Stephen King is one of the best-selling authors in history with over 400 million books sold. Nearly every major work has been adapted for film or TV. He’s achieved sustained success across five decades, which is extraordinarily rare. For decades, critics dismissed him as a “genre writer” producing commercial horror rather than “serious literature.” But that is changing and he has won the National Book Foundation’s Medal (2003), won Bram Stoker Awards, World Fantasy Awards,…
Australia just launched what is being called the world’s first ban on social media for children under 16. It takes effect today (December 10, 2025). What the law does is that it prevents Australians under 16 from creating or keeping accounts on age-restricted social media platforms. That means the government is deactivating a huge number (over 1 million) of social media accounts that transgress that standard. There are no parental consent exceptions. Even with parental…
In this day and age it takes a lot to shock me and even more than that to stop me cold in my tracks, but this morning that has happened. I’m sitting here at the Cornell Club, having flown into JFK last evening with Kim from Prague via Finnair and Helsinki, over the pole (flyin’ in a big airliner..just like Paul McCartney wrote in Back in the U.S.S.R.). There were no chickens flying everywhere around…
For some time now, we’ve been watching the somewhat normal process of the rebalancing of the political landscape in the United States from conservative Republicanism to Democratic collectivism. I know we like to label things in this country and the favorite labels these days include fascism, communism, socialism, and any other handy isms. But the big picture fundamental is best captured as the generic labels of conservativism versus collectivism. This morning on CNN International, there…
I have a long and involved affiliation with Venezuela. In 1946, my mother, at the age of thirty, “joined the Foreign Legion” by hiring on to the Rockefeller Foundation to go to Venezuela to do rural indigenous development work. She was literally choosing to escape a turbulent five years on both the global and personal fronts and trade in her decade of work with the New York State Welfare Department for a new adventure. After…
Yesterday, Donald Trump and Zohran Mamdani met face-to-face in the Oval Office of the White House. This was characterized by many as a timeless contrast of the fascist and the communist. Fascism is a far-right authoritarian political ideology characterized by dictatorial leadership (concentrated power in a single leader or party), forcible suppression of opposition (elimination of political pluralism and dissent), extreme nationalism (often with racial or ethnic superiority themes), militarism (glorification of military strength and…
In 1985 I was running the largest merchant banking unit in my bank, something called the New York City Division. It was what all my peers aspired to do, but I found it sort of boring to be doing things like helping ITT do its next acquisition or helping Ron Perlman at Revlon reshape his juggernaut. I was asked to go up to talk to our Vice Chairman, who said the Management Committee wanted to…
Today I have been watching the latest Ken Burns extravaganza called The American Revolution, another PBS documentary, this one about the most important revolution in the history of mankind. We all tend to think that it was the French Revolution which was the most impactful, but I think it might be debatable based on how we define “impact”. Most people would be surprised to learn that before heading to Wall Street some fifty years ago,…
Every once in a while a coincidence will happen that makes you wonder about who exactly has his hand on the tiller of the universe. Back in 2006, Kim and I were meeting some friends for dinner at a restaurant on the upper east side of Manhattan. Neither of us frequented the area, but Kim had an orthopedic appointment nearby. In fact, I noted that I had last been in that same area in 2005…
Tonight I am entertaining Kim’s family for the second night. They are here to honor the death a few days ago of her and their sibling. Unfortunately, since everyone grieves differently, some in the family are simply not ready to convene, so its all a bit of a broken play. Kim is at her final dress rehearsal for her show, which plays tomorrow and Saturday. She is going through a lot this week, so I…