In the Still of Autumn Is it just me or has everything sort of gone quiet all of a sudden? I know the world is on the precipice primarily because of the Israel/Hamas/Gaza situation as Israel pauses before making a ground incursion into Gaza. I know that the fighting Ukraine continues, but that Ukrainian fighters are infiltrating Crimea and sending more an more drones to attack Russian positions in Eastern Ukraine and in Russia itself.…
Free Will This morning I read an interesting article about Professor Robert Sapolsky of Stanford University. He is a professor of biology and neurology who is an atheist who was raised as an Orthodox Jew in the heart of Brooklyn. He has spent his career studying the behavior of both primates and humans and has come to a rather bold conclusion. He believes there is ample evidence to prove that when it comes to man’s…
What’s Up With Ping Pong? When I was a kid of about five years old, we lived in Costa Rica, which meant that many of the standard American games and conventions were missing from our daily lives. We had bikes and simple toys, but we would do crazy things that the local kids did for fun like dragging a dead snake behind a bicycle. I don’t really remember whether my mother remembered to bring things…
Truth or Consequences For almost fifty years, America listened or watched a show that was designed to make average people do crazy things if they did not properly answer some obscure trivia question. It was called Truth or Consequences in both the radio and TV incarnations. Just to be sure that their plans for zaniness did not get derailed, the producers layered their questions so that they were always more complex and impossible to answer…
The Family Jewels Among all the other issues we face these days, there remains one underlying issue that always manages to bubble up when the going gets tough. This may be just my own sensibilities, but it has to do with guns. Just to review the facts, there are supposedly 393 million privately owned guns in America. There are about 260 million adults (people over 18 years old), so that would seem like 1.5 guns…
Bagel Run In my family there is a legend that goes back to my days of owning a house in the Hamptons (technically in the town of Quiogue, which means “little clam” in the language of the native Montaukett tribe). I owned that house from 1989 until 2003 and used it as my weekend respite where I would take my children for our time together. We spent time in the pool, we built a treehouse…
Getting Crazier We all know that American politics has been pretty crazy for about eight years now. Yes, that coincides with Donald Trump coming onto the scene of the American political landscape in a serious (I have a really hard time using that word to describe anything Donald Trump does) way. It does strike me that we are in the beginning of the eventual end to that reign of terror now that we are seeing…
Little Maxie Back in 2012 (hard to believe that was 11 years ago!) I was just starting work on the New York Wheel project. That seems like a lifetime ago at this point, but then I was living with Kim at our South Street Seaport condo and as of late July, I was on payroll as the CEO of New York Wheel, which had offices at 19 State Street, a curved glass high rise building…
Walking Myself Home I just read a beautiful story in the Washington Post about a man who spent a year of his life caring for his cancer-ridden wife until the moment of her death. He described it as walking her home. Many people over the years have written about these final moments, and we have seen movies like Terms of Endearment, that capture the wistfulness of someone beloved’s last moment of consciousness. But despite the…
I’m So Confused In the last ten days we have all been inundated with more and more breaking news about the war in Israel and Gaza. I didn’t think anything, even the war in Ukraine, could displace the Trump legal drama unfolding in New York City, Atlanta, Washington D.C. and everywhere in between, but this Mideast crisis has done just that. Everything else in the news cycle is taking a way back seat. While there…