The Jennings Boys

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I’m dropping my son off at a UC Irvine sports camp. We drive past some construction workers and I heckle them through my rolled-up window so they can’t hear me.

“Closest you guys ever got to a college campus, huh?” I say. “They’re probably high school dropouts like Peter Jennings. I hate to speak negatively about the recently deceased, but Peter Jennings was not that bright. He used to say that he learned something new every day, but that’s easy if you don’t know very much to begin with.”

“Ken Jennings is smart,” my son chimes in.

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Requirements are Boring

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You’re working on the requirements for Project X? Boring. You’ve got someone figuring out architecture for Project Y? Boring. The guys are designing Project Z? Boring. . . .

Who has built something that their customer will certify is part of what they want? That’s interesting.

Who has shipped something to their customer and the customer is using it? That’s very interesting.

— Ron Jeffries

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Happiness

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In the early 1970s, when a friend and I were newly hatched social psychologists, we decided to write a book on happiness. The head of an eminent Boston publishing house took pity on us and, over lunch, explained the facts of life. ‘No one wants to read a book on happiness’, he said kindly. ‘Happy people don’t; why in the world would they want to? They are already happy. Unhappy people don’t want to, either. Why in the world would they want to read about happy people when they are feeling sullen and miserable? Moreover, it’s faintly embarrassing to be seen on a bus or park bench reading a book on happiness. It’s like being caught reading a book on paedophilia. A passer-by will question your motives.’ And so my friend and I went our separate ways; he to write a book on loneliness, and I, a book on anger.

— Carol Tavris

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Little Racketeers

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Few Americans either behind or in front of our cameras give evidence of any recognition or respect for themselves or one another as human beings, or have any desire to be themselves or to let others be themselves. On both ends of the camera you find very few people who are not essentially, instead, just promoters, little racketeers, interested in ‘the angle.’

— James Agee, October 12, 1946

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One Thing We Agree On

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The West reveals here a hatred of itself, which is strange and can be only considered pathological; the West is laudably trying to open itself, full of understanding, to external values, but it no longer loves itself; in its own history, it now sees only what is deplorable and destructive, while it is no longer able to perceive what is great and pure.

— Pope Benedict XIV, “If Europe hates itself”

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