I was recently at a dinner where someone asked who we each had our first crush on. I have to go way back to 1960 when I saw the Disney movie Pollyanna, which starred Haley Mills and earned her an honorary juvenile Oscar. Pollyanna was Disney’s adaptation of Eleanor H. Porter’s 1913 novel, directed by David Swift. Hayley Mills plays Pollyanna Whittier, an orphaned missionary’s daughter sent to live with her wealthy, rigid Aunt Polly…
Don’t worry, this is neither a story about car insurance mascots nor tropical lizards. Rather, what got me started on this theme is Oliver Stone’s Wall Street (1987) character, Gordon Gekko, played by Michael Douglas (he won the Best Actor Oscar for it). Stone, whose father was a Wall Street stockbroker, built the character from several ’80s figures including Ivan Boesky (the biggest source). His 1986 Berkeley commencement line that greed is healthy became Gekko’s…
How does man attain perfection? Mostly by giving up on the idea that perfection is something you arrive at. Many great thinkers took the question seriously and pondered it. Plato said that the soul became perfected by ordering reason over appetite, guiding itself toward what he called the “Form of the Good”. The Form of the Good is the highest reality, the source that makes all other Forms (Justice, Beauty, Equality) both exist and be…
The older I get the more I think that while I’m not a communist. I may be a Marxist (Karl as opposed to Groucho, though I did like Groucho’s chutzpah). Marxism is the body of social, economic and political theory that Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels developed in the mid-1800s. It rests on a few core ideas. Marx’s “historical materialism” holds that the way a society produces its goods and services shapes everything else: its…
Oligarchy is a form of government or power structure in which control rests with a small group of people, usually distinguished by wealth, family, military power, or corporate influence, rather than with the public at large. The word comes from the Greek oligos (“few”) and arkhein (“to rule”). In modern usage it often describes systems that may be formally democratic but where a wealthy elite has outsized sway over policy and institutions. Post-Soviet Russia’s business…
Anyone who knows me knows that I love a good World War II movie. I’m actually quite torn between Pacific Theatre in the European Theatre and enjoy them both for different reasons. In the 20 years after the war ended, some of the best of those movies came out movies like 12 O’clock High, Run Silent Run Deep, From Here to Eternity, Sands of Iwo Jima, The Best Years of Our Lives, The Guns of…
Today was ride day. Gordon couldn’t make it so it was just me and Len, which always makes it easy. It’s easier to agree on a route (Len simply doesn’t care and will ride wherever I lead him even though he rides the local roads more than I do and knows them way better). It’s easier to stay tight and in formation with two riders. And it’s easier to adjust the ride as we go…
I recently saw some typical projections about what college majors were drawing the highest compensation three years out from graduation. It looked pretty math-heavy to be sure. I’ve looked into it further and found that while there’s no official dataset that tracks pay exactly three years after graduation, the closest are the New York Fed’s early-career figures (grads aged 22–27, roughly 0–5 years out) and Department of Education data covering about four years out. Both…
One day in 2015, when Kim and I had moved to Staten Island so I could pursue my crazy vision of building the world’s largest observation wheel on New York Harbor (why does that sound so idiotic today when it made total sense at the time?), I heard her conversing with someone out on our patio. The patio overlooked the parking lot for the half dozen orange ferries that plied the waters from there to…
Every day we deal with personalities. We do that mostly without noticing. We read and adjust to personality in nearly every interaction. We are forced to read people and form quick trait impressions from voice, posture, and word choice, and they’re often surprisingly accurate, especially for extraversion. We are constantly adjusting our approach to people based on our assessment of their personality. We give the anxious colleague more reassurance, we keep it brief with the…