championship, moving past East Greenwich in the state's final four. (East Greenwich would watch Portsmouth play in the regional finals on ESPN.) Three years later, many of the players met again in the semifinals of the 2005 state high school championship; Portsmouth knocked East Greenwich out after a miraculous comeback. You had to cross two bridges to get to Portsmouth from East Greenwich, so it was far enough away to be The Other. But it's Rhode Island. You see the same faces, over and over.
On June 17, 2006, East Greenwich ace Dan Bracey was on the mound at McCoy Stadium -- the Triple-A home of the Pawtucket Red Sox, a glamorous setting for a state tourney. East Greenwich's home bleachers sat 50; there were a thousand fans, maybe more, for this game. East Greenwich students had been let out early to go to it. The team had chartered a bus. "At that point it's 100 percent the biggest moment of our lives," says second baseman Matt Streich.
The Patriots were favored. They had brought back all but one starter from the previous season and added two sophomores: Ryan Westmoreland, a budding superstar; and Pedrotty, whose home run in the Little League regionals had pushed Portsmouth to within one game of Williamsport. The Patriots had the best regular-season record in the division; they had already won the first game of the best-of-three championship series, and they led 2-0 in the sixth inning of Game 2. They were three outs away.
Bracey's 100th pitch of the night put him ahead 0-2 on Portsmouth's No. 9 hitter, Jimmy Ayars, with two outs. Pedrotty was on first and Solecki was on third. Bracey set and looked in for the sign, when, suddenly, everybody started yelling.
"Look at John Pedrotty, running out toward right field. And Bracey is walking toward second base and John Pedrotty is standing in shallow right field, out of the baseline. No call has been made yet. East Greenwich doesn't know exactly what to do."
PEDROTTY WAS THE skunk.
In the rulebook, the baseline is not -- contrary to what most people think -- the line between two bases. Rather, it's a straight line between wherever the runner is and the base he's going for when a tag is attempted. As the MLB rulebook puts it:
A runner is out when: (1) He runs more than three feet away from his base path to avoid being tagged ... A runner's base path is established when the tag attempt occurs and is a straight line from the runner to the base he is attempting to reach safely.
If no defender is attempting to tag the runner, there is no baseline, and the runner can go anywhere he wants. He can walk into right field if he wants.
"What I decided to do was to run him out on the grass to try to get somebody to chase him," Ulmschneider would explain after the game. "One, they've got, out deeper there, a longer throw. They're running towards him -- they have to stop, throw off a turn, throw off balance, and I like our chances in that scenario. Or we're looking for them to throw to somebody. If they make a throw, we just try and score from third."
First-and-third situations are breeding grounds for gimmick plays in high school. Often, the runner on first will attempt to steal second, hoping to draw a throw that will allow the runner to score from third. But defenses will rarely make that throw, so offenses have designed ways to tempt the defense into going after the trail runner while letting the lead runner sneak home. Sometimes, when the pitch is delivered, the base stealer will stop halfway and try to get in a rundown. Sometimes he'll start walking to second base while the pitcher still has the ball. There's a balk/steal play, where the runner takes off sprinting once the pitcher gets set, the goal being to startle the pitcher so that he'll make an illegal move off the mound in reaction.
These plays -- and "skunk in the outfield" -- all have the same paradoxical premise: It's more valuable to the team that's at bat for the runner to be on first base. If he wanted to go to second, he could just steal. But as long as he's on first -- or, at least, not yet on second -- he might be able to ignite something weird. When Ulmschneider had his team run the play in practice for the first time just before the championship series, his pitcher on the mound -- Solecki, coincidentally -- immediately balked and then started yelling that the runner can't do that.
"Bobby Downey [of East Greenwich] is one of the best coaches I've ever coached against," Ulmschneider says now. "If we do a walk-off steal there, if we steal a base and slide short, get in the rundown -- they'll defend it." Indeed, East Greenwich practiced their reactions to these plays all the time. "I go, 'If Solecki's reaction is what it was, what's to say Bracey's won't be?' So I gave the sign."
Westmoreland was in the on-deck circle, and he saw the sign from Ulmschneider, who served as the third-base coach. "I was speechless. I couldn't believe it, to do it in Game 2 of the state final. I remember thinking to myself in the on-deck circle, 'I wouldn't be surprised if we lost this game.'"
"They will walk over toward third base and keep Brendan Solecki near the bag, and the ball will go back to the mound and they will ignore Pedrotty, out there in shallow right field, trying to draw some attention. Bracey has the ball in his hand behind the mound and he's waiting to see what happens."
STEP 1 HAD been to make Bracey panic. He didn't. He stepped off the rubber and walked down to the flat grass area behind the mound, so if he had to make a throw it wouldn't be on a slope. East Greenwich fans tried to get the umpire to call Pedrotty out of the baseline, but by the rulebook he wasn't. Bracey tried to call a timeout -- as he'd be allowed to do when any other baserunner was taking a lead -- but at some undefined point Pedrotty had taken more than a lead.
"There wasn't a Step 2," says Portsmouth's catcher, Nick Grande.
"I don't think we really practiced what you did once you're out in right field," Solecki says. "The initial part of it was, like, 90 percent of it. Get the other team to do something stupid or balk."
"To be honest, I didn't know what to do," Pedrotty says. "I didn't know the rules. I didn't know, if I deviated from my path, would I get called out? If I went to second base, I didn't know if I'd get called out. It was awkward: You're standing there, just you and the pitcher, looking back and forth, like, what am I supposed to be doing here?"
So Pedrotty just stood there, hands on his knees, staring into the eyes of an increasingly agitated Bracey. The pitcher could have simply gone back to the mound and delivered a pitch, let Pedrotty have second, but this situation was so wrong that it felt like they had to do something to put things back in place. Bracey was making pump throws, faking like he was going to run the ball at Pedrotty -- but the ball never left the area behind the mound. Coach Downey was yelling, "Ice, Dan, ice!" That was their designated instruction for delayed steals, and it meant: Throw the ball to the second baseman. But everybody was yelling. Even Bracey was yelling.
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Meanwhile, East Greenwich first baseman Steve Salvator was trying to counter with his own trick play. Recalls Streich, the second baseman: "Salvator, it was like he's crawling through the Vietnam jungle, getting low to the ground and taking a parabolic angle behind this kid. Like nobody sees what he's doing, like we're going to do a quick throw. He's showing me his hand, like, 'Throw me the ball,' and our coach is yelling, 'Don't throw him the ball!'"
Solecki, on third base, kept bluffing toward home, but the ball was closer to the plate than he was.
Bracey finally looks toward Downey, arms outstretched, furious: What do you want me to do? Downey tells him to give the ball to Streich, the second baseman, who had the best arm in the infield. Bracey didn't want to -- in this moment, he's the only person he trusts to make a throw home.
"I don't blame the kid," Streich says. "I didn't want me to have it, either. What am I going to do, just stand there? I was praying to God that the kid did not run home, because I would have thrown the ball five rows into the stands, my hands were so sweaty. No chance I could have made that throw."
Streich doesn't even remember taking the ball -- "I think I blacked out for a good minute or two" -- but eventually Bracey handed it gently to him. "I told him, 'Don't screw this up,'" Bracey says. "Like if your dad gives you $20 to go out, and he gives you that look, like, 'I'm trusting you, don't let me down.'"
The longer the play got, the darker it all started to feel. At first it was funny, but as time ticked by nobody seemed to be having fun. The players in the Portsmouth dugout were starting to feel embarrassed, some guys complaining in real time that it was a stupid play. After about one minute, says Streich, "It was like a snap of the finger, and the whole mood [in the stadium] totally changed -- pure chaos!" East Greenwich fans were screaming across the stands at Portsmouth fans.
"It was an interesting evolution from that puzzlement to the anger," says Bracey's father, Jim, whose downturned camera caught some of the audio. "I had a good friend of mine there who had no real direct interest in the game, but he was a great athlete, his kids were great athletes, and oh my God, was he fired up. He was pissed, he was yelling. What ended up happening was Coach Ulmschneider became the target of it."
"This is a show! I can't believe this is going on! Dave Ulmschneider has to be loving this!"
EVERYBODY IN RHODE Island baseball called him Umpy, a nickname he'd inherited from his dad when the younger Ulmschneider started coaching in 1993. He was a volunteer assistant coach at first, earning his first paying job in 1998 and his first head-coaching job in 2000. In 2002, a bunch of incoming Portsmouth freshmen came to him and told him they were going to win Ulmschneider a state championship. Those freshmen were seniors in 2006.
"There were very few situations where he put us in a situation to fail," Pedrotty says. "I have the utmost respect for him."
He was a player's coach. He didn't try to mess with guys' swings or pitching mechanics. He let leaders emerge among the players so they could learn from each other.
"He was a really good coach," says Bobb Angel, a Rhode Island Radio Hall of Famer and the play-by-play broadcaster for the 2006 championship series. "Totally understanding of the ins and outs and all the angles. My guess is he just put one and one together."
The trick plays book had ways to defend the skunk play. The most ingenious defense is a huddle play, where the pitcher, second baseman and shortstop all huddle near the mound. One of them takes the ball, but the offense can't see which one. Then the shortstop goes toward the runner on third, and the second baseman goes toward the runner in right field. Both runners have to retreat, not knowing whether they're in danger of being tagged out.
But Ulmschneider knew East Greenwich had never seen this play and wouldn't know those defenses. He might even have foreseen that in a worst-case scenario, where Bracey doesn't panic and East Greenwich doesn't make a mistake, he'd end up in a stalemate like this. What he hadn't foreseen was how it would feel.
It felt terrible. Totally unexpectedly, he felt embarrassed, for himself and for Pedrotty and for his opponents and for his team. But until you do something, until you see the way it changes the atmosphere, the way reactions pick up momentum, it's hard to know. He could have been the hero.
"It's a fine line," he says. "I remember saying after the fact -- you know, we've all seen where somebody has done something, and they're legendary coaches and they can do it. But believe me, I was no legend. I was just a D-II high school coach in Rhode Island."
"The ball is in the hands of the second baseman, Matt Streich. Pedrotty now is gonna go back to first base, because nobody's going to throw over there. And now we are back the way we were. That was wild! East Greenwich fans don't like it. The Portsmouth fans are loving it. And John Pedrotty's back on first base."
THE LONGEST PLAY ever, and it's not even a line in the play log. Nothing happened. "I just remember being, like, I'm over this," Pedrotty says.
"It was like an Andy Kaufman routine, but not quite long enough," Bracey says. "Long enough to get everybody mad, not long enough for them to get the joke."
Nine years later, Dave Ulmschneider was inducted into the Rhode Island Baseball Coaches Association Hall of Fame. Bob Downey, the East Greenwich coach, gave the introductory speech. Downey called Umpy beforehand and mentioned he was going to bring up the Pedrotty play.
"I said, 'Please don't, Bobby.' He was going to, and I said, 'Bobby, please,'" Ulmschneider says.
Bobby didn't. And given what happened after the play, it might have seemed like gloating if he had.
BRACEY GOT BACK on the mound to throw his 101st pitch of the night. "I was fine if all the ligaments in my arm broke on that pitch," he says. "I really wanted to strike him out." Just before the pitch gets to the plate, a fan screams "See ya!" Ayars hits a routine grounder to Streich, and the same fan again yells, "See ya!"
Bracey stomps off the mound, pumping his fist. He steps over the foul line just as Ulmschneider is jogging toward him on the way to the first-base dugout. Bracey, out of character, gives him a dirty look, might have even said something. East Greenwich's reserves empty out of the dugout to give Bracey fives and fist bumps, but Bracey keeps his arms down and he shoulders through his teammates. He's furious.
So is the rest of the team. They'd been battling against a team that, in their hearts, they secretly knew was better than them. As one Avenger puts it, "We were well-rounded. They were well-rounded and they had superstars."
East Greenwich kids had been losing to Portsmouth kids since Little League. But for two and a half minutes, Portsmouth had treated them like clowns, and that was over the line.
"I think they thought they were totally in control of this situation," Streich says, but by running that play the emotions of the game got out of control. "In that situation, you let a sleeping dog lie. Once Dan got that guy out and gave the biggest roar and fist pump I've ever seen, I'm pacing in the dugout and I said to our backup catcher, 'I'm going to hit a home run in this inning, I don't care.' I don't swing for the fences, but if somebody gets on in front of me, we're winning because I'm going to hit a home run. I was irate. That was the most emotional I've ever been on a playing field. We didn't like them to begin with, and they're trying to make us look bad, trying to make us s--- ourselves, and we didn't do it. That's what sparked the rally."
Solecki, who had been the runner on third for the Pedrotty play, went back to the mound. He'd thrown only 76 pitches and allowed only four hits. But Nick Rossetti hit a pinch-hit single and Salvator followed with a single to right; Pedrotty bobbled the ball for an error, allowing Rossetti to score. Brandon Palmer singled to tie the game, and Streich came up. On the second pitch, he homered into the bullpen. In just four minutes, East Greenwich had turned the series around. The Avengers would add another run and win 5-2.
"Somebody said they think that fired 'em up," Ulmschneider said in a radio interview after the game. "You know what? In a state championship, you're down 2-0 in the seventh, you're down to the last three outs -- they're gonna come out guns blazing and leave it all on the field."
He might be the only person at the field that day who believes that. "It definitely rattled us," Westmoreland says.
Says Pedrotty: "I just felt like we did something that was probably the only thing we could have done to swing momentum in that situation."
The Patriots woke up the next morning and saw Downey quoted in the local paper, crediting the play with helping inspire East Greenwich's comeback.
"For East Greenwich," the writer wrote, "successfully defending the play was about more than preventing a run. It was about finally beating the Patriots."
THE NEXT DAY, Portsmouth won Game 3 and the championship. They were the better team. Westmoreland threw a three-hitter, struck out nine, and in a lot of ways it was his coming-out party. He was already great, but the next two years he was the state's best player, carrying Portsmouth until the Red Sox drafted him and gave him a $2 million signing bonus.
An East Greenwich fan at Game 3 had a big sign that read "UMBRAGE." It was a response to Ulmschneider's postgame interview, when he explained the play, disputed there was anything controversial about it, but added, "I guess some fans took umbrage."
After the Pedrotty play, Ulmschneider spent a lot of time thinking about umbrage, and it started to change his coaching style. "There's a school of thought among a lot of people that you get to the run rule" -- a mercy rule -- "so you can save pitching whenever you can. But I think I'm more cautious now about being the guy on the other end. We're not going to rub anybody's face in the game. We're not going to run when we're up by five. All anybody wants, whether you win, lose or draw, is to be respected by people for being a good guy and being knowledgeable. I kind of felt after this that I had put winning a game in front of that. I try to be more considerate of what it's like on the other end."
This is good. It's also, though, a little bit of a loss. There was nothing wrong with the Pedrotty play. It was within the rules, and it was easy enough to defend. "Bush league" is usually a slur teams throw around to try to convince another team to act against its own interest.
"You know, really -- it was not bush," says Jim Bracey now. "We just defined it that way. He was intelligently exploiting the rules. He ultimately blinked." And Ulmschneider blinked because the crowd yelled "Bush" at him.
A few weeks after the game, Dan Bracey started dating one of the girls who'd been in the stands that day. (They're now married.) He pitched even better as a senior, topping 90 mph, which is plenty to dominate in high school. He committed to pitch for Columbia University. In the final high school game of his career, his team lost -- on a walk-off phantom pickoff throw.
Coach Downey told the seniors what a sham it was for a team to pull such a bush-league play and end their high school careers that way. "In the heat of the moment," Bracey says, "I was pissed.
"But looking back, it was brilliant."
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Reinventing the email experience is an area numerous startups have tried to tackle over the years, with some apps focused more on triage, others on making a better desktop alternative to Outlook, and still more aiming to re-envision email as a mobile-first product, among other ideas. A new startup called Superhuman, from the founder of Gmail add-on Rapportive acquired in 2012 by LinkedIn, is different.
Instead of giving email a new coat of paint, Superhuman’s underlying technology is designed to speed up everything about using email, while also bundling in features like snoozing, scheduling, read statuses, undo send, insights from social networks, and more.
The startup was founded by Rahul Vohra, who incorporated Superhuman as soon as he left LinkedIn, where he worked for two years following Rapportive’s acquisition. Rapportive was one of the most popular Gmail add-on, as it put people’s social network identities, professional titles and other key information in Gmail’s sidebar, allowing you to quickly connect with them beyond the inbox.
At LinkedIn, the product had shifted away from supporting other social networks – a decision Vohra admits he made knowing that those features – like its connections to Facebook and Twitter – wouldn’t receive ongoing maintenance.
Vohra spent a couple of years at LinkedIn, but has known for some time that Superhuman would be his next product.
“I always really knew that I wanted to start Superhuman,” he explains. “That was very clear to me as I was watching the email space change. We were asking ourselves the question: ‘what would Gmail look like if it was built today, not twelve years ago,'” he says. “We decided it would be blazingly fast; it would be visually gorgeous; the whole thing would work offline; you wouldn’t need a multitude of browser extensions to get things done; and people would be materially faster at doing their email.”
What’s different: browser-based, speedy, advanced features without add-ons
Though the app has a number of bells and whistles, the most interesting thing about Superhuman is that it’s largely a redesign of browser-based email with a focus on speed. Many of the next-generation email apps have launched first as desktop or mobile clients, by comparison.
Unlike most browser-based email, which is server-based, Superhuman can store and index gigabytes of email in the web browser itself. This is possible by leveraging today’s more powerful APIs in the browser, along with the faster CPUs and hard drives on our computers.
“I just think that no one ever tried. Everyone assumed you’re in a browser tab, so clearly the service should store the email, the service should do the search, and the service should work like Gmail,” Vohra says.
A product like Gmail couldn’t do this, because it needs to serve over a billion users – that means supporting older computers, out of date browsers, email over slower internet connections, and so on.
Superhuman, however, is only targeting a fraction of the email market: business users who will pay a subscription for a more powerful client. For this reason, the browser version of the email app only works in Google Chrome. But a desktop client, and later a mobile app, will also be available.
A core tenet of Superhuman’s reinvented inbox is one designed for speed. Everything that happens – searching, sending, start-up, etc. – will take place in 100ms. This is the speed at which people see the action as “instantaneous,” Vahora explains.
In addition, he says hundreds of other product decisions in Superhuman, each which may seem minor on their own, also help to make getting through the inbox faster.
In beta tests, the team has found that users who used to dig through their inbox for 3 hours per day are now cutting through it twice as fast.
Another key feature involves the way Superhuman aids with email triage. Similar in some respects to Gmail’s “Priority Inbox” functionality – an optional feature favored by power users – Superhuman understands which email is important based on historical usage patterns. But it also picks up some of the “important” emails that Gmail’s system ignores – like calendar invites, notifications about Google Docs updates, and other invites to collaborate on work.
The app additionally includes a good handful of built-in functionality often not available in browser-based email without the use of plug-ins, or by switching on a “Gmail Labs” option. For example, an “undo send” is on by default; you can schedule emails for a later date and time; you can snooze emails; and you can even track who’s read the email, when and on what device, through a “read status” indicator.
This indicator will show you who among multiple recipients have read your email – something that differentiates it from simpler solutions that only know if an email has been opened or not.
A Rapportive-like feature returns
And, not to worry, a Rapportive-like feature is available as well. Superhuman displays information about your contacts in the inbox – including profile pictures, where they live, job titles, and the option to connect with them on social networks like LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and elsewhere.
As to whether Superhuman can meet this ambitious goal of getting power users to not only abandon Gmail, but pay for the privilege of doing so is another question. It’s hard to give up the muscle memory and email workflow you’ve used for years, and everyone has their own set of email preferences. Many are game to try a new email solution, but retaining users over time is hard.
However, Vahora has assembled an impressive team to help. He describes CTO Conrad Irwin … as the “best programmer you’ll ever meet,” and the “best programmer at LinkedIn. Another co-founder, Vivek Sodera, co-founded LiveRamp which was sold to Acxiom for $310 million. Head of mobile, Emuye Reynolds, came from Apple.
“There are only fourteen people in the world who have been building iOS apps for longer than she has,” Vahora notes. The remaining team includes other ex-Apple, ex-Zynga, ex-Google, ex-Amazon, and ex-Facebook employees and engineers.
Superhuman, (which is not related to an earlier Superhuman also in the productivity space) is not making its product publicly available at this time during beta testing. But including this week’s soft beta launch on Product Hunt, it has racked up somewhere between 30,000 and 40,000 sign-ups for its waitlist. You can move up the list by tweeting about it, Vahora says.
The startup is in the process of closing on funding, but has been partially bootstrapped through Vahora’s personal investment until now.
IDT Corporation (NYSE:IDT) is an entrepreneurial holding company founded in 1990 by Howard Jonas, which has over the years been involved in a variety of business ventures including calling cards, shale exploration, debt collection, wireless spectrum, media and comic books among many others.
Howard’s bread and butter has been investing in a collection of misunderstood or underfollowed assets cheaply and selling them at nosebleed valuations. His notable successes have included selling IDT’s stake in Net2Phone to AT&T (NYSE:T) for $1.1 billion in 2000 and more recently, the sale of Straight Path Communications (NYSE:STRP) to Verizon (NYSE:VZ) for ~$3.2 billion (STRP was spun out of IDT in 2013 and holds 5G wireless spectrum licenses).
After several successful spin-offs, it looks like there will be one more on the horizon for IDT. IDT plans to complete its transformation into a pure play telecommunications and payments company in Q4 2017 by separating its remaining non-core assets. The basket of assets to be spun off consists of (1) the real estate assets, (2) investments in early stage pharma and around $60 million of cash to fund future investments. The pure play IDT will consist mainly of its telecom and payment services (“TPS”) business and smaller UCaaS (“United Communications as a Service”) and Consumer Phone Services segments.
The best way to value IDT is as a sum of its various parts, which we refresh here ahead of the upcoming spinoff.
IDT has around $146 million in cash after adjusting the unrestricted cash balance of $132 million for the dividend paid in Q2 ($5 million), sale of 1mm shares to Howard Jonas ($14 million), and cash received from the sale of the Gibraltar Bank ($4 million). As mentioned previously IDT will be sending around $60 million of cash with the spinoff to invest in pharma, which we include with pharma below.
We arrive at ~$40 million of cash at Telecom after excluding the ~$60 million in cash that will go with the spinoff and ~$45 million in minimum cash to service the deferred revenue liability. To be conservative, we assume that the $40 million will be spent on growth capex over the next 2-3 years to build out the BOSS MVNO and payments businesses and do not give IDT any credit for excess cash at the core TPS business.
IDT’s real estate assets include its 18-story 500,000 SF office building in Newark NJ, HQ and associated 800 car parking garage, an operations facility in Piscataway, NJ, and a 12,400 SF condominium interest in Jerusalem, Israel. IDT’s focus is not on the real estate so we don’t see management creating a ton of value here other than to possibly re-mortgage the Newark HQ building to raise more cash for the pharma business.
The main asset here is the Newark HQ building (520 Broad Street) and parking garage, which generates revenues of around $2 million per year. IDT acquired the Newark building in 2008 for $50 million and it fell into disrepair after flood damage. IDT spend around $10 million in FY2015 to renovate four floors (of the 18) so that it could move back into the building.
The Newark building is carried on the books at ~$46 million and assessed at $20 million in public NJ Property Tax Records. The neighboring Verizon Bell Tower (540 Broad Street / 436,000 SF) was sold to a developer for $16.5 million in 2016 for a residential conversion compared to an assessed value of $38 million.
Based on our due diligence, the Newark building is not currently tenantable and a developer would have to invest at least $30 million into the property so we think that it should be worth in the ballpark of ~$10 million or less. The Piscataway facility was assessed at $3.5 million for NJ property taxes and we assign this a value of zero. $10 million for the real estate gives us $0.40 per share in value.
IDT has invested $10 million in a 50%-owned subsidiary, CS Pharma, which has raised an additional $10 million in funding from outside investors for pharma and biotech investments including the hedge fund manager, Michael Steinhardt. To date, CS Pharma has invested $10 million in a clinical stage oncology therapeutics company Rafael Pharmaceuticals (fka Cornerstone Pharmaceuticals) in the form of a convertible note.
IDT also holds warrants to purchase a stake of up to 56% in Rafael Pharma at the lower of a 70% discount to the valuation of the next capital raise or $1.25 per share in an IPO. It would cost around $60 million to exercise these warrants, which would be at a valuation of ~$100 million (for 100%), which is roughly the amount of cash that IDT will be sending to the spinoff.
At first, the pharma investment seems totally random but we think that it is another example of Howard Jonas buying a cheap lottery ticket. As a bit of background, Rafael Pharma was founded in 2001 by Dr. Robert Schorr (President & CEO) who also coincidentally happens to be a rabbi. The Company’s lead anti-cancer drug CP-613 from its Altered Energy Metabolism Directed (AEMD) platform targets the mitochondria of cancer cells to choke off the energy supply and inhibit reproduction.
CP-613 is currently being evaluated in 15 Phase 1 to Phase 2 clinical trials as a single agent and in combination with standard drug therapy for hematological malignancies and solid tumors. Rafael Pharma was poorly managed and about to run out of funding last year before completing the Phase 1 clinical trials when Howard Jonas convinced IDT and other investors to provide the needed cash. In March 2017, the Company had a breakthrough when the FDA gave CP-613 the go-ahead for Phase 2 clinical trials for patients with acute myeloid leukemia (AML) and pancreatic cancer.
Phase 2/3 clinical trials for AML and pancreatic cancer are very costly due to the difficulty in obtaining a large enough sample size of patients in advanced stages, which requires conducting trials at multiple hospitals. We think that Rafael Pharma will have to spend at least ~$100 million on Phase 2/3 clinical trials for CP-613.
In a May 2017 WSJ interview Howard Jonas stated that “Drug developer Cornerstone Pharmaceuticals Inc. is taking up 90% of his time” and that with his windfall from selling STRP to Verizon, he no longer has to search for partners to fund development of the drug and can write the checks himself. The fact that $60 million of IDT’s cash is being funneled to fund future investments in Rafael Pharma and that Howard is willing to pony up the cash for future Phase 2/3 clinical trials of CP-613 tells us that as an insider, he is extremely bullish on the prospects of the company.
The important thing here is that the warrants were issued to IDT before Rafael Pharma completed the Phase 1 clinical trials – the valuation of other biotech companies has typically increased by 2-3 times after releasing positive Phase 1 results. We think that a good comp for Rafael Pharma is Calithera Biosciences (NASDAQ: CALA), also a clinical stage oncology company whose leading drug CB-839, a glutaminase inhibitor, is currently being evaluated in Phase 1b and Phase 2 clinical trials. CALA is pre-revenue and has a market cap of $482 million with around $164 million of cash (EV of $318 million).
If we go by what IDT has invested so far plus the cash that IDT plans to invest, the total value of cash plus pharma is $70 million ($2.80 per share) with a free option on whatever premium the market would like to attribute to the Phase 1 clinical trial results.
IDT Telecom is a leading provider of prepaid communication and payment services through its retail division and one of the largest providers of international voice termination services through its wholesale division. IDT buys minutes on the wholesale market at a contracted price and quality and resells them on the wholesale market to other carriers and on the retail market via traditional calling cards and PIN-less calling card services.
The wholesale and retail divisions complement each other and IDT has been able to aggressively price termination services in part due to large volume of traffic generated by its retail business. IDT is the 6th largest carrier and largest US-based carrier of international minutes terminating ~27 billion minutes annually across its wholesale and retail businesses.
Wholesale Telecom (TTM Revenues: $580 million / ~41% of revenues): In the wholesale segment, IDT acts as a carrier to Tier 1 carriers and MNOs providing termination services for long distance calling in more than 170 countries. IDT enters into buy-sell agreements with different carriers, terminating their customer’s traffic in exchange for terminating IDT’s wholesale and retail traffic with their customers.
There are a couple of key trends to note in wholesale. First, termination rates charged by Tier 1 and other providers of international long distance traffic have been on a declining trend due to the liberalization of telecom markets around the world. Second, the higher revenue routes are not necessarily the highest margin because termination costs are also higher so growing wholesale revenues in higher priced routes could often result in lower gross margins.
Third, the growth rate of international voice traffic as a whole is stagnating due to the rise of OTT voice and substitute communication services, which have zero termination costs. This has been facilitated by increased broadband connectivity, which has improved the overall quality of VoIP calling.
The wholesale business is competitive and low margin so scale is important - IDT is a fairly large player in wholesale terminating ~19 billion voice minutes annually. In wholesale, IDT generates $580 million in revenues with gross margins in the high single digits (~9-10%).
Retail Telecom (TTM Revenues: $622 million / ~40% of revenues):
As traditional calling cards have died out, IDT’s main source of retail revenues is derived from BOSS Revolution, a PIN-less calling card service targeting immigrants through a network ~40,000 physical locations (bodegas, convenience stores) for top-ups. BOSS would win out over Skype if the caller is unbanked and if the caller and/or call recipient does not have access to cellular data or Wi-Fi. Otherwise there would be no reason to use BOSS versus free OTT calling apps (Skype, WhatsApp).
In fact, BOSS offers free calling over Wi-Fi/data within the BOSS app to compete with OTT services. Today, IDT’s retail customer base is pretty sizeable with 2-3 million customers and IDT terminates ~9 billion minutes annually in retail. IDT did around $622 million in retail revenues and earns gross margins in the mid-teens
IDT’s main problem is that its core BOSS PIN-less calling card service product seems to be in structural decline. BOSS fundamentally competes with free OTT calling services (Skype, WhatsApp) and will eventually disappear as broadband penetration increases in emerging markets.
Retail revenues could be further pressured in markets where termination costs go to zero making it economical for mobile carriers to offer cheap unlimited international calling - this has already happened in Mexico with the deregulation of the wholesale market forcing IDT to dramatically cut calling rates to Mexico from $0.055/min to $0.019/min in July 2016. After factoring in the full impact from Mexico, retail revenues have been declining sequentially at 3% q-o-q, which would translate to an annual decline of ~12%.
Payment Services (TTM Revenues: $235 million / ~16% of revenues):
IDT leverages its retail customer base and strong distribution channel to immigrant communities to offer payment services including mobile airtime top-up (IMTU), international money transfer (BOSS), and POS solutions for retailers (National Retail Solutions).
Over 90% of payment services revenue is from IMTU, which IDT began offering ~13 years ago. Basically, IMTU is a quasi-remittance service that allows US customers to buy prepaid airtime minutes to load balance into a family/friend’s cellphone in another country. IDT makes gross margins of around ~9-10% on IMTU. IMTU is now a mature business and is expected to grow in the low single digits.
The real driver of growth in payments going forward is expected to be international cash money transfers over IDT’s BOSS Revolution platform and POS solutions for retailers. Money transfer and POS solutions have higher gross margins of ~30-50% but it will take a couple of years for them to meaningfully contribute to the bottom line.
UCaaS (TTM Revenues: $28 million, 2% of Revenues):
UCaaS mainly consists of the legacy cable telephony business with growth driven by Net2Phone cloud hosted PBX calling and IP PBX SIP Trunking solutions for SMEs. UCaaS does gross margins of around ~60% and EBITDA margins of around ~9%. Net2Phone currently has 17,000 seats and IDT believes it can get to 100,000 seats by 2019 at $20/seat/month ($200 ARPU), which would be $20 million in revenues and $2 million of EBITDA at ~10% margins.
To summarize, the core telecom business is declining because of the challenges in retail. At the same time, IDT is pursuing several growth options, which may or may not be successful:
We think that the most impactful of these growth options the BOSS MVNO. The BOSS MVNO, which will be launched in Q1 2018, will offer cheap calling plans based on usage at sub-$20 per month rates vs. the $40+ fixed rate plans offered by mobile carriers. IDT has several key ingredients in place to launch the MVNO with limited incremental investment:
The BOSS MVNO is similar to Ting, which also offers completely unbundled pay-per-use pricing and was launched on the Sprint network in 2012 and has 250,000 subscribers. If ~10% of IDT’s retail customers switch to the BOSS MVNO, this is annual revenue of around $70 million and incremental EBITDA of around $30 million off the bat assuming ~40-45% gross margins (in line with Ting) as most of the G&A spend overlaps with existing retail and payments businesses.
This would be a great return on investment assuming IDT is spending around $10 million in capex annually to develop this. However there is a lot of competition in this space and a graveyard of failed MVNOs.
Taking stock of the situation, we expect the TPS business to generate $36 million of EBITDA in 2017 after corporate overhead and giving zero credit to the MVNO initiative, which could be potentially sizeable if successfully executed. With the core retail business declining at ~10% per year due to the factors mentioned earlier, we estimate a working capital hit of $6 million mainly from lower deferred revenues. IDT has guided to $20 million of capex for 2017 and $23 million for 2018.
The current level of capex spend is elevated due to investment in various growth initiatives including the BOSS MVNO. Looking back historically, IDT’s maintenance capex needs for telecom have been much less at around ~$8-10 million. We estimate ~$40 million of growth capex over the next couple of years, which we deduct from excess cash as a sunk cost without including any incremental EBITDA growth.
This gives us a “run rate” FCF of $20 million for TPS. IDT is not expected to be tax payer due to its sizeable stock of foreign and US NOLs. Just looking at the core cash flows of TPS and with a lot of the excess cash going to the spin-off, it looks like the current dividend of $19 million per year is not sustainable. Given the risks, we would be willing to buy the core TPS business at a ~20% FCF yield, which would imply a value of ~$100 million for Telecom or $4 per share with the MVNO launch as a “free option.”
Despite the $16 million settlement between IDT and STRP, which included the sale of STRP’s IP portfolio to IDT for $6 million (which was then sold by IDT to Howard at the same price), there is currently a class action lawsuit by an investor group (JDS1 LLC) holding $32 million of STRP stock to invalidate the settlement. As a result IDT may still potentially be on the hook for STRP's sizeable fine from the FCC ($100 million plus 20% of the sale proceeds of $3.2 billion) after being in violation of its duty to build out infrastructure rather than just hoard spectrum licenses.
JDS1 LLC is alleging that in order to avoid the potentially hefty indemnification obligation stemming from IDT’s 2013 spin-off of STRP, Howard Jonas coerced STRP’s board into settling the liability for only $10 million as part of the side deal to sell the IP assets to IDT. From the merger proxy, it was clear that Howard Jonas was only willing to support a deal where IDT would be relieved of the indemnification obligation post-closing.
The 2013 separation agreement has conflicting language as to whether IDT is liable but this could be a sizeable risk for IDT if the class action goes through. Although this will probably be settled for a lot less than the headline amount, our view is that IDT wouldn’t have disclosed this in an 8-K (link here) if it was insignificant or zero probability.
Factoring in a sizable margin of safety, we’d be willing to pay around $7 per share for IDT and $6 after discounting the additional risk related to the STRP class action. At this fairly conservative valuation, you get the core TPS business, which is in decline at a 20% FCF yield, plus free options on the BOSS MVNO and other growth initiatives at TPS plus a lottery ticket on the pharma business.
IDT Telecom ~$100 million or $4.00 per share at a 20% FCF yield
(-) Additional discount for STRP Lawsuit ~25%
Value of IDT Telecom (after discount for STRP risk) = $3.00 per share
Real Estate ~$10 million or $0.40 per share
(+) Early Stage Pharma + Cash ~$70 million or ~$2.80 per share
Value of Spinco = $3.20 per share
Total = ~$6.20 per share
With IDT currently trading close to $15, we think that a lot of optimism is already baked in based on Howard’s past successes. We think it's better to wait until after the spin-off to try to buy the pieces of IDT at a significant discount.
The core TPS business is likely to sell-off significantly on any announcement of a dividend cut, which we think is very likely as the current dividend of $19 million per year is not sustainable with the investment in growth.
Although we feel that IDT’s valuation is full at current levels compared to where we would be willing to buy in especially given the potential litigation risk related to STRP, we think that shorting the telecom stub is too risky given the cost of paying 1-2 quarterly dividends, uncertainty around the exact timing of the dividend cut and that the BOSS MVNO may positively surprise early next year with a meaningful contribution to top line and EBITDA.
As a ~$70 million market cap company, the pharma/real estate spin-off is likely to be unattractive for current IDT investors who are clipping a 5% dividend, which may create the opportunity to buy this at a sub-$50 million valuation. Given Howard’s bullishness and time commitment to this investment, we’d jump at the chance to invest in the spinoff very cheaply.
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Welcome back to Sunday Sustenance, the weekly column of simple, delicious meals for the laziest of weekdays. Sunday seems to be the day most of us cook breakfast, and too often we skip out on it during the week. Let’s rectify that, starting now.
Recently a lot of you posed questions about eggs, and I was very surprised to see so very few questions about scrambled. Maybe that’s because we Americans tend to favor big, lumpy dry curds over the richer, creamier variants found elsewhere, but even those big lumps can be creamy, fluffy, and delicious.
Another famous problem with scrambled eggs — unless you’re getting them at a drive-thru — is that they aren’t famous for being reheated. Yes, a poached egg can be gently reheated in warm water, but how many of you are waking up on a Thursday and excited to re-poach eggs before work? Not me. And though few of us care to admit it, we’ve all had some variation of reheated “scrambled” “eggs” in a breakfast burrito from the freezer or a big breakfast chain sandwich. But you and I, we’re better than that. So let’s make a quick, simple breakfast that you look forward to tomorrow morning—and maybe for the rest of the week.
So yes, I’m suggesting that you reheat scrambled eggs. But these won’t be individual egg lumps, these will be more akin to the tender “frittata” style eggs that so much of the internet has taken to calling “egg muffins.” The addition of dairy or nut milks add enough moisture to ensure they’ll be enjoyable all week long, but they’ll still be sort of meh, flavor-wise. To alleviate this, I turn to Greek yogurt.
The rich, thick, higher fat Greek yogurt lends a helping hand to the proteins in the egg, keeping them surrounded in a dense bath that will slow the process of drying out when cooked.
That’s it. Why such a short ingredient list? Because I can’t tell you exactly what to put into your eggs, and I want to leave room for customization. Everyone likes different things, and no one is going to tell you what you should add here. At least twice a week, one of the fellas I work with at my day job covers his eggs in maple syrup. I have not seen this elsewhere, but I guess it’s an option.
Brush the insides of the jars with the butter, and stuff them with ingredients. I’m going with chorizo, baby spinach, and sweet onion. Add as much or as little filling as you want, there’s no wrong way to do this.
Whisk the eggs together until a cohesive mixture forms and there are no streaks of white visible. Season with salt and pepper, then add in the yogurt, and continue to whisk until smooth.
Divide the egg mixture into the jars, taking into consideration that these will puff up a bit when cooked. And by a bit, I mean something that resembles the Egg Rollie, so make sure you leave room for expansion.
Place the jars on a cookie sheet, and bake them in a 350℉ oven for 25-30 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean. They’re going to be screeching hot, so give them a few minutes to cool and deflate before consuming. If you didn’t finish a dozen eggs worth of frittata, cover them once they’re cooled sufficiently and keep them in the fridge for up to five days.
Those other two jars you didn’t wolf down in 10 seconds will make you the envy of the office this week, so be prepared to answer questions. To reheat, remove the lid and cover with a paper towel. Zap them for a minute and you’ll be right back in egg heaven.
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I’ve found that these things are an excellent way to clean out the fridge of any leftovers. Maybe don’t salvage that leftover Italian sub, but spicy capicola with cubanelle peppers and some grated parmesan cheese? Hell yes. Leftover corned beef from the St. Paddy’s sale? In the jar with some small diced potato and onion and you’ve got a hash-tata, and that’s a beautiful thing.
A Google engineer who was fired for posting an online claim that women’s biology makes them less able than men to work in technology jobs has charged that he is being smeared and is a victim of political correctness.
James Damore, 28, questioned the company’s diversity policies and claimed that scientific data backed up his assertions. Google CEO Sundar Pichai wrote that Damore’s 3,300-word manifesto crossed the line by “advancing harmful gender stereotypes” in the workplace. Pichai noted that “To suggest a group of our colleagues have traits that make them less biologically suited to that work is offensive and not OK.”
Damore argued that many men in the company agreed with his sentiments. That’s not surprising, since the idea that women just can’t hack it in math and science has been around for a very long time. It has been argued that women’s lack of a “math gene,” their brain structures and their inherent psychological traits put most of them out of the game.
Some critics sided with Damore. For example, columnist Ross Douthat of the New York Times found his scientific arguments intriguing.
But are they? What are the real facts? We have been researching issues of gender and STEM (science, technology engineering and math) for more than 25 years. We can say flatly that there is no evidence that women’s biology makes them incapable of performing at the highest levels in any STEM fields.
We have been researching issues of gender and STEM for more than 25 years, and we can say flatly that there is no evidence that women’s biology makes them incapable of performing at the highest levels in any STEM fields.
Many reputable scientific authorities have weighed in on this question, including a major paper in the journal Science debunking the idea that the brains of males and females are so different that they should be educated in single-sex classrooms. The paper was written by eight prominent neuroscientists, headed by professor Diane Halpern of Claremont McKenna College, past president of the American Psychological Association. They argue that “There is no well-designed research showing that single-sex education improves students’ academic performance, but there is evidence that sex segregation increases gender stereotyping and legitimizes institutional sexism.”
They add, “Neuroscientists have found few sex differences in children’s brains beyond the larger volume of boys’ brains and the earlier completion of girls’ brain growth, neither of which is known to relate to learning.”
Several major books have debunked the idea of important brain differences between the sexes. Lise Eliot, associate professor in the Department of Neuroscience at the Chicago Medical School, did an exhaustive review of the scientific literature on human brains from birth to adolescence. She concluded, in her book “Pink Brain, Blue Brain,” that there is “surprisingly little solid evidence of sex differences in children’s brains.”
Rebecca Jordan-Young, a sociomedical scientist and professor at Barnard College, also rejects the notion that there are pink and blue brains, and that the differing organization of female and male brains is the key to behavior. In her book “Brain Storm: The Flaws in the Science of Sex Differences,” she says that this narrative misunderstands the complexities of biology and the dynamic nature of brain development.
The widely held belief that boys are naturally better than girls at math and science is unraveling among serious scientists. Evidence is mounting that girls are every bit as competent as boys in these areas.
And happily, the widely held belief that boys are naturally better than girls at math and science is unraveling among serious scientists. Evidence is mounting that girls are every bit as competent as boys in these areas. Psychology professor Janet Hyde of the University of Wisconsin–Madison has strong U.S. data showing no meaningful differences in math performance among more than seven million boys and girls in grades 2 through 12.
Also, several large-scale international testing programs find girls closing the gender gap in math, and in some cases outscoring the boys. Clearly, this huge improvement over a fairly short time period argues against biological explanations.
Much of the data that Damore provides in his memo is suspect, outdated or has other problems.
In his July memo, titled “Google’s Ideological Echo Chamber: How bias clouds our thinking about diversity and inclusion,” Damore wrote that women on average have more “openness directed towards feelings and aesthetics rather than ideas.” And he stated that women are more inclined to have an interest in “people rather than things, relative to men.”
Damore cites the work of Simon Baron-Cohen, who argues in his widely reviewed book “The Essential Difference” that boys are biologically programmed to focus on objects, predisposing them to math and understanding systems, while girls are programmed to focus on people and feelings. The British psychologist claims that the male brain is the “systematizing brain” while the female brain is the “empathizing” brain.
This idea was based on a study of day-old babies, which found that the boys looked at mobiles longer and the girls looked at faces longer. Male brains, Baron-Cohen says, are ideally suited for leadership and power. They are hardwired for mastery of hunting and tracking, trading, achieving and maintaining power, gaining expertise, tolerating solitude, using aggression and taking on leadership roles.
The female brain, on the other hand, is specialized for making friends, mothering, gossip and “reading” a partner. Girls and women are so focused on others, he says, that they have little interest in figuring out how the world works.
But Baron-Cohen’s study had major problems. It was an “outlier” study. No one else has replicated these findings, including Baron-Cohen himself. It is so flawed as to be almost meaningless. Why?
The experiment lacked crucial controls against experimenter bias and was badly designed. Female and male infants were propped up in a parent’s lap and shown, side by side, an active person or an inanimate object. Since newborns can’t hold their heads up independently, their visual preferences could well have been determined by the way their parents held them.
Media stories continue to promote the idea of very different brains on little evidence.
There is much literature that flat-out contradicts Baron-Cohen's study, providing evidence that male and female infants tend to respond equally to people and objects, notes Elizabeth Spelke, co-director of Harvard’s Mind Brain Behavior Interfaculty Initiative. But media stories continue to promote the idea of very different brains on little evidence.
Damore also claims that women experience more stress and anxiety than men, and that “This may contribute to the higher levels of anxiety women report on Googlegeist and to the lower number of women in high-stress jobs.”
He implies that stress and anxiety are personality traits inherent in females, but more likely they are due to the pressures and discrimination women face on the job that men do not. For example, a 2008 report sponsored by major companies, “The Athena Factor,” found that women in high positions in male-dominated fields, such as tech, suffer harsher penalties than men when they slip up. Women don’t get second chances. Men do.
One of the report’s authors, Sylvia Ann Hewlett, founding president of the Center for Work-Life Policy in New York, notes in the Harvard Business Review that in tech firms, “the way to get promoted is to do a diving catch. Some system is crashing in Bulgaria, so you get on the plane in the middle of the night and dash off and spend the weekend wrestling with routers and come back a hero.”
But what if you don’t make the catch? “Women have a hard time taking on those assignments because you can dive and fail to catch. If a man fails, his buddies dust him off and say, ‘It's not your fault; try again next time.’ A woman fails and is never seen again.”
Add to that conundrum the fact that just getting in the door is harder for a woman than it is for a man.
Competent men are seen as likeable, while competent women are seen as bitchy. Men are often promoted on promise, while women get elevated only on the basis of performance. And sexual harassment is a constant problem for women in tech. These are issues that males simply do not have to face. The “anxiety gap” exists for a reason, and it is not about biology.
Her resume may look exactly like his, but because her name is Mary and not John, she may not get a second look. A review of studies of U.S. decision makers who have the power to hire candidates found that clearly competent men were rated higher than equally competent women. This bias is especially rampant in the high-tech industry. One study, conducted by professors at Columbia, Northwestern and the University of Chicago, found that two-thirds of managers selected male job candidates, even when the men did not perform as well as the women on math problems that were part of the application process.
Throw in the facts that, according to research, competent men are seen as likeable, while competent women are seen as bitchy, that women get less credit for their accomplishments than men do, that men are often promoted on promise while women get elevated only on the basis of performance, and that sexual harassment is a constant problem for women in tech.
All of these are issues that males simply do not have to face. The “anxiety gap” exists for a reason, and it is not about biology.
Many of Damore’s controversial conclusions rest heavily on one recent study and much older, now-discredited research, ignoring reams of data that tell a very different story. The argument that men, especially affluent men, are more focused on their “male” breadwinner role than on their more “female” family roles, does not reflect either research data or observational data.
For example:
And they seem to have noticed. According to SmartAsset.com, “in just the past year ... at least 17 big employers have either introduced or expanded paid-leave options for new dads.” They include Hilton, Netflix, Spotify, Microsoft and Fidelity.
“The rate of expansion is unprecedented,” said Ellen Bravo, executive director of Family Values @ Work.
But many men who would opt for paternity leave hesitate, not because of innate biological dispositions, but because of fear of retribution. Cultural stereotypes exert a powerful effect, punishing men for the caring, family-oriented behavior that they desire. Damore’s article may make it even harder for such men to take the paternity leave they so clearly crave.
The recent history of Sweden’s legislation on paternity leave highlights dramatically the overwhelming role of cultural stereotypes on male parental behavior. It’s not biology at work here, but laws mandating at least two months of the nation’s well-paid, 13-month parental leave exclusively for fathers that have created profound social change.
“In perhaps the most striking example of social engineering, a new definition of masculinity is emerging,” notes the New York Times. Birgitta Ohlsson, European affairs minister, put it this way: “Machos with dinosaur values don’t make the top-10 lists of attractive men in women’s magazines anymore. Now men can have it all — a successful career and being a responsible daddy. It’s a new kind of manly. It’s more wholesome.”
Damore, on the other hand, argues for downplaying empathy in American companies.
Creating more dinosaurs doesn’t seem like a healthy way to go.
Caryl Rivers and Rosalind C. Barnett are the authors of “The Age of Longevity: Re-Imagining Tomorrow for Our New Long Lives” (Rowman and Littlefield) and “The New Soft War on Women: How the Myth of Female Ascendance Is Hurting Women, Men — and Our Economy” (Tarcher/Penguin). Barnett is a senior scientist at the Women’s Studies Research Center at Brandeis University and received the 2013 Work Life Legacy Award from the Families and Work Institute. A professor of journalism at Boston University, Rivers was awarded the Helen Thomas Lifetime Achievement Award in 2007 from the Society of Professional Journalists for distinguished achievement in journalism, as well as a Gannett Freedom Forum Journalism Grant for research on media.
As No Man’s Sky has developed, it’s struggled to balance the appeal of its mystery with the utility that makes it playable. With today’s update, Atlas Rising, it feels like the game has finally struck that balance.
The 1.3 update for No Man’s Sky comes with a lot of changes, small and large. Most exciting among them are a new mission board with randomly generated missions, changes to dog fighting, and—finally—”joint exploration.” It’s not quite multiplayer—you’re only able to interact with up to 16 players, who are represented by balls of light—but it’s a step closer to it. But what I’ve found most interesting so far is the way the game has refined its story and how it shows what’s possible in No Man’s Sky to players.
When I played No Man’s Sky at launch, it was easy to get lost and confused. This was a part of the game’s appeal, in a way: to be able to get so deeply lost in a vast universe. I’d go from planet to planet, just looking for the best sunsets or strangest creatures. Now the game has actual opening missions, as well as ones that span more than one planet and galaxy. I was a little afraid that a more structured game would take away from the joy of exploration, but instead it’s made the game easier to parse. Instead of making goals for myself 100% of the time, I now I have a neat thing to check out in each new galaxy. Many of these introduced me to new gameplay elements. On one planet, I learned how to make antimatter. On the next, I found my first outpost. This guiding hand is sparse enough that I don’t feel pigeonholed towards one way of playing the game but direct enough that I now have a much clearer sense of what to do if I get bored of sunsets. For the even more mysterious additions, like portals, there’s now a in-game guide that will tell you what to do with them when you find them.
On a sillier note, the terraforming add-on for the multi tool is very amusing. No Man’s Sky has been adding more ways for players to make permanent marks on the world via updates like base sharing and leaving messages for each other, but now you can make a literal mark. If you have the terraforming add-on, you can shoot at the ground using your multi tool and add or destroy terrain. You can use a couple of different textures and adjust the size as well. I’m sure this will have some use for base building, but I just liked getting to indulge in the sci-fi fun of making a huge tower of rock sprout from the ground.
I didn’t have a chance to try out joint exploration or dogfighting, but the maneuverability of the ships has changed a lot. You have way finer control over how ships move, especially on planets, to the degree that I felt like I had to relearn how to fly a ship. I was constantly over turning and flying into rocks, but overall it’s a welcome change. At launch, I’d often ditch my ship in favor of walking; now, using my ship to go to far away landmarks is much more feasible.
When No Man’s Sky first released, I wasn’t really sure what it was, or what it was trying to be, but I found a way to have fun with it. Now I have a better sense of the game’s goals: it’s a survival game with base building and a heavy emphasis on exploration. It’s not revolutionary, but now it’s focused enough that it does all those things very well. This doesn’t mean it’s lost its sense of wonder—there are still views that take my breath away. No Man’s Sky is just easier to play now, and I’m very excited to get lost in it again.
I’m a lecturer in computer science at Stanford. I’ve taught at least four different programming languages, including assembly. I’ve had a single-digit employee number in a startup. Yes, I’m a woman in tech.
I have known, worked for, and taught countless men who could have written the now-infamous Google “manifesto” — or who are on some level persuaded by it. Given these facts, I’d like to treat it — and them — with some degree of charity and try to explain why it generated so much outrage.
At the outset, it must be conceded that, despite what some of the commentary has implied, the manifesto is not an unhinged rant. Its quasi-professional tone is a big part of what makes it so beguiling (to some) and also so dangerous. Many defenders seem genuinely baffled that a document that works so hard to appear dispassionate and reasonable could provoke such an emotional response. (Of course, some see that apparent disconnect not as baffling, but as a reason to have contempt for women, who in their eyes are confirming the charge that they are more emotional and less quantitative in their thinking.)
The memo, for instance, begins by listing “biases” of people on both the “left” (“compassion for the weak”) and “right” (“respect for the strong/authority”).
And, indeed, the concerns the manifesto articulates about imbalance in political leanings at Google are easy enough to nod along to. (“Alienating conservatives is both non-inclusive and generally bad business”) Much of the science it cites, too, has at least some grounding in peer-reviewed research, even if the author’s conclusions are not justified by the findings, failing to adequately account for sociological and other factors.
The author, James Damore, even precedes his now-notorious list of biologically driven “personality differences” with this caveat: “[Y]ou can’t say anything about an individual given these population level differences.”
But then he continues: “Women generally … have a stronger interest in people rather than things, relative to men”; and that this may “in part explain why women relatively prefer jobs in social or artistic areas.” He suggests that female extraversion tends to be “expressed as gregariousness rather than assertiveness,” which helps explain why women have a harder time “asking for raises, speaking up, and leading.”
Why do women report higher levels of anxiety at Google, according to the manifesto? Because of their gender’s higher levels of “neuroticism.” The stress of being a minority demographic in a sometimes-hostile environment is not acknowledged as a contributor.
“Note that these are just average differences,” the manifesto reiterates, soothingly, “and there’s overlap between men and women.” Here again, this studious dispassion and showy air of reasonableness create cover for the memo’s defenders. They have been vociferously arguing online that women at Google are not “average” and so they should not be offended by the manifesto’s litany of citations to studies of the “average” woman’s deficiencies.
So why all the outrage? A few reasons:
It’s important to appreciate the background of endless skepticism that every woman in tech faces, and the resulting exhaustion we feel as the legitimacy of our presence is constantly questioned. I could fill a memoir with examples just from my own life, but the manifesto led to a few more instances. After one man on Twitter repeated that it was irrational for any one woman to take offense at a discussion of women’s characteristics “on average,” I responded:
I teach probability and statistics at Stanford. I understood the part about averages.
— Cynthia Lee (@cynthiablee) August 8, 2017
That tweet captures a lifetime of being a woman in tech. (A subsequent tweeter said that, my CV notwithstanding, the “jury’s still out” on whether I’m qualified.)
To be a woman in tech is to know the thrill of participating in one of the most transformative revolutions humankind has known, to experience the crystalline satisfaction of finding an elegant solution to an algorithmic challenge, to want to throw the monitor out the window in frustration with a bug and, later, to do a happy dance in a chair while finally fixing it. To be a woman in tech is also to always and forever be faced with skepticism that I do and feel all those things authentically enough to truly belong. There is always a jury, and it’s always still out.
When men in tech listen to the experiences of women in tech, they can come to understand how this manifesto was throwing a match into dry brush in fire season.
The manifesto’s sleight-of-hand delineation between “women, on average” and the actual living, breathing women who have had to work alongside this guy failed to reassure many of those women — and failed to reassure me. That’s because the manifesto’s author overestimated the extent to which women are willing to be turned against their own gender.
Speaking for myself, it doesn’t matter to me how soothingly a man coos that I’m not like most women, when those coos are accompanied by misogyny against most women. I am a woman. I do not stop being one during the parts of the day when I am practicing my craft. There can be no realistic chance of individual comfort for me in an environment where others in my demographic categories (or, really, any protected demographic categories) are subjected to skepticism and condescension.
I called the manifesto’s citations to findings about “average” women a “sleight of hand” for a very specific reason: While he dutifully includes that limiting language when making the citations, the policies he goes on to advance in the memo have no mathematically rigorous connection to those averages. He is deploying these dispassionate facts to argue for ending Google’s attempts at creating a fair and broadly welcoming working environment.
(I cannot judge what the author’s motives might be in adopting this rhetorical strategy: It could be cynical and strategic, or, as I suspect, the author may simply be very, very naïve.)
The author was not simply listing various items of scientific news at random, for the reader’s information only. He was building a case for ending specific, real programs that affect very real people. If his proposals were adopted, it wouldn’t be some abstract concept of “average” that doesn’t get a scholarship, it would be an actual individual woman. It would be an actual female Googler who doesn’t get to attend the Grace Hopper Conference, which provides many women with their first experience of being in a majority-women tech conference space.
If, as the manifesto’s defenders claim, the population averages do not have anything to say about individual Googlers, who are all exceptional, then why is Google the subject of the manifesto’s arguments at all? What do averages have to do with hiring practices at a company that famously hires fewer than one percent of applicants? In the name of the rational empiricism and quantitative rigor that the manifesto holds so dear, shouldn’t we insist that it only cite studies that specifically speak to the tails of the distribution — to the actual pool of women Google draws from?
For example, we could look to the percentage of women majoring in computer science at highly selective colleges and universities. Women currently make up about 30 percent of the computer science majors at Stanford University, one key source of Google’s elite workforce. Harvey Mudd College, another elite program, has seen its numbers grow steadily for many years, and is currently at about 50 percent women in their computer science department.
Yet Google’s workforce is just 19 percent female. So even if we imagine for a moment that the manifesto is correct and there is some biological ceiling on the percentage of women who will be suited to work at Google — less than 50 percent of their workforce — isn’t it the case that Google, and tech generally, is almost certainly not yet hitting that ceiling?
In other words, it is clear that we are still operating in an environment where it is much more likely that women who are biologically able to work in tech are chased away from tech by sociological and other factors, than that biologically unsuited women are somehow brought in by overzealous diversity programs.
It is striking to me that the manifesto author repeatedly lists race alongside gender when listing programs and preferences he thinks should be done away with, but, unlike gender, he never purports to have any scientific backing for this. The omission is telling. Would defenders of the memo still be comfortable if the author had casually summarized race and IQ studies to argue that purported biological differences — not discrimination or unequal access to education — explained Google’s shortage of African-American programmers?
Many defenders of the manifesto have eagerly, and, as far as I can tell, earnestly, pointed me to the manifesto writer’s frequent claims to support diversity in the abstract, as if these are supposed to be reassuring. (“I value diversity and inclusion, am not denying that sexism exists. ...”) They are not reassuring. The object of his memo is to end programs at Google that were designed, with input from a great many people who are educated and focused on this issue, to improve diversity. If those programs are killed, absent a commensurate effort to create replacement programs that have plausible ability to be at least as effective, the result is to harm diversity at Google.
He does make some recommendations, but they range from impotent (“Make tech and leadership less stressful”) to hopelessly vague (“Allow those exhibiting cooperative behavior to thrive”) to outright hostile (“De-emphasize empathy”).
In the end, focusing the conversation on the minutiae of the scientific claims in the manifesto is a red herring. Regardless of whether biological differences exist, there is no shortage of glaring evidence, in individual stories and in scientific studies, that women in tech experience bias and a general lack of a welcoming environment, as do underrepresented minorities. Until these problems are resolved, our focus should be on remedying that injustice. After that work is complete, we can reassess whether small effect size biological components have anything to do with lingering imbalances.
For today — given what women in tech have had to deal with over the past week — try pouring a cup of coffee for a female coder in your office, and asking her about the most interesting bug she’s seen lately.
Cynthia Lee is a lecturer in the computer science department at Stanford. She founded peerinstruction4cs.org to support educators in flipping their computer science classrooms using peer instruction. She has a PhD in high-performance computing.
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