Updated at 3:21 p.m. ET on April 24, 2019

On an episode of Jeopardy that aired Tuesday evening, James Holzhauer became the fastest-ever contestant on the show to earn $1 million in prize money. During his now 14-game win streak, he has seemed unstoppable, usually pulling away from his competitors early in the game and piling up money at an unprecedented rate: He’s winning more than twice as much per game as the Jeopardy legend Ken Jennings did during a record-setting 2004 run on the show. And Holzhauer’s highest daily prize yet, $131,127, exceeds the previous record holder’s one-day sum by more than $50,000.

What makes Holzhauer so dominant? When I asked him, he was able to sum up his game plan pretty easily: “I sketched out what I believed to be my optimal strategy for Jeopardy: Play fast, build a stack, bet big, and hope for the best,” Holzhauer wrote to me in an email. “In my mind, playing a seemingly risky game actually minimizes my chances of losing.”

It may be risky, but Holzhauer has the trivia chops to make it work. Mark Labbett, a British trivia pro nicknamed the Beast, has been familiar with Holzhauer since competing against him five years ago on a game show called The Chase, in which a resident trivia expert (Labbett) took on layperson contestants (including Holzhauer). The conceit of The Chase is that the expert is expected to outshine his challengers, but Labbett remembers facing Holzhauer as “the worst beating I’ve ever had” on the show.

[Read: Jeopardy wasn’t designed for a contestant like James Holzhauer]

“I’ve got to give Jeopardy immense credit, and The Chase U.S.A.,” Labbett told me. “In Britain or Australia”—where The Chase still airs—“James would not have made it onto television, because he’s just too damn good. They would never have him on.”

Labbett said that Holzhauer has “the unholy trinity” of Jeopardy skills. First, he has deep trivia knowledge. In training for competitions such as Jeopardy, trivia experts typically memorize lists of presidents, world capitals, and the like—unchanging bodies of knowledge that will pay dividends in competition. Holzhauer seems to have mastered these, but Labbett is impressed by his grasp on more topical categories of information, such as sports, pop music, film, and TV. “He doesn’t appear to have any [subject-area] weaknesses, which is very rare—a genuine all-rounder,” Labbett said.

Developing expertise like this requires a sharp memory, but also a ton of work. Labbett told me that before he became a father, he would spend 30 to 70 hours a week honing his knowledge in some capacity or another. His methods vary: Studying might mean browsing random pages on Wikipedia, watching TV (to stay current), or reading 30 consecutive pages from a reference book.

Holzhauer’s second advantage, as Labbett sees it, is the speed of his recall. “Good quizzers often need a couple of seconds to think of the answer,” Labbett told me. “James doesn’t.” This is a skill that’s not as responsive to practice, and it’s a valuable edge in a game that prizes quickness. So is a proficiency with Jeopardy’s finicky buzzers, which many contestants struggle to time correctly. Holzhauer’s mastery of the buzzer is what allows him to get in ahead of other contestants, even when all three of them might know the correct response.

The third element of the trinity is Holzhauer’s mind for strategy. When in control of the board, he rarely hesitates to pick his next clue—often doing so with an eye for Daily Doubles, tiles that essentially let players wager as much of their money as they’d like—and calibrates his bets without much apparent anguish.

“I know a lot of very good trivia players who would never be able to work out the complex wagers that he does on the Daily Double, because they just wouldn’t be able to think as fast as that,” Labbett said. The ability to make such on-the-fly calculations, Labbett noted, doesn’t necessarily overlap with trivia expertise—trivia usually doesn’t require people to do math on the spot.

What’s helpful to Holzhauer in this regard is his professional background. He is a Las Vegas–based sports gambler, and as such is comfortable not just making risk-benefit calculations, but also putting significant amounts of money on the line. Jennings, during the first 14 episodes of his 74-game, $2.5 million run 15 years ago, placed an average wager of $2,700 on Daily Doubles and $6,175 on Final Jeopardy (the show’s last clue, on which everyone bets). Holzhauer, meanwhile, has averaged $9,879 on Daily Doubles and $26,686 on Final Jeopardy as of Tuesday night. (Episodes of Jeopardy are usually taped months in advance.)

“I would never have had the stomach for those kinds of bets,” Jennings recently told Wired. If he did, maybe he’d have had a chance of winning money at the rate Holzhauer has. Over Jennings’s first 14 games, his overall net gain on Daily Doubles was $48,600. Holzhauer’s has been $319,366.

But even setting aside these successful bets, Holzhauer is outperforming Jennings—and every other contestant, ever—in providing correct responses. Jeopardy devotees tally up something called a “Coryat score” (named for a 1996 contestant named Karl Coryat), which reflects a player’s raw trivia and buzzer abilities, isolated out from the rewards of smart betting. The figure is calculated, more or less, by adding up the value of every correct response a player gives, and subtracting the value of every incorrect response.

According to Andy Saunders, who runs a site called The Jeopardy! Fan, the average Coryat score of a Jeopardy contestant is $11,300. Through 14 games, Jennings’s was $28,786. So far, Holzhauer has him beat by about $1,000—which makes his the highest Coryat score ever. (For the record, the highest conceivable Jeopardy score, wagers included, has been calculated to be $566,400, though this would require a highly unusual arrangement of Daily Doubles, to say nothing of being able to buzz in and give every single correct response.)

With a player this dominant, what could lead to Holzhauer’s undoing? I asked him this as well. “A particular vulnerability is that I can wipe out my entire score with one missed Daily Double, but I could also lose by failing to uncover any of the Daily Doubles at all, or just running into the wrong opponent at the wrong time,” Holzhauer told me.

Some of the game-show experts I interviewed noted the same risks. “The [top players’] knowledge base is vast, and so therefore it’s going to come down to the occasional random fact that they don’t know,” says David Hammett, who has worked as a mathematical consultant for game shows such as The $100,000 Pyramid and The Weakest Link. “And if it happens in particular on Final Jeopardy, against another contestant that has any relatively close degree of savviness with the buzzer and with content, that’s how Ken lost, and that’s probably how James would lose."

A major betting wipeout, then, seems the most probable unraveling of Holzhauer’s strategy. But say such a wipeout never comes, and Holzhauer remains on the show long after beating Jennings’s win streak. Perhaps this wouldn’t be boring: As Hammett noted, many people watch Jeopardy not for the contestants, but so that they can shout responses at their TV and see how they do. Yet suppose that some sort of Holzhauer fatigue sets in eventually, and his presence becomes predictable, and thus bad for ratings. Are there any dials the producers of Jeopardy could turn in order to bounce him from the show?

The game-show experts I talked with stressed that the integrity of Jeopardy is unassailable, and that the existence of cheating or bad-faith manipulation is out of the question. Still, there are ways the producers could think about trying to oust Holzhauer, or at least reduce the amount he wins each episode. (A representative of Jeopardy told me that the show’s producers wouldn’t comment on Holzhauer’s performance while shows he’s on are airing.)

One strategy might be to figure out Holzhauer’s weakest categories, and load up the board—and, ideally, Daily Doubles and the Final Jeopardy clue—with them. But Hammett thinks this would be difficult to pull off. “Those [categories] seem so few and far between. You certainly can’t make an entire game out of those,” he says. “It would probably be (a) impossible and (b) it would just come off looking very awkward.”

What about making the questions harder? Hammett says it’s not unheard of for producers to start adjusting a show’s difficulty if it’s, say, running over budget. But harder clues would likely only play to Holzhauer’s advantage, given that his trivia expertise appears to be deeper and broader than many of his opponents’.

Mark Labbett, the Beast, proposed a twist on this idea. “Do you want to know the best way to stop a superstar quizzer?,” he said. “Make it easier.” A trivia show that asks, for example, about the capital of California or the president who issued the Emancipation Proclamation would erase some crucial advantages of a player like Holzhauer. “It just becomes what we call a cavalry charge,” Labbett said. “Everyone knows the answer—it’s just who hits the button first.” (Though, of course, Holzhauer is usually the first to do so.)

Labbett also discussed the possibility of bringing on another elite contestant, a sort of assassin, to take Holzhauer down. But this would have its problems too. “Then you’ve got a new apex predator. How do you get rid of him?” Labbett said.

Given that these options are not only unlikely to be put into practice but also ineffective, Holzhauer’s streak will probably last until he has a bad day (and someone else has a very good one). When that day comes—if that day comes—Holzhauer will be left with the question of what to do with his newfound fame. Jennings, since his own run on the show, has fashioned a career as an author and a podcaster, and hasn’t restricted himself to the subject of trivia. Holzhauer could go back to gambling on sports in Las Vegas, but Bob Boden, a TV executive who has worked on dozens of game shows, says that Holzhauer might be able to go on to write books, like Jennings, or perhaps pursue a career in television.

In fact, Boden was the producer of The Chase, the show on which Labbett had to contend with Holzhauer. Watching from the control room, “we were dumbfounded by how well he did,” Boden remembers. So dumbfounded, in fact, that he later had Holzhauer audition to join the show as a colleague of the Beast.

Which is to say, Holzhauer will probably have options. But first, he has to lose.

from Business | The Atlantic http://bit.ly/2GEuYKC

Ken Jennings rose to fame after an unprecedented run on Jeopardy 15 years ago: Over the course of 74 episodes, he won a total of roughly $2.5 million.

Recently, a contestant named James Holzhauer has been working toward Jennings’s record at an astonishing pace. After the Friday-evening broadcast of the quiz program, Holzhauer had won about $850,000 over just 12 episodes. If he keeps up that rate, he’ll reach $2.5 million in less than half the time it took Jennings to do so.

Before Holzhauer went on the show, the most money earned in a single episode of Jeopardy was $77,000. During his 12-episode streak, he’s beaten that total not once, but five times, and has set a new record of $131,127. Holzhauer’s success has been attributed not just to his deep trivia knowledge, but also to his aggressive style of play—he homes in on high-value tiles that might contain Daily Doubles, and then often bets enormous sums when he finds them—and his unmatched buzzer-pressing reflexes.

[Read: How a week of “Jeopardy” gets filmed in one day]

Whatever his method, Holzhauer is far exceeding the show’s average single-day winnings, which a Jeopardy fan website calculated to be $19,980. With his sometimes six-figure daily prizes, how much damage is Holzhauer doing to the show’s finances?

“Every game show has a prize budget,” says Bob Boden, a former head of programming at Game Show Network who has worked on dozens of shows there and elsewhere, including Family Feud. “Typically, for a long-running show the prize budget is determined by way of averages of what has been won in the past.” Large deviations from such averages can strain these prize budgets. “James’s performance, I’m sure, is causing grief for an accountant somewhere,” says Boden, who’s now an executive at the production company Entertainment Studios.

Estimating payouts is easier for some types of shows than others. “You know that the winner of Survivor is going to get $1 million, and you know what the second- and third-place players will get, so the prize budget on that is locked,” Boden says. Budgets for shows such as Jeopardy with variable winnings are harder to project.

Some production companies protect against that unpredictability by taking out insurance policies that cover abnormally large jackpots. This is common, Boden says, for shows such as Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, in which giving out the top prize is rare but really costly. But he says he’d be surprised if Jeopardy, which has a prize structure less prone to extremes, has such a policy. (Representatives for Jeopardy and Sony Pictures Television, which produces it, did not respond to requests for details about the show’s financial workings.)

Jeopardy, though, should fare just fine during Holzhauer’s reign, for two reasons. First, prize budgets are generally not game shows’ biggest expenses. Boden says that the bills for paying production crews and on-air talent tend to be higher. (The salary of Alex Trebek, Jeopardy’s host, has been reported to be $10 million a year.)

Second, Holzhauer’s stellar performances are drawing in more viewers. Normally, Boden says, it’s not compelling TV for a single player to run up the score, “but in a situation like this, where records are being set and broken every night, the excitement, I believe, outweighs the lopsided results.”

That excitement will almost definitely help the show’s bottom line. Increased viewership often translates to more lucrative ad sales (though, Boden notes, this uptick in ad value isn’t immediate and would take some time to kick in). Spikes in popularity are also good for whatever additional revenue streams a show may have, such as merchandising or interactive gaming. More symbolically, Boden says, a thrilling contestant like Holzhauer can further burnish the reputation of a long-running game show like Jeopardy, solidifying its place in the canon of American TV.

Jennings was extremely valuable to Jeopardy in this regard, but with average winnings of about $34,000 an episode, he was a bargain compared with Holzhauer, who’s averaging roughly $71,000. In fact, if reports of Trebek’s salary are indeed correct, Holzhauer is currently outearning even the show’s host on a per-episode basis—though, of course, he has a bit less job security.

from Business | The Atlantic http://bit.ly/2UwdC6q

It’s my holiday tradition to bring tidings of discomfort and sorrow to my colleagues in the news business. One year ago, I described the media apocalypse coming for both digital upstarts and legacy brands. Vice and BuzzFeed had slashed their revenue projections by hundreds of millions of dollars, while The New York Times had announced a steep decline in advertising.

Twelve months later, it’s end times all over again. There have been layoffs across Vox Media, Vice, and BuzzFeed (and dubious talk of an emergency merger). Mic, once valued at $100 million, fired most of its staff and sold for $5 million. Verizon took a nearly $5 billion write-down on its digital media unit, which includes AOL and Yahoo. Reuters announced plans to lay off more than 3,000 people in the next two years. The disease seems widespread, affecting venture-capital darlings and legacy brands, flattening local news while punishing international wires. Almost no one is safe, and almost everyone is for sale.

It’s tempting to think that this is the inevitable end game of Google and Facebook’s duopoly. The two companies already receive more than half of all the dollars spent on digital advertising, and they commanded 90 percent of the growth in digital ad sales last year. But what’s happening in media right now is more complex. We’re seeing the convergence of four trends.

[Read: When Silicon Valley took over journalism]

1. Too many players

It’s not just Facebook and Google; just about every big tech company is talking about selling ads, meaning that just about every big tech company may become another competitor in the fight for advertising revenue.

Amazon’s ad business exploded in the past year; its growth exceeded that of every other major tech company, including the duopoly. Apple is building tech that would skim ad revenue from major apps such as Snapchat and Pinterest, according to The Wall Street Journal. Microsoft will make about $4 billion in advertising revenue this year, thanks to growth from LinkedIn and Bing. Uber is reportedly getting into the ad business as it eyes new revenue sources to beautify its forthcoming IPO. AT&T is building an ad network to go along with its investment in Time Warner’s content, and Roku, which sells equipment for streaming television, is building ad tech. Oracle, Adobe, and Salesforce are using their cloud technology to collect data that could be used for ad targeting, as Axios reported.

These tech companies have bigger audiences and more data than just about any media company could ever hope for. The result is that more advertising will gravitate not only toward “programmatic” artificial-intelligence-driven ad sales but also toward companies that aren’t principally (or even remotely) in the news-gathering business.

2. Not enough saviors

As advertising has migrated to digital platforms, the news media have converted to hero worship. The iPad was going to save media. Then it was venture capital. Then it was the mystical promise of “Hulu for news.” Then it was Facebook’s video platform. No, podcasts!

Each savior has proved fleeting or fictitious. The iPad is great for many purposes, none of which is the resuscitation of mid–20th century business models. Venture capitalists blithely expected media companies to produce tech-company returns, and many pulled back when they learned what any journalist could have told them: News isn’t a profit gusher. Companies such as Mic that went all in on Facebook turned themselves into glorified subletters—and they ended up on the street when the social network changed its priorities.

[Read: Facebook and Snapchat are the new television]

3. No clear playbook

News organizations are experimenting with anything and everything.

For the past two years, many newspapers and magazines have reoriented their businesses around subscriptions, asking readers to make up the revenue lost from advertisers. Some magazines and papers (including The Atlantic and The Correspondent) are asking diehards to become not just subscribers but members who pay a premium to go deeper with their favorite journalists. Axios, Crooked Media, BuzzFeed, Vice, and Vox have built out TV production studios and sold shows to HBO and Netflix. BuzzFeed is opening a store in New York City and selling kitchen merchandise with Walmart.

Ultimately, however, the market might not support some forms of journalism. For example, the number of local reporters today is at its lowest point since the 1970s, despite the fact that the U.S. population has grown by 50 percent. Research has shown a direct connection between declining local journalism and less civic engagement. If local news is a public good, it may deserve public support—perhaps in the form of government subsidies. But asking for public assistance might seem like an act of pure desperation.

4. Patrons with varying levels of beneficence

Publications that were once the crown jewels of publicly traded firms are finding refuge in the arms of affluent patrons. Many legacy titles have already landed with millionaires and billionaires, including Time (bought by Marc Benioff, the founder of Salesforce), Fortune (bought by Chatchaval Jiaravanon, a Thai businessman), and The Washington Post (owned by Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon). Emerson Collective, an organization founded by the billionaire Laurene Powell Jobs, purchased a majority share of The Atlantic in 2017.

Those nostalgic for the lucrative old days might curl their toes at the mention of a Medici-esque sponsorship model. But billionaire-supported investigative reporting is surely better than no investigative reporting at all. So what’s the matter with patronage?

A patron is a person. A person can change his or her mind—and often does. Chris Hughes junked The New Republic when losses eclipsed his idealism. Phil Anschutz snuffed out The Weekly Standard. Michael Bloomberg has made noises about selling off his political desk if he runs for president, or offloading his entire eponymous media empire, which employs several thousand people.

[Read: Student journalism in the age of media distrust]

This sounds downright awful. But the business of news has always been unsteady. It seems safe to say that, going forward, media organizations will get by on some combination of subscription, patronage, and auxiliary revenue from sources such as events and licensed content. Whatever happens, advertising will almost certainly play a lesser role.

To understand the future of post-advertising media, let’s briefly consider its past. During a period of the early 19th century known as the “party press” era, newspapers relied on patrons. Those patrons were political parties (hence “party press”) that handed out printing contracts to their favorite editors or directly paid writers to publish vicious attacks against rivals.

That era’s journalism was hyper-political and deeply biased. But some historians believe that it was also more engaging. The number of newspapers in the United States grew from several dozen in the late 1700s to more than 1,200 in the 1830s. These newspapers experimented with a variety of journalistic styles and appeals to the public. As Gerald J. Baldasty, a professor at the University of Washington, has argued, these newspapers treated readers as a group to engage and galvanize. Perhaps as a result, voting rates soared in the middle of the 19th century to record highs.

It was advertising that led to the demise of the party press. Ads allowed newspapers to become independent of patronage and to build the modern standards of “objective” journalism. Advertising also led to a neutered, detached style of reporting—the “view from nowhere”—to avoid offending the biggest advertisers, such as department stores. Large ad-supported newspapers grew to become profitable behemoths, but they arguably emphasized milquetoast coverage over more colorful reader engagement.

As the news business shifts back from advertisers to patrons and readers (that is to say, subscribers), journalism might escape that “view from nowhere” purgatory and speak straightforwardly about the world in a way that might have seemed presumptuous in a mid-century newspaper. Journalism could be more political again, but also more engaging again.

That’s already happening.

For example, in just the past few decades, The New York Times’ revenue has shifted from more than 60 percent advertising to more than 60 percent reader payments. As its business model has changed, so has its coverage. “Look at The New York Times in 1960 vs. 2010; the reportage is more interpretive,” observed the late James L. Baughman, the communications theorist and University of Wisconsin professor.

Mid-century newspapers were as broad and unobjectionable as department stores, because department-store advertising was their business. News media of the future could be as messy, diverse, and riotously disputatious as their audiences, because directly monetizing them is the new central challenge of the news business.

Every once in a while, somebody asks me whether we’ll ever get back to a place where the country can agree on a “single set of facts.” Those asking the question tend to be nostalgic for the 1950s, when they could count the number of television channels on one hand and rely on Walter Cronkite and a local media monopoly to control the flow of information.

That past is dead and irrecoverable. We’ve accelerated backward, as if in a time machine, whizzing past the flush 20th century to a more distant, more anxious, and, just maybe, more exciting past that is also the future.

from Business | The Atlantic http://bit.ly/2RnOktx

Andrew Cherng started working in the United States at 18, while he pursued an undergraduate degree in mathematics at Baker University, in Kansas. Starting in 1967, he began spending his summers in New York City, working in a restaurant where his father had connections. It was his first real job. The work was fast-paced, his English wasn’t perfect, and New Yorkers were ruthless, he says.

After Cherng had been working in the restaurant for six summers, his cousin, who also lived in New York, decided to open a restaurant in Washington, D.C. The new business needed a manager, and Cherng seemed an obvious choice. In 1972, his cousin moved the restaurant to Hollywood, and Cherng followed. Several months later, Cherng’s parents moved to the United States.

In 1973, Cherng and his father found a place to start their own restaurant: Pasadena, California. After six months of remodeling, Panda Inn, which would inspire Panda Express, was created. Cherng ran the dining room while his father ran the back. Cherng’s father died in 1981, before he could see the restaurant chain take off.

Panda Express now has 2,000 restaurants globally and more than 35,000 workers. I recently spoke with Cherng about his first jobs in the United States, how they differed from his father’s experience working in restaurants in China, and how he created Panda Express’s company culture.

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Lola Fadulu: What was your first job?

Andrew Cherng: I grew up in Asia. Just before coming to the United States, we actually moved to Japan from China. I was a high-school student for the most part. My father got me a job in the kitchen in a restaurant somewhere in Chinatown in Yokohama, Japan.

Then I came here, to the U.S. One of my first jobs was working in a school cafeteria as a dish washer. We had this industrial bacterial dish-washing machine. So there would be people working, and the plates, the silverware, would go onto this moving assembly-line-like thing. They’d go through a very hot wash. I had the job of picking up the hot plates at the end of it. And it was really, really hot. By the end of it, my hands got pretty tough.

Fadulu: How was working in a school cafeteria for you?

Cherng: It was okay. I mean, you know, it was a job. You’d have to be pretty quick because if the plate does not get picked up, the line stops. When I was in college, I also worked in the library. I did some filing and organized some shelves in the library and stuff like that. One of the more relevant jobs that I’ve done is that from the first summer, which is 1967. I actually went to New York and, for the first time, learned how to work in a restaurant. That was really an eye-opener, because that’s when I found out how difficult it is to adjust to working in a restaurant.

Working as a waiter—that wasn’t easy. I remember I took a job in Clifton somewhere. The restaurant was pretty big, and there were a couple people working, a couple waiters working. One minute, the restaurant was pretty slow, and within 15, 20 minutes, my section was totally full, and that’s probably 10 tables. I was like, “Are you kidding me? I don’t know how to do this.” And I don’t even know how I got through it. I worked in New York all through my college years, including graduate school. Just about every vacation, I would either fly up, or I would drive up from the Midwest—from Kansas when I was in college, and Missouri when I was in graduate school. So I worked five or six summers, plus Thanksgiving, Christmas holidays, New Year’s, and those times.

Fadulu: Why New York, specifically?

Cherng: My father knew some friends working in New York, and that’s where I knew some people who could help me. He got me in touch with the people who helped me, so that’s where I went. My father was a chef.

My dad actually started to work in restaurants at a very young age, in China. My dad grew up in the countryside, and he never went to school.

[Read: Westworld star Jeffrey Wright on the lessons he learned from sports and summer jobs]

Fadulu: How did working in restaurants in New York inform how you went about creating Panda Express?

Cherng: We always think about getting our people to adopt to this idea of I can do more than just working, I can learn to take responsibilities, I can thrive, and I can also help other people to do the same. We like people who work hard and didn’t think they could be a manager; when we suggest it to them, we have to push them a little bit. We like that because taking responsibility is something they can learn. Restaurant people, by nature, don’t mind working hard, because it is a seven-day week. You work harder on holidays—that’s expected. If you’re looking for an easy job, you wouldn’t work in the restaurant. We need to figure out how they should grow personally.

One of our values is continuous learning, whether you go back and get a degree or whatever learning they think will help them advance themselves.

from Business | The Atlantic http://bit.ly/2T63S2e

Tim Chen had recently been laid off from his job as a financial analyst at a hedge fund, during the recession of 2008, when his sister asked him for help finding a good credit card. Much of the information he found online was confusing and disorganized, so he decided to start a personal-finance website; it would go on to become NerdWallet, which is now worth $500 million and employs almost 500 people. I recently spoke with Chen about how it feels to get laid off, starting a business during a recession, and why workers should pay attention to who their managers are. This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for length and clarity.

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Lola Fadulu: Your parents were computer scientists. Did they want you to go into computer science?

Tim Chen: Yes. It’s a stable job. They knew it well. They had been able to provide for our family by working in the industry. My sister and I were really fortunate. My parents paid for our college education, which is huge.

Fadulu: It sounds like both your parents were steering you toward jobs that would lead to stable futures and high standards of living. How much were you thinking about money when you were applying to jobs post-graduation?

Chen: Growing up, I never felt well off, even though in hindsight we were at least much more stable than average. I think it’s part of the immigrant mentality to be really ambitious about providing for a good future for your kids. I think people base their perception of the world on what happened in their lifetimes, and both my parents fled from armed conflict in their very early years and grew up quite poor after World War II.

Fadulu: The way you grew up was very different from the way your parents grew up.

Chen: Until 2008, I thought that the economy was this super-stable thing, and everything was good. I didn’t realize that crazy economic shocks can happen. 2008 really changed my life. I lost my job, I lost a lot of my savings. I ended up starting a company as a result. It’s funny, my grandpa used to tell me, “You should take your money and go buy gold and jewelry with it, because you never know when the government’s gonna get overthrown by communists.” I’d go, “Grandpa, that’s such outdated thinking.” But it wasn’t that long ago when that happened to a huge country.

Fadulu: Were you completely surprised when you lost your job in 2008? Did you see it coming at all?

Chen: Absolutely not. [I was] totally blindsided. Never in a million years would I have thought that the institutions that I worked for, or the banks themselves, would be worried about going out of business. In hindsight I feel very fortunate that there was a recession, from a personal perspective, because I never would have gotten into entrepreneurship, even though it was an ambition of mine. It’s just too hard to take that risk when you have a stable job and you’re living in a really expensive city like New York. So the downturn forced me into it. In the early years, I wasn’t seeing much success with NerdWallet, and it was really the length of the recession that caused me to keep trying instead of taking another job.

Fadulu: Did you have any other business ideas you were considering, or was it NerdWallet all along?

Chen: I didn’t know that I wanted to start a business. I didn’t have anything that I was seriously considering outside of NerdWallet. It really came about when my sister asked me for help finding a credit card. I said, “Let me Google that for you.” I was kind of surprised when I didn’t find anything that helpful, in terms of breaking it down in an easy-to-understand way. I quickly realized that this is a problem with all financial products. They’re extremely hard to shop for, because, basically, there’s no incentive for anyone to provide you with an easy-to-understand way to shop for them.

Fadulu: What was the hardest part of starting NerdWallet?

Chen: I think one of the hardest parts was convincing other people I wasn’t crazy. You can’t do something like this yourself. You need to convince people with perfectly good jobs to quit their jobs and come join you, which is a lot of responsibility to shoulder, especially in the early days. Fortunately, in the early days it was much easier because many of my friends in New York were unemployed. A lot of us were affected by the financial crisis. A lot of us were just sitting around twiddling our thumbs, going to Dave & Buster’s in the middle of the day because they have half-price tickets on Wednesdays. And it was easy at least to get a few people to hang out [and join NerdWallet] until they found gainful employment. The first two years, I basically told people I was unemployed because there was really very little traction in the business.

Fadulu: You had to convince people to quit perfectly good jobs. How did you do it? What were your selling points?

Chen: In the early days, it was really just hitting up people out of my personal network from college or people who had been laid off from their jobs and seeing if they [wanted to help out]. I couldn’t pay them at the time. Later on, as we started growing, it really became more about painting the vision of what [the business] could eventually become and getting people inspired by that.

[Read: LeVar Burton on pursuing the priesthood before acting]

Fadulu: What would you say is the best piece of advice you’ve received from a mentor or a colleague?

Chen: For me, personally, it was that you can’t just put your head down and work hard and do things. You have to communicate well what it is you’re trying to do—the vision behind what you’re trying to do—to get other people inspired to understand what you’re doing and help you out. I think that really applies for NerdWallet the company because ... I, myself, have done very little. My one piece of advice from my early career is that I had no idea that my development and my happiness at each of these jobs was going to be almost completely driven by my manager. In my first job, I was in a different city than my manager, and people didn’t have time to develop me or guide me. I didn’t learn much my first two years of work. At my second job, I learned more in the first two months than I did in the first two years [of the first job]. In hindsight, my manager [at my second job] cared a lot about developing me and teaching me things, and that was huge. And then at my third job, my manager and I didn’t really get along. I got fired. I think these things are important to think about.

Fadulu: What do you think about the state of the workforce for young people?

Chen: I think what I’ve noticed about Millennials in our workforce is that they are some of the most passionate, inspiration-driven people, whereas the stereotype for the older generation is that they cared more about stability and were more willing to work in a factory manufacturing widgets all day in exchange for that stability. People are much more transitory in their careers now. If you find great alignment for three or four years with a job opportunity, and you say, “I really want to learn from the person I’m working for, and three or four years from now I’m going to come out with a different set of skills,” that seems like a great fit for three or four years. You can’t really think too far beyond that. It’s really hard to plan where you’re going to be in 30 years. If you keep on doing that, it’s kind of like rock-climbing. You’ll end up in a good place.

I think the best opportunities in 30 years, while we can’t anticipate them now, are going to go to the people who have picked up a lot of skills along the way.

from Business | The Atlantic https://ift.tt/2QRwz2y

At the age of 17, LeVar Burton was on a path to the priesthood, having entered seminary three years earlier. But Burton began questioning the Catholic point of view, and he did not receive satisfying answers from his elders. He decided to change his trajectory, and landed on acting.

Two years later, as an undergraduate at the University of Southern California, Burton got a role acting alongside Cicely Tyson and Maya Angelou in Roots, the TV miniseries. “They schooled me,” he said. He’d go on to act in Star Trek: The Next Generation and to host PBS’s Reading Rainbow.

I spoke to Burton recently about serving the greater community, his calling to the priesthood, and his advice for young people dealing with the challenges that can come with extraordinary success. This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for length and clarity.

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Lola Fadulu: You were born in Germany. How long did you live there?

LeVar Burton: We came back to the States when I was a year old, and then went again when I was in the third and fourth grade for another two years. So it is [my father’s] second tour of duty that I actually remember.

Fadulu: What do you remember about it?

Burton: Oh my gosh, I remember so many things. I remember our first apartment, which was what they called “on the economy,” which simply meant that it was in town. It wasn’t on the military base itself. This was the 1960s and the Allies had been in Germany since the end of World War II, so there was a constant influx of GIs and their families going there. I remember the beer man who came and delivered beer, just like they delivered milk.

Fadulu: Did your parents talk to you about their jobs often?

Burton: My mom talked a lot about not necessarily her job, but her belief that one’s life should be a service to the greater community. That was certainly something I picked up and absorbed. Most of the people in my family are in the field of education in one way or another. It’s kind of the family business. We are also a family that really values education, puts a very high premium on education and its value in society and for individuals. I personally believe that education is the key to freedom.

Actually, literacy is the key to freedom because you can educate yourself. But my mom didn’t talk a lot about her job, because she worked in a [federal program] that at that time was called AFDC. AFDC stood for Aid to Families With Dependent Children, so she worked with a lot of women who were then, as today, escaping situations that involved abuse, and she was really trying to help these women and their families get back on their feet after some catastrophic event that had obviously caused them to lose their balance. She didn’t talk about those cases specifically, because, No. 1, it was inappropriate because that’s confidential information and, No. 2, it wasn’t age-appropriate conversation either.

Fadulu: As a child, you were hearing about the importance of serving the greater community and of education. Did you ever push back on those life philosophies?

Burton: You did not push back where Irma Jean Christian was concerned. I’m sorry, that was just not an option. I don’t know how you were raised, but in my family, we did not push back on our mother. My first career choice was the Catholic priesthood.

Fadulu: Can you tell me a little bit about entering the seminary to become a priest?

Burton: It was all initiated by me. I had a calling. I felt like that’s how I was destined to spend my life, and so I took steps as early as I could in that direction, and my mom was very supportive. I entered the Catholic seminary at the age of 13 in Northern California. I began my formal training as an initiate into the order of the Society of the Divine Savior. I was there for four years. During my time there it actually shifted its focus from being solely a seminary to also being a college-preparatory program.

Fadulu: What is the most important thing you learned from your four years in seminary?

Burton: That I didn’t want to be a priest. I had a lay teacher who was neither a priest nor a brother who taught my favorite subjects, a man named Lee Bartlett. He was the English teacher, he was the drama coach, he also taught philosophy, and he opened up my mind to ways of looking at the world that were separate from the Catholic point of view, and a lot of it made sense to me. I had a lot of questions that the Catholic saints and the dogma of the Church could not answer. So I decided that I needed to find some other focus for my life at the ripe old age of 17.

[Jimmy O. Yang spent years getting ready for “Crazy Rich Asians.”]

Fadulu: How did you go about finding that other focus?

Burton: I sort of took inventory: What did I feel like I was good at? Where did I find some passion, some juice, in my life? And the answer was theater arts. It was the not-being-afraid-to-be-onstage part that I found I was good at. I had a natural affinity for acting and public speaking.

Fadulu: Were you nervous at all about finding a job in acting postgraduation or during your summers?

Burton: I wasn’t, no. I’m sure my mom was. But I had gone from wanting to be a priest to being an actor. I’m sure she had some concerns about both of those choices, but she never let on. She always showed a face of loving support.

Fadulu: Did you have any jobs in college?

Burton: No. My first day as a Bachelor of Fine Arts major in drama at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, they made an announcement: “If you want to be a B.F.A., if you want a Bachelor of Fine Arts major”—and there were only two places that really offered a B.F.A. in drama at the time, USC and Carnegie Mellon—“If you want to do this, then you’ve got to commit to it. You will not have time to hold down a part-time job. You will not have time to go out for a sport. You will not have time to join a fraternity or sorority. You will be spending every waking moment in these environments, and you will be busy.” And they were right. But before I went to USC, the two summers before, I worked at Mr. B’s Formal Wear in Sacramento, renting tuxedos to wedding parties and proms. I had to wear a tuxedo every day.

Fadulu: What was it like getting Roots in college?

Burton: Are you kidding me? My life was changed forever. My first day as an actor, Cicely Tyson played my mother, Maya Angelou played my grandmother. I was 19, and they embraced me as a peer. They schooled me. They certainly taught me what it meant to be a professional, but they assumed that because I was there I belonged there, and they treated me as such. It was an extraordinary experience for a young person.

Fadulu: What did they teach you about what it meant to be a professional?

Burton: So many things that it’s impossible to list. For instance, the importance of being on time; the importance of knowing your dialogue, knowing your lines; the importance of treating everybody with respect. Just things that they don’t teach you in college.

Fadulu: Do you have any advice or tips for young people who are dealing with the stresses of extraordinary success?

Burton: Extraordinary success at a young age is incredibly challenging. My advice would be to make knowing yourself, discovering yourself, and engaging in a rigorous process of introspection and personal growth your primary focus because it’s only through a foundation of knowing who you are that you’ll be able to maintain your balance in a very unstable and destabilizing career.

from Business | The Atlantic https://ift.tt/2JKejFv

I grew up on the high-elevation plains of northwest Montana, on the Blackfeet Indian Reservation, in a culture in which English did not become the dominant language until the middle part of the 20th century. Leaving to attend the University of Montana in the mid-1990s, after receiving a tuition waiver the summer following my senior year of high school, marked my first time living away from our reservation. My graduating class was one of the first in which many of us left to seek degrees, a development that mirrored a shift taking place nationwide; by 1996, 30 percent of Native American 18- to 24-year-olds were enrolled in college, up from about 16 percent in 1989.

Some of us went to college to escape our treaty-established, semi-sovereign homeland and the social and political problems common in Indian country. Others left because there wasn’t anything else to do. Many of us, though, were driven by an idea about higher education that had recently begun to take hold on reservations—that the purpose of college was to prepare us to help our communities. Not until well into adulthood did I realize that this well-meaning notion reflected not only our communities’ need for help, but also their failure to understand that higher education, in the absence of structural change and economic opportunity on the reservation, was likelier to draw young people away from home than to help them make it better.

The relationship between education and economy is more complicated in Indian country than elsewhere in the United States. While access to higher education is a means to a better life as much for American Indians as for anyone else, connotations specific to reservation people exist that trouble the situation. Going to school means leaving a cultural context—which includes many relatives, sometimes too many—that doesn’t occur anywhere else in the country. Departing for college also means engaging with an educational system that does little to break the myth of how this country came to be, one that elides historical facts about broken treaties, Indian law, and Congress’s plenary power over tribal nations.

At the University of Montana, I found myself having to address American ignorance in an exhausting manner, explaining again and again that no, we do not go to school for free, and yes, we do pay taxes; that “blood quantum”—a measurement of a person’s “Indian blood” that determines membership for most tribes—is a colonial invention.

Prior to colonization—for millennia, in fact—the economy of the Blackfoot people revolved around the iinii, or buffalo, which provided not just food, but tepee covers, clothing, tools, and weapons. The animal’s sudden, severe decline in the mid-to-late 1800s, the result of slaughter on the part of Americans hunting for hides and so-called sport, caused enormous cultural chaos for all plains tribes. Within several years, many indigenous people in the vast region were without sustenance. In 1883, as many as 600 Blackfeet starved to death, an event that came to be known as the Starvation Winter. That time still hangs in the air, one of the few historical events discussed on my reservation.

While the recent return of the buffalo to the Blackfeet Reservation has resulted in positive PR, employment statistics in our homeland make clear that their reappearance is largely symbolic. In 2015, the poverty rate among Blackfeet was higher than 38 percent (compared with a national average of 13.5 percent), unemployment was at almost 19 percent (compared with 5.3 percent nationally), and labor-force participation was at 53 percent (compared with 62.7 percent nationally). Many reservations are in rural areas geographically isolated from stronger urban job markets. Although people sometimes perceive casinos as having brought riches to reservations, that’s true in very few cases. Meanwhile, outsiders who might consider investing on reservations have difficulty assessing the risks because tribes are separate sovereign entities, with distinct and unfamiliar laws and legal structures, so they often avoid investing altogether.

And, for various reasons, the kind of economic opportunities that might produce homegrown entrepreneurship are rare. For one thing, many reservation Indians live on land that is held in “trust” by the federal government and managed by the Bureau of Indian Affairs—meaning individual tribal members don’t own the property on which they live. As a result, they lack the collateral needed to acquire business loans, a problem compounded by a lack of financial literacy endemic to Indian country.

What no one ever told me at college, I assume because it seemed self-evident to them, is that higher education is associated with a white-collar economy. When you come from a reservation, where any such economy is unlikely to exist, understanding what a degree is supposed to do is difficult. In my case, I happened upon Jack Kerouac’s work when I was 19, and became a writer. I dropped out of school, not sure how higher education related to writing fiction, unsure if I’d ever reenroll. Thus began a pattern—drop out, reenroll, drop out, reenroll.

Each move home brought an overwhelming sense of relief after the stultifying atmosphere of attending class with non-Indian students I found bafflingly humorless. (In even the darkest of times, Blackfoot prefer to laugh at life and one another.) But returning home also showed me what awaited if I stayed there: substitute-teaching gigs, working at the diner, or managing my family’s convenience store, where I often stood in the parking lot listening to the vast, predawn silence of the northern plains, drinking coffee and waiting for the first customer. Much later in life, I recognized these experiences as my first encounters with the economic hardship that dominates Indian country.

Though the general message for people like me is that the purpose of higher education is to return home to help our community, the reality is that the economy on most reservations cannot support the work that’s needed. The kinds of jobs most Americans might associate with a healthy, middle- or upper-middle-class economy—software development, sales, marketing—are nonexistent. Other occupations so common to healthy economies that we often take them for granted, such as counselorships, managerial positions, and careers with nonprofits and the state and federal government, are rare.

Perhaps it is telling that the most lucrative job available to me, during my stints back home, involved doing controversial work in the oil-and-gas industry, acquiring lease signatures from Blackfeet landowners who lived on our reservation and around the western United States. To outsiders, Indians participating in the extraction of resources from their land by American corporations uninterested in tribal nations’ well-being might appear contradictory. The reality is that, in our devastated economies, many people have little other choice.

None of these were jobs I wanted. I craved to be around writers, and the writers I knew were on campuses and in urban areas. I felt a need to be in a culture where the fine arts were appreciated, where that type of intellectual discussion was commonplace. Each time I left school, these things brought me back. After nine years, at my mom’s urging, I finally graduated. Much later, I learned my long undergrad arc, with its staccato enrollment, is common for a reservation Native.

I often ask myself what our reservation would look like if there had been a healthy economy and a more diverse culture to welcome those from my graduating class who received college degrees. The majority of my high-school classmates who left for school did not come back, opting for stable jobs elsewhere, perhaps returning to the reservation for Christmas or the summer powwow. As for me, I kept drifting. When I was 36, a new job opened up at Blackfeet Community College, one of the few white-collar positions available to someone like me on our reservation. I applied and got the job. Directing the writing center, I hoped, would give me what I needed most: a steady income, time to write, and the opportunity to give back to people in my community. I also intensified my relationship to Blackfoot-language work, helping to start a nonprofit dedicated to the revival of our mother tongue. I went to traditional ceremonies again. I ran into cousins during late-night visits to the convenience store. For the first time since high school, I became a full-time participant in contemporary Blackfeet culture.

At Blackfeet Community College, I found that many of our young people now assume they will go to college. This is the case on reservations across the country, whether that means attending one of the 38 tribal colleges and universities in the United States or another school. In an American sense, reservation people are becoming more educated. But I soon realized that college degrees haven’t translated to Indian graduates regularly securing white-collar jobs in their homelands; years after I graduated college, reservation economies still aren’t substantial enough to provide those careers. When asked what they wanted to do with their future associate’s degrees, my students responded largely with blank looks.

In my students, I saw my 18-year-old self. Many wanted to help our community, and I was at a loss to help them understand how that might happen in a place with such limited opportunities. I didn’t know how to tell them that their basic, human desire for stability and a decent income would contribute to a brain drain that has profoundly affected our economy and politics; that the purported objective of education—that we are to become educated so we can help our communities—is difficult, if not impossible, to accomplish. Without improved economies, higher education simply contributes further to reservation students’ confusion about where they belong in this world.

Though I was one of the few who found the kind of job an educated reservation Indian is supposed to find, I remained conflicted. Due to my professional duties, along with the stress that comes with teaching students from a community broken by colonial force, I found myself writing less. So I applied for a Stegner Fellowship in creative writing at Stanford University, and was accepted.

This fall, I left the reservation again, departing with some sense of failure—of not having done enough. The Stegner Fellowship will potentially provide opportunities unavailable to me otherwise: time to write and professional advancement. Pursuing those experiences, though, will necessitate being away from my reservation for most of the rest of my life. All too often, success for reservation Indians means leaving your heart in your homeland.

from Business | The Atlantic https://ift.tt/2AM8T9Z

The writer Elizabeth Kolbert’s grandfather, a refugee from Nazi Germany, was a huge fan of Westerns written by Karl May. They captivated Kolbert’s grandfather so much that when he immigrated to the United States, he took his kids out West for vacations. Later, Kolbert’s mother did the same.

As a child living in Westchester, New York, Kolbert dreamed of moving out West and having adventures of her own. She ended up mostly staying put in and around New England, but her job as a journalist helped fulfill her love of adventure, allowing her to spend much of her time following field scientists around remote locations.

I recently spoke with Kolbert about her dreams of going out West and her tendency to imagine alternative lives for herself. This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for length and clarity.

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Lola Fadulu: When you were younger, what did you want to be when you grew up?

Elizabeth Kolbert: I didn’t have a clear plan. I’m going to be quite frank: I wanted to move out West. That’s what I wanted to do when I was a kid. I was going to go out West and do something, but I never got west of Albany.

Fadulu: Why did you want to go out West?

Kolbert: My parents took us out West in the summer a bunch of times, and I thought it was great. We used to go to Rocky Mountain National Park.

My grandfather was a refugee from Nazi Germany, but he had, as a kid, read these Westerns by a guy named Karl May. They’re very, very famous in Germany, and they are adventure stories set in the American West. When he immigrated to the U.S., he took his kids—my mother and her sister—out West to sort of live out these adventures he’d read as a kid. And then it obviously made a big impression on my mom, and then she took us. And so that was the background to these trips. And as I say, they did make a big impression on me and I thought I, too, should go have adventures out West.  

Fadulu: What did your parents do?

Kolbert: My dad was a doctor, an eye doctor. And my mom, throughout much of my childhood, was a stay-at-home mom, very active in local politics, on the school board, things like that.

Fadulu: Did they have a career path in mind for you?

Kolbert: They were not at all prescriptive in that way. I think my dad would’ve been happy if I had been interested in medicine. One summer when I was in high school he did arrange for me to have an internship, I guess you’d call it, at the hospital where he worked, and I proceeded to contaminate a lot of the equipment. I think it became clear pretty early on that [medicine] was not going to pan out.

Fadulu: How would you describe your younger self?

Kolbert: I grew up in the ’60s and ’70s, and I was probably very much a product of the time, of rebelling against, to a certain extent, what seemed to be the conventionality and 9-to-5-ism of suburban life.

Fadulu: There was something about suburban life that just didn’t feel like it was for you.

Kolbert: Well, it wasn’t just suburbia. It was really more the sense that you were just going to ... just tick off certain things. Do X, do Y, and then find yourself following a path that everyone had already followed before and that had been laid out for you before. That was very much part of the zeitgeist, and I definitely absorbed that. I didn’t want to just go off and work for some corporation, work for some institution and be subsumed in that.

Fadulu: Do you feel you’ve followed a path?

Kolbert: Well, as it turned out I did sort of follow a path, but it was not a path I knew about as a kid.

This is what happened: I studied German literature in college, and I thought I might go on and study German literature. I got a fellowship to go to Germany, and I very quickly decided that [becoming an academic] was not what I was going to do. I was kind of bumming around Europe, and I tried my hand at writing things.

I’d worked on the high-school paper; I’d worked on the college paper. I’ve always been attracted to journalism. And I wrote a bunch of stuff that actually made it into the travel section of The New York Times. And then I came back and got a really entry-level job.

This was a different era when, at the Times, there was a very clear path. You got a clerical job. You were not even a secretary; you were called a clerk or a copy person. Copy person was a term left over from the days when Times reporters would type stories on sheets of carbon paper. And then you would rip out—it was called a “take.” You’d rip out one take, which is basically one page, one sheet of carbon paper, and you’d yell, “Copy.” And the copy person would come take it from you, and then distribute these copies to the editors to lay out or whatever.

And by the time I arrived at the Times that system had long been gone, but you were still called a copy person. I arrived at a big transitional moment for journalism—not as transitional as the moment now, but that moment where everything was being computerized and all that.

And there was a path that you could take. You could be one of these clerks and copy people, and if you wrote furiously—and, basically, it meant spending 24 hours a day at the Times—you could get pieces in.

This was the mid-’80s. The front section on Sunday was divided into two sections, and in the second section was this place that they had ads. They basically just needed copy to go around the ad.

[The wisdom of going back to school in retirement]

And so you would write these un-bylined stories, and if the editors liked them, essentially, they would actually hire you as a reporter. So that is how I became a journalist.

Fadulu: What do you think of career planning?

Kolbert: I went through much of my youth thinking a lot of things were equally interesting to me, and I was equally untalented in a lot of them. And so part of it was this process of trial and error, really, of trying to find something that I was interested in and also had enough ability to pursue. I play the clarinet, and it was very clear early on that I had no talent, but in some life I would’ve been a concert clarinetist. I still, even now, am afflicted by imagining alternative lives.

Obviously, there are 7.6 billion people on the planet, and they’re all leading different lives. And I’ve always found that a very fascinating and daunting fact. Why are you you? Why were you you? You happened to be born a certain person, but that seems really accidental. Could you become someone else? Could you have led a different life? Could you still lead a different life?

Fadulu: Are there any experiences that you particularly wish you’d had, or are just really curious about?

Kolbert: I guess it does get back to “Should I have gone out West and become a cowgirl?” or whatever. Some of the most intense experiences I’ve had have been out in really remote places, and I guess that’s a way of living that I sometimes wonder whether I should’ve pursued.

Fadulu: What sort of job do you think you would’ve had if you’d worked in a remote place?

Kolbert: I’ve been out with a lot of field scientists now. I’m not a field scientist; that’s not my temperament, and I don’t have quite enough patience for that kind of work. But I’ve always been filled with admiration for those people, and those are some of the greatest experiences I’ve had, being out in the field with these people in places where no one else was. We were the only people out there.

Fadulu: It seems like in journalism, because you’re out in the field and talking to so many different types of people, you’re kind of living different lives. Do you feel that way?

Kolbert: Yes, absolutely. And I think it’s also for people like me, who are interested in a lot of things but not absolutely committed to any particular vision of life. As you say, it does allow you to, if not exactly lead alternate lives, to have a glimpse into them and to always be doing something new.

I’m really, really grateful that I have been able to, if not actually lead multiple lives, chronicle multiple lives.

from Business | The Atlantic https://ift.tt/2AItD2C

Paul Volcker’s 6-foot-7-inch frame was draped over a chaise longue when I spoke with him recently in his Upper East Side apartment, in Manhattan. He is in his 91st year and very ill, and he tires easily. But his voice is still gruff, and his brain is still sharp.

We talked about his forthcoming memoir, Keeping at It: The Quest for Sound Money and Good Government—about why he wrote the book and the lessons he hopes to impart. Volcker is not a vain man, but he knows that his public life was consequential, and he wants posterity to get it right. He also does not mince words. In our conversation, he assailed the “greed and grasping” of the banks and corporate leadership, and the gross skewing of income distribution in America.

Keeping at It, written with Christine Harper, an editor at Bloomberg, is primarily the chronicle of Paul Volcker’s public life, which was spent in the thin air of global finance. After graduating from Princeton in 1949, he studied economics at Harvard and then in London, where he focused on the operations of the Bank of England. For the next 20 years, his career cycled between the U.S. Treasury and the Chase Manhattan Bank, with a particular focus on monetary affairs.

Few Americans had heard of Volcker until he was nominated, in 1979, to be chairman of the Federal Reserve Board by President Jimmy Carter, a post he held for the next eight years. During that time, he almost single-handedly pulled the nation back from a near-Weimar-scale financial collapse. If there were a Nobel Prize for government service, Paul Volcker’s name would surely be on the short list.

Volcker’s career spanned nearly the entire postwar era. World War II had ended with the United States effectively controlling the major part of the world’s wealth. In a supreme act of statesmanship, Washington offered to provide trade credits and other aid to allies and former enemies alike, so long as they adopted reasonably democratic values. The American dollar effectively became the world’s currency at its 1934 peg—$35 per ounce of gold. That worked splendidly while America’s allies were in recovery mode, but by the 1960s most industrialized countries were competitive with the United States. Swiss currency traders, the nefarious “gnomes of Zurich,” realized that America’s gold reserves could no longer support its dollar issuance. So they started testing the dollar with sudden spasms of dollar sales in the hope of forcing a devaluation.

The classic method of meeting an attack on a currency is to raise interest rates to increase the attractiveness of holding it. But this was the early 1960s, and John F. Kennedy had promised to “get this country moving again.” Higher interest rates would have scuttled that ambition. The Treasury Department hit on a temporizing solution: a tax on foreign security purchases to curb the foreign traders’ enthusiasm for holding dollars. Volcker, then a deputy undersecretary at Treasury, drafted the enabling legislation. It did not take long, however, for traders to engineer an end run around the new tax by simply keeping their dollars overseas. Thus was born the “Eurodollar,” which would proliferate wildly, quite out of the control of the Federal Reserve.

Volcker returned to Chase for several years before rejoining Treasury as undersecretary for monetary affairs in the Nixon administration. The war in Vietnam—paid for by deficit spending rather than new taxes—had triggered serious inflation. Oil imports were surging, and currency traders smelled blood. But Richard Nixon had a genius for the bold stroke. Along with John Connally, his outsize Treasury secretary, Nixon in August 1971 brought virtually his entire economics team to Camp David, where he announced that he would cut taxes, impose wage and price controls, levy a tax surcharge on all imports, and rescind the commitment to redeem dollars in gold. In his 1975 book, Before the Fall, Nixon’s über-speechwriter, William Safire, recalled, “Volcker was undergoing an especially searing experience; he was schooled in the international monetary system, almost bred to defend it.” Everyone he had worked with “trusted each other in crisis to respect the rules and cling to the few constants like the convertibility of gold.” Volcker was charged with drafting the announcement of Nixon’s new economic policies, but his moroseness showed through. Safire did the final draft, proclaiming “a triumph and a fresh start.” About Volcker himself, Safire wrote, “It was not a happy weekend for him.”

As the ’70s wound down, the dollar became a debased currency—but one that, for want of an alternative, still served as the world’s most important reserve currency. Nations might make other provisions, but that could take years. To make matters worse, an ideological cleavage between Milton Friedman’s “freshwater” Chicago monetarists and East and West Coast “saltwater” economists added an unusual testiness to the board’s discussions. Monetarists looked to the supply of money, which is the multiple of physical money—M1 in the jargon—times its velocity, or turnover rate. Friedman’s rigid version of monetarism assumed that the velocity of money was fairly stable over time, so policy makers could ignore it and steer solely by M1. (Indeed, Friedman also believed that you could eliminate the Federal Reserve Board.) Traditionalists, such as Volcker and most other saltwater economists, looked first to interest rates as a policy tool.

By the time Volcker was sworn in at the Fed, in 1979, inflation in the U.S. was running about 1 percent a month, and rising. In 1973, the OPEC countries had forsaken the hallowed $3 peg for a barrel of oil—tripling their prices and tripling them again six years later. By then, spot prices for gold were bouncing around from $235 to $578 per ounce. When the U.S. Treasury, in the early 1980s, needed to raise money, it would be forced to float bond issues in marks and yen, so far had the almighty dollar fallen.

Two months into his new job, Volcker attended a conference of central bankers in Belgrade and was shocked to find himself harangued by his peers. As he explains in his memoir, German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, who was a friend, lectured Volcker for almost an hour “about waffling American policymakers who had let inflation run amok and undermined confidence in the dollar.” A shaken Volcker cut his trip short, got his fellow Fed members on board, and called an unusual evening press conference. Most dramatically, he stressed that he was shifting his key policy tool to monetarism. As a hedge, he also raised the Fed’s discount rate by a full point. The New York Times editorialized about the rate hike under the headline “Mr. Volcker’s Verdun,” noting that when it came to holding the line on inflation, the Fed chairman’s message echoed that of Marshal Pétain: “They shall not pass.”

At first, the experiment seemed to work. The objective was to reduce the money supply and thereby bring down prices. By January 1980, however, the numbers were going haywire. Perversely, inflation took off—it reached an annual rate of almost 15 percent. The Fed’s technical staff ruefully admitted that Friedman’s money-supply theory was not precise enough to form a basis for effective policy. The Fed board maintained its monetarist rhetoric, but Volcker shifted back to raising interest rates in order to wring inflation from the economy. This was language that all businesspeople understood. The bank prime rate eventually jumped to 21.5 percent, T-bills hit 17 percent, and prime mortgages were at 18 percent. Those rates were the highest the country had ever seen. Volcker went on a grueling speaking tour to bolster the case for what he was doing.

By the time Ronald Reagan was inaugurated, in 1981, the U.S. economy had slipped into a deep recession, one for which the Volcker Shock was largely blamed. Unemployment neared 11 percent. Volcker became a target of popular anger. One welcome ray of sunshine came from the White House, with Reagan giving full support to the continuation of Volcker’s program. (Volcker later said, “I don’t kiss men, but I was tempted.”) Another came from the American Home Builders Association, in early 1982. Its industry had been badly hit by the recession, but Volcker gave a tough speech to the association about staying the course against inflation, and was amazed to get a standing ovation.

Inflation—blessedly—broke in mid-1982. The second half of the year saw a flat consumer price index. Real GDP for 1983 was a very respectable 4.6 percent and  a blistering 7.2  in 1984. By 1986 annual inflation had come down to only 2 percent. The crisis was effectively over. After 1982, Americans enjoyed the lowest interest rates (with a blip here and there) among the major industrial countries, and interest rates are low to this day. The second half of the 1990s was one of the most prosperous periods in history—there was a twin boom in high technology and in housing. Volcker attributes the crash that came in both industries to the same “greed and grasping” he cited when we spoke.

Volcker served two terms as the chairman of the Fed, giving way to Alan Greenspan in 1987. By that time, the challenges confronting the Fed had moved to new arenas—like the reckless “oil lending” by the big American banks to Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, and a string of smaller countries. In Keeping at It, Volcker writes, “Looking back, I see Latin America today as a sad culmination of hard-fought, constructive efforts to deal with a debt crisis that, aided and abetted by reckless bank lending practices, grew out of a chronic absence of suitably disciplined economic policies.” Volcker will never escape a Fed-inflected prose style, but his assessment is spot-on.

Retirement has treated Volcker well. He did some teaching and loved it. He spent 10 contented years as the chief executive of Wolfensohn & Company, an old-fashioned investment bank, which mostly gave advice on mergers and acquisitions. When he retired, he had plenty of time for nonprofit activities and was much in demand. He chaired inquiries into the ownership of Jewish art sequestered in Swiss bank vaults; the massive theft from food and medical programs after the Iraq War; and corruption in the World Bank.

Volcker also played an important role in the cleanup after the 2008–2009 crash. His advice was widely solicited, if not always followed. In his memoir, he describes sitting at a conference and listening to bankers warn that new regulations must not inhibit trading and “innovation.” He finally exploded: “Wake up, gentlemen. I can only say that your response is inadequate. I wish that somebody would give me some shred of neutral evidence about the relationship between financial innovation recently and the growth of the economy, just one shred of information.” His lasting contribution from this period is the so-called Volcker Rule, which bars traders from taking risky positions with depositors’ funds, and which he summarizes as “Thou shall not gamble with the public’s money.”

[Read more: Wall Street has basically the same culture that led to the 2008 crash. ]

Keeping at It is not a tell-all book. Volcker’s subject matter is economic policy, and his praise or criticism is almost entirely directed at specific ideas and actions. His first wife, Barbara Bahnson, died in 1998. In 2010, he married his longtime assistant, Anke Dening. There is not much of a personal nature in the book, and yet, unwittingly, it paints an accurate personal portrait. The picture that emerges is of a man of granitic integrity, committed to what he perceives as wise policies—committed, that is, to what he calls The Verities: stable prices, sound finance, and good government.

The secret of Paul Volcker was his father. Paul Adolph Volcker Sr. was almost as tall as his son. He was an engineer, with a degree from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and he went on to become a city manager. The city he was most identified with was Teaneck, New Jersey, a municipality that had fallen prey to a corrupt political machine. It was the kind of challenge that Paul Sr. leaped at. In his son’s memoir, Paul Sr. is always working; even after a long day, he drove around his modest empire and made note of broken traffic lights, spilled garbage, and other petty violations. They were not petty to him. The city fathers once tried to can him for hiring a professional police chief. They couldn’t fire him, but they could stop paying him. Paul Sr. went to court and got his pay—and got his police chief. Exactly what his son would have done.

There are few people like Paul Volcker in the U.S. government today, or in business, for that matter—respected and trusted by everyone, whatever the disagreements, and motivated by public service. Volcker reveled in his middle-class status. He notes in his memoir that, in the 1960s and 1970s, Washington was “mostly populated by middle-class professionals, including families of civil servants and members of Congress,” and that “there wasn’t great wealth.” Now, he writes, Washington is “dominated by wealth” and by “lobbyists who are joined at the hip” with people in government, whether on the Hill or in the executive branch.

As a result, he says simply, “I stay away.”

from Business | The Atlantic https://ift.tt/2CRHiWA

Natasha Rothwell was born in Wichita, Kansas, but doesn’t remember much about it. Her father was in the Air Force, so she grew up moving around—to New Mexico, Florida, Illinois, New Jersey, Maryland, and even Turkey. “I definitely have wanderlust because of how I grew up,” she says. As an adult, she moved to Tokyo, where she performed at the Tokyo Comedy Store and taught English. She’s had a variety of jobs, including working at McDonald’s, where, on her father’s advice and to her manager’s surprise, she gave two weeks’ notice when she decided to leave.

Rothwell is a producer of HBO’s Insecure, in which she also stars as Kelli. In addition, she’s developing a new show for HBO for which she will be an executive producer and a writer; she’ll also star in that. Before all this, she wrote for Saturday Night Live and performed improv at the Upright Citizens Brigade.

I recently spoke with Rothwell about changing one’s mind about career paths, transferring between colleges, and her career mantras. This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.

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Lola Fadulu: I saw in an interview with The Baltimore Sun that you considered journalism for a little bit, but then ultimately changed your mind. Why did you change your mind?

Natasha Rothwell: It was just misguided. I always loved to write, and I still do as a part of my job. Creative writing was where my passion lay. I thought that because my parents had pretty by-the-book jobs, I should have one too.

I concocted this whole after-school special in my head where I thought my parents would be really upset if I told them I wanted to major in theater, so I thought the next best thing would be to go to school for journalism. My initial school that I went to was Ithaca College, which has an outstanding theater.

I thought proximity to what I wanted to do would be good enough. I remember seeing a production of The House of Blue Leaves. The program had the poem by Langston Hughes that starts, “What happens to a dream deferred?” I remember just crying reading that poem because I was like, Oh, that’s what I’m doing right now. I’m sitting in the audience, and I’m looking at my friends onstage, and I want to be onstage, so I have to change that perspective by literally finding a way to get to the stage.

I had this big coming-out moment with my parents where I was like, “I want to be an actor.” They were so nonplussed. They were like, “Yeah, we know. We were really confused. We thought that that’s what you wanted to do, so we were surprised by the journalism thing, but we wanted to be supportive.”

I ended up transferring to the University of Maryland, where I got a full scholarship for acting. That’s where I completed that program.

Fadulu: Why did you decide to transfer to UMD? Could you have changed your major at Ithaca, or were you locked into journalism there?

Rothwell: No. I could’ve changed my major. I auditioned for the B.F.A. program and got rejected. I was offered a place in the B.A. program. At the time, I thought that the only way to make it to Broadway—because at the time that was my understanding of what I wanted to do—I had to be a B.F.A.

My goal was to transfer to the University of Maryland and take my core credits. At the time, my dad was stationed at the Pentagon and my mom was working at a hospital near there. I was like, I’ll stay at home, and I’ll go get my core credits first semester and spend the spring auditioning for all of these fancy B.F.A. schools.

While I was at the University of Maryland, one of the advisers there said, “Well, we have a full scholarship. You have to audition for it. It’s called a creative-and-performing-arts scholarship.” I decided to do that just in case, as a backup, and I got it. I didn’t expect to get it.

To me, at the time it just made the most frugal sense in the world to go there, even if it was a B.A. program. At that point, I had been there a semester. I’d connected with the professors and felt like I could get what I needed from the program. I didn’t intend to stay, but I’m so glad that I did.

Fadulu: Would you say that you developed an interest in acting and writing at the same time, or did one come before the other?

Rothwell: They happened sort of at the same time, and then performing is what I decided to nurture the most. I have two sisters and a brother, and being in the Air Force, when you move to a new place, your siblings are your first friends. We would often entertain each other. I loved doing that. I loved making them laugh and playing around. We put on talent shows.

[Read: The upside of career restlessness]

I definitely sensed my love of performing and making people laugh through that, but I also remember writing a poem about Martin Luther King and reading it at Thanksgiving. I was maybe 10. It’s so sweet now, but very mortifying to think that I stopped Thanksgiving and was like, “Guys, dear older black people who lived through segregation, let me tell you about this guy, Martin Luther King. It’s going to blow your mind.”

As I got older, when there were opportunities in school for plays and performances, I definitely gravitated toward them, but I would say it wasn’t until high school and college that I started writing one-act plays or monologues.

Fadulu: What was your first-ever job?

Rothwell: Babysitting. I definitely remember reading the Baby-Sitters Club books and thinking, I’ll start a business babysitting some of the neighborhood kids. When I was younger, at the church that we attended, they had the infants’ and toddlers’ room where they needed teenagers to come in and watch kids, so I definitely worked in there.

Fadulu: You liked kids?

Rothwell: Well, it wasn’t necessarily an affinity for kids in that I wanted to be around them, but I think that when you’re young and you’re trying to figure out how to supplement your allowance it’s like, What can I do if I want two candies at the store, and I can only afford one? What are some things that I can do to make money? It was definitely more an economic decision than a passion decision.

Fadulu: Were you considering other ways to make money besides babysitting?

Rothwell: I remember having a Kool-Aid stand. You have to sit in the sun and try to get people to buy warm Kool-Aid. That was probably the only other way I thought of to make money. I think I have a vague memory of bringing candy canes to middle school and selling them around the holidays, but I had to be sneaky because it was candy. Nothing that was a legitimate business.

Fadulu: What was your first job when you were of legal age?

Rothwell: I worked at Blockbuster Video. Rest in peace, except the one that's left. I worked at McDonald's. During the summers, I worked multiple jobs. I worked at Target.

My first [real] job was at a bookstore. It was not Borders. What was the one before Borders? There was a bookstore that was pre-Borders. I remember spending maybe three hours curling my hair for this interview. It was so important to me. I was 15.

I was a photographer at JCPenney. Essentially you sat people down, you pushed a series of buttons, and then you were a professional photographer. I bounced between that department and the men’s department. I helped a lot of older men who didn’t understand how colors worked, if something matched. It’s like, “Excuse me, Miss. Do these go together?” I’m like, “No, sir.” I was so unfashionable. I had no business telling anyone what to wear, but that’s what I did.

Fadulu: Do any other memories pop up from working at Blockbuster or McDonald’s?

Rothwell: I remember quitting McDonald’s with a written two-week notice.

Fadulu: Oh, wow. That’s very nice of you.

Rothwell: I’m sort of a nerd and a goody-goody to a fault. I just remember asking my dad, “If I no longer want to be employed by an establishment, how might one leave an establishment?” He’s like, “Well, typically you write. You put in your two weeks’ notice.” So I typed it up. I remember giving it to my manager at McDonald’s. He said, “You could leave today.” I was like, “No. I want to put in my two weeks.” I worked there for two weeks. I think every day I showed up in that two weeks he was surprised. He was like, “Oh, you’re still here. I thought you quit.”

Fadulu: Were you still curling your hair for McDonald’s?

Rothwell: No. I got to wear a visor at McDonald’s. It was a rock-and-roll McDonald’s. I don’t even know if it’s still there. It had a jukebox, and it had black-and-white tile.

Fadulu: Can you talk a little bit about how UMD and UCB prepared you for starting off as a writer for Insecure?

Rothwell: At the University of Maryland, I was very heavily involved in the improv group.

I found my way to New York and started performing at UCB. Because of that, I was seen by SNL and was able to write on SNL. Writing for Saturday Night Live opened a lot of doors for me. I took meetings with Amy Gravitt [the executive vice president of programming] over at HBO. We really connected in our meeting. She served in the Navy, and I’m an Air Force brat. At the end of our meeting she’s like, “Well, we have this show in development I think you’d be really good for. Do you know Awkward Black Girl?” I said, “Oh, yes. Of course I know that show.” She’s just like, “Yeah, it’s going to be a show from the same writer, Issa Rae.” Three months, later I interviewed for the writer’s room via FaceTime with Issa and Prentice, our show runner, and got the job. Basically, that’s how the University of Maryland led me to Insecure.

Fadulu: Do you have a piece of advice you’ve received that has really helped you in your career?

Rothwell: I have a quote framed on my bedroom wall. It says, “Be so good they can’t ignore you.” It’s a Steve Martin quote. Being a person of color at any job always means you’re going to work twice as hard for half as much.

When I read that quote, I remember thinking, Oh, it’s not just about working twice as hard for half as much—it’s about being excellent about what you’re doing, so that way people will pay attention and you’ll stand out. I always strove to just be the best.

from Business | The Atlantic https://ift.tt/2StIQeF