In 1963 I was nine years old and my mother, at the age of 47, was getting her Doctorate at the University of Wisconsin in the capital city of Madison (Go Badgers!). We were living on her fellowship of $3,000 (that’s per year, not per month). She had rented a little house in a typical suburban development that must have had about 200 little crackerboxes of the sort you learned to draw when you were…
I was literally born into the Cuban Revolution. My mother was working in Venezuela for the Rockefeller Foundation, my parents met and married in Caracas, and any and all travel back and forth to the United States took place through the Pan Am hub in Havana. The Cuban Revolution began in 1953, with Fidel Castro’s attack on the Moncada Barracks on July 26, 1953. By my birth math, I was three months in utero at…
This morning I’m heading out for a motorcycle ride to go out into the eastern ranch country near Julian. We will drive out through Valley Center, probably the reddest part of the county, then through the various Indian reservations, which I find always hard to divine in terms of their degree of social consciousness (do they care more about helping their poor and downtrodden or about their casino revenues that buy them all shiny new…
We have all spent a lot of time over the past year watching the Ellison Dynasty exert its influence over global media. I managed to keep my thoughts to myself during the Warner Brothers / Discovery wars between Paramount and Netflix, not knowing who would inflict more change/harm on the things I cared about in the movie and media universe. But then Pete Hegseth had to step to the podium this weekend doing what all…
I’ve been using the word squidgy a lot lately. I didn’t think it was a real word, but apparently the Cambridge English dictionary disagrees and says it is, indeed, a real word. It means “soft and wet and changing shape easily when pressed” and it seems to be most often used in relation to bread that has been not quite fully baked and has a squidgy center. What’s interesting about that is that it is…
I have always believed that living somewhere with broad, expansive views makes a huge difference. Don’t get me wrong, intimate and beautiful courtyards and gardens can be lovely and very inspiring without the benefit of panoramic distances, but nothing beats the long view, whether of some water scene overlooking an ocean or lake or some distant mountains majesty. When shopping for a home to which to ultimately retire in 2011, Kim and I (joined by…
It is hard these days not feeling like the world is getting changed from underneath us. I’m sure every generation feels this to some degree, but I am equally sure that some eras involve more of this feeling than others. The more change we are confronted with, the more we look for ways to grapple with the change and understand what’s going on or what’s driving it. I have noticed lately that lots of people…
The other day, my colleague Damiano, who runs the expert witness business with which I have chosen to affiliate, called me from London. He had just attended some sort of gathering of litigation professionals and had come away with a distinct impression that there is a crisis blossoming in the arena of private credit that will be leading to a substantial wave of litigation. It’s Damiano’s job to stay tuned into the financial markets and…
Last week when I gathered with my old motorcycle buddies, one of them, a guy who makes his living managing money for others, brought a copy of Andrew Ross Sorkin’s newest book, 1929: Inside the Greatest Crash in Wall Street History and How It Shattered a Nation. Sorkin is an interesting writer. He is the NYC-raised son of a playwright and Wall Street lawyer. He has a BS in communication from Cornell University, my Alma…
The United States has always had a special advantage against its global competitors and that’s it’s isolation in the Western Hemisphere. This is a geopolitical and historical point of differentiation that cuts across geography, economics, military history, and political development. The advantage has been enormous, though with some important nuances. In terms of the geographic advantage, the U.S. sits in what strategists sometimes call a “geopolitical paradise.” It is bounded by two vast oceans, two…