There is an old joke that involves a guy who goes to Hell and is asked by Satan to choose his preferred poison. The first room is freezing cold with snow and ice all around and everybody in that room is shivering cold. The second room is your classic hellscape with fire and brimstone and everyone in that room is in agony as their flesh burns. In the last room, everyone is standing around in…
Recently I started watching the Ken Burns series on The Roosevelts. It more or less covers the century from when Teddy Roosevelt was born in 1858 until when Eleanor Roosevelt died in 1962 at the age of 78. Teddy only lived 60 years, dying in 1919 and Franklin (FDR) died in 1945 at age 63. Ken Burns is my age and is perhaps the best chronicler of American history (at least in film) of my…
Many years ago I read the now famous novel Things Fall Apart, written in 1958 by Nigerian author Chinua Achebe. It is considered one of the great literary works of the Twentieth Century. That may be because it was one of the first novels to come in European style and yet from the pen of a native African, but still others believe it is simply a great story that needed to be told from a…
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…
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…
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…
I feel like I am less inclined these days to write about politics, but that may or may not be true if you tally my stories about politics versus those about everything else. What I do sense is that I want to hold back and not just repeat my shock and awe over every new challenge put forth by the Trump team. I feel like I’m happy to let the system and others more activist…
Yesterday while Kim was going in and out of the front door with some holiday decorations, there was a sudden thump sound and she unexpectedly swore audibly. I did the usual, “Everything OK?” lazy man outreach from my chair across the room. When she said, “This thing fell down”, I had no idea what she was talking about so I decided I probably needed to get up to investigate. What had happened was that the…
Like so many of us in this moment, I am still struggling to make sense of the world in this new configuration. For instance, we spent the last two years and more, watching all the literal trials and tribulations around the indictments and even a few convictions of Donald Trump, the man who is the president-elect of the greatest nation on the face of the earth, the one that has the largest economy and represents…