30 responses to
“Thinner.”

1. Kirk said on January 6th, 2009 at 1:02 pm

   You con­cerned about the iPods grow­ing pro­gres­sively thin­ner as Jobs does? It didn’t bother me, and I’m pretty con­ser­v­a­tive on photo use.

2. nancy said on January 6th, 2009 at 1:05 pm

   Yeah. The incred­i­ble shrink­ing CEO con­trasted with his gad­get. Only the gad­get keeps get­ting bet­ter, and Jobs likely has a pretty seri­ous ill­ness. But maybe it’s just me.

3. Kirk said on January 6th, 2009 at 1:10 pm

   My lack of gadget-consciousness could be a flaw in my judgment.

4. Matt Mendelsohn said on January 6th, 2009 at 1:40 pm

   Well, as a for­mer news sec­tion photo edi­tor at USA Today (and faith­ful nan​cy​nall​.com reader), I know what you’re think­ing. The iPod is shrink­ing like he is and the photo edi­tor went out of his or her way to find pho­tos that showed this.

   Nor­mally, we would try to stay away from a hint of sub­ver­sive (or silly) mes­sages via photo edit­ing but in this case I don’t see any­thing wrong. He’s get­ting very, very thin and the fact that he hap­pens to hold­ing his prod­uct in each photo makes the photo that much bet­ter – and that much less a bor­ing head shot. Per­haps no exec­u­tive in the world is more closely tied to the prod­uct pro­duced by the com­pany than Steve Jobs.

   (An exam­ple to the con­verse would be when a photo edi­tor picks a frame of a dis­graced preacher giv­ing a press con­fer­ence. Dur­ing that press con­fer­ence, the preacher hap­pens to rub his eyes. It looks like he’s cry­ing when in fact he’s just wip­ing his eyes. The photo edi­tor selects this frame because he might think it syncs with the mood (somber press con­fer­ence), when in fact it con­veys a some­what innacu­rate depic­ton of what really hap­pened. It’s a bit deceit­ful but it hap­pens a lot.)

   But here? I think the pic­tures are very telling and I think the cor­re­la­tion between man and machine is an added visual bonus. (Bonus, not in a happy way, of course.)

5. brian stouder said on January 6th, 2009 at 1:45 pm

   I sup­pose the easy joke cap­tion would be some­thing like -

   an apple a day keeps the doc­tor away, but you’ll starve if that’s all you’re eating

   (if he were a woman , they’d be whis­per­ing words like “anorexia” and “Karen Carpenter”)

   and — why do some fel­lows think that stub­ble looks good?

6. Kirk said on January 6th, 2009 at 2:23 pm

   I’m going to ask our photo editors.

7. Hank Stuever said on January 6th, 2009 at 2:26 pm

   I love it.
   It says a lot of things on a lot of lev­els (or it doesn’t) and it’s up to the reader to con­text him­self. My reac­tion, even as I know it’s unfair and cer­tainly don’t wish the bil­lion­aire ill, is: Yep, this inane devo­tion to tech­nol­ogy has a with­er­ing effect on life.

8. nancy said on January 6th, 2009 at 2:46 pm

   Great obser­va­tions, all. Mean­while, I just checked stocks on my iPhone and note that on a gen­er­ally up day on Wall Street, Apple is down slightly. Hmm.

   Oh, and also: Proof once again that for cer­tain kinds of sto­ries, noth­ing works like a still.

9. Kirk said on January 6th, 2009 at 3:14 pm

   Our photo boss didn’t even catch the iPods. His beef was that the first image is shot with a wide-angle lens, which makes things wider, and the other two were shot with a tele­photo lens, which tends to com­press, thus exag­ger­at­ing the rav­ages of time. But he did con­sider the gen­eral idea legitimate.

10. Kevin Knuth said on January 6th, 2009 at 3:23 pm

    That explains that first photo then Kirk– I never though Jobs was ever that heavy.

11. Matt Mendelsohn said on January 6th, 2009 at 3:48 pm

    Hank wrote, “My reac­tion, even as I know it’s unfair and cer­tainly don’t wish the bil­lion­aire ill, is: Yep, this inane devo­tion to tech­nol­ogy has a with­er­ing effect on life.”

    That’s a really sim­ple and pro­found way of sum­ming up my reac­tion as well. It’s a totally sub­jec­tive reac­tion but it’s an hon­est one. Well said.

12. Danny said on January 6th, 2009 at 6:00 pm

    Nance et al:

    Best sports line of the day: “I don’t know why every­one is so mad at Matt Millen. The Lions have been ter­ri­ble for a very long time. It’s not like Matt Millen dis­man­tled the Roman Empire.”

    Para­phras­ing a caller to Dan Patrick’s show this morn­ing. Hilarious.

13. nancy said on January 6th, 2009 at 6:19 pm

    Boy, Kevin, you really have a dif­fer­ent def­i­n­i­tion of “heavy,” don’t you?

14. Jolene said on January 6th, 2009 at 8:35 pm

    I can’t say that these pho­tos both­ered me. Being some­what obliv­i­ous, I’m not sure that I’d have noticed the iPods if you hadn’t pointed them out. There’s noth­ing more engross­ing than another human, and my atten­tion went directly to Jobs.

    I won­der what it is that he has. Seems that, if he really wanted to reas­sure peo­ple, he’d be more explicit. As the cap­tion indi­cates, his fail­ure to name his diag­no­sis sug­gests that he’s got some­thing hor­ri­ble and life-threatening.

    If it’s not some­thing that seri­ous, then it’d be nice if it were con­ta­gious. That kind of weight loss would be worth a lit­tle suffering.

15. nancy said on January 6th, 2009 at 8:44 pm

    He’s had pan­cre­atic can­cer in the past, so the sus­pi­cion is that he’s had a recur­rence. It’s one thing to be slim­ming, another to be dying.

16. Jolene said on January 6th, 2009 at 8:58 pm

    Actu­ally, if he’s had pan­cre­atic can­cer, I’m amazed that he’s still alive. In most cases, once that diag­no­sis is made, the patient has only a few months to live.

17. Deborah said on January 6th, 2009 at 9:11 pm

    Yeah, It was some kind of can­cer but I don’t think it was pan­cre­atic. I could try to Google it but I’m too lazy. Regard­ing Job’s weight there are 7 years dif­fer­ence between the first photo and the last one. When he was diag­nosed with can­cer he prob­a­bly decided to live a health­ier lifestyle over­all and if he lost 5 lbs a year which is not obscene he’d be 35 lbs lighter. I say this because that’s exactly what my hus­band did. Very slowly he has been steadily los­ing the excess weight he gained over the last 10 years. If you look at pic­tures of him 7 years ago and com­pare them with recent ones you’d have the same reac­tion. But he’s per­fectly healthy. Swim­ming, hik­ing and watch­ing the extra help­ings has done it for him.

18. Jolene said on January 6th, 2009 at 9:11 pm

    Here’s an arti­cle that explains (1) why he’s still alive and (2) what might be hap­pen­ing re his weight loss. In short, he’s still alive because he had a rare form of pan­cre­atic can­cer, not the usual (i.e., rapidly ter­mi­nal) kind. As treat­ment, he received a Whip­ple pro­ce­dure, a rad­i­cal oper­a­tion that involves exten­sive rearrange­ment of the diges­tive sys­tem (described at the link above). In a small pro­por­tion of cases, patients expe­ri­ence con­tin­u­ing diges­tive dif­fi­cul­ties that lead to weight loss, which may be what is hap­pen­ing to Jobs now.

19. Deborah said on January 6th, 2009 at 9:13 pm

    Ok you’re right it was Pan­cre­atic. I just got off my butt and Googled it.

20. Catherine said on January 6th, 2009 at 9:16 pm

    There’s an arti­cle about his ill­ness in Wired, I’m too lazy to find a link (EDIT: But Jolene’s not!). Accord­ing to the arti­cle, it was an unusual (benign?) can­cer that is typ­i­cally quite sur­viv­able, unlike most pan­cre­atic can­cer, which is a death sen­tence as Jolene points out. He did lose part of his pan­creas, and so they had to reroute much of his diges­tive sys­tem. In peo­ple who’ve had the reroute, a cer­tain per­cent­age have trou­ble absorb­ing nutri­ents from their GI sys­tem, and that was the think­ing about his weight loss. I guess it’s turn­ing out to be some­thing else.

    I took the pix as a riff on the before and after pic­tures com­monly found in Jenny Craig & Nutrisys­tem ads, and like Jolene didn’t notice the ipod sub­text there. So much for that art his­tory degree.

21. joodyb said on January 7th, 2009 at 1:09 am

    i don’t know what this says about me, but did any­one else notice he always wears the same shirt? like, always.

22. Gasman said on January 7th, 2009 at 1:11 am

    Pan­cre­atic can­cer is what killed my dad 28 years ago. He lived 9 months after the diag­no­sis. It is a hell­ish way to go. I wouldn’t wish that fate on any­one, ‘cept maybe Cheney.

23. Jolene said on January 7th, 2009 at 3:28 am

    It’s a fea­ture, joodyb. His wardrobe con­sists entirely of jeans and black shirts. Saves think­ing about what to wear.

24. Jeff (the mild-mannered one) said on January 7th, 2009 at 6:51 am

    Dave Barry might be able to make pan­cre­atic can­cer funny, though i hope he never has any rea­son to try … but he did make 2008 funny, which is just about the same thing: http://​www​.miami​her​ald​.com/​l​i​v​i​n​g​/​c​o​l​u​m​n​i​s​t​s​/​d​a​v​e​-​b​a​r​r​y​/​v​-​f​u​l​l​s​t​o​r​y​/​s​t​o​r​y​/​8​2​6​9​6​5.html

25. Dorothy said on January 7th, 2009 at 8:54 am

    Pan­cre­atic can­cer is what felled sev­eral mem­bers of Jimmy Carter’s fam­ily, plus Patrick Swayze. All I know is what I’ve heard — it’s vir­tu­ally a death sen­tence. I was unaware until this morn­ing that there was a less threat­en­ing form, such as what Steve Jobs had. One of the best rea­sons to read nnc.c — learn­ing con­tin­ues on a daily basis.

26. Jolene said on January 7th, 2009 at 9:24 am

    In other news, Craig Fer­gu­son announced that he’d got­ten mar­ried, seri­ously under­min­ing the qual­ity of my fan­tasy life.

27. brian stouder said on January 7th, 2009 at 9:55 am

    Craig Fer­gu­son is one of those names that I hear from time to time, but about whom I know noth­ing else.

    For a sec­ond I was think­ing of the face of Gregg Craig — and while I agree that the par­ties he gets invited to would be very inter­est­ing to attend — surely Jolene can do bet­ter than him!

    And then I thought of the guy who turned out to be Colin Fer­gu­son, and he was who I was expect­ing to see when I googled “Craig Fer­gu­son”, and saw who Jolene was refer­ring to.

    For me, Google­less = clueless

28. Jolene said on January 7th, 2009 at 10:13 am

    To know about Craig Fer­gu­son, Brian, you have to be a per­son who stays up later than most peo­ple can afford to do. He’s smart, funny, and has a charm­ing for­eign accent. All the key sources of attractiveness.

29. joodyb said on January 7th, 2009 at 6:38 pm

    Craig Fer­gu­son rep­re­sents the quasi-rare charm­ing Scot in our TV culture.

30. nancy said on January 7th, 2009 at 8:04 pm

    We caught him on “Mil­lion Dol­lar Pass­word” the other night. (The things you watch when you watch as a fam­ily.) He was a great player, but he prof­ited from being paired with Ser­ena Williams, who was so dumb that one of her clues for “brunch” was “Brady.”