Lady Business: New jobs and old circles; Hungary and Saudi Arabia
Hello and welcome to Lady Business, a newsletter about women, the business world, and all the ways they overlap. You can sign up for Lady Business and read previous issues here. This is the 84th issue, published November 16, 2019.
Life Cycles
Hello, and greetings from the end of my month-ish of garden leave! I started my new job at Fortune last week amid a lot of exciting and nostalgic first-day-of-school feelings: I'm going to a new office, meeting a new group of coworkers, finding a new commute and establishing new routines. It’s even the appropriate fall weather (or was, before New York turned into a frozen tundra this week).
Every once in a while, it’s kind of fun to have a routine disrupted! (Well. Aside from being forced to learn new ways in which the MTA is broken.) Pretty soon I’ll know, without thinking, which subway exit to aim for; where to buy my favorite coffee in between the subway and the office; what my favorite real-lunch spot is, and where my favorite no-time-for-lunch spot is. And figuring all of that out is part of the joy of starting something new. It’s not that my new work neighborhood is totally unfamiliar; it’s a ten-minute walk from my former work neighborhood, and a ten-minute walk in a different direction from my work neighborhood before that. But it’s just far enough away from both to be outside of the routine, while touching the familiar.
Which is part of what transitioning to a new job is about, right? Finding a new equilibrium that overlaps with, but stretches beyond, what's familiar and hard-won experience. (Part of this is also finding the best routine for Lady Business, so thank you for forbearing with my irregular publication schedule over the past month. We'll be back to more of a weekly cadence, but I'm playing around with the best day. If you're more or less likely to read this on a weekend day, please hit reply and let me know!)
Speaking of the balance between old and new, my start at Fortune also coincided with news developments in two stories I spent most of the past year covering:
--While I was on vacation in Vienna and Budapest, eating all the cake and finding goose and their livers on almost every menu, New York's city council closed the loop on my last Inc. feature and banned foie gras. I spent most of my summer immersed in the stuff -- how it's made (by the controversial process of force-feeding ducks and geese) and why it's such a recurring regulatory target when three farms in the entire United States produce it, versus the 9 billion factory-farmed chickens we consume every year.
Ariane Daguin, the owner and co-founder of foie gras distributor D'Artagnan and the woman I profiled in that Inc. story, is vowing to fight the ban, which goes into effect in 2022 (and she says that her sales of foie gras have been going up since it was passed). So while this was all happening in New York, it was especially strange to see how common and seemingly uncontroversial foie gras is in Hungary, where standalone shops and market stands are devoted to the stuff:
--Related to Hungary and its fraught political history (and present), one of the best parts of my vacation in Budapest was a vineyard tour and lunch. Because wine, of course, but also because our tour guide was a bright, matter-of-fact sixty-something woman who gave us a personal history of Hungary through the ups and downs of its wine industry. She had grown up under Soviet occupation in a town known for its grapes, where family vineyards where essentially shut down or shunted into supplying state-run distilleries, and where many established winemakers were expelled after World War II for having German ancestry. The vineyards we visited had been re-established or come out of hibernation only in the past couple of decades, which gave me a new perspective on just how recently the Berlin Wall fell, and the extent to which some countries are still coping with the post-Soviet economic (and personal) consequences.
--A year after I spent a fraught and fascinating week as a journalist in Saudi Arabia, the country made headlines again for recovering more of its pre-Jamal Khashoggi reputation. Former Uber CEO Travis Kalanick, the man who reached junior-high intellectual heights by nicknaming his company "Boober," bravely broke another barrier by becoming the first Silicon Valley CEO to take money from the Saudi government since that whole "oops we murdered a journalist thing." (Not to be outdone, Kalanick successor Dara Khosrowshahi truly mangled an interview about Saudi Arabia and the aforementioned murder, initially shrugging it off with a "Who among us hasn't committed a little light homicide?" He later said he regretted his comments.)
Lady Bits
--The New Yorker goes long on serial entrepreneur Suzy Batiz. Come for the profile of the crazy-successful-crazy hustler behind Poo-Pourri, who “might be micro-dosing right now!”; stay for the descriptions of the fifteen-thousand-square-foot, century-old restored Methodist church she calls home: “Her kitchen counter, which used to be an altar, holds a cluster of devotional candles … The former choir loft is a sitting room with crystal singing bowls for sound baths.”
--I’m really enjoying the new Watchmen series, and I say that as someone who enjoyed but winced at parts of original graphic novel. (Feminist it was not.) The source material was smart, visually gorgeous and narratively stunning ... if mostly about middle-aged white men and their discontents. HBO’s series echoes the visual excellence and narrative sharpness of its source material but tells a story about the villainy of white supremacy -- and appears to be centering it on three women, of three different races, all over the age of 40.
--The Good Place is totally over Big Tech (among other things):
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