Don’t worry, this is neither a story about car insurance mascots nor tropical lizards. Rather, what got me started on this theme is Oliver Stone’s Wall Street (1987) character, Gordon Gekko, played by Michael Douglas (he won the Best Actor Oscar for it). Stone, whose father was a Wall Street stockbroker, built the character from several ’80s figures including Ivan Boesky (the biggest source). His 1986 Berkeley commencement line that greed is healthy became Gekko’s…
How does man attain perfection? Mostly by giving up on the idea that perfection is something you arrive at. Many great thinkers took the question seriously and pondered it. Plato said that the soul became perfected by ordering reason over appetite, guiding itself toward what he called the “Form of the Good”. The Form of the Good is the highest reality, the source that makes all other Forms (Justice, Beauty, Equality) both exist and be…
The older I get the more I think that while I’m not a communist. I may be a Marxist (Karl as opposed to Groucho, though I did like Groucho’s chutzpah). Marxism is the body of social, economic and political theory that Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels developed in the mid-1800s. It rests on a few core ideas. Marx’s “historical materialism” holds that the way a society produces its goods and services shapes everything else: its…
Oligarchy is a form of government or power structure in which control rests with a small group of people, usually distinguished by wealth, family, military power, or corporate influence, rather than with the public at large. The word comes from the Greek oligos (“few”) and arkhein (“to rule”). In modern usage it often describes systems that may be formally democratic but where a wealthy elite has outsized sway over policy and institutions. Post-Soviet Russia’s business…
Anyone who knows me knows that I love a good World War II movie. I’m actually quite torn between Pacific Theatre in the European Theatre and enjoy them both for different reasons. In the 20 years after the war ended, some of the best of those movies came out movies like 12 O’clock High, Run Silent Run Deep, From Here to Eternity, Sands of Iwo Jima, The Best Years of Our Lives, The Guns of…
Texas toast is extra-thick sliced white bread, usually cut about twice the normal thickness that’s buttered (often with garlic) and griddled or toasted until golden outside and soft inside. Who doesn’t love a slice of Texas toast? It’s commonly served alongside barbecue, chicken-fried steak, or fried chicken (Raising Cane’s made it famous), and the extra thickness makes it great for French toast or hearty sandwiches. Most food historians trace it to Texas diners and drive-ins…
We got our California mail-in ballots yesterday, so Kim and I decided to take the time to work through the long two-page, four-sided ballot together. We needed all the help we could get to work through it and we had the extensive voter information pamphlet (more a booklet than a pamphlet) as well as our good friend Claude to help us work through the issues. The first page was pretty easy because it was the…
Today was ride day. Gordon couldn’t make it so it was just me and Len, which always makes it easy. It’s easier to agree on a route (Len simply doesn’t care and will ride wherever I lead him even though he rides the local roads more than I do and knows them way better). It’s easier to stay tight and in formation with two riders. And it’s easier to adjust the ride as we go…
I recently saw some typical projections about what college majors were drawing the highest compensation three years out from graduation. It looked pretty math-heavy to be sure. I’ve looked into it further and found that while there’s no official dataset that tracks pay exactly three years after graduation, the closest are the New York Fed’s early-career figures (grads aged 22–27, roughly 0–5 years out) and Department of Education data covering about four years out. Both…
Toxic masculinity is not just front page news these days, its the top topic on the front page. Masculinity rests on real biological differences between the genders, but how those differences turn into norms of “being a man” is shaped heavily by history and culture. Most researchers see it as an interaction, not either/or. The biological roots of it lie in hormones. Prenatal and pubertal testosterone shape body size, muscle mass, and some behavioral tendencies.…