At a friend’s job, they ask newcomers what the kids movie song for their career would be. It’s an oddly revealing question (I suppose unexpected queries have that advantage even if I think asking someone how many golfballs would fill a schoolbus is pretty obnoxious. I’m not sure that it’s any more ridiculous and aggravating than making experienced professionals design high scale systems alone on a whiteboard in front of a panel of dudes named John and Dave)

I used to say my answer was “Try Everything” by Shakira. When things are going poorly, it’s “Surface Pressure”. Lately I’ve been trying to decide between “Knowing What I Know Now” from Wish and “Get Lost” from Moana 2.

Speaking of Moana 2, there’s another song in that movie that I’m convinced is just an all hands agenda from any tech startup on earth. It’s got all the key characters.

What Could Be Better Than This?
CEO:

“We’ll be there in no time”.

“The ocean is our friend.”

“Trying is mandatory.”

Engineering:

“The odds are we’ll end up in watery graves. Observation!”

“Falling on your face is the best!”

“There’s really only failing, then learning, then death.”

Finance:

“Everything is better than this.”

“I think I’m going insane on the sea. Just give me one grain of sand in the tree.”

HR:

“I’m in for a crazy ride!”

“Everybody Now!”

I’ve been making a lot of playlists lately (usually I just listen to Dessa on repeat, but it’s been a musical resurgence). Here’s another one:

             [ NOGA EREZ ]
                 /   \
          (A)   /     \   (B)
               /  [1]  \
    [ DESSA ]-------+-------[ TAYLOR SWIFT ]
         \  \      / \      /  /
          \  \ (2)/   \(3) /  /
           \  \  / [!] \  /  /
        (C) \  \/_______ \/  / (D)
             \ /         \  /
              +-----------+
             /  \  (4)   /  \
     [ BEYONCÉ ]----------[ MEGAN THEE STALLION ]
                 \      /
                  \ (E) /

[A] Intelligence under pressure
[B] Visibility + gendered punishment
[C] Survival over performance
[D] Public shaming and resilience
[E] Black womanhood and authority

AXIS 1: VISIBILITY vs. CONTROL

How much of the self is exposed—and who controls that exposure
This axis tracks whether power comes from being seen, shaping how you’re seen, or refusing visibility altogether.

Taylor Swift — Maximum visibility, reclaimed
Hyper-visible; punished publicly; responds by narrating, reframing, and mythologizing exposure.
Noga Erez — Visibility as provocation
Deliberately abrasive presence; uses being seen as a stress test for cultural norms.
Megan Thee Stallion — Visibility as weapon
Overexposed body and persona; leans into spectacle to overwhelm surveillance.
Dessa — Control through withdrawal
Strategic opacity; limits legibility as protection.
Beyoncé — Unquestioned presence
Occupies visibility without explanation; authority doesn’t depend on audience approval.

AXIS 2: INTELLIGENCE AS PERFORMANCE vs. INTELLIGENCE AS SURVIVAL

What thinking is for—and what it costs
This axis separates intelligence as something displayed, mocked, hidden, or inherited.

Noga Erez — Intelligence as trap
Hyper-awareness produces anxiety; being smart invites punishment.
Taylor Swift — Intelligence as narrative mastery
Wit and storytelling used to regain control over meaning.
Dessa — Intelligence as tactic
Thinking is instrumental, efficient, and often concealed.
Beyoncé — Intelligence as inheritance
Knowledge passed down as survival instruction.
Megan Thee Stallion — Intelligence as embodied wit
Sexual humor and wordplay as real-time power.

AXIS 3: HUMOR AS LUXURY vs. HUMOR AS RISK

Who can joke—and at what cost
This axis shows how humor correlates with safety, race, and proximity to real harm.

Taylor Swift — Humor as polish
Irony and camp soften critique; relies on interpretive generosity.
Noga Erez — Humor as provocation
Annoyance and exaggeration used to destabilize norms.
Dessa — Humor minimized
Jokes would draw unwanted attention; restraint preserves control.
Beyoncé — Humor withheld
Gravity preserved; stakes too high for satire.
Megan Thee Stallion — Humor as defiance
Joking while under threat; laughter as aggression.

AXIS 4: RESPONSE TO GENDERED PUNISHMENT

How women survive backlash, discipline, and danger
This axis captures the strategic response to being targeted.

Noga Erez — Mockery
Exposes absurdity by overstating it.
Taylor Swift — Reclamation and solidarity
Turns exile into community.
Dessa — Misdirection
Refuses the clean target.
Beyoncé — Preparation and inheritance
Trains for survival before punishment arrives.
Megan Thee Stallion — Excess and refusal
Overwhelms attempts at control.

My writing is my own, but I’ll admit I made that ASCII art with Gemini. I wanted a venn diagram with 5 rings, but I had too much text. This is a pentagram map, which is apparently a real math thing, even though it looks to me like something a witch would use to conjure spells. Or maybe it’s a network diagram (graph).

The pentagram map is particularly interesting because it’s one of the simplest examples of a discrete integrable system, making it a good testing ground for theories and techniques. It also generalizes to higher dimensions and other variations.

My math stopped at statistics, so I had to ask the difference between integrable and integratable:

Pentagram maps are a tool in cluster algebra theory, which is a relatively modern area of mathematics (developed in the early 2000s). They’re used to study discrete integrable systems and have connections to several areas of math and physics.

I never took calculus (that and not reading The Odyssey are probably my biggest academic shames), so at first I assumed integrable meant integratable. I asked my husband and he said “we prefer to drop letters even if it makes the word hard to say in math”. I asked Anthropic’s Claude and it summarized:

So if you see “integrable system” in physics/dynamics literature, it’s talking about the conserved quantities thing. If you see “integrable function” in calculus, it’s about whether you can compute the integral. And “integratable” is mostly just people making up a word that sounds like it should exist.