Hasta La Gadget!

Back when I was 30, my life fell apart. My marriage collapsed, I sank into a depression, and I lost my home, money, and self-respect. I also blew out my knee.

I wish I could say I injured it climbing Mount Kilimanjaro or something, but no—it was nothing that exciting. Here’s what happened: One afternoon, right in the middle of my God-awful divorce, I turned my head to look at something over my right shoulder, and suddenly my left knee…exploded. It made a sound like a gunshot, and I felt something inside the joint go snap. Then my leg went out from under me, and I hit the ground in agony. When I finally stood up, I was limping. And I limped for the next 13 years.

Long after I had put my life back together, my knee still hurt. I tried everything to fix it: physical therapy, acupuncture, ice, heat, yoga, massage, and ibuprofen by the handful. (The one remedy I refused to attempt was surgery, only because I knew so many people whose knee surgery had made their condition worse.) Over time, I resigned myself to the fact that my knee was just bad—the way certain dogs and art and upholstery patterns are just bad.

And then one day, about five years ago, I did a curious thing. I decided to try to really listen to my bad knee. We’d spend a quiet evening together, with the lights turned down and the phone turned off, in order to understand each other. I got very still with myself, focused all my attention upon my knee, and asked it, with loving respect, “What are you trying to tell me?”

I wasn’t sure what to expect. How can a knee answer a question, right? But I was desperate to heal myself, so I just lay there quietly in the dark, ready to listen to whatever arose.

And then my knee spoke.

Full disclosure: I’m not a doctor. Nor am I crazy. But I know what I heard that night. And when I say unto you that my knee spoke, I mean, my knee spoke. Suddenly a strong and unfamiliar voice filled my consciousness, and this is what it said: “Go faster!”

I could not have been more shocked. I’d expected it to say something like “Be more gentle with me!” or “Learn how to slow down!” But I had already been gentle and slow with my knee for 13 years, and it had never stopped aching because gentle slowness was not what it wanted. No, apparently my knee wanted speed.

Then my knee—realizing it finally had my attention—went on a rant. “I want to run fast!” it shouted. “I want to climb trees! I want to dance! Use me! Jump up and down on me! There is absolutely nothing wrong with me! I am wondrously designed! Stop calling me bad! Stop using me as a symbol of your divorce and a memory bank for all your past sadness! Stop treating me like a Victorian invalid! Stop babying me! Please talk to your therapist about your emotional troubles instead of holding your pain inside me! That isn’t fair to me! I am not weak! I am a knee, and I want to be used as a freaking knee! I want to run! Go faster!”

The next day, honest to God, I ran three miles—and fast. I didn’t feel any pain, nor have I experienced the slightest hint of pain in my knee since.

Again, I’m not a doctor. (Please don’t do anything dumb with your body after reading this column, okay? Sometimes there’s really something wrong with your knee.) But I share this experience because it raised within me an important question: Are you perhaps stronger than you think?

Yes, you have been hurt. Yes, your life has not gone as planned. Yes, your mind and body have taken some serious blows. And yes, sometimes we all need gentleness and care. But we must also be mindful not to baby ourselves to the point of incapacitation. Sometimes gentleness is the direct opposite of what your mind and body are actually crying out for. Life wants to be lived. Knees want to be used. And sometimes the only cure for pain is to go faster.

Elizabeth Gilbert is the author of, most recently, Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear.

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(Reuters) – An out-of-control sales culture, a defensive boss obsessed with stamping out negative views about her division and a group chief executive who called her “the best banker in America” were to blame for Wells Fargo & Co’s devastating sales scandal, an internal investigation found.

The probe into how the San Francisco-based bank could have allowed abusive sales practices to fester for years at its branch network laid most of the blame on the former head of the retail division, Carrie Tolstedt, and some of her management team, in a report released to media on Monday.

In the report, which was carried out by the bank’s chairman Stephan Sanger and three other independent directors, Tolstedt is blamed for ignoring the systemic nature of the problem which was pinned instead on individual wrongdoers and accused of obstructing the board’s efforts to get to the bottom of what was going on.

John Stumpf, the CEO who retired under pressure from the scandal in October, was criticized for failing to grasp the gravity of the sales practice abuses and their impact on the bank.

In the 110-page report, Stumpf was described as blinded by Wells Fargo’s cross-selling success. He refused to believe the model was seriously impaired and was full of admiration for Tolstedt, with whom he had a long working relationship. According to one director, Stumpf praised Tolstedt as the “best banker in America.”

The report said Tolstedt hid the scale of the misconduct from the board, which only discovered that 5,300 staff had been fired for opening more than 2 million unauthorized accounts when the bank reached a $185 million settlement with regulators in September last year.

On the advice of her lawyers, Tolstedt declined to be interviewed for the investigation.

Lawyers for Tolstedt and Stumpf did not immediately respond to requests for comment from Reuters on Monday morning.

Wells Fargo said Tolstedt had been fired for cause and would be forfeiting her outstanding stock options with an approximate value of $47.3 million.
Wells Fargo said it had decided to claw back approximately $28 million of Stumpf’s bonus, which was paid in March 2016.

In total, the bank has fired five senior retail bank executives, including Tolstedt, over the scandal and has imposed forfeitures, clawbacks and compensation adjustments on senior leaders totaling more than $180 million, including $69 million from Stumpf and $67 million from Tolstedt.

Since the scandal broke, the bank has seen a steady decline in the number of consumers opening checking and credit card accounts and has lost its status as America’s most valuable bank by market value.
 
THE BOARD

Sanger, a board member since 2003, is under pressure to assure investors and regulators that he is rooting out the bank’s problems after a welter of criticism that the board did not do enough despite knowing about the problem since 2014.

According to the report, multiple board members felt misled by a presentation by Tolstedt and others to the board’s risk committee in May 2015. The board members said they left thinking that between 200 and 300 employees had been fired for sales practice abuses and the problem was largely concentrated in southern California.

Last week, influential proxy adviser Institutional Shareholder Services recommended investors vote to replace the majority of directors at Wells Fargo, including Sanger and the other three independent directors, at its April 25 annual meeting.

The U.S. Justice Department, meanwhile, is investigating whether executives hid details from the company board and regulators as the problem grew over the years, people familiar with the matter have told Reuters. U.S. Attorney offices in San Francisco and Charlotte, North Carolina, are investigating.
The report criticized the board for not centralizing the risk functions at the bank earlier, not requesting more detailed reports from management and not insisting Stumpf get rid of Tolstedt sooner.

Tim Sloan, who replaced Stumpf as CEO, is described in the report as having little contact with sales practices at the bank before becoming chief operating officer and Tolstedt’s boss in November 2015. Six months later he told her to step aside.

Since the scandal broke, the bank has ended sales targets, changed pay incentives for branch staff, separated the role of chairman and CEO and hired new directors to its board.
 
A NOTEWORTHY RISK

A big part of Wells Fargo’s problem was its decentralized business model, which meant the retail bank was able to keep inquiries from head office at arm’s length and there was no joined-up effort by either the bank’s human resources or legal divisions to track and analyze the scale of the problem.

As far back as 2002, Wells Fargo’s retail bank was taking steps to deal with sales practice violations and in 2004, a report by the bank’s Internal Investigations division recommended eliminating sales goals for employees.
That report was sent to, among others, the chief auditor, a senior in-house employment lawyer, retail bank HR personnel and the head of sales & service development in the retail bank. No action was taken.

Externally, Wells was lauded by investors for its ability to cross-sell individual customers multiple products and for its squeaky-clean reputation relative to peers following the financial crisis.

Internally, the sales pressure was oppressive, particularly in California and Arizona, where senior bankers sometimes called subordinates several times a day to check in and chastise those who failed to meet sales objectives.

A sales push, dubbed “Jump into January”, encouraged bankers to make lists of friends and family who were potential sales targets. Staff turnover usually increased that month.

Sales practices were identified as a “noteworthy risk” to the board and its risk committee, of which Sanger was a member, after a series of stories in the Los Angeles Times detailed some of the sales practices.

But Tolstedt was left to deal with the issue and was “notoriously resistant to outside intervention and oversight” the report said.

Tolstedt was also perceived as having the support of Stumpf, who was seen not seen as someone to raise problems with.

”Stumpf was ultimately responsible for enterprise risk management at Wells Fargo, but was not perceived within Wells Fargo as someone who wanted to hear bad news or deal with conflict.”
 
(Reporting by Carmel Crimmins; Editing by Muralikumar Anantharaman and Meredith Mazzilli)

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Flanked by the president who promised to fill the seat of conservative Antonin Scalia with someone in the mold of the late justice, Neil Gorsuch was sworn in on Monday as the Supreme Court’s newest member — ending a bitter, yearlong fight that may forever change how Supreme Court battles are waged and won.

In a private ceremony at the Supreme Court and later in a public event at the White House, Gorsuch took separate constitutional and judicial oaths as the nation’s 113th justice.

The lifetime appointment restores the court’s half-century-old conservative majority. At 49, Gorsuch could serve on the bench for decades. It is also by far the biggest coup of President Donald Trump’s chaotic first 100 days in office ― the confirmation process went relatively smoothly despite bitter bickering in the Senate, which blew up its own rules to get Gorsuch confirmed.

“You’re now entrusted with the sacred duty of defending our Constutiton,” Trump said right before Gorsuch was sworn in. “Our country is counting on you to be wise, impartial and fair. To serve under our laws, not over them, and to safeguard the right of the people to govern their own affairs. I have no doubt you will rise to the occasion and the decisions you will make will not only protect our constitution today, but for many generations of Americans to come.”

Gorsuch’s swearing-in at the White House was also symbolic. His former boss on the high court when he was a young lawyer, Justice Anthony Kennedy, administered the oath. 

“We as a people find our self-definition, our heritage, and our destiny in our Constitution,” Kennedy said in brief remarks before he read from the judicial oath. As of Monday, Gorsuch became the first former law clerk to serve alongside one of the justices he worked with.

“I will never forget that the seat that I inherit today is that of a great, great man,” the new justice said following his swearing-in, in a reference to Scalia, whose seat remain unfilled for more than 400 days.

One Supreme Court commentator quipped that Gorsuch may have been referring to Judge Merrick Garland, whom former President Barack Obama chose to fill the Scalia seat but was historically denied even a hearing by Senate Republicans. During his own confirmation hearing, Gorsuch had nothing but praise for Garland but refused to say what he thought about how the Senate mistreated the judge.

The White House, for its part, has its sights set on the next Supreme Court vacancy.

Three justices — Kennedy, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer — are all in their 80s or near it, and a death or retirement during Trump’s first term is a real possibility. With the loss of a liberal justice or Kennedy, who often votes with them on issues such as gay rights, Republicans could entrench a 6-3 conservative majority on the Supreme Court.

After Monday’s festivities, Gorsuch is expected to dive headlong into the work of the court. Later this week, he will convene with his other eight colleagues for his first private conference, where the nine will consider what new cases to add to the Supreme Court’s docket for the new term, which begins in October.

As the most junior justice, Gorsuch will also relieve Justice Elena Kagan, who joined the court in 2010, from answering the door at these conferences — a tradition reserved for the court’s newest member. Gorsuch is also expected to take over from her attending  the cafeteria committee — an informal body that determines the food that is served to the public and employees on Supreme Court grounds.

This is a developing story and will be updated.

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John Leguizamo’s new one-man show, “Latin History for Morons,” is all about giving Latinos credit for their place in U.S. history.  

In an interview with Vogue published Thursday, the 52-year-old discussed what motivated him to write the show, which is currently running at New York City’s Public Theater.

Leguizamo recalled being treated like a foreigner as a kid because of his Latino heritage. Even today, the star said he’s told things like “You don’t belong here” on Twitter. But after discovering that his son was experiencing the same kind of bullying in school, he decided to read up on Latino heroes in U.S. history.

“If in my son’s class they would have read all the Latin contributions, people wouldn’t be so ready to attack us,” he told Vogue.

When asked about whether he was taught anything about Latino contributions to the country while in high school, Leguizamo said it was “nonexistent” in his education.

“There was a little bit of improvement in my son’s education, but Latin and black contributions — and I don’t mean to lump us together — were nonexistent in my public school,” Leguizamo said. “Even when I went to college, there was nothing. When I was studying the Civil War, there was nothing about everything we did, not one mention of any participation or contribution, ever. And it would’ve changed my life.”

In 2015, Leguizamo made the point that high school history makes Latino students feel “invisible” during a HuffPost Live interview.

“We’re not taught anything that we contributed to this country and we’ve been around for 500 years,” Leguizamo said. “Just imagine, you’re a white kid and all of a sudden everybody’s Latin and everything they’re teaching you is Latin and you don’t hear anything about yourself or about your contributions … and you feel like you haven’t contributed anything. How would you feel? How would you think of your future? How would you think of your participation in American culture?”

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When asked at the Stand for Rights telethon to benefit the ACLU which candidate he’d like to see run for president, documentary filmmaker Michael Moore told The Huffington Post, “He’s sitting back there. His name is Hanks, first name Tom. I just told him, ‘You know, we need you to run.’”

(“Run, Tom! Run!” is how we hope that conversation went.)

Why not? If “Cast Away” is any indication, Tom Hanks can even make you empathize with a volleyball.

Despite this, Hanks told HuffPost he’s not a politician, and it really comes down to “where you can do your best work.” The actor believes his best work is telling “stories about people,” which is what he did at the ACLU event on March 31 when talking about immigration.

“There’s people with brown skin who are having cheeseburgers somewhere in the middle of America, and it’s just assumed by a very, very ignorant segment of the population that if they’re brown they must be terrorists from the Middle East,” Hanks told HuffPost. “That’s a degree of reality, and it’s nothing more than a level of malevolence that is magnified by ignorance.”

When asked what he’d say to those people facing discrimination, Hanks sounded off, first bringing up the story of Guadalupe García de Rayos, a mother of two who had been deported to Mexico after living in the United States for more than two decades. Like many people, the actor couldn’t believe the story when it happened, saying it comes down to “common sense.”

“That’s contrary to a degree of common sense that is the speed at which America is supposed to work at. We understand, yes, a law has been broken. That woman has been in the country illegally for all those years. My father-in-law was in the country illegally for a number of years. I know all sorts of people who have been in the country illegally for a number of years. They are not here to scam the system, to break laws. They’re here to be free, to improve themselves, and to live and raise a family under the auspices of all the things we stand for: liberty, freedom, freedom of speech and free press,” said Hanks. 

That’s contrary to a degree of common sense that is the speed at which America is supposed to work at.
Tom Hanks

The actor continued, saying if America stops standing for the principles it was founded on, it’s not America anymore.

“A lot of people come to America because they’re tired of being tortured. They are. America stands for this thing, that if they stop standing for it, which is your huddled masses yearning to be free, we’re not America anymore,” said Hanks. “We’re some other Podunk country that doesn’t pay attention to such things as freedom of the press and the right to the degree of self-determination that the Constitution allows.” 

America stands for this thing, that if they stop standing for it, which is your huddled masses yearning to be free, we’re not America anymore.
Tom Hanks

The ACLU telethon, which streamed on Facebook Live, featured what seemed like every celebrity in New York. Alec Baldwin discussed voter suppression and Tina Fey talked about women’s rights, but Hanks was happy to address immigration policies. For him, it’s personal. 

Hanks said his father-in-law, Allan Wilson — who came into the country as an undocumented immigrant before later naturalizing — would not be allowed in the United States today.

“If he had been kept out of the country the same way many people are being kept out of the country … I’d not be married to the woman I’m married to. I’d not have the kids that I have, and I wouldn’t have the grandchildren that I do. That’s just a fact,” said Hanks.

He explained, “Now, that’s a degree of common sense that goes beyond this thing that says, ‘Well he broke laws, therefore he has to go.’”

Hanks believes you can’t follow the letter of the law in these cases.

“I have no problems with throwing crooks in jail, whether they’re citizens or not. Throw them in jail, by all means. But if the only thing they’ve done is they kept their nose clean, dodged the feds until they become citizens of the United States because they want to be free citizens of one of the few countries in the world that guarantee that status, more power to them,” said the actor, concluding, “The rules have to change.” 

Hanks may not think he’s president material, but we, along with a certain volleyball, would disagree.

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