History as Judge I religiously read Letters From an American every day, first thing. I was put onto it by our friend Candice several years ago. Candice is a retired NYC school teacher and is someone I always describe as a person for whom the word “Moxy” was invented. The daily post is authored by Heather Cox Richardson, a noted academic historian and Professor at Boston College, where she specializes in the arenas of the…
Topic Overload I occasionally get recommendations from readers for topics for my blog stories. Yesterday, one of my regular readers, my friend Steven, sent me a list of ten such recommendations. I know he was flying back to New York yesterday, so I suspect he was killing time in between movies on the flight. I have another friend who is also a regular reader and also has the name Steve. He was recently on a…
Fear of Aging For as long as man has walked this earth, he has shown a certain fear of aging. The Bible gives us an alternative to aging in the legend of Methuselah. He is noteworthy in providing the link between the original prophets of Genesis (specifically Enoch) and Noah. His predecessors lived for several centuries and his descendants, like Noah, and he lived to almost 1,000 years. From that time, human longevity kept shortening,…
Atlantic and Pacific I am drawn to the differences between East and West. I lived most of my adult life in the East and I have chosen to live the rest of my life in the West. The Egyptians built their cities for commerce and living on the East bank of the Nile and they built their monuments and mausoleums for their passage into death on the West side of the Nile. The sun also…
Intimidation Donald Trump is an expert at intimidation. Just look at the array of recent portraits of the man. He is making a habit of lowering his face and scowling at the audience from underneath his bushy eyebrows and fluffy yet wispy coif. He has perfected the snarl. He is under a rather strict gag order because his comments can energize a legion of faceless followers to reign down violence and distress on anyone that…
Stormy Days Today is the second day of the Stormy Daniels testimony in the Donald Trump falsification of business records case in Manhattan. Everyone is debating the importance of the Stormy Daniel testimony to the Trump case. We have all heard ad nauseam that it matters not whether anyone believes the sexual encounter actually occurred in 2006 between Trump and Stormy (my rhetorical question is, who among us does NOT believe that it did happen?),…
Interregnum It is often said that the most dangerous time in any country is that time in between one governing reign and another. The same is said of wars, that the times just before and just after the formal cessation of hostilities is actually the time when there is more risk afoot for the general population. Things and, indeed, people get lost in the transition, things fall between the cracks (does that really make sense…
Timeout The modern world is all about near constant engagement with media and outside stimulation. I read more and more about the growing crisis about youthful mental agitation which pre-dated COVID, but was clearly ratcheted up by the Pandemic. The growing amount of mental disruption and distress is particularly acute in young people who get a disproportionate amount of their interactions through social media. It used to be that difficult interactions among youngsters took the…
Heeeeere’s Donny There are few movie lines more memorable than Jack Nicholson sticking his head through a freshly axed bathroom door saying with a devilish smile, “Heeeeere’s Johnny!” The Shining, from which the line comes, is also right up there in the pantheon of scary movies. Well friends, we are in our own scary movie and while I need to substitute Johnny with Donny, the urgency and extreme nature of the threat to us all…
What We Value I pretty much ignored the “Trial of the Century” about the O.J. Simpson accusations that he killed his wife and her lover. That happened in 1995 and I was close to being at the height of my career in investment banking. I was busy running around the world and building a global investment business. It was the year that my youngest son was born. The last thing I cared about was the…