I love the New Yorker magazine. It always makes me think. Today I read an article in the most recent edition about President Javier Milei of Argentina. It caught my attention for a number of reasons. To begin with, I spent a lot of time in Argentina in the 1980s trying hard to get back about $500 million that they owed my bank. That was during the presidency of Raul Alfonsin, who had followed a…
Given that we now live 2,759 miles away from New York City, a mere 5 +/- hours by plane, plus another four+ hours of transit time to/from the airports (not to mention whatever unexpected but still somewhat ordinary hassles occur at the airports on either side of the country), Kim and I do our best to coordinate our visits to accommodate as many multiple purposes as we can. The cost of air travel for us…
The other night I watched a movie that had missed my screen for many years. With all the movies that get served up and dangled in front of me for consideration through Prime, Netflix, AppleTV, Peacock, Paramount and MAX, I am very surprised that this one has never been pitched to me or perhaps just got overlooked by me. It stars Al Pacino and John Cusack, two actors I would always want to watch. It…
Just before the election, some time in October as I recall, the Washington Post declared that they would not be issuing their normal presidential election endorsement. That meant that they would not be endorsing Kamala Harris as one would expect. The same decision was taken by the publisher of the Los Angeles Times. Both papers announced that their decision was in keeping with their desire to remain neutral arbiters of the news and to not…
We’ve all heard about the Aboriginal tradition of young people going through a rite of passage when they come of age and go forth to explore the broader world around them but more distant than what they have known in their upbringing. Its’s a time of reflection of the soul, a return to one’s roots and family ancestry, a joyous revisiting of the wonders of the natural world. For someone like me that has spent…
I know I wrote about the healthcare system in America recently, so please don’t read too much into the fact that today I’m writing about medicine. It is purely coincidental…I think. It just so happens that meds are on my mind for all sorts of reasons. I will start with the most personal of those. I am expecting the delivery of two prescriptions today and I am in short enough supply of those two so…
We will get picked up tomorrow at 4:30am and spend the next eleven hours or so doing our best to go from our little hilltop here in San Diego to the paved and gloriously lighted streets of midtown Manhattan. This trip has become a holiday ritual for the past five years and the seasonal pre-Christmas gathering has been a family tradition now for seventeen years (since I sold the last of my Park City ski…
I limit my social media engagement to three sites at this point. I am a viewer of Instagram (I never have posted) and I find it a nice and easy way to follow the whereabouts and doings of my children and nieces/nephews. I started on Instagram specifically because I found that my kids were posting away from me when I was on Facebook and I decided to get sneaky and sign up for Instagram to…
The power of media is a longstanding source of commercial interest among the wealthiest people of the world. I recently saw a documentary by Ken Burns about Benjamin Franklin, the man often referenced as the most globally powerful American of his era and perhaps the most influential Founding Father of what has become the most powerful country in the world. Franklin was indeed an influential figure in early American media, and was so significant in…
The world is filled with dictators, despots and strong men. The world has pretty much always been filled with dictators, despots and strong men. I hate to say it, but I can find no reason not to expect that it will always be so. My entire life has intersected with these strong men, beginning with my earliest years growing up in Venezuela. My mother was a development officer at the Rockefeller Foundation in Venezuela from…