As I read about the court-ordered removal of the Donald J.Trump name from the Kennedy Center in Washington, the word defenestration naturally comes to mind. The word means throwing someone or something out of a window. It comes, as so many great words do, from the Latin fenestra (window). Historically and politically, the word is most famously associated with the Defenestrations of Prague, two historic incidents in Bohemia (1419 and 1618) where officials were thrown…
It’s hard not to think about SpaceX and AI every minute of every day these days. I remember in the late 1990s., we were all abuzz about the Internet. We thought it would change everything. The comparison of the Internet and AI is valid in that the buzz is similar in feel, but AI may be more fundamental. The hype was genuinely euphoric and widespread with every business needing a “.com” strategy overnight, just as…
How many times has it been analogized that America is the Roman Empire of the 21st Century? The rise and the fall. Few subjects in history are richer or have been more studied as a cautionary tale. The Kingdom of Rome began as a small Latin village on the Tiber, legendarily founded by Romulus. Seven kings ruled before the last, Tarquinius Superbus (Tarquin the Proud), was overthrown in a patrician revolt. The Republic that resulted…
Tech week (also called “hell week”) is the final rehearsal period before a theatrical production opens, when all technical elements are integrated with the cast for the first time. Kim is directing a show for her vocal ensemble called Encore. They produce two big shows per year, and the first one for 2026 is scheduled for this coming weekend. The show is called and themed as Encore Hits the Road. Since encore likes to sing…
I returned home from my week’s travel last night and it was a bit of a whirlwind. First of all, traveling alone is always different. I’ve travelled so much in my life and career that its not really foreign to to do so, but for the last decade or more the norm has been to be with Kim and that now feels more like normalcy to me where traveling alone feels somewhat adventurous. I neither…
About 30 years ago, I was at a Cornell recognition function (I believe it was a Presidents Club gathering) in New York City, and a pleasant young woman came up to me wearing a badge that identified her as part of the development office at the University. Nothing about that was unusual because this sort of function always had lots of development officers schmoozing alumni like me. What was different was that she told me…
I am on campus for Reunion weekend. Cornell University’s campus in Ithaca, New York is one of the most dramatic and distinctive in the American Ivy League. It’s a place where serious academic architecture meets genuinely wild natural landscape. The campus sits on a hill above Cayuga Lake, the second biggest of the Finger Lakes, at an elevation on East Hill that gives it sweeping views of the lake and surrounding valley. Two dramatic gorges…
I have long since stopped counting the number of times I have driven the roads through Pennsylvania and upstate New York on my way into the Finger Lakes region to Ithaca. i’m the third generation of my family to travel these roads and there are at least two more generations after me that have begun racking up the same miles. It began when my maternal grandfather got off the boat and processed through Ellis Island…
My oldest son Roger shares my initials. I am Richard Albert and he is Roger Andrew. We have always figured that there was some benefit in sharing the same initials since monogrammed things like satchels and miscellaneous leather goods always look good wearing some intergenerational aging. We also both like the toughness and rugged image of the curled horned beast that protects the heard and roams the mountainside. I have to take responsibility for carrying…
I just spent a day doing something I don’t do much with people I haven’t seen often enough, and therefore learning and experiencing a lot of new things. The world is separated into people who love boats and boating and those of us landlubbers who never really caught that bug. In my youth in Wisconsin, the land of 15,000 lakes (even though neighbor Minnesota brags about having 10,000 lakes), I did my share of boating.…