Why I Stopped Arguing With People

I am a software engineer, and I used to enjoy arguing with people for technical correctness. Code reviews, design meetings, mailing-list threads, dinner tables. If someone was wrong, I wanted them to know it, and I wanted them to know exactly why. I collected counterarguments the way I collected patches. I believed that if I just laid out the logic clearly enough, the other person would have no choice but to come around. Truth would win.

It almost never worked that way.

Sometimes I won on points and lost the person. More often I won nothing at all: I’d watch someone grow more certain of the very thing I had just disproven, while the room quietly drifted to their side. I would walk away technically right and completely alone.

Over the years I’ve slowly stopped arguing. Not because I stopped caring about being right, but because I finally understood what an argument actually is, and what it can and cannot do. Here is what changed my mind.

Being Correct Is Not Always Good

The first thing I had to give up was the belief that being correct is always good. As an engineer, this felt like heresy. Correctness is the whole job. But correctness in a fact is not the same as goodness in a moment.

Lao Tzu saw this 2,500 years ago. In chapter 2 of the Tao Te Ching:

Being and non-being create each other.

Hard and easy complete each other.

Long and short define each other.

High and low depend on each other.

Sound and silence harmonize each other.

Everything exists only in relation to its opposite. There is no “right” without a “wrong” to make it right, and the moment you insist on standing on the high ground, you’ve created the low ground someone else must stand on. Winning an argument manufactures a loser. Being visibly correct manufactures someone visibly wrong.

So being right is not a pure good floating in space. It’s half of a pair, and it drags its opposite along with it. Once I stopped treating correctness as an absolute, I stopped needing to win.

Most Arguments Are About Ego, Not Ideas

When you argue with someone, you think you’re debating an idea. Often you’re not. You’re challenging their sense of self.

Many people are ego-driven. Their opinions aren’t positions they hold; they are the position. Prove the idea wrong and you haven’t corrected a fact, you’ve attacked a person. So they defend it the way anyone defends themselves: not with reason, but with resistance. The stronger your argument, the harder they dig in.

You can’t win an argument like this, because it was never an argument. It was a fight over whose ego stays intact. Even when you “win,” you lose, because now you have an enemy who is more convinced than before.

So I’ve drawn a line. I only discuss pros and cons with smart people; I don’t argue right and wrong with ego-driven ones. With the first kind, a disagreement is a joint search for the better answer, and both of us walk away sharper. With the second, there is no answer being sought, only a self to be defended. Knowing which conversation you’re in is half the battle. The other half is having the discipline to walk away from the second one.

People Are Not Rational

We like to believe humans are rational animals who occasionally feel emotions. It’s the reverse. We are emotional animals who occasionally think.

Most people don’t reason their way to conclusions and then feel accordingly. They feel first, then reason backward to justify the feeling. They follow the crowd, mistake confidence for correctness, and adopt whatever the people around them already believe. Independent thinking is rare, far rarer than we admit.

Once you accept this, arguing with logic starts to look absurd. You’re bringing a proof to a feeling. The proof is airtight. The feeling doesn’t read.

Correcting Others Rarely Helps Them

“But my motivation is good,” you say. “I’m not attacking anyone. I’m just pointing out a mistake so they don’t get hurt.”

I believed this for a long time. It sounds noble. But even with the best intentions, correcting people usually fails, and here’s the hard part: don’t do it anyway.

People don’t see your motivation. They see criticism. They rarely understand why you bothered, and they almost never appreciate it. Worse, most people don’t learn from advice at all. They learn from consequences. They have to touch the stove themselves. Words bounce off; pain sticks.

This sounds cold. It is. But it’s also, sadly, true. The most respectful thing you can often do is let people meet their own consequences, because that’s the only teacher they’ll actually listen to.

The One Exception: When They Ask

There’s a clean exception to all of this, and it flips the entire logic.

Help people when they explicitly ask for help.

When someone asks, the cause and effect reverse. You’re no longer imposing your judgment on someone who never wanted it. Their asking is the cause; your helping is the effect. Now there’s an opening, a real one, because they’ve decided they’re ready to hear it. The ego is lowered. The defenses are down. The advice lands.

So I don’t offer anymore. I wait for the door to open from the inside. And when someone opens it, I give everything I have.

Don’t Win the Argument, Profit From the Difference

If letting go of the argument sounds like pure loss, here’s the reframe that turns it into a gain.

When you and someone else see the world differently, you have two options. You can spend your energy trying to convince them you’re right, which, as everything above shows, almost never works. Or you can treat that difference as an asset and go build on it.

If you genuinely believe something others don’t, that’s not a debate to win. That’s an edge. The market rewards being right in a way that no argument ever will. Instead of persuading the skeptic, ship the thing they think is wrong and let reality settle it. Their disagreement isn’t an obstacle; it’s your moat. If everyone already agreed with you, there’d be no opportunity left.

This is especially true if you’re starting your own company. Differentiation is not a side effect of business, it is the business. A startup exists precisely because its founders believe something the rest of the world hasn’t accepted yet. If you could win that argument in a meeting, it wouldn’t be worth a company. The entire value lives in the gap between what you see and what others refuse to.

So I stopped trying to close that gap by talking. I started trying to profit from it by building. Let people disagree. Their disagreement is where the money, and the meaning, is.

You Can Only Change Yourself

Here’s the part that took me longest to accept.

In this world, there is no one you can change. Not your spouses, not your friends, not your kids, and of course not strangers on the internet. Only yourself.

That’s not cynicism, and it’s not giving up on people. It’s the opposite. It’s putting your energy where it can actually do something. Every hour spent trying to change someone who didn’t ask is an hour stolen from the one person (yourself) you can change.

And changing yourself is enough. You don’t need to fix everyone else to live well. When you become clearer, calmer, more skilled, more honest, the world around you shifts on its own, not because you forced anyone, but because people respond to who you actually are. Change yourself and you’ve changed your entire experience of the world. That is sufficient. Nothing more is required.

Accept this, and a strange peace follows. The arguments fall away. The frustration drains out. You stop trying to win people over and start letting them be who they are.

So turn the question around.

If the only person you can change is yourself, then the one question that matters is: how do you actually get better? Not by winning arguments. You get better by asking others for feedback, again and again, and truly listening to it. It’s the same asking I described earlier, the one clean exception, now turned on myself: I’m the one requesting help, so the advice can finally land. And you cannot do that with an ego in the way. The ego that needs to win is the same ego that can’t hear. It’s not just harmful; it’s a disaster, to everyone around you and to yourself most of all, because it quietly walls you off from the one thing that would improve you.

So put it away. Stay humble. Keep asking. That is the whole discipline.

I stopped arguing not because I stopped caring about being right, but because I finally wanted something more than being right: I wanted to keep getting better. And the only door to that is the one ego keeps slamming shut.

by Jerry Cayford

Boomer-bashing is everywhere. Maybe it’s warranted, but a reality check is in order, because the bashing starts from an easy and false idea about how power has moved in American society. The recent change in House Democratic leadership is almost too perfect an example. As a “new generation” takes power in the top three offices, we quietly ignore the most interesting generational story. We griped about the old guard clinging to power, and we cheer for our new young leaders, but we don’t mention that political power skipped a generation: it passed from the pre-Baby Boom generation to the post-Baby Boom generation. The Boomers themselves were shut out of power. As usual.

Wait! Before you insist the idea of Boomers shut out of power is ridiculous, that Boomers run the world, that at most the effect would be trivial and the concern petty, let me tell you another story, one whose outlines are well known. My father came out of graduate school in 1963 into the best seller’s market academics have ever seen. The Baby Boomers were just starting to hit college age, and universities were scrambling to hire enough professors to meet this huge wave of incoming students. He waltzed into a tenure-track position at a good university in one of the most desirable cities in the world. A few years later, he got tenure, despite publishing only one paper, not even as lead author (an unthinkable feat in the publish-or-perish jungle I encountered some decades later). He stayed there the rest of his career.

Now, it is no disrespect to my wonderful father, who is smart, a terrific teacher, and a valuable asset to his university, to acknowledge that his career started at an opportune time. Contrast his experience with my sister and her husband’s, smack in the middle of the Boomer generation. The year her husband came out of grad school, there were six openings in his field in the whole country. Universities now faced shrinking enrollment as the Baby Boomers passed college age, but were stuffed with tenured faculty still in their thirties and forties. My brother-in-law got one of those six positions—a one-year, non-tenure-track post—saw the writing on the wall, and used that year to apply to the Foreign Service and a viable career.

The Baby Boomers got pretty much shut out of the academy. I tell you this story to show I am not peddling conspiracy theory, just demographic facts. (I’ll get to the conspiracy part later.) The academy is just one kind of power, the power to shape some of the thinking of the generations coming up, and some of the public conversation. I will argue that a similar dynamic occurred in the corporate world and in politics.

Let me address terminology first, though. Some people would say that one of the incoming Democratic leaders, Katherine Clark, was born in 1963 and is therefore a Baby Boomer. This is wrong; 1963 is solidly Generation X. Yes, there is a convention among certain nerdy technocrats, blind to cultural nuance and aware only of demographics, to end the Baby Boom generation with declining birth rates around 1964. But the real dividing line—the change in values and cultural consciousness—is earlier, as documented by novelist Douglas Coupland, a keen observer. The widespread adoption of the term “Generation X” comes from Coupland’s novel Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture, which is about his generation (he was born in 1961, the same year as Barack Obama). Coupland is right, the technocrats wrong, and those of us who grew up through that cultural seismic shift knew the kids coming behind us—born in 1960, ‘61, ’62—were a different breed, conservative and materialistic, strangers to us Baby Boomers.

And that brings us to why it matters who gets power. Only when those who get it have different values and viewpoints from those who don’t does it really matter. Only then will the leaders make choices and decisions at odds with those they lead. And that is my thesis in drawing attention to the exclusion of Baby Boomers from power: this exclusion has been central to the suppression of progressive values in American society.

That the Baby Boomers are significantly more liberal than the generations before and after us is uncontroversial. A perfect graphic illustrating this came out during the 2020 election, showing polling on support for Biden or Trump by birth year. (NY Times newsletter 10/7/20) The graph’s curve moved from wholly Biden among the youngest voters, steadily toward Trump as people got older, with Trump support peaking at the middle of Gen X. Then it swung back until Biden support peaked at the middle of the Baby Boomers, then back to Trump for the Traditionalists (the generation of Dick Cheney, Nancy Pelosi, Mitch McConnell, and the old guard whose grip on power is just now loosening), and finally back to Biden among the remaining members of the Greatest Generation. Again, this is just demographics.

What demographics don’t show is the very unequal distribution of power among those generations. What happened to the Boomers in the academy is particularly clear and particularly extreme because of tenure, but the same basic dynamic was at play in business. As people grow up, they consume more, so the huge numbers of Baby Boomers created a growing demand for consumer goods. The one kind of power our generation did exercise was as consumers: in music and clothes, gadgets and movies, housing, style, and other cultural goods, we had a huge impact. In these very visible ways, we shaped the culture, and the generations brought up in our shadow can be forgiven for seeing us as a dominating presence.

The supply side of that demand explosion, though, followed the logic of the academy. Junior managers just a little older than the Boomers got promoted rapidly to meet demand. The Boomers’ own careers then followed behind this rapid growth onto job ladders where the rungs above were occupied not by a random age distribution and steady attrition, but by a glut of Traditionalists still in their prime. Disproportionately, the Baby Boomers never made it to the seats of power at the top of the business world.

Mergers and corporate concentration exacerbated this effect by shrinking the number of seats of corporate power in the society. This concentration started when Baby Boomers were mid-30s or younger, and it has continued throughout their careers. One wonders how much it was caused by pro-corporate Traditionalists reacting against anti-corporate Boomers, but that’s a bit conspiracy-sounding. Let’s just say a complicated history favored Traditionalists keeping the power they had acquired so easily; I’m trying to sketch the big picture and stay out of the weeds.

The political history does not have as simple a logic as the academy or the economy; nevertheless, the same thwarting of Baby Boomers happened in politics. The current hand-off of power from Nancy Pelosi and her two lieutenants to Hakeem Jeffries and his two lieutenants, involving only three offices, may be mostly symbolic of power passing from the Traditionalists over Boomers into the hands of Gen X. But if we dig deeper, the larger pattern holds the same for lawmakers as for academics, driven this time not by demographic inevitability but by the historical accident known as the “Watergate Babies.”

Matt Stoller tells the story in “How Democrats Killed Their Populist Soul” (The Atlantic, October 24, 2016; more detail is in his eye-opening book Goliath: The 100-Year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy). Just months after Nixon’s resignation, the blue wave election of 1974 swept a huge freshman class of Democrats into office. (The 1970 and 1972 elections also brought many new Democrats into Congress.) As Stoller says, “Over the next 40 years, this Democratic generation fundamentally altered American politics.” What generation were these Watergate Babies? Traditionalists, of course. The oldest Boomers turned 28 in 1974, extremely young to get elected to Congress. Of the 69 first-time House Democrats elected in 1974, two were Baby Boomers and 55 were Traditionalists, alongside twelve from the Greatest Generation. (These numbers go by the conventional generation boundaries. In fairness, I would date the Boomer cultural change earlier than the demographic one; but an earlier boundary would make only a marginal difference to this Traditionalist dominance of Democratic Party politics.) Once again, the doors to power are closed to Boomers just as their careers start. This time, incumbency in political office has a similar dynamic to tenure in academia, making the exclusion effectively permanent.

Remember that cultural values are the issue, because the story is more interesting than a one-dimensional left/right spectrum. A variety of progressive values are being excluded from power. Beyond being generically more liberal, Boomers brought politics into the center of attention, and with a particularly populist orientation. Power to the people. Almost the only thing I remember from Sunday school is singing “Blowin’ in the Wind,” eight or ten years before I knew who Bob Dylan was. Rock music was art, and a forum for serious discussion. The Beatles’ “Revolution” is not a simplistic response to the revolutionary zeitgeist. Doonesbury chronicled our generation best, the beautiful and the ugly, our idealism and its failures. For a “sixties revival costume ball,” several Doonesbury characters dress as the Kennedy cabinet, “the Best and the Brightest.” (“Lay some hubris on me, fellahs.” “We can WIN the war in Vietnam!!”) They mockingly quote Kennedy’s beautiful inaugural address, from memory—“The energy we bring to our endeavors will light our country! The glow from that fire can truly light the world!”—and they laugh, then stop laughing: “God. What’s happened to us?” “I dunno, man. I dunno.” Self-criticism without shirking.

It’s no secret that Democratic leadership has relentlessly recruited centrists and blocked progressive candidates for decades. The shutting out of Boomers has meant not only that the Democratic Party is at odds with its activists, and is far to the right of its base, but also that it has ceded populism to the Republicans. Populism is the most powerful political force of our time, and not by accident. Suppression breeds backlash. The Traditionalists’ respect for authority and their hierarchical thinking have controlled the reins of power even as the left-populism of the much larger Boomer generation has seeped throughout American culture. That the backlash manifests finally as right-populism and comes from the fringes is only natural when the values of the Boomer mainstream are blocked. The Establishment’s continuing hostility to populism is shown by the media’s reserving that term for the right-wing, conspiratorial, wacko version, while Bernie Sanders’s highly successful left-populism is assimilated to the term “socialism,” if it is acknowledged at all. (See Thomas Frank’s 2020 book The People, No: A Brief History of Anti-Populism, the latest of his brilliant political analyses.)

The Democratic Party’s recent generational passing of power, then, is a perfect symbol of the dynamic we’ve seen all our lives. The Traditionalists, who have always enjoyed easy access to leadership roles, seek out like-minded Gen Xers to take over. Still, if the Baby Boomers are destined to pass through this life always the chorus, never the lead, the chorus is, in the end, a powerful voice.

Like the Democrats, Republicans are well right of their voters, meaning the whole of government is. In a democracy, leadership far out of step with the people is ultimately unstable. Either the democracy crumbles or the leaders get back in step. Our current national drama is the struggle between these two resolutions. The good news is that we are finally seeing the first steps by leadership toward an overdue correction. From timid but significant climate policy actions (long delayed by suppression of the Boomer-driven environmental movement) to tentative revival of the moribund antitrust laws (resistance to corporate power being among our defining generational markers), progressive Boomer values are making their reappearance on the political stage. Look for the chorus to grow louder.

The show is not over, and we are still here.

Keep the faith, man. We shall overcome.

Confessions of an Ivy League Callgirl

People ask so many questions about it. You did that? You're kidding, right? What's it really like? What kinds of people use the service? What kinds of girls work for it? Men, especially, are utterly fascinated by the subject. It's like getting a glimpse into some mysterious semi-forbidden world, a world caricatured by pornography and attacked by conservatives and speculated about by just about everybody. Men get a vicarious sexual frisson thinking about it. Women wonder what it would be like to have someone pay — and pay well — for something they routinely give away. And, inescapably, people look at me and get a little scared. I could be — I am — one of them. I am their sister, their neighbor, their girlfriend. I'm nobody's idea of what a whore looks like. Maybe that's why I'm scary.

They want callgirls to be different, identifiable. That keeps them safe. The reality, of course, is that usually we're not. Oh, the girls on the streets at night, yeah, with them, you know. But callgirls — women who work for escort services, especially expensive ones, especially those run by other women — we don't look any different than anyone else. Not even always prettier. So we're scary. Because, you know, we could be you, too.

Maybe we are.

I had a master's from Yale and had just received my doctorate in social anthropology. I was anticipating tenure-track employment. What I got instead was a series of lecturer positions, because most universities were no longer offering professorships or offering very few. I was teaching on a semester-by-semester basis, being paid the less-than-princely sum (before taxes) of $1,300 per class. And I needed money. I needed a lot of money, and I needed it quickly. I needed the money because Peter, my most recent boyfriend, had not only decided to fly to San Francisco to meet up with some ex, but had emptied my checking account before leaving. A prince among men. Rent was due. The decimated bank account had held all the money I had to live on until the end of the semester.

So I picked up the Phoenix, and I opened the “After Dark” section and read the ads. I circled one.

The woman on the other end of the line, who I will call Peach, ran an agency that could be considered a midlevel escort service. How can I explain it? She didn't get the rock stars when they came to town, but she did get their entourages. She got people who owned companies, but not necessarily companies anyone had ever heard of.

Peach's employees stood out in that she required a minimum of some college education. The fact is that she helped pay off a whole lot of graduate student loans. She had a specialty niche: She did well with clients who wanted intelligent conversation along with their sex.

Her clients were university faculty, stockbrokers, and lawyers. They were computer geeks who couldn't tell a C-cup from a C-drive. They owned restaurants, nightclubs, and health spas. They were handicapped, busy, socially inept, about to be married. They saw girls in offices, restaurants, boats, their own marriage beds, seedy motels, strip malls, and suites at the Park Plaza. They were the most invisible, unremarkable group of men in Boston, having in common only that they could afford to spend $200 for an hour of company.

They used the time in a variety of ways, and that is my usual response when someone — and someone will, inevitably, in any conversation about the profession — says something judgmental about the perceived degradation of exchanging sex for money. Because, in my experience, that doesn't make sense. You think I'm just manipulating semantics here, don't you? I'm not: Hear me out. Many people are paid by the hour, right? An employer hires a consultant, for example, on the basis of certain areas of expertise the consultant can offer. The employer — or client — pays for the consultant's time by the hour. A callgirl is a consultant, using her expertise and experience in seduction and giving pleasure to fulfill a verbal contract with a client who is paying her by the hour. She is a skilled professional possessing knowledge for which there is a demand and for which the client is willing to pay her a predetermined rate.

If there's such a gulf between these two people, if there is more degradation in one than in the other, I'd like you to explain it to me. I have women friends who are waitresses in so-called sophisticated restaurants on Newbury Street, and I'm sorry, but I would never put up with what they have to endure every night. Not for any amount of money.

Speaking of the money, it's a pretty good hourly rate. Remember that what we get, we don't have to share with anybody — no state or federal tax, no social security. I take that back: It's a damned good hourly rate.

Occasionally there is no sex. Lonely men sometimes are just looking for company, for someone to listen to them: That's worth the fee. I remember a scene in Frankie and Johnny, when Al Pacino, newly released from prison, hires a woman to “spoon” with him — allow him to fall asleep curled into the curve of her body, her arms around him. I always found that scene incredibly touching.

The reality, however, is that most clients do want sex. Some want it quickly and efficiently, after which the girl is free to go; others want it as part of a date-like interlude. And there's every imaginable situation in between.

Peach was brisk on the phone. “You can refuse any call if you don't like the sound of the guy, or how it feels,” she said. “You can say no to anything you don't want to do, and I'll back you up.” I could have sworn I heard her stifle a yawn. I was far from yawning, myself. I answered with trepidation, but apparently I gave the right answers. Evidently, I passed the test to which I was being subjected. There was the briefest of pauses. “Hmm. All right. I'll have you see Bruce tonight. He'll like you.”

“Tonight?” For all my eagerness, that seemed very soon. Panic set in. “Peach, I'm not dressed.” I was wearing jeans and a T-shirt with a black vest and an olive linen jacket. Not my image of how a callgirl should dress. (Like I knew anything: I had seen Half Moon Street and Pretty Woman. What you might call a limited frame of reference.)

Peach was dismissive. “Don't worry — you're dressed perfectly. A lot of the clients go for casual. So do it, or not. Call me at 7, if you want, and I'll set it up.”

And that was that. Do it, or not.

I decided to do it.

Bruce seemed pleasant enough on the phone (I had been expecting a stutterer, maybe?) and gave me directions to a local marina. He lived, it transpired, on a boat.

He was a bear of a man, bearded, with eyes that twinkled behind his glasses. We sat on a sofa in the cabin of his sailboat, drank a very nice chilled Montrachet, and talked about music, our conversation interspersed with clumsy silences. It felt oddly familiar. To tell you the truth, what it felt like was a date. A first date.

He went to refill our glasses, and when he came back, he did the classic yawn and stretch — the favorite move from everybody's first junior-high romance. But at that moment, I leaned forward to pick up my glass, so he missed. Finally, he kissed me. A first date kiss.

It was at that precise moment that I knew it was going to be all right. This wasn't anything esoteric or bizarre or dangerous: this was something I had done before, something I did well, and — best of all — something I enjoyed doing.

Later, I learned that some callgirls won't kiss, that they consider their lips the only part of themselves they can withhold. I disagree. Maybe the pretense of romance is better than no romance at all. Or maybe I just like to kiss.

Can I tell you this? It was better sex than I'd had with the rat bastard boyfriend. Ever. And I was getting paid for it. I felt like singing, or skipping, something joyous and happy. I had just spent a pleasant evening. After I took out the $60 that was Peach's fee, I had made $140. In one hour. Anybody else out there making that kind of money?

There was a guy up in North Andover, a handsome, middle-aged black man who I saw from time to time. After a semi-successful three quarters of an hour on his bed, he would make out a check (previously cleared with Peach, of course; this tends to be a cash-only business), always with a flourish. He winked at me as he wrote that it was for the “purchase of artwork.” There was a ridiculously young man in South Boston, nice, who offered me a light beer and never gave me a chance to drink it. There was my first hotel client, a regular who visited once a month on business. He was very busy, he informed me, gesturing toward his open laptop on the coffee table. He was as good as his word. I was out of there in under 20 minutes. It was 8:30 at night, and I was walking down a hotel corridor with $150 that I had made in less time than it had taken me to get dressed.

None of these men had a particularly scintillating personality. One kept following up his remarks with, “Oh, you probably don't understand that. Like, who am I talking to here, Einstein or something?” “True,” I agreed, the third time he said it. “Einstein's doctorate wasn't in anthropology, mine is.” He was pretty much quiet after that.

All in all, they weren't bad people. Ordinary, marginally attractive, with questionable social skills, yes. Dull, predictable, full of insecurities, sure. I had dated men just like them in the past and for no compensation.

Among my regulars there was Phil, who liked to show me off to his friends. We sipped cocktails together in trendy restaurants on Columbus Avenue, chatting with all the people he knew who “accidentally” happened by that night, before going back to his place for sex.

Robert took me to wine-tasting parties at Cornucopia on the Wharf. We'd sit at big circular tables and listen to the distributors discuss the wines while we ate and sipped, and he watched the other men watching my breasts.

For Raoul, I dressed in little black nothing cocktail dresses and went to the symphony and the occasional opera. We ate dinner first, wonderful dinners. The sex always seemed to be an afterthought. More frequently than not he would ask if I'd terribly mind skipping that final portion of the evening; he was in his sixties, and quite naturally got tired. I always managed to express regret.

You walk along Commonwealth Avenue down near the Public Garden and Beacon Street with its wrought-iron fences, and you wonder about who lives behind the mullioned windows and thick velvet draperies. You imagine that they must be people of culture. So when Peach sent me to Beacon Street, I felt nothing but a sense of mild anticipation.

Her directions led me to a fourth-floor apartment that overlooked the Charles, and as soon as I got there, I moved toward the window with an exclamation of delight. But this client — Barry by name — wasn't paying me to enjoy the view. I know this to be true because he said so, even as he grasped my arm and pulled me away from the window, a grasp that was to leave clear, deep imprints of his fingers on my bruised skin.

Barry pinned me against a brick wall, and it hurt. His hands hurt, too, pushing against me, squeezing my breasts. I gasped and pulled away and told him to stop. He laughed. He actually laughed. “You don't tell me to do anything,” he said. “You're just a whore. You do what I say.”

I remember being pushed onto the bed, with him on top of me. I remember his voice, over and over: “You're just a whore, aren't you? You're just a dirty little whore. Say it! Say you're a whore!” I struggled away and crouched next to the headboard. No amount of money was worth this. I took a deep breath and screamed. And did it again.

Barry sat on the bed, the fury draining from him. He stalked toward the bathroom. “Don't slam the door on your way out,” he said, coldly. “I'm taking a shower. You made me feel dirty.”

I had made him feel dirty.

Later, I met a woman named Margot who also worked for the agency. Over drinks at Jillian's, we began sharing client experiences. Barry, it turned out, was one of Margot's regulars. I stared at her. “How can you stand him?”

“Well, see, I have this theory.” Margot took a liberal swallow of her Manhattan. “Guys like Barry, they have so much rage against women, you know?” “No shit,” I muttered.

“Okay. So he keeps pacing around his apartment and muttering about women being whores. Maybe he watches them through his windows, pretty women down on the Esplanade or Memorial Drive, and it's stoking his feelings of insecurity and inadequacy — well, eventually there will be too much pressure, and it'll blow.” She sipped her drink before delivering the punch line. “So if the pressure gets eased, maybe he won't blow. Maybe if he can play out his sick little fantasy with one of us from time to time, with someone who can handle it, you know, then he won't walk down Beacon Street one night and follow some innocent woman home. Maybe he won't hurt her.”

I liked Margot's theory. Everything I'd been reading about prostitution was about how it contributed to the oppression of women, how it perpetuated men's fantasies of control and power. And here was this woman, calmly sipping her Manhattan and telling me she was considering the needs of other women. I liked the thought of that anonymous woman walking down Beacon Street at night, her footsteps echoing. I liked thinking that she was safe because somewhere four stories up, Margot was there, sleeping with the enemy.

I don't know, in the end, why I left. I'm not even sure it matters. Take your pick: I left because I got scared, or because I got hurt, or because I grew up, grew out of it.

In the end, I think that I left because it was simply time to leave.

The business had given me what I needed. It gave me financial security. And maybe, too, it gave me the thrill of having lived on the edge for a while.

Sometimes, even now, when it's around 7 o'clock, I'll stop and wonder what's going on tonight. Who's working, what clients will call, that sort of thing. It won't be anybody that I know, not anymore. Time has moved on, in this business faster than anywhere else.

But the names don't matter: The needs will always be the same. Telephones will ring, girls will fix their makeup in vanity mirrors. Tonight, as every night, money will change hands. Callgirls will give pleasure, excitement, mystery, hope, enchantment.

I stop and I think. Then I shrug and head out to the bike path for a ride, or I load the kids into the car.

I have told one story — mine. I willingly and deliberately entered the employment of an escort agency. I do not regret having made that decision.

Because agencies like Peach's exist, agencies that do not exploit or injure their employees, a number of women like myself were and continue to be able to attain a measure of financial security in a society where it is difficult for a woman to do so. I am aware, however, and most urgently want you to be aware, that many women are not in this profession because they need to pay off student loans. I have a positive story to tell. I'm not at all sure that my experience is that of most women involved in this business.

Please don't be so quick to call us hookers, to judge us. We could be your mother, your sister, your girlfriend, your daughter. Even your college professor.

No, I take that back. It's not a matter of saying that we could be. We are.

Excerpted from Callgirl by Jeanette Angell, The Permanent Press, ©2004. All other names have been changed.

note: during august, bang! will publish friday editions only.

in 2019 i published a column in portuguese calling the triple-double the stupidest statistic in the sport. the argument was arithmetic and it was not difficult to make. ten is a line somebody drew. nine rebounds are worth what ten rebounds are worth, minus one rebound. i counted a hundred and seventy-two players averaging double figures in points that season and used the count as proof that ten points is not a landmark. moskowitz and wertheim had already published the underlying idea in scorecasting, which is that round numbers govern people for no reason anybody can defend.

then i went further. anthony davis finished that season with 25.9 points, 12.0 rebounds and 2.4 blocks and zero triple-doubles, and i wrote that he was the better player. the conclusion was that a triple-double is three random figures stacked and called an achievement, and that its value is nothing.

russell westbrook retired on wednesday. he announced it in a video he does not speak in, narrated by michael b. jordan, with a short caption. “you had to be there. and now it’s over,” westbrook wrote.

i have had that 2019 column open all day. it holds up on the number and comes apart on the man.

he finishes with two hundred and nine triple-doubles, more than anybody in the history of the league. forty-two of them arrived inside one season, in 2016-17, breaking a mark oscar robertson set in 1961-62 and held for fifty-five years. he averaged a triple-double across four separate seasons. robertson managed it once. nikola jokić has managed it once. westbrook did it four times and nobody else has done it twice.

none of that touches the arithmetic. those are still three lines somebody drew, and clearing them is still a question of where the lines happen to sit. a season averaging 9.8 rebounds is not a lesser season than one averaging 10.2, and anyone who says otherwise is telling a story about counting rather than about basketball.

the win-loss record is the part i could not have written around.

in the two hundred and nine games where he got there, his teams went 153-56. a winning percentage of .732, spread across eighteen years, seven franchises and several rosters with no business winning anything at all. a measurement worth nothing correlated with victory for two decades. either the correlation is an accident of who happened to be standing on the floor, or those three columns were registering something the arithmetic could not reach.

versatility is the word the broadcasts used. versatility is too polite. what the columns were registering was appetite.

getting to ten in points, rebounds and assists on the same night asks a guard to want the ball on every possession, and to want the miss on every possession he did not touch. westbrook stood six feet four. he retired as the career leader in rebounds from the point guard position, a badge he carried in public with some pride. he got there by walking into traffic with centres for eighteen seasons and coming out with the ball.

scott brooks watched him work out before the 2008 draft and had one thought, and it was about his own playing days. “there’s no way i can stay in front of this guy,” brooks said.

the seattle supersonics took him fourth out of ucla that june and moved to oklahoma city before he played a game for them. then he did not miss one. three hundred and ninety-four consecutive games from the start of 2008-09 through the end of 2012-13, which is five full seasons of a man arriving.

in portland in 2015 he took a knee to the face and broke a bone. i was calling that game on tv and could not believe what i was watching. there was a dent in his cheek. he missed two games. he came back five days later in a protective mask and put up forty-nine points, sixteen rebounds and ten assists.

kevin durant spent eight seasons in the locker beside him and once described the training schedule in a single line. “by time i would get to the gym, russ was already done in the morning,” durant said.

743 dunks between the regular season and the playoffs, second among guards in league history behind dwyane wade. a six-four man went at rim protection on purpose, at full speed, for eighteen years. the collisions were deliberate and they were repeated.

the same constitution produced five thousand and thirty-eight turnovers, second all time. twelve thousand five hundred and forty-three missed shots, seventh. a career three-point percentage of 30.8, accumulated across the exact eighteen years the league spent rebuilding itself around the shot he could not make.

the appetite travelled. between 2016-17 and 2020-21 he played three hundred and fifty-six games for three different franchises. he averaged 26.0 points, 10.3 rebounds and 10.1 assists across the whole of it. a hundred and forty-seven of the two hundred and nine came inside that stretch. the rosters changed, the coaches changed, the cities changed. the output did not move.

oklahoma city got the largest share. eleven seasons, and he leaves as the franchise leader in points, assists, rebounds and steals, which is a sweep that only happens when one man is present for everything. the roster he grew up inside had durant and james harden on it and reached the finals in 2012, where he scored forty-three in game four at twenty-three years old and lost in five. harden was traded that autumn. westbrook tore a meniscus in the first round in 2013. durant fractured a foot in 2015. in 2016 the whole thing ended in a game seven against a team that had won seventy-three, and durant signed with that team in july.

westbrook signed an extension into the vacancy.

what followed is the season everybody still argues about. 31.6 points, 10.7 rebounds, 10.4 assists, forty-seven wins with a roster missing the best scorer in basketball, and an mvp decided in one of the most contested votes of the century. the extension held the franchise together long enough to attract paul george and carmelo anthony. the trade that sent him to houston in 2019 returned the assets that became the 2025 champions. oklahoma city gives him a standing ovation every time he goes back, which is what cities do for the ones who stayed.

the hallway ran on the same appetite. he turned the walk into the arena into a runway and sewed some of the outfits himself. he kept the met gala pieces and the draft night suit. the whole league copied him, and shai gilgeous-alexander still does the walk in oklahoma city.

houston is where the second half of the career starts and where the shape of it becomes visible. the rockets sent clint capela to atlanta to give him a floor with nothing standing in the middle of it. the experiment ended in the orlando bubble. after that came washington, the lakers, the clippers, denver and sacramento. five of his last six stops lasted a single season. in all the years after durant he won one playoff series, with denver in 2025.

the criticism was correct, and the sentence deserves writing properly rather than as a concession. a six-four guard who needs the ball, cannot shoot from distance and rebounds like a power forward is a genuinely difficult object to place on a roster. the offence he wanted required a floor nobody builds any more, with a centre on the block and long rebounds coming off flat misses. every front office that declined to reorganise itself around him at thirty-four was making a sound basketball judgment, and several of them made that judgment twice.

the shooting was more complicated than the shorthand allows. he is one of thirty-three players in league history with a thousand career makes from sixteen to twenty-three feet, and he ranks eighth on that list at 37.8 percent. what he never became was the man who waits behind the line for a pass.

the request every team made was identical. be smaller. do less of it, more efficiently, in fewer minutes, off the ball.

appetite does not come in doses. a man who had been the most involved player on any floor he stood on since 2008 could not be metered down to fourteen quiet minutes without becoming somebody else. the somebody else would have been worth signing for about two seasons, and then the athleticism goes. what every team wanted was the version of him that had never existed. he retires fourth in career points among players who never won a title, behind karl malone, harden and anthony, which is a list of men who were each too much of one thing.

he and lebron james are the only two men who have finished with twenty-five thousand points and ten thousand assists. widen it to two thousand steals and the list still stops at three.

he was still producing at thirty-seven. sixty-four games for sacramento last season, fifty-eight of them starts, 15.2 points and 6.7 assists for a team that finished 22-60 and tied utah for the worst record in the west. sacramento talked to him about coming back in a reduced role behind a rookie point guard. washington made an approach. he stopped instead, at the last moment when stopping was still a decision he was making rather than one being made for him.

his agent released a statement on wednesday about the market for players in their late thirties. “teams won’t spend on older vets because of current cba rules,” jeff schwartz said. the lakers changed hands for 12.5 billion dollars in the same week.

the aprons did not invent the judgment that a thirty-seven-year-old guard shooting 30.8 percent from three is a luxury item. they removed the margin where a team could be wrong about that judgment and absorb the error. the veteran minimum used to be where a franchise kept a man for reasons it could not defend in a spreadsheet. a roster spot gets charged twice now, once in salary and once in the flexibility the second apron takes back. nine all-star selections, nine all-nba teams, two scoring titles, three assist titles, an olympic gold medal, a place on the seventy-fifth anniversary team. the market in august had a smaller job behind a rookie.

jokić needs eleven more triple-doubles to take the record and will almost certainly have them by march. he will reach the same number from the opposite direction, at walking pace, from the elbow, with his hands. the record will change owners and the argument about whether it means anything will change with it, because the man collecting it now is the least arguable player alive.

i still think the number is junk. the arithmetic of 2019 has not moved an inch, and ten rebounds is still a coincidence of base ten. what the column got wrong was assuming that a meaningless line says nothing about the man who keeps crossing it. lines drawn at random are the hardest kind to cross on purpose, because nothing in the game bends to help anybody reach them. he crossed them anyway, in a body four inches too short for most of it, for teams that mostly lost in may.

two hundred and nine of them. the last on the fifteenth of march, and three times that night he got to ten.

seventeen new paid subscribers since the last edition, and seventeen is not a round number: joanna, brian, mattias, priya, thomas, elena, dario, david, anthony, marcus, iris, ben, charles, yusuf, leonard, gil and anders.

they paid in the same week this newsletter spent a whole friday arguing that round numbers measure nothing at all. seventeen people deciding a basketball sermon should keep existing is a count that measures plenty.

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