Start with the face. There’s an emptiness, a blankness. Her lawyers argued for her right to remove her mask before the jury, but her face can itself seem like a mask. It’s a generic face, an American plainness; as open as the prairies is how they’d describe it in my English class at New Trier High School in Winnetka, Illinois. It’s a perfect face for projection, for seeing whatever you want to see in it, and that’s what people—me, you, he, him, she, her, they, them, us—have done.
At first, looking at that face, we saw a young genius, a whiz kid, Steve Jobs come back as just what the moment needed: a woman in the age of the woman (“the future is female”), the Internet’s first female start-up billionaire, a Stanford dropout with an idea that could change the world; those who recognized its brilliance early would make a fortune.
