Unclear so far if Laurene Powell was first-generation herself. Steve Jobs’s birth mother, a graduate student at UW-Madison involved with another graduate student there, initially authorized his adoption by a professional couple who backed out at the last minute when they decided they wanted a girl. Or so the story goes per most canonical Jobs biographies. He was then adopted by the Jobs family with the stipulation that the family save for him to go to college, which really strained their resources. Despite considerable ambivalence and, eventually, outright intransigence, Steve then only applied to Reed College, only went to humor his parents after all they’d done for him, then dropped out after about a year, commuting from a farm and Hare Krishna center to audit classes instead of paying tuition. Thus the notion of whether or not Steve himself was a first-generation college graduate is complex – he was certainly not a graduate, and solely by choice, but he wasn’t technically a first-generation college student even though he was so socially and culturally.

There’s long been a lot of public folderol about why the Jobs family does not run a philanthropy on the scale of or with the same prominence as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation – are they quieter about their giving, or just withholding?

In essence, to be explored later, Laurene Powell Jobs has significant engagement in corporate education reform movements popularized by Teach for America, though she is not a board member there (though TFA corps members got free first generation iPads!)

She is often called “Steve Jobs’s widow,” which, while true, does not capture her new life. In January 2015, she was said to be dating former Washington, D.C. mayor Adrian Fenty, who is also interested in education reform.

She’s listed as a member as Laurene Powell. The membership is rather extensive, as is the advisory board, mostly with ex-CIA and diplomats (and Tom Brokaw). In addition, she’s now a member of the Stanford Board of Trustees, which includes many very, very rich people but not the Wealth Genius superelite.

Steve Jobs’s sensibility was perfectly suited to that of the professional morphologist, the physician (pathologist) who uses pattern recognition to diagnose and stage cancer. It requires obsessional features and appreciation for beauty and order in disorder. Here is a deidentified sample – not his – of islet cell neuroendocrine pancreatic cancer:

I spent a significant amount of time in medical school annotating the entire Vampire Weekend catalogue, at first for my own entertainment, then whoever else’s. Then the Vampire Weekend lyrics pages found their way to a bunch of musicians and critics who made fun of them and potential investors who enjoyed them (and vice versa I imagine). Most people don’t approach their lyrics like the Beastie Boys as they should, and that was the whole idea behind my interest in the project.

Their catalogue includes a number of probable references to the same neighbourhoods discussed in this poem, probably because two of the members are from New Jersey. A few of my friends thought I wrote this poem about them, what with all the references to Montclair, but I didn’t. I wrote THIS one about them, which doesn’t have any!

The juxtaposition of “low-income urban neighborhoods and” is a reference to an early piece of criticism on the band by Charles Mudede, who chooses to focus on “the ground beneath their feet/the hot garbage and concrete.” It was an inside joke.