There is something about the holidays that make us all want to hunker down around hearth and home. This year, nature is cooperating in that program by delivering what looks to be a four day stretch of foul weather to our hilltop and the surrounding county. That foul weather is starting today and running through Friday, which means it will engulf Christmas Eve, Christmas Day and what the Brits like to call Boxing Day. Kim’s…
All major religious traditions have narratives about moral decline and its consequences. Start by thinking about Christianity. The Bible contains several narratives depicting periods of widespread moral corruption and their consequences. The earliest and most dramatic example occurs in Genesis and describes the pre-flood world as, “The Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every intention of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.” This leads…
Kim and I are both people who did not spend a lot of our lives doing what people call “partying”. That is to say, I don’t drink at all and Kim only drinks a little. We both like music (Kim, obviously, more than me), but we tend to like it in combination with some form of storytelling like musical theater or thematic cabaret. Neither of us is particularly inclined towards rock concerts and what I…
Lets get real for a moment. We’ve all seen the various economic and demographic projections for 2050. We know that there are three winners in terms of economic output. They are, unequivocally and with no particular order, the United States, China and India. If you look at current population level as a guide (all economists understand the relationship between population and economic growth), this makes sense. In rank order, based on 2025 data, the ten…
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,…
Buddy has never had to struggle a day in his three-year old life, as best I can tell. Granted, he has only been with us now two of those three years, but I doubt his prior life as Beau Cartier, as painful as that name may have been to his masculinity, was so horrible either. Clearly, he was too feisty by nature for those pseudo-refined folks who so willingly gave him up to us two…
I’ve said many times that my autobiography would need to have one of several titles. My two favorites are The Hole in My Pocket and Living 3XL. The first is a testament to how little respect I have for money and how that led to the irony of making a career of running world-class money management businesses while paying little or no attention to the wealth accumulation imperative that drives so many in the world…including…
As we were on our way to Europe a few weeks ago, Kim was speaking to her friend Candice and she recommended the latest Dan Brown novel to us. I enjoyed the other Dan Brown books I’ve read, starting with The DaVinci Code. I seem to have a hard time finding male novelists these days. The novelist ranks seem to be heading in the way of most professions, with women increasingly dominating the scene. Overall,…
We are changing it up this holiday season every which way. We started by taking our trip to London, Edinburgh and Prague over the Thanksgiving holiday. And while we kept to form with our NYC Cornell Club family gathering and will have the whole local family over on Christmas Day, we usually have done a New Years Party for the neighbors, but have chosen to substitute that with a neighbors’ holiday gathering here next Saturday.…
This morning I got an email notice from my friend Steve in Phoenix announcing that he and his lovely wife Maggie have moved into a new rental apartment as part of their aging/downsizing progression. As in most families, tribes and animal groups, there is always a lender of the pack, and that family seems to have Maggie as its leader. As the mother says in My Big Fat Greek Wedding, “the man may be the…