I’m Shrinking Do you remember that scene from the 1957 classic, but somewhat cheesy movie The Incredible Shrinking Man when he starts to shrink so much due to exposure to radiation and insecticide that he literally shrinks away into oblivion? As he does so you hear him say in a smaller and smaller voice, “Help! I’m shrinking…I’m shrinking…” Well, it turns out that this is where science fiction meets reality. News flash! We are all…
The Boys in the Boat All things pass. But sometimes they return, even if for brief moments. That may be the best definition of eternity any of us can ever achieve. This morning I was at JFK staying at the TWA Hotel, which I wrote about. I was reminded of John F. Kennedy and Howard Hughes. That was their glimmer of eternity as they sparked memories in one Baby Boomer’s brain and found their way…
Wild Animals I am surrounded by wild animals. First among them are Charlotte and Evelyn. Those are my two granddaughters, who are spending the week with us here on the hilltop. They are reasonably well-mannered wild animals, but wild animals nonetheless. What makes them wild is that they are visceral, unpredictable and do not follow any particular convention with which I am familiar. They don’t bite or present any particular danger to me, but neither…
The Earth as Property I have written about the awareness that has come to me recently about the increasing importance of ESG (Environmental, Social and Governance) issues in managing corporations and, for that matter, all manner of investments. That awareness came prior to my formulating the syllabus for this semester’s course in Law, Policy & Ethics, so I added two full class sessions to focus on the policy and ethical issues of ESG in today’s…
Things Fall Apart Back when Cornell was choosing a book for all incoming freshmen (and the entire rest of the Cornell community) to read each year, they selected Chinua Achebe’s 1958 African classic about pre-Colonial Nigeria called Things Fall Apart. The novel tells a story of Okonkwo, a local village wrestling champion as he deals with the advent of white colonialism and Christianity into Africa and how that affects his family, village social fabric and…
Waiting for Enlightenment Life is funny sometimes. Today is the the day before the much awaited arrival of my granddaughters for their Spring Break week-long visit. It has been five years since they were last here. Evelyn was one and Charlotte was four. I think it’s fair to say that this will, for all intents and purposes, be seeing Casa Moonstruck for the first time. Naturally, we’ve seen the girls many times in New York…
You Sunk My Battleship! The war in Ukraine has had many interesting twists and turns, but none more so than yesterday’s sinking of the Russian Flag Battleship in the Black Sea, the Moskva. As all the news pundits have been saying, this was less a strategic military victory than a meaningful symbolic victory for Ukraine, who has claimed credit for the sinking. Naturally, Russia is denying that the ship was sunk by a Ukrainian missile…
Repeating Twenty-five years ago I was attending a function at Cornell University when I met a pleasant young woman by the name of Nancy. She introduced herself as the wife of my cousin Pete. My mother had three brothers and two sisters while she grew up in the town of Lansing in the Finger Lakes area of New York State. One sister died in childhood during a raging flood. One brother and the other sister…
Women in Anything I was raised under a materialistic system of governance. My mother was a professional woman who supported our family exclusively, with no visible support coming at any time from dear old Dad, who was long gone by the time I was four. Mom never lost a step and never complained about any of it. In fact, I would say that she would have been surprised if it was any other way. She…
Hilltopping This morning I was driving to my favorite rock store, KRC, to pick up some bags of stabilized decomposed granite (DG) and I started noticing that every hilltop I could see, and there are plenty of hills around here to offer hilltops, is fully built out with one or two homes. Finding your own hilltop to command a view of the surrounding environs is obviously very popular. When we were in Italy recently on…