On the Shoulder About ten years ago I was in for an annual check-up with my doctor. He was an Irishman working as a GP at NYU and he had a good crisp sense of humor. In my effort to get my money’s worth from the visit, since I never seemed to have much wrong with me, I asked him about my right shoulder. It had been bothering me a little and I tried to…
Waiting for MLK Today is April 4th, the day fifty-four years ago when Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee. In those fifty-four years, it is hard to decide if we have made progress on civil rights and a true state of equality and justice for all in America. In the last few years we have seen more signs of resurgence of movements for white supremacy than I can recall seeing at any…
Violence in Never OK Who among us has never gotten so mad or so aggrieved or so aggressive as to resort to violence to give emphasis and voice to our feelings? I believe few men can make that claim and probably most women would be unable to make that claim. I make the gender specification because it seems to me that there is some hard-wiring in the male psyche that defaults to violence when threatened.…
The Revenge of the Roller Coaster I used to proudly display a framed poster of a roller coaster in my office. It was a lesson I probably learned rom one of my old mentors, Joe Manganello, who was the Chief Credit Officer of Bankers Trust Company for many years. I used to spend many hours in his office during the years of the LDC debt crisis when I was responsible for $4 billion of bad…
The Headwall I taught my ethics course last night on the subject of the subprime mortgage crash of 2007. I used the movie The Big Short as the case study and had two team of students debating the thickly implications of the activities in the market in early 2007 that I lived through so very much in real time back then as the head of BSAM. I gave the students additional reading to review including…
Sunrise Siesta It’s 6am on Friday and guess what? Yep, we awoke at 4:30am to prepare for our 5am Uber to the San Diego Airport for our Alaska Airlines direct flight to Orlando to start our Florida extravaganza. Last night we had to go pick up Natasha at the airport as her Jet Blue flight from JFK was an hour late. We only got home at 10:30pm so we knew we were going to have…
Water Water Everywhere Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote The Rime of the Ancient Mariner more than 200 years ago and it is considered one of the most famous poems in the English language. There is so very much to unpack in this poem and even its title for me. The obvious place to start is that my name is Marin and yet it was not my birth name and I am not in the least bit…
Immune to Immunology I am reading about the Immunity Debt, a new term being coined to explain why people who have been socially distancing during the Pandemic are getting sick with other more common viruses for which they have not been building immunities. I have said for a long time that my sisters and I are more robust and in good health because we grew up eating a lot of emerging markets dirt, compliments of…
How Bad Do You Want It? By Steve Larsen It has never occured to me to have guest writers on my blog, but one of my loyal readers and, indeed, both a close friend and writing (and riding) collaborator, Steve Larsen, has sent me a story and I am inclined to publish it today rather than save it for some lazy moment when I need a post. It deserves better than that, so here it…