Sliding On In Doormen are unusual relationships for tenants. I have a very strong relationship with Corrado (Mr. Porca Miseria) based on the need to be sympathetic to the tragedy of his wife’s ongoing cancer treatments. In our apartment in the Seaport we had a doorman that had a daughter with a woman out of wedlock, who he was raising since she was in jail. That certainly gave us something to talk about. One of…
WeWorked By now, most people in the literate world have heard of WeWork. It is the shared workspace company that caters to and further encourages the entrepreneurial culture that is blossoming across the globe. WeWork has become globally ubiquitous in the less than ten years of its existence. What Uber/Lyft are to car culture and what Airbnb is to hospitality, WeWork is to Dilbert and office cubicle culture. Adam Neumann, the Israeli kibbutz-raised kid and…
A Bull in the China Shop China is fucked-up. Is this all their doing or is it because others are fucking with China? Donald Trump seems to enjoy doing that. Regardless, the question quickly becomes, does that fuck us up? Last night my lovely wife Kim surprised me by asking me if I was worried about China bringing down the world economy. I would normally assume this was a hidden question about whether Nordstroms…
Day Tripping In 1998 when I was at the apex of my banking career, I met Terry. I was on the Management Committee of Bankers Trust Company, where I ran both the Global Private Banking and was Vice Chairman of BT Alex. Brown, responsible for their Private Client Services business. It was a big job with loads of perks, easily the most I ever received. The biggest perk was a car and driver, which was…
Whining About the Future Have you seen the recently published maps of Europe with the heat profiles that we are suffering this summer highlighted? It was shocking when we saw those heat maps for the Eastern United States a few weeks ago, but now these European maps are astounding. We are witnessing before our very eyes the transformation of Sicily, Spain, Sardinia, Corsica, Malta, much of Greece, the Western shores of Italy, the Adriatic…
The Joy of Disconnecting I’ve been away for two weeks and while I was keeping up with my emails and even sending a few of my own, I was not watching any TV (zero, none) and that means that I was not watching any MSNBC or CNN news. Our regular routine is that I watch MSNBC from about 6pm through and until close to midnight. I may take a breather for a movie if…
Who Wants to Live Forever? The Highlander is a cult classic about Connor McLeod, a Scotsman who is chosen to engage in an immortal battle of good versus evil. He is played in the four Highlander movies by Christopher Lambert. The weapon of choice is the broadsword and the age is imprecisely Medieval. Who should school Connor in the sacred ways of the sword, but an unconvincing Spaniard (more likely a Glaswegian) played by…
Tempus Fugit I am no Latin scholar, but I did take four years of Latin in high school. My mother, who had never taken a moment of Latin during her education through graduate school, was convinced that Latin was an extremely useful course of study for a young man heading out into the world. You may recall that doctors used to write their prescriptions in Latin so as to make it less likely that scoundrels…
Staging Retirement The way I write these blog stories is to think about what’s on my mind, think about what topics might be interesting enough to write about and then asking myself if it fits into the basic categories I have defined for myself and written about for the past five months. Not that complicated, but fortunately, still requiring some chin-rubbing and pondering as I like to be more than just mindless in most…
An Extraordinary Life I see that Gloria Vanderbilt died at the ripe old age of 95. It was said on Morning Joe that she had led an extraordinary life. I’m sure that is true in that she is a bit of a household name, mostly because of her designer jeans made popular in the 1970’s and 1980’s. It isn’t lost on many that her son, white-haired Anderson Cooper, can be seen every night on…