Update from the road

On Saturday Graham and I went to see a special father-son bonding movie: Uncut Gems starring Adam Sandler. I had read a bit of one review that said it wasn't your typical Adam Sandler movie, and Graham had noted it got positive reviews on Rotten Tomatos, etc. Big mistake. It was the most painful thing I have perhaps ever sat through, like George Costanza at his absolute worst, cubed. Oh well. That said, it was in its own way a good movie, well executed, but that doesn't mean you want to watch it. Better to just take my word for it and appreciate it.

Yesterday we drove home, making a special stop in Princeton to see our old friends and neighbors for brunch. Which was totally worth it, but then the rest of the day was arduous, what with the short day and rain and pretty horrific seasonal traffic. We tried to be smart by going down 301 on the north part of Maryland's Eastern Shore, only to get slammed by truly nasty traffic on a construction-narrowed Bay Bridge. Note to self: do more due diligence on road construction in the future. But, in the end, it's the East Coast during the holidays. It's just a hard game to win if you don't make a very conscious effort to time it well.

The Possessed

For Christmas Natalie got a copy of Elif Batuman's The Possessed, a memoir which tells the tale of those who are consumed with the study of Russian literature, as she was when she earned a Comp Lit PhD at Stanford. The book also addresses the tension within the author between the desire to write and the need to study those who had written before. Naturally I had to borrow it forthwith. I am now about eighty pages in and can pronounce that it is thus far good if not great. Sometimes it gets dragged a little too far into the depths of trivia.

For the time being I will plow forward, as this has shouldered aside the German mystery novel I mentioned recently. No doubt I am encouraged in this task by Rob's excellent new La-z-boy recliner here by the window in the bedroom at George's house, which has been a great place to hide out while the house swarms with the activity of Berridges bustling about trying to figure out where to put things as the great exodus from Larchmont to North White Plains moves into its final chapters. Mary and Rob have returned to Larchmont for one last visit as we speak, to attend to some loose ends and because, I think, it is hard to let go of one's home of 45 years. Mary Lee will meet them there.

Natalie will go into the city to see the Broadway production of Alanis Morisette's Jagged Little Pill, while Graham and I will head into White Plains to see Adam Sandler's new film Uncut Gems, which has apparently been well-received.

The thing about the recliner is that it so completely takes ones body out of the equation, doing all the physical work, encouraging me to be pretty much a reading, writing, and phone calling machine. I can live with that. Though it reminds me that I do need to go out and get a little exercise too.

Curiously neutral nabe

Our Northeastern base of operations has shifted from Larchmont, in lower Westchester, to North White Plains, about 15 miles upcounty, in the welcoming home of Mary's brother George. The area is less swank, but still plenty comfy and with much of its own interest. We have been exploring on foot and trying to figure out good paths by which we can get out and get some exercise. The best way leads through the graveyard out behind George's subdivision.

It was hard to figure out how to get back there, but we eventually determined that we had to go through the side and back yard of a guy named Kevin, who has a very nice 1957 Rolls Royce Silver Cloud in his garage which used to belong to the drummer of Bon Jovi, for whom Kevin used to run the soundboard.

The graveyard is an interesting one. We couldn't find any gravestones much older than 1918, which makes it seem like it only really became a commercial burial place around the time of World War I. A large plurality if not outright majority of the gravestones are of Italians, many of them with very rarely encountered names like "Kresenzia" and "Emanuella." Some of the stones tell pretty eloquent stories in very few words, something like:

Antonio 1882-1928
Antonia 1888-1974
Luigi 1922-1942
Fiorello 1916-1998

Not a whole lot of commentary needed there. 46 years is a long time to survive a spouse.

Alongside the Italians there are a bunch of clearly German and Irish ones, but very little of your milquetoast WASP variety, and not a lot of Jews.

There are a couple of plaques commemorating a "Home for the Poor" here which presumably predates the cemetery. I should have taken a picture so I could look it up.

The neighborhoods up behind George's subdivision probably were built from the 1940s and 50s forward, so post WWII. Solid little houses, with some torn down and larger houses built in the 70s-80s but not much since then. Interestingly, very few bumper stickers, no yard signs, very few visible signs of political affiliations, though some houses had driveways full of Toyotas and Hondas and sported solar panels, while others had big American trucks. But even those houses lacked the American flags we often see in patriotic households.

That said, spent some time in the local public library this morning working. A nice modern facility, where one of the librarians sported a knit pancho and spent a long time on the phone with an apparently elderly patron explaining the difference between looking a book up on the library's catalog vs. Amazon. Out in front of the library flew an American flag, and below that a black POW MIA flag. Just before I left for lunch, an enormous American truck was backed into a parking space. Out of it climbed a skinny hasidic kid. I wasn't expecting that.

A Christmas miracle

Before we headed north last week, I found myself praying -- to the extent that I do, which is not really much -- that the Economist special double Christmas issue would arrive before we went on our trip. And lo -- there it was in our mailbox on the 18th or so. Santa had worked his magic properly.

The issue is by far the highlight of the year, with quirky feature stories about distinctly untimely subjects such as the history and culture of Siberia and the history of the Eucalyptus tree in California, two of this year's features. It is qualitatively better to have it over Christmas, and it makes a distinct improvement in the holiday break in the Northeast, because it gives me something warm to curl up with and read in 20-30 minute chunks during brief breaks in family activities and whatnot.

New regime

In North White Plains, at George's house, about to head into the city to see new clients and also have lunch with my old buddy Joe, hopefully at my favorite Bukharan place in the jewelry district, first described here back in 2005, though it did move to a different location at least a decade ago. Haven't seen Joe in a couple of years, and I'm excited to introduce him to Natalie in passing at the Grand Central clock, which feels in so many ways like the epicenter of the universe. I know that betrays a certain provincialism in me, but what are you gonna do?

Have begun reading a new mystery novel for the holidays, Babylon Berlin by Volker Kutscher. Pretty good.

I had something of a light nightmare last night that I was subletting an office space from a certain Chapel Hill lawyer, a tall and balding neighbor whose family sports no fewer than three Prii ("team Thrius"). I had a nice office with a window, but then a woman lawyer came in and took over the space and redecorated the place in a not very nice green and I was being pushed out of there, though my stuff wasn't moved. It looked at first like I was being put in a crappy office with no window, but then it turned out I was being punted into the outer portion of his office suite, which had evolved into a pretty crowded coworking space, populated by millennials whose eyes were glued unwaveringly to their screens, and who listened to music at shared worktables. It was horrible, horrible.

I think it may have been influenced somehow by the Sanford and Son episode we watched last night in which Scrooge-like Fred is visited in dream by the ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Future, all of them incarnated by Lionel. Fred sees the error of his ways and gives away all of Lionel's Christmas presents to this enterprising kid, including a number of items monogrammed "LS", which Fred tells them stands for "Love Somebody."

The Yanceyville bypass

Driving to New York, taking the Western Passage through Virginia, with our newest driver at the helm for the first leg. We just went past Yanceyville, taking the little 86/158 bypass around town. Which leads begs question: why was that road ever built? All the town's businesses, such as they are, are out there. A quarter mile away, the town proper, with its classic courthouse and parking in the square, more or less moulders. Did Yanceyville really need to be bypassed? I guess it makes truck routes faster, but was it worth it? Probably not.

A House for Mr Biswas

VS Naipaul is one of those names of authors that I've seen around forever and been meaning to read, but never get around to. Somebody told me A House for Mr Biswas was a good place to start, so I did.

Published in 1961, loosely based on the biography of Naipaul's dad, it's a very good book. It is neither easy nor hard reading, per se, nor is the tale it tells easy (in the sense that is inspires and has an uplifting moral) nor hard (in the sense that it exposes the terrible cruelties of colonial society or the fundamental injustice of Being). Instead, it reflects pretty well the story of the protagonist's life -- to the extent that the typical reader -- incarnated as me -- has a solid frame of reference to evaluate it.

Even as I write this I feel the theoretical critic in me looming over my shoulder ("reflects? What do you mean? It's fiction, created from whole cloth"). But I have to let this go.

In any case, the reader gets a good sense of what it was like to strive, flail and make limited progress in life in colonial Trinidad. I'm sure the book will bounce around in my head for a while. It was unlike other things I have read, and I pushed through north of 500 pages pretty quickly, so I have no regrets about taking it up.

(call came in re board responsibilities while writing. Now am a little behind, so must push forward)

Graham running down to the lake

In the summertime Graham often runs down to the lake to see who's there. In the autumn the habit has continued, even when there's no one there. It is very sweet to see him goofily hurdling down the hill after we get back to the house (today after his first foray onto the interstate as part of a full 1.75 hours of driving, then some Mexican food up in Hillsborough, punctuated by a lengthy discussion of negative interest rates and how they are supposed to ripple across capital markets and incent behavior). Then we raked and got a Christmas tree. A good day.

These Truths

Just finished listening to Jill Lepore's These Truths in the car. A book of tremendous importance, her command of American history from John Winthrop to Alex Jones is pretty impressive and she is a tremendous writer and, perhaps most important, an honest and honorable person who is aware of her own limitations and those of the people naturally inclined to ally with her. The recording was enhanced by the fact that she took time to do the reading herself, which is something many authors don't do, but it lets them place emphasis where it feels right.

The most important thing to take away from this book is that -- far from unprecedented, Trump and the populism he embodies is all too precedented in American history, and in people we don't think of as natural precedents. Democrats don't come off uncriticized, as indeed we shouldn't, though it's pretty clear whose side she comes down on.

She is undoubtedly stronger on some subjects than on others. Her treatment of the evolution of judicial originalism is particularly strong, as is her portrait of the arc and influence of Phyllis Schlafly. In general, I'm not sufficiently versed in American history to criticize much of this book, though if I knew of a place where a reputable and intelligent conservative had published a reasonable length review of the book, I might try to read it.

One thing I will say is that, Lepore's book -- like Stephen Pinker's Enlightenment Now, Yuval Noah Harari's Sapiens, or even Peter Frankopan's The Silk Roads -- seeks to bite off a very large chunk of world history, digest it, and present it back to the reader. All of these are great books, each of them worthwhile, from brilliant folks. And yet I wonder if there isn't something odd about this totalizing instinct in contemporary authors, this instinct, nay this need to explain everything, if there is not a bit of hubris to it, or is it just born of an ambient anxiety particular to the present moment, a sense of history getting out of hand. That said, I really need to buy physical copies of each of these books that I've listened to in the car and have them on my shelf for reference purposes. Great books all, from great minds.

Contra indications

When I was an analyst covering the life insurance industry, I remember at some conference in Vegas somebody saying to me that people get either Alzheimer's or cancer, but not both. As more and more people in my orbit pass away, primarily friends' parents but increasingly contemporaries too, that seems anecdotally true. So using the power of the interweb, I looked it up, and lo and behold there is actual research supporting this "inverse comorbitidy" and even of a potential molecular reason why both tend not to develop.

There seems to be an almost divine mercy to this. Either there is cancer, causing a lot of pain to the dying person, accompanied often by great cognitive lucidity and presence (when not addled by chemo). So that families are able to take leave of one another and, when the person has passed, a sense that at least the burden of suffering has been lifted. Or there is Alzheimer's/dementia, in which case those left behind suffer from a lack of closure and from the protraction of a shadow of the beloved and also sometimes with struggles in the earlier stages when cognition is slipping and there is denial and resistance, but when she passes it is also a relief.

Of course the inverse comorbidity is not absolute, but it seems to be largely true. As the affluent adopt better and better health habits and chronic diseases recede as causes of death, these seem to be becoming more frequent paths out of this mortal coil. We come to place where two roads diverge, and the path chosen for us makes all the difference. In the short term.

The enthusiasm of sales

In a shocking and unprecedented move, I forgot my phone charger in Larchmont on Friday, which I discovered when I was already on the train to New Haven. So, after having lunch with Natalie a Sally's Apizza (my first time -- delicious but no better than Pepe's, which has personal nostalgia value), and after walking Natalie back to campus, I stopped into a TMobile store off of the town green to get another one.

The people in the store -- a young fellow of African descent and a young woman of European -- were very nice. Because they had the cord part of what I needed for purchase but not the little box thing that plugs into the wall, the young woman went and found one they had sitting around and just gave it to me.

But then the guy asks me: "So are you a TMobile customer?" and I sheepishly admitted I was not, he lit up. He was 150% ready to pitch me on plans. I needed to make a train and didn't have time to talk to him (admittedly, I slightly exaggerated how soon my train was due), but I admired his spirit, because this guy was doing his job. And yes, I'm sure he would have gotten a nice commission had he been able to convert me, and it would only have been right. Honestly, this is the kind of kid you want to hire.

Which brings me to my main point, which I am pretty sure I have made before but I'll say it again: one of the great tragedies of the shift to e-commerce is the disappearance of retail jobs which encourage person-to-person contact and -- in the best cases -- offer some sort of variable compensation. Particularly for people with less privilege and wealth, retail and front of house food service jobs are ways to interact with other people, develop people skills and confidence, and progress in the world. Of course it isn't easy, there are no magic carpets, but they are important nonetheless, because they are great levelers, places where people from different social strata are brought together and made somewhat equal through the magic of that commercial copula, the retail transaction.

That kid really should go far, so long as he plays it straight, works hard, and is fortunate enough to have someone pay attention. I would have tipped them had their supervisor not come out.

When the credit card prompter asked if I would like to donate to the charity of TMobile's choice, which was something education-related, I was like "oh hell yes."

Belmont, MA

Arriving at my friend's mom's memorial service at a nature center, I was directed to park in a spot. A guy parked next to me in what was, I suppose, a Nissan Leaf. He looks at me. "Is that an electric vehicle?" he asks, eyebrow arched. "No" I said. "This is an electric vehicle charging spot" he says, pointing to a sign. So I dutifully backed out and parked in one of the last remaining spots. Somebody else pulled into the charging spot 30 seconds later, in a Camry. Sigh.

Once more

I find myself back in Larchmont, at the old family manse. It is a calm day, the winter sun glinting off the Long Island Sound, except for the inescapable sounds of suburbia: somewhere within earshot a big truck or other piece of equipment is grinding away and beeping as it works on something: pouring concrete, tearing up a street to put in new wires, something. It is the hidden and ongoing cost of maintaining old infrastructure, which is needed to support high population density: unless it is planned for in advance, which they didn't used to. (NB. Went outside to clarify noise. Apparently it is limb-trimming/grinding and custom cabinetry noises as the next door house is being filigreed for some new neighbors. Pretty sure this is at least the second major renovation since I started coming round these parts, but then again that has been a quarter century, so what do you expect?)

Being in the old house is odd. It is half full of familiar furniture, half full of the stuff brought in by the stager to sell the place, which we seem to have done. And let there be no doubt, at this point in time we are lucky to have been able to make a quick exit (knock wood) from the house, albeit at a lower price than we expected/hoped over the years, especially having listed in September. I recently had drinks in NC with a guy who wants to move down but can't sell his house in Milford, CT. He listed at $2.4 million maybe 2 years ago and can't find a buyer at $1.5.

Soon this house will be the source of noise to its neighbors as it is brought into the 21st century.

Kevin's mom's funeral in Yonkers last night was interesting. It was a lovely display of her art and pictures from her life, that was all good, and an interesting group of people. I talked to a few of them, but mostly I was the total outsider, the WASP from central casting, and everybody was talking to the people they knew, which is understandable. The open casket and people coming close and kneeling down and crossing themselves before paying their last respects, that was a new one.

Funerals, weddings and lifecycles

On Saturday I heard that someone I know from Al Anon, whom I will call Margaret, had died. Which was something of a shock. She was quite young, maybe in her early forties, and I hadn't seen her for some time. When someone that young dies, it can be pretty much one of two things: cancer or suicide. Which it was doesn't really matter.

Margaret's passing made me reflect on all the cancer and dying I see around me. A cousin has pancreatic cancer, the mothers of not one but two of my brothers in law are in different stages of the passing process, but are in it, nonetheless, and a friend from high school just posted about her 22ish son's cancer. Plus the sister of another friend has gliobastoma, I just heard. On the one hand, knowing a lot people with cancer is pretty much a function of being 53 and knowing a lot of people. This is just what my life is going to be like for a while, if not the rest of my life.

Usually, when people get to the age of much grey hair and much dying around them, it is offset by a stream of weddings and births amongst their children and their peers' children. But that hasn't quite started happening, and it is our own damned fault: it's because we married and the started families late, relative to historical standards. Time was, people married in their teens or early twenties and started families a few years later. So it was normal to be a grandparent around the age of fifty. But we got married in our late 20s at best and started popping out the littluns even later. Natalie was born when Mary was 36 and I was 34, Graham three years later. Do the math.

At the very least, I like to think that the stability of our household (relative to the one in which I grew up) and the priority we have given to family all along the way will communicate something to our kids, and at the very least won't make them anxious about getting in on the settling down game from the get go. Fingers crossed. I am not far from ready for some grandchilluns!

Tesla moment

So I was walking through the parking lot  after buying some stuff at Staples, and as I came round to the back of my car to open the hatch a guy in a black Tesla stopped and looked at me. We made eye contact and my mind was whirring trying to figure out if I knew him and that was why he had stopped. He looked kind of like my old colleague Steve (who lives in Providence) or this guy Jerry from out at Graham's martial arts studio, but of course it wasn't either of them.

It dawned on me that he had stopped because he had seen me and wasn't sure I had heard him. I may or may not have, but it didn't matter because I knew I was stopping to put things in the back of my car, but he had no clue.

I'm pretty sure that's what went down there. It was very considerate of him to stop. He pulled forward, and it was done.

Day in the yard

Despite a lingering cough which -- due to all the cancer circling around me (my cousin Martin, Kevin's mom, Neah Jo's boy...) -- I was momentarily inclined to put down to incipient lung cancer, I heeded the prediction of rain for tomorrow, manned up, and headed out into the yard. Where I did a lot of stuff.

Got the leaves off the roof, the season's second tranche, a big one. Looking up at the trees above I see I'll need to go back up there one more time, but there shouldn't be too much work next time. While I was up there a jackass a couple of houses up was making a bunch of noise with his gas-powered blower, which promised to mess with the equanimity of my day, but eventually did not, as he turned the thing off soon thereafter.

After that I took care of the patio and the deck, then ventured out into the back yard, where I did a lot. While there I generated and stacked a lot of kindling, and realized that I really needed to get Mary's gardening stuff out of the porch so I could put wood there, so I got onto that (after spending 15 minutes or so in the biggest of the leaf piles checking out the sky). But when I got the stuff to the basement I realized that the place was an unholy mess, so I straightened it up, and in the course of so doing took a bunch of stuff out of there to the trash and recycling. And I carried the fireplace stuff up and stuck it on the porch. Then I moved wood from the wood pile, and kindling from one of the two backyard kindling stashes.

Then I noticed Natalie had left in the Subaru, so I raked up the driveway. Naturally, spending that much time in the yard, I talked to a bunch of neighbors, and had a lovely visit from Scott and Olga's golden retriever Phoebe, one of my very best friends.

After about 5 hours in the yard, walking up and down the hill a bunch, my calves are tired as hell. It is about time to head to my mom's to eat leftovers. All told, not bad.

A proper Thanksgiving

After north of a week, I am still fighting off this cold: light symptoms, not overwhelming, but still there. A battle rages within me, whether to act like it isn't happening, in traditional guy way, or to embrace it and milk it for every moment of rest it opens the door to.

For the most part, I've been doing the former, but with Mary out in the yard raking and the leaves pouring down like snow and a large feast approaching this evening, the pressure is mounting. I think I need to cede to it and get out there and join the autumnal Sisyphean ritual, for whatever the reason is that we do it. Mostly, it makes her happy.

By now it is late enough in the morning that I think I've got to cave. I have, in any case, pushed past the halfway point in the Naipaul novel, which has been a little on the slow side but interesting in its own way. Enough procrastinating.

Relief

It appears that I have neglected to check in on something that has been weighing upon us a little, namely some struggles Graham has been having recently in a couple of classes. He's had some crappy test grades, which gave him Bs in the first quarter.

Now you could genuinely object: "big freaking deal, Bs aren't such bad grades", and I would hear you if you did. But Graham is an exceptionally smart boy, and one who has some specific challenges associated with his autism. The social challenges are the biggest ones. He's got a friend, a really good kid, but one who is so popular I think he gets distracted from his classes, who is having much more profound academic challenges, but he's a kid who will always do fine because he is exceptionally personable and has some bonus good features on top of that.

Graham is also a very nice boy, but he doesn't have the same effortless social grace and charisma that will lift his friend's boat in stormy seas. Graham needs to work with what he's got, which is raw brainpower. And he needs to learn to appreciate, cultivate and channel it.

I will spare you all the specific details around his math class, some of the questionable characteristics of his teacher, etc. It's a long story. We had been waiting for a grade on a math test to come back for a few weeks now, longer than was reasonable, let's leave it at that. His grade came back, and it was OK, better than we feared. We'll take it and keep plugging.

Paper Boy

One thing I keyed upon in T. Boone Pickens' autobiography was his description of his paper route, which hearkened back to the bios of Warren Buffett (The Snowball) and the autobio of Edward Thorp, the guy who while a math professor developed the system of card-counting that eventually made casinos change their models, before he want on to found Princeton-Newport Partners and become an early instance of the academic crossover to Wall Street and a quant who made a bunch of money.

The paper route, for all of these guys, was a place where they learned focus and work ethic as well as process optimization. That is, they all worked hard to figure out systems that let them do a little bit more with their time.

At the same time, a reader has to wonder about the extent to which this paper route story is really true, and the extent to which it becomes part of the mythology of the self-made man. I certainly don't doubt that all these guys delivered papers, that's no doubt true, and I'm also willing to believe that they worked really hard while doing so and learned valuable lessons. But the narrative that "I have worked hard from a very young age and have always striven to improve myself and that's why I'm super rich [and you're not]" can be a little bit self-serving.

But not all of them add in or accentuate the "and you're not" note. Buffett's dedication to the Giving Pledge is clear, Pickens gave hundreds of millions of dollars to Oklahoma St (overweighting athletics more than I'd like). I'm not sure about what Thorp has given money to, but he is just super cool. I just read this interview https://www.barrons.com/articles/why-edward-thorp-only-owns-berkshire-hathaway-1521547200 which makes me want to read more.

Golden Day

Last night's sore throat didn't disappear overnight, so I stayed in bed pretty much all day and read. First I polished off the T Boone Pickens auto-bio I had found somewhere in a thrift store or something. Or maybe it had belonged to Mary's dad. Not a great book, but I learned a bit about the oil business and something about the golden days of raiders and how the emergence of junk bonds helped them shake up staid and complacent board rooms. All told some complex stuff -- and Boone is a complex figure, particularly his role in the whole Swift Boat episode a couple of decades later -- but corporate activism of this sort has a role in the investment ecosystem.

Then, chicken tortilla soup from Monterrey Tacos and Burritos -- my sick day staple. Good stuff. After lunch, I lay in bed and looked out at the golden leaves in the backyard, and I actually fell asleep for an hour, something that doesn't always happen on days when I spend a lot of time in bed.

After napping, I got started on VS Naipaul's A House for Mr Biswas, which had been in the to be read stack for a long time. So far so good.

Meanwhile, in impeachment land, Mary swore it was a good day, and the liberal chatosphere seems to agree, but the numbers over at 538 seem to be moving towards impeachment fatigue in the genpop. And if the genpop doesn't swing, you damn sure know the Republican Senate ain't goin nowhere.

But it is inspiring in its way to watch the proceedings in snippets, to watch these non-descript, earnest career civil servants come forward and act professionally, as they have their whole careers. "The Swamp." The Trumposphere seems not to grasp that all these educated people could have gone out into the private sector and made a whole lot more money, but they chose to work in government and serve the common good, and now they get reamed for it by a bunch of fuckwits.

Intimations of mortality

Got the news yesterday that a cousin of mine has pancreatic cancer. This on top of news that one brother-in-law's mother no longer wants to live, while another's has gone into hospice after being told by doctors that she has a very short time period left, after battling cancer for a while.

Some months ago, I had gone to visit my dad's sister out in the country. She didn't know who I was, though looking at me she thought I was my dad for a second and then referenced her own dad, so she clearly at some level knew I was not just kin, but a Troy male.

In any case, all this mortality is kind of snowballing on me a little, making me focus on my priorities a little. Right now, that means shaving, showering, brushing teeth, and getting to the office.

Rent seeking as taxation without representation

Two stories on the front page of the Journal today point in the same direction:

• Google amasses millions of health records and 
• Amazon does a bad job policing fraudulent Chinese vendors

The common thread is of the tech giants basically needing to police themselves. The Google project as currently constituted apparently complies with HIPAA, that's all fine and well. But given lapses in recent years over the protection of consumer data by the giants, can we trust Google to keep the data secure? Because, in the absence of a physical presence by an actual US Federal regulator on the premises (which exist at the big banks) with robust access to more or less everything, that's what we have to do.

Similarly, Amazon has a gajillion Chinese sellers, some of whom are selling fake crap. Amazon has to police them itself, because as the swamp is being drained, the government is ever less able to. But the only reason Amazon should really police this stuff is to protect its brand. But really, it should.

So the tech giants' rent-seeking behavior, because they are essentially tasked with a regulatory function (policing their own and their partners' potential misbehavior), insofar as they take money out of consumer pockets without offering us a voice at the table (aside from Bezos' famous empty chair for the customer), begins to look and feel a lot like taxation without representation.

Said the guy typing onto a Google-owned blogging platform, before getting into his car to listen to a book on an Amazon one. Sigh.

An aside. Thank God for the papers of record and their own role in the regulatory/control equation. The Journal continues to do great investigative reporting, even though I don't agree with much of what its Op-Ed team puts out. The Times and the Post do too, though admittedly their own captivity to the political leanings of their core audiences led them into at times insufficiently circumspect coverage of various Trump scandals. The LA Times, the Boston Post, shit, Teen Vogue has had some important stories. And then there's The Economist. As the government abnegates its regulatory responsibility, we are increasingly dependent on the fifth estate.

It would be interesting to have a look at the Post's coverage of Amazon. How many critical stories has it broken? Certainly I can attest that the Journal has acquitted itself well in certain stories like Theranos: when Rupert Murdoch, having invested $100 million in the company, was lobbied by CEO Elizabeth Holmes to stop John Carreyrou, the Journal writer whose investigative reporting eventually brought the company down, to stop investigating. Murdoch demurred, saying that he didn't get involved in editorial decisions, and that they were doing their jobs. He eventually sold his stock back to Theranos for $1 and booked a loss. Then again, the Journal rarely writes coverage critical of Fox News (or the Times or the Post, for that matter)

So it is up to us to watch the Watchmen.

Phoneless

Graham and I hustled out to the high school at 6:30 this morning to put him on the bus for the big trip to DC that is something of a rite of passage for ECHHS sophomores. He'll be back late Tuesday night. I told him to text us as he got close, which he promised to do, and then hopped on the bus. I said: "You've got your phone, right?" "Of course," he responded.

Then, 30 seconds or so later, he appeared from the bus again. "Actually, I forgot my phone." Since everybody else on the bus had a phone, including our neighbor Tyler, with whom he is rooming, I just slapped him on the shoulder and said "it'll be good for you," and shooed him back up the staircase.

Whether it is also good for us, his parents, is another matter. Although we know that not being in touch with one's kids 24/7/365 was the case since the dawn of time until just a few years ago, we are still used to it. He will be fine, and we probably will be too. But still.

How I got bit by a dog

It occurred to me that I had not recorded this episode for posterity, so I had better do so. So two weeks ago I was out running, and there was this youngish lady hanging out at the bottom of a driveway with what turned out to be an old hippy in black leather pants. This being Chapel Hill. And she had a dog. On a leash. Now, many people walk their dogs on this stretch of road, and they are invariably friendly, so I don't always take evasive action, and I didn't this time. The dog, a hound, whose name turned out to be Hunter, starts jumping at me, and I figure he's being friendly and wants a pet. But no, he's a tad hungry, as is apparent when he bites me in my bicep. A little nip, but still, a bite.

The adrenalin started firing in me, and I yell out "he fucking bit me!" She pulls him back, but she's freaked out by my aggression, and starts crying. So I apologize for cursing, she says it's not her dog. I get the name of the owner and jog on home, pissed off that my evening was going to be blown.

You see, Mary was headed out to dinner with some friends, and I had plans to get Mexican take out and watch The Sopranos with Graham, but now I see my evening disappearing down the drain of the emergency room. I was pissed.

At any rate, turned out OK. I went to the FastMed place up on the corner, where we checked that I had had a recent tetanus shot, the RN or PA attending gave me a scrip for an antibiotic and told me to expect bruising, and our evening came out OK.

Somewhere in there I had tracked down the owner who was shocked that Hunter had bit me (as had been the neighbor from whom I had gotten his number), but he wasn't sure that all his shots were up to date because the vet was closed.

The next day I'm sitting out on the porch reading, when my phone rings, and it's the dog owner. "Hello," I said. And he says: "I just wanted to let you know that Hunter's OK." And I'm thinking: what a relief! I was so concerned that somehow nibbling on my arm had harmed his teeth. Turned out, he meant that Hunter didn't have rabies. "Awesome," I said, and we were more or less done.

Unless I get a bill for hundreds of dollars from the FastMed. Then he'll be hearing from me.

Advisor as doctor, but we are all our own physicians...

A few months back I alluded to the fact that I see the financial advisor/planner as being a lot like a general practitioner physician: we are generalists trying to give sensible guidance on a wide array of financial topics in people's lives, ultimately referring out a lot of things (taxes, legal, etc) to other professionals. Those who try to be all things not just to all people but to any one person quickly run up against the limits of their own capacities.

In the last week or so, after getting bit by a dog (it appears I forgot to write about that, not a big deal, but there were some humorous moments) and then going to meet my new main doc and getting some bloodwork done, it was really brought home to me how true it is in this day and age that we are all our own physicians. Doctors are there to watch for things getting out of whack, to interpret blood tests and other little vitals to let us know when aging and other processes are catching up to us, and to help us do the right things in times of crisis. But mostly they are coaches who steer us towards healthy practices to slow the advance of chronic conditions to which we are all subject by modern living. They counsel exercise, decent eating, stress management, sleep, community etc. They don't have time to do much else when the clock allocates 18 minutes per appointment.

And so it is with finance. Those of us who counsel others are very limited in our span of control or influence. We can try to model, illustrate, and instill practices that will benefit people in the long run, but we can't force anyone to do anything, except for the things we have in our direct control, typically investments. Which are important but only become a dominant part of most people's financial lives relatively late in the game, when they are in their mid-to-late 50s and later. Up until then it's so much more about forecasting future needs, saving, spending, being tax-conscious, and not making crazy mistakes in investing by stretching too far for big wins. And covering one's bases with insurance.

The problem is all of this stuff is boring, complex, not sexy, it all involves a high level of abstraction and deferral of gratification. Rare is the person who enjoys these things. So our job is to continually nudge others in a sensible direction, step by plodding step.

This is also ultimately the limiting factor in the business of robo-advisors and other platforms that deliver advice over screens. They are competing for peoples' attention with cat videos, sitcoms, social networks, and the whole panoply of distractions that draw people away from domains that alternately make their eyes glaze over and elicit fear. Robo-advisors can undoubtedly provide good services and help many, particularly younger folks, but as life gets more complicated and children, dollar figures, and risks get bigger, many people need more granular listening and nudging from actual human beings.

For us as providers, as for doctors, the constant struggle is scaling, division of labor, and time management to do this well. Speaking of, gotta hop.

Adventures in the state for lovers

Woke up this morning at 9, then discovered it was 8. Somehow I had not gotten the memo that it was time to shift out of daylight saving mode, which is not surprising since I have dramatically limited the amount of time on Facebook and listening to NPR, to keep the Trump infection down and to focus on the long view as much as possible.

Long weekend already, since we drove up to Newport News for a robotics competition Friday evening and then back again yesterday. On each night we failed to reach our destination before 10:30. I will spare you the details, except to caution against stopping at Big Pig BBQ in Stony Creek, VA if you are in any sort of a hurry. The Q was fine, but it took 35 minutes to make some fries, 5 Q sandwiches and 2 BLTs, which is just absurd. Particularly since the woman in front was just sitting around. You would have thought the cook might have called her in to help.

But I digress. On Friday we stopped at Five Guys, where we didn't know there were no chicken options. Mary, being a woman of firm beliefs and resolve, was not going to eat beef in a place like that, so she had a very disappointing veggie sandwich, and when we got to our hotel, an Embassy Suites near the Hampton Convention Center, she was starving. The hotel was, moreover, swamped by an anime convention and -- this being the day after Halloween -- there were lots of guy and gal geeks swarming around in silly costurmes a little bit tipsy. She went to the hotel bar to get some food, I went to bed.

She took a while to come up, and, while I knew that getting food would take a while, I also thought to myself: "I wonder if someone is hitting on her." Sure enough, she comes back up after 45 minutes or so with tales of scarcely edible dumplings and an African-American military guy in his 40s who had struck up a conversation with her. He was, he told her, something of a regular there, "because it's quiet." Hmmm. He also asked her questions like "What are your plans for the evening?" Mary did mention words like "son's robotics convention" and "husband" but he never 100% seems to have given up until she left.

She seems to have enjoyed it a little. Of course. It is always nice to have outside confirmation that you are attractive. She also learned a little about DOD procurement but couldn't get a firm statement from him about what he thinks about asswipe up in the White House.

Knocked off course

As so often, I launched my laptop with the intent of doing something, then saw something in an inbox (in this case Facebook's) that distracted me and I forgot what I was going to do. Which happens when walking around the house all the time too, of course, but the laptop and the web are particular dangers because there are so many potential distractors there. Particularly in the morning when I look at the S&P futures and there are all these stories there on Bloomberg begging to be read. Thank God I don't have a Bloomberg login and am limited in the number of stories I can read, or I could be there all day.

But the main thing that protects me from all of that is my task list and my routine, which in the morning is to read certain things in a certain order while sitting in certain places, consciously protecting myself from specific influences as I open to the world for the day. As I go, I shorten the horizon of what I am taking into consideration: moving from the very long view to the tasks of the day, always trying to integrate the latter into the former and keep the two (and the many time horizons between them) in alignment.

Arthritis

So I visited my new primary care physician yesterday, a very nice young woman of South Asian descent. Unfortunately she is -- like all PCPs these days -- harried by the system and pressed for time, which drives home the point that we are all ultimately our own doctors, the managers and guardians of our own health. But in half an hour she did an admirable job in getting up to speed on where I was on a broad range of health issues, despite the fact that my health records had not been updated in her system (I should have had them faxed weeks earlier instead of one week, admittedly my bad).

One thing we did get done was I some xrays of my problem knee, which discovered some arthritis, or " Mild tricompartmental, medial compartment predominant, left knee osteoarthrosis." More precisely even, 

"LEFT knee: No acute fracture or dislocation. Tricompartmental osteophytosis with tibial spine spurring. Mild medial tibiofemoral joint space narrowing. No joint effusion.

RIGHT knee: Limited views of the right knee demonstrate tricompartmental osteophytosis with tibial spine spurring. Minimal medial femorotibial compartment joint space narrowing. No acute fracture or dislocation.

Honestly I'm not sure what it all means or what I do going forward. It sounds less bad than a torn miniscus or patellar tendinitis, AKA "jumper's knee", which is what I thought must be going on. I will have to figure this out talking to friends and neighbors who are doctors. Certainly I must consider myself fortunate to have gone this far in life without an ACL tear.

Two assasinations in one day

Listening to These Truths by Jill Lepore in the car these days, and just as I got home (spoiler alert) John Wilkes Boothe had just shot and killed Lincoln. Then, in the evening, I watched The Crown, and JFK got killed. It was rather odd, and profoundly moving, to experience both within 5 short hours of one another, and a reminder that, come what may, a peaceful of transfer of power between Presidential administrations is the best thing we can hope for.

The Invention of Nature

Just polished off Andrea Wulf's The Invention of Nature: Alexander Von Humboldt's New World. Alexander von Humboldt was a scientific polymath and force of nature (pun intended) whose life spanned from the late 18th to much of the 19th Century (1769-1859), which ain't chopped liver for back then. I was originally intrigued by this book because Alexander was the brother of Wilhelm von Humboldt, whom I knew as a great philologist from back then, but who it turns out was also a major diplomat and (it turns out) founder of the University of Berlin, which became the model for the western university as we know it.

So Alexander was an impressive and intense figure, whose travels through first South America and later Russia and writings thereupon formed the basis and inspiration for a whole lot of modern science, especially ecology and geology etc., less about physics and chemistry etc. More macro than micro.

But back then there weren't well or clearly defined disciplines, because there weren't institutions (either educational or governmental-policy forming) within which to house and cultivate them. It was pretty much an open field, and it took obsessive, driven dynamos like Alexander von Humboldt (and Darwin) to call them into being with their herculean efforts and promotion of their endeavor. Von Humboldt was apparently a great promoter of other scientists, an institution and discipline-builder himself (reminiscent of what Norman Borlaug did later in Mexico, Pakistan, and India).

Wulf's book won a ton of prizes, and perhaps rightly so for resurrecting a figure largely forgotten in the West (though less so in Latin America. I was reminded of the book in Guanajuato, Mexico in April when I saw a street named after Humboldt. Admittedly, we have Humboldt County, California itself well-known in my day at least for the quality of weed grown there). But ultimately I think it's a good but not quite great book, because she spends a little too much time pumping up Humboldt as the ur-thinker whose ideas ultimately gave rise to our notions of holistic environmentalism. She may be right about that, but she harped on it a little too much. The task of the historian is, I think, only partly to tie the past to the present. It is just important to dwell in the past as such, and I could have used a little more of that.

But I'm glad I read it.

Changing the accents

Every weekday morning, as part of my "transition into the day," I read a short piece by a guy who has been around the wealth management world for many decades and has been writing more or less weekly in various places: newsletters, publications, etc. In so doing he has evolved a rather consistent and reasonable way of thinking about markets, economics, people, etc.

He falls to the right of me on the political spectrum. In what I read today (written in 2003), a piece concerning tax policy and election cycles, he made some snarky reference to the fact that his family makes a lot of money because it works its butt off. Affluent people often talk like this, framing themselves as the victims of tax policy.

But who can blame them, as Democrats (and similar parties worldwide) often frame the need for tax hikes in terms of class struggle? But it would be interesting to see Democrats reframe this in Kennedyesque language ("Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country") or even parable of the talents language ("Of those to whom much is given, much is asked"). Democrats could acknowledge and express gratitude to those who pay a lot in taxes, but not grovel before them, or at least figure out how to walk a middle road.

Ultimately, and this is something I think about a lot, so I'm sure I've blogged about it recently, we are trying to figure out what's the optimal way of allocating capital towards broadly construed goods: education, health, productivity, happiness. What is the best allocator: state or markets/private citizens? Obviously, the answer differs by the nature of the specific good in question and the specific historic circumstances and culture around it in a time and place, so we never find one answer.

But the constant vilification of a class makes things difficult. In the present, for example, if it comes down to a fight between Zuckerberg and Warren, who do we think wins? The sad truth of the matter is that it may well be Trump.

The Weight of the Crown

Alone amongst my family, I have kept on watching The Crown off and on, in between episodes of things I watch with the rest of them of shows involving more guns and guffaws. The show is indeed slow. Its slowness would seem to derive from the fact that, at base, it has but one theme: the weight of the crown, and what that means for the Queen and her family, but mostly for the Queen herself; the tension of being at once sovereign and human, and at times the added pressure being sovereign and woman.

It does sound boring, and is in fact not long on car chases. One would not think that this theme could be strung out successfully over many episodes, that there were so many facets to it. But there are.

The most recent episode I watched concerned the Edward VIII's desire to return to public life, which coincides in the episode (and presumably in real life) with the discovery that he had been in league with Hitler in a variety of ways. Should Elizabeth forgive him and let him serve the government? At the same time Billy Graham is touring through Britain and giving sermons to stadiums, and Elizabeth, in distinction to most of the rest of the snooty royals, refuses to act as if he is an unwashed commoner. She watches his sermons and hears some of his message. Again, she is at once sovereign and human.

Unlike most people, however, she can just snap her fingers and he'll come visit, which she does, and he does, twice. The second time, it is for advice, as she ponders what to do with her dandy, barely repentant fascist uncle. And Elizabeth says to Graham, basically: "I'm in a tough position, as the head of the church. There's no one between me and God."

So now the stage has shifted, because now she has reframed the issue and it's not about sovereign/human, but about divine/human, and we are back on familiar territory, because we are thinking in not just Christian (God/man) terms but Socratic (ideal/real) or even pre-Socratic (one/many) ones.

But we've really been there the whole time, which is why the show has been more or less relatable from the beginning, because it has foregrounded the fact that Elizabeth, while a clever and earnest girl, was never a rocket scientist. She was a good girl -- Gallant to Margaret's Goofus -- but she also enjoys a romp between the sheets with the dashing if debauched and philandering Phillip and is not above a petty snit now and again. But she tries. Over and over again she wrestles with tough questions as the camera lingers on her -- aided in this act by Claire Foy's good looks.

And in fact, this very ordinariness is the key to her appeal and her power. Although anointed by God and easy on the eye, Elizabeth is not very special. Like Kafka's Josephine the Mouse Singer,* Elizabeth's voice is scarcely distinguishable from that of her subjects, a fact that is ultimately not lost on her, but she labors diligently to justify the attention paid to her.

It must be said The Crown, at least through the first two seasons, is mighty white. The show deals with questions of gender ever so slightly, and class too, and there are allusions to gayness here or there, and there are scenes of Philip and his crew ogling and then bedding African and Polynesian women, which comes back to bite him, and around the time of the Suez crisis there's a pretty frank admission of the UK's dependence on oil seized by force, but by and large the first couple of seasons float in that blissful time before the colonial repressed has returned. So it is easy for things to float along at a high level of abstraction, because these questions of ruler and subject, man and God, one and many are being worked out amongst a bunch of people and supernatural entities who, in their minds' eyes, look like one another. By and large this is the realm of the Masterpiece Theater genre from which The Crown jumps off, a comfortable and scenic world in which affluent, liberal and educated audiences can look at pretty things and consider an issue or two before getting ready for the work week. It will be interesting to see if the upcoming seasons can open up and process more complexity. I ain't saying it's easy.










*Franz Kafka, "Josephine the Songstress", If, then, if it were to be true that Josephine doesn't sing but just whistles, and indeed, as it seems to me, that her whistling barely exceeds the bounds of the ordinary, that really her powers in whistling don't even extend into the triumphant sort mentioned earlier whereas the whistling of our typical laborer, someone who is quite down to earth and who whistles the whole day long without any particular effort, that this just goes hand in hand with his earthly travails, well, if all of this were to be true then, indeed, Josephine's purported artistry would be refuted-but now, first and foremost, now we'd have to face up to this riddle as to why it is that her performances are so electrifying! And really, when you get right down to it, it's not merely whistling, this is not everything that Josephine exhibits in her performances-you need only place yourself in the back of the auditorium and listen attentively... or, better yet, test this out in the following manner: if Josephine is singing amongst a group of others and if you should give yourself the task of making her voice out from amongst these others then without fail you won't be able to distinguish anything else but a typical, middle-of-the-road sort of whistling that, at the most, is a bit sweeter or somehow softer and this is the only distinguishing characteristic that you might hear.

Political space to breathe

Around 6:15 the other day as I was nudging my way out onto 40 on the way home, I weaseled my way to the left most lane, as I always do, as in the absence of some mishap on the left-hand shoulder of the road, it unclogs and moves most quickly as the 40/Durham Highway interchange processes all the rush-hour volume that gets dumped onto it by RTP feeders. Just soon as I made it into the lane, I saw a black pick-up truck with decorative rims and a pretty aggressive exhaust tuning trying to nudge its way in front of me.

Now, ethically I could have no problem with what the guy was trying to do. He was doing exactly, 100% the same thing I had just done. But culturally it was pretty clear that we were part of different tribes, me in my "ricer" Prius, he in his potential coal-roller truck. Initially, my vestigial northeastern "fuck that guy this is my lane" instinct kicked in, and I was going to adjust my speed to not let the guy in front of me while not making eye contact in classic New Jersey fashion.

Instead, I just let the guy in. And he gunned his engine (just to accelerate) and it gave a throaty growl as he pulled in in front of me, and he gave a friendly wave. Which surprised me.

Time was, this was how things worked across the cultural divide. People from town and country, or from different walks of life, could acknowledge our differences and operate civilly with one another. And by the time we have made eye contact with one another and started talking, should we choose to, it usually goes that way now. But we have to make the eye contact and begin talking.

But I must admit that this might be my white male gentile privilege talking. It is relatively easy for me to shift into this neutral discursive gear, because I'm not really threatened by anything the Right is doing. Far from it, in fact, they are defending my turf for me, though I know in the abstract I don't want them to and it is wrong. They aren't talking about taking away my ability to make birth control decisions. Even global warming: I live inland and have enough money to figure out how to take evasive action from the worst of the initial effects.

So maybe it is just easier for me to dial it back, play nice, and try to see their perspective and engage productively. Perhaps that's the definition of snowflake.

Corporation as State

A couple of days back the Wall Street Journal ran a story about how Google was restricting access to its app store to apps that serve up payday loans with rates in excess of 36%. This is unquestionably a policy goal that I support, and people near and dear to me and many of our readers have fought hard to enact similar laws and put in place regulatory bodies to implement them.

In general I am supportive of investment strategies and corporate initiatives that are aligned with my values. But at the same time I have to admit that it is regrettable that the private sector is being called in to forward what is essentially the promotion of the type of public goods that are more typically thought of as being the domain of government.

Because what about if companies were pursuing "public goods" with which I disagreed? I suppose, in some sense, they often are. Chick Fil A closes on Sundays and their founders support a wide range of Christian charities with which I disagree, Cook Out plays Christian music and has Bible quotes on its soda cups, etc -- but mostly it harms me through its relentless upselling of add ons (charging for slaw, for example). Then there are all the corporate sponsors of the NRA. I guess the difference there is that it's very easy to opt out of those if you don't want to support, whereas Google's App store is pretty much where you go if you want an Android app. Though I doubt that Payday lenders are being cut out of Google search, so one could find them through a browser if not an app.

Would it be preferable if government entities focused on public goods, while private ones tried to advance their own private aims exclusively? I suppose it's hard to legislate the distinction between public and private goals.

Certainly if a company had a true monopoly position it would be questionable to let it have too much power enacting social policies. But we're not quite there yet.

Apologies for the rambling. It happens.

Guy blowing leaves in street

As I was pulling out of my neighborhood this morning there was a guy with big headphones on and a powerful blower, out blowing leaves and pine needles from the street in front of his house. From the street, mind you, not from his yard. I don't know where he thought he was going to blow them to. There weren't many of them to start with, because he doesn't have that many trees in his yard.

His blower, of course, was a two-stroke. I must say, I was kind of appalled. I mean, WTAF. The biomass needs to go somewhere, and the last thing we need is some underemployed yard Rambo out there cleaning the streets with a fine-toothed comb.

I am the first to admit that he is engaged in an order-imposing behavior akin to my own driveway sweeping and roof-cleaning, so recently documented. But I don't use a super loud, high emissions blower, and I use my electric one very sparingly, out of consideration for my neighbors eardrums.

I did not, however, accost him, much though I would have liked to.

A little "progress"

Yesterday between my beloved post-prandial Saturday nap and Maeda Galinsky's memorial service I spent some time in the driveway raking and sweeping up leaves in advance of the much-anticipated rain we are finally getting today. Afterwards, as the sun was going down and I was sitting at my desk not doing much of anything, I bucked up and headed for the roof. As I said some months ago, Marvin had given me the idea that the only way we were going to get the damned thing clean was with a bucket of diluted "outdoor bleach" and rags.

But of course, a metal roof is hot as fuck in the summer. So I wasn't doing it then. And now is the time of year when, even as the weather moderates, the days grow shorter by the day -- a minute a day, quoth Sergei and Larry. So daylight is precious.

Nevertheless, up I went with rag and bucket. As you would suspect, it's not quite as glamorous as it sounds, and requires some careful dancing. You have to plan carefully not to step on an area you just washed (I could go on)... in short, it was hard, and it was very difficult to get much done.

But I made a meaningful if incomplete dent in the really dirtiest area and, objectively, I got a lot of dirt off the roof. Intrinsically, therefore, I made progress, if not a ton. My arms were tired. And I figured out that, while this probably isn't the absolute best approach to cleaning a metal roof, it is, like democracy, the worst approach except for the alternatives. Plus it's always nice to be up on the roof to look down the hill at the lake.

At the end of the day, I felt good for having done a little something, and slept well.

Narrow and wide

All too many of Natalie's courses seem interdisciplinary in nature (history, literature, art, sociology...) and based upon themes ("Race, Politics, and the Law," "The African Encounter with Colonialism"). A couple of caveats:

1. As an area studies (Russian and East European Studies) major, I participated in this and
2. The students do work awfully hard and read a lot of books by people I've never heard of -- which indicates to me that they're digging deep -- and
3. Natalie is objectively better educated than I was at her age, meaning she and the system are doing a lot of things right

I nonetheless wonder if the relative lack of single-author or more narrowly focused classes (I took classes with titles like Pushkin, Wittgenstein, Augustine, Russian Symbolism, Dostoevskii and Tolstoi, Russian History to 1796) etc. means that the pendulum has swung a little too far towards professors presenting their own pre-baked theses, leaving a little too little space for students to do their own thinking. Certainly Natalie has already run into trouble in one course where she disagrees with the professors and they gave her a crappy grade on a paper, she thinks mostly because they don't agree with her.

As an example of something I've seen in my own learning about a topic along these lines. I've complained here on the blog about the slowness of Ezra Vogel's bio of Deng, and how it seems stuck in interminable discussions of how China worked through Mao's legacy and its own ideological direction following Mao's death. I pined for tales of what was actually happening in the street. So I stated listening to Weijian Shan's book about exile to the Gobi in the Cultural Revolution, and there I learned just how intense and real the ideological discussions were all up and down China during this period, and also during the preceding and arguably crazier Great Leap Forward of the late 50s-early 60s. The absolute seeming insanity of what the Chinese would do on the basis of fine points of ideology. Kill all the sparrows. Try to scale up steel production by building millions of tiny forges in backyards and melt down pots, pans, knives, bicycles....

Fast forward to today and look at the conflict between Houston Rockets owner Darryl Morley and his little tweet about the Hong Kong protester, and Alibaba #2 and Brooklyn Nets owner (also Branford College '87, so a guy I knew in college) Joe Tsai's response characterizing what is happening in HK as a "separatist movement", seeming to toe the Beijing party line. But then he explains that in fact it's not just the party line, but that because of the Opium Wars and also the Japanese occupation prior to and during WWII, Chinese are extremely sensitive to perceived intervention. It's complex.

My point is that perhaps the best way to grasp the complexity of being is to dig deep in specific places and do your own spelunking.

Also, who are we to say the Chinese go overboard about fine points of ideology, we a nation of people who allow the proliferation of hundreds of millions of guns and very high rates of gun-related violence because of a romantic view of our "right to bear arms." And other stuff too. Liberals also do crazy shit because of very fine parsing of sacred ideas. But now it's time for work.

Elegant density

Beth and Kevin have this knife block that is very low slung and fits very neatly within the drawer to the left of the stove. Or perhaps it's more accurate to say Beth has it, because I can tell you fo sho Kevin didn't find it. It's not his thing.

In any case, it is rather ingenious and is an example of the marvelously efficient ways that city dwellers use space, which is something I first really saw when I started coming to New York regularly in the 80s, at Mark's family's apartment at 91st and Park but more particularly at Hilary's at 89th and Madison. His family was a little more affluent than hers, which meant, frankly, that her place was smaller and therefore more thought was put into it, and it was more homey.

There were bookcases in the narrow hallway outside of Hilary and Ellen's room, lots of bookcases generally. Not built in, for the most part. I remember as well a display of Medallia d'Oro coffee tins in the kitchen atop the cabinets, a decorative flourish and therefore not the most efficient use of space, but it was way up there and none of them was Sheryl Swoopes, so it wasn't really usable space. But to a North Carolina boy it was a lovely touch, urban and urbane.

But overall the place did have this quality of making a warm and hospitable home out of a small space, which is one of the magical things about city dwelling. And now I have come to the fourth paragraph, and the alarm bell in my head signals that it's time to stop blogging and move on with the business of the day, a day much less intense than yesterday's 5 meetings. Which I can live with.

Ditmars

Staying at Beth and Kevin's new place in Ditmars, Astoria, Queens. To get there had to hop the M60 bus from 125th St because the N wasn't running. Which seemed like a pain in the ass initially, but proved to be a lovely introduction to the nabe. From the bus stop just off 278 at 31st St I saw a Maltese cultural center, and then a few blocks up 31st, just to the West, was the Cheski Dom (Czech House) and a Bohemian Beer Garden, which, in Halloween stylie mode, was done up as the Bohemian Fear Garden.

Astoria is awesome, very reminiscent of Flatbush in the 80s, or probably the 90s, as the hipster/gentrification process is well underway. Is that good or bad? It's a tough call. On the one hand, some of the lower income people will in fact get pushed out, even without Amazon's HQ2. It's just happening. On the other had, money will flow into the neighborhood and the physical plant will be renewed and there will be opportunities for owners to exit and move to places with more space and yards and, frankly, better schools. It is bittersweet but not all evil.

In Manhattan now, one conference call down, waiting for meeting 1 of 4 to arrive. Here she is!

Digging deep

I started off this post with an enumeration of the ills that are weighing on me right now, but you don't want to read that, and I don't want to read it 20 years from now when I come back to check out my blog.

Hmmm.

In the afternoon yesterday an Indian couple in their 50s came in to talk to me. They have twin boys who are applying for college now, and they have very specific questions about making concrete decisions right now about where their sons will apply and the financial implications of it. Basically, if one of them gets in Duke Early Action and has to commit to going there, no matter what. Even if Duke doesn't offer them enough $.

The fact of the matter is that they are making this decision right as their backs are up against the wall of a deadline, when they should have been thinking it through months in advance. They came to my seminar in April, and could have been educating themselves about it a long time ago.

Of course, they are to some degree subject to the whims of a couple of 18-year olds.

I feel some guilt about not being able to answer their questions right off the top of my head, but that's being too hard on myself. I haven't guided people through this specific decision just like this, at this point in time in the decision cycle.

What this really is is an opportunity to dig deep, gain some knowledge, and better equip myself to serve people in the future. Gotta run with that.

Change up

In my ever-changing quest for an early morning routine that starts my day off right, my most recent iteration has involved: up around 645, start coffee, feed cats, meditate, crunches, push ups, then read with coffee. The reading has been "spiritual" in nature, for a long time Al Anon books, then I've moved on to stoics, Jewish thinkers, most recently Buddhists. Not thinking that anybody was going to have the answer, mind you, just looking for daily deposits in the bank of tranquility before I head off into the day.

The blog has been pushed back to later in the morning, after reading the paper and checking email, futures, etc. Which is a delicate place for it to be. Sometimes it happens, sometimes my attention gets sidetracked. In fact, my attention is always at issue. For a while the novelty of meditating was good enough to offer me a bit of a buzz.

For today at least, I'm slipping the blog in early, just to mix things up a bit.

I will grant that the book I am not reading today, Chogyam Trungpa's Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism, has a decent point, namely that people are chasing after spiritualism in a materialistic way, looking to conquer tranquility and/or notch up scalps on a path to it. Is that me? Kinda? Maybe?

Still, I have struggled reading the book to fully groove on it. I know in truth that the answer is likely to be that need to strive less, but that is hard to do.

Him

To the extent possible, I try to post little about Trump. He already sucks up all too much oxygen from the world's discursive ecosystem. It is difficult to ignore him, but I try not to have him monopolize my attention. Mary's attention, to my mind, constitutes a more than sufficient investment from our household.

Yet it is hard to do so, because he is so inane, because he is so dangerous, as he tramples on all the norms of checks, balances, due process, alliances built up painstakingly at many levels by well-meaning representatives of various parties all up and down society.

But also because he does represent a fundamental truth, that there's a huge chunk of society who feels like they have been ignored and left out but that this one guy, this flaming asshole - and his analogues in different countries -- can save them. That he cannot, that they are the only people who can and that to do so they must cast down their cell phones, remote controls and Bibles and other sacred texts and figure out how to help themselves -- and that the state is desperate to help them do so while corporations are content to Taylorize them into irrelevance -- that truth has not sunk in yet.

OK. I just have to stop. It's not productive.

Level-setting

Listening to Weijian Shan's Out of the Gobi in the car now, really an incredible book, the autobiography of a guy from Beijing exiled to the Gobi desert during the Cultural Revolution, where he dug ditches, cut reeds on a frozen lake, made bricks, was trained as a "barefoot doctor," and did a host of other things under rather subhuman conditions of starvation, cold, and general privation. Then how he came out, went to the US for college, and eventually becomes an investment banker and private equity deal guy.

And in parallel the story of China and its history. I started in on this book while taking a time out from Ezra Vogel's life of Deng Xiaopeng, which is a plodding court history, for the most part, about the shifting sands of decision-making at the heights of the Chinese Communist Party during much of the time period Shan describes. Shan's is a much more readable book for the general reader, which is pretty much me.

Shan's story is also just a story of an incredibly hard-working, decent guy. He has pretty much herculean stamina and forbearance, which is a nice reminder of what is possible when I am feeling put upon or grumpy.

But of course it is an autobiography, so one needs to take things with a grain of salt. It would be interesting if there were critiques out there of Shan, blogs from people who knew him that said things like: "Actually that guy is a total dick!" But I doubt it, and it is certainly nice and inspiring to read these stories. We want to believe them.

Asleep, Woke

There was a piece in the WSJ's Mansion section one recent Friday about Santa Fe as a great place to buy a house if you are "woke." I didn't read it, I never read that section, but gather it may well have been tongue in cheek about the term "woke." As well it should be.

"Woke" is a nice word for use by students who -- just venturing forth into the world -- must figure out who they are and find purchase in the big slippery world by establishing group affiliations: I am this, not that, etc. But its use by adults is not just silly, it's dangerous right about now. Right about 3 years ago we got our asses kicked by something that came at us out of the blue and was completely unexpected. Despite the fact that we had just seen it happen in the UK, and that we had seen nationalist-populism creeping forward in places like France for years. Far from being woke, we were asleep. And we still haven't actually woken up.

The problem is not that I disagree with those that like to use the word "woke" to complement themselves for their rectitude on matters of substance. Far from it. We are aligned on more issues than we are not, most likely.

But they/we still haven't figured out how to win, and we still haven't made a substantive and earnest effort on an individual basis to understand why we lost.

There was a humorous situation at our house on Saturday. I got home in the afternoon and found a Spectrum van in our driveway with its engine running. We've been planning to cut to cord and go internet only, and in the run up to that our phone was dead. I was also having trouble with the cable TV.

You don't need all the gory details, but we were pissed at Spectrum so we decided to have them send a service guy out to fix our phone and cable. So when I got there the guy made a joke about taking my parking space and I said I didn't care about that but that his engine was running. This was the day after the Climate March. He said he always left it running when it was hot. It was mid-80s and in the shade, so his van would not have gotten hot if he turned it off. But I held my tongue.

To fix our TV he grabbed the remote and turned it on. He said the TV and cable box both needed to be on. I frickin knew that, and had turned them both on. But it was mostly embarassing. But I don't really care because it's just not worth watching cable TV, or it's not worth the attention it takes to find something worth watching.

The phone -- after 45 minutes of head-scratching and trips to the van and back -- turned out to have been unplugged by the alarm company guy when he installed the cell phone alarm system we needed to have our alarm keep working once we cut the cord.

So there I was, pissed that his van was running, thinking about how Spectrum should have a policy about this, and it was all because stuff was either unplugged or I had been hitting the wrong button or just didn't care. If only Spectrum would prorate the bill for when we shut off, the issue would never have arisen.

But at a higher level, I didn't know this guy. It would have been great to have been able to have a real conversation and figure out why it was he really didn't think running his van mattered, or who had convinced him that climate change was bullshit. And the best way to have the conversation would have been really slowly, in a non-judgmental, friendly way. But I knew that if I did so, he'd just keep running his van for longer, that he was on the clock, and I really just wanted to move on with my day.

But I do hope somebody from Spectrum brand management catches this blog in their filter and they should have a policy, because at the end of the day it's costing them money. And the reason they don't care is because they have too few competitors to force them into disciplined cost control.

On skill in literature

At the end of my class on Eugene Onegin on Monday, a guy asked "If it doesn't have a particularly deep meaning and it's not particularly uplifting, why is it so acclaimed? Why should we care?" Although the entirety of my lecture had been dedicated to addressing this question in a complex fashion, I didn't have a one-line answer for him other than to say that it wasn't generally a requirement for literature to have one or the other quality, and I cited Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther and the suicide epidemic it had kicked off in the decades prior to Onegin as an instance (I had the timing of it wrong in my mind, Werther was published in 1774 though Goethe was still alive as Onegin came out).

But it does raise an overall question: why is skill and/or technical accomplishment not a sufficient attainment for literature? In painting (Vermeer), sculpture (Michelangelo), music (any number of people) skill and technical complexity in and of themselves are more or less considered adequate to get an artist into the canon, or at least it's understood why they are monumental accomplishments when they first are published.

With literature, it's different. We do want something more, almost from day 1, though verisimilitude often gets you brownie points in the early days.

The Fall

It's a lovely morning, and I was all teed up to write about the crispness of the air, how nice it is to have on sweatpants, etc, when I started watching a video of an interview on CNBC (which I try not to watch) with Jeffrey Gundlach of DoubleLine (who is indeed very smart). I didn't get very far, because the day is too short to watch this kind of thing, or, rather, I have higher impact things that I need to do.

But it did take me back to a fundamental point: there is so much discussion and thought in the markets about monetary determinism: interest rates, money supply, blah blah blah. When fundamentally the drivers of economic growth are population size and productivity. The developing world is troubled by shrinking populations. Everywhere birth rates are below 2.1, including the USA. It's worst in Japan, South Korea, Finland (I think), but everywhere rates are low. Meanwhile there are people around the developing world who want in.

We need to let more of them in, to support economic growth. Which doesn't necessarily need to mean more interstates and McMansions. And our lives are so much happier and better when we let more of them in. The food is more interesting, people get more interesting and beautiful when people from different places fall in love and have children, music gets better... It's all good.

But our political culture is going in exactly the wrong direction with the expansion of neo-nationalism. And we need to fix that.

I don't know who is having conversations with the angry white men and women of the hinterlands about what they are doing on at least a monthly if not a weekly/daily basis to expand their skillsets and become more marketable. Do they listen to books in the car, or do they listen to talk radio that just pisses them off? I suspect the latter.

Missing books

I culled my library a couple of times over the years, once when we moved from Wilton St to Linden Lane in Princeton in 2003 in anticipation of the birth of Graham (who will be 16 tomorrow) and once more in 2009 as we were paring down to come home to Chapel Hill. So that would have been right around the time of George Sr's passing. So, at watershed moments in life.

My Russian library was what suffered most, of course, as my distance from my academic field grew greater and more pronounced. I have retained a bunch of books, to be sure. Complete sets of Mayakovsky, Turgenev, and partial ones of Goncharov, Belinsky, Pisarev, Pushkin, plus the core canon in translation and a bit of reference.

But getting ready for this Pushkin talk has brought to light that I let go of some important ones. First and foremost, that brown criticism anthology edited by Victor Ehrlich that contained translations of both Shklovsky's article on Pushkin and Sterne -- which I would really have liked to have had over the last couple of weeks -- and, more importantly, Jacobson's "On the Generation the Squandered its Poets," written shortly after the Mayakovsky's suicide in 1930, a very special and rare little gem. Yes I can find these things on the internet, and yet I feel like they are part of my life and I'd like to have them around. I may yet hunt for them again. But not on the internet, that would be like cheating. In the used bookstores of America.

Hustling over here

Still a little snowed in under Pushkin, after a decent soccer game with a came by DC Whitenack and a lovely 35th reunion this weekend. Gotta run Graham up to Carrboro shortly.

Yesterday I took Graham to the Service Fair at Carrboro High School to learn about various organizations through which he could earn service hours. At first he appeared to be just rambling around aimlessly, so I tried to give him some direction about some he could check out. After standing with him at a couple of booths, he says to me: "I'm happy to learn more about these, but it's not helpful to have you breathing down my neck." So I backed the hell off, proud that he could tell me that straight up like that. The boy is learning.

Saying no, and specializing

Somewhere recently I heard it said that the difference between successful and very successful people is that the latter say no to almost everything. By that measure, I am an abject failure, but I am getting better.

But this notion aligns with so much that is wise. Today I had a long meeting with a new client, then got a haircut and took Mary to the office, before hopping on a conference call for a Board thing, wherein I pushed something forward without getting formally stuck with leading a project, though I did suggest that I could do some nudging.

Then I heard that one client got a job, while received news that another had had a baby. Both were extremely welcome.

Most business gurus suggest that to have a successful business, you should really specialize quite narrowly -- which is really just a very specific way of saying no to a lot of possibilities -- and I get that. But the problem is that by doing so close yourself off to a lot of experience. So you narrow yourself. So in the end I still come down on balancing specialization and generalization.

And now, off to meet NC's next Treasurer, and then buy soy milk for Graham, before helping with math homework, and maybe working on my Pushkin lecture for next Monday. Sigh.

Home Improvements for Dummies

There was a copy of this book sitting out on our coffee table. I had taken it off the shelf and put it there for some reason before we went to the Northeast in August, but had forgotten why it was there. Then, sometime last week, I remembered that it was because I had to fix something in Graham's toilet, the black plastic floatie mechanism, not the clapper (I have long since mastered that one).

In a moment of pride I mentioned to Mary that I had remembered why I had the book out and she looked at me and, in perfect deadpan, said: "I don't know why we even have that book in our house." We both like to had fell out laughing.

There is really nothing much better to making your spouse crack up hard. After a couple of decades it ain't always easy.

Time out

Need to focus on prepping for lecture on Onegin on the 16th. I called up NC State yesterday to find out how many were signed up. After being on an "Alternative Career Path" panel at an academic conference attended by 3 in February in New Orleans, I was prepared to be underwhelmed.
Instead I learned that there will be 22 people there. So I'd better get my game geared up.

Also, soccer game at noon and a very busy week coming up.

Therefore, most of my brain is occupied by stuff to do, not much of the relaxation that typically lets me blog interestingly. But I'm thinking of you, fair readers.

Chappelle special

Watched a bit of Dave Chappelle's most recent show on Netflix last night. He's doing stand-up in Atlanta.

The thing that impressed me first and foremost is how surprisingly much his groove dovetailed with the Trumpians and other male whiners about what is being taken away from him. How hard it is on celebrities these days, when everybody is all up in Michael Jackson and R Kelly's business just because they were having sex with children. All celebrities have targets on their heads, he tells us. And then he was complaining about how come he couldn't say "faggot" when he could say "nigger." Oh cry me a river.

Throughout history comics have played an important role in critiquing society's repressive tendencies: Lenny Bruce, Richard Pryor, SNL, etc. They burst through boundaries for us. That's great, thanks. But right now Chappelle just sounds like a little too much like some dude on Reddit whose had his Nth Amendment freedom taken away.

Still, he's pretty funny here and there. Because he's Dave Chappelle, bitch. Not as funny as the first season of his show, but that was like an all-time peak for comedy, he ain't never going back there.

A donut

After all my deeply insightful blogging and after a fine showing last time out, Adam crushed me 6-0 today. But it was a competitive 6-0. The first game probably had 8 points at deuce.

One thing I need to remember is that, sad though it may be, I really have to be careful with my swimming as we turn the corner into soccer season. I slightly strained a quad today running for a particularly deft drop shop of Z's because I was still tight from an extra-long swim on Monday. Swimming doesn't dovetail nicely with the sports involving sprinting and changing direction quickly. Which is particularly sad, because as the days get shorter and less hot, the water in the lake gets fresher, so it's a nice time of year to swim. I guess I'll have to stick to recreational as opposed to exercise swimming.

Didn't do anything terribly today, though there were three double faults, mostly I just went for winners and missed too many shots. Though there were some beauties to be sure.

Next time.

Watching the transactions

One of the great things about having shared bank accounts with our kids -- along with being able to move $ into them easily -- is being able to observe their spending. Graham doesn't spend on anything -- except the time he signed up for some "Free TV" thing on the internet and some German company was dinging him for $35 a month for a while. That was fun. BofA credited it back to our account.

But Natalie is out in the world, so I can see what she's up to. Laundry. Book store. A coffee or two a week. Now and then a Lyft or Metro North to NY. She is a good kid, which is a beautiful thing.

What more can I say?

How things are done

At our Lake Board meeting the other night, the Chair was describing how the staff currently sweep the sometimes copious goose poop off the floating docks into a bucket and carry it in a boat or canoe back into the woods to dump it there. Because meetings always run too late and this was much too small a topic to kick off a potentially contentious discussion, I didn't say anything. It has always been my practice to kick the stuff off the dam with my foot, or if necessary my hand, into the lake, and then splash off the remnant using lake water. This tends to get the dock to an appropriate Pareto or 20/80 level of cleanliness.

It is a frickin lake, after all, and animals are pooping in it 24/7.

Often there are parents over on the beach 20-30 yards away, and none of them has ever said "oh my god! My child is swimming in this lake and you are putting goose poop in there." Far from it, I believe they are actually thinking "thank God that guy is taking care of that nasty work. I just had to change a diaper (or just got through that stage a couple of years ago) and am tired of dealing with poop."

The next day, I and another member of the Board, a scientist who tests the water and deals with environmental contamination professionally (teaches at Duke, consults with Beijing, New Delhi on air quality) if it would be Ok if the staff just swept the poop into the lake. Of course it would, I said.

Today I was sitting on the porch reading The Economist, and I was very happy to see some kid float out to the docks on a boat and do exactly what I described above. Did a great job of it, in fact.

End of summer

So here we are, Labor Day weekend, about to move into the busiest part of the year, and I'm tired. It was a lovely summer, in so many ways. Lots of important milestones.

Graham had the most transformative summer. The biking trip in Italy with granny plus three weeks at Duke TIP really have opened him up to the world in a lot of ways, and it's a beautiful thing to see.

Natalie's own trip to Italy and then Spain was lovely for her, but really a more incremental step forward since we already knew she could handle herself wherever she was perfectly well. But she had fun and made friends and learned a lot, so it was all good. I think her internship with the Southern Coalition for Social Justice, in which she spent a lot of time driving around rural NC, going to county law enforcement offices and asking them for data (and understanding why they couldn't just snap their fingers and get it), probably showed her just as much of the world as going to Europe. Just seeing a lot of rural America and walking in the buildings taught her a lot about where she lives and what she has.

Mary and I, we went to Boulder for a week and stayed in Leslie and Walter's house, which was lovely. Then there was work. Then we went to Larchmont and helped pack up Mary's mom's house. Not quite enough vacation. Oh well.

I would try to chill out over the weekend, but I have to prep for my lecture on Eugene Onegin at NC State in a couple of weeks. How the heck did I let myself get talked into that?

Spousal competition

Natalie texted Mary about a couple of things yesterday evening while my phone was upstairs. It sounded like the kind of thing I might have been cc'd on, but I wasn't. Meanwhile, there have been things she has texted me about and Mary has said "why didn't I get that?"

It is odd that, of all things in the world, there should be even the slightest bit of competition between spouses for the affection of their children, but of course there is, and at some level we encourage it. By mildly criticizing one another to the child when the other is absent, or by carping at each other in front of the kids about trifles, for instance, instead of presenting an eternally unified front. But it's ultimately -- obviously -- not a good thing. What is a good thing is that our kids should feel free to reach out to each of us about whatever without a need to include the other for worry that our feelings might be hurt.

Generally speaking, my family -- which started off as a family of four and in some sense remained that through my dad's death -- has a much more robust culture of one-on-one communication than does Mary's -- a family of six. They tend to do things communally, and even regard my family's insistence that we break away for one-on-ones -- me and Leslie going to the store or for coffee over Thanksgiving, for example -- with mild suspicion and envy.

So really I should (and in general have done) encourage Mary and Natalie (and Graham) to cultivate dedicated and open communication channels to one another. The sibling bond is super-important for after we are gone.

If there is a silver lining to this jealousy, it is that the kids will remember it when they are adults (and hopefully raising our grandkids) and realize that it was all about our own insecurities and imperfections, because we had not in fact figured it all out and were always just doing our best with our limited means. Because that's also all they'll be able to do.

Saddling back up

Back in NC now after a bittersweet visit to Larchmont and the Northeast. On the one hand, life rolls forward, so we experienced a full week of lasts:

• Last stroll in Manor Park -- at least from walking out off the porch
• Last swim at Manor Beach (I realize all this "Manor" stuff sounds vaguely ridiculous, but these are the actual place names)
• Last lunch at the Village Deli after popping out from the library, where Natalie and I ceremonially enjoyed a final chicken cutlet with LTO and hot sauce together. This had become our go to sandwich
• and so on

Or at least we hope we did, because once we list this house we sho nuff hope it sells.

In the course of this, I twinged my back after carrying too many boxes up and down steps, so I ended up spending a fair amount of time sitting in the highly automated recliner that was purchased for Mary Lee during her health bouts this spring and I must confess, I liked it. But it is a little sad that, I spent the last week in this house, so majestically oriented towards the Long Island Sound, in the darkest room in the back of the house, even if the sitting was top notch. Between my back, the lack of air conditioning and the concerted effort to keep the humidity in the house down to stop the mold so heroically battled down by Rob last year from returning, and the general state of reminiscence-infused chaotic packing of the rest of the house, I spent precious little time in the sun room, including that most magical of happy places, the couch in there, upon which I have read so many excellent books while listening to the gentle metallic sounds of boat parts whose names I don't know because I didn't grow up in a boaty place clinking against one another out on the water.

But it was perhaps a function of hiding away in the back, and also in the Public Library during the day, which deprived me of the spunk needed to write.