Free for All Friday
Free for All Friday
You want links? We've got links. Stick around as we get everything going full-steam again.
We’re back with another Free for ALL Friday!
Each week I keep track of some of the off-the-path things I've read that I thought were interesting enough to share, and list them here. We work extra-hard to make sure you never hit a paywall, using my own subscriptions, gift links, and other (100% legal) hocus-pocus.
This had been running on my daily email — now known as Big Optimism (sign up here!). But I think it makes sense to bring it over here, instead. Feel free to share other gift links and free links in the comments. But please: No acrimonious politics; there are a lot of other places for that.
I have a gut feeling that the last story I have listed will be the most-popular, most-clicked, and most-shared. Let me know if I guessed right.
On a Washington D.C. Sidewalk, a Race to Save a Marine General’s Life
Let's start with a positive story, well-told.
Gen. Eric M. Smith collapsed in cardiac arrest while out for a run. This is the remarkable, previously untold story of how he survived.
The top U.S. Marine general stepped out for a run on a warm, late afternoon last fall, pounding the pavement on a routine three-mile loop. General Eric Smith had spent the morning cheering on participants in the annual Marine Corps Marathon.
A few blocks away, Timothy and Joyce LaLonde concluded a celebratory post-race lunch and began the walk back to Joyce’s nearby home. The siblings, accompanied by several family members, were shaken by what they encountered: A man facedown on the sidewalk — alone, unresponsive and bleeding from his mouth.
“Tim, come!” Joyce LaLonde recalled yelling to her brother. “Hurry!”
The ensuing scramble saved the life of the Marine Corps commandant, 59, a father of two who had suffered cardiac arrest, just a block from his home at Marine Barracks Washington — a crisis in which the speed and quality of medical intervention proved vital.
For the first time, those directly connected to Smith’s rescue have publicly detailed how he survived.
“If you were to have this scenario play out 1,000 times, maybe five people … would survive it like he did,” said Smith’s cardiac surgeon, Thomas MacGillivray.
Howard Schultz Is Back-Seat Driving Starbucks. That’s a Problem for His Successor
I saw someone on Twitter opine that Starbucks has now entered its Subway phase: still ubiquitous, but fading, failing, and a place many of us (myself included) never think to patronize anymore. It seems like Howard Schultz might agree.
The tale behind his recent public outburst. Meanwhile, the CEO rallies staff, ‘Are you in it to win it?’
Howard Schultz, the legendary entrepreneur who turned a local coffee chain into a global icon, said in late 2022 that he had no plans to keep an office at headquarters nor be in the building once his successor, Laxman Narasimhan, took over.
He would let Narasimhan run the business with a clear mandate and a singular voice.
There would be only one boss, and “that’s me,” Narasimhan said at the time. “I will listen to him but there will be times I won’t agree with him. We will resolve those things privately.”
That lasted barely a year.
It all exploded into public view Sunday night when Schultz wrote a LinkedIn post that read like an open letter to shareholders criticizing how Narasimhan and his senior leaders were running the business. On the heels of the company’s weak earnings report, the 70-year-old declared that Starbucks had to improve service to its U.S. customers. He challenged executives to tie on one of the chain’s signature green aprons and better root themselves in the coffee giant’s history and culture.
“Don’t try to do everything at once,” he wrote. “Leaders must model both humility and confidence as they work to restore trust and increase performance across the organization.”
The C.E.O.s Who Just Won’t Quit
Ironic follow-on article, right?
What happens to a company — and the economy — when the boss refuses to retire?
Of the many riddles that confront corporate chief executives in the course of their work, perhaps the most important is when to quit. The cost of overstaying is steep, especially when tallied in missed opportunities: Steve Ballmer, who led Microsoft for 14 years, famously scoffed at the invention of the iPhone, believing that businesspeople would never want it because it didn’t have a keyboard.
“You interview a million people, and you will be hard pressed to find anyone who loves his company and loves what they do as much as I do,” says Greg Brown, 63, who has been chief executive of Motorola since 2008. “I don’t even consider it work. I don’t have hobbies.”
Workers of all kinds and levels say they are going to defer retirement. That’s especially true of striving and hard-driving institutional leaders; just look to Washington D.C. But particularly for the people running corporate America, the reasons to overstay in leadership are even more compelling. There’s the authority, the personal assistant, the corner-office views, the feeling of being needed, the flattering, the deference and, of course, the money.
“Most leaders, left to their own devices, will not know when it’s the right time for them to leave,” says Ranjay Gulati, a professor at Harvard Business School. “It’s really hard to stay grounded and humble when everyone is telling you you’re right.”
Is It Easy for Migrants to Enter the U.S.? We Went to the Border to Find Out
Nearly 40 years ago, a writer named Ted Conover wrote a book called Coyotes: A Journey Across Borders with America's Mexican Migrants, which documented some of his travels with Mexican workers who had crossed the Mexico-U.S. border. I always liked Conover's work (he later got a job as a New York corrections officer in order to write Newjack, about what life was like in Sing-Sing Prison).
That's what drew me to this article in which reporters went to the southern border to follow first-hand as a family from Venezuela try to find a way across the border, along with thousands of others waiting for one of about 100 asylum appointments per day.
The writers definitely have a perspective, and of course this was a much smaller project than what Conover did in 1987. But, I thought they fairly presented the lives of the would-be immigrants and the border officials who are trying to deal with six times as many people trying to get across the border now as in 2019.
Across the United States, Vintage Motels Are Being Imagined for Modern Times
The re-envisioned lodgings offer easy car-to-door access but also all the amenities of a boutique property, from local artwork to on-site fire pits.
“There are pretty strict building moratoriums around here,” says Ryan Fortini, a Cayucos resident who co-owns the town’s Pacific Motel with his wife, Marisa Fortini. “If you really want to go after a creative project, you’ve got to reinvent something that already exists.” So in January 2020, the couple bought a run-down Cayucos motor lodge called the Dolphin Inn and then spent the next two and a half years transforming it.
When their newly named Pacific Motel finally opened its doors in September 2022, the revamped property introduced a new kind of boutique lodging to the tiny beachside town.
It also became part of a wave of re-envisioned motels that are infusing new life into old properties across the United States—and creating new ways of engaging with communities in the process.
A Subreddit for Dumbphones Is the Smartest Place Online
Perhaps it's not the smartest thing for me to spread an article about dumbphones to an audience, at least half or more of which is reading this on a smartphone. But I found the story, and the reddit sub it references, worth sharing.
If you’re stressed about screen time, r/Dumbphones can show you a better way.
Dumbphone Life, as r/Dumbphones moderator Jose Briones told me, is about “recovering your time and attention for the things you actually value.” Of course, getting sucked into a subreddit because it was algorithmically suggested to me—based on my extensive online browsing—is the antithesis of that. But it’s how I found r/Dumbphones, now my favorite place on the internet.
LINKS: Wired — and the subreddit
The Unwanted Shelter Dog Who Found His Way to Westminster
I just have a gut feeling that this will be the most-clicked article on the page.
An animal whisperer and her feisty mutt Miles are among the hopefuls at the dog show’s agility competition.
A strange thing happened a few years ago when Christine Longnecker, who teaches horseback riding in and around Erie County, Pa., brought her new rescue dog, Miles, to a class. Instead of waiting quietly with the other non-horses in the barn, Miles suddenly sprinted into the ring and bounded over the fences himself.
“He looked so excited,” Ms. Longnecker said. “And then he turned and barked as if to say, ‘This is how you do it.’”
That was the beginning of Miles’s career as an agility dog — the sort of dog you might see sprinting over and through obstacles while its owner frantically rushes around, yelling commands. On Saturday, he is scheduled to compete for the second time in the agility competition at the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show.
While Tuesday’s classic dog show finals, with best in show on the line, are open only to good-looking purebred dogs, the agility competition rewards speed, intelligence and enthusiasm. Any dog can compete, no matter who its parents are.
Miles is an All-American dog, the American Kennel Club’s name for mutts: 40 percent cattle dog, 23 percent Labrador, 10 percent Border collie and 27 percent mélange of hound, according to a dog DNA test.
He is also an unlikely success story: a once virtually unadoptable rescue dog who now competes against the top agility dogs in the country.
LINK: The New York Times
Won’t click on any NPR links
Enjoyed almost all of these Bill and as you guessed, the dog story won my first prize with the Marine Corp general’s rescue. He has no idea really how lucky he was to have survived that even with being in fine physical shape. It just wasn’t his time yet. So glad for everyone.