Angela Wu. Blog!

Tim Wu explains why small businesses are starting to win again:

"A week after the interview, I’m eating lunch in a cafe near my home when someone taps me on the shoulder: Harry. He’s at a table across the room – do I want to join? We talk about the interview, how absurdly hot it was under the lights. He mentions playing five-a-side the night before and we trade stories about the first football matches we went to see. Harry says it was the only place his dad would let him swear – a little six-year-old Styles, gleefully doing “wanker” signs at the opposition fans.”

My Grandma the Poisoner: What Do You Do When You Think You Have a Murderer in the Family?

When I was four or five, sometimes I’d walk into my grandmother’s bedroom to find her weeping. She’d be sitting on the side of the bed, going through boxes of tissues. I don’t believe this was a side of herself she shared with other people; she may have felt we had a cosmic bond because I had her father’s name as my middle name and his fair features. She was crying for Martha, her daughter, who died of melanoma at the age of 28. Ten years later, after Norman—her youngest child, my uncle—died, also at 28, she would weep for him.

People were always dying around Grandma—her children, her husbands, her boyfriend—so her lifelong state of grief was understandable. To see her sunken in her high and soft bed, enshrouded in the darkness of the attic, and surrounded by the skin-and-spit smell of old age, was to know that mothers don’t get what they deserve. Today, when I think back on it, I don’t wonder whether Grandma got what she deserved as a mother; I wonder whether she got what she deserved as a murderer.

A few months ago, I loaded the wife and kids into the car and went out to visit Grandma. I hadn’t seen her in more than a year and a half, and in that time she had moved from her house to an assisted-living place to another assisted-living place. There was no good excuse for my lapse—I guess I couldn’t quite deal with the way we’d left her house. A catastrophe. Full of stuff. The buyers said they’d take care of it, and they did; they tore the whole thing down. My brother had a friend from the neighborhood (out on Long Island, a.k.a. Lawng Islund) who said it was the scandal of the year.

That house, where I spent so much of my childhood visiting Grandma, was disgusting. In the late 90s, my brother and I dedicated three days to cleaning it up. Joe, my grandmother’s last boyfriend, had died, and his stuff was there. He was one of five dead people whose stuff was there, was everywhere. My aunt’s stuff, my uncle’s stuff, my grandfather’s stuff, and Grandma’s second husband’s stuff filled, I’d estimate, about half the total volume of the house. Driver’s licenses and important papers and half-finished projects and mementos like the rusted bolts my uncle Norman, on his diving trips, had dragged out of sunken wrecks. In the basement library, we uncovered a vial of red viscous fluid. The vial, sealed with a hard wax or plastic, was handblown and quite beautiful, and the box was neatly jointed hardwood. We thought the thing might be valuable. It could have been old—we weren’t sure. So we tried to sell it to an East Village curiosity shop, which advised that we dispose of it via the Poison Control Center.

In the basement’s woodshop we found a sprinkling of half-melted heroin spoons (Grandma had let some pretty questionable characters crash with her), and in the backyard we found a big black garbage bag full of dead animals. You could tell it was animals from the outside of the bag; you could see the shapes of the corpses. We both peeked in but were so quick about it that all we confirmed was the presence of dead bodies, not what kind. My brother says he saw turtles, which seems likely, since my mother had owned half a dozen turtles that all perished in a sudden, inexplicable cataclysm. I saw an owl, which is less likely, but also possible, since there are owls on Lawng Islund. Most likely, we decided, the bag was full of cats and raccoons, which were always getting into Grandma’s garbage. She’d yell at them from the back porch. The last time I saw the bag it was on the lawn waiting for the trash pickup. In the shining black plastic you could still see the rounded shapes of haunches.