The Annals of Mathematics is a journal headquartered in Princeton. While I was a grad student, an Annals editor stopped another professor on the third floor hallway in Fine Hall. The editor showed his colleague a paper that had been submitted to the Annals, and asked for his opinion. The colleague immediately turned to the page with the author's university affiliation. He remarked on the lack of prestige of that (large public Midwestern) university and concluded that, due to where it came from, the paper should be rejected since it was very unlikely to meet the high standards of the journal. The editor thanked him for his help.
Over the years, I've told colleagues and friends about things I have seen or experienced. Many times, people have said that I should write them down so that they won't be lost and forgotten, since some of them might be useful parts of our history. I've been writing them down, without being sure what I would do with them. I decided to gradually post them on this website, and see what reactions I get. I suggest reading from the bottom up (starting with the August 2017 post "The Meritocracy"). Thoughtful and kind feedback would be useful for me, and would help me to revise the exposition to make it as useful as possible. I hope that while you read my stories you will ask yourself "What can I learn from this?" I'm particularly interested in knowing what you see as the point of the story, or what you take away from it. Please send feedback to asilverb@gmail.com. Thanks for taking the time to read and hopefully reflect on them!
I often run the stories past the people I mention, even when they are anonymized, to get their feedback and give them a chance to correct the record or ask for changes. When they tell me they're happy to be named, I sometimes do so. When I give letters as pseudonyms, there is no correlation between those letters and the names of the real people.