"There was one interesting thing I learned from Carlson’s article: Mayer was inspired in high school when she read Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness with a grea

"There was one interesting thing I learned from Carlson’s article: Mayer was inspired in high school when she read Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness with a great teacher. If you’ve read the book, you’ll know it’s about a wary ingénue in the corridors of corporate and imperial power who encounters a grotesque, power-mad egomaniac with delusions of grandeur, who has set up a personality cult around himself despite having deserved nothing of what he’d come into in his career, until he is overthrown by the “brutes” he’d attempted to control and suppress. Remember that the next time you read a business-press takedown of Mayer." It is literally impossible to tell what this is supposed to mean. When we remember this, what are we supposed to make of the memory? Is Mayer Kurtz, here, and the business press the brutes? That would sort of make sense, but why would Auerbach say that? Is Mayer Marlow? That doesn't make much sense. Also, what's so all-fired great about being inspired (he doesn't by what, or to do what [1]) by Heart of Darkness? I respect David Auerbach a lot, but he seems pretty susceptible to Slate Disease. [1] Elsewhere I was told that she was inspired ... to decorate her classroom in a jungle theme. Whoop-de-do.