Gavin Newsom, San Francisco mayor, talks about the influence of his severe dyslexia

From the intro to a NY Times magazine piece about who may be the next governor of California:

Gavin Newsom (pictured), the mayor of San Francisco, has an emergency button under his desk that was installed 30 years ago after former City Supervisor Dan White entered City Hall through a window and fatally shot Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk. Not knowing what the button was for, Newsom kept pushing it on his first day in office, only to have three sheriffs rush in repeatedly.

Newsom says he has not had occasion to press the button since, although the mayor admits he is tempted to whenever meetings drag on or when reporters ask him annoying questions or when he becomes bored, something that happens easily.

I was sitting in Newsom’s office in May, and the mayor was fidgeting behind his desk, which is neat except for a few side-by-side stacks of collated papers. These are what Newsom calls his CliffsNotes, part of an elaborate system of self-education he developed over several years.

Newsom struggled with severe dyslexia as a child and compensated by rereading, underlining, bracketing and scrawling comments in the margins. “I just butcher a book,” he explained to me. “Everything I underline I assume is important to me.” Interns type up what Newsom has underlined and produce a set of notes for him. “Sometimes I will make CliffsNotes of my CliffsNotes,” Newsom said. He described the practice as “really pathetic.” But it works for him and illustrates a larger point about people with learning disabilities: when a person struggles to learn in conventional ways, he said, you adapt “in ways that can nurture creative solutions.” Doing so can also promote “audacious goals that many would dismiss as irrational.”

That may well be the best description of Newsom’s latest ambition: to succeed Arnold Schwarzenegger as the governor of California even as the state is in the midst of one of its recurring cataclysms. They come along once or twice a decade, sparked by natural disaster or some fiasco of overcrowding (prisons, schools, roads) or shortage (water, energy, cash) or civic rebellion (taxes, cops, Gray Davis).
California always seems to produce more spectacle than anywhere else in the country, and that goes for its meltdowns too. Calamity is just part of the equation here, as if God gave California so much glamour and grandeur and great weather that he had to throw in some apocalyptic menace to provide a little balance. Earthquakes, say. Or Sacramento.