the last book I ever read (Jesus Wept: Seven Popes and the Battle for the Soul of the Catholic Church, excerpt fourteen)

from Jesus Wept: Seven Popes and the Battle for the Soul of the Catholic Church by Philip Shenon:

Ratzinger faced one important, possibly insurmountable obstacle in his campaign against liberation theology: the pope he served. During the cardinal’s first year in Rome, John Paul kept waffling on the subject, offering comments one day in support of the movement, only to back away the next. In March 1983, however, Ratzinger had reason to hope that the pope’s indecision was finally over. John Paul had just returned from a grueling seven-nation tour of Central America, which included a stop in El Salvador, where he made amends for his initial, callous response to Archbishop Romero’s murder. He prayed over Romero’s tomb and offered seemingly heartfelt praise for “a pastor who always tended to his flock.” His public events drew a joyous outpouring from hundreds of thousands of Salvadorans. That was in stark contrast to the hostile reception he had received two days earlier in neighboring Nicaragua. The leaders of that country’s newly installed socialist government, former leftist guerrillas who called themselves Sandinistas, came to power in 1979 after overthrowing the corrupt dictator Anastasio Somoza, whose family had ruled over Nicaragua for four decades. Somoza’s ouster had been widely celebrated by the public, and the senior ranks of the Sandinista government included four priests who were champions of liberation theology. One of them, Father Ernesto Cardenal, the culture minister, was a proud, self-declared Communist. “Christ led me to Marx,” he said. The decision by priests to accept government appointments infuriated Nicaragua’s conservative church hierarchy. It also alarmed the United States, which protested to the Vatican that Nicaragua was an example of liberation theology run amok. The Reagan administration was then arming right-wing anti-Sandinista insurgents known as contras.

There was a sour expression on the pope’s face throughout his twelve-hour stay in Nicaragua. He did not hide his agitation during a welcoming ceremony in which Sandinista leader Daniel Ortega announced that “Christian patriots” were central to “the popular Sandinista revolution.” At a Mass for hundreds of thousands in the capital city of Managua, the pope was heckled by Sandinista supporters chanting “Power to the people!” and “Liberation!” Infuriated, he yelled back, “Silence!” At a reception line with cabinet ministers, Cardenal dropped to one knee to kiss the pope’s ring. John Paul pulled his hand back and wagged his finger at the priest, telling him to “straighten out your position with the church,” a public scolding caught on camera.

the last book I ever read (Jesus Wept: Seven Popes and the Battle for the Soul of the Catholic Church, excerpt thirteen)

from Jesus Wept: Seven Popes and the Battle for the Soul of the Catholic Church by Philip Shenon:

The end of the Dirty War, and the junta’s collapse, began in earnest on April 2, 1982, when the military launched an ill-fated invasion of the Falkland Islands, a tiny archipelago in the South Atlantic about three hundred miles off Argentina’s eastern coast. A British territory since the early nineteenth century, it had a population of about eighteen hundred English-speaking residents. Argentina had always claimed sovereignty and knew the islands by a different name, the Malvinas. The invasion by ten thousand Argentine troops was a poorly disguised effort to divert attention from the country’s disastrous economy and civil unrest. It quickly turned into humiliation. The British launched a naval armada to retake the islands and seized them again in June, at a cost of 907 lives—649 of them Argentine soldiers and sailors.

The invasion initially had popular support among Argentines, including church leaders. Bergoglio praised soldiers who died in “the Malvinas war”—he would never call them the Falklands—as heroes: “They went out to defend the fatherland, to claim as theirs what had been usurped.” The invasion led to an abrupt decision by John Paul II to visit Argentina in June; it was the first pilgrimage to the country by any sitting pope. The awkward two-day trip, which came in the final days of fighting, was an attempt by the Vatican to appear even-handed. Aides said the pope went largely because he did not want to cancel a long-planned visit that same month to Britain. On arrival in Buenos Aires, he called for negotiations to end the war, a plea that came too late, since Britain was only days from victory. Still, the junta was eager to exploit the visit to suggest a papal endorsement, and military leaders were delighted when the pope said virtually nothing during his time there about human rights.

the last book I ever read (Jesus Wept: Seven Popes and the Battle for the Soul of the Catholic Church, excerpt twelve)

from Jesus Wept: Seven Popes and the Battle for the Soul of the Catholic Church by Philip Shenon:

There was always one glaring exception to the pope’s demand that the church stay out of politics: Poland. In August, weeks after the pope returned from Brazil, Poland was seized by labor unrest tied to the Communist government’s decision to raise food prices. Workers went on strike in the shipyard in Gdansk. The strike committee was led by a thirty-seven-year-old electrician, Lech Wałęsa, who went on to lead a national opposition movement. The city’s archbishop announced his support for the workers, whose rallies were often held at a shrine they created at the front of the shipyard gates, covered with images of the Virgin Mary and photos of John Paul. The strike was immediately recognized within Poland as not simply a challenge to the shipyard managers but, as it grew, a threat to the survival of the Communist government in Warsaw.

The pope would not wait long to take a side. On August 20, during an address in St. Peter’s Square, he noticed a group of several hundred Poles. Many were waving Polish flags, while others carried banners expressing support for the shipyard workers. Unexpectedly, the pope burst into song in Polish—an emotional hymn often heard at the Gdansk protests. Many Poles in the crowd wept openly and began to sing along. After the last verse, the pope called for those in the square to join him in a “prayer for my homeland.”

Days later, he dispatched telegrams to Poland’s bishops to offer his backing for the Gdansk protests and organized a special Mass in St. Peter’s in support. The situation in Poland continued to deteriorate, with Wałęsa’s trade union growing increasingly militant. The pope’s deputies said he monitored the news minute by minute. There were some days, they said, when he would talk about nothing else.

the last book I ever read (Jesus Wept: Seven Popes and the Battle for the Soul of the Catholic Church, excerpt eleven)

from Jesus Wept: Seven Popes and the Battle for the Soul of the Catholic Church by Philip Shenon:

In January 1980, Archbishop Romero was in Rome for a second audience with the pope, and it did not go much better. In a diary entry, Romero wrote he was grateful that John Paul “received me very warmly and told me he perfectly understood how difficult the political situation of my country is.” Still, rather than give full backing to Romero’s brave protest against the savagery of El Salvador’s military, the pope once again urged caution. He said Romero should be worried about the possibility of “score-settling” violence by the government’s “popular Left opponents, which could be bad for the church.” Even more than the year before, Romero returned home convinced he would soon be assassinated. In February, the church radio station was bombed, as was the library of the Catholic university. He stopped sleeping in his own home, hoping to make it more difficult for the death squads to find him. He had taken to driving alone. “I prefer it this way,” he wrote. “When what I’m expecting to happen, happens, I want to be alone. So it’s only me they get. I don’t want somebody else to suffer.”

More than nine hundred Salvadoran civilians were killed in political violence in the first three months of the year. In a sermon in March, Romero warned that the nation was “in a prerevolutionary stage,” with worse to come. He wrote in his diary that he could not understand why the pope, who regularly condemned Mafia violence in Italy, did not say more about political violence in Central America. He was puzzled that John Paul would “speak out about the cruel killings in Italy” but remain mostly silent about the “many killings in El Salvador every day.”

In his final speeches, Romero said he was comforted that, in defending the poor and oppressed, he had done the work demanded by the Savior. In his last radio address, he said: “I know that many are scandalized at what I say and charge that it forsakes the preaching of the Gospel to meddle in politics. I do not accept that accusation.” His diaries show he was unaware at the time that the pope had formally decided to strip him of his authority. In March, senior Curia officials met to plan his ouster from his archdiocese. “He was acting without responsibility,” said Cardinal Silvio Oddi, who then led the Congregation for the Clergy. According to Oddi, Romero had to go because the government in El Salvador “interpreted Romero’s doctrine to be in favor of communism.” Before he could be ousted, however, Romero was dead. On March 24, he was assassinated as he said Mass in a small hospital chapel in San Salvador. The assassin, later identified as a member of a government-backed death squad, fired a single bullet into Romero’s chest, just as the archbishop was raising a chalice to begin Communion. A photographer captured the moment, as Romero gasped for breath, blood pouring from his mouth. A week later, his funeral descended into chaos; twenty-six people were killed and hundreds injured when gunfire broke out on the steps of the Metropolitan Cathedral.

the last book I ever read (Jesus Wept: Seven Popes and the Battle for the Soul of the Catholic Church, excerpt ten)

from Jesus Wept: Seven Popes and the Battle for the Soul of the Catholic Church by Philip Shenon:

In 1980, no misconduct case before him was more troubling than that of Peter Hullermann, a thirty-three-year-old priest who had been transferred to Munich for psychiatric care after he admitted molesting an eleven-year-old boy in the northwest German city of Essen. Church authorities there eventually accused him of “indecent advances” toward several other boys. Ratzinger’s staff accepted responsibility for supervising Hullermann during his treatment by a Munich psychiatrist. Archdiocese records confirm that on January 15, 1980, Ratzinger led the meeting in which Hullermann’s transfer to Munich was approved. In accordance with church policy at the time, there was no consideration in either Essen or Munich of referring Hullermann to the police. Nor was there any thought of forcing him to leave the priesthood, even though Ratzinger’s staff was explicitly warned that Hullermann was likely to continue molesting boys. One document described him as a “clear danger” to children.

Despite those warnings, church records made public decades later showed that just days after arriving in Munich, Hullermann was allowed to resume his full priestly duties, with no restriction on his access to children. He went on to molest at least a dozen more boys across Germany. Years later, Ratzinger would claim ignorance of the details of Hullermann’s case, but his top deputies could not. The cardinal’s records showed that his chief personnel officer, Father Friedrich Fahr, had been determined to find a way to preserve Hullermann’s career despite his confession that he was a child molester. Fahr wrote in 1980 that while the young priest required urgent psychiatric care, he should be treated with “understanding,” since he was a “very talented man.”

the last book I ever read (Jesus Wept: Seven Popes and the Battle for the Soul of the Catholic Church, excerpt nine)

from Jesus Wept: Seven Popes and the Battle for the Soul of the Catholic Church by Philip Shenon:

The pope’s six-city US visit in October 1979, which began in Boston and included stops in New York and Washington, was perhaps the most anticipated event in the history of the American Catholic Church, and the excitement was shared by non-Catholics. The evangelical preacher Billy Graham described John Paul as “the most respected religious leader in the world.” President Jimmy Carter, a devout Southern Baptist, welcomed him to the White House: “God blessed America by sending you to us.”

For many of the nation’s fifty million Catholics, there was disappointment, however. In advance of the pope’s trip, the Associated Press conducted a poll of the nation’s Catholics and found 66 percent wanted the Vatican to lift the ban on birth control, 53 percent believed priests should be allowed to marry, and 50 percent believed women should be granted abortion on demand. In the pope’s speeches in the US, he made clear he would compromise on none of those issues. He often adopted a scolding tone, suggesting Americans were out of step with the church’s moral teachings, especially about sex.

Catholic women had special reason to feel slighted during the trip. Since Vatican II, nuns had been allowed in many US dioceses to join priests at the altar and handle communion wine and wafers. It was seen by bishops as a way of dealing with a shortage of priests. In advance of the pope’s trip, however, the Vatican announced that women would be barred from any role in worship services that he attended. When he gave a speech in Philadelphia to twelve thousand clergy from around the country, priests were invited to sit in the audience on the main floor of the auditorium, while nuns were moved to the balcony. In that address, the pope made his most explicit statement to date of his conviction that women could never be priests: the all-male priesthood was “a tradition that cannot be altered.”

the last book I ever read (Jesus Wept: Seven Popes and the Battle for the Soul of the Catholic Church, excerpt eight)

from Jesus Wept: Seven Popes and the Battle for the Soul of the Catholic Church by Philip Shenon:

Throughout his youth, Argentine politics centered on one man: Juan Domingo Perón, first elected president in 1946, when Bergoglio was nine. Even after Perón was ousted in a 1955 coup and sent into exile, his fanatical supporters remained. For decades to come, political debates centered around the populist movement—Peronism—founded by Perón and his equally charismatic first lady, Eva Duarte, better known by her nickname, Evita.

Years later, Bergoglio was coy about his views on Perón, although as a young man he had been an enthusiastic supporter. His adversaries in the Jesuits would later draw comparisons between the two men. They saw Perón’s influence in Bergoglio’s personality-driven, sometimes cold-blooded style of leadership. Bergoglio credited his early fascination with Argentine politics to the woman who, outside his family, was the most influential in his life: Esther Ballestrino, a feminist and self-declared Marxist who ran the chemistry lab where he worked as a teenager. She did not force her leftist views on him but instead “taught me to think about politics,” he remembered.

the last book I ever read (Jesus Wept: Seven Popes and the Battle for the Soul of the Catholic Church, excerpt seven)

from Jesus Wept: Seven Popes and the Battle for the Soul of the Catholic Church by Philip Shenon:

Cardinal Spellman of New York, the city’s archbishop from 1939 until 1967, was for years the target of credible allegations that he violated his celibacy vows with men. Clarence Tripp, a respected psychologist associated with Indiana University’s Institute for Sex Research, the pioneering research center founded by Alfred Kinsey, tracked down a Broadway dancer who was the subject of the most persistent rumors. Tripp was convinced that the male dancer, who was regularly chauffeured around Manhattan in the cardinal’s limousine, had been in a long-term sexual relationship with Spellman. The American journalist Lucian Truscott IV reported that, when he was an army cadet at West Point in the 1960s, he was groped when he and two other cadets interviewed the cardinal for a student magazine. “Spellman put his hand on my thigh and started moving it toward my crotch,” Truscott wrote. “He was just about to reach my private parts when a monsignor, who was standing behind him, reached over his shoulder, grabbed his wrist and put his hand back in his lap, as if this was a common occurrence.” Allegations about Spellman’s sexuality were due to be published in 1984 in a biography by a former reporter for The Wall Street Journal. The New York archdiocese pressured the publisher to remove the material. The pressure campaign was led by Spellman’s longtime secretary, Monsignor Eugene Clark. There was no little irony when Clark, who went on to become rector of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Manhattan, was forced to resign from that post after New York tabloids revealed his affair with a female secretary.

the last book I ever read (Jesus Wept: Seven Popes and the Battle for the Soul of the Catholic Church, excerpt six)

from Jesus Wept: Seven Popes and the Battle for the Soul of the Catholic Church by Philip Shenon:

Among American Catholics, the birth-control debate grew more heated that year, becoming part of a larger struggle over women’s rights and sexual freedom. In June, the US Supreme Court overturned state laws that banned artificial contraception, including birth-control pills, and decreed that Americans enjoyed a “right to privacy” in family planning. For many Catholics, the ruling was logical and humane. Several bishops said the government should never have been in the business of regulating women’s fertility. “Catholics do not need the support of civil law to be faithful to their religious convictions,” said Cardinal Cushing in Boston. “And they do not seek to impose by law their moral views on other members of society.”

At the time, American priests complained they were being bombarded with questions from parishioners about why taking oral contraceptives was a sin. The Pill did not kill a living being or interfere with the physical structure of sperm and eggs, so how was that sinful? Many priests were forced to relearn the scriptural justification—the Old Testament story about a minor biblical character named Onan, who refused to impregnate his sister-in-law after his brother’s death. (Many twentieth-century theologians were convinced the story was meant to condemn Onan’s supposed lack of family loyalty, not birth control. Many also found it strange the Vatican wanted to remind Catholics of an otherwise distasteful scriptural passage about a man pressured to have sex with his brother’s widow.)

the last book I ever read (Jesus Wept: Seven Popes and the Battle for the Soul of the Catholic Church, excerpt five)

from Jesus Wept: Seven Popes and the Battle for the Soul of the Catholic Church by Philip Shenon:

In the debate, many bishops said they wanted the document to go further and call directly for an end to the birth-control ban. Patriarch Maximos of the Melkite Church was, as always, direct—outrageously so for many in the Curia. He urged the pope to realize that millions of Catholic women around the world already used artificial contraception in defiance of the church because they had no other choice if they wanted to feed the children they already had. He raised a question other bishops were too diplomatic to ask: Why should married couples allow their sex lives to be regulated by a group of aging celibate men in Rome? The ban, he said, had always reflected a “bachelor psychosis.”

Suenens followed, and his speech created another uproar. He called for an end to secrecy in the deliberations of the birth-control commission. He left no doubt he believed artificial contraception was no sin. He warned that if the council failed to address the issue, it would invite the sort of scandal and mockery that the church had not known since the Holy Office condemned Galileo in the seventeenth century.

“I beg of you, my brothers,” Suenens said, his voice rising. “Let us avoid another Galileo affair! One is enough for the church!”

the last book I ever read (Jesus Wept: Seven Popes and the Battle for the Soul of the Catholic Church, excerpt four

from Jesus Wept: Seven Popes and the Battle for the Soul of the Catholic Church by Philip Shenon:

The church faced another important debate about sexuality. Many priests around the world dared not say it out loud, but their greatest hope for Vatican II was that the world’s bishops would rewrite church law to allow them to marry. The Vatican had always portrayed the so-called doctrine of priestly celibacy as eternal and irreversible, but it was neither. It is not demanded in the Gospels, nor was it a way of life followed by the twelve apostles. There is a traditional understanding among Christian theologians that Jesus was celibate and unmarried, but the New Testament does not state that explicitly. There is, by comparison, compelling evidence in scripture to show that most of the apostles, as well as most of Jesus’s larger band of disciples, were married. The apostle Peter had a wife whose ailing mother was healed by the Savior, as recorded in three of the four Gospels. For a thousand years after the Crucifixion, priests almost always took wives and experienced both the comfort and the chaos of a family. Like Peter, other early popes were married. That changed in the eleventh century with the election of a strong-willed pope, Gregory VII, who rewrote church law to demand lifetime celibacy for all priests and bishops, including those already married. Historians believe the decision was motivated in part by Gregory’s disgust over the scandals of a group of shockingly promiscuous Roman bishops. Other accounts suggest he was equally motivated by money—by the struggle to balance the Vatican’s budget. By demanding celibacy, he guaranteed the estates of dead priests—their homes and anything else of value—were turned over to the church. Since churchmen were often drawn from families of great wealth, including royalty, his decision promised a vast new source of income. Nine centuries later, the doctrine was blamed for a worldwide shortage of priests, which had become a crisis for the church by the 1950s, when thousands of men left the priesthood each year, most to marry. In many countries, there were not nearly enough new priests to replace them, in part because so many millions of young men died in battle in World War II, which emptied out seminaries. The situation was especially dire in South America, a continent where virtually every man and woman was born Catholic. The centuries-old migration of European-born priests to serve parishes in Latin America largely dried up. In some urban areas of Brazil, the world’s most populous Catholic nation, there was a ratio of one priest to every twelve thousand people. Brazilians born deep in the Amazon rain forest might see a priest only a few times in their lives. It was well-known inside the Vatican, but never acknowledged publicly, that South American bishops turned a blind eye to the fact that many priests in rural areas had common-law wives and children.

the last book I ever read (Jesus Wept: Seven Popes and the Battle for the Soul of the Catholic Church, excerpt three)

from Jesus Wept: Seven Popes and the Battle for the Soul of the Catholic Church by Philip Shenon:

John, seventy-six on the day of his election, knew he was seen as a caretaker pope, but he had no intention of being one. In fact, from the moment he pulled on those white robes, he delighted in upending the common wisdom that his would be a dull, uneventful papacy. Instead, he wrote, “I have an immense program of work in front of me to be carried out before the eyes of the whole world, which is waiting and wanting.”

His most momentous decision came three months after his election. On January 25, 1959, he announced in a speech that he would summon all the world’s bishops to a meeting in Rome—a so-called ecumenical council—to plot the church’s future. It would be the first such gathering since the First Vatican Council adjourned in 1870. The idea occurred to him, he said, after he noticed that his desk was “piling up with problems, questions, requests, hopes”—all tied to issues that the world’s bishops should be empowered to resolve for themselves. In his speech to a group of cardinals, he offered no date for the Second Vatican Council, or Vatican II, as it came to be known, although he hoped it could be organized within two or three years. He said he wanted the church to approach the gathering with a spirit of aggiornamento—an Italian word meaning “bringing up to date.” He dreamed the council could bring about reconciliation between Catholics and other Christians. In that hope, he said, the Vatican would issue a “friendly invitation” to representatives of the “separated churches”—Protestants, Eastern Orthodox, as well as the fast-growing evangelical communities of the United States and South America—to send observers. When his speech was finished, he expected to hear applause, maybe even cheers, from the cardinals. “But they did nothing of the kind,” he wrote in his diary, remembering his disappointment. “There was only silence.” L’Osservatore Romano, which the Curia controlled, buried news of the speech deep inside the paper. It censored the pope’s remarks about his “friendly invitation” to non-Catholic Christians—“friendly” was removed, and the reference to “separated churches” was replaced with “separated communities,” reflecting the Curia’s view that there was only one true church. Cardinal Giacomo Lercaro of Bologna was incensed by John’s announcement: “How dare he summon a council only three months after his election.” The new pope, he said, was proving to be “rash and impulsive, lacking in experience and culture.” As John’s friend Cardinal Montini put it: “This holy old boy doesn’t seem to realize what a hornet’s nest he’s stirring up.”

the last book I ever read (Jesus Wept: Seven Popes and the Battle for the Soul of the Catholic Church, excerpt two)

from Jesus Wept: Seven Popes and the Battle for the Soul of the Catholic Church by Philip Shenon:

Humani Generis was a landmark in Küng’s life. He thought it was so wrongheaded that it convinced him the pope, hailed by most Catholics as error-free in his every word and action, was in fact fallible. “For the first time, I was convinced that Pius XII was wrong,” Küng remembered. Then in the middle of his graduate studies in Munich, Ratzinger had reached the same conclusion: This bishop of Rome, like all of his predecessors, was capable of making terrible mistakes. How else to explain so many bad, bloodthirsty popes—“men who would obviously not be picked by the Holy Spirit”—throughout history? It was a parlor game among his classmates: Who was the worst pope ever? Was it Sergius III, elected in 904 after assassinating two of his predecessors and whose favorite mistress gave birth to a son who succeeded him as pope? Or Innocent IV, the thirteenth-century architect of the Inquisition, who approved the use of the rack and other instruments of torture? Or maybe it was Alexander VI in the fifteenth century, reported to have had an incestuous relationship with an illegitimate daughter. He also had a fondness, it was said, for drunken orgies that ended with naked prepubescent boys jumping out of cakes. Popes from the eleventh through the thirteenth centuries mounted the Crusades, in which mercenary armies slaughtered more than a million Muslims and Jews.

Power-loving popes had always tried to create the perception that, because they were the successors to St. Peter, they were infallible. But Küng and Ratzinger—and anyone else familiar with the New Testament—knew that this was a misreading of Peter’s biography. The Gospels portray Peter, a Jewish fisherman who abandoned his life on the Sea of Galilee to join the Savior’s wandering band of disciples, as lovable but deeply flawed. Jesus mocked him for his weak character and, as the Savior predicted, a terrified Peter denied his loyalty three times in the hours around the Crucifixion. Besides, as Küng and Ratzinger also knew, the doctrine of papal infallibility held that the bishop of Rome was error-free only in limited circumstances, when issuing the most rare sort of proclamation, known as an ex cathedra decree. And far from being ancient teaching, the doctrine dated back only to 1870 and the First Vatican Council. At that council, many bishops rejected the doctrine but were overruled by the bullying Pius IX, who insisted he needed sweeping new authority because the Vatican was then under threat of invasion by the Italian army. To his credit, after demanding the right to claim infallibility, Pius IX never once invoked it in his teaching documents. In the century that followed, it was invoked by only one pope and on only one occasion—by Pius XII in his widely ridiculed 1950 decree on the Virgin’s assumption into heaven.

the last book I ever read (Jesus Wept: Seven Popes and the Battle for the Soul of the Catholic Church, excerpt one)

from Jesus Wept: Seven Popes and the Battle for the Soul of the Catholic Church by Philip Shenon:

The Holy Office had been responsible for many of the Vatican’s worst historical embarrassments, including the imprisonment of the great Italian scientist Galileo in the seventeenth century because he rejected the church’s view that the sun rotated around the earth. The congregation played an important role for centuries in maintaining the Index of Prohibited Books, a list of works banned as blasphemous. The writers whose books appeared on the Index included Voltaire, Hugo, Descartes, Milton, and Copernicus. In the twentieth century, the French thinkers Jean-Paul Sartre and André Gide were added for works that won them the Nobel Prize. In 1906, in an obvious effort to distance itself from its past, the congregation removed the word “inquisition” from its name. Whatever it called itself, Küng wrote in his memoirs, it was clear to him as a student that the spirit of the Inquisition had never died: “They may no longer be able to burn dissidents at the stake, but they can burn them psychologically.”

As a young theologian, Ratzinger shared the harsh criticism of the Holy Office. The Vatican under Pius XII, he wrote in the early 1960s, was a place of small-minded “baroque princes” who believed that they alone should decide how Catholics lived. He was reminded of the Curia’s indifference to the faithful every time he went to church and watched parishioners struggle with the Latin liturgy. Since the fourth century, the Vatican had insisted that the Mass be offered throughout the world only in Latin, the formal language of the faith since the Roman Empire. In the twentieth century, many theologians urged the church to allow the Mass to be said in the vernacular—in local languages—so everyone could appreciate a ceremony meant to re-create the poignancy of the Last Supper. But Pius, while open to other liturgical reforms, would not abandon Latin. Ratzinger thought the Vatican’s insistence on the ancient language had always exaggerated its importance, since Latin was not the language of Jesus and his apostles. The Savior addressed his disciples in Aramaic, a language related to Hebrew. After Aramaic fell into disuse, the principal language of the church for nearly three hundred years was Greek. In writings early in his career, Ratzinger blamed Latin—“a language in which the living choices of the human spirit no longer found a place”—for the “sterility to which Catholic theology and philosophy has in many ways been doomed.”

the last book I ever read (The Bathroom by Jean-Philippe Toussaint, excerpt ten)

from The Bathroom by Jean-Philippe Toussaint (translated by Nancy Amphoux and Paul De Angelis):

25. When it was time to play and my doctor was already striding with high, springing steps in the direction of the number-three court, the fat blond man, who had not moved from his chair, said to his sister that he was not going to play. She was obviously taken aback and asked why not; he answered that he did not have to give a reason. There was an exchange of rather hard looks, the sister started talking at high speed, making numerous gestures. He was imperturbable, did not move an inch; he listened calmly, cleaning a molar with a toothpick. A few minutes later my doctor came jogging back, head high, gaze questioning. Having been informed of the situation he squatted down in front of his brother-in-law and, speaking in a low voice, slapped him lightly on his fat thighs and pinched his fleshy cheeks between two fingers, to convince him to come play. Still cleaning his teeth, and looking more and more out of sort, the fat blond man shook his head. At least he stood up, removed the toothpick from his mouth, and said, with a long drawl, before walking away, that we could go to hell.

the last book I ever read (The Bathroom by Jean-Philippe Toussaint, excerpt nine)

from The Bathroom by Jean-Philippe Toussaint (translated by Nancy Amphoux and Paul De Angelis):

63. I bought a pad of stationery from the shop that sells newspapers and, sitting at the big round table in my room, drew two columns on the paper. In the first I entered the names of five countries—Belgium, France, Sweden, Italy, and the United States—and next to them, in the second, I recorded the results of my darts games. After this initial knockout phase, I organized a match between the two national teams with the highest number of points. In the finals, it was Belgium against France. From the very first throws my own people, concentrating intently, easily outdistanced the butter-fingered French.

the last book I ever read (The Bathroom by Jean-Philippe Toussaint, excerpt eight)

from The Bathroom by Jean-Philippe Toussaint (translated by Nancy Amphoux and Paul De Angelis):

62. When I played darts I was calm and relaxed. I felt pacified. Little by little, emptiness would creep over me and I would steep myself in it until the last trace of tension vanished from my mind. Then—in one blazing movement—I would launch the dart at the target.

the last book I ever read (The Bathroom by Jean-Philippe Toussaint, excerpt seven)

from The Bathroom by Jean-Philippe Toussaint (translated by Nancy Amphoux and Paul De Angelis):

57. We had left the café and were going back to the hotel. Hands in my coat pockets, I walked head down, pressing my feet down hard on the pavement to push the city under water. Every time I came to the bottom of a staircase I jumped unobtrusively to the ground with both feet together and, waiting for Edmondsson at the bottom of the steps, asked her to do the same. With the town sinking at the rate of thirty centimeters a century, I explained, or three millimeters a year, or point zero zero eighty-two millimeters a day, or point zero zero zero zero zero zero zero one millimeters= a second, one might reasonably hope, by pressing our feet down hard on the pavement as we walked, to play some part in the drowning of the town.

the last book I ever read (The Bathroom by Jean-Philippe Toussaint, excerpt six)

from The Bathroom by Jean-Philippe Toussaint (translated by Nancy Amphoux and Paul De Angelis):

46. Leaning toward the plate-glass window with my hands cupped around my eyes, I looked into the Standa department store, which was still closed, and tried to attract a saleswoman’s attention by tapping on the glass with a fist. When one of them finally looked my way I waved a greeting respectfully and pointed to my watch to ask what time the store would open. After one or two unproductive exchanges in sign language, she shuffled over to me and, stretching her fingers wide apart, showed me nine of them. Then, coming still closer, her chest and stomach pressed against the pane of glass so slightly separating us, her mouth almost against mine, she articulated lasciviously, Alle nove, creating a little cloud of steam between us. I looked at my watch: it was half past eight. I turned away, started walking through the nearby streets. In the end I found tennis balls somewhere else.

the last book I ever read (The Bathroom by Jean-Philippe Toussaint, excerpt five)

from The Bathroom by Jean-Philippe Toussaint (translated by Nancy Amphoux and Paul De Angelis):

22. Little by little, I began to make friends with the barman. We exchanged nods whenever we met on the stairs. Occasionally, when I went for my late-afternoon coffee, we’d have a conversation. We talked about soccer, automobile racing. The absence of a common language did not bother us; on cycling, for example, we could go on forever. Moser, he’d say. Merckx, I’d remark, after a little silence. Coppi, he’d say, Fausto Coppi. I’d stir my spoon in the coffee, nodding, thoughtful. Bruyère, I’d murmur. Bruyère? he’d say. Yes, yes, Bruyère. He seemed unconvinced. I thought the conversation at an end, but just as I was preparing to leave the counter, he grabbed me by the arm and said, Gimondi. Van Springel, I replied. Planckaert, I added, Dierieckx, Willems, Van Impe, Von Looy, de Vlaeminck: Roger de Vlaeminck and his brother, Eric. What could anyone say to that? He gave up. I paid for the coffee and went upstairs to my room.

the last book I ever read (The Bathroom by Jean-Philippe Toussaint, excerpt four)

from The Bathroom by Jean-Philippe Toussaint (translated by Nancy Amphoux and Paul De Angelis):

17. When leaving the hotel, I seldom went far. I’d stick to the streets nearby. Once, however, I had to return to the Standa department store: I needed shirts; my new underpants were getting dirty. The store was full of light. I walked slowly down the aisles, like an inspector, occasionally patting a child’s head. I lingered in front of the clothes racks, selected shirts, felt the wool of the sweaters. In the toy department I bought a set of darts.

the last book I ever read (The Bathroom by Jean-Philippe Toussaint, excerpt three)

from The Bathroom by Jean-Philippe Toussaint (translated by Nancy Amphoux and Paul De Angelis):

34. The rain had become a downpour, as though all the rain were going to fall: all. Cars slowed on the drenched roadway; sheaves of dead water rose on each side of the tires. Except for one or two umbrellas fleeing horizontally, the street looked immobile. People had taken refuge outside the post office door and, huddled together on the narrow stoop, were awaiting a lull. I turned around and went to open the clothes cupboard; I pawed through the drawers. Underwear, shirts, pajamas. I was looking for a sweater. Was there no sweater anywhere? I came out of the bedroom and, using my foot to push aside the cans of paint that cluttered the passageway, opened the closet door. Leaning forward into it, I began shoving at crates, opening suitcases, in search of a warm garment.

the last book I ever read (The Bathroom by Jean-Philippe Toussaint, excerpt two)

from The Bathroom by Jean-Philippe Toussaint (translated by Nancy Amphoux and Paul De Angelis):

7. Twice a week I would listen to the radio broadcast of the day’s play for the French soccer championship. The program lasted two hours. From a studio in Paris the announcer would orchestrate the voices of the reporters covering the matches in the different stadiums. Believing that soccer gains in the imagining, I never missed these dates. Lulled by warm human voices, I would listen to their reports with the lights off, sometimes with my eyes closed.

the last book I ever read (The Bathroom by Jean-Philippe Toussaint, excerpt one)

from The Bathroom by Jean-Philippe Toussaint (translated by Nancy Amphoux and Paul De Angelis):

1. When I began to spend my afternoons in the bathroom I had no intention of moving into it; no, I would pass some pleasant hours there, meditating in the bathtub, sometimes dressed, other times naked. Edmondsson, who liked to be there with me, said it made me calmer: occasionally I would even say something funny, we would laugh. I would wave my arms as I spoke, explaining that the most practical bathtubs were those with parallel sides, a sloping back, and a straight front, which relieves the user of the need for a footrest.

the last book I ever read (Apple in China: The Capture of the World's Greatest Company by Patrick McGee, excerpt fourteen)

from Apple in China: The Capture of the World's Greatest Company by Patrick McGee:

Despite this progress, Apple is only in the earliest phases of diversifying iPhone production. As Morgan Stanley analysts estimated in mid-2023: “90-95% of Apple’s production is still in China; we believe a full decoupling would likely require hundreds of billions of dollars of investment at least, which would prove an outsize burden for the supply chain.” Indeed, the pace of growth in Apple’s operations in India is nothing like that of China a decade earlier. From 2016 to 2023, iPhone production in India grew from zero to around 15 million units, accounting for 7 percent of global shipments. China, between 2006 and 2013, ramped production from zero to 153 million units. So, at best, India is taking on iPhone orders at one-tenth the rate China did a decade earlier.

the last book I ever read (Apple in China: The Capture of the World's Greatest Company by Patrick McGee, excerpt thirteen)

from Apple in China: The Capture of the World's Greatest Company by Patrick McGee:

When Trump entered office in early 2017, Cupertino was on high alert. Executives were far more concerned about Trump than they ever were about Xi Jinping. Beijing’s ruler was a despot, sure, but he was a rational actor whose interests, broadly speaking, neatly aligned with Apple’s. Neither Beijing nor Cupertino wanted iPhone product to be shifted out of China. But that’s precisely what Trump wanted. “Tim, unless you start building your plants in this country, I won’t consider my administration an economic success,” Trump said he told the Apple CEO, in July 2017. Cook, according to Trump, had promised Apple would build “three big plants, beautiful plants.” Clearly understanding the risks of the insurgent presidency, Cook made a point of calling Trump, even visiting the president every four to six weeks. “Cook, this big southerner, was calling Trump all the time—he was nice to him,” says Margaret O’Mara, tech historian and author The Code. “He was so savvy navigating the broader currents of global trade.”

His diplomatic overtures climaxed in November 2019 when Cook personally gave President Trump a tour of a Texas factory churning out Apple’s Pro lineup of Macs. After the event, Trump tweeted: “Today I opened a major Apple Manufacturing plan in Texas that will bring high paying jobs back to America.” The tweet was patently false. The owner of the plant was contract manufacturer Flex, not Apple; it had been assembling Macs for six years; and rather than representing some milestone, the factory had been demonstrating just how difficult it was to make computers in America.

the last book I ever read (Apple in China: The Capture of the World's Greatest Company by Patrick McGee, excerpt twelve)

from Apple in China: The Capture of the World's Greatest Company by Patrick McGee:

What Apple didn’t tell investors in November 2018, or say in its January 2019 revenue warning, was that sales of the XR weren’t simply attributable to a cooling Chinese economy. Instead, Chinese consumers were choosing to buy phones from Huawei. Apple had dealt with copycats since the earliest days of the iPhone, but most Chinese rivals could be ignored—they catered to the low end of the market. Huawei was different. It competed with Apple in the top tier, and in 2018, Apple executives began observing that Huawei’s latest Mate phone was awfully good, outshining Apple in features rather than just price.

Four days before the November 1 earnings call, Cook had held a Sunday meeting with other executives. “In China, we’re worried about the new Mate devices,” he told the team. He was right to be concerned. Just a few years earlier, the gap in quality between iPhones and Chinese handsets was stark. But Apple had brought up quality across the region, and the gaps were closing. Within a year, Huawei would be outselling Apple not just in China but globally.

the last book I ever read (Apple in China: The Capture of the World's Greatest Company by Patrick McGee, excerpt eleven)

from Apple in China: The Capture of the World's Greatest Company by Patrick McGee:

Every supplier knows that if it can’t meet its commitments to deliver a defined number of units, it faces a legal fight with Apple or risks not being chosen for the next product. So when push came to shove, suppliers knew what to prioritize. “They were always willing to do the right thing until it wasn’t economically feasible to continue to do the right thing,” says an Apple engineer who managed product launches. “If you make an organization choose, they will choose profits.”

Another Apple executive referred to the statistic that iPhone account for less than a fifth of global smartphone shipments but garners 80 percent of industry profits. “To do that, you need to be creating competition at every level in the supply chain. You need to be ruthless,” this person says. “But you can’t do that and also be compliant.” A manufacturing design engineer at Apple recalled a day when Cook sent a note about the importance of corporate social responsibility. Such notes were meant to convey something important: We care about this at the highest level of Apple. But that same day his more direct bosses were demanding improvements to output. “The two messages were opposed to each other,” he says. But there was no genuine recognition of that. Apple as an organization was a living, breathing manifestation of cognitive dissonance.

the last book I ever read (Apple in China: The Capture of the World's Greatest Company by Patrick McGee, excerpt ten)

from Apple in China: The Capture of the World's Greatest Company by Patrick McGee:

The risk of this approach is that it gives too much power to the supplier. So under Tim Cook’s leadership, Apple had built redundancy into the supply chain, teaching multiple vendors how to do the same thing to mitigate risks of overdependence. “Every year there’d be discussion about our huge reliance on a small number of companies. What would happen if one of these companies were to stumble?” says one manufacturing design engineer. “Certainly at the component level,” this person adds, “even Foxconn didn’t have the space for the machines to make the components we needed, so we were kind of forced to find second sources, third sources.”

Given Apple’s scale and manufacturing concentration, the result of this strategy is that Apple spawned the formation of major industrial clusters in which engineers from Cupertino would teach multiple factories how to, say, shape glass for the iPhone. So instead of being beholden to Len Technology—the company that cut and tempered Corning class for the first iPhone—Apple would constantly send engineers form Cupertino to train its rivals. That kept Lens on its toes, lest Apple choose a different supplier for the next-generation iPhone—a potential catastrophe as Apple, by 2015, was producing a quarter billion iPhones per year. Moreover, it kept Lens from raising its prices. So any company supplying Apple with some component was preemptively thwarted from believing it had any power to exert, because Apple made it known it had options.

the last book I ever read (Apple in China: The Capture of the World's Greatest Company by Patrick McGee, excerpt nine)

from Apple in China: The Capture of the World's Greatest Company by Patrick McGee:

By the end of 2010, the number of attempted suicides rose to eighteen. Foxconn became a household name for all the wrong reasons, and Apple was accused of ‘iSlavery.” Whatever his other skills, Terry Gou didn’t exactly come out of this crisis looking like a media-savvy CEO. He installed nets all around the factories, to prevent workers from jumping to their deaths, and compelled workers to sign a pledge not to commit suicide. Describing his hopes for the new factories in Zhengzhou and Chengdu, Gou said that workers living inland and closer to their families would feel less anxiety. “There will be hospitals, there will be other facilities, there will be sources of entertainment,” Gou said in September 2010. “And if people still decide to kill themselves, then no one can blame me.”

the last book I ever read (Apple in China: The Capture of the World's Greatest Company by Patrick McGee, excerpt eight)

from Apple in China: The Capture of the World's Greatest Company by Patrick McGee:

MacKay had first visited China as a nineteen-year-old in 1979 and attended university there in the 1980s. When he was a student, he says, everyone dressed in proletariat blue or People’s Liberation Army green. “There were no private cars, very few private restaurants. If they had ten items on the menu, they may have actually had two in the restaurant.” So when people in China started to make money, he says, “they really didn’t know how to display it, how to control it. And Apple,” he goes on, “was in the middle of that. Not only were they manufacturing there, but they were selling this product on a retail level that was in such high demand. And it was every time Apple launched something. It was what the Chinese with money wanted. Because it was a symbol. It wasn’t even the phone—it was the symbol of the phone.” MacKay tries to think of a Western analogy that might convey the feeling but can’t. “You’d have to go back to the 1880s, when the first cars came out,” he says. “It’d be like being one of the first people with a car instead of riding a horse on a muddy stream.”

Thousands of people who couldn’t afford iPhone found ways to buy them anyway. China Daily reported that a study of college students in Wuhan found that 20,000 had taken out loans with twelve-month interest rates as high as 47 percent to buy “fancy electronic products,” 90 percent of which were Apple. Perhaps the most widely publicized incident was that of a seventeen-year-old who underwent black market surgery to sell his kidney in exchange for enough cash to buy a new iPhone and an iPad.

the last book I ever read (Apple in China: The Capture of the World's Greatest Company by Patrick McGee, excerpt seven)

from Apple in China: The Capture of the World's Greatest Company by Patrick McGee:

The first major report was in the UK’s Daily Mail, published in August 2006. It described workers at Foxconn’s Longhua factory living in high-security dorms “100 to a room, arriving with a few possessions and a bucket to wash their clothes.” Overtime, laborers told the journalists, was mandatory, and shifts could last fifteen hours a day. “We have to work too hard, and I am always tired,” one worker said. “It’s like being in the army. They make us stand still for hours. If we move we are punished by being made to stand still for longer.”

The article went viral, and after conducting an audit, Apple acknowledged that more than a third of workers exceeded its maximum workweek of sixty hours. Within a month Cupertino established a Supplier Responsibility team, vowing to improve conditions and hold vendors to account. This cat-and-mouse pattern—of the media finding problems in the supply chain and Apple pledging to do better—would be replicated over and again in the decade plus to follow. The periodic exposes helped to shine a light on working conditions and likely caused some positive change. But the media’s forays into what Apple was up to overlooked wider questions of company strategy, business development, and the management of product cycles. In histories of Apple, both in articles and books, China usually enters the conversation to explain the company’s problems, not its successes. But an early exception emerged in a wonky report on supply chain efficiency that came out just before the iPhone went on sale.

the last book I ever read (Apple in China: The Capture of the World's Greatest Company by Patrick McGee, excerpt six)

from Apple in China: The Capture of the World's Greatest Company by Patrick McGee:

The no-quibble terms were a legacy of the iPod, a relatively simple product and one for which Foxconn was directly sourcing many of the parts. Apple had taken control of the more strategic and high-value-added items, but Foxconn had sourced commodity components on its own. Lacking any data on the iPhone before it was released, Foxconn treated it like an iPod and agreed to the same terms. But consenting to the same clause for such a different product proved to be a disaster. For the first iPhone, the percentage of units that came back within twelve months—what Apple calls TWR, standing for total warranty repair—was around one in seven. There were problems with the home button and the volume controls, and a spate of issues that didn’t meet standards from the perspective of field durability. Foxconn wasn’t necessarily building it poorly; it was simply the first consumer electronics product of that complexity to be used multiple hours a day. Apple’s quality standards were high, but they weren’t built to meet smartphone addiction—a concept that hadn’t really existed before. “You use an iPod occasionally, but you use the iPhone all the fucking time,” says an executive involved in manufacturing the original unit. The no-quibble clause was maintained for at least two to three generations of iPhone, until it got to a point where Foxconn was losing money and they had to plead with Cupertino to amend the contract. “It became untenable from a business standpoint,” says a person familiar with the change.

the last book I ever read (Apple in China: The Capture of the World's Greatest Company by Patrick McGee, excerpt five)

from Apple in China: The Capture of the World's Greatest Company by Patrick McGee:

The eighty-hour workweeks and increasing need to be in Asia at inconsistent times, with little warning and often for unknown durations, caused massive stress on the engineers’ mental health and their marriages. They were primarily men, and some of their wives took to calling themselves “Apple widows” because their husbands were around so infrequently.

So many marriages were broken up during the first years of Jobs’s comeback that informal preventive measures were established to contain further damage. Engineers called it the DAP, or Divorce Avoidance Program. In the late 1990s, the acronym referred to when an engineer couldn’t come in to work that day because his marriage was on the line. “It was like, ‘Where’s Glen this weekend? Why isn’t he working?’” one engineer recounts. “And a colleague would reply, ‘Oh, he’s on the DAP.’ The basic meaning was: Glen’s about ready to get a divorce if he doesn’t have a weekend with his wife. So Glen wasn’t working that weekend. That kind of stuff happened on the team all the time.”

Then the DAP evolved. The necessity of giving engineers respite to save their marriage was understood, but with Apple’s ID studio continuing to push the boundaries of what was possible, workers were under constant pressure to perform. So instead of giving time off, Apple started to give out bonuses meant to assuage spouses. One engineer with more than two decades of Apple experience recalls calling his wife from the Apple office and telling her that he had to take another trip to Asia the following week. “And she just blew up. You could hear her on my phone speaker two offices away,” he says. “The thing that made her calm down was that whenever I’d go to China on a project, if that project was completed and went to production, we got a $10,000 bonus.” Engineers had a name for these bonuses: “Dan bucks” or “Danny bucks,” in reference to Dan Riccio, the VP of Product Design. He’d played a role in negotiating for the bonuses. “We had these fake little vouchers that had Dan on them—he didn’t look happy,” an engineer says.

the last book I ever read (Apple in China: The Capture of the World's Greatest Company by Patrick McGee, excerpt four)

from Apple in China: The Capture of the World's Greatest Company by Patrick McGee:

Organized crime was a major problem in Taiwan, with underworld gangs dating back to Japanese occupation in the early twentieth century. By the early 1980s they’d penetrated the legitimate business sector. When the government launched a series of harsh crackdowns, some gangsters responded by running for office and winning elections. By the early 2000s, business, politics, and organized crime were so intertwined that the lines separating legitimacy from illegitimacy were blurry at best. Apple had been paying its contract manufacturer directly, which in turn was supposed to pay these sub-suppliers—vendors a tier or two down in the supply chain. Apple engineers had been, as one of them put it, “beating up on” vendors the past few days, pressuring them to work harder, work smarter, and now they were realizing these vendors hadn’t even been compensated. “Apple writes a check, the supplier is supposed to have the vendor make the change, and you go to the vendor as an engineer to see the effects,” Hillman says. “And you find out they haven’t even been paid a dime because it all went to the mafia.”

the last book I ever read (Apple in China: The Capture of the World's Greatest Company by Patrick McGee, excerpt three)

from Apple in China: The Capture of the World's Greatest Company by Patrick McGee:

Cook’s spirit is kindred to that of Immanuel Kant, the eighteenth-century German philosopher whose daily routine was so consistent that residents could set their watch to when he strolled by. His zeal for order is exactly what Apple operations needed. Compaq was a well-run business, but Apple was an absolute mess. Cook could make his mark immediately. Joe O’Sullivan, by then the acting head of operations, was tasked with teaching Cook the ropes. His goal was to distill his eleven years of experience into eight weeks of on-the-job training, beginning around April 1998. After just two weeks of on-the-job training, beginning around April 1998. After just two weeks, the two men agreed no more time was necessary. “By the time I left him, he knew more than I did about Apple,” O’Sullivan says. “That man has a fast mind. And a grasp. And a memory—honestly, it’s borderline photographic.”

Cook established exceedingly high expectations the first time he held an operations meeting of worldwide managers. In the weekly review, attendees went over what had gone wrong in the prior days, what needed to be fixed immediately, and what was coming up. These meetings were typically ninety minutes; sometimes they could stretch beyond two hours. On the day Cook took over, the weekly review went nearly thirteen hours. He insisted on a granular level of understanding and demanded fluency in the intricacies of every project. If a manager one week, in a lengthy presentation, projected that their team would ship 200,050 of something by Friday, Cook would remember. So the next week, if the manager said, “Yep, we met our numbers. We did two hundred thousand,” Cook would look at them and ask, with deadly seriousness: “And fifty?”

the last book I ever read (Apple in China: The Capture of the World's Greatest Company by Patrick McGee, excerpt two)

from Apple in China: The Capture of the World's Greatest Company by Patrick McGee:

The technique Apple would use to build the iMac enclosure dates back to a shortage of billiard balls in the late nineteenth century. The balls were typically made of ivory sourced from tusks, but the game’s popularity was growing faster than hunters could kill elephants. When a billiard equipment maker offered a $10,000 prize—more than $3 million today—for someone to come up with an alternative, an American inventor took up the challenge. He melted plastic, then injected it into a casing—a metal mold in the shape of a small sphere—and let it cool. Once the plastic solidified, he removed the casing and out popped a billiard ball. A patent for plastic injection molding was granted in 1872, and over the next 125 years the process became more intricate, automated, and repeatable. There was nothing unique about plastic injection molding the case of a computer, but Apple’s Industrial Design studio was intent on pushing the boundaries of what was possible.

Novak liked a challenge, but as he squinted at the horizontal lines on the front cover that wrapped around the display, he concluded the design just wasn’t possible. When molding plastic, the steel moves in one direction, but the horizontal texture lines ID had drawn up ran in perpendicular fashion. Technically you could mold one—but just one, because it was never going to come out of the mold. Novak experimented. Failed. Then experimented again.

the last book I ever read (Apple in China: The Capture of the World's Greatest Company by Patrick McGee, excerpt one)

from Apple in China: The Capture of the World's Greatest Company by Patrick McGee:

Apple’s pioneering strategy to build circuit boards was to employ Jobs’s younger, pregnant sister Patty, paying her a dollar for every board she assembled. Patty “settled on the living-room couch of her apartment, the boards on the coffee table before her, the soaps on the TV and a phone cradled on her shoulder talking to friends, jamming the rows of little caterpillar-shaped integrated circuits into the holes on the surface of the green placemat-sized fiberglass printed circuit boards,” writes Malone. “She wasn’t very good at it, with a tendency to jam the chips down when they didn’t fit just right—thus bending their little gold legs and setting the stage for future short circuits—but she was cheap, methodical and, most of all, available.

For the more popular Apple II, a small team took all the parts and separated them into little kits. Every few days they gave the kits to a Los Altos housewife, who coordinated a fragmented network of assembly operations spanning houses and apartments crowded with immigrant women from Southeast Asia and undocumented Mexicans. “No one ever mentioned minimum wage, or Social Security, or workplace safety laws,” Malone writes. “And thus, for more than a year, the Apple II, promoted as the machine to liberate people from the slavery of bureaucracies and office work, was in fact being partially assembled in sweatshops.”

the last book I ever read (Death with Interruptions by José Saramago, excerpt thirteen)

from Death with Interruptions by José Saramago (Margaret Jull Costa, Translator):

The hours passed, the hours necessary for the sun to come up outside, not here in this cold, white room, where the pale bulbs, which are always lit, seem to have been placed to fend off the shadows from a corpse who is afraid of the dark. It is still too early for the scythe to give the order that will make the second pile of letters vanish from the room, and so it can sleep a little more. This is what insomniacs say when they have not slept a wink all night, thinking, poor things, that they can fool sleep by asking for a little more, just a little more, when they have not yet been granted one minute of repose. Alone for all those hours, the scythe tried to find an explanation for the remarkable fact that death had made her exit through a sealed door, one that had been eternally condemned, certainly for as long as the scythe has been here. In the end, it gave up any attempt to understand, sooner or later, it will find out what’s going on behind that door, for it’s almost impossible for there to be secrets between death and the scythe, just as there are no secrets between the sickle and the hand that wields it. The scythe did not have to wait long. Only half an hour of clock time could have passed when the door opened and a woman appeared. The scythe had heard that such a thing was possible, that death could transform herself into a human being, preferably female, this being her normal gender, but had always thought it a mere tale, a myth, a legend like so many others, for example, the phoenix reborn from its own ashes, the man in the moon carrying a bundle of firewood on his back because he had worked on the sabbath, baron munchausen saving himself and his horse from drowning in a swamp by pulling on his own hair, the dracula of transylvania who cannot die, however many times he is killed, unless a stake is driven through his heart, and some people even doubt he’ll die then, the famous stone in old Ireland that cried out when the true king touched it, the fountain of epyrus that could douse lit torches and light unlit ones, women who anointed the fields with their menstrual blood to increase the fertility of the sown seeds, ants the size of dogs, dogs the size of ants, the resurrection on the third day because it couldn’t have been on the second. You look very pretty, said the scythe, and it was true, death did look very pretty and she was young, about thirty-six or thirty-seven just as the anthropologists had calculated, You spoke, exclaimed death, There seemed to me to be a good reason, it isn’t every day one sees death transformed into the species of which she is the enemy, So it wasn’t because you thought I looked pretty, Oh, that too, that too, but I would have spoken even if you’d emerged in the guise of a fat woman in black like the one who appeared to monsieur marcel proust, Well, I’m not fat and I’m not dressed in black, and you have no idea who marcel proust was, For obvious reasons, we scythes, both those who cut down people and those who cut down grass, have never been taught how to read, but we have good memories, mine of blood and theirs of sap, and I’ve heard proust’s name several times and put together the facts, he was a great writer, one of the greatest who ever lived, and his file must be somewhere in the old archives, Yes, but not in mine, I wasn’t the death who killed him, So this monsieur marcel proust wasn’t from here, then, asked the scythe, No, he was from another country, a place called france, replied death, and there was a touch of sadness in her words, Don’t worry, you can console yourself for the fact that it wasn’t you who killed proust by how pretty you look today, said the scythe helpfully, As you know, I’ve always considered you to be a friend, but my sadness has nothing to do with not having been the one to kill proust, What then, Well, I’m not sure I can explain. The scythe gave death a bemused look and thought it best to change the subject, Where did you find the clothes you’re wearing, it asked, There are plenty to choose from behind that door, it’s like a warehouse, like a vast theater wardrobe, there are literally hundreds of wardrobes, hundreds of mannequins, thousands of hangers, Take me there, pleaded the scythe, What’s the point, you know nothing about fashions or style, Well, one look at you tells me that you don’t know much more than I do, the clothes you’re wearing don’t seem to go together at all, Since you never leave this room, you have no idea what people are wearing these days, That blouse looks very like others I can remember from when I led an active life, fashions go in cycles, they come and go, they go and come, if I were to tell you what I see out in those streets, No need to tell me, I believe you, Don’t you think this blouse goes well with the color of the trousers and the shoes, Yes, agreed the scythe, And with this cap I’m wearing, Yes, that too, And with this fur coat, Yes, And with this shoulder bag, Yes, you’re quite right, And with these earrings, Oh, I give up, Go on, admit it, I’m irresistible, That depends on the kind of man you hope to seduce, But you think I look pretty, That’s what I said to begin with, In that case, goodbye, I’ll be back on sunday, or monday at the latest, don’t forget to send off the mail each day, that shouldn’t be too hard a task for someone who spends all his time leaning against the wall, You’ve got the letter, asked the scythe, deciding not to rise to such sarcasm, Yes, it’s in here, said death, tapping her bag with the tips of slender, well-manicured fingers, which anyone would be pleased to kiss.