When I was just clicking into my teens and living in Maine, noted academic and author, J.R.R. Tolkien was about the age I am now. Besides being an Oxford Don (twice over), he had already written The Hobbit in 1937 and The Lord of the Rings in the following 17 years after that. Tolkien’s Rise to popularity developed in waves with his early reception through the war years for The Hobbit thought of as a…
Towards the end of listening to 1929 by Andrew Ross Sorkin, he references Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. I’ve heard of Pinker’s book, but never read it and there was an upcoming opening on my Audible dance card, so I downloaded the book and have started listening to it. Notably, Pinker wrote the book in 2011, fifteen years ago. In it, he argues that, despite widespread perception to…
When I think of the world’s ills, social media goes right to the top of the list. That’s actually a pretty startling thing to say given what’s happening across the world at the moment. The truly existential and long-term risks to the world should start with climate change and the documented, slow-moving crisis that it portends. The physical consequences like rising seas, intensifying storms, prolonged droughts, ecosystem collapse, and mass displacement are already underway and…
Social Media is a very perplexing arena for me and I find myself thinking about it a lot and pondering its place in the universe. My exposure to it began in 1998 when I invested in a start-up called Six Degrees. The “six degrees of separation” idea comes from a few places. The original concept traces to Hungarian writer Frigyes Karinthy, who in a 1929 short story called Chains proposed that any two people on…
My stories are organized into six categories that I designate after I’ve written the story and am posting it to my site. I recognize that while I’ve written across all six categories and find that some stories fit neatly into those buckets, I suspect that if I were to redo the blog, i would change and probably expand the categories to better conform with what I actually write about the most. Without trying to construct…
Snake Plissken is the iconic fictional antihero from John Carpenter’s Escape from New York (1981), played by Kurt Russell. He’s a former Special Forces soldier turned criminal, distinguished by his eye patch, gruff demeanor, and complete contempt for authority. The story drops him into a dystopian 1997 Manhattan that’s been walled off as a maximum-security prison, tasked with rescuing the President. Escape from New York is set in a near-future America (that would be the…
In 1983 I was asked to launch a futures and options subsidiary for my bank, Bankers Trust. Don’t stop reading because you think I am using this as a launchpad for another boring discussion of derivative products and how I was the Robert Oppenheimer of banking who helped create the atomic bomb of the financial world. This little futures and options subsidiary was intentionally a separate legal entity that would have its own subsidiaries to…
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…
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…