Observing people

Observing people — their dress, facial features, body language, attitudes, behavior, skills, quirks, habits, and conversation — is a pastime we all share. When writers observe and describe people, however, they zero in on specific details that fit an overall pattern or impression. In an Esquire magazine article, Joseph Nocera profiles Steven Jobs, the cocreator of the Apple and Macintosh computers, ex-chairman of the board of Apple Computer, and now head of Next, Inc., another Silicon Valley firm. All of Nocera's details reinforce his dominant idea that Steven Jobs is a temperamental boy genius.

With personal computers so ubiquitous today, you tend to forget that the industry is still barely ten years old; the Apple II, the machine that began it all, was unleashed upon an unsuspecting world in 1977. You forget, that is, until you sit in a room full of people who have built them and realize how young they are. Jobs himself is only thirty-one. If anything, he looks younger. He is lithe and wiry. He is wearing faded jeans 1(no belt), a white cotton shirt (perfectly pressed), and a pair of brown suede wing-tipped shoes. There is a bounce to his step that betrays a certain youthful cockiness; the quarterback of your high school football team used to walk that way. His thin, handsome face does not even appear to need a daily shave. And that impression of eternal youth is reinforced by some guileless, almost childlike traits: by the way, for instance, he can't resist showing off his brutal, withering intelligence whenever he's around someone he doesn't think measures up. Or by his almost willful lack of tact. Or by his inability to hide his boredom when he is forced to endure something that doesn't interest him, like a sixth grader who can't wait for class to end.