Not gonna read it, b/c FTFNYT, but from your description, isn't that classic "burying the lede" ? It's how FTFNYT has laundered fascism for decades.

Sounds a cut above a profile of a chatbot the reporter fell for, at the very least.

I don't think bad writing was ever the problem. Also, is she in prison yet?

That's probably covered in the article.

She is not yet in prison. I low-key think Holmes has mind-control powers. The entire article is the journalist being, like, I don't know why I think this person is OK but I can't make myself stop thinking it. And the whole thing about Theranos was that the veneer was comically thin. None of it ever particularly made sense and nobody has any convincing excuse for why they were taken in. (The alternative, sadly probably correct, theory, is that all of these people are stupider than you can possibly imagine.)

On my way to look at the Holmes article just now, I noticed a different NYT article called "Why I Changed My Mind on the Debt Limit".

There is absolutely no way that article is anything but dumb as shit in 2023. Anyone who changed their mind on the debt limit in 2023 - in either direction - should not be writing articles for public consumption.

I'm still deciding what I think about Hillary Clinton's emails.

6: I don't think that's fair. A lot of people changed their minds about the debt limit since 2011. Specifically, Obama Democrats went from thinking it might be a reasonable vehicle to force a bipartisan budget compromise to thinking it was a doomsday weapon in the hands of a completely reckless fringe caucus. One person who very clearly changed his mind about it is Joe Biden.

("In 2023" might be doing a lot of work in your comment. I'm not sure the piece nails down exactly when Tribe changed his mind )

I didn't like the NYT article as much as Ogged, but he's generally right, and it was disappointing to see Isaac Chotiner attacking the article on Twitter by taking quotes out of context, and apparently either not reading the whole article, or failing to understand it.

I made the comment without reading the article. I'm willing to believe that he changed his mind on something more interesting than "should the debt ceiling be raised without fuss?" but I'm still going to mock the headline.

10: I just read Tribe's article. He makes a legal argument why ignoring the debt limit would be the lesser of two evils. He seems to be saying that this argument didn't occur to him in 2011 when he took the opposite position. I think he's just doing that typical lawyer thing of trying to pretend a political position is about the law.

I enjoyed reading the profile. For me, it was a little like watching a suspenseful bit in a horror movie. Nooo, don't join them at their house for vacation with your family!! And the editor pointing out that the author had absolutely fallen for a con was fun. I have to imagine the original story was even warmer towards Holmes. I thought it was basically a wonderful example of what it's like to meet someone with loads of charisma. I can't say I've ever met someone that engaging, but I can absolutely see how Holmes raised money and recruited the board of Theranos.

"Noooo, that bear has ingested a vast amount of cocaine. "

I myself am a defender of the NYT in crowds like this one. But the Chozick piece is a rebuttal of any defense of the Times as an institution. Reporters are human, but there's no way this bullshit should have made it past an editor.

Ogged says this:

This is not about whether anyone else gets the humanizing treatment, or if fraudsters should be profiled at all.

Correct! There are all kinds of reasons to write a profile -- maybe even a sympathetic profile! -- about Elizabeth Holmes.

Ogged again:

Just as a profile, it's good.

No! Wrong! It was a fucking mess! Most obviously, Chozick obscures the public record about Holmes, whose actual history of specific involvement in an elaborate fraud is undeniable. (A jury had good reason to find this beyond a reasonable doubt.)

To pick just one example, Chozick offers this with no pushback whatsoever:

Ms. Holmes's defenders, stretching back to childhood, said in letters to the court, and in conversations with me, that the feverish coverage of Ms. Holmes's downfall felt like a witch trial, less rooted in what actually happened at Theranos, and more of a message to ambitious women everywhere. Don't girl boss too close to the sun, or this could happen to you ...

"There's an unspoken lesson for female executives: you're allowed to be successful but not too successful," Jackie Lamping, a Kappa Alpha Theta sorority sister of Ms. Holmes at Stanford, wrote in a letter to Judge Davila, who oversaw the trial.

Ms. Holmes said she believed that making herself the poster girl for women in tech put a huge target on her back. She regrets being the subject of fawning magazine covers (though I imagine the authors of those stories regret it more). "I never lost sight of the mission but I think I did of the narrative," she said. "The story became this story that was totally snowballed away from what we were actually talking about."

And let's repeat this from Holmes:

"I never lost sight of the mission but I think I did of the narrative," she said.

Well, no. As Chozick completely fails to point out, Holmes was in complete control of the narrative and never had any interest in "the mission."

pf: yep if nothing else FTFNYT completely screwed this pooch.

My understanding about editing -- based on a brief, 40-year stint -- is that if you think your reporter got rolled by a profile subject, then you either spike the piece or you overhaul it. And at least, you excise the first-person omphaloskepsis*

*(learned this from @ericuman) pic.twitter.com/hDhS6uovBw

— Bill Grueskin (@BGrueskin) May 7, 2023

I'm just so grateful that Theranos went under before covid, I shudder to think about how they would have pivoted to covid scams. And she just goes right ahead and confirms it!

"Over antioxidant smoothies, Ms. Holmes told me she has ideas for Covid testing, drawing on her work in a Singapore lab as a college student during the SARS outbreak."

Anyway, Theranos was always trying to do something completely impossible scientifically from the get-go, and it's just incredibly damning that she's still trying to spin it as a real product:

"What does she think would have happened if she hadn't garnered so much early attention as the second coming of Silicon Valley? Ms. Holmes does not blink: "We would've seen through our vision." In other words, she thinks if she'd spent more time quietly working on her inventions and less time on a stage promoting the company, she would have revolutionized health care by now."

There was no product! You literally can't do blood tests with just the prick of a finger for pretty basic reasons (the pressure in the narrow tube causes blood cells to burst, each test needs a certain amount of blood so the more tests you do the more blood you need, etc.) It was complete fantasy from the very get-go, which is what Phyllis Gardner said the very first time Holmes pitched any of this stuff.

Those paragraphs by Chozick make me almost certain she didn't read Bad Blood, which is gross malpractice if you're doing a profile of Holmes.

I read the Twitter clips and did notice it seemed to have some self-awareness that it was a PR-consulted profile-rehab job, but that then leads to the question, why did the NYT even think that was worth ink?

Indeed.

if she'd spent more time quietly working on her inventions

There were no inventions!

17: Do you have any dumbed-down explanations of this? There are certain tests that are amenable to point-of-care testing. A1c is one, and I think you can do it for lipids too, but I don't know how much blood it takes. I think it's less than a full vial.

21: The show-stopper for the idea is that the things they proposed testing are at such low concentrations that even amplification on a small sample doesn't work - they're below what we call "limit of quantitation." Think of homeopathy: you have an "active" that gets diluted and diluted and diluted. At some point, it's mathematically unlikely that even 1 molecule of the active is still present. If you draw a tiny blood sample, then try to run many tests, you won't have enough active to detect.

Yeah, I don't see how there's any way around it only being a fraud from the beginning. Impossible or just very hard, the whole premise of Theranos was that they were going to do something very difficult that no one else knew how to do because they had made some technical advance, and they just hadn't. They didn't have a technical idea that they failed to successfully work out all the bugs with, they had nothing, ever.

I want to cut her more slack than most people seem to for having got into the whole thing as a teenager being screwed with by a manipulative much older boyfriend, but that's making excuses for her as having been an active participant in a scheme that was fraud all the way down, not a technical innovator who didn't quite make the product work.

They ran their early tests with competitors' machines to show they had something.
Anyway I'm shocked shocked that a reporter who laundered right wing lies about the Clintons into the mainstream press was taken in by a professional liar.

"There's an unspoken lesson for female executives: you're allowed to be successful but not too successful," Jackie Lamping, a Kappa Alpha Theta sorority sister of Ms. Holmes at Stanford, wrote in a letter to Judge Davila, who oversaw the trial."

Is American feminism an unusually good growth medium for cults and affinity fraud, or does this sort of thing (Holmes, Wolfe, NXIVM etc) happen elsewhere? Not aware of any similar cases in the UK.

You guys aren't as good a novel frauds.

What's the best British cult? Methodism?

28: Obviously.

23 They had an idea: wouldn't it be cool if you could do all these tests with just a pinprick? Having the idea is necessary but obviously not sufficient. Otherwise, we'd be crediting HG Wells with the invention of time travel.

Wouldn't it be cool if someone made transporters like they have in Star Trek? And now we know to keep aliens away from messing with the software.

That's not a technical idea, it's a goal or a wish or something. They didn't have anything that made them closer to accomplishing it than anyone else was.

I keep seeing the title/headline - "Liz Holmes Wants You to Forget About Elizabeth" - and thinking that if the rest of the article isn't "And we're going to make sure you never, ever do" it's a failure or a con job.

"Elizabeth" does have a large number of potential nicknames.

Eliza, Elizabeth, Betsy and Bess,
Went to the woods to find a bird's nest.
They found a nest with four eggs in it,
They took one apiece, and left three in it.

Still an asshole thing to do to a poor bird.

Cloaca thing to do when it's a bird.

There probably have been firms founded when all they had was an idea and no breakthroughs that would bridge the gap between idea and reality, and threw money at it until they succeeded. (Before the full scope of the fraud was publicly known, my brother suggested this may have been the underlying story with Theranos, that they were simply a high-profile failure.) But they developed these machines pretending to do the functions, such that investors would believe at least some such breakthroughs had been made and they just needed to get it to mass feasibility; that's well beyond an overambitious error, and understandable why it turned into not just civil but criminal convictions.

"Guess what? Chicken cloaca" doesn't work.

Right, 22 is the main problem. Keep in mind here that many tests are doing some chemical reaction and so you can't typically just run a test and then use the same blood to run another test.

There's a secondary problem, which is why fingerpricks are usually only used in very specific scenarios, is that there's serious issues in getting a good consistent sample. In particular, it's very easy for the technician to burst the red blood cells (hemolysis) if they squeeze too hard to extract the blood. Now some tests will still be fine, but many won't.

Agree with 24, and also would add that this viewpoint that overemphasizes "ideas" ("wouldn't it be cool if we could do dozens of tests all with one prick?") without understanding the context or details is very typical of teenagers. So I'm even willing to maybe cut her a tiny bit of slack there, if she'd grown up and realized later as an adult that "wouldn't it be cool" isn't an invention.

There were lots of pricks, though.

Holmes should have put ads on the internet telling people they could learn about the contents of their blood with one weird prick.

I am still smug about the fact that I asked my dad about Holmes when she was ascendant, and he said flatly, "Absolutely not possible. She's a crank," and I took that from there.

24:

"I want to cut her more slack than most people seem to ...

I didn't read Bad Blood or much of Carreyrou 's original coverage, so it might be a little naive for me to agree with this, but I kind of agree with this.

At any rate, I could at least imagine a sympathetic profile of Holmes that doesn't do violence to the facts. Maybe someday a reporter will give us that.

I recommend actually reading Bad Blood. It's an easy, engaging read (although it gets a bit more boring when it becomes more about the journalism), and makes clear that she's an active and willing participant. There are sympathetic aspects to her relationship with Balwani, yes, but this is already a person who has been given no end of unearned sympathy. She doesn't need it.

I think there were lots of smart, good-faith people who worked there and earnestly thought they were one big breakthrough from making some version of the idea work. And remember part of SV startup culture is not just "fake it til you make it" but "pivot til you find a marketable product." There was a turn somewhere in the late 00s or early 10s where they could have said "we tried and failed, oh well" but instead turned to actual fraud. I think Holmes was always a fraud in the sense that she didn't have any realistic plan for achieving her goals, but there is a difference in kind between the early-days Reality Distortion Field and the late-days Indictable Securities Fraud. It seems like the special pleading for her is about empathizing with how she slipped down that slope.

What's interesting is they did actually make a go of the science. I had some inside info that they were exploring buying a company capable of transferring nanoliter scale liquid samples so they were definitely trying to make it work.
For reference a finger prick gives several microliters of blood so if you can move tens of nano liters you can do dozens of experiments in theory. The detection part not so much for reasons mentioned above.
What I think happened is Holmes and Balwani saw the dollar signs and prestige and wouldn't take no for an answer from the scientists. Maybe there's a sympathetic story about the pressure on leadership from investors but I think it was just hubris and greed and they decided failure was impossible.

I think there were lots of smart, good-faith people who worked there and earnestly thought they were one big breakthrough from making some version of the idea work.

Yes - and I'm pretty sure I remember from the book that she and Balwani enforced rigorous internal stovepiping so everyone thought the breakthrough lived in another team and they were just working on another aspect.

Can't we write a sympathetic story about hubris and greed, and how much it hurts to get a regular income?

My colleague and I were just griping about students who are perfectly able to do the homework, and do well in the class when they are doing the homework, and then they stop doing the homework, and then they fail the class. I quipped, "They got so excited seeing if they could not do the homework that they never asked stopped to ask if they should not," and now I feel very pleased with myself.

At least if they fail calculus, they probably won't be in a position to forget to ask if they should make dinosaurs.

Learning not to do 50 seems to me like one of the main values of a college degree. But universities don't seem to see it that way anymore, no student should ever fail. So I kinda don't understand what they think the value is.

I think there were lots of smart, good-faith people who worked there and earnestly thought they were one big breakthrough from making some version of the idea work. And remember part of SV startup culture is not just "fake it til you make it" but "pivot til you find a marketable product."

I am not the person to ask about the technical end of this. But the impression I have is that there was no one who in good faith thought that they themselves were one plausible breakthrough away from making any version of it work -- anyone operating in good faith thought that there was someone else in the company who either had or was working on a secret breakthrough.

For Holmes and Balwani, I don't think there's any way to get to good faith, just to what people are describing as ordinary levels of SV bad faith -- promising that you already have a technical solution to a problem when in fact you're just hoping to come up with something. And my sense is that (a) even if that's ordinary fraud, it's still fraud. You might get away with it sometimes, but it's not honest. And (b) there's a difference in degree that can turn into a difference in kind around how hard the unsolved problem is. There are some problems where you can be pretty sure that having smart people working on it for long enough will likely get to a solution, but the finger-stick multiple lab tests problem wasn't one of those, and it's not reasonable to think Holmes and Balwani were confused in good faith about that.

a difference in degree that can turn into a difference in kind

This is also true of image-making, and I wonder where to draw the line. Adopting the Steve Jobs attire easily fits into the realm of clever self-promotion. (As it did with Jobs himself.) But there's something creepy about adopting a different voice. Is that choice a "tell" that there's something seriously fucked up going on here? Or am I adopting a sexist double-standard?

I agree with everything in 53.

Fraud has several necessary elements -- knowingly false statement of material fact, reasonably relied upon, that causes damage. Your garden variety SV bad faith overpromising falls short of fraud, it's hoped, at the final element: your faking turns into making before any chickens actually come home to roost.

Looking at the portions of the NYT article quoted about, I'm left wondering if the piece was actually written by AI.

I'm not saying Holmes was confused in good faith about what was going on in the labs, certainly not as late as 2015. But 19yo Holmes may have been somewhat; remember "100s of tests from a single drop of blood" wasn't the original business plan. I think a lot of people, including her, thought that if they had hundreds of millions of dollars and worked really hard they'd come up with something (not necessarily what they had promised). Ian Gibbons, for example, worked there for five years and thought he was doing something worthwhile.

I thought 55.last presented an opportunity for a clever original joke, but it turns out there is actually a Wikipedia entry for Artificial Stupidity.

54: There was definitely something creepy weird going on. It's not enough to make her not criminally responsible, but again, remember Holmes got into the whole fraud as an undergrad -- she had to have been way, way over her head, and just kept on doubling down rather than extracting herself from the situation.

remember "100s of tests from a single drop of blood" wasn't the original business plan

Wasn't it? What was the original plan that was different (and I think you're implying more practical)?

My memory of Bad Blood is that that was the original plan.

Taylor Swift's lyrics for "Bad Blood" really work for this too, for those of us who are not going to read a whole book.

17. You literally can't do blood tests with just the prick of a finger

Except for the ones you can. You can check somebody's INR (International Normalised Ratio: a measure of clotting time) with a finger prick and a portable reader. I understand that in Germany they issue people on blood thinners a hand held kit and encourage them to adjust their own meds. There are probably a few others.

I imagine Holmes had a list of such tests and built her fraud around it.

she had to have been way, way over her head, and just kept on doubling down rather than extracting herself from the situation.

This is the sort of thing I'm looking for in 44.last. But telling that story would necessarily involve confronting Holmes' criminality, and Holmes isn't going to consent to that.

Holmes' choice of Chozick illustrates how trustworthy Chozick is as a conveyor of bullshit.

The original pitch was an antibiotic patch which was even more physically impossible. So there.

Can we grant that Theranos would have been delighted, in 2005-2010ish, to have been able to do a handful (not hundreds) of tests reliably, on small volumes (not microliters) of blood, in a slick, Apple-ish device that would comfortably fit on a pharmacy counter? And that given $45M and couple of dozen PhDs working for several years, it's not completely outlandish to think that was within the realm of possibility? Now, the investors who were giving Elizabeth Holmes, in particular, millions of dollars to do this in 2004 were complete fools. (I mean, see 5. I don't understand how she raised the money in the first place.) But having snowed those initial investors, did she plausibly think she had a chance to pull it off and be a legend? Sure, why not.

Upon actually reading the profile: I feel like the author is explicitly trying to play up ambiguity and complexity and how-can-we-really-know-anything as an excuse not to actually reconcile the contradictory senses she got from the facts of the cases vs. the personal impressions from when she met Holmes and was rolled.

This is in the oft-quoted "I was essentially writing a story about two different people..." as well as, a little before it:

If you hate Elizabeth Holmes, you probably think her feigned perma-hoarseness was part of an elaborate scheme to defraud investors. If you are a person who is sympathetic to Ms. Holmes, then the James Earl Jones inflection was a sign of the impossible gymnastics that female founders must perform to be taken seriously. If you spend time with Ms. Holmes, as I did, then you might come away like me, and think that, as with many things about Elizabeth Holmes, it was both. Either way, even Mr. Evans agrees, the voice was real weird.

Can we also talk about the babies thing?

Piecing together the timeline:
- 2018: Criminally indicted
- 2019: Marries
- Jul. 2021: Bears first child
- Aug. 2021: Trial begins
- Jan. 2022: Convicted on counts with maximum sentence 20 years
- Nov. 2022: Sentenced to 11.25 years
- Sometime between Nov. 2022 & Feb 2023: Bears second child

I want to err on the side of strong lenity for reproductive choices. But the second pregnancy seems a really questionable choice - giving birth to a baby when strong odds are you will be absent for many formative years?

Can we grant that Theranos would have been delighted, in 2005-2010ish, to have been able to do a handful (not hundreds) of tests reliably, on small volumes (not microliters) of blood, in a slick, Apple-ish device that would comfortably fit on a pharmacy counter?

I don't actually think so? That is, "small volumes"'is pretty binary as I understand it -- there's a fingerstick, but if that's not enough then you need a real blood draw with a phlebotomist. A tabletop machine that could do the tests that everyone already knew you could do with a fingerstick might have been a viable product, but it wouldn't have been a big deal. And they never had anything as far as I know that would have moved a test from the fingerstick category to the real blood draw category.

66.last: Maybe she wants the formative years to be run by someone who isn't a fraud?

Not my place nor my problem, but yeah, I agree. It was cruel of her to have those kids knowing she'd be gone. Or, she was trying to elicit motherhood to force the jury? the judge? into forgiving her and that's also bullshit.

Or, she was trying to elicit motherhood to force the jury? the judge? into forgiving her and that's also bullshit.

I didn't want to say it with my deep lack of motherhood experience/connection, but I was thinking that.

I also discovered in researching 66 that she bought a one-way ticket to Mexico sometime around the verdict. She says it was in anticipation of being acquitted, but no real way to know; the feds flagged it and made sure she couldn't. (Prosecution vs. defense differ on whether the actual booking took place before or after the verdict.)

I'm still fascinated by the 'manifesting' or 'power of positive thinking' mindset that Trump practices. She could also claim that's what she's doing (I haven't read anything about her, but am prepared to judge her based on some clips that YouTube showed me from the movie about her.) with the Mexico tickets and having kids. But there is reality and not all of it can be shaped by mental focus.

She could also have been trying to flee the county.

67: You are pushing everything into a false binary: what's currently feasible vs. what's impossible. Hundreds of people came to work every day over more than a decade thinking they could somehow advance the state of the art enough to make the general idea of Theranos at least somewhat workable. Looked at from the vantage point of 2004-2005, without everything we know now, it was not a self-evidently ludicrous idea, if taken with a grain of salt. It was ludicrous to think Elizabeth Holmes was the right founder for this company.

So crass.

The general distinction of the tests that can be done with a finger prick and what Theranos wanted to do is bulk properties vs molecular tests. Clotting, hematocrit (when they check your iron eg before donating blood) are measuring overall behavior of the blood sample. Theranos wanted to do molecular tests actually quantifying specific molecules in the sample- viruses, proteins, cholesterol, etc. Those have an inherent signal to noise issue because there are only so many copies of the molecules you're looking for and they're in a background of other soup. Some things you probably could detect in nanoscale- specifically anything DNA or RNA based because you can exponentially copy and amplify those- but other molecules just can't give enough signal on that small a scale with any detector due to physical limitations.

66 and much else besides, c'mon, she's a sociopath

65 The thing about this that just jumps out at me right from the start is the personalization. I don't hate EH. I think she's a crook and deserves to go to prison, but I don't have the kind of personal relationship -- even a parasocial relationship -- where an emotion like hate is appropriate. There's surely a whole lot more people like me than there are people who 'hate' her.

Hate connotes an emotionality, even a hint of irrationaility, that's commonly used as an excuse by bad actors. None of us need be listened to wrt Justice Thomas, since we hate him, and are just looking for reasons to justify that,

74: Again, this is second-hand, but I think you're wrong about what was self-evidently ludicrous from a 2004 perspective -- I don't think there was any technical advances that made people realize that Theranos's goals were impractical. The goals were impractical all along for the reasons given in 76, and people who believed in Theranos thought they had made some really impressive, surprising breakthrough, because the whole thing would have been impossible without it.

Holmes just seems like the airplane meme to me. Yes, many successful disruptors were told that their ideas were bad, but when someone tells you your ideas are bad, that's not evidence that you're a success.

That gets us to failure but the fraud is -- do people just throw millions around without having any clue?

More to 74 -- Your argument implies that any successful fraud could be sincere. People believed in Theranos; therefore Theranos' claims were believable; therefore it's reasonable to think that Holmes and Balwani believed in them. And I don't think that works. People believed in Theranos only because Holmes and Balwani were claiming to have made a secret technical advance that allowed them to do something that was very surprising. Trusting Holmes and Balwani was bad judgment, but people who did were relying on something. H and B themselves, however, weren't trusting anyone: they knew there wasn't any secret technical advance.

I think "I sincerely believe we are going to make this breakthrough, therefore I will order an employee to make a fake device to fool investors so we can keep the money flowing toward the eventual breakthrough" would still be fraud.

To 74/79: Remember it was largely because of the technical infeasibility that Theranos raised money primarily from investors without medtech experience.

80.2 I'm sure a whole lot of the early money was sold by wouldn't it be cool if . . . and FOMO on this gal who was so smart that making her stay in a degree program when she could be out saving millions of lives would be a crime in itself.

My dad spent much of his retirement, and a bunch of his savings, getting taken in by one tech investment hustler after another. He always had fun thinking about how cool each product would be if it panned out, and also, tbh, what a hero he'd be when his kids all got hugely rich when these things hit. As that guy said in that ad, 'fortune favors the bold.'

I liked him better as an MIT janitor.

My grandmother got suckered by a get rich quick scheme involving "sisters"-themed mugs. Think how many sisters there are, and how they might like to buy each other a loving mug! Step 6: profit!

She was mugged.

Only because the cuptials were called off too soon.

It was too hot to handle.

It's been a while since I read Bad Blood, but in the later stages of the company, part of what was genuinely evil about Holmes and Balwani was how ruthlessly they hounded people inside the company who had doubts about the technology. It went way beyond fraud.

I'm part way through the profile and just wanted to stop by here to see if everyone noticed that she named her baby Invicta

She likes watches.

Vicki for short, I'm sure.

89- I haven't been paying that much attention to the legal stuff but nobody has been charged with anything related to all the threats and harassment and scary stalking, right? That, to me, seems like worse behavior (in an individual, criminal, actual-harms-experience sense) than the fraud. I've been sort of vaguely surprised every time I'm reminded of the topic, that none of that has been part of any indictments or charges or reprimands or whatever.

A lot of the harassment was done by famous lawyers, so I expect it was within the law (in a "the real scandal is what's legal" sense, not defending them).

93 Punching down on employees and stealing money from rich people are pretty different kinds of activity as viewed by the guardians of rich people's property.

I admit I kind of enjoy it when rich people get defrauded.

It didn't help me at all in any tangible way, but knowing that some asshat was mixing up antique wines in an Arizona condo and selling them to the Koch guy cheered me up for a week.

I've met a few very charismatic politician-types in my life. Not, like, Bill Clinton-levels of charisma, but definitely of that ilk. And every time, the experience has left me feeling somewhere between uneasy to dirty. Talking to one of those people makes me super-suspicious. Their solicitous internet in me makes me want to run for the hills. And that's without knowing that they've been convicted of fraud!!
Maybe real charisma overcomes that feeling, or maybe there's a gendered element to it. But it's baffling to me that a journalist sent to profile a known fraudster wouldn't be on edge the whole time. I don't even mean that as a piece of professional criticism-- I just don't understand how it's psychologically possible.

98 2: it seems plausible to me that she planned the arc of the story in advance. If she did, is that fraud?

There is definitely a brand of academic charisma that leaves me super cold, where I immediately think, "Oh, you're the asshole who thinks you're an idea-man, and everyone else is supposed to carry out your ideas. Because you're not good with details."

Now I'm also terrible with details. But I'm not an asshole who thinks everyone else loves grunt work and lives to serve out my extremely nebulous, ill-formed ideas.

I get paid to deal with details.

I'd rather get paid to sell Carlo Rossi to billionaires, but it never occurred to me.

With rising inequality, counterfeit wine is a growth industry.

103: Did you read the NYT article about counterfeit luxury handbags? I tell you nothing is sacred anymore.

98 IKIMHB, I once met Bill Clinton, and then not long after Hillary, and she was way more charismatic.

I once met Bill Clinton and the next week he needed bypass surgery.

The thing about Elizabeth Holmes is that I think she somehow at some level believed her own bullshit. Like when she was raking in all that money from investors, she wasn't thinking to herself "Suckers! Now I'm rich! Now, how do I manage to keep all this money and stay out of jail when everyone realizes that we have no invention." I think her thoughts were more like "Yes! That all these people are giving me money proves that I am destined for greatness! With all this money and my genius and faith, surely we will succeed!"

"So we just need to tell a few more lies for a few more months, and then it'll all be true!"

Like relationship counseling.

I read Bad Blood when it came out, so it's been a few years, but I came away with the impression that there were at least two phases of Theranos. In the first one they were trying to do something to approximate the promises made but it wasn't quite clear yet (on the inside, if not on the outside) that it was never going to work. During that phase, which probably was still on the fraud side of things, there seemed to be opportunities to do the Silicon Valley pivot thing and come up with something that was actually profitable without being revolutionary.* But instead they kept doubling down, and in the second phase there was a lot of intimidation in order to keep the fraud going that seemed to have a different character than how they were treating people before. I don't think the "charisma" could have held out as long without all the intimidation.

There's also a point where one of the early investors** brought up all kinds of things that didn't add up about the company and thought that his concerns would be taken seriously. Instead he got run out. That might have been the last chance for the company to be something legitimate, but it probably would have meant getting a whole lot of new leadership.

*For example, I guess they could have done something more like what Everlywell has ended up doing.

**I can't remember his exact role, but he'd previously been very successful with Apple and seemed to know what he was talking about in terms of tech and business.

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published an article purporting to document for the first time in ancient Armenia an actual performance of an Elamite version of the epic of Gilgamesh. 20 Their claim was soon proven to be incorrect: the three tablets turned out to be administrative records dealing with taxes and grain deposits.

And weren't they surprised in Utah, too!

63: Holmes' choice of Chozick illustrates how trustworthy Chozick is as a conveyor of bullshit.

I think the piece is somewhat problematic and weird but better than much standard NYT political crap.* Interestingly Chozick (no longer an NYT employee) is one of the few who has faced any consequences for the HRC coverage fiascos. And that was because she ultimately exhibited some self-awareness about it and showed up some editors.**

*Check out the fucking Annie Karni profile of Nancy Mace today for instance (sorry no linky).
And Ms. Mace -- savvy and irreverent -- has become fluent in the art of the political troll, finding ways to signal to the MAGA base that she hasn't forsaken it.
She has repeatedly, and baselessly, accused the Biden family of being involved in "prostitution rings."
"So savvy! And yet there's a smack of irreverence to it." Holy fucksticks Batman!

**She *was* the author on the worse single Times debacle of the campaign--where the Times paid a Bannon guy money for a several day exclusive headstart on covering Clinton Cash. Does not get as much attention as the emails because it never caught on that much outside of the NYT political reporters and the NY FBI office but it was utter shit and the Times terminally debased themselves with it (in a sane world) . But I think Chozick was merely assigned it; Haberman sent an enthusiastic anticipatory tweet about it.

65: I feel like the author is explicitly trying to play up ambiguity and complexity and how-can-we-really-know-anything as an excuse not to actually reconcile the contradictory senses she got from the facts of the cases vs. the personal impressions from when she met Holmes and was rolled.

As others have noted this kind of thing is infuriating when it is presented as some holy shit mind-boggling thing. How do they think these type folks operate? "Surprisingly we did not find any evidence of their having kicked puppies."