Holding something back

After losing 6-4 to Cary on Tuesday and hearing some of the wisdom Sam, one of the Farm coaches, had imparted to him, I decided to implement some of that against Z yesterday. So I held myself back from trying to hit winners -- including for the most part drop shots -- and tried to hit deep to his backhand. For my efforts, I won 6-3. 

The mental effort of implementing this plan consistently was pretty exhausting, to be honest. I enjoy myself a heck of a lot more when I swashbuckle and come to the net, hit interesting angles, etc. I like to express myself. I guess in some sense that's what I have my blog for, self-expression. But I need more!  

Not nothing

Last week I met with a member of the UNC faculty to discuss helping him with his finances. He waxed gloomily about the state of the university and how it was "disappearing before his eyes" or something like that.

I get it. You get used to being something one way and then it changes. University faculties came over the course of a few decades to believe that they had this really comfortable place that rightfully belonged to them within which they could do and say pretty much anything so long as they didn't go entirely off the rails having sex with students -- and superstars could honestly do that too so long as they were discreet about it. They drifted far from the sensibilities of their funding bases.

Professors loved to rail about how money ruled everything and that had deleterious effects on everything. They were not entirely wrong. What they got wrong is that, in terms of guiding one's practical behavior, while money and power are not everything, they are not nothing. Drift too far afield from your funding base and eventually you get spanked hard, particularly when the demographic winds are blowing directly in your face. 

Poor saps

On Friday we went to the funeral of someone in our community who had passed away after a long battle with metastatic breast cancer. We had gotten to know her and her husband over the last decade or so a little at social events. We weren't super close, but we were plenty fond of her.

She and her husband hadn't been the most regular of church attendees, but apparently her brother insisted that her service be in a church so it took place at the Chapel of the Cross, the most gothic of Chapel Hill's two Episcopalian churches, through the intercession of an old friend and neighbor. Therefore the preacher didn't know her and, in his brief eulogy, had to use such phrases as "her family tells me that..." He did a fine job, nonetheless, being a professional. The service was also brief and a touch perfunctory.

Nonetheless I couldn't fail to note that Mary was crying more than a little. My guess was that the breast cancer aspect of it was hitting home pretty hard. I know from experience that the last thing in the world she wanted was to make eye contact with me or for me to comfort her, lest that make it worse. After the service we all headed to the reception hall for food and congregation, I assumed. 

But when we got there, we were told that her brother would make a few remarks. And so he did. He began at the beginning, when their dad was a cop in the city and the family lived first in one apartment in the projects in Queens, then another as the family expanded, finally out to Levittown on Long Island. He told the story of her life, stage after stage, act after act, with great joy and feeling and directness, culminating in looking directly at her kids and her husband and expressing deep love and appreciation for them. Everything the service lacked he filled in and then some. There was also some Christian stuff thrown in.

Mary was a wreck. I wasn't far behind her.

As one does, I started thinking about our life and how it seems like there may be a little too much blocking and tackling going on, too much getting from one challenge to the next, making and saving money, planning for the future, etc. And how I still feel like I'm at a vacation deficit. A quick consult of the calendar and prices on the internet confirm that we can still make it out to the Olympic Peninsula in early September without breaking anything. I think that's happening. Will lock it down tonight.

The end of the trail

When I graduated from college in 1988, I came back to Chapel Hill because... frankly I was lost. I really hadn't thought much or well about the future, my substance use issues were in full blossom, I was a little scared of the world and didn't have a decent sense of how I would make my way in it. I made up some threadbare excuses like "I wanted to move from the consumption to the production side of culture and there's a creative community and low costs in Chapel Hill" and "I'm training to dunk." There was a kernel of truth in each of them, but mostly they were kind of excuses for poor planning and even worse execution.

When I got home, after going on a lovely trip around Europe with my mom -- her first, and my first in which I stayed anywhere nicer than a hostel -- my dad gave me this mountain bike. It had belonged to Laura, dad's girlfriend then, who would become his second wife. So it's frame was a little too small for me (I just jacked the seat way up). I also painted it with gold leaf in honor of the Cheap Art "movement" which some friends of mine from college were spearheading.

Over the years there were periods when I rode the bike a fair amount. In graduate school after I got sober it was my bike both for getting around and for riding around Central Park on Saturdays, and sometimes for "commuting" downtown to Mary's place in the West Village once we became a thing. The subway was an easier way to commute, but the bike was more fun. I also rode the bike in my first adult charity ride, the 2006 Tour de Cure for diabetes research, on the team of my friend Cyrus.

I only just now thought to check and it turns out I had written about my bike already back in April and even in my most recent post. Today at least I've added some detail so I'll leave it. I finally brought it to its final resting place yesterday. Ashes to ashes, metal to metal.* At the very least, this disposal forms part of a bigger project, the revivification of our basement (from which it has now been removed). There will no doubt be occasion to share more detail about that in the months to come.

*It occurs to me that my slowness to get rid of this thing and need to keep writing about it has something to do with my complex relationship with my dad. Also the never-ending need to generate blog post topics.

WFH frenzy

With Amanda out doing a couple of days of online training, I've decided to work from home for today at least. I am veritably overwhelmed by the array of things to do, things to ponder, things to read, people to write, etc. that present themselves to me. Some of them, admittedly, are things that I have hesitated to allocate weekend time to: for example, take my 40-year old mountain bike out to the solid waste management facility and "throw it into the bin for metal," as I have been directed to do by my bike-whisperer neighbor Russell. 

I resist doing it partially because I'm sad to do it and partially because I don't want to give up precious weekend time. Weekday time, however, feels less precious. Anything I do on a weekday can, if given the proper spin, be made to feel productive. Perhaps it's not the "highest and best use" of my time, as we sometimes say, but if I have a work-relevant podcast I am listening to, and if I'm out in the world thinking slightly differently than I might if at my desk at work, who's to say it's not productive in the strictest sense. I might even run into a client or prospect if I go to a store. It might give rise to thoughts that blossom into not just a blog post, but a Substack post (I really need to write one of those).

There's also actual work to be done.

Ask me again at the end of the day. At least I've gotten a blog post out early and can now check that box.

Missing hands

We had a guy come out and give us a quote on replacing some ducts back in the spring. They were ancient ducts, original to the house, even. Not surprisingly he also recommended we think about replacing the furnace too. I did a little light research and realized he was right: that would be a smart thing to do. So we greenlit the project, conceptually. I reached out to try to get it on the calendar.

Since June I've been back and forth with this salesperson, actually more back than forth. I call him, or email him, or text him, maybe he gets back to me and says he'll call me the next day, and then doesn't. Last week I called his employer and asked about him. Apparently he still worked there, but they didn't have any record of his interaction with me because, well, they have no CRM and are managed out of a paper bag. But 10 minutes after I called them he texted me and apologized and said he'd get back to me. He didn't.

It has been hot and the HVAC companies are busy, I guess. But still. I suspect this primarily has to do with the much-ballyhooed "shortage of contractors." They're all retiring, or so we've been hearing for a decade or so now. So it would only seem natural to let more people who would like to do this work into the country. It ain't rocket science. People want to live here and work. Let them.

A new wrinkle

Headed out for a bike ride around 11:30 Saturday morning. I know it sounds late for August, but it didn't look that hot our, upper 80s but not 90s. I've ridden in much hotter weather.

Then again, what with going north and then hosting a fundraiser, I hadn't ridden for a month. In any case, I got all geared up and lubed up and headed out, planning for an 18-20 minute ride. I huffed and I puffed up Curtis, the most imposing climb of the ride which has the misfortune of coming right at the beginning. Once I was up that, I figured I was in good shape.

Over at Estes and Airport, I rode around inside the new Aura/Booth complex, trying both to gauge occupancy (rising but we won't really be able to tell till the semester starts) and, more importantly, what will be occupying the pair of commercial spaces not yet filled up by a gym. A cafe? A brew pub? Those are the logical candidates. A bodega with features of one, the other, or both would be brilliant but I doubt there's sq ft for it. I also looked at an interior parking area behind the row of units facing onto Estes. There the Potemkin village comes to an abrupt end. It's a huge heat island of concrete and onto which many 10s if not 100 and change units back. Ugly as sin. 

But I digress as, I suppose, I did yesterday. My main point was that when I got maybe halfway up Hillsborough towards Calvander, a little shy of the middle school, my left calf cramped up pretty good. Turned out I was 5.2 miles from home. I got off, found some shade, pounded water mixed with Noon, ate a packet of yellow mustard (thanks Sherman for that tip) and then made for home, this time going through town for ease of hills. I stopped at Weaver Street to refill my 2nd water bottle and there ran into someone I hadn't seen maybe since high school (Christoph Nettesheim), though I've talked to him on the phone. He had to hustle, but not before I extracted from him a promise to come to our next reunion. I made it home.

The key moral here is, I think, that I need to plan and execute my rides a little better. I hadn't ridden my bike since June and my biking muscles were a little in retreat. Since I got the new Prius I haven't been riding my e-bike to work at all, which has been a valuable way to keep my biking legs doing at least a little something a couple of times a week. Plus I didn't prehydrate mindfully enough. Aging is not for slackers. 

New opportunities

In recent months I've been offered to chair a board I've been on for a long time. Also, the local Democratic Party is spinning up an interesting venture (a "service corps") to provide direct services to the community and it wants board members. In some ways I think the service corps a good idea. I even gave a little money towards the kick off. In others I'm less sure. I've been thinking about that this morning.

The big problems are with expected scope and systems. What can someone asking for help reasonably expect the Corps to do? Help with anything? Is it to be a privately-funded analog to NYC's 311 service, providing a guide or entry point to municipally-provided services? Or will it endeavor to help with just about anything, including services typically-provided by the private sector?

Either one of these is a massive undertaking. Is the goal to ultimately provide all of the services or primarily to build goodwill and let people know the Democratic Party is trying? To build internal, aligned connectivity.

How will it set guardrails around requests on risky, loaded issues? Like if someone calls in saying "my insurance company won't pay for gender-transition surgery for my 11-year old"? Or "I can't afford ammunition for the handgun I like to carry everywhere?" 

At some point in time it risks become a big, lossy overlay on the full set of governmental and non-governmental services, mostly a recipe for failure. But maybe the thing is that you don't expect petitioners to get everything solved for them, they just need to have a place to ask and someone on the other end of the line. And it becomes another place to aggregate constituent concerns, to listen and learn.

It's an interesting endeavor but it has the potential to become all-consuming and one where setting boundaries is very difficult.

Need for adventure?

Met with a client yesterday who has, this summer, gone to the summit of one mountain on one continent and also done a multi-day hiking trip around another mountain on another continent, on top of a business trip to Asia. When I had first run into her into the hallway in our office after the latter trip, he had said he was exhausted. Then both of us got busy for a week and change before out meeting and we hadn't caught up properly. I asked yesterday if how he was feeling now, did he feel like she'd had enough. He said that in fact he had already planned another expedition in Latin America.

On a professional level the thrust of my questioning was to suss out how much money he was going to need in retirement. Might his travel needs flatten out? The answer their was a clear no.

But, truth be told, I'm also thinking about myself. Mary and I just had a nice trip up the East Coast. It was great. We saw old friends and clients, much of whom are the same thing. We got some exercise, went up to the top of some (small) mountains. But it wasn't very adventurous.

At home, in the evening, I continue to ingest adventure content on YouTube, first and foremost Itchy Boots (where our Dutch heroine Noraly is about to pass for the last time out of Argentina as she rides her motorcycle north towards Alaska), but also other channels here and there too. It's entrancing, if sometimes slow going.

When I was younger I got out a bit. I went to some somewhat offbeat places in my 20s, mostly in Eastern Europe. But I could have done more. Sometimes I wish I had done so. By now I'm not all that adventurous and Mary definitely isn't, though she'll go a lot of places if I do the planning and, if she's been there before and she feels like she might get a good picture out of it, she'll go there again (hence her multiple trips to Juneau and Haines).

I think probably we should be breaking out a little more. I could even go on a trip or two without her, given her limited taste for ascending mountains.

But there's always the carbon to think about. YouTube for sure has a lower carbon footprint. And our back porch here in the morning is rather nice...

Early Rising

Over the last year or two I have been obscuring the face of my bedside clock and also the one in the bathroom before going to be because, if I wake up to pee and see that it's something like 5 am, it will probably be difficult for me to fall back asleep, and it's already too late for me to take the two Sonatas it takes to knock me out. Not knowing what time it is therefore helps me get back to sleep. My discipline lapsed last night and I forgot to cover the clock in the bathroom. I went in and discovered it was 4:45am.

Right about now I have legitimate things to be worried about. Mom seems to be unable to get out in front of medical issues that are making her unhappy, and she's not getting any younger. It makes me want to see her more. Meanwhile business is ramping up. Opportunities for actual business growth are presenting themselves, but the fact that I'm financially stable and with a 6-handle on the front of my age makes me think whether growing my business is the right thing for me to be doing.

On top of the basket case that is American public life in 2026. The Right, the Left dominate the headlines but nobody wants all of that really. Nor do they in China, I don't think. Or even, left to their own devices, in Russia.

Towards the end of our collective 60th birthday party at Sidetrack earlier in the summer I heard Will talking to someone about sleep and his issues with it. I should take the topic up with him again next time I see him.

Thankfully at least one source of minor one-time stress seems to be abating: our local drought. 4-6 weeks ago it seemed really bad. Now it appears to be moderating. It's not all done, but it's a comfort to see one thing back off.

Return to NAIRU

As I sometimes do, this week I looked at the tables of economic data in the back of the Economist. One of the most important relationships in economics for the last few decades has been that between inflation and unemployment. Ideally, both of them should be stable. The Fed has long had a stated goal of 2% inflation, and the idea has been to set interest rates to manage business cycles to keep inflation around there. When the economy is growing fast, tight labor markets drive up the cost of labor -- a big component in the cost of everything -- so banks raise rates to slow growth in order to drive unemployment up to the equilibrium rate of unemployment, the NAIRU for short ("non-accelerating inflation rate of unemployment").

Recently we got the news that inflation had run above the target rate of 2% for 63 consecutive months. Leaving aside discussions of causes, which I'd say are manifold and contain amongst them a lot of COVID-driven accident compounded by policy mistakes on both sides -- amongst the biggest being ill-targeted stimulus from Biden and too-tight borders and excessive Fed jawboning from Trump (early 2018 rate cutting cycle was a mistake -- markets should have been left to correct and settle) -- that's a long time.

But the biggest mystery to me is why public discussion of what the NAIRU should be has vanished. It sounds like a really wonky discussion but it's not. When the debate first came on my radar, back in the mid-late 90s, consensus on what the NAIRU should be hovered around the 5.5-6% range. Unemployment went down to 4% in the height of the dot-com boom then topped out at 6.1% in August 2003, by which time the Fed was lowering rates. Admittedly, we now see that may have been a mistake because it created the credit conditions which created the financial crisis. Under Obama we climbed back from the brink, and by the time Trump was elected unemployment was well below 5%, where it has stayed with the exception of the short-lived COVID megaspike. 

I'm going deeper into the weeds than I intended to but my main point is that since late in Obama's days, we have tolerated unemployment much lower than we would have historically. It sounds cruel to want higher unemployment when everybody wants to work (in theory, except when we are complaining about our jobs, of course). Maybe we actually need to get back to managing to somewhat higher unemployment.

One more thing: it's important for there to be unemployment up and down the labor value chain. Highly compensated people need to be getting let go for a bunch of reasons, both economic and social (for the growth of empathy). We need businesses to fail. Career and business failures create the seeds of creativity and growth. We may see a lot of this as AI gets integrated into the economy. We may need empathy from and for many.

Nickled and Dimed in China

After The Economist gave it a good review and perhaps even put it on the magazine's best of the year list for 2025, I decided to check out Hu Anyan's I Deliver Parcels in Beijing. Mostly honestly because the book had been a bestseller in China, selling about 2 million copies.

The book narrates the author's 19 different jobs after leaving school in a tale of increasing downward mobility. He delivers parcels, he works in a bike store, he does graphic design for some weird zines, he is the proprietor of a clothing store in a mall. His compensation rarely seems to correspond with what I would have thought the work was worth. Through it all 95% of the time he's a nice guy to a fault, he doesn't assert himself, he lets himself get trampled on by bosses, coworkers, customers, just about anybody. Naturally sometimes he gets pissed off. Throughout there's a pronounced contrast between his extreme earnestness and the general shittiness of those around him.

He lives in crappy apartments. For periods he lives with his parents. He goes through punk rock periods (as one would) and periods of reading pretty heady books. Then he tries writing. Then he writes some more. Eventually he writes articles that go viral, which grow into this book. More than anything it reminds me of Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed, which itself didn't blow my mind when I read it back in 2014. And yet, we have to read these kinds of books, because they are not our lives.

 

 

House.os

For some time our dryer hasn't been getting our clothes as clean as it should. We've been thinking maybe we need a new dryer. Up in Maine Carol pointed out that it was probably our dryer vent which needed cleaning. Since I'm pretty sure that hasn't been done in some years, I'm betting she's right.

There are lots of books about home repair and maintenance but it would be very good to have something like an OS that would remind you when things need to be done and perhaps even call vendors. Hell, you could have an agentic OS that could interface with vendors and negotiate with them. You could develop standard interfaces which parameterize the services on offer (sweep chimney? Roto root? Trim hedge? Clean dryer vent?) and negotiate prices. There probably is one in development if not in production.

An interim step would be for entrepreneurs to locally run a something like an estate-manager-as-a-service business which provides to homeowner's an outsourced management of all physical plant maintenance functions. Again, this probably exists. If not, I know a couple of people who could spin one up in different locations.

The other side of this trade is already consolidating as contractors (electricians, HVAC people, painters, plumbers etc) retire and sell their businesses to private equity funds at retirement. Eventually some type of aggregation should happen from the purchaser side.

Then again, this would take away another opportunity for contact with humans from different walks of life than oneself, one of the great pleasures of commerce. And thereby deny both vendor and purchaser opportunities for growth. It would also deny parents the opportunity to teach children valuable lessons about entropy, attention, planning, work, self-reliance...

Afterglow

The caterer made little chicken and waffles thingies for our fundraiser the other night, and in the end there were all these chicken tenders leftover which have formed the basis of a number of meals since then. Yesterday's lunch and then dinner at our night-after party attended by eight. Today for lunch I explicitly opted not to eat them because I knew they'd be part of tonight's dinner. Then, around lunchtime I was walking down the hall towards the common area of our coworking space, and I espied a guy having Chik-Fil-A for lunch and instinctively yearned for some.

Jonathan and Sharon will soon be by to help us polish off the rest of the leftovers, except we have way more wine and beer than we need, probably enough for a Christmas party. Also desserts.

But because we had little to pair the chicken with I had to make a slaw. Then Mary bought some tomatoes to go with the plethora of garlic toasts that never got dressed with goat cheese and other stuff. So again we will have a surfeit of food.

D-Day

At or about 5:30 today, something like 160-180 people will descend on our house in excited anticipation of seeing our current and most recent governors at our house to help the former help the latter raise money for his US Senate run. And let there be no doubt, we need him to win.

Over the last few days I've run into a number of people who've said, "I'm looking forward to the event at your house." But then I check the RSVP list and don't find their names. Some of them may be blowing sunshine up my butt, but I suspect most of them just don't think it's important to RSVP. I even know people who like to show up and write checks because they don't want to get the emails and texts that come with handing over your contact details to the machine. All of this makes it rather difficult to predict how much food and wine to order. We set a high minimum for this event because we've demonstrated that we can fill the house with a lower minimum. Next time we may have to go higher yet.

And then, overnight an unanticipated storm blows in. All of our porch furniture got soaked. A screen got blown off one window and all the windows along the rear of the house -- washed on Saturday -- got wet, and some got crap blown onto them. Hopefully the grass in the park out back will be dry enough by 530 that people can park on it without mucking it up.

In any case, the farmers need the rain so we just need to give thanks and suck it up  

Ending Moravia

Moravia's The Conformist isn't doing it for me so I think I will put it down, about halfway in. There are just so many books on my shelves waiting to be read that I shouldn't allocate time and attention to something that fails to energize me.

There are certainly virtues to reading the "minor literature" of a period, the stuff that was heralded at the time but didn't stand the stern reductive force that the canon imposes over time: only a few books for any given time or place tend to command attention decades or centuries later, particularly in other lands. My Major Oral exam in my PhD program, which I designed myself (as is the custom) focused on the minor prose writers of the 1820s-1830s, people like Orest Somov, Vladimir Odoevsky, Ivan Lazhechnikov and some others whose names I've forgotten. For my dissertation I read people like Panaev, Mikhailov, Askochensky and others, also largely lost to the sands of time. 

You can learn a lot about a period from these books. What were people focused on and worried about at the time? What was their concept of human nature and what -- in the author's view -- made their contemporaries the way they are? 

Moravia focuses relentlessly on fascism. How could Italy -- and individual Italians -- let themselves become Fascists. Writing in late 40s-early 50s, the palette Moravia reaches for is a mix of Proust and Faust: traumas visited on the child by fucked up parents create aberrant behaviors, guilt and a desire to be like everyone else. That's about it.

Who knows, I may go back to it. I doubt it.

Books Are Magic

In Princeton Ted recommended that we listen to the Sound Exploder podcast on our drive back to NC. Since we were indeed a little tired of our current list of podcasts and had even -- you may be shocked to hear -- squabbled a little over listening to a little too much of mine (so we listened to more of Mary's for a while), we decided to take Ted's recommendation. We listened to Lindsay Buckingham on the early days of Fleetwood Mac and the crafting of their first hit, whose words I could mumble imprecisely but right now I can't recall for the life of me what song it was. Then we listened to Lindsay and Stevie Nicks at length about the backstory of their predecessor band to Fleetwood Mac and one of the songs on their first record, which Mary had never heard and doesn't really care to hear again, but we heard about their early days and time passed as the miles of Maryland's Eastern Shore disappeared in the rearview (Google had sent us down Route 13 to Annapolis to avoid construction).

Finally all of that ended and it came time for the episode I had picked out for me: Emma Straub talking about the Magnetic Fields' 69 Love Songs. I had assumed that Straub was a member of the band, but she was in fact not but had first been Stephen Merritt's personal assistant and then traveled with band for a decade running their merch table while they toured in support of the triple album that cemented them into cultural history. Goes to show you how music connoisseurship declines once you have kids and a job.

Anyhoo, after Straub spent a decade touring with the band she published books and opened a bookstore (Books Are Magic) in Brooklyn that has become something of a thing and now has two branches, but will apparently open no more. I like that. I will need to visit it.

Not because I need books, mind you. I have a lot of them and one of the successes of my vacation was that I got rid of a couple of them, giving one to friends and leaving another in an AirBnb. I also did not stop and peruse the shelves of any of the excellent looking used book emporia in upper New England. 

I will get more books, however, in the fullness of time.

Mild overwhelm

Back in the saddle for a day with a very full list of tasks and meetings that will persist for a couple of weeks. Towards the end of yesterday we learned that our upcoming fundraiser with two well and rightly loved governors will be probably 40% larger than any we've had and has already well exceeded its seemingly ambitious fundraising target. Sadly, not too many of the attendees will be my close friends (thanks so much, guys), so this will be really a fundraiser rather than a party with friends. Hopefully there will be some food leftover and we can invite people the next night to clean up the remains, something that has evolved into a beloved tradition. I guess I just have to embrace the true fundraising aspect of it.

Meanwhile there are things I need to do out the wazoo at work. Clients to serve, notes to input, expenses to log. My new associate Amanda is off on vacation for a couple of weeks. 

To say nothing of the things that need doing around the house. And tennis that needs to be played. 

The doorbell just rang downstairs and I went to see who it was, since I saw no delivery van. It was a guy with long hair and a beard and a hardcover book in his right hand who said he was out advocating for peace on earth. I told him we supported his cause, but needed to get ready for work.

Home again

And so we have returned from our epic 3-week adventure in the north, which included:

• ~2500 miles of driving
• Sleeping in 9 different beds
• Meals with 13 different people or couples in 6 different states
• 2 instances of dodging World Cup games (including the final) using advanced knowledge of NJ infrastructure

All in all, a most successful trip, from which more stories may yet be gleaned. For today, I must focus on reentry to the land of the working, as my young associate Amanda heads off on her own two-week car trip extravaganza en famille tomorrow and I must make use of this single working day to synch up with her.

Also, it is Spirit Week and Alma Mater day at the office and I have to find something in school colors (CHHS, natch) to wear to the office.

More on the paragraph

As I often do, I brought some more serious books along with the espionage/mystery stuff with me on vacation. I started with the Ernaux I already mentioned, partially because I knew it was bite-sized and easily consumed in almost one sitting. Next on deck was Alberto Moravia's 1951 The Conformist, which I picked up used somewhere. Now that I poke about the internet a bit, I see that the book doesn't appear to have been received that well and isn't even considered to be Moravia's best, but probably survives in print because of attention brought to it by Bertolucci's 1970 film. But somebody translated it into English and it has survived so here I am, reading it. It's OK. I may come back to it later.

One noteworthy feature of the book is its rather lengthy paragraphs. I have railed a little on the prevalence of the one-sentence paragraph earlier on the blog. In Moravia paragraphs can easily run a page, a page and a half. My gut says that he displays a bias towards the long paragraph because it signals the high style and seriousness of modernism. Moravia's book is shot through with hints of Kafka and Proust if not Joyce, Faulkner and Broch, those other high priests of modernist interiority as signaled by paragraphs that at times strike the modern reader as veritably interminable.

I've also been dipping into the New Yorker archives here on vacation on my new tablet and have started reading the first 1961 Rachel Carson article that expanded into the 1962 book Silent Spring. Carson also prefers long paragraphs. Looking at them I can see obvious places where a modern editor would probably break them into new ones, on account of a shift in narratorial focus.

There are of course no hard and fast rules as to when paragraphs should begin and end. They are more or less supposed to contain units of focus or content. A bias towards longer paragraphs on the part of an author or (dare I say it) an era seems to indicate human subjects with greater integrative capabilities. To the extent that -- as many have said -- we live in an attention economy, the inability and/or wholesale disinclination to attend to things for longer hollows us out. When Our Robot Overlords finally arrive to conquer, they may discover there is nothing here to seize.

Laura Lippman

The thing about mysteries is, or rather are, that because many people enjoy reading them and many people secretly aspire to be writers, many try their hand at writing them. And there's a bit of a craft to it, a bunch of conventions to help one along. And so, it turns out, a pretty decent quantity of people get good at writing them, which makes the pleasant serendipity of finding one seemingly at random possible.

That's what happened to me with Laura Lippman. I picked up the first (for me -- Lady in the Lake, 2019) of her books at some kind of free location: maybe a little free library or in a coffee shop. I liked it well enough that I picked up a second one (What the Dead Know, 2007) in a used bookstore. I just finished that one and am delighted to have a new author I can look for in used bookstores or libraries, perhaps even a new bookstore, as there's no reason for me to wish to deny her revenue, though it seems like she is doing well enough so providing for her livelihood may be less important than supporting a used bookseller.

The Trifecta

Today I accomplished my summer vacation trifecta. On this trip I have

1. Eaten fried clams
2. Eaten a lobster roll
3. Swum in very cold mountain river water. In fact, not once but thrice in the same day

As of now I can pretty much go home now and/or devote the rest of vacation to delivering Mary to suitable photo locations and then walking back and forth getting in extra steps while Mary photographs things. Which is substantially what vacation is anyway.

But it is rare to accomplish all three in one trip.

Up in the holler, South Duxbury, VT

After a bunch of automotive adventures, some of which I may in the fullness of time recount, we find ourselves up a holler near the "town" of South Duxbury, Vermont in a little cabin. Maybe 450 square feet, all super-efficiently laid out. Really the stationary equivalent of a Winnebago/RV. As if to demonstrate this, we've already had one minor squabble about washing dishes. She was wrong, I was right.

Anyhoo, yesterday evening as we were sitting at the compact dinner table eating ravioli and an arugula salad with slivered almonds and strawberries when we heard a little bustling activity outside our window. Someone, it seemed, was trying to get into the shed in the back which holds the garbage cans and various other sundries. When I investigated it yesterday evening, the shed's doors were fasted by not one but three different latches, which clearly implied there were bears in the area.

And so, a bear. I thought I saw a black shape out there. We turned off all the lights so we could see better outside. The pathetic little flashlights on our phones were no help, but I did hear a growl.

A little chat with the AirBnb host confirmed that bears had been known the bustle about back there (hence the three locks) but that none had ever tried to get into the cabin.

Having spent a lot of time in Alaska, Mary has done an awful lot of internet research about bear attacks. She did some more. For my part, I got all traces of food out of the car out in the driveway, blasting first a little Hendrix and then (when I recalled the snacks in my tennis bag) Gang of Fours "Love like Anthrax" through our little portable speaker to keep the bears away. I returned safely.

Happening

In between mystery novels I just read through Annie Ernaux's Happening, a 2000 memoir of her 1963 abortion. 

One wouldn't think Ernaux would be as distinctive as she is. Maybe plenty of women have written unsparing narratives of their own abortions and I just haven't come across them because I'm a guy. Maybe there are others who are gimlet-eyed observers of the simple of time, changes in mores and how a storyteller can refract and embody it all.

But I don't know them. All too often the quest for distinctiveness forces authors and artists to reach for some kind of quirk instead of just being themselves on the page, canvas or whatever. Ernaux skips all that and just does what she has to do. She feels, thinks and remembers deeply and lays it out for the reader. I'll keep reading her.

If only her books were a little longer.  

Bye bye Neymar

Seeing Neymar shit-talking with the Norwegian goalkeeper before an absolutely meaningless penalty kick yesterday in the 100th minute as Brazil prepared to crash out of the World Cup was an appropriate coda to an ultimately undistinguished career. Yes he scored a lot of goals. Yes he was very talented and sometimes fun to watch. But ultimately Neymar will go down as a footnote to history, maybe the soccer version of Dominique Wilkins or Russell Westbrook: someone who was fun to watch but never really won anything.

What's worse, Neymar was the one who really popularized the weak-assed tippy toe stalling penalty kick. To my mind it's just wrong and emblematic of someone who lacks commitment. The penalty kick is for the most part an unfair contest between shooter and keeper. It should more or less always result in a goal or a sense of failure for the shooter. Neymar's PK is a net loss to the game.

His retirement from soccer is a net gain for the sport. Ponder last night. Why not let some young kid take the PK? Why not, for example, Endrick? Having a new face get the last goal would have been net prospective to Brazilian soccer. Neymar was retrospective, and going out like that tells us a lot about Brazilian soccer as a whole. They have a lot of talent -- plenty of the players out there were familiar -- but are a pale shadow of their glory days. It's a shame. But the great Brazilian teams of the 60s were kind of like the Celtics or UCLA Bruins of their day. The competition wasn't as great yet.

Blazing away, Belfast, Maine

We're at the tail end of this heat dome in Maine. We had come up here to beat the heat, which we'll be able to do starting tomorrow. It's 89 outside now and falling, but it was touching 100 as I hustled up here from Cambridge on Thursday to pick Mary up at Portland. Not so hot for NC, more than plenty hot for ME. Thankfully, our place has AC, a window unit just big enough to cool the 600 or so square feet here.

David and I played tennis in the park today. Hard courts. My feet and calves are killing me, my knee may follow suit.

Afterwards, we popped by the snack bar to survey its bill of fare, expecting hot dogs and the like. Instead, it turns out they feature such things as lobster empanadas. I had lunch for today, but we may well be back tomorrow or the next day.

77th and Amsterdam, 8:30 pm

On a blistering Tuesday evening in Manhattan Natalie and I enjoyed ice cream after a nice Omakase on Columbus. Sitting by a blacktop watching mixed gender 3X3 soccer, two other younger boys kicking ball through the older kids game. Everyone around, it seemed, had football on their mind, with France having just dispatched Sweden 3-0 in the Meadowlands earlier that evening. We were killing time while NJ Transit got done ferrying the hordes of spectators from the stadium back to Manhattan or wherever they were staying. 

Then there was an incident. An hispanic guy in his 20s(?) was laying on the ground leaning against the fence around the blacktop growling. We didn't know why. A silver-haired woman, whom I christed "the mayor" has been watching everything. She goes over and talks to him. He comes back and sits with her.

Slowly, some affluent white kids who were playing basketball or had some other incident with the hispanic guy trickle over and apologize to him. They praise his basketball skills. At last the tallest of them, a guy, also jeunesse doree, comes over and apologizes. They hug.

Amazing.

Natalie and I were primed for wonder at this moment of urban transcendence, having seen an amazing short documentary on the history of NYC, animated by Stanley Tucci, in the basement of the Museum of the City of New York. It made each of us proud to be present or past New Yorkers. Go and watch it. 

Just my luck

Headed into Manhattan on NJ Transit to see Natalie. Turns out today is one of maybe 8 days when a World Cup game is being played in the Meadowlands: France vs. Sweden in the Round of 32. NJ Transit is running a special service to get fans to and from the stadium which basically blacks out normal service before and after the match for a few hours -- or you have to pay an extra $100. To heck with that.

Thankfully Frank alerted me to this last night and I've been able to get on train before the blackout window starts. But I may have to stay out in the city for some extra time afterwards until normal service is resumed. Or take a PATH train to Newark and hope to be able to squeeze onto a train there to get back out to Princeton.

I am generally not a huge Mbappe supporter, not because he's not a great player but because he has a bad attitude and failed to carry himself well after France lost to Argentina in 2022. Moping when he should have been congratulating his teammate Messi for getting a monkey off his back, at long last.

But tonight I hope that Mbappe et al dispatch Sweden in regular time so that train service will be restored at a reasonable hour. Or that they go down in flames. But honestly France is fun to watch so I don't even mind if they win the whole thing. Great team.

Forgetting the tip

On Friday I had breakfast at the Carolina Coffee Shop with Brad. I grabbed the check since he paid it last time, but in the excitement of all the stuff we were discussing I forgot to sign it, which I realized when I was over by the Paul Green Theater because I realized I didn't have a mental image of what I had tipped. Fortunately, it being summer, I was able to pull a uey, go back and park in the middle of campus, and sidle in the back way to the Coffee Shop to fix my goof.

The server found the ticket and discovered that I had indeed not signed nor calculated a tip. I asked if it would have gone through without a signature and she said it would have, she just wouldn't have gotten a tip.* 

I have pontificated on the importance of tipping before, but the ever closer march of Our Robot Overlords (henceforth ORO) and the societal wealth dispersion they exacerbate only heightens the need for tipping.

This morning at my hotel in DC the sole server (all orders had to be placed at the bar) was momentarily terse with me and my hackles got raised for an instant. Then I recalibrated and realized there was just one of her, likely beset with many of me in the course of just about any morning. She was, moreover, a relative newcomer to our fair shores, working in a service role early in the morning. On the other side of the wealth divide. I tipped her 20% and moved on with my day.  

*As with physical checks, the signature protects the delivering financial institution against challenges.

Ode to Gioia

Right now I am making my way through Ted Gioia's piece on authenticity in music. A quick check reveals that last year at about this time I referenced him and accused him of writing the one-sentence paragraphs that litter LinkedIn and too much of Substack. That ain't happening in this piece, nor do I honestly recall why I levelled that critique of him at the time. Probably I'm just jealous.

Gioia has impressive range and has really dedicated himself to his project. I commend him for it, as if he gives a fuck. He portrays his father movingly in this piece and transitions from that into an earnest reflection on the topic of irony and authenticity, the Goofus and Gallant of contemporary discourse. I'll tell you more when I finish it.

Right now I'm gearing up to drive north for a few weeks. DC, Princeton, New York and an exurb thereof, Cambridge, Maine and Vermont. A little business on the way up, then Mary flies up for vacation. We don't even have a date fixed for our return. Really it's optimal empty-nested free wheeling. I will report from the road.

Crowd averse

Watching the pictures of the Canes parade, it just occurred to me that one of the reasons I am a bit crowd averse (I've never gone to a stadium rock show, for instance, and don't really go far out of my way to see live sports though I watch sports highlights at home probably 350-360 nights a year) and am rubbed the wrong way by crowds (at UNC basketball games, all the choreographed crowd response stuff reminds me of Riefenstahl and Nuremberg) is that when we were boys I was all too often the focus of group aggression at the bus stop and around the neighborhood. I just distrust groups of people and the things we do as groups. 

Yeah I can get into it too, but it's hard to really let myself go if I'm not being ironic, since I'm never drunk anymore. Though my irony may not always be apparent to outside viewers.

Scofflaw in a Subaru

Out here on the porch this morning as I am most mornings, trying to enjoy the cool air while it remains and listen to the birds and whatnot. Somewhere in there I start to hear this weird droning noise, some kind of compressor. It keeps going.

Is it in our basement? Is it Caroline and Jamie's HVAC? After a while I have to investigate, so I go and change into outdoor flipflops and head out with my cup of coffee. It seems to be coming from the other side of the park, maybe Scott and Olga's, which would be problematic because they're in France for a  month or so. So I start walking that way. As I get out into the lake parking lot it seems to be coming from a little Subaru and as I come to the other side of it I discover that the culprit is a guy inflating a stand-up paddleboard. 

I'm sorry, but to my mind running a compressor for 15 minutes to inflate your little toy falls squarely within the broad prohibition on running small machines on Sunday morning: lawn mowers, leaf blowers, all of that. This is the South. It's not done. I like to had kicked the guy's ass but I was only in flip flops and carrying my coffee. Next time.

Nb. 10 minutes later someone else is doing the same thing down closer to the lake.

Atrophy

For a few years now biking has pretty much entirely replaced swimming as my non-impact summer exercise, partially because I just got into biking, partially because I kept having an allergic reaction (at least once a summer) to something in the lake water and would have at least one night of shitty sleep from being all stuffed up. And you know there's no way I'm swimming laps in a pool with this lake right here.

So I almost entirely neglected the lake. The other day I decided that enough was enough and went in. By the time I breast-stroked out to the second float, a mere 100 yards or so, I could feel it in my dorsal lats, or teres minor, something around there. Not just a little soreness, mind you, it felt like they were going to cramp up.

Another little surprise from the aging process. Obviously I need to reintegrate a little more swimming into my exercise routine before it gets too late to do so.

Scanning for Mary

The other day Mary needed something scanned, so I scanned it for her, filed it and sent it back to her as an attachment to an email. It seemed like the most natural thing in the world.

Time was, it used to piss me off a bit that I was the person that had to do all of that kind of thing. Not only that, but handle all the finances and support all the devices and do a bunch of other shit. All while being guilt-tripped because I wasn't very helpful ideating about what we should have for dinner on Thursday.

I was listening to Derek Thompson's podcast this week as he talked to a woman who had written a book on "Dadbrain," ways in which guys' operating systems have been changed over time through more intensive parenting. Interesting stuff. As part of their discussion they talked about a game called "Fair Play," which is a deck of cards describing various household tasks that couples have to do. Couples pick them and allocate them out and discuss them, something like that.

One of the opening premises of the game is that "all time is created equal," one partner's time is equal in value to the other's. On the one hand, yes, in a transcendental sense this cannot be argued. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, none of it matters in the end anyway. On the other hand, in an economic sense, this is prima facie false. The primary breadwinner's time is more valuable. It's not a value judgment to state this. It just articulates what the market tells us and households are at some level economic units. The key thing is that couples and families need to develop an internal culture of how they value money, the extent to which they accept the market valuation of time, what they want, and how much risk they are willing to bear if they largely eschew market valuation and say something like "we value our time equally." 

Much was made in the podcast discussion of the concept of "mental load" (meal planning, Dr's appointment scheduling, getting kids to practice etc.) that is disproportionately born by women. I get that. Over short time scales this is true and much of that shit is a pretty boring and soul-deadening. I did not hear a lot about the mental load of planning over longer time scales (career development, complex skills building, network development, contingency planning) that allows a household to maintain and grow earnings capacity and finance things. I can't imagine it's not discussed in the book.

At any case, here at our house is that we are by now by now largely beyond all that, though Mary still does appreciate some help in meal planning and I get it. Generically, I'm not fully sure that on the liberal side of the spectrum contemporary discourse has really thought this through. Or maybe it's me that hasn't.

Some fine sources of friction

As so much of the world has moved inexorably in the direction of removing friction from commercial and social transactions (think 1-click purchasing from Amazon and/or the online purchase of all goods and services, delivered to your door), there's naturally a counter school of thought that lauds the benefits of friction and the slowing down of commerce and also social interactions. 

For example, when I asked the guy at Circle City Books in Pittsboro if he listed books for purchase online and he said, "Why would I want to do that? The whole purpose of having the store is to get out and see people." 

For the same reason, I almost never order food for delivery. I would much prefer to go out and see the merchants and patrons in restaurants. This was particularly acute during the pandemic. I wanted the human contact and also to offer it to them. Same with groceries. Though I understand why people with young kids and two jobs would not want to waste time with supermarkets (and I kind of remember that from when my kids were young), I love going to the store and seeing the people. You never know who you're going to run into. Admittedly I only really formally realized the fruits of this when my career took on a sales dimension around 2003, but as I think back to growing up what were the malls to us but the places where a lot of our social lives (outside of schools and sports) happened. You went to the mall not so much to buy stuff as to see who was there. 

At the office, I now park in a garage where I have to come down to the ground floor, walk across to the office building, then ascend again to the 3rd floor where my co-working space is. This all adds friction or transaction costs to leaving for lunch, creating a strong incentive to bring lunch and eat in the common space. So now we have a stable BYO lunch klatsch with a rotating cast of characters.

In residential neighborhoods, there's a clear recognition that the absence of friction combined with people's incessant hurry and poor time management (I am as guilty as anyone) creates a need for artificial friction in the form of low speed limits, speed bumps, children at play signs, etc. On much of the East Coast, the absence of predators has created an abundance of the greatest natural and variable source of friction, the flocks of hungry and entitled deer that clog our streets, nature's wandering speed bumps.

A thing of beauty

Last night I was amongst a select few Tigers of certain vintage to attend a show of tap dancing by one of our very own, the only Josh that matters, Josh Hilberman. Josh has been doing tap pretty much his whole life and is the impresario of his own school of tap in Liege, Belgium.

Somehow I was unable to bolster the audience with members of my household by referring to the show as "avant-garde tap," which turned out to have been an erroneous characterization, though it was fuelled by Josh's own Facebook promotion of the bit of the show in which he tapped bare-footed on an amplified clogging box in nothing but his underwear and some chain mail and other metal accessories, so at least it was not I who was at fault.

In fact, the show was nothing if not traditional. It was, indeed, a history of tap and Josh's relationship to it, with pictures of the greats of tap history hung on the wall and Josh telling their tales and how he had been blessed to work with and/or learn from them.

A highlight of the show was his performance of "Cappella Josh," a piece which he proudly informed us had entered the vernacular of Barcelona tap and had more or less displaced some other piece as the core of the local canon. How many of us can say the same? He was joined for this by Michelle Dorrance, who is the Michael Jordan of Chapel Hill tap (seems like Gene Medler is the Dean Smith so I think we have to call Josh, who also taught Michelle some in her youth, the Phil Ford). It was beautiful to see them up there. I was glad for the dark of the theater, for your scribe could scarce restrain a wee tear.

Elsewhere, the Canes beat the Golden Knights (who thinks of these names) to even the Stanley Cup Final, while Michael Whatley furiously scribbled notes in preparation for a press conference.

The perils of routine

By this point in my evolution, many, many aspects of my day have become highly routinized. Mornings are particularly so. I know I have written about them before so I will spare you the most excruciating recapitulation of it all. In the telling it bores even me.

There comes a point in my morning cycle where I take my one a.m. pill. The problem is, of course, that the whole thing is so systematic that a few minutes later I may not recall whether my memory of taking it is from today or yesterday.

Similar things happen in tennis. Particularly when playing against Adam, after a changeover (in tennis one switches ends of the court after each two games) I often can't recall whether he just served or I did. Thankfully, Adam also gets confused now and again. 

Aging is not for the faint of heart, but it beats the alternative.

Willing vs willful

At my AA meeting this morning the topic was willingness, which in the context of AA mostly implies willingness to accept: that one is an alcoholic, that one controls very little, that one needs help, etc. In essence, willingness signifies surrender, acquiescence, really, a lack of will. 

By contrast think of the Nietzschean concept of the Will to Power, ultimately apotheosized in Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will about the 1934 Nuremburg Rally. It's not like this concept is ever far from the surface in the English concept of will. We often speak of willpower or willfulness.

Indeed, the opposite of willingness, unwillingness, signifies really less an absence than a surfeit of will. So we find ourselves squarely in the presence of another instance of what Freud identified in his essay on the uncanny as the identity of primordial opposites, the space where the heimlich (homely) and unheimlich (uncanny) merge. 

Part of me is slightly tempted to ask an AI do a historical-etymological analysis of how this happened, but what I'd really be interested in is finding an article by some nerd who actually did the work the AI would be stealing. But I don't really care enough to do that.

Wearing old stuff

Sometime in recent months Mary noted that: "people with grey hair shouldn't always be wearing old, faded stuff. We need to look crisp." I will confess that her words have stuck with me a little bit since then and have even haunted me at moments. One of those moments was this morning when I headed out for my normal Saturday morning meeting wearing some shorts that have been in my wardrobe, I'm pretty sure, since the late 80s and were purchased at a vintage store then. They were held up by a brown leather belt I had bought from a hobo (apologies, it still seems like the right word for the guy) on the side of the road heading down to Pittsboro in 1990 for the kingly sum of $1.

No doubt, there's some substance to what she says. But I hate shopping. What am I going to do about this, get in my car and go to the store? Not bloody likely.

Are our angels less better in a more connected world?

The Economist opened its first leader article this week by noting that about 750,000 people died in wars in the period from 2021-2024, marking a significant acceleration from the 1990s-2010s (note that the 1994 spike reflects the genocide of Tutsis by Hutu in Rwanda).

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/deaths-in-armed-conflicts-by-type?time=earliest..2024

Excluding Rwanda, the world experienced a period of great calm between the fall of the Iron Curtain and the accession of the era of global populist strongmen, first Putin then all of his imitators, including most obviously Trump. Hegseth's fetishistic embrace of war and lethality does not prophesy anything better. This marks a retreat from the key metric proposed by Stephen Pinker in The Better Angels of our Nature, that the decline in the incidence of death at the hands of another (he looped in homicide rates -- also improved over long time scales) was a core marker of societal progress. 

The rise in battle deaths and also coincides with the rise in power of the new strategic powers, the megatech companies within whose platforms (Blogspot for instance is part of Google) we live so much of our lives. It's probably worth reflecting on the extent to which the rise in arm conflict is facilitated by, correlated with and -- dare I suggest it -- marginally caused by the rise of these new strategic powers centers of what Ian Bremmer has termed our Technopolar world. Certainly since they have no dog in intra- and inter-state armed conflicts, they don't harm the hyperscalers. 

It's too late in the day for me to draw this line of thinking out too far. Ponder it.

Processing speed

Sunday has evolved into doubles day for our merry little clan, where Adam, Patrick and I host a rotating cast of neerdowells for our yuckfest of on-court fuckupery. Yesterday we got Seth, who along with Patrick made me and Adam look slightly silly.

Many years ago Graham got a neuropsych evaluation through TEACH, the pioneering autism research and treatment organization of which Victor Zinn had been a founder. Graham's results came back high and very high in a bunch of categories, but on the low end for "processing speed." As with many of his traits, I'm pretty sure this came from me. I've never been good at certain things. I remember having a hard time at Phillips when guys would stand around in circles telling circles and trading witticisms. Chris George and Crabill were on fire, but I'd be on the edge and something would come to me but I wouldn't be able to get it in. Or I'd wait and jam it in somewhere when there was a nanosecond of free air but the whole flow had moved on and the guys would look at me funny. Organized basketball, especially with a ref, was the same thing: the patterns would emerge too quickly and I could never really consistently anticipate what was going to happen next. Doubles feels the same. It happens so fast sometimes I can't get get my arms around it.

Soccer and singles are different. For the most part fewer things can happen, and the rhythms that emerge are pretty rule-bound. They suit me better than basketball and doubles.

No doubt I could overcome this with more practice and/or with going to clinics or even watching more YouTube videos about doubles strategy. But there are problems with all of those things, mostly related to efficiency and the limitations of the whole 24/7 thing. Who has time for all that when a hungry blog cries out in hunger?

A continuation

Just as I was firing up the old blog, I heard voices inside. Graham came home to sleep last night, after he and his housemates moved from last year's rental to this year's one, which is about a half a mile closer in to campus from last year's as the crow flies. It's actually quite close to where David Hall and I lived in 1989-90, when Marvin actually took up residence on the enclosed sun porch for a little while. That was fun.

In thinking about yesterday's theme of altering one's look for pragmatic reasons, having one's ego/presentation blunted as it were by the demands of others, it occurred to me that part of such pragmatic thinking and practice is that it is a component of thinking quite of quite specific others: one's family. Which is to say spouse and children. I wore a suit and tie for years to maximize my ability to earn money and I still kind of do. If I go to a wedding, funeral, church service, fundraiser, meeting with a prospect or client, whatever it is, I actively dial back ego and fall into compliance with broader norms, and partially it's to optimize my chances of getting revenue somewhere down the line or perhaps of calling up and asking someone if they might do an informational interview with one child or another. I've been doing a lot of that recently for Graham.

And in some sense even in our adolescence we were doing that when seeking out mates. Again, we were in training. Marxists would say that we were "reproducing the social means of production," or something like that. And they would not be wrong.

When I was at Yale it was the second or third inning of broad social acceptance of gay people and lots of people were out or experimenting with same-sex relationships. Straight people were sometimes referred to as breeders. I began to semi-ironically refer to myself as a "breeder" when talking to gay people. It was a good line.

Dressing for others

As Graham transitions from studenthood towards straight up adulting, I ponder what is the right cadence and pressure level at which to deliver messages to him about the transition. At times I am tempted to suggest that he think of every time he leaves the house to be a potential job interview. Not that he should put on a oxford shirt and khakis and real shoes, but maybe to dial back on the old t-shirts and gym shorts in favor of cargo shorts and short sleeve shirt just in case he runs into somebody who might be a potential employer. 

I know I had to think like that for a while in my career. Not really dress up but not wear my absolute worst shorts to the grocery store in case I ran into a client or prospect. I am past that now but it took a while.

Then there's the issue of the ladies. What if you're at the library or a cafe or wherever you want to look not bad because... In some ways the fact that we were almost always seeking mates when we weren't in couples back in the day prepared us for later in life, when we had to figure out where to array ourselves vis-a-vis corporate norms to earn a living.  

A precious few rock and rollers and other artist types got to say fuck it all and just do whatever and we always idolized them for their freedom.

Does this do violence to our individuality and self-expression, as has been a theme of lots of cultural production down through the years? Yeah, maybe. But then again, that's life.

How it should work

I am still very much in the adjustment phase of getting up and getting to the office by 9, or 9ish, technically. And, frankly, to having someone in my office when I get there. The former is largely a burden though I see the benefits, the latter almost entirely a joy, though some facets of my productivity suffer a little. For instance, my blog.

A few weeks before at the spring musical extravaganza of the Prime Time Players, my mom's theater troupe, at intermission time a guy came up to me. It was Henry (not his actual name), a Chinese friend of one of our former partners who is a biotech entrepreneur but also an avid ping pong player (though he might prefer I call it table tennis). There's a lot of this sport played at the Seymour Center by people of a wide variety of ethnicities. In the my first summer of work for Red Reef Advisors, the partner informed my that we were going to bring in Henry's son Ted (a Duke student) as an intern. Not being used to having interns, I wasn't altogether delighted by this but what was I gonna do?

So Ted came in most days and sat with me at the office, and as I was doing stuff I explained to him what I was doing, and in the course of so doing he got a solid basic grounding in a lot of principles of finance. Asset allocation and location. The difference between capital gains and ordinary income tax. The logic of tax deferral in a person's lifetime earning's arc. These are the kinds of things that come up quickly. Turned out the kid learned a lot and found the internship valuable.

Flash back to the Seymour Center. Henry, who was playing ping pong, comes up to me and says hello and tells me he has some financial questions. "I have a financial advisor, but I'd like to call you to discuss some issues." I gave him my card.

This is how things are supposed to work. Maybe he'll be a client soon.

The Lack of Light

On my birthday a month and change back this 2022 novel (English translation 2025) by Nino Haratischwili arrived wrapped under my birthday tree. Apparently it had been on my Amazon list, where it likely landed after being on the Economist list of best books of the year or something like that. Honestly I don't remember. 

Clocking in at 700 pages and change, one of its many cover blurbs likens it to Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan series. Honestly that may be a stretch, but it was still quite solid. 

The Lack of Light chronicles the trajectory of post-Soviet Georgia and Tbilisi through the prism of four female friends who grew up around one apartment building and its courtyard. In my mind's eye it's a Stalinka, a sturdy building from around WWII but before the dawn of the shoddy neo-modernist buildings which sprouted all over Eastern Europe like shitty quadrangular mushrooms from the 60s forward.

There's a lot of drama around civil war, love, internecine gang wars in which the four protagonists' brothers are engaged, art etc. It's solid and worth reading, if ultimately as much Oprah as Ferrante. Sadly, there are no really compelling description of khachapuri or other delicious Georgian foods. Good enough that I may check out the author's other books, but I won't sprint out and grab them.

Leaning in to AI

The invited speaker at Graham's UNC Econ graduation did a great job. He himself was a UNC Econ grad who had gone on to be successful in business and he looked and fit the part. Short haircut, affable, confident. He kept it short and sweet, with three basic points. One of them was about presentations (tell them what you're going to tell them, then tell it to them, then conclude by telling them again). Sad but true.

Point 2 was that AI's gonna be big so the grads should lean in to it. On the one hand, it's hard to argue that. I keep meaning to do it. But I already have so much to do and so much that's not getting done. My blog for instance. Books to read. People to talk to, esp phone calls that don't get made. Tennis lessons I should be taking. Exercises I should be doing to strengthen my aging body. Little crap that needs to get done around the hose. So I never do it.

Should Graham (and Natalie)? Well yes, kind of, maybe. But part of me believes that the whole world is going to be leaning in to AI and maybe we should be leaning in to people to counterbalance all that AI leaning. People are what we should ultimately be caring about. (remember, the planet itself will be here long after we are gone and is more or less indifferent to our presence, on a geological time scale).

I forget what the guy's third point was but remembering 2 of 3 is far from bad.

Power law in the new new economy

As the newest models of AI enable hackers to run more and more effective models against corporate AI at scale with lower headcount and higher possibilities of payout, questions of values and alignment all up and down society become ever more important. People need to believe in what they are doing and there has to be an ethical grounding to their activities for a substantial chunk of the most talented to wish to forego the very largest paydays, work for a salary and pay taxes. The system has to seem to work for a lot of people for us to want to participate.

With Trump continuing to substantially run roughshod over most of government (witness this week's $1.776 billion "anti-weaponization" settlement from the IRS) and our corporate titans ever more untethered from reality (witness soon-to-IPO SpaceX's corporate structure which gives unprecedented power to Musk, and even the S&P 500 bending over backwards to revise its rules to include the new IPOs [OpenAI and Anthropic too]), we are not encouraging abidance with rules, norms or values. Raw power is in ascendance.

Something will break, and it won't be pretty.

Some reflections on local fauna

I wonder where we are in the long-predicted bird-pocalypse. Out on the porch in the mornings these days I hear a variety of birdsong.

Some light Googling tells me that the declines in bird populations across America continue. 2.9 billion birds gone since 1970, says the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, a loss of 1 bird in 4. I suppose we shouldn't be shocked given that there are a lot more humans and a lot more built environment in which we live. 

So they have less environment in which to live. It sounds bad, but maybe it's not all bad. We have more deer living everywhere, but they're skinny little things and it doesn't look like they're having much fun as they munch through everything they can see.

Interestingly, Mary has been seeing some mink in our yard recently. Given that mink love to eat bunnies and we haven't seen many bunnies this year, Mary has hypothesized that the mink have gobbled up the bunnies and taken over their dens. Good of them to do that away from our curious but squeamish human eyes.

Summer residence

Just now I find myself back out on our screened in porch, looking out at the lake. I posted a picture of it back in April. It looks much the same now. Since the pandemic I have spent as much time out here on the porch as I can during the warmer months. Right now is the key window: we are past peak pollen season (I think! famous last words) but before peak heat.

There's still a tablecloth on the picnic table out here left over from our party we had for Graham's graduation last Saturday. It didn't end up being that many people: 15 or so including family plus a few of Graham's friends plus their family members. But that turned out to be a really nice size, plus the weather was perfect.

In the lead up to the party I had gone out to pick up a couple of bags of ice to throw in the cooler with drinks. My phone rang. It was Mary. "Are you close to the farmer's market, can you pick up flowers?" I had to make a U turn so I gave her a good snarl and let her know what an unthinkable imposition it was. Then I went to the market and bought some really lovely flowers. When I got back home I presented them to her with dulcet tones, "here you are, darling?" and she laughed.

It has been a beautiful thing over the years to get to the point where we can do this: get really snippy with one another in the lead up to parties as we stress out over getting things right, then just drop it all because we know by now that it's all part of our particular petit bourgeois kabuki.

Continued adjustment

I continue to adjust the rhythms of my life to the addition of my new understudy/coworker, Amanda. For example, she gets in at 9 most days, so I have to do the same. She leaves at 2 to meet the school bus and have a WFH afternoon and I want to max out the utility of face time.

Right now there's the additional complication of the fact that D, a neighbor guy who can do almost anything (details to follow) who is renovating our two downstairs bathrooms, which have remained more or less as they were when we moved in to the house in 1978 or so, so in my mind they are just perfect. Mary, however, could not disagree more strongly, and she is at long last basking in the glory of justice. Below is the main hall bathroom, once more for posterity.

So I am trying to get out of the house by 8:30, which takes me back to days of yore. It also gets me in to the office while the breakfasts are still out, offering me an opportunity to harvest food and preserve it for later.

Standing on its own

Just went through Graham's graduation from UNC. A lovely weekend, but one populated with an awful lot of speeches. A few reflections.

First and foremost, there were all too many references, direct and obligue ("we wear the RIGHT shade of blue") to Duke. Defining ones self by comparison to others is an inherently self-denigrating and slovenly thing to do. UNC needs to be who it is and not worry about other institutions. 

Instead of defining ourselves in terms of Duke, we might do better by looking at positive examples of what the university should be. It was telling (and to his credit, I might add) that only one person thought to invoke Dean Smith, Eric Church, the apparently famous country singer who gave the main address at the big ceremony at Kenan Stadium. In three ceremonies (Friday night for the History and other departments, Saturday night the big one, and Sunday morning for Econ students), nobody thought to invoke Frank Porter Graham, Bill Friday, or any other of the university's historic north stars. Big miss.

About Eric Church, he spoke well but I wasn't impressed with his guitar-playing or song-writing. He sang well.

I was very unimpressed by the fact that the university somehow granted only him an honorary degree. Typically it confers five or so of them. He was the only good person or North Carolinian that could be found? It seems there is a defined process for nominating and advancing candidates for degrees. Somehow I tend to doubt that a country singer who has raised some money was the only good candidate who could be found. This looks all too much like the Board of Governors saying to the faculty and the rest of the community: fuck you, we're in charge.

A few words about Lee Roberts, current Chancellor and a Duke grad. He came across as a total stiffy. He said "Go Heels" with all the enthusiasm of the McDonalds CEO biting into that Big Mac. The only time he seemed genuine was when he was introducing Eric Church, whom he noted was "a real North Carolinian," unlike Roberts, who grew up in DC. Roberts does not belong at the helm of a major university.

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 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. 

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."