The Best Relationship Advice Ever

WILSON
Let’s say you’re right. Completely right about everything. Give in anyway.

HOUSE
This is not a point of pride. This is a point of principle.

WILSON
Right, you’re the Rosa Parks of hooker massages.

HOUSE
The principle is she’s being irrational. If I give in on this, it sets the stage for the whole relationship.

WILSON
Putting up with irrationality is the foundation for every relationship. I agree with Sam when she’s calling her father a monster. I agree with her when she’s calling him a saint. And in exchange, I get to have sex with her. And I’m sure she has similar tradeoffs with me.

Relationships are hard. You have to make sacrifices. So sacrifice being crazy. Go get her a gift and apologize.

—House

This Guy Once Held a Knife to John Boehner’s Throat. Years Later, Boehner Served As His Best Man

Boehner never accepted an earmark in Congress — and he enjoyed railing against those who did. His heckling once provoked Don Young, an Alaskan himself, to pin Boehner against a wall inside the House chamber and hold a 10-inch knife to his throat. Boehner says he stared Young in the eyes and said, “Fuck you.”

Young says this account is “mostly true,” but notes that the two became good friends, with Boehner later serving as his best man.

John Boehner Unchained

Question a Man’s Judgment, Not His Motives

As a freshman senator, Joe Biden saw Jesse Helms, the archconservative North Carolina Republican, ripping into a piece of disabilities legislation.

Biden was furious, and began attacking Helms to Mike Mansfield, the Democratic Senate majority leader.

Mansfield asked Biden if he knew that Helms and his wife had adopted a disabled nine-year-old boy no one else would take.

“Question a man’s judgment, not his motives,” Mansfield instructed.

How to Get What You Want From Other People Without Demanding It

When I talked to Miranda backstage at the Richard Rodgers Theater before a performance one evening, he described [Jeffrey] Seller as someone who knows very well what he wants but understands that he cannot demand it.

“He is incredibly smart creatively, but he’s never prescriptive,” he told me. “Jeffrey doesn’t pitch scenes. He doesn’t say, ‘Here’s where you need a moment for Madison to turn to Washington and say the following line.’ What he will say is, ‘What you’re doing now isn’t working, and it’s on you to fix it.’ If there are commercial interests involved, he’s very good at couching them creatively.”

The C.E.O. of Hamilton Inc.

Dale Carnegie Would Have Lauded Scooter Braun

In January 2011, an anonymous tipster called TMZ, offering to sell a compromising video of Justin Bieber. At the time, Bieber was 15 years old and about to star in a bio-pic, Never Say Never.

The caller emailed a teaser from the video that reached Diana Dasrath,TMZ’s “clips-clearance manager.” The teaser showed Bieber, sitting alone in a room, singing his hit “One Less Lonely Girl” a cappella. In place of the usual lyrics, Bieber had substituted “nigger” for “girl.” He giggled as he sang, “There’ll be one less lonely nigger” and “If I kill you, I’ll be part of the K.K.K.”

That afternoon, TMZ contacted Bieber’s manager, Scooter Braun, for comment. In a phone conversation, Braun pleaded with TMZ honcho, Harvey Levin, not to post the video, saying, “You’re going to ruin this kid’s life.” Levin hesitated for four seconds, then said that he was moving ahead, and that he would need a statement from Braun by the morning. “Harvey, whatever those four seconds were—whatever that place is—that’s the place that I want you to go back to,” Braun said. He and other members of Bieber’s team stayed up all night crafting a statement.

In the morning, Braun and Levin spoke again. Levin confided that he’d been unable to sleep. “A lot of people call me and tell me I’m an asshole—they say, ‘Fuck you,’ ” Levin said. “You didn’t. I’m not putting the video up.” Braun broke down in tears. Bieber later called Levin and thanked him.

The Digital Dirt

A Great Man Shows His Greatness by the Way He Treats Little Men

“Bob Hoover, a famous test pilot and frequent performer at air shows, was returning to his home in Los Angeles from an air show in San Diego. As described in the magazine Flight Operations, at 300 feet in the air, both engines suddenly stopped. By deft maneuvering he managed to land the plane, but it was badly damaged, although nobody was hurt.

“Hoover’s first act after the emergency landing was to inspect the airplane’s fuel. Just as he suspected, the World War II propeller plane he had been flying had been fueled with jet fuel rather than gasoline.

“Upon returning to the airport, he asked to see the mechanic who had serviced his airplane. The young man was sick with the agony of his mistake. Tears streamed down his face as Hoover approached. He had just caused the loss of a very expensive plane and could have caused the loss of three lives as well.

“You can imagine Hoover’s anger. One could anticipate the tongue-lashing that this proud and precise pilot would unleash for that carelessness. But Hoover didn’t scold the mechanic; he didn’t even criticize him. Instead, he put his big arm around the man’s shoulder and said, ‘To show you I’m sure that you’ll never do this again, I want you to service my F-51 tomorrow.’

—Dale Carnegie, How to Win Friends and Influence People

Be Honest, Washingtonians: You’ve Done This Before, Right?

“You have no doubt heard of Over-the-Shoulder Orbital Reconnaissance, whereby in any public social setting the federal Washingtonian has one eye focused on the important person in whose orbit he is revolving, and the other scanning the azimuth, in case a person with higher gravitational pull has entered the room. When such a thing occurs, an entire hierarchy of maneuvers is deployed to diplomatically achieve escape velocity and jump orbit. (Ex.: Drain drink, look thirstily around.)”

D.C. Isn’t the Second-Snobbiest City in America; It’s the Snobbiest

How Mary Jo White Wooed Her Opponents

Time:

White organized weekly one-on-one meetings with each [SEC] commissioner during which she discussed upcoming business—or, when there were few pressing items, major league baseball. The meetings and White’s demeanor in them changed the dynamic at the agency, says Daniel Gallagher, a Republican commissioner who fought with Obama’s first SEC chief, Mary Schapiro. “She’s down-to-earth, funny,” he says. “It’s harder to go out and attack initiatives or rule makings when you have that personal relationship with the chair.”

Betrayed by a Close Friend

1. Bill Daley and Joe Biden

On the CBS morning show last week, Bill Daley, Obama’s former chief of staff who is now a CBS News contributor, acknowledged the story in Double Down that he had pushed to poll to see if Biden should be dumped from the 2012 ticket and replaced with Hillary, something he never told Biden; this, even though the vice president was the best friend and one of the few defenders the unpopular chief of staff had in the White House. Daley had been Biden’s national political director on his ’88 presidential bid.

2. Noah Glass and Jack Dorsey

What Glass didn’t know was that Dorsey was the one who wanted him out. Perhaps it was because he sensed vulnerability or perhaps it was because Glass was the only person who could rightly insist that the status updater was not Dorsey’s idea alone. Whatever his reasons, Dorsey had recently met with Williams and threatened to quit if Glass wasn’t let go. And for Williams, the decision was easy. Dorsey had become the lead engineer on Twitter, and Glass’s personal problems were affecting his judgment. (For a while, portions of the company existed entirely on Glass’s I.B.M. laptop.) After conferring with the Odeo board, around 6 p.m. on Wednesday, July 26, 2006, Williams asked Glass to join him for a walk to South Park. Sitting on a green bench, Williams gave his old friend an ultimatum: six months’ severance and six months’ vesting of his Odeo stock, or he would be publicly fired. Williams said the decision was his alone.

That night, a defeated Glass met with Dorsey at a nearby club, where they drank late into the night. At one point, as they stood at the bar to order another round of drinks, Glass confided his day’s ordeal. Dorsey acted dumbfounded and blamed Williams. As the night came to a close, Glass hugged his friend and walked home. Two weeks later, he was forced out of the two companies he co-founded. Dorsey soon became chief executive of Twitter.