real time. He’s a sort of Rumpelstiltskin of the Dis. Able to take any rejection, insult, or failure and magically transform it into a compliment. At one point in his memoir, he effortlessly transmutes a string of failures into a bouquet of compliments. In college, he lost the Botany Prize because, as he explains, his thinking was too expansive for standardized tests; he lost the Entomology Prize because he was too generous (he “stood back” to let a poorer student win the money);
