When I was just clicking into my teens and living in Maine, noted academic and author, J.R.R. Tolkien was about the age I am now. Besides being an Oxford Don (twice over), he had already written The Hobbit in 1937 and The Lord of the Rings in the following 17 years after that. Tolkien’s Rise to popularity developed in waves with his early reception through the war years for The Hobbit thought of as a…
As I keep listening to The Better Angels of Our Nature, I have been fascinated by the devolution of violence, both historically and culturally. It’s a fascinating listen/read and I will again highly recommend it to anyone who has a curiosity like mine for sociological and cultural issues and trends that both explain aspects of our universe and help me understand why the world isn’t as genteel as I wish it were…or why maybe I’m…
Towards the end of listening to 1929 by Andrew Ross Sorkin, he references Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. I’ve heard of Pinker’s book, but never read it and there was an upcoming opening on my Audible dance card, so I downloaded the book and have started listening to it. Notably, Pinker wrote the book in 2011, fifteen years ago. In it, he argues that, despite widespread perception to…
When I think of the world’s ills, social media goes right to the top of the list. That’s actually a pretty startling thing to say given what’s happening across the world at the moment. The truly existential and long-term risks to the world should start with climate change and the documented, slow-moving crisis that it portends. The physical consequences like rising seas, intensifying storms, prolonged droughts, ecosystem collapse, and mass displacement are already underway and…
When the term “tribal warfare” has come up, I have always thought of Africa for some reason. When I was traveling to subsaharan Africa almost forty years ago, I was surprised to learn about how much inter-tribe rivalry existed and what a storied history and debate there was about how prevalent it was in the context particularly of a continent beset with a turbulent colonial past and then as a source of the Western Hemisphere’s…
Drone warfare refers to the use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to conduct surveillance, reconnaissance, and lethal strike missions, often remotely piloted from thousands of miles away. When I think about drone warfare I think about the movie Eye in the Sky (2015), arguably the best fictional treatment of drone ethics. Helen Mirren and Alan Rickman star in a tense real-time drama about a strike decision with civilian collateral risk. It was excellent on the…
The United States Marine Corps has one of the most storied histories in American military service, spanning over 250 years. The Marines were established in 1775, when the Continental Congress authorized two battalions of Marines to serve as a landing force for the Continental Navy during the Revolutionary War. The first Marines were recruited at Tun Tavern in Philadelphia, a date and place still celebrated in Corps tradition. After the Revolution, the Corps was briefly…
Snake Plissken is the iconic fictional antihero from John Carpenter’s Escape from New York (1981), played by Kurt Russell. He’s a former Special Forces soldier turned criminal, distinguished by his eye patch, gruff demeanor, and complete contempt for authority. The story drops him into a dystopian 1997 Manhattan that’s been walled off as a maximum-security prison, tasked with rescuing the President. Escape from New York is set in a near-future America (that would be the…
In 1983 I was asked to launch a futures and options subsidiary for my bank, Bankers Trust. Don’t stop reading because you think I am using this as a launchpad for another boring discussion of derivative products and how I was the Robert Oppenheimer of banking who helped create the atomic bomb of the financial world. This little futures and options subsidiary was intentionally a separate legal entity that would have its own subsidiaries to…
I was literally born into the Cuban Revolution. My mother was working in Venezuela for the Rockefeller Foundation, my parents met and married in Caracas, and any and all travel back and forth to the United States took place through the Pan Am hub in Havana. The Cuban Revolution began in 1953, with Fidel Castro’s attack on the Moncada Barracks on July 26, 1953. By my birth math, I was three months in utero at…