the last book I ever read (The Yellow House: A Memoir by Sarah M. Broom, excerpt eight)

from National Book Award winner The Yellow House: A Memoir by Sarah M. Broom:

By evening, all of us who had traveled to the French Quarter for work from elsewhere wore the day’s labor on our bodies. We could place each other instantly by our uniforms: Napoleon House workers wore all black with white lettering on the breast pocket; women in black dresses with white aprons and scalloped hats were cleaning women at one of the hotels. If you wore a grass-green outfit, the ugliest of them all, you worked at the Monteleone Hotel. Black-and-white-checkered pants like those Michael wore with clog shoes meant you belonged to the kitchen of any one of the restaurants. My uniform was khaki pants, a burgundy cap, and a matching polo shirt with a CC’s emblem.

The malicious New Orleans heat could seem to crawl inside, affecting your brain so that walking felt like fighting air. New Orleans humidity is a mood. To say to someone “It’s humid today” is to comment on the mind-set. The air worsened the closer you came to the Mississippi River and wet you entirely so that by day’s end my hair was zapped of all its sheen and my clothes stuck to the body in all the wrong places. I needed a bathtub by the time I made it to work, so imagine how I looked at the end of the day, for travel home.

the last book I ever read (The Yellow House: A Memoir by Sarah M. Broom, excerpt seven)

from National Book Award winner The Yellow House: A Memoir by Sarah M. Broom:

Darryl became “Praise the Lord” man whenever he was in recovery, saying “Praise the Lord” like a tic after every single sentence no matter its relevance. After rehab, trust regained, he would reenter the Yellow House and find temporary work—at a candy factory, say. He’d work until his second paycheck, then start back on drugs. I always knew when he was using because he was moody and jumpy, sleeping for too long on the couch. Sometimes, when I tried to wake him, afraid that he was dead, he’d call me Fatso. I had wide shoulders and big thighs.

“Who even uses that word?” I’d say to him.

The Darryl we loved, but rarely saw now, was extremely funny, a wordsmith, teller of the best tales. It was less what he said, more how he said it. He had a comedian’s timing. He told tongue twisters using a lot of curse words, which made me crack up laughing, especially in those years when I could hear better than I could see. Sometimes, when we were younger, all of us who were in the house at any given time would end up in Mom’s pink-painted bedroom while Darryl regaled us with ordinary stories made to sound fantastical. How a bullet grazed his face during a fight over a girl at a middle school dance, leaving a scar under his eye that looks like a folded leaf. “I just kept dancing, you know, baby, those legs kept moving. Ain’t no thing,” Darryl claimed. Sometime we’d feel so free in our togetherness that we’d have the nerve to jump on Mom’s bed. It would be all laughs and smiles and sometimes jabs and light wrestling when Darryl would interrupt with what we thought was yet another wry story. “I’m the black sheep of the family,” he would say to ruin everyone’s mood.

the last book I ever read (The Yellow House: A Memoir by Sarah M. Broom, excerpt six)

from National Book Award winner The Yellow House: A Memoir by Sarah M. Broom:

Shame is a slow creeping. The most powerful things are quietest, if you think about it. Like water.

I cannot pinpoint the precise moment when I came to understand that no one outside our family was ever to come inside the Yellow House. During the Livingston days my mother started saying, You know this house not all that comfortable for other people. And that line seemed after a time unending, a verbal tic so at home with us that she need not ever complete the sentence.

the last book I ever read (The Yellow House: A Memoir by Sarah M. Broom, excerpt five)

from National Book Award winner The Yellow House: A Memoir by Sarah M. Broom:

“Can I have some?” I still want to know.

My mother stirs a pot on the stove.

I change tack.

“The teddy bear needs a pickle,” I say to Mom who moves around seven-year-old me like I am invisible.

the last book I ever read (The Yellow House: A Memoir by Sarah M. Broom, excerpt four)

from National Book Award winner The Yellow House: A Memoir by Sarah M. Broom:

The Red Barn on the corner of Chef and Wilson that before blasted Nancy Sinatra’s “These Boots Are Made for Walkin’” became the Ebony Barn with Lee Dorsey’s “Working in the Coal Mine” coming off the stereos, serving a new clientele. Around this same time, constructions began on a public housing project, a scattered site some city planners called it, on Chef Menteur Highway just next door to the Ebony Barn. Its proper name was Pecan Grove, but on the streets it was just the Grove. Before it was all the way finished, the children on the short end sold Ms. Schmidt’s fallen pecans to the construction workers. Ms. Schmidt couldn’t have cared less; she was leaving the East soon anyway. The Grove would house 221 apartments in a reddish-brown brick, two-story compound. According to the newspapers, it was an “experiment” meant to bring residents from several different downtown housing projects closer to New Orleans East, which soon-to-be residents would call the country. From the start of the complex’s going up, Simon Broom said it would infest everything around. He pointed to Press Park, where Ivory Mae’s sister, Elaine, living, another scattered site, more westward. Press Park had been built on top of the Agriculture Street Landfill, ninety-five acres and seventeen feet of cancer-causing waste.

By the late 1970s, the racial composition of the East had flipped. Within twenty years, the area had gone from mostly empty to mostly white (investment) to mostly black (divestment).

the last book I ever read (The Yellow House: A Memoir by Sarah M. Broom, excerpt three)

from National Book Award winner The Yellow House: A Memoir by Sarah M. Broom:

From the beginning, no one could agree on what to call the place. But namelessness is a form of naming. It was a vast swath of land, more than 40,000 acres. Some people called it Gentilly East, others plain Gentilly. Show-offs called it Chantilly, supposedly after French-speaking city founders. It was called the area “east of the Industrial Canal,” “Orleans East,” or just “eastern New Orleans.” Some people called it by their neighborhood names, what used to be: Orangedale or Citrus. Pines Village, Little Woods, or Plum Orchard. My generation would call it the East.

Big Texas money bought a single name that stuck: its vast cypress swamps were acquired by a single firm, New Orleans East Inc., formed by Texas millionaires Toddie Lee Wynne and Clint “Midas Touch” Murchison, one of whom owned the Dallas Cowboys, both of whom owned oil companies. Everything, they felt, could be drained. “Like the early explorers, New Orleans now gazes out over its remaining underdeveloped acreage to the east,” Ray Samuel, a local advertising man hired by New Orleans East Inc., wrote in a promotional pamphlet. “Here lies the opportunity for the city’s further expansion, toward the complete realization of its destiny.” That was the dream.

the last book I ever read (The Yellow House: A Memoir by Sarah M. Broom, excerpt two)

from National Book Award winner The Yellow House: A Memoir by Sarah M. Broom:

Edna and Uncle Goody lived uptown on Philip Street in a community of women where everyone called themselves something other than their given name, it seemed, where familial relationships were often based on need rather than blood. What you decided to call yourself, these women seemed to say, was genealogy too.

The disappeared Rosanna Perry had two sisters who were part of this community. People called her eldest sister Mama. Mama also answered to Aunt Shugah (Shew-gah), a supposedly Creolized version of Sugar except it is actually only a restating of the English word, the stress moved elsewhere. Aunt Shugah’s actual name was Bertha Riens. She was also sister to Tontie Swede, short for Sweetie. Aunt Shugah was the biological mother of a woman who only ever called herself TeTe, with whom Amelia shared a sisterhood even though they were cousins.

These women, who lived in close proximity, composed a home. They were the real place—more real than the City of New Orleans—where Amelia resided. In this world, Amelia became Lolo, another version of her name entirely, the origins of which no one can pinpoint. Everyone called her Lolo, no one uttered her given name again, not even her eventual children, which exacted on the one hand a distance between child and parent and on the other an unnatural closeness and knowing.

the last book I ever read (The Yellow House: A Memoir by Sarah M. Broom, excerpt one)

from National Book Award winner The Yellow House: A Memoir by Sarah M. Broom:

I can see him there now, in my mind’s eye, silent and holding a beer. Babysitting ruins. But that is not his language or sentiment; he would never betray the Yellow House like that.

Carl often finds company on Wilson Avenue where he keeps watch. Friends will arrive and pop their trunks, revealing coolers containing spirits on ice. “Help yourself, baby,” they will say. If someone has to pee, they do it in what used to be our den. Or they use the bright-blue porta potty sitting at the back of the yard, where the shed once was. Now, this plastic, vertical bathroom is the only structure on the lot. Written on its front in white block letters on black background: CITY OF NEW ORLEANS.

the last book I ever read (Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber by Mike Isaac, excerpt fourteen)

from Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber by Mike Isaac:

Worse for Kalanick, his board of directors was putting new pressure on him to fire Anthony Levandowski. By late March, the dirt that had come out on Levandowski turned him into a major liability.

In December 2016, Levandowski had launched a self-driving-car test program in San Francisco without a permit and in direct defiance of the California transit authorities, who called the maneuver illegal. Almost immediately, the test program went awry. One of Uber’s test cars blew through a red light in broad daylight, an event captured on the dashboard camera of a nearby motorist. As the clip went viral online, Uber issued a statement: “This incident was due to human error. This vehicle was not part of the pilot and was not carrying customers. The driver involved has been suspended while we continue to investigate. This is why we believe so much in making the roads safer by building self-driving Ubers.”

But three months later, the New York Times published a story, citing internal documents, that claimed Uber’s narrative was false; it was the self-driving software that missed the red light, not the driver. Uber had lied to reporters, on the record, about an illegal program it was running in its hometown.

the last book I ever read (Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber by Mike Isaac, excerpt thirteen)

from Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber by Mike Isaac:

It was the leather jackets that truly stuck out in Fowler’s mind. Earlier in the year, all of the site reliability engineers were promised leather jackets as a gift from the company, a nice team-building perk to reward employees. Uber had taken all of their measurements and would buy them for the group later in the year. Weeks later, the six remaining women in Fowler’s division, including Fowler, received an email. The director told the group of women that they wouldn’t be getting leather jackets after all; Uber got a group discount on the 120 men’s jackets they were able to find. But since there were so few women in the organization, they weren’t able to find a bulk rate. That lack of a deal, the director said, made it untenable to justify placing a jacket order for the six women in the organization.

the last book I ever read (Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber by Mike Isaac, excerpt twelve)

from Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber by Mike Isaac:

Brazil was in upheaval when Uber arrived in 2015. Unemployment was at an all-time high, and violent crime and murder rates across Brazil were skyrocketing. While the lack of jobs meant many more Brazilians were willing to drive for Uber, the cash bankroll of each day’s earnings made them a tempting target for thieves. At least sixteen drivers were murdered in Brazil before Kalanick’s product team improved identity verification and security in the app.

the last book I ever read (Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber by Mike Isaac, excerpt eleven)

from Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber by Mike Isaac:

But during the “charm offensive” Josh Mohrer, Uber’s brash and cocky general manager in Manhattan, had made a grave mistake. In an interview that week he let slip a mention of an early version of “Heaven,” a tool that provided a “God View” of riders on trips in real time. The reporter had taken an Uber to meet with Mohrer that afternoon. Mohrer bragged that he had tracked her the whole way. The comment would not go unnoticed.

Eight days after the first story broke, Quentin’s team was hit with a bombshell. As scrutiny intensified in the wake of Uber’s recent scandals, an enterprising young hacker in Arizona named Joe Giron had decoded Uber’s Android application and found the list of data access permissions Uber’s app requested upon installation. The litancy went far beyond what most Uber users expected: phone book, camera access, text message conversation logs, access to Wi-Fi connections. These were permissions that were suspect for any app to request, much less a taxi service. Why would a ride-hailing app need access to their customers’ text messages or camera? It was seen as a broad overreach into users’ privacy. Not only was Uber willing to go after journalists, but the company also wanted to know everything about you and your phone.

the last book I ever read (Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber by Mike Isaac, excerpt ten)

from Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber by Mike Isaac:

Pham’s fraud specialists soon proved invaluable—and not just in China. In Brooklyn, the team watched as credit card thieves used stolen card numbers to run drug trafficking and prostitution rings using Uber vehicles. The ruse was simple: the dealers would buy stolen credit card numbers from the Dark Web, then plug those number into the app to charge Uber trips to the stolen accounts. Over hundreds of trips per week they delivered drugs and call girls throughout New York City—all paid by Uber incentives, or through chargebacks from credit card companies after the original card owners reported the fraud.

After monitoring the criminals for months, Uber eventually partnered with the New York Police Department to help take the scammers down in a complicated sting operation. Over the court of a single Uber ride, the police would obtain a report from a credit card company, call the driver of the vehicle and tell them to pull over, then arrest the rider on a number of charges, including credit card fraud, possession of narcotics, prostitution, and so on. Though they would never brag about it publicly, the fraud team helped the NYPD take out the entire operation.

the last book I ever read (Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber by Mike Isaac, excerpt nine)

from Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber by Mike Isaac:

Kalanick knew he had made some unforced errors. In the midst of the GQ profile, he let it slip that his newfound tech celebrity, and the attendant riches, made attracting women much easier now than it was when, say, he was living with his parents while building Red Swoosh. On-demand woman, he joked, wasn’t that far off.

“We call that boob-er,” Kalanick told the reporter.

Suddenly, Kalanick wasn’t just a grown man-child in readers’ eyes, he was a blatant misogynist. One particularly cringe-worthy paragraph in the GQ story had Kalanick quoting the infamous Charlie Sheen, describing Uber’s potential success as “hashtag winning.” He name-dropped boutique hotels in Miami like the Shore Club and SLS as places he’d rather be than hustling at Uber. He was trying to be honest—and perhaps a little bit cool—but to the public he sounded like an enormous douchebag.

the last book I ever read (Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber by Mike Isaac, excerpt eight)

from Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber by Mike Isaac:

Taxi owners knew they had to stop Uber. In some major cities, taxi owners had paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to purchase “medallions,” taxi-service permits required by the local government. Medallions could be absurdly expensive, upwards of a million dollars in peak markets like New York City. Drives and dispatchers took out huge mortgages to buy them. The limited number of medallions created an artificially constrained market, which meant cab drivers and taxi company owners could charge enough to earn a decent living (and pay for the medallion).

Then Uber showed up. The medallion system—a market based entirely on scarcity and exclusivity—was threatened to its core. With UberX, the company’s peer-to-peer service, anyone with a car could drive for Uber. That simple concept destroyed Big Taxi’s barrier-to-entry system, sending the price of medallions plummeting. In 2011, medallions in Manhattan were going for $1 million apiece; six years later, one fire-sale auction of forty-six medallions in Queens fetched an average price of $186,000 per medallion. Overnight, taxi drivers whose entire livelihoods were tied up in paying off an expensive medallion went underwater.

Cabbies were aghast. Doug Schifter, a livery driver from Manhattan, faced financial ruin after the rise of Uber wrecked his income driving for traditional car services. Schifter drove to City Hall in Lower Manhattan on a cold Monday morning in February 2018, put a shotgun to his head, and pulled the trigger.

the last book I ever read (Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber by Mike Isaac, excerpt seven)

from Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber by Mike Isaac:

Once Google had bought Levandowski’s startup, he dove headlong into mapping and self-driving tech for his superiors, joining the secretive Google X division. Colleagues said Levandowski deserved much of the credit for convincing Google’s top brass, especially Larry Page, to pour millions into self-driving research. And by virtue of working on a project dear to the CEO’s heart, Levandowski began to develop a special relationship with Page.

But he was also shrewd. When Google ought 510 Systems, Levandowski sold it for just under the amount that would have required him to share the profits with the fifty or so employees under him, depriving dozens of his colleague of a rich payday. Even worse, Google hired less than half of 510 Systems’ staff. The rest had little to show for their time spent working on Levandowski’s robots.

the last book I ever read (Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber by Mike Isaac, excerpt six)

from Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber by Mike Isaac:

In theory, regulators were against Lyft’s antics; after all, the company was breaking rules. Uber had been recruiting drivers for some time, but within limits; all of Uber’s drivers were licensed livery vehicle operators registered with local transportation offices. Lyft turned that on its head. The mustachioed startup invited anyone with a car and an ordinary Class C driver’s license to start driving for Lyft.

But as one Uber employee competing with Lyft at the time said, “The law isn’t what is written. It’s what is enforced.” To Kalanick’s dismay, SF transit authorities weren’t enforcing a damn thing. For all his bluster about ignoring regulators and disrupting an industry, Kalanick hadn’t actually gone as far as Lyft and Sidecar. Up until then he hadn’t been willing to cross the line into extreme ride-sharing.

the last book I ever read (Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber by Mike Isaac, excerpt five)

from Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber by Mike Isaac:

Kalanick was growing nervous. Across town at Uber’s headquarters, he had heard about Zimride’s plans, and he had heard whispers about Sunil Paul’s escapades, too. Kalanick considered Mark Zuckerberg a friend—or at least a familiar acquaintance—and the Facebook CEO had given Kalanick a heads up. Facebook employees were going crazy for Sidecar, Zuckerberg told him. Zuckerberg warned Kalanick that he might want to keep an eye on the company.

Soon after, Green and Zimmer announced their pivot. Zimride would abandon its long-distance carpooling program and launch a new service called Lyft; the plan was to make casual ride-sharing a fun, friendly experience, asking passengers to ride shotgun next to their drivers and strike up friendships while joyriding to their destination. The cherry on top was a cutesy pink mustache. Lyft sent all of its drivers giant, whimsical, plush hood ornaments to affix to the front of their cars. It was an instant hit.

the last book I ever read (Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber by Mike Isaac, excerpt four)

from Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber by Mike Isaac:

The founder’s instinct proved correct. Uber’s guerilla tactics far outmatched the resources and technical acumen of government workers or taxi operators. In Seattle, for instance, Austin Geidt dropped in like a paratrooper, quickly hiring ground support staff to drum up interest from riders and drivers. Ryan Graves then swooped in and made the pitch to town car companies: “We’re giving your drivers a way to earn extra money.” In a matter of weeks, Uber was able to grow its ridership before the city even knew what had happened. By the time regulators had arrived, Uber was too popular with citizens to try and shut it down. Once Uber hit critical mass, transportation authorities lacked the manpower to stop the fleet.

To Kalanick, Uber wasn’t doing anything wrong. After all, these were official limo and town car drivers, operating well-maintained, insured vehicles and using Uber’s service to make extra money during inefficient downtime. Everyone working for Uber was a licensed, professional driver—period. (This was before UberX allowed anyone with a car to become a driver.) As Uber’s footprint spread across the United States—Seattle, New York, Los Angeles, Chicago—it became more popular and thus more difficult for cities to block the company.

the last book I ever read (Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber by Mike Isaac, excerpt three)

from Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber by Mike Isaac:

What Gurley admired was the potential for scale. Most startups took a business that already existed and tried to make it slightly better or more efficient. Uber promised to upend an entire industry, one that had seen little innovation in decades. The sheer size of the taxi market could make Uber worth billions if the company continued its growth trajectory. And best of all, this new entity, potentially worth billions, had been created out of thin air. It could theoretically drag the entire transportation industry out of the analog world and into the digital one practically overnight. Best of all, whoever did the dragging would set the terms for the entire marketplace.

By downloading the Uber app, riders gave themselves the power and freedom to summon a car instantly, to any location, at any time. And drivers didn’t need to spend hundreds of dollars installing some cumbersome box in their dashboard to connect to these customers. Maybe they’d have to spend ten bucks on a dashboard smartphone caddy—Uber would give them the phone for free.

the last book I ever read (Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber by Mike Isaac, excerpt two)

from Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber by Mike Isaac:

Rob Hayes, a partner at First Round Capital, saw Camp’s Twitter schtick and was intrigued. He sent an email, met the company, and quickly cut a check for nearly half a million dollars in the company’s first “seed” round of funding. Chris Sacca, a friend from Kalanick’s “JamPad” days, also threw in a chunk of capital, along with a handful of other close acquaintances who became “advisors”—a glorified title for early supporters. Of the early group of seed investors, though, Hayes and Sacca were the most hands-on, offering advice and strategy. Hayes and Saccas’s seed investments would one day be worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

the last book I ever read (Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber by Mike Isaac, excerpt one)

from Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber by Mike Isaac:

But the crown jewel was the final musical guest. As Uberettos lined the venue inside the Palms hotel, the house lights went dark and the stage filled with smoke. A voice began to sing the first few slow bars of a familiar song. Then she appeared. Wrapped in a blood-red jumpsuit, sequins shimmering against the neon beams behind her, fog machines wrapping her in mist. The words started coming into focus, a hit all the twentysomething employees knew by heart: “Got me looking so crazy right now, your love’s got me looking so crazy right now. . . .”

Employees began screaming as the singer stepped into the spotlight. They realized what Kalanick had done: He got Beyoncé.

the last book I ever read (The Education of Brett Kavanaugh by Robin Pogrebin and Kate Kelly, excerpt fourteen)

from The Education of Brett Kavanaugh: An Investigation by Robin Pogrebin and Kate Kelly:

When the FBI’s investigation was completed, McConnell announced that its results would not be made publicly available; the White House would loan the FBI report to Congress for just twenty-four hours, starting on October 4, and senators would have to view it in a special soundproof reading room in the Senate building known as a sensitive comparmented information facility, or SCIF.

To enter the SCIF, senators had to go past a guard through a set of heavy metal double doors requiring punched access codes. The viewing began at 8 a.m., with Grassley getting the first look, followed by Feinstein at 9 a.m. Then, at ten, Senate Judiciary Republicans were invited in, followed by the committee’s Democrats at eleven, and so on in alternating intervals. The legislators were not allowed to take notes on paper or to bring in any personal electronic devices. They were not provided copies. They could not bring in staffers. They could not relay any of the findings.

the last book I ever read (The Education of Brett Kavanaugh by Robin Pogrebin and Kate Kelly, excerpt thirteen)

from The Education of Brett Kavanaugh: An Investigation by Robin Pogrebin and Kate Kelly:

At least one senator’s office learned of Ford’s supposition that Keyser had driven her home on the night of the gathering. But whatever credibility that detail might have lent to Ford’s account risked being undermined by Keyser herself, whose history of addiction made her a problematic witness to put on national television.

Months after Kavanaugh was already sitting on the court, a copy of a National Review article on his confirmation hung, framed, in Keyser’s downstairs bathroom. Dated October 8, 2018, it bore the headline “Was Leland Keyser the Hero of the Kavanaugh Controversy?”

the last book I ever read (The Education of Brett Kavanaugh by Robin Pogrebin and Kate Kelly, excerpt twelve)

from The Education of Brett Kavanaugh: An Investigation by Robin Pogrebin and Kate Kelly:

Benjamin Wittes, the editor in chief of the blog Lawfare and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, concurred in The Atlantic: “If I were a senator, I would not vote to confirm Brett Kavanaugh.” Wittes added that he wrote those words “with no pleasure, but with deep sadness,” since he had a long relationship with the judge.

“He delivered on Thursday, by way of defense, a howl of rage,” Wittes wrote. “His opening statement was an unprecedentedly partisan outburst of emotion from a would-be justice. I do not begrudge him the emotion, even the anger. He has been through a kind of hell that would leave any person gasping for air. But I cannot condone the partisanship—which was raw, undisguised, naked, and conspiratorial—from someone who asks for public faith as a dispassionate and impartial judicial actor. His performance was wholly inconsistent with the conduct we should expect from a member of the judiciary.”

the last book I ever read (The Education of Brett Kavanaugh by Robin Pogrebin and Kate Kelly, excerpt eleven)

from The Education of Brett Kavanaugh: An Investigation by Robin Pogrebin and Kate Kelly:

Kavanaugh’s portrayal of his drinking in college did not square with what Ludington remembered: a college classmate who would drink so much that he was completely “shit-faced” by the end of an evening. The Kavanaugh whom Ludington had known would slur his words and be belligerent. To see Kavanaugh spinning his college drinking in such a misleading way made Ludington decide to speak out. “I simply wanted to say, ‘This is what I do know: the idea that Brett was never blacked out is preposterous,” he later recalled. “Because you don’t get as drunk as he got and remember everything.”

Despite the occasional concessions—“Sometimes I had too many beers,” for example, and the apology to Renate Dolphin—many of Kavanaugh’s classmates from both Yale and Georgetown Prep felt he had shown a lack of candor. Like Ludington, they had observed Kavanaugh drunk and seemingly out of control at times. They had been that drunk themselves and believed they would admit it under the same circumstances. Anything less, these people felt, would be fundamentally dishonest—an unforgivable trait for a Supreme Court candidate.

On September 30, the Sunday after the contentious hearings, Ludington put out a statement. “I do not believe that the heavy drinking or even loutish behavior of an 18- or even 21-year-old should condemn a person for the rest of his life. I would be a hypocrite to think so,” Ludington wrote. “However, I have direct and repeated knowledge about his drinking and his disposition while drunk. And I do believe that Brett’s actions as a 53-year-old federal judge matter.”

the last book I ever read (The Education of Brett Kavanaugh by Robin Pogrebin and Kate Kelly, excerpt ten)

from The Education of Brett Kavanaugh: An Investigation by Robin Pogrebin and Kate Kelly:

The exchange with Klobuchar, even in light of the Clinton reference and the Graham outburst, would be regarded by many as a new low point in the Kavanaugh hearings. As damaging as the Ford allegations were, as excruciating as it had been to watch her, and as exercised as Kavanaugh had been up to then, nothing had appeared quite so impertinent as him turning the tables on a senior female senator who had just opened up about her own family history with alcohol.

Klobuchar, after all, was effectively interviewing Kavanaugh for a job as his superior in that context. She was using compassionate, deferential language and requesting honest answers. Yet Kavanaugh pounced on her, perhaps hoping to give her a sense of the personal anguish and humiliation he was experiencing.

the last book I ever read (The Education of Brett Kavanaugh by Robin Pogrebin and Kate Kelly, excerpt nine)

from The Education of Brett Kavanaugh: An Investigation by Robin Pogrebin and Kate Kelly:

On September 24, shortly after the Fox interview, The New York Times reported that Kavanaugh and his close high school friends, including Mark Judge, had bragged at Georgetown Prep about their sexual interactions with Renate Schroeder—a student at the nearby girls’ school Stone Ridge who was a year younger—and memorialized their assertions with a club dubbed “Renate Alumnius” in their yearbook.

The boasts about fooling around or having sex with Schroeder, which were made around the fields and hallways of Prep—and in a ditty about her that was published in an inexplicit form on Kavanaugh’s friend Michael Walsh’s yearbook page—were frequent and offensive during the early 1980s. All in all, Kavanaugh and thirteen other boys had Renate references on their personal yearbook pages. A group photo of the future judge and some of his closest friends in their football gear was captioned “Renate Alumni,” which, in that context, suggested they had all been physically involved with her.

Through his attorney Alex Walsh, Kavanaugh denied having boasted about such sexual conquests. But Renate herself, now a Connecticut wife and mother with the married name Dolphin, called out the “insinuation” as “horrible, hurtful, and simply untrue.” Although she had been friends with Kavanaugh and other members of his circle at the time, she had not known of the sexual references implied by the yearbook or the song that belittled her. She and her friends from that era said she had never had sex with any of the Prep boys.

the last book I ever read (The Education of Brett Kavanaugh by Robin Pogrebin and Kate Kelly, excerpt eight)

from The Education of Brett Kavanaugh: An Investigation by Robin Pogrebin and Kate Kelly:

She was a diligent, obedient student, becoming valedictorian at her Catholic elementary school, St. Lawrence, and excelling at her Catholic high school, St. Joseph. “She dedicated everything to school—she did not get in trouble, I don’t even think she dated,” recalled LeBlanc. “She just was determined to succeed, and she was going to go out and get it. And she did.” Ramirez worked summers serving ice cream at Carvel, driving there in the used car she’d bought with $500 of her babysitting earnings. Unable to afford full freight at Yale (nearly $13,000 at the time for tuition, room, and board; $72,100 in 2019), her parents had to take out loans. To chip in, Ramirez, who studied sociology and psychology, also obtained student loans and had work-study jobs on campus, including serving food in the dining halls and cleaning dorm rooms before class reunions.

She was a cheerleader her freshman year, sometimes positioned at the pinnacle of the pyramid, but learned quickly that although cheerleading was cool in high school, it didn’t carry the same cachet in college.

For Ramirez, Yale was full of painful ironies like that. People would call her Debbie Cheerleader or Debbie Dining Hall or start to say “Debbie does . . .” as a play on the 1978 porn movie Debbie Does Dallas. But Ramirez, who had limited sexual experience and knowledge, didn’t understand the reference.

the last book I ever read (The Education of Brett Kavanaugh by Robin Pogrebin and Kate Kelly, excerpt seven)

from The Education of Brett Kavanaugh: An Investigation by Robin Pogrebin and Kate Kelly:

Ramirez wasn’t new to prejudice. She’d had to argue her way into the honors class at her high school. Her mother worried that, at Yale, her daughter would feel inferior. But Ramirez was determined to press forward. “I was used to being underestimated,” she said. “I was used to people thinking, ‘How did she do that?’”

“My mom would have preferred me to go to a smaller college—looking back at it, she was right,” she said. At a place like Yale, “they invite you to the game, but they never show you the rules or where the equipment is.”

To some extent, Ramirez was experiencing the harsh reality that all Yale students face: “You think you’re badass in high school, then you go to Yale and you have to work your ass off just to be average,” said Andy Thurstone, a classmate. He added of Ramirez, “I think she was a little overwhelmed with that.”