Essays

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Punched in the Mouth

When I was 12, I got into an argument at summer camp with the kid whose bunk bed was below mine. I leaned down from my bed to make a point, and he punched me in the face.

I’d wrestled on the playground, but I had no framework for a punch. I didn’t know what to do: I couldn’t hit back at that angle, and I certainly wasn’t going to keep talking. Confused, I rolled over and went to sleep. I don’t remember the argument, but I guess I lost.

The Motto

I have two mottos. One is for self-improvement, adapted from Judith Shapiro:

Learning should make the inside of your head an interesting place to live.

I wrote about it yesterday.

The other is for acting in the world. It supposedly comes from Mike Tyson:

Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.

I wasn’t thinking of the summer camp kid when I chose it, but he’s still my only punch. Without him, maybe the quote wouldn’t have been salient. James — if you’re reading this, I owe you one.

Everyone had a plan

I mostly use the motto to help me appreciate other people.

Most of the “bad people” in our lives didn’t plan to be that way. Almost everyone wants security, love, and respect. And they want to get it the right way — working a useful job, attracting a partner, earning status through worthy deeds.

If a person’s life looks very different from that, it’s usually because something punched them in the face (drugs, abuse, a catchy wrong idea from an academic scribbler). And while I may never know the full story, I can at least remind myself that they didn’t want to be a liar, thief, or murderer at 12.

I don’t know many liars or thieves (much less murderers), but I do know people who are annoying or difficult in ways that make my life worse. That’s when I actually have to practice compassion — and the quote helps. Everyone had a plan: what looks like a bad trait might be a bad circumstance.1

But what if someone never had a plan? Some people don’t really think about the future.

“Never” is a long time. Are you sure? 

And if you’re right, that means something punched them when they were too young to plan: another reason to feel compassion.

Which plans deserve punching?

If you can punch away someone’s plans, that implies two things:

  1. If someone has a plan you can’t abide, punch them.
  2. If you want to make plans with someone, no punching!

I know a lot of nice people. One thing that trips them up is poorly applied politeness. If someone mistreats them, they’ll complain in private, but they’ll go to crazy lengths to avoid confrontation. I’ve seen a close friend be pressured into working for ten hours to avoid a ten-minute showdown with the selfish person responsible. If someone clearly doesn’t care about your wellbeing, approach them with stern words and an iron will.2

But some people need the opposite advice. Communities I love (effective altruism, rationality) struggle with the narcissism of small differences. People who share nearly every important value, and could easily work toward common goals, too often become enemies. Sometimes, this happens after one bad interaction.

The irony is that EAs and rationalists are good at small jabs — public debates that bruise without breaking. But an accusation of bad faith or rumor of criminal deeds is a punch to the mouth. It disorients the other party and makes it hard to keep talking, much less make plans. Sometimes, that’s for the best (we’ve seen plenty of bad faith and the occasional crime). But it’s tempting to go too far, because the Internet loves a good punch.

Very convenient — sometimes punching is right, sometimes wrong. How do you actually distinguish the two?

If someone’s plans are fundamentally opposed to yours, stop them. Don’t let people steal from you, or be cruel to you. If you want to change their behavior, your justice should be fair — but also swift and certain.

But if there’s any chance your plans can coexist, explore that. Set up a private conversation. Be wary of actions you can’t reverse; it’s hard to un-punch someone.

Don’t be too punchable

Memento percuti — remember that you can be punched.

In one sense, this is the lesson I learned at summer camp: don’t assume that rules will protect you. To paraphrase a fellow Tyson acolyte:

“The pain isn’t usually what overwhelms the individual: it’s their new understanding of what the world looks like and how unprepared they are to deal with it. The laws, social conventions, and agencies that keep us safe aren’t present in this moment. That frightening realization catches most people when the first punch lands; people shouldn’t be allowed to do that, but they are, and nobody is going to stop them.”

It’s also a punchy way of saying “be flexible”: keep your options open, make lots of small bets, and insure what you can’t afford to lose.3

The world will change a lot over the next few years. Punches will come from new directions. Guard your jaw.

 

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The Mind Is A House

The mind is a house you can’t escape. You live in your own head, and you’ll be trapped there for the rest of your life.

We all react to this in different ways. You can:

Leave the house for a while.

Drinking lets you open the door and wander around in your front yard.

Meditation lets you make the walls transparent, so you can pretend the house isn’t there.

LSD lets you climb up on the roof for a helicopter tour. But if things go wrong, you punch a hole in the roof and it leaks until you patch it up.

I’ve known people whose happiest moment was the first time they left — it helped them understand that the house was, in fact, a house.

Get roommates.

You can fill your house with replicas of other people.

Some people live with their friends. Some live with their parents. Some live with Jesus.

Some people have really accurate replicas. Others have weird broken versions that love them less and judge them more. I once spent several days being yelled at by a replica of my favorite professor, until I met her in person and realized I’d drawn her eyebrows way too angry.

Some people have houses so crowded that they have to squeeze around people to go anywhere; they might not even have their own rooms.

Roommates can be fun. And sometimes, someone really needs the space — like your kids, or your spouse. But you own the house. Your roommates don’t pay rent. If they trash the place, or insult the host, you can kick them out.

Open the windows.

You can’t escape the house, but you can look outside. Travel opens windows. So does meeting new people. As you create more views, you may feel less cramped inside your house, or learn to appreciate how cozy it is.

Perspective-taking is looking through your window into someone else’s house. If you concentrate, you might be able to walk around inside.

Decorate.

The most compelling reason to get a good education is that it makes the inside of your head an interesting place to spend the rest of your life.

—Judith Shapiro

If you look at art for a while, it might show up on your walls. If you read, you’ll get a mental library. By exploring new fields or philosophies, you can build entire rooms.

Decorating can be addictive. If you spend all your time shelving books and buying art (my weakness), you may find your house a bit stuffy and quiet. I wish I had more roommates.

Learn to keep your house in order.

Window stuck? Roommates won’t leave? Try becoming a better housekeeper.

When I get more sleep, I have an easier time decorating, and I stop tripping over that one broken step.

When I stick to my gratitude journal, the lights seem brighter.

Therapy offers tools: A rag and oil to get the window moving, a lock to keep the roommates out of your space.

But housekeeping alone doesn’t make a home. I’ve known people whose houses were incredibly tidy, but barely decorated; they were dusting empty shelves and wiping white walls.

 

Every single person has a house

I try to remember that everyone has a house.

If someone is an asshole, something might be wrong with their house: mean relatives who won’t leave, a backed-up disposal filling the place with foul odors.

This doesn’t mean you have to help them clean — though you can if you want to. It doesn’t mean you can’t shun them, or put them in actual prison if they hurt someone. But you can feel whatever sympathy seems right, and enjoy knowing that your own house doesn’t smell like garbage.

If someone has a mental illness, something is definitely wrong with their house. Maybe the lights are dim, and there aren’t any windows to let the sun inside. Maybe there’s a radio they can’t turn off, even to sleep. Maybe they have a violent roommate who routinely trashes the place. Whatever’s happening, they can’t escape. 

Some people are trapped in burning houses; we should put the fires out, even if they don’t want help.

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Protein Bars I’ve Known and Loved

My assistant cross-country coach used to bribe me. If I ran for 20 minutes in agony, she’d give me a Clif Bar on the bus ride home.

The bribery worked, because I was, and remain, a fiend for food in bar form. I even made my own to save money, mixing whey and eggs and oats — they were great, aside from the part where they grew mold at room temperature and I didn’t know until I’d eaten two. I think it’s the last time I ever vomited. So that was it for me and homemade bars.

Most of my disposable income in college went to feed my obsession. An excerpt:

I bought most bars from Amazon, but they didn’t stock one of my favorites: Detour Peanut Butter Cream, which I got from a little convenience store behind the dorm. It was run by an Israeli couple who got to know me and my standard order (the bar, plus a diet ginger ale). We had many brief, sincere conversations across four years. I knew them better than most of my professors.

Half a lifetime later, those bars are still among the best I’ve had. They aren’t manufactured anymore.4

Here’s to the five-star bars I had to mark “Discontinued” in my personal protein database:

  • RXBar Layers Peanut Butter Chocolate
  • Optimum Nutrition Cake Bites
  • Optimum Nutrition Chocolate Sea Salt Bites
  • The emperor of bars: Supreme Protein Peanut Butter Crunch. I still remember the feeling of that first bite, and the smell of a freshly opened wrapper. The nuts embedded in the chocolate shell. Fuck!

Did you say “personal protein database”? 

I did. This is the official public launch:

I might fill in more stats someday. But I don’t feel the need to make it comprehensive — I see it as more museum than buyer’s guide. (Something tells me my tastes aren’t typical.)

That said, if you’re just getting into protein bars and want a spiritual guide — or a few recommendations — I’m available.

What country has the best protein bars outside America?

Australia. And I might drop “outside America”.

I visited five convenience stores — three in Sydney, one in Sydney Airport, and one in a small regional airport. They all had vastly better selection than comparable stores in the U.S. I didn’t have time to visit the Aussie equivalent of a GNC, but one day, I will return. Keep your shelves stocked.

That’s Harbor Bridge in the background. I took a tour later. Their gift shop was the one sad exception: no bars.

Why protein bars?

In college, I realized that no one would make me run for 20 minutes ever again. I celebrated by gaining 40 pounds of muscle. The dining hall couldn’t keep up; it was a year of bars and basement barbells.

I got in the habit of trying new bars whenever I found them. Some became staples. Some were the worst things I’ve ever chewed. But even a bad bar makes a good story.

Now that I’ve crossed 150 bars in the database, it’s fun to think about reaching 200, maybe 250, before the singularity hits and I can synthesize a new bar for breakfast every morning of my life.

 

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Good News I Rarely Think About

Media, social or otherwise, tends to surface bad news: things you don’t normally notice that make you sad or angry when you do.

These three stories are the opposite: good news I rarely notice. They also apply to most people reading this.

 

My friends aren’t dead

One night in Wisconsin, I dreamed my friend Xuan was dead.

The sky was dark gray and cloudless. A crowd of silhouettes whispered the news. I talked to them yesterday, I thought. Why are they dead? How are they dead?

I woke up in a panic and checked Facebook. As Xuan’s page loaded, I remembered that dreams weren’t real. Death was real, but not this particular death.

I felt amazing the next day. I kept thinking about whatever Xuan was doing at that moment: studying, rehearsing, eating lunch. We weren’t even all that close, but it was amazing to know they still drew breath.

If I dreamed about another friend dying tonight, I think I’d wake up feeling the same way: profound gratitude for their existence. 

Therefore, I should feel that way now.

I just spent a few minutes meditating on the existence of random people I know. They are all out there, somewhere, being themselves. Andrew is repairing someone’s nose. Dan is playing with his baby. Britney is collecting adventures to blog about. What fantastic news!

I wish I could more easily tell my friends that I love the fact of their existence. This essay is one attempt; so is this one.

My neighbors would fight ICE

My wife and I wanted to get ice cream, but the line was too long. San Diego has a lot of long lines. The beaches are crowded. Rush hour starts at 3:30. People people people.

Despite my self-professed humanism, I still get antsy in crowds. But that night, as we gave up on ice cream, I thought about the crowds of Minneapolis. Masked gunmen invaded the city and shoved people into unmarked vans, but the crowds of Minneapolis slowed them down. They stood in the snow and blocked the streets. They whistled and filmed and followed vans full of people who might kill them.

San Diego, like almost every U.S. city, is a liberal place. If ICE came here tomorrow, it would look like a sunny Minneapolis. Instead of hogging the ice cream, the crowds would be making ICE scream. (I’m not sorry.)

Just like I know my friends are out there, I know my neighbors would step up if times became extreme. This isn’t true of all times and places, but it seems to be true more often than not, and I certainly think it’s true of my 21st-century American city.

You’d like most people if you got to know them

If you traveled to most places, and spent some time living with the locals, you’d probably come away liking those places and people. Some of this is the mere exposure effect; some of it is because most people are friendly and hospitable.5 (“We treat guests well” is one of those things every culture thinks about itself, but that just makes it a human universal, like storing sewing supplies in cookie tins.)

More than any generation in history, we live surrounded by strangers. It doesn’t help that the most visible strangers are often people living on the street, in situations that make it hard to be hospitable or pleasant.

But so often, a stranger is a friend you haven’t met.6 Or at least a person as real and important as the people you know. If circumstances brought you together — ICE invasion, AA meeting, playoff game in a bar — you’d probably get along fine.

Conclusion: You should like most people now.

I wrote more about this idea here, as it applies to charity.

 

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Just as Best as You Are

In 2013, I pitched a story on middle school math to America’s finest magazines. I failed.

I wrote the story anyway, hoping to sell it somewhere. The most normal 1500 words wound up, unpaid, in a magazine for middle-school math teachers.

This is the rest. (With a few notes from 2026.)

 

When you reach the finals at MATHCOUNTS, you face your first level playing field.

You’ve been the best forever. Best student in your class, your school, your state. Now you’re on a stage with 11 other kids, just as best as you are.

But that’s not true. There is equality in math, but not MATHCOUNTS. It ends in a series of head-to-head competitions. 11 of you are about to be worse than someone.

The other kids don’t look as scared as you feel.

This image took me way, way back. Apparently they do an esports version these days.

I’m in the audience, trying to impress an eighth-grader.

The average age of three members of a quartet is 57 years. What is the age of the fourth member, in years, if the quartet’s overall average age is 62 years?

David Zhu, finalist, hits the buzzer.

I’m faster. I’ve already whispered the answer to my seatmate Arjun: “77.”

“77,” Daniel announces. It’s the winning point. His opponent, Nicholas Sun, has set. Daniel advances to the round of 8.

“Nice!” says Arjun. He’s from team Virginia. He saw me taking notes, got curious, and soon became the best friend I’ve made in this place.

I needed a friend. As a student journalist, I’m used to blending in — either with students or with journalists. At MATHCOUNTS, I’m too old to compete and too young to be a teacher. I don’t fit.

This isn’t the fault of the MATHCOUNTS Foundation: they’ve been excellent hosts. Any chance for public attention, even the faint hope I represent, is unusual. The competition’s a tough sell: rustier than the Intel Talent Search, sweatier than the Scripps National Spelling Bee. No one wants to watch algebra on TV.

But even if MATHCOUNTS isn’t relevant, the kids themselves are. This is the smartest room in Washington, and Raytheon is watching. (Seriously: They’re sitting behind me.)

“You’re good,” says Arjun.

“I remember some of my old tricks. These will get harder, though.” I write a small checkmark in my notebook. So far it’s Aaron 5, Mathletes 3. I won’t stay ahead for long.

Arjun says he wants to apply to MIT. I ask if he’s hacked anything lately. He’s plotting to get Pokémon Fire Red running on his graphing calculator.

“The emulator is Linux, and the calculator is Windows”, he says. “So I’ll probably have to pull an all-nighter to get the code right. But it’s definitely possible.”

It was, in fact, possible.

In middle school, I went to MATHCOUNTS twice. The second time, one of my Delaware teammates finished 205th out of 224 competitors. We all thought that was pretty embarrassing. But he still made it to the Ivy League, where he studies mechanical engineering and computer science. Someday he’ll help design a car that several million people drive or an electric toothbrush that ends cavities or maybe a new missile.

For a few hundred thou, Raytheon gets three days of marketing to 250 brilliant kids. An Under Secretary of Defense stops in to give a speech about majoring in STEM: “Your country needs you.” Mathletes are pure potential energy, and someday they’ll convert it into something stronger than algebra. Who gets to use those brains?

Maybe it will be the second sponsor: Texas Instruments. I can’t imagine they need the marketing, but they paid up anyway, and gave out 250 free calculators — next to Raytheon, they’re saints.

Between rounds, I ask Arjun for his feelings on the military-industrial complex. He hasn’t noticed the vast forces tugging at his future. I decide to think about this later.7

If m is removed at random from the set {0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9}, and then n is chosen at random from the remaining numbers, what is the probability that x2 + 2mx + n2 = 0 will have two real solutions?

In my day, I was fast. At my first Nationals, I was whispering answers to teammates at the speed of 2006 champion Daesun Yim, who is now building software at Palantir Technologies to help the government fight terrorists.8

Even today, I could beat 3 or 4 of the finalists. Back then, it would’ve been 8 or 9, had I studied hard enough to ace the written test and qualify for the “countdown round”.

It would’ve been 8 or 9, I tell myself. Respectable. But even so, I see Ashwin Sah, and I know that I was never the best. I was never even close. The U.S. military can’t have me, but if they take Ashwin, they’ll still win their wars.

On the high stage, seated behind one of the adult-size podiums, Ashwin looks to be about 4’8 and 80 pounds. He annihilates his first opponent, and though his semifinal match goes to 3-3, every point he doesn’t score feels like a stroke of misfortune in a Shakespeare comedy. The end is never in doubt.

Alec Sun, who made the finals last year and also in 2011 as a sixth-grader, is tearing up the other side of the bracket. I can’t match his pace; no more checkmarks for me.

As a “fun fact”, the moderator told the auditorium that Alec hadn’t scored a single finals point in his first two tries. But the rude anecdote doesn’t slow him down. It’s like he spent the last year meditating on a mountain instead of studying math. He had the math already, and now he has the nerves, while Hongyi Chen can barely breathe and another kid cries upon defeat.

Before long, Alec descends the mountain to face Ashwin. Now we’ll see who’s best.

It’s not a real mountain, but the kids did set the Guinness World Record for “fastest time to arrange the first 25 rows of Pascal’s Triangle (Human Formation)”. Look it up.

David Foster Wallace once described a tennis match as “carnage of a particularly high-level sort… like watching an extremely large and powerful predator get torn to pieces by an even larger and more powerful predator.”

Alec and Ashwin are predators of equal size — once cheetahs, now jaguars. They stalk each other warily, buzzing in slower. These are the competition’s hardest problems, and no mistake will go unpunished.

A rhombus has sides of length 10 inches, and the lengths of its diagonals differ by 3 inches. What is the area of the rhombus, in square inches?

((x-1)! * (x+1)! )/(x!)2 = 1.125. What is the value of x?

[I couldn’t transcribe this one, but it had a circle inside a square which was itself inside a circle inside a square. Someone answered before my brain could even process the problem.]

With the slower pace, I actually score a couple of points — though I need to be reckless, guessing wildly and getting some wrong. In spite of my errors, Arjun is impressed.

I’m feeling sorry for the parents, who have math genes but are thirty years removed from algebra; can they even track what’s happening?

But then, after a series of heavy blows, Alec and Ashwin are tied 3-3. Everyone understands that math: next answer wins. It’s Game 7, bottom of the ninth — and here’s the pitch!

What is the greatest integer that must be a factor of the sum of any four consecutive positive odd integers?

It’s an easy question for the finals. The boys read, think about sample digits, add those digits, and factor them in the span of four seconds. Ashwin’s hand is first to the buzzer. Fly ball, deep left field…

“Two.”

I drop my pen. Ashwin’s wrong. 1 + 3 + 5 + 7 is 16, 3 + 5 + 7 + 9 is 24, the pattern continues, and the ball falls into Alec’s glove. No mistake goes unpunished. He gets a leisurely ten seconds to check his work.

“Eight.”

When I watch the final question again on YouTube, the camera pans away from the boys’ handshake. That’s a shame: I found the handshake comforting. If the best of us couldn’t work together, we’d never have invented the electric toothbrush.

Speaking of reasons to brush one’s teeth: Raytheon sponsored our dessert.

 

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Tautologies: If You Know, You Know

I

In high school, I convinced my cross-country team to wear shirts that said:

“To run faster, you must run faster.”

Some people didn’t get it. One day, we were stretching next to some cheerleaders, and they began to debate whether the quote had meaning.

“It’s not actually saying anything! It’s like, like…”

“No, it makes sense! You’ve gotta run faster if you want to run faster. There’s no trick.”

When I tell people that story, half agree with Cheerleader #1, the other half with #2. No obvious pattern; some people are just tautology people. If you know, you know.

II

I fucking love tautologies. A logically self-evident statement clears the air: there’s nothing to agree or disagree with. You just have to accept it and move on. It is what it is.

III

A tautology, like the eighteenth camel, can be helpful even if it adds nothing.

My favorite teacher survived a bout with cancer in our senior year and came back smiling. Then Race to the Top broke her spirit: Delaware’s new mandates forced her to teach special ed with no training, making her job feel almost impossible.

One day after school, we talked about it for two hours. She was in tears, not knowing how she’d make it through the next year. I didn’t know what to say: I had no life experience and no understanding of district policy. All I had was tautology:

“If it can’t continue, it won’t continue. Something will change. Maybe they’ll change the rules, or maybe you’ll find a new school. But it won’t be like this forever.”

Somehow, this worked. She was happier when I left. I couldn’t stop Arne Duncan’s reign of terror, but I could help Dr. Greenstone reframe: if it can’t go on like this, it won’t go on like this.

IV

Nature is tautological. An object in motion keeps moving. That which survives, survives.

That second one turned Douglas Adams into a tautology guy:

I thought about that for a while and it finally occurred to me that a tautology is something that if it means nothing, not only that no information has gone into it but that no consequence has come out of it.

So, we may have accidentally stumbled upon the ultimate answer; it’s the only thing, the only force, arguably the most powerful of which we are aware, which requires no other input, no other support from any other place, is self evident, hence tautological, but nevertheless astonishingly powerful in its effects.

“Astonishingly powerful” undersells the point: a good tautology is undeniable. To run faster, you really must run faster. If you can’t run faster, then you won’t run faster — but the only solution is to run faster.

When I designed those cross-country shirts, maybe I was thinking of Adams. Or Ayn Rand, another high school influence. To her, reality itself was tautological: “A is A”.9

V

Back when I streamed Magic: the Gathering, I used to attract viewers with wild decks, then alienate them by playing with an insane degree of conservatism.

“You missed lethal, Aaron!”

“If they had exactly the right three cards, attacking was dangerous.”

“That’s incredibly unlikely!”

“We can kill them later when it’s 100% safe. As long as I don’t lose, I always win.”

In the world championship quarterfinal, I faced a Hall of Famer who was very skilled, but notorious for playing slowly. In the pre-match interview, I explained that I planned to stall until his time ran out. As long as I stopped him from winning, he was guaranteed to lose.

VI

I used to be a professional moderator. The forum I ran had many rules.

If I ever own my own forum, I may try what I call “the perfect moderation policy”:

“If no one becomes a jerk, we won’t have jerks.”

Divisive content is designed to spread. So is divisive behavior. If acting a certain way provokes others to act the same way, the behavior spreads like fire: that’s why they call it a “flame war”.10 You’ll always have would-be provocateurs — but to successfully provoke, they must provoke someone. Ergo, the perfect policy bans becoming provoked.

VII

When I got to Yale, I was delighted to find these banners in our rowing tank:

You can’t avoid the past: it happened. But it only happened in the past. The present is what’s happening now.

Some mantras fail. You won’t always be the best. You won’t always outwork the other team. But last year will always be last year. And if this year doesn’t work out, there’s always next year.

Is it stupid? Maybe. But if it works, it works.

 

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Death and Football

[Content note: Jokes about death and violence]

This is a true story I wrote in 2014. I’m publishing it on the request of Penelope Laurans, who received it from Anne Fadiman after the story was told at a dinner commemorating the very strange history of Yale football. Of my 273 blog drafts, it was perhaps the one I least expected to publish, but life is also very strange.

If you aren’t sure whether to read this, go to the end and look at the photo. Then, if you want to know the story of the photo, read this. (Spoiler warning.)

It was an October Monday, the night of The Yale Record’s weekly meeting.

We were brainstorming slogans for t-shirts to commemorate the 130th annual Harvard-Yale game (“The Game”), and preparing to sell said shirts so that we might someday commemorate the magazine’s second straight year of not being in debt.

The administration often threatened to take away our office if we didn’t toe the line, so we had to abandon our best idea: John Harvard crucified on the letter Y.

After that, we held a public vote, and resolved to print t-shirts with the two most popular slogans. It doesn’t matter what they were. What matters for my story is the third:

“Whoever wins, our lives will end equally … IN DEATH.”

Continue reading →

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Area Writer Applies To The New York Times, Fails

Part II in my very occasional series on applications that don’t succeed.

Why I do this: Most people who apply for prestigious positions fail, and it seems healthy to acknowledge that truth. Otherwise, we end up in a world where all we can see are the triumphs of the people around us, in stark contrast to our own failures. (Some people refer to this as “Facebook envy”.)

So I’m swimming against the tide, by showcasing the times I wrote something with all my might, only to receive a rejection letter.

Continue reading →

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The Sad Story of Marilee Jones

David Edmondsdon, the former CEO of Radioshack, was fired because he falsely claimed to have a theology degree from an unaccredited Bible college.

At least, that’s what Radioshack said. There may have been other reasons, but newspapers took the college story seriously, even though it was ridiculous. Why does learning about your CEO’s lack of a theology degree matter, once you’ve seen him perform decades of competent work?

But even that story isn’t as crazy as…

 

The MIT Scandal

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