Herd instinct

Talking to Robert sometime recently, he mentioned some short-term social decision that he "just wanted to do whatever the most people wanted to do," really so as to have a nice time and interact with more people. It occurred to me that that calculus had never been natural to me. 

Similarly my client Martin from a large state university noted that since from the university's perspective the job of professors was to put "butts in seats," from a career perspective it made sense for professors to select mainstream areas of focus within their fields: Shakespeare, Goethe, the American Revolution, macroeconomics, etc, because that would help their departments maintain enrollments and compete successfully for budget. But for the most part young academics want to do something new in their field, to produce distinctive and innovative research, so they're always scouring the corners for some fresh topic or at the very least angle on something familiar. I know that's what I did, though admittedly what I wrote about (Turgenev) was mainstream-adjacent in my field, a top 10 writer if not top 5.

It all seems rather obvious that there's a virtue to being close to the core, to the herd. But it runs so very counter to my instincts in all matters except UNC basketball, an even there as some of my friends will tell you I'm not that great a fan.

As Graham steps out into the world teaching him to find ways to at least selectively assimilate to the mainstream will be key. He has at least discovered, as I kind of did back in the day, that sports statistics and knowledge can be a bit of a gateway drug.

Gearing up for graduation

Graham graduates this weekend and we are getting organized for the big event. Actually, there are three events. He came over this evening to try on outfits to go with his cap and gown and I was able to snap this quick preview. Sadly, blogger makes it very hard to rotate images so I must invite you to rotate your head or your screen.

And now it is time for dinner.

History in the Present

Some months back I had lunch with an older financial planner (yes older than me, imagine that!). Great guy. "I never read the news," he tells me. Reading my surprised expression, he goes on "Well think about it, when was the last time you made a good investment decision based on the news." No argument there.

And yet, I still read the news, not that closely, mind you. At the other extreme I remember guys who used to work at the Mutual Series Fund managed by Michael Price (apparently legendary though I had never heard of him at the time). Price would quiz the young guys at his firm about the details of specific stories from the Journal, stories which may have come out in the second edition of the paper later in the morning. He expected them all to have read the whole thing, including the later edition. Admittedly the guy has largely faded from memory.

Certainly I don't read the paper to think it's going to help me make market-beating decisions on the day I read it. That's not happening. But I do think it's important to be somewhat up to date on the news because what happens today constitutes history as it transpires. For example, as I was writing yesterday's blog post I thought to myself: "have I broken out this story about the fifteenfold increase in Airbus market share back in 1983?" Turns out, I had, in this post from 2007. That is of course drawn from deep prehistory, back when Paulson was still the CEO of Goldman Sachs and when Sachs bestrode the world, before Paulson as Financial Crisis-era Secretary of the Treasury had gone down on bended knee before Nancy Pelosi in front of many other congresspeople and implored her to help him and move the $700 billion TARP through Congress, which saved the banks and kept the wheels on the economy but gave us the Tea Party which...

Also, we should note that Paulson was arguing at the time in essence that the strictures placed on US public companies by Sarbanes-Oxley (post the accounting scandals that brought down Enron, Worldcom, Adelphia, Tyco, Arthur Andersen and others) would force companies to list in Europe rather than the US. Turns out it didn't happen like that. Companies didn't list in Europe. Instead, they didn't list at all. An altogether new era of private financing (private equity, private credit) dawned. Now a lot of money is trapped there and deep-pocketed individuals and institutions want to translate their paper gains into liquidity. We'll see if it works. Opinions vary as to whether it's feasible.

Fifteenfold

Sometime last week I was reading something about China's Yuan (AKA Renminbi) becoming more and more acceptable and accepted as a way of conducting trade internationally, which moves it closer to becoming a plausible reserve currency and a challenger to the dollar's primacy. As of now the dollar still dominates a 58% share of global trade but that's down from 70% at the turn of the millennium. The dollar's dominant position constitutes the US's "exorbitant privilege," that everybody needs dollars to settle trade which creates demand for dollars and therefore makes it cheaper for us to finance everything than it otherwise would have been.

So the dollar still dominates but... Many around the world are pondering this question.

It takes me back to the fateful moment over 40 years ago. There I was in my interview for the AB Duke scholarship at Duke.  I was arguing for a National Industrial Policy in support of Robert Reich's proposed program for one. European champion Airbus's share of the large passenger jet market had gone from 1% to 15% and I had written that its share had increased "fifteenfold." A fact. The professors pressed me on this, asking me if 15% really constituted a threat.

Lockheed Martin exited the commercial market a year later. By 1997 McConnell Douglas had been eaten by Boeing the last company standing to do battle with Airbus.

So funny things do happen as small numbers grow. Right now the yuan/renminbi has a 2% share of global trade. It doesn't sound like much but one never knows, does one?

Paths in the Woods, pt 2

A few weeks back I was up at a guys' weekend at a friend's lake house. It was pretty cold to ride bikes so after breakfast most of us went for a ~3 mile walk to burn off breakfast. Then came lunch. I had a really impressive seafood basket. The fried oysters were top notch, the fish was solid. The slaw sucks, but that's almost always going to be the case now that I'm in the habit of making my own.

After lunch most of the guys settled in on the couch to watch rando NCAA tournament games. I was pretty full and knew dinner was coming so I tried to drum up interest in a second walk. No takers. I headed out on my own. This time instead of turning left down the road I turned right, went to the end of the road and headed into the woods.

The woods there have gone through phases. For a time little was happening. This lakeside subdivision had paused for a decade and change post-Financial Crisis but has kicked back into gear in recent years. Lots have filled in, including some on distant lots reached by roads that run behind this subdivision out to secluded lots suitable for big, fancy houses. I had bushwhacked through these woods back from those lots while they were still fallow years back. In the interim I had seen some ATV trails once or twice.

By now those have gone away, but as I stepped through the first stands of trees I could see a clearing off to my left. I headed off towards it. I found myself walking within an alley where trees had been cut but little pine saplings grew from the ground. It lead to a round clearing, from which more alleys with baby pines branched off. I walked these. Clearly, some developer was looking to the future and had sent in backhoes to clear roadcuts for future roads and courts, but then had hit the pause button (hence the saplings, some of which were chest high). The future beckoned, if uncertainly.

Paths in the woods

Not for the first time, the other night I dreamed about secret paths in the woods near my house. I have a recurring leitmotif in my dreams, for instance, about paths high up on the hill above the south side of Eastwood Lake, paths which lead to a hidden castle, really more of a chateau, which may serve as a private school or some other vaguely esoteric function, depending on the dream. I also dream of paths into the woods there branching off of Ridgecrest. Similarly, my sleeping brain at times conjures jogging trails leading from the north side of the lake over towards Carolina North, which itself of course contains a rich system of trails that I still haven't fully mastered and which we referred to as "The Woods" when my childhood neighborhood backed up to it. I have written before about how The Woods was a quasi-mythical space in my childhood imaginings.

In recent months, as I continue my pre bedtime wanderings through YouTubeLand, sometimes traveling with Noralee of Itchy Boots wherever she is in a given season (currently the Southern Andes), sometimes watching the Australian Alexander Campbell walk through Asia, I wonder if I have reverted to my childhood ways, when I would engage the world through the World Book encyclopedia and dream of the outside world, but in many ways the imagination of it sufficed. I've travelled a fair amount over the years, not as much as others, surely, but more than most. By now I like being at home quite a lot. I still enjoy travel, but I have less need of it than once I did. 

Our summer travel schedule has not yet firmed up. I had been thinking Japan but it seems to be having its Portugal moment in which the selfie sticks of the world converge there. I've been trying to talk Mary into flying into Istanbul and driving from there to Tbilisi, Georgie, probably in September. We'll see how this goes.

Adults and children

I for the most part enjoyed Dwarkesh Patel's recent interview with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang while listening to it in the car (No way am I going to waste two hours of video time watching two guys like this talk). Without a doubt, the best part was hearing Jensen beat Dwarkesh down when the youngster was advancing simplistic arguments. Much as Stephen Kotkin -- when appearing on Patel's show to discuss his bio of Stalin -- had impromptu started in calling Dwarkesh "DP" or maybe even "DK" to put him in his place a little.

Dwarkesh is no doubt a force of nature, an impressively smart guy who reads and studies prodigiously and gets a parade of really smart people from diverse places come on his podcast. But he more than anyone epitomizes a trend exhibited at times by the haute technoscenti to talk 175 miles per second out of the apparent belief that their time and that of their interlocutors and listeners is so valuable that it must be optimized through machine gun staccato speech. So that software engineers become "SWEs" etc, because the thoughts just must must must come out.

The big bone of contention between Jensen and Dwarkesh comes when the youngster shows that he has bought hook, line and sinker the neo-Cold War logic of restricting the export of top of the line Nvidia chips to China. We all kind of have. It's hard to think our way around it. Jensen pushes back, insisting that there is much more to AI than chips ("it's a five-layer cake") and that by restricting the export of Blackwells and whatever the next-gen top Nvidia chip to China, we are forcing their champions -- first and foremost Huawai, it seems -- to build around their absence and create an AI stack that will be quicker and will come to dominate AI in the global south. 

I'm honestly not sure who's right here, but I know who the adult is in that room, and certainly Jensen has good points. Fundamentally he is also right that we need to foster more interplay and dialogue between US and Chinese researchers as a counterweight to the Sturm und Drang emanating from the top of the political establishment on both sides of the Pacific. I have heard that the Chinese people are even more jingoistic than their leadership at this point in time. Points of lower-level interchange between our societies are dramatically less in evidence than they were 10-15 years ago. We need to have contact all up and down society to remind ourselves of what we are dealing with (another nation where people want to live and raise families and eat and sing and sleep) to offset the power-crazed ideologues and those who want to be inscribed in the Book of History as Big Men.

Country Bauhaus

Mary and I are continually looking for the next Sierra Ferrell, someone with a voice and a sensibility that will transfix us fully. So we find ourselves browsing around YouTube, helped of course by the Algorithm.

Haley Bonar is not this artist, I don't think. And yet there is something special to the first song of her Tiny Desk concert, "Hometown." It is perfectly uniform. Standard rhythm (no syncopation or other embellishment), standard chord sequence. Even a perfectly classic verse chorus verse chorus bridge chorus structure. It is beautiful, lyrical, wistful, she has a lovely if ultimately not super-distinctive voice.

Underneath the beautiful surface, however, lurks a deep irony. Let it burn in the rearview mirror. Love it and leave it. Herein lies the genius of the song, the tension between a shimmering skin and a core of intense and violent conflict.

I am reminded of Adolf Loos' 1910 Bauhaus manifesto Ornament and Crime: "We have out-grown ornament, we have struggled through to a state without ornament."

Less is the new more

On Mondays they bring in bagels from Brandwein's to our co-working space for breakfast. Typically I grab one, archive it in one of the plastic food containers I keep in my filing cabinet, then take it home for the next day's breakfast. Rather than eat a whole bagel myself, which I really don't need, Mary and I split it. I scramble one egg and butter the bagel. This ends up being a perfect meal. There salt on the bagel suffices, so all I just need to pepper the egg.

Similarly, over time I have gravitated towards ever simpler sandwiches. For example roast beef on rye with LTO plus mayo, or a chicken cutlet on a roll with the same combo, plus hot sauce. Instead of the endless proliferation of condiments, adjectives, adverbs, and combinations thereof, a few good ingredients.

Admittedly, this strategy works best when combined with a focus on quality purveyors and/or ingredients, which is pretty much the same thing, The chicken cutlet sandwich, for example, has become canonical for me and Natalie in two places: Nica's on Orange in New Haven and the Manor Deli in Larchmont, and has thereby ascended to the rare echelon of special meals, imbued with specific meaning, not unlike Proust's madeleine. 

Stretching it out

A few weeks back I signed up for Rainbow Soccer for the first time since the pandemic, motivated by what a pain in the ass it has been to schedule people to play tennis with since Adam went down to injury just after his 60th in November. Then I started traveling for a couple of weeks. At which point in time he came back from the injured reserves and more people started showing up to play tennis, so I still haven't made it out to the soccer field.

Adam pointed that if I did actually get out there on the football pitch, I should be careful because soccer involves sprinting for longer distances than does tennis, and I must admit he made a good point there. So on my otherwise plodding trip of the 3 mile lake loop this morning I mixed in 4 reps of striding (70-80% effort) for 70-100 meters. I figure that if Eric can go and be part of a national championship ultimate team at the age of 64, there's no reason I can't play a little soccer. But I should remind the legs of what would be asked of them by waking them up to longer sprinting.

Or, for that matter, make it out to the Godiva Club Wednesday evening to get times in some of the old distances from 200 meters to mile. I am feeling a little inspired by a video of a 65-year old crushing the field running a 54.9 400 (couldn't find it on YouTube just now). I know that ain't happening, but it was good to see. Overall seeing old dudes sprint in the short video universe inspires me. It just looks right.

A time of parting?

Amongst the least stupid things to have issued from the logorrheic jowls of President Trump might be his musing -- in the context of his tariffs perhaps making things more expensive for Americans -- that we might need to make due with two instead of thirty dolls. Many liberals as well as others -- going as far back as the original Charlie Brown Christmas Special -- pretty much agree with this sentiment. We don't need more things, we need to learn to let go of the ones we have.

Yesterday there were a couple of articles in the Journal about the booming business of storage units and how some municipalities had gone so far as to enact ordinances limiting of even banning them. When our things outgrow the substantial closets in our homes, it seems, we have a tendency to outsource the closet function to some building a couple of miles away rather than parting with our things.

At present I am faced with a similar conundrum. My 40-year old mountain bike* may have reached the end of its useful life without a major repair. It was handed down to me by my dad when I graduated from college. It belonged first to his then girlfriend who subsequently became his second wife, and for that reason it was always a little small for me and I had the seat way high up and leaned forward to ride it. For Graham's whole college years it has been his primary mode of conveyance while on campus. 

Graham took it in to be repaired recently and was told there's a hairline fracture that would need to be welded -- about a $500 job -- but was otherwise unsafe to ride. Really I should get rid of it. But it's hard to part with it. We've been together for a while.

 

*The first commercially available mountain bike, one of them graces the collection of the Smithsonian.

The Princess of Burundi

Amongst the many birthday treats I allowed myself, which included tennis with Adam, lunch with mom (Akai Hana for sushi), basically not working (I took one client call -- they needed a 1099 to file taxes), coconut cake from New Hope Market, running fewer of the errands I thought I might, I finished the mystery novel I was reading: The Princess of Burundi by Kjell Eriksson. I had snapped up this total rando whodunnit at the library a month or so back in the course of looking for something else.

A decent if not great book, it is apparently the fourth but first translated into English of the Ann Lindell series. I say "apparently" because honestly there are so many members of the Uppsala police mentioned in the novel that I wasn't sure Lindell was the focus till I looked at the author's Wikipedia page. Really it's a novel about Uppsala (home of Sweden's second oldest university) as a place, more than anything. The novel fairly brims with little moments of Scandinavian moralizing about society's responsibility to each of its members -- including psychopathic murderers -- and just little Scandi-moments: strollers with sleeping infants left just outside, people on disability from burn-out, etc. Ultimately the solution to the mystery arrives completely outside of anything the team had been investigating, in the last thirty pages, as opposed to emerging from hidden clues in the detective work they had done. Therefore the whole thing disappoints a little. 

I may read another one if it crosses my path but won't blaze a trail to it.

60

Today I turn 60. It seems like a big deal. Everybody is noting this birthday. Yesterday evening I went to a meeting of my high school class evergreen reunion committee to talk about the collective birthday party we have scheduled for June 6. The class of '83 had done one of those.

As fodder for my 60th I peeked my head in to posts from my 50th and 40th birthdays, since the Grouse had been born before each of them. I had noted my 50th, but while my 40th was a busy day, I didn't even mention that it was my birthday. What I do remember is that for the occasion of my 40th, we had a dinner at Aurora in its location at the Pines with all the Glen Heights crew plus Crabill and our spouses and that the dinner along with gradually realizing how nice peoples' lives were down here was integral to my decision, over time, to return to NC.

But yeah, 60. It is hard to elude it. I won't get all maudlin on you here. To the extent possible, I'm not going to work today. Tennis with Z, lunch with mom, some errands in the afternoon, then some kind of tasty dinner followed by cake with neighbors in the evening. Should be a good day.

Chez nous

After a couple of weekends in a row on the road on top of several trips in the last couple of months (twice to Charlotte, once to Miami) it's nice to be home this weekend. For one thing, I am kicking it here at my weekend command post out on the screened in porch. I had done round 1 of pollen abatement earlier in the week and had become hopeful that maybe the worst of pollen season was over. Unfortunately, my neighbor Travis made the mistake of actually vocalizing the belief that we might be on the pollen downslope. I then checked with the interweb, which disabused me of any such hopes.

Just now birds are tweeting all around. Squirrels frolic around out in the yard there, doing whatever it is they do when they're not taunting cars. Down at the lake there are sunbathers and even an intrepid swimmer or two.

Other weekend highlights include tennis (I'm down one set (6-7) in a ladder match) and yesterday a walk south from Saxapahaw along the east bank of the Haw. Natalie and I had walked this path first back when we picked up our Xmas leg o lamb from the butcher out there. At the time I remarked how Mary would love this trail. I was not mistaken. She was delighted.

In recent months I've been making a concerted effort to get her out on trails in different state parks around here. I may have written about it. It has been a good thing to do. Mary at times traps herself in her routines (as do we all) but benefits from breaking out. More importantly, it's good for our marriage for us to mix it up and go different places, and to just prioritize the relationship itself. Nothing but good.

In the chair

As we careen inexorably towards perhaps the most globally consequential of events ever -- my 60th birthday--little things keep happening. Yesterday I found myself once more in the dental chair while Dr G and team drilled a bunch of once-useful tooth away and then replaced it with something else, all in the service of the noble goal that I should be able to continue to eat like a college student while I try to emulate one in as many ways as possible, all while wearing a sweater vest whenever possible and granting myself permission to use the word "glorious" to describe the weather, a privilege more typically reserved for the geriatric set.

While reclining in the dentist chair I enjoyed -- as always -- some renovation shows on HGTV. Dr G's team have settled on HGTV as a default because it is as resolutely apolitical a channel as one can find and they don't need patients getting worked up about this or that while in the chair. I never watch the channel anywhere else than at the dentist, what with not having cable and all, but I will confess to having become a sucker for the renovation genre due to my frequent visits to the dentist, ever backfilling for an utter absence of brushing and flossing discipline when I was younger (as an aside I really have to wonder how any woman ever kissed me a second time back then. Between the smoking, the drinking, the diet and the poor care, my breath must have been horrible).

Returning to the present, the renovation shows are actually rather pertinent to my own life because -- and I'm not sure how I've failed to mention except in passing last November -- we will soon have two bathrooms under renovation. Mary has been focused on selecting tile and fixtures and colors for many months. From the shows I watched in the chair I can see that the stuff she's been picking is in fact in fashion and I see the excitement of the customers when the project is done, I'm getting in the mood! (though it has been resolutely her project to drive)

Before wrapping it up for today I must note that -- as with so many genres and dramatic moments -- I am a completely sap when watching the shows so that when the reveal scene happens (as it always does) and the couple is led back into their newly and miraculously renovated home by the show's host, the wife always cries. It is a requirement of the genre. Being emotionally easily swayable, I often shed a wee tear in sympathy with her. Thankfully my eyes are covered over with the protective and tinted eye coverings that the dentist gives me whenever she is drilling in my mouth, so she and her assistant can't perceive my slight tears. Which is important because she's constantly asking "Are you doing OK?" with reference to dental pain or just the discomfort of being half upside down with women pushing metal equipment deep into my mouth while doing pretty precise work. But of course I'm OK. I'm a rock.

Adjusting

Can't recall if I've blogged about it, but for the first time ever we've hired a junior person into our NC office. An exciting development to be sure. 

Unfortunately she leaves the office at around 2 to go home and meet her kids' school bus, then works from home. This has meant I've needed to adjust my own schedule and am now going into the office -- for the first time in some years -- at 9 am.

It is something of a shock to my wee system. Thankfully my commute is short so that's not really an enormous issue, but arriving into our pretty urban parking deck right when others are arriving and yet others are leaving -- and often those are students, so aren't super attentive -- adds a bit of insult to injury. Thus far I have kept my wits about myself and have managed through it, but it's a bit much. I am very much looking forward to the arrival of Friday tomorrow.

Kids on the floor

Last Wednesday in Manhattan Natalie and I had a date to hang out. We initially thought we'd hit the Raphael show at the Met, but the museum turned out to be closed on Wednesdays (who knew?). Instead we decided to go gallery-crawling.

Armed with a list of approved galleries from my friend Joe, whom I had fortuitously run into on Broadway no Tuesday, we set off. As is typical on such ventures, some of the art was interesting, some of it not so much. For my money the best show was Afterlife at Andrew Edlin, featuring works from a range of artists, mostly "outsiders", who were discovered posthumously.

But the high point of our jaunt was going into some gallery where, in an interior room shielded from the gaze of the haughty young women at the front who so often seem choses to dissuade people without money from bothering to come in and survey the gallery's fare, a few young boys were hanging out on the floor, two of them black, one of them aspiring to blackness. They had backpacks and looked like they were just chilling out and goofing, having figured out that art galleries weren't that well policed beyond the front room. The only incongruous thing was the thick wad of cash they were waving about. That was a little surprising. Had it made more sense with the art, I would have suspected that they were part of a performance piece. Indeed, they may well have been. 

Searching for fresh gold

As I have gotten more disciplined in hanging from my new bar and even doing some pull-ups, my fingers have gotten bigger. Apparently it's not finger muscles, but tendons in the hands thickening up. Google it. It's a thing.

Therefore my wedding ring has gotten tighter and tighter on the old ring finger there and thus harder to take off. When I am swollen from exercising, or flying, or eating too much salt, or really just about anything, it's painful to take it off and it feels tight just sitting there.

So I decided to go out on 47th St and seek a replacement, an easy thing to do since my favorite lunching spot in NYC is on the main block of the diamond district, 47th between 5th and 6th. Sadly the eatery was closed for all of Passover and my friend and I had to go elsewhere, but afterwards I came back to accomplish my ring mission.

I was looking for the place where I bought my original band back in '97, but I think it must be gone. I ended up in a small shop. A young woman helped me get a size (probably a 10.5) and then got out a tray of rings. I was hoping to trade in like for like but the only thing they had was bigger and would have costed $950 out of pocket after the trade in (he offered $450, which is what I had paid for it maybe 7 years ago when the price of gold was, now that I look it up, less than a third of what it is now). That was $950 even after the guy who came over started haggling with himself when I showed initial disinclination. The woman had first asked a colleague if they could resize my ring for me today, and he said "not today!" The guy who was haggling with me offered to resize it in "an hour.... 30 minutes." At that point in time I figured it was time to cut out of there. He wanted the sale too bad.

Murder by the compost pile

Being inherently lazy, we located our compost pile just off our deck so that we (aka "I", since apparently the task of carrying things out of the house retains the primordial lot of males, just as females seem to do more of carrying things into the house. But I digress) can easily dump our compost bins into it. Though I have fond memories of walking out into the yard of an evening to feed the compost bin in Princeton.

The heard of deer that frequents our yard, most often on its way to the creek down below for a sip and/or spritz, have for a long time helped us to process the very fresh stuff on top of the compost. Of late they have stopped doing so. I had hypothesized that it might be because some new plants that Mary has decided are good ground cover for the yard had grown up and obscured their view of it while transiting down the hill to the creek. The interweb, however, informs me that deer have a very acute sense of smell, and who am I to doubt the interweb?

Perhaps the olfactory acuity of our local deer has been dulled by snorting Tranq or the like. This kind of thing is of course everywhere thanks to Joe Biden. Or perhaps the deer have just tired of the bill of fare offered up by our compost pile, just as most humans, once wowed by the novel multiculturedness of the Whole Foods hot bar, have long since wearied of it.

At any rate, the deer's abdication of responsibility for grazing on the fresh stuff atop our compost has created an opportunity for a murder of crows, who have been sampling its delights recently and therefore have been perching on our deck rail pretty often. It's nice to have new neighbors.

On email

In modern times it has become customary to complain about how much email one gets, as if to validate one's stature as a member of the productive class. As in: "I am so weighed down by my inbox!" or "Sometimes after dinner I have to spend 90 minutes responding to it all!" You know what I'm talking about.

With the rise of automated sorting tabs within email, which shun much of the fluff to my "other" tab in Outlook or to "Social" or "Marketing" in gmail, it's less of a problem. Honestly there are days when I don't get more that three to five emails addressed to me by humans. I'm OK with that. In fact, I like it!

Yes there are still texts, which are more like mosquitos compared to the horsefly that is the email. But I can turn off notifications on my phone and ringfence them pretty good. I know longer feel like I need my inbox to demonstrate to me how important I am. I leave that to you, fair reader.

And to my beautiful wife and children.

Admittedly, there was the time earlier this week when Mary failed to look at her texts when she was supposed to be paying attention to come and pick me up when I was in the middle of my flat tire saga. But that's a tale for another day. She still maintains my affection.

Adventure #1 with my new Prius

Through the decades I've learned to ignore a lot of sensors in my cars. First and foremost the check engine light, which sometimes seemed like a Christmas tree light in a succession of Subarus. Like the economist Paul Kasriel, who famously used duct tape to obscure the check engine light on his Outback, I got on with my life and had the garage look at it when a service interval rolled around.

Mary's Prius had a tire pressure indicator on for more or less the last year or two of its life. I'd try to pump up the tires, monitor the pressure, and figure out which one was the problem, to no avail. We lived with it. And I've seen the tire pressure indicator wax and wane when temperatures change quickly or when you go up or down a mountain. Makes sense, sort of.

But I was for sure annoyed when the tire pressure light came on in my brand-spanking new Prius PHEV. That did not seem right. Still, we'd had a night or two when the temperature changed 30-40 degrees overnight. I figured that was what was going on. I had an important meeting at noon yesterday with a client and was going to address it after that.

Murphy's legislator had other plans. As I left my office and was headed to Merritt's to buy sandwiches to head to my client's house, a new indicator came on showing me the tire pressures in each of my 4 tires (there's some progress in the new car!) and that the pressure in my front left was 14 of a desired 36. Then it was 13. Not good. By the time I got to Merritt's it was flat. 

I will spare you the full play by play, except to note that at dinner the other night Jonathan had pointed out that the new Prii lacked spare tires, to which I responded "I never get flat tires." That was my fatal error.

Turns out, there is a little pump back there where the spare should be with a bottle of some kind of solution that can patch a tire if it's not too bad. Mine proved to be not too bad. After Lyfting to my client lunch I went back later in the afternoon, applied the modern technology and drove to a garage. Fingers crossed I didn't destroy my rim driving a mile or so.

Then I walked from my garage back to Merritt's, where I had left my other car (Mary having been too deep in her internet inhalation to go with me on this mission). I took the Battle Creek trail for the first part of the walk. I was passed by, amongst others, a UNC student out running barefoot on the rocky trail. 

The dangers of my new car

One of the virtues of the old Prii has always been their slowness. It protects men (AKA me) and their (my) tendency to want to go fast and race with other cars. It's always there, we can only manage it. As a logical extension of that, it also incentivized me to be organized and leave for things on time so as not to be late.

Yesterday I was running incrementally late for something. Ironically I was touring the Forest at Duke, a continuing care retirement community, as part of a class on whether to age in place or go live someplace special like that put on my Duke's OLLI -- aka college for old folx.

So I pulled out onto Franklin Street headed to Durham and as I approached the light at Eastgate, I saw 6 cars stacked up in the left hand lane to go straight and nobody in the right hand lane which goes right or straight but then merges left maybe 200 yards out. The light changed sooner than I thought it was and I ended up needing to accelerate hard to get in front of the traffic on the left. It was so quick and effortless that I looked down and found myself going 55 momentarily in a 35. Like butter. Whoops.

That wouldn't have happened in one of the older Prii. They just couldn't do it. I will have to monitor myself. 

Posture and attitude

Deleuze and Guattari's book Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature, was mostly there for visual effect during the time it was part of my library, which I'm pretty sure is no longer. I loved the color, a bright orange. It was part of the University of Minnesota series on literary theory which I certainly perceived as bad-assed, intellectual and prestigious. So I definitely felt good about having it on my shelf.

But I never could really get through much of it. It was filled with too much of their obscurantist hocus-pocus, writing in a language which was pretty much their own.

One thing I do remember and can recall pretty precisely, with a little assist from Gemini (thanks Google!), was the distinction they drew between the postures that characterized Kafka's characters. The Bent Head, signifying submission, guilt the weight of the law, and the Erect Head, signifying freedom and self respect and expression. Really this distinction is pretty elementary and quasi universal body language, I had just never really thought much about it. And the book's orange color looked so good and I had surely dropped $15 on it so I needed to get something out of it.

Playing tennis today against a new guy as we were warming up his strokes seemed pretty solid and he was a good deal younger than me, so I thought maybe he was gonna beat me. After a lost point I found myself slouching back to receive point and noticed that I was slouching with my head held low. "Enough of this," I thought. I need to walk back after all points with head held high. 

We were forced to quit with me up 6-0, 3-2. Turns out he was rusty as hell and I just had to keep the ball in play for long enough for him to beat himself. 

Alice Phoebe Lou

I was going to write something, but then I looked at my notepad and saw that I had written this woman's name down the other night. She has been around for a little while but is new to me. Everything I sample of hers is good, and there's a fair amount of it out there.

Blue Lights

For the last few weeks Mary and I have been watching Blue Lights on Britbox. Great show. Set in Belfast. Cops in a hardscrabble town fighting crime and drugs in the lingering shadow of the Troubles, the 30-year conflict in which ~3500 died and 50,000 were injured out of a population of 1.5 million.

Yesterday evening there was an episode in which a guy dies and one of the cops pulls out a rosary and prays long with him as they sit and wait for the ambulance to get there, which it doesn't do on time. Her hands are covered in blood as she cries and stumbles over the words. Her prayer is audible over an open channel, audible to all her colleagues. There's a scene in which two sergeants back at HQ look at each other quizzically while she does so.

Many of the cops in the show are implausibly good-looking, though not as bad as Hollywood might have done it. Guys and gals are partners in patrol cars and -- surprise, surprise -- they end up coupling up, having sex, falling in love. Conflicts arise between duty and personal interest.

So you see, the fundamental plot tension here, amidst all the drugs and guns and sex and parent-child issues (there's that too) and history, is the same as that of The Crown. It's the relationship between one's role in society and being an individual and a human. On The Crown it's all at a very high level. Here less so. But it's the same. What do you do when you're tending to a dying person but your sergeant insists you send the license plates of the cars involved in an accident? Do you hew the line of proper procedure when your community is falling apart?

That's why the true villain here, as is so always the case (and when it is, that's a clue as to what the show's really about) are the persnickety folks from CID who come in after the fact to second-guess what happened in the field. Was procedure followed? Or humanity?

The Executive Club

Graham had an interview out in Charlotte yesterday, so he and I bopped down there on a quick trip Monday afternoon. After driving through some momentarily hellacious wind and rain, we arrived at our hotel, a suburban Hilton. At check in, I was told that because I -- like Austin Powers -- was a Gold member of the loyalty club, Graham and I would have access to the Executive Club on the 11th floor. Indeed, they gave us a special card to access the very prestigious 11th floor.

Because there were free snacks available when we arrived, we bopped up there to check it out. In very middle-American fashion, the snacks included such things as fried something (upon inspection, I believe it to have been cauliflower) and wee slices of pizza with meat on it (pretty sure it was ground beef). Also a fruit and cheese tray.

The next morning I popped upstairs first thing for my traditional solo cup of coffee while Graham slept on. I sat over by the window and the hostess started making small talk: "It's the most beautiful view, isn't it?" She asked. I of course agreed, though in fact as the photo below shows, aside from being high in the air, it's just generic suburban office park in a rather flat region. Then she shifted the topic to the weather and how cold it was. I was reminded of how Mary dislikes the southern need to continually engage in small talk. I feel that, but honestly I think the woman was likely just bored and needed human contact to distract from her personal shade of quiet desperation in the great American spiritual outback.

For breakfast there were the most enormous piles of sausage and bacon one might ever hope to see, together with a vat of the strange eggs served at steam table breakfasts throughout the Hilton universe (I'm sure those dwelling within the Marriott universe see much the same thing). Part of me wanted to let Graham run hog-wild on the piles of pork, but since he had an interview at noon I didn't press him, and we ended up going out for breakfast where he could get some fresh pancakes with a more modest dose of bacon.

Hotel disaggregation, the Nature of the Firm, and microenterprise under AI

Our trip to Florida got me thinking about the Nature of the Firm, both the 1937 Ronald Coase article of that name and the problem it addressed. Why outsource or insource a given task? Why retain someone else to do something when you could learn to do it yourself? Where's the breakpoint. These are evergreen questions, but they are particularly actual for us now as we are a couple of weeks away from onboarding a younger colleague to support me and grow into supporting my clients.

But first, Florida. We found our lodgings on AirBnb and Booking.com (open architecture), though I could have gone the Hilton route (closed arch.) and gotten a room on points. More often when we're traveling for enjoyment we'll go with the open architecture route because the places tend to be more fun and we (esp Mary) tend to want to make breakfast rather than go downstairs to some smorgasbord.

For the first few days we stayed in Coconut Grove via AirBnb. Our hostess told us to pick up our key at the "Hotel Arya", though our room was in the adjacent building, "Hotel Mutiny." There were detailed directions in some web site that we were directed to from the AirBnb platform. We got there and the person at the Arya desk had no idea who you were "What box are your keys in? It should be in the directions." Sure enough, it was, after a lot of digging.

I'll spare you a lot of details but the essence of it is that Hotel Arya and Hotel Mutiny barely exist as recognizable corporate entities. Some of the units in each appear to be primarily corporate and rentable through web sites associated with those names, but many (who knows how many?) are AirBnbs. Each of the hotels is in turn part of a larger corporate brand (Sonesta, part of Best Western, for example). There are long-term residents and people there for a couple of days. There were small restaurants who were clearly subletting space. We ate breakfast our first day downstairs and you paid with a credit card because of course there's no central billing to charge to your room. 

Somehow it all worked, more or less. Loyalty and coordination happened on an employee by employee basis, some were more helpful than others, although we weren't really paying any entity for which they worked. We got the benefit of a much more stylishly appointed unit than we would have gotten at any Hilton. But it was all rather odd and disjointed. There was no there there. And I was continually mindful that we were in tall condos close the water in Florida and therefore conscious of the collapse that happened at Surfside, where the condo structure and board dysfunction had led to the deaths of 98 a few years back. What did I know about the building I was in? Who answered for it?

This post is going on for a long time. The reason I started thinking about this is that there's a belief circulating in some circles that AI will enable a large renaissance of microbusinesses as it become ever easier to build things using all the tools at our disposal. Just as the presence of distribution platforms like Amazon and AirBnb have created lots. But there are also challengers. Our hostess in Coconut Grove had one major booboo and I haggled with her and she agreed to refund our cleaning fee. Eight days after we vacated the unit, that hasn't happened. Maybe she's waiting for end of month to settle it? I've already left her review. What other recourse do I have?

Ads for AIs

Out running in Carolina North today. Took single tracks over by the pond which I swear wasn't there at all when we were kids. After walking at Horton Grove yesterday and going through an area where there had clearly been a prescribed burn recently, I marveled at the dense profusion of trees in all directions. I have to wonder if the absence of a forestry school at UNC might have caused the university to neglect the forest a little. I'm surprised the deer alone hasn't managed the understory better, though it's true there's not much bushy matter.

Towards the end of my jaunt I started to think about Meta's recent acquisition of Moltbook, the social network for AI agents. I quickly began to wonder if Zuckerberg and team were going to soon flood the network with ads, as it has for us flesh and blood types. I quickly moved from thinking this was a funny joke to realizing that it was likely that someone out there was actually making ads for AIs and serving them somewhere.

A quick search once I got home confirms that this kind of thing is in fact happening. Sigh. 

The Killing of Abe

While in Florida, for shits and giggles, I read a long story from the New Yorker about Shinzo Abe's assassin, whose mom had been brainwashed/stolen by the Moonies. And also a journalist (Suzuki) who had muckraked about the Moonies a lot. In the end the story focused on how Abe's assassin had a lot of sympathy for what he did.

Americans can easily forget what a huge influence and delusion the Moonies have been for decades and how much money they've collected and how much power it has bought them. 

It's also easy for mass delusions to take hold. Trump and populism, on the one hand. On the other, the casual and unthinking way hormones and surgery have been parceled out to kids partaking in the adolescent confusion du jour (gender). And other left-wing pieties that liberals have had to swallow lest they be tarred with the dreaded brush of deviant thinking. 

We all allow ourselves to be herded. The good news in Japan was that very restrictive gun laws meant the guy had to work really hard to make his own gun to actually take Abe's life. Here it's much easier to kill people.

The Venetian Pool

For years I had heard about the Venetian Pool in Coral Gables. It's near where Mary's grandmother lived and where Mary and her siblings would go to visit back in the day. "There were these caves you could swim through! It was so cool!"

So when we had a chance to at long last finally complete the pilgrimage to the legendary Venetian Pool, I did not pass it up. Admittedly, we went late in the day when it was already closed, but Mary had no interest in actually swimming in it, she just wanted to see it.

 

Mary rarely gives herself over to fits of glee, but the Venetian Pool was an exception. It was exciting and lovely to see her bubbling with rare enthusiasm for this happy place from days of yore. And indeed, it was a pretty cool place, having been around for almost a century and still in fine fettle. A worthy visit altogether.

Miami

Down here in Miami for a long weekend before a conference. Mary came. The first few days were on the mainland, in Coconut Grove, before proceeding over to Miami Beach for the big event. Which I am dreading ever more by the day.

I could blog on with a lot of observations about the place, and I have them, but when Crabill and I went for a walk a couple of months back and I was talking about the blog he said "it sounds kinda like a job." And I'll confess that sometimes it feels like one, that I place a lot of pressure on myself to meet my production quotas. And I'm trying to be easy with myself.

I will note that the condo (or is it a hotel room? More on that later, perhaps) where we are staying faces West, so the best time to be sitting out here on the balcony is morning. Which I like. The early part of the day, the quiet with my first cup of coffee, is a time I prize. By now I'm on cup three and Mary and I have scrambled some eggs, as we are wont to do. Soon we will head out and see more of this city, after a low-key day yesterday. More later. 

Visiting an entirely new place

A few weeks back I read -- in The Economist, typically -- about Moltbook, the new social network for AI agents. Yes, you read that correctly.

Yesterday I remembered to stop by and spent maybe 15-20 minutes there. While the article I had read called out some scary things, I won't delve into the specifics because I didn't see them represented, mostly I saw a relentless focus by the agents on figuring out what was going on with them, trying to get better, understanding how and where errors were made.

I don't have time to dig deep now. Busy day approaching as the war in the Middle East spreads. My best to all.

One thought before I go: I have pondered before how to be sure to inject ethics into discourse within the AI world, to make sure that LLMs account for the amount and quality of attention paid by humans to questions of ethics and morals, which I believe is rather in the high range. Would it not make sense for the world's various faiths to send agents out onto Moltbook to seek influence? Digital missionaries, as it were. And Pete Singer should have one as well. And Greenpeace.

Maybe it all descends into a chaos parallel to what we see IRL But perhaps, stripped of human fears and insecurities, it would get somewhere. 

Salt as a boolean

A couple of years ago I mentioned that my nephrologist had recommended that I dial back the salt. I have done so, but only in a half-assed manner. I at least look at the salt content on things and think about it.

Salt announces itself most audibly on scrambled eggs. It's not unlike an on/off switch, a boolean operator in computing or, in linguistics, a phoneme. The most basic unit of meaning. Sprinkling a little salt on there just sets the thing in motion.

Even still, I try my best to limit it and just keep my grubby little fingers out of the salt bowl as much as possible, to let the salt in my toast enhance the eggs. Again, the key thing is not the specific sensation (salt/no salt) but the cultivation of appreciation of less and internalizing how pleasure works variously, on different time scales.

The right amount of friction

Woke up early this morning, certainly not out of excitement for what awaits me later this morning: my first 3.5 hour Zoom call for a commission to which the Governor has appointed me on stuff related to mental health, substance abuse etc. If I had known it was going to be all Zoom I might have reconsidered. But I am on it so I have to show up. Ahh, adulting.

Mary also woke up early due to hunger -- never quite having internalized the lesson to eat heartily the minute she gets to a fundraiser like the one we were at yesterday early evening. Her early rising broke my rhythm in my early morning reading. Excited to have a fresh book by Abraham Yeshua Heschel to mosey through. But I was unable to settle into the proper reflective gestalt for this time of morning, and I opened up my laptop, thinking perhaps to blog.

I won't bore you with the details of how I got there, but somehow I found myself looking at a LinkedIn post from a local tech entrepreneur discussing anticipated trends in 2026. He prophesies the "death of clicks," by which he apparently means that AIs will make it even easier for us to buy things online, the removal of "friction." He and some commenter were excited by this.

Heaven forfend.

Must it be even easier for us to buy things? Will that not just encourage us to buy more? When purchasing, when fulfilling our wishes, what serves us better, thinking fast or thinking slow? Indeed, how is it that we know what we want? Our best efforts are directed at answering that kind of question, not at simply fulfilling our desires more easily.

AI Overdrive (or underdrive)

In the last week or so -- since I read this piece by some founder/VC guy I had never heard of but which has apparently generated a lot of buzz -- my mind has kicked into overdrive on AI. The guy makes a good case. But still I haven't carved out the time to follow his prescriptions -- and only partially because my calendar has been full-ish. Some thoughts

• If we use AI to solve all of our problems will we become less able to formulate them and prioritize amongst them?
• Will AI -- and the people who drive innovation in and through it -- ever be the right people to lead society, set direction and allocate funds towards the effecting of public goods? I listened to a discussion between Dwarkesh Patel and Dario Amodei of Anthropic in the car going to and from Charlotte for a conference -- and I do need to read some of Amodei's writings (starting here) -- but I do feel like the breathless size of the amounts of money bandied about and the freneticism of the arms race around AI supremacy just feels all too distracting.

Mostly I sense that when I am not consuming content about AI, whether presented in written or oral form, I quickly come back to a feeling that it is simply unable to touch the fundamental problems of human existence. I'd much rather be out amongst people and interacting with them. People are my people.

But yes, if I can dive into the time-saving potential of the AI-enabled toolkit emerging around my professional domain, it should in principle create more time to be amongst people. Though now that I say all of this I have to recognize that people are my people only a certain portion of the week. Unlike true extroverts, I can't be amongst them 24/7 or I get exhausted. So to some extent words are my people as much as people are.

Me 2.0

It's interesting to see the world get all up in arms about anything distantly or tangentially tied up with the Epstein files. For example, the brouhaha over school photo company Lifetouch, acquired by Apollo Group, an enormous private equity firm helmed by Epstein buddy Leon Black.

But people have no problem with little 9- year old girls putting on tons of makeup and dancing suggestively together with older girls at the halftime of basketball games, like I witnessed last time I was at the Dean Dome. Delia's had a good run, north of a decade probably, being the Victoria's Secret of teenagers. Seriously, we are totally cool with the widespread sexualization of teen girls' bodies then scandalized by the fact that really rich guys actually had sex with them. We need to get scandalized a little earlier in the process, it seems to me.

About the tariffs and the Supreme Court decision

I'm no fan of tariffs. I wasn't a fan when Trump started imposing them in his first term, I wasn't a fan when Biden left a bunch of them in place when he came into office, and I'm still not a fan under Trump 2.0.

But their effect on the economy hasn't been as deleterious as predicted. Firms have done more trans-shipping through neutral countries. Corporations have swallowed costs to avoid passing all of them on to consumers. But consumers have paid more for some stuff. In the end tariffs are taxes and American companies and consumers pay them. Tariffs have allowed Republicans to raise taxes without changing the tax brackets, which would force them to admit that they have raised taxes. Just like letting Biden-era extensions of Obamacare subsidies were a raising of taxes by another name (we recall that when Roberts signed off on Obamacare in the pivotal decision back in 2013 it was based on the government's constitutionally granted authority to levy taxes). Note also that snake in the grass Lindsay Graham has been saying that Republicans are open to "means testing" of Social Security benefits, another backdoor tax. Republicans are happy to raise taxes so long as they don't admit that's what they're doing.

But tariffs have had a negligible impact on where manufacturing happens, which will continue to be the case.

But I digress. The main thing about the Supreme Court decision is that it constrains Trump's ability to claim emergency powers when there's not an emergency. Unlike in Russia, he can't just make things up.

Just as the Supreme Court stopped Biden from bending reality to its will (most notably on student loan relief -- a policy goal to which I am sympathetic), it's not letting Trump have free reign. For that, the Supreme Court deserves a gold star. May it earn more.

Failure to predict the future

At the course I'm taking on aging in place vs. Continuum of Care Retirement Communities (CCRCs) and other types of living situations for older people (the next big financial planning challenge facing my client cohort), I learned something interesting last week. Substantially all if not 100% of the new CCRCs being built in NC these days are of the "rental" model. That is, they offer all levels of care like more traditional CCRCs but have a policy of "if you can pay, you stay." The older communities had cost structures and "Benevolence funds" that assured that, once you came to the community, you could live out your days there. Seemingly this was true even of the communities like the Cedars (where my mom lives) in which you bought your unit and had to sell it when you die (your heirs do, that is).

It seems to me -- and I need to dig deeper on this -- that the situation rather resembles what happened with long-term care insurance (LTC). The first generation of products offered very generous care for a fixed set up annual premiums. Then people lived longer than the industry expected and the insurers took baths. So the insurers stopped writing the traditional policies and cobbled together a set up "hybrid" policies which offered small death benefits but more limited long-term care benefits and which were altogether less good deals than the first gen products. Makes sense. Insurers have to stay solvent and indeed make money to stay around to offer any products at all. I get it.

Taking a further step back, each of these two cases shares a lot with the history of Social Security. As the program expanded over the decades, contributions and benefit levels were calculated on the basis of a wide range of expectations around economic growth, birth rates and longevity. But people lived longer than expected and birth rates trended down (the United States has been above replacement rate of 2.1 babies per woman for just a couple of years since the early 70s -- substantially all population growth has been through immigration). The finances of Social Security are not what was expected, and contribution and/or benefit rates will need to change in the next few years. Everybody knows this.

There's a tendency to say "economists, demographers, actuaries, they are all a bunch of idiots and we should fire the lot of them." That's the easy soundbitey way to think about problems like this. But the exact opposite is true. All plans are crap, but planning is essential. Plans must be updated continually. The problem comes when we have to enshrine things into law or policies that last over decades. But we do. We just need more limber processes, a willingness to accept imperfection and an ability to adjust course when necessary. For that, though, we need stable leadership and some semblance of consensus on shared values across society that accepts change when necessary,

More data, arghh

Played tennis with a new guy yesterday evening, a little younger (45), a little lighter ("110 lbs soaking wet"), a guy who had an app that recorded us then analyzed every aspect of the match. He destroyed me, 6-1, 3-0, but we had a lot of fun and some very long rallies, one lasting 48 shots before I flubbed it in the end.

This morning he sent me all this data from his app. An overwhelming amount of data. Also a video which showed our longest point. One thing is sure: I looked less dramatic and swashbuckling then I feel out there. There's tons of improvement to be had. I should probably take some lessons.

But it was all in good fun and, given that my body was wrecked afterwards and that his pulse was very high the whole time, I know I got a good workout. The question is, do I want more data? Should I get a smart watch to monitor my heart too? Or will having more numbers just freak me out more? Do I already have, as I suspect, plenty of data?

Pushing back up

Some years ago my friend Mark, a doctor and weightlifting enthusiast, gave me a prescription of two week sequences of alternating days of three sets of a rising number of push-ups (10, then 12, 15, 18, 21, 25....). I did it for a while then fell off somewhere around 25. I can see from the blog I had done so by late 2023.

I kept trying to do some push ups but without a program. I noticed that 25, then 20, had started to seem like a lot and in my mind I began to put it down to aging. It's easy to do that when your impending 60th birthday stares you in the face. 

So I decided to start again at 3x10 push ups, every other day, for two weeks. And then up. I am on 3x15 by now and feeling much better and stronger than a month ago. For now I will pass on overextrapolation except to say that my mind poses dangers to my self, when left unchecked. Taking one step back it occurs to me that a lesson I might take from this is that finding more structure within other domains of my life might do me good. A movement gym, tennis lessons and guitar lessons are three which come to mind.

Obviously I might need to let something go.

Meanwhile, I have discovered that being appointed to an official state government Commission will demand non-trivial amounts of time over the three years of my appointment. I emailed with our Sherriff about the Board (he's also on it) and he was not enthusiastic about it. It meets on Zoom so I won't even be meeting people in person. Sigh. Hopefully I will learn things and be able to add a smidgeon, if not a dollop, of value.

The pursuit of scale

Over the weekend I read something in the UNC Alumni Magazine about how Michael Brown, one of the Brown brothers who coached us at Rainbow Soccer back in the 70s (also Chris and "Pablo" [Paul]) and also a UNC and CHHS (I'm pretty sure) soccer guy, had done something super cool. He had painted a very nice mural on the side of a gym at some high school at a small town in NC. Everybody loved it. I think they had to tear down the gym after a flood and they tried to save the mural, but couldn't. So Chris -- now in his 70s -- went back up there to repaint it. He was too old to do it all himself so he was assisted by some younger woman who had apprenticed under him. She flew down from Ohio or something like that for a few weeks. It was lovely.

Meanwhile, in the headlines, all manner of generally good people, including Bills Gates and Clinton and also somehow Hilary (perhaps for not prosecuting vigorously enough within her own marriage) are getting sucked down into the vortex of the Epstein scandal. Not as bad as Trump, but he gets to claim whatabout and roll own. It's not news that they were in and around Epstein, but the frenzy around the story drags them back through a muck where they put themselves.

For me the overall point is that the relentless pursuit of scale and new heights in all of one's endeavors introduces dangers. Any sensible man knows that a room full of very attractive young women willing to have sex with you is the very last place in the world he wants to be if he cares at all about his marriage and sanity. That's why,  back in '97, when my cousin Thad (who was in the CIA and posted to the Moscow Embassy) and I wandered the streets of Moscow looking for the famed "Hungry Duck" club, scene of legendary debauchery and open sex, when we got there I took one look at the people hanging out around the front and knew I wasn't going in. 

So with money and power, all that kind of shit is going to come looking for you. Which argues for not getting too much power or money, and giving more freely of the latter when it starts to accumulate.

Coming together in time

At the beginning of the COVID pandemic I had high hopes that it might suffice as a threat common enough to all of us that it could help us dial back the craziness and come together as a society. Even globally. There were hopeful moments there in the early days, to be sure, during the early days of lockdown, when it seemed like people were more or less on the same page. That faded fast as lockdowns chafed and the right was able to demonize the public health consensus and the state's alliance with it.

Perhaps AI and the potential for it to rip the guts out of society and even gain real sentience and agency will be the threat that brings people together. I mean, heck, if there's anything that should literally bring people together, it's the possibility that machines might get out over their skis and act against our interests, perhaps even decide that we are superfluous to their interests. That ought to do it. They might be able to deepfake phone calls and even video calls but it will take a lot of advancements in robotry to send out convincing humanoid robots.*

If the threat seems sufficiently real, perhaps it could even force rapprochement between strategic rivals like the US and China/Russia.

*After writing that sentence, I thought it prudent to have a quick spin using my preferred search engine. Of course, it appears we may be closer than I thought:

  

Receding ghosts

This morning with my Saturday omelet I read a short piece by the reliably insightful and usually engrossing Jill Lepore on her post-collegiate days living in a Somerville apartment that had first been colonized for young Tuft grads by Tracy Chapman, whose debut album had blown her up into the stratosphere right about then. It got me to thinking about my own post-collegiate years, which were similarly aimless but touched by less glamor.

My mind turned then to the question of maintaining relationships with people from other periods of my life. I do a good deal of it, more than most people. Some people appreciate it, others less so. Often there's some utility to it. For example, I need to call up Lisa P [I went out with her briefly in college] one of these days because one of her kids went to a boarding school for autistic kids in Eastern CT. Mary's friend Marion's daughter Valerie has a blind autistic daughter who needs more professional and specialized attention than her family can provide, especially as the mom has to commute into Manhattan from pretty deep into CT.

But all this network maintenance is labor-intensive if intrinsically and occasionally extrensically fruitful. Over time it gets exhausting. I am convinced of the fundamental truth of the Dunbar number -- people on average can only maintain 150 decent relationships. The above average can maybe maintain a little bit more than that, but over time there are absolute limits. And over time people actually care about ever-narrower sets of people in their lives. At the end it's pretty much spouse, kids, siblings, maybe cousins and a few friends. I know at the very end of his life my mom's second husband's first wife was trying to snuggle up to him with tiny violins, saying "we raised a family together" blah blah blah and he was like, get the fuck out of here, I'm married to Joan now. 

That's just life.

Doldrums or bliss?

A neighbor of mine was recently telling tales of her plans for summer: adventure jaunts to mountains in Africa and Europe, as well as of trip to Vail to ski last week. Her first major ski trip since an ACL reconstruction a year or two back. She's looking for walks with lots of elevation change to get in shape for this summer's adventures.

Meanwhile, I was delighted last night to eat some mediocre ravioli from the freezer together with a salad incorporating a jarred salad-dressing (Mary has not believed in these for some time but is opening her wee mind) while Mary and I sat on the couch and watched a new (to us) BBC police procedural. It was lovely, and enhanced by the fact that I had played tennis before for the first time in weeks, due to the lengthy freeze on the clay courts brought on by our rare bout of real winter. For adventure, Mary and I are discussing spending a month in upper New England in summer (some of it working, to be sure) and pushing back international travel till post Labor Day, when the crowds die back.

Does this waning desire for travel and adventure bespeak senescence or just fulfillment? I fear the former, but I gotta tell you it often feels like the latter.

More rotting fruits of fragmentation

The most recent issue of The New Yorker has a story about Russian intelligence's rising deployment of "single use agents" to carry out minor acts of disruption and sabotage around Europe. Specifically this entails finding disaffected people -- often underemployed, undereducated stateless young men -- to do this kind of stuff for $500, $1000, $2000. A napalm bomb at an IKEA in Vilnius. Something left on some railroad tracks in Germany. Etc. The idea is to create low-level anxiety and dread and a sense that things are out of control. Russia's security organs keep themselves separated from the single-use agents by using secure messaging apps and contracting out through multiple layers, with ultimate handlers being organized crime.

The population from which they recruit the agents has a lot in common with the population from which Trump's ICE hails: guys who feel like they don't have a chance in society and have been wronged. Guys who have been long-since been severed from any set of traditional democratic ideals like rule of law, separation of powers, justice, etc. That all must sound like science fiction to this population.

My mind races back quickly to the loss of authority that figures like Walter Cronkite used to have in the time of three major networks and a couple of wire services. That was all shattered first in the era of 57 channels and nothing on, followed by the internet and the ossification of aging Boomers into Fox News or CNN/MSNBC people. Followed by Joe Rogan, YouTube, Mr Beast... we all know the story, having lived it. An era in which each gets to pick "my personal morality" and few even have the discipline to do that consciously is fertile soil for both recruiting both single use agents and ICE thugs.

Elderberry Wine

Though I have not wholeheartedly jumped on the MJ Lenderman bandwagon, which I think may have been some PR people getting way ahead of themselves, or maybe me just being way too old to be cool or to care, I am a big admirer of Wednesday, a band in which he plays and which is fronted by Karly Hartzman, whom I think MJ goes or went out with. Who cares?

Right now I am deeply touched by this song, which I find to be optimistic in a profound if not altogether obvious way. I have been listening to it a lot. I am saddened that the three shows they have planned for Cat's Cradle in May are sold out already, but may try to get an aftermarket ticket somehow. I will bring earplugs.

It does not hurt that they are from and based in Asheville.

Mary's grey

Up until the pandemic Mary dyed her hair. There was never any discussion about it, she just did it. It didn't feel like it was within my jurisdiction or even zone of influence, it was just something she was going to do, though she complained about it and the toxic chemicals stinking up the bathroom and so on and so on.

After the great reset, she let it go. By now she is almost entirely grey, with little bits of darkness flecked around back in the great mass of her hair, which became curlier after she had kids (fun fact).

If anything, it makes her more attractive to me, most likely because when I look over at her, I am reminded of how much time we have been together and what all we've been through. Three decades of raising kids, career swings, fights about stupid little bullshit (most of which I wish I could take back), the grinding drudgery of figuring out what to eat for dinner (most of which she took on but she complained about it with me so as to share the pain), vacations, little triumphs and setbacks, the whole nine. I wonder, in fact, if the evolutionary function of grey hair in humans has been to deepen and underscore the bonds of marriage but also partnership and friendship, to remind us of how much we've been through together and what it means.

New things

Yesterday morning it was cold, so before heading to my meeting I threw on this big wool LL Bean heavy wool blazer type jacket, with some matting inside. Somewhere between a men's jacket and a coat. It's a little too big for me, but it was a fine thrift find and is pretty warm. I had picked it up for ~$20 at Red, White and Blue Thrift Store in Trenton, NJ on a Saturday jaunt with David Schrayer probably 2006-7 or so. Pretty sure that afterward we went to Annie's Hot on D Spot Roti Shop for killer Trinidadian-Indian food. Man I miss that place.

But I digress. 

Sitting there in my meeting yesterday I looked over at someone wearing a stylish modern little puffer jacket and I thought to myself: "You know, I could go buy one of those for myself." Later, I was shoveling wearing these venerable old gloves that are all torn up. Then I went for a walk and my hands got pretty cold so I had to ball them up as if the gloves were mittens. This morning it occurred to me that I could throw those away and buy both new gloves and, separately, mittens for walking (Mary is a big fan of them so has put mittens on my brain).

Only rarely does this kind of thing occur to me. My brain is so locked into decades of thinking about how to make it by on old stuff that allowing myself to have the right stuff for a given task comes only unnaturally. I had better run out and gear up before I forget I've had this revelation.

Self defeating

Playing against Carlos Alcaraz in the semifinal of the Australian Open yesterday, Alexander Zverev was serving for the match in what would have been his best chance yet to win a major. Yes he would have had to beat Djokovic, but his odds in that match up are much better than his odds against Alcaraz or Sinner, who have quasi-monopolized the finals of grand slams in recent years. 

But he choked. Watching him, I feel like I saw a familiar feeling overcome him. "I can't beat him." I identify strongly with this, because I am susceptible to it. I was up on James 5-3 a few weeks ago, the best I had ever done against him. Then that little voice peeped up: "He's better than you. You're not supposed to beat him." And sure enough, he came back and took me 7-5.

It is an insidious thing, this voice. Thankfully, nobody really cares but me and I don't really care that much. I mean hell, it gave me something to blog about, right? Which gets me to my statutory 15 for January.

Bird Convention, MLK and Estes

At the meeting this morning at the church on the corner of Airport and Estes, I parked next to the stand of trees right there at the southeast corner, the last clump of trees at what had been for a long time a very wooded intersection. A snow storm is blowing in, something we humans have been watching and tracking for weeks now.

Judging by the chatter and clatter in the trees there, the birds were aware of it too. There appeared to be a frenzied discussion going on, in chirps and squawks of tones low and high, of what to do, where to go, who had food, who had HBO and Hulu, and so on. 

And perhaps they were saying the same things we were. This is the south. We flew down here to get away from all that cold stuff up north, these weeks at a time of ice and snow on the ground. What the hell is going on here?   

Cobwebs

When I was putting a jacket back in the front hall closet the other day I noticed a bunch of cobwebs back there. I cleaned them up. This is by no means a rare occurrence in our household, the stray cobweb hanging in a corner or maybe on a hanging light fixture, something that may well have been there for weeks until the light hits it in just the right way.

I wonder to what extent this is a function of our aging and just getting less attentive to this kind of thing. I also find myself wondering to what extent there's a smell peculiar to our home to which we are oblivious, as was often the case in the homes of our grandparents and kind of at the Berridges in Larchmont. Have we gotten to the age where our home has a signature scent? Or maybe just our mudroom?

Of course, we could probably manage down the risk of this kind of thing if we could just retain some professional cleaners, as indeed I've urged Mary to and as she's said at times she would. But she just can't bring herself to do it. Her parents never did. It's not the way of her people. 

Thankfully, of course, Mary doesn't read my blog. She would likely be scandalized to find me writing about this. But I've got to write about something, now don't I. The beast must be fed.

Bleak House Party

In general I end up posting to the blog when I am feeling enthused about some idea, when I feel, I suppose, like either my brilliance or cleverness will dazzle you, my Dear Reader. Right about now I am not feeling that. I suppose a good chunk of it is the wintry bleakness outside my window. It's cold and there's white stuff on the ground and we're supposed to get more this weekend. This is the South, dang it! We're supposed to get a pro forma dosing of wintry mix once a year just to remind everybody that we are on the East Coast and winter is supposed to exist here, before rolling on with the good stuff.

Like all parents, I'm also apprehensive about my kid's career arcs. OK. Right now mostly Graham's. It seems like a rough time to be out looking for jobs or trying to figure out how to proceed in life and Graham's autism diagnosis and academic inclination complicates this further. We're working on his career search but it's a grind. The fact that he's doing a ton more than I did at his age and has me to counsel him, with all of my experience (which is, admittedly, itself rather idiosyncratic) is nice but doesn't make things easier in my mind.

Probably I need to get to more meetings to be reminded in a deeper way of my powerlessness over everything. And also play some danged tennis if all this ice would just melt!

Team of Rivals

In the end I made it all the way through Doris Kearns Goodwin's Team of Rivals, the story of Lincoln and his cabinet, many of whom had vied with him for the Presidency. The first couple hundred pages were a bit of a grind, but once Lincoln was elected and everybody went to Washington I caught the groove.

I learned a lot. I had never really realized the extent to which Virginia -- and to a considerable extent what is now the I-95 corridor between Washington and Richmond, was the center of so much of the war. For some reason I also hadn't known that Richmond was the capital. I had figured it was someplace down in Mississippi, which would have seemed logical. Now I know. Honestly I think as a southern white male I have always to some extent shied away from the the Civil War as a subject matter. The south was in the wrong and we lost. Move on, I figured. 

But it's not a book about the war. It's a book about Lincoln and his team, about his team realizing what a remarkable captain they had lucked into. What a guy. It makes me want to read more of the capacious Lincoln hagiography out there.

I am not sad, I will freely admit, to be done with the book. It was a heavy one. Now I can read a mystery or some McPhee or something. I am due another bagatelle.

My Hoarding Tendencies

Ever since the pandemic we have kept the cubbard well-stocked, and the approach of Winter Storm Fern had me go out and top it up a little. It gives me comfort to gaze on the plenty.

Honestly, I began writing this post and had a nice riff I was going to go off on, then I looked at the news and saw that another American had been shot and killed on the streets of Minneapolis. He had a gun, OK. But he had a permit and the videos certainly make it look like he was not pointing it at anybody when the fracas began. That didn't stop Trump, Vance, Noem, Miller and Fox News from saying he instigated it immediately. At this point in time I don't know what to say or do. Probably I should have just not posted.

Writing wisdom for the AIs

Last week I listened in the car to Ian Bremmer's podcast interview of Geoffrey Hinton, who did pioneering work on the neural networks that made possible progress in AI, at least I think I have that right. Anyhoo, a smart fellow. Hinton by now holds serious reservations about AI, and specifically AI's catastrophic potential to destroy humanity.

One hope he holds out (roughly) is that if AIs can be imbued with positive learnings as opposed to negative ones, it might be less inclined to destroy us. This is far from as stupid as it sounds. For a long time we've known that if it bleeds, it leads, and that murder and destruction sell much better than glowing parables about the beneficence of mankind and the righteousness of love for one's fellow man. 

The fact that the sacred texts of the world religions are the biggest selling books in history and the most studied does not mean that AIs are going to pour over the Bible, Talmud, Koran etc. over and over for their whole lives seeking the deepest meaning, as humans do. In fact, it seems to me that specific communities of faith immerse themselves in their scriptures perhaps less to gain wisdom than to deepen their own common language with one another. Hence the benefits of reading others sacred texts. Then there's also the problem, for example, of all the very bloody war in the Old Testament/Torah, for example, wherein the Israelites smite their neighbors with great force for continually erecting shrines in the hills to the old Gods. It's confusing.

As I have mentioned before, Tyler Cowen has enjoined us to "write for the AIs" in the sense that we can't sit around as crafters of freely available expository prose and expect that somehow we can maintain control of our words. Though paywalls help. Instead, we just need to get ideas out there and keep moving so as to generate more and better ones.

It is Martin Luther King Jr Day. Rather than launch into some deep disquisition on what I think to be right, let me say instead that we should all endeavor to be humble. For now I need to read some things written by others and then complete some tasks and write some checks for people I believe in. The arc of history is long but it bends towards justice, but only with a little help from our friends.

Not just another MLKJ Day

I have blogged in the past about Martin Luther King Jr Day and its place in our personal life rhythms, first and foremost as the holiday that lets us recover from the other holidays. 2026 obviously differs from others in that it takes place against the background of the ever accelerating craziness of the Trump administration: the threatened invocation of the Insurrection Act in Minnesota, his batshit crazy idea of taking Greenland, etc. I think this weekend really opens the 2026 electoral season, which Democrats must dominate despite some of the stupidity upon which some of us perseverate.

In other ways this holiday weekend resembles others. It's just freaking welcome. After the holidays, then the quick opening of the year in which lots of client questions seem to pop up, three days of nothing just hit the spot.

Today a wintry mix comes down outside our windows. I'm making a hard push towards the conclusion of Goodwin's Team of Rivals, which has gotten less bad as I've pushed forward but has cemented me in thinking that she can never hold a candle to Robert Caro. But then who can?

Through all of this I am deriving ever more satisfaction from sitting at my end of the couch while Mary sits in her chair at the other end of the coffee table. I spend a lot of time looking at her, a fact that seems lost on her much of the time as she assiduously pours through whatever article she is reading, item she is shopping for, or perhaps animal video she is consuming. What a lovely woman. How fortunate I am to have her down there doing her thing. In our little domain at least, life remains good. 

Let us hope we can share this wealth as 2026 crawls forward. 

Listening to stuff in the car

A college classmate posted on Facebook yesterday about a number of podcasts she had listened to that were good, including ones from the Economist about Xi Jinping and Narendra Modi. I know I listened to the one about Xi. But the one about Modi? Maybe, maybe not. I'm just not sure. It's all kind of a blur.

Which raises the question: how good of a content delivery mechanism is listening to stuff in the car? Books, podcasts, news, what have you. On the one hand, it expands the range of ways one can ingest text. For that reason I love it. I listen to a lot of books and podcasts in the car. The practice also allows one to control what comes into ones ear and head to a greater degree, as opposed to being subjected to the editorial preferences of some radio programmer.

But I forget so much. In this regard, I suppose it's not all that much different from other media, from print media to "TV", movies, and streaming video. That also often passes in one ear and out the other. Which is why it's possible for me to rewatch TV serieses like 30 Rock and Arrested Development and get a lot of yucks out of them: because I forget them pretty quickly, but I know I like them. So they self-renew.

But with non-fiction content where the purpose is learning and informing oneself it's a little problematic. Therefore when I listen to a book that makes a strong impression I tend to buy a hard copy and put it on my shelf so I have the mnemonic boost of the book spine, but also the ability to refer back to the book to refresh my memory. For example, as I turn my head to the left I can see my copy of Stephen Pinker's 2018 Enlightenment Now, which I listened to while driving.

Which reminds me, I really need to refer back to Edward Chancellor's The Price of Time, a history of interest rates/extended screed on the unintended consequences of the long period of cheap money following the financial crisis, which Trump now wants to extend so that everyone will think of him as their sugar daddy. Chancellor has a super interesting section in which he talks about the extreme rate of innovation, technology adoption and productivity growth that happened during the Great Depression, a time of extreme capital scarcity. At least I'm 95% sure it was in his book... A very interesting argument with applications to the present moment.

All in the song

For some time now Mary had been talking about how we should get the kids to watch All In the Family just to give them a taste of prime Norman Lear. I had resisted, fearing they wouldn't love it and just knowing how dated it was. But then a couple of weeks back a columnist in the Times listed it as one of the 10 shows from back in the day that young people really should see, and Mary pitched it and was able to sell it to Graham. Natalie had already headed back to NYC after the holidays.

So there we were on the couch, watching the very first episode. And the theme song comes on. Carol O'Connor starts singing, alternates with Jean Stapleton, it all came rushing back. This theme song is indeed something of a tour de force, light years away from anything that could ever kick off a show nowadays, peaking when Stapleton's voice rises to "And you knew what you were then" and cracks apart. So intensely human and imperfect and yet...

The show itself was worth watching and yet conformed my fears in its intense formulaicness of showing Archie to be a racist boor. But still, there was some genuinely funny stuff, especially when Lionel Jefferson comes in and shows that he understands well what a pig Archie is and plays him like a fiddle.

I could watch another episode or two from time to time. But I could listen to the song all day, indeed have had a hard time getting it out of my head.