Eulogy for David

Good morning, I’m C......T....., the son of Joan Ontjes, David’s wife.

                                                       

By 2004, plain old dating and Match.com had not produced the perfect -- let alone the right – guy for Mom. So when my sister Leslie and I heard that she had met this doctor fellow David Ontjes, whose kids we knew from junior high and high school, we were intrigued. That spring my wife Mary and I came down to NC for an event, bringing our newborn son Graham. We didn’t yet know that Graham was allergic to milk. So we left him with mom, David and a bottle and headed out for the evening. We got home around midnight and found that Graham had thrown up his milk all over David, who had nonetheless carried on dutifully dandling and rocking him around to keep him calm.

At that point in time, we knew he was a keeper.  But Mom and David weren’t even “going steady”. They had been on a number of dates, but David kept saying that he was “seeing other people.” Mom eventually said to him, “Well so am I and, if you don’t decide quickly, I may not be an option.”  A couple of days later, David invited her over for a glass of wine. Mom expected him to break up with her. When she got there, David asked her to stay for dinner, and she agreed. Light conversation continued. Finally, after dinner, David, a little nervous, got down to business, saying “I just can’t date two people at the same time. Would you like to date me exclusively?” She said yes, and 13 wonderful years began.

In 2006 they were married here at University Presbyterian. Because they were married late in life, David and mom knew that, according to standard protocol, they wouldn’t have as many anniversaries as they would like. So they crafted a system of 5 anniversaries

1.    First date

2.    Going steady

3.    First trip

4.    Engagement

5.    Wedding

And so they celebrated some 50-odd anniversaries together. And David, frugal though he may have been, even agreed to go to nice restaurants every time.

David and Mom did a lot of fun things together: they kayaked together, and they biked up and down the East Coast and in Europe. In fact, they were so photogenic a couple that their smiling faces graced the cover of the catalog for VBT Bicycling tours.

They performed together in a variety groups, including the choral group Voices, and the musical comedy company the Prime Time Players. Both of them really loved singing, so I know this brought a lot of joy to each of them. Check out the videos at the reception.

David was a wonderful presence in the lives of our children. He had great trips with them to places like Lake Matamuskeet and the Virginia Creeper trail. He genuinely loved to share entirely age-appropriate TV shows with them. David and Graham spent many happy hours together watching “Popeye” and David’s personal favorite, “Spongebob Squarepants.”

David was a fine presence at the table. He loved to make waffles and to grill, and was always a hearty consumer of whatever was served, especially dessert and chocolate. Leslie’s son Daniel marveled at the number of Dove chocolates he could snarf down. In dinner table conversations, he provided our typically liberal Chapel Hill family with a valuable conservative counterpoint. He was also fond of dredging up tales of yore of dubious veracity, like a fishing tale he retold several times over one weekend, in which the fish he caught grew in each retelling, from a guppy on Friday to a monstrous hundred-pounder by Sunday dinner.

The long and short of it is that, over these thirteen years, David grew to be a full-fledged member of our family, from a minnow to a scale-breaking prize winner.  We will all miss him dearly.

A long, full week

It has been a long, full week. As some of you know, my mom's husband, David Ontjes, passed away. I'll post the eulogy I wrote for him as evidence that I have not fallen down entirely in my scribal duties to Being.  As if Being gave a fuck.

Since Mary has been reading the New York Times on her laptop, even on Sunday mornings, just in case He Who Must Not Be Named and his lunatic chronies in the White House have done something earth-shattering overnight, I have been reading the front page on sundays once I finish up the sports section, instead of going straight to Week in Review.

There is a lot of stuff on the front page.

This week there's an article about Google's very successful efforts to take over the education market. Part of the thrust has been to nudge students to use online sharing tools like Google docs to learn to collaborate better, as part of an overall Zeitgeist shift away from the mastery of arcane facts and methods towards learning to work as teams.  Here's what one Google exec says:  "I cannot answer for them what they are going to do with the quadratic equation. I don't know why they are learning that. And I don't know why they can't ask Google for the answer if the answer is right there."

My guess is, that if kids don't learn the quadratic equation, they ain't getting no jobs at Google. By and large. Certainly not as programmers. Fundamentally, kids need to be pushed to master challenging intellectual material both to learn to think and to master complexity. Period.

The fact that they aren't forced to memorize multiplication tables, to develop a basic proficiency with numbers, is scandalous. How are they going to be able to estimate things and, most practically, know if they are getting ripped off if they can't work with numbers in their heads?

Morven, NC

Thursday took me down to Columbia, SC.  Google Maps said it would be 3:36 by interstate, or 3:56 by smaller roads. That was an easy choice. Somewhere along Rte 1 south of Sanford, my phone said that Rte 1 and some other backroads route would be about the same. I took the road lesser traveled, per Sergei and Larry.

Driving along state road 145 towards the South Carolina border, there was a sign on a tree, featuring a fetching, seemingly hand-painted picture of a sandwich. "Cheese Steak, 1 mile on right." It was speaking my language, though sadly I had lunch plans in Columbia with Jack Pringle so I couldn't really investigate as I would have liked to. You know what I mean.

But one mile passed, and there was no sign of a cheese steak. Then two miles. I began to think it was some sort of cruel joke, or that somehow the sign had outlived its signified. Finally after three or fout, I came into the town of Morven, NC. The old main block of downtown was more forelorn than most by a degree: every business was shut down. But then, on the right, I saw it: Mama Noi's, featuring Philly Cheese Steak, Hamburgers, Fresh Pizza, and Fresh Hot Subs. What's not to like?

And then it was over. I passed through the south end of Morven. An African-American woman was out in her yard. I waved to her. She waved back.

All the fish in the ocean

"Foreigners complain about African migrants coming to their countries, but they have no problem coming to our waters and stealing all our fish."  Moustapha Balde, 22, Senegal in this article in the New York Times.

Basically the idea of this story is that China's fishing fleets -- deeply subsidized by the government -- are putting intense pressure on the ocean's stock of fish. This on top of the already sufficient hunger of affluent populations in "the developed world", which we already knew were doing this.

A couple of weeks back in the Economist there was this piece on pressure to fish down to the Mesopelagic layer of the ocean, where a bunch of tiny wierd-looking creatures that we've never tapped into live. They are part of the oceanic food chain, and taking them for humans will disrupt it further, but just as importantly they are part of the cycle of by which the oceans sequester carbon, so that harvesting them will further exacerbate global warming.

All of which led me to thank Mary, as I don't always do, for continuing to nudge us in the direction of a more plant-based diet. Beans, vegetables, lentils, whole grains. Ughh. It is honestly hard to get excited about it, unless I can slather it in melted cheese. But I know that it is right from a sustainability perspective.

Yield, supply chain, and hunger

On Wednesday I was at an event sponsored by the AgBioTech team at the NC BioTech Center, and there was a lot of discussion of food insecurity in the world. As agriculture vendors, the speakers were very focused on food production as the bottleneck that causes food insecurity, which in turn leads to people dying of hunger. 

But spoilage and waste are huge issues in getting food to people.  We have all seen or read about how much food gets wasted in America because of portion sizes, etc. Supply chain inefficiencies are huge issues too, check out this article on the path of an onion from grower to end user in India from The Economist. If supply chains could be made more efficient in the developing world, more food would make it from farm to mouth.

But an awful lot of jobs and ways of human interaction would be disrupted too. We have lost a lot of that in the West, and indulge in nostalgia by going to farmer's markets and buying a few choice things to get "back in touch with the land," etc. In Marxist terms, we attempt to de-reify a few commodities, and we feel good about it.

Meanwhile Amazon eats the world, and it's so hard to fight it. It's so convenient to order everything from there.

Anyway, back to the food question. At the highest level, from a capital allocation perspective, we have to ask ourselves whether, if food insecurity is the big issue, it is better to focus on production or distribution and supply chain management. A lot of which revolves around building better roads and/or rail as well as ports in the developing world.

Bus routes

Because it had been raining for something vaguely like forever, I went and sat at the bus stop with Natalie and a friend this morning. There I learned that the bus often comes half an hour late and just barely gets them to school on time.

They also said that, on the first day of school, when the other girl there accidentally got on the bus headed to the middle school, that the bus driver didn't even know how to get to the correct middle school and the students had to give her directions.

An outrage! Well, actually, it's just a natural outgrowth of labor and real estate markets. It has gotten so expensive to live anywhere in Chapel Hill that no bus drivers can afford to live there. In fact, I was having breakfast with a judge the previous morning and I learned from her that there were only two Chapel Hill police officers who lived in town:  the police chief and her husband, who could afford to because she was an attorney in private practice before being elected to her judge position.

And bus drivers don't even get paid as well as cops. In fact, Chapel Hill is apparently having difficulty recruiting bus drivers.

So there you have it. Labor markets.

The situation is at least in some regards better than it was when I was in high school, when high school students could drive buses, and they were often stoned. Or, at least, that's what they told me 25 years after the fact.

My book?

In recent week I've had encouraging feedback from interesting directions. A career counselor type suggested I should be a speaking nationally on some topic on which I had expertise, A professor at Stanford whose class I had guested in via Skype likened my perspective to that of a public intellectual and said I should have my own podcast. It's all very flattering.

But what should I focus on?  I have to spend a lot of time keeping up with client stuff, details of people's lives, and it's fulfilling in its own way. I'm reading all the time, and broadly, and that has its own joys. I like being out in the streets talking to people, to a degree, though I do get worn out by it and also by the very breadth of what I'm exposed to.

Again, where to focus to build a real brand? That's the question.

Return to the creek

Towards the end of my run I dipped into the forebay area where North and South Lake Shore come together. It's hard for me to believe I didn't blog about it a month or so ago when we were working on it. In short, we had to drop the level of the lake about 2.5 feet (by opening some valves at the base of the dam using a ridiculous 14 foot fork which we poke around till we hit metal). Then we had to bust up all these places where the creek between the forebay at the lake was plugged up, largely by hard-working beavers who just put all kinds of shit in the creek.

The work was cold and filthy and disgusting. One day I lost my wedding band while I was digging down into the muck with my arms and basically throwing bunches of branches up on shore.

It was, in short, awesome. And by hook or by crook, we got the water in the creek to flow and lowered the water level in the forebay significantly -- we literally drained a swamp -- so a contractor could bring in heavy equipment and dig out 10 foot tall, 50 foot long pile of muck, which was deposited alongside the forebay.

So, a month and change later, today, that is, I stopped in to see how things were going with the creek.

Astonishingly, all of our hard and good work is pretty much a thing of the past. The swamp was no longer drained. The creek was barely flowing. It seemed in one place that a beaver had been back starting to build up a dam, being a beaver, in short. In one place we had brought in a mini-backhoe to help us unplug a particular plugged up spot in the creek, and there had been heavy and visible treadmarks.  No more. They are filled in with grass.

Overall, this being Earth Day, I was reminded of how utterly indifferent nature is in the end about our presence. It could give a flying fuck. It will be just fine when we are gone. We needn't worry at all about the planet.

I thought back to McPhee's The Pine Barrens, which I just read, where he details all kinds of settlements from the 18th and 19th centuries back in the Barrens, of which scarcely a trace remains. Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.

Me and the park

Yesterday morning I was headed to an event at the Frontier, a space owned by the RTP foundation on 54 between Davis and Alexander.  I have been there many times before, but somehow I can never quite get it straight in my head where it is.

Partially this is because of the placelessness of the park, all the glass boxes set back behind trees off of 45 mph roads and highways.

Partially it is because I have become so dependent on Google Maps for everything and somehow my brain just doesn't internalize space and directions the way it used to. Is it because dominion over this subject matter has become less compelling to my ego?

Partially it is because I was spaced out, listening to a book in the car (Abundance, by Steven Kotler and Peter Diamandis).

In any case, I got off 40 onto Davis and was in the left turn lane, about to head towards Miami Blvd, when I realized I needed to turn right to go towards Alexander Drive.  I should have turned left and gone up and hung a u-ey, instead I backed up, put on my right turn signal, and made my way across the lanes to make a right turn thanks to the very kind people in the lanes in the middle.  It was a silly thing to do, really rather irresponsible, as close as it was to 9 am.

Thankfully, no one was hurt.

Taking it all in

It is unreasonable to expect that anyone should read everything and be on top of everything pertaining to one's field, yet that is in some sense the expectation I put on myself. I have stacks and stacks of books, am managing a constant flow of periodicals through the house and links coming through my social media feeds, I know that I can't read it all. Yet somehow I feel like I'm supposed to.

I have internalized pretty good discipline with regard to the New Yorker over the decades. I have recognized that I will never even begin to keep up with it, and that to try basically impoverishes me via a steady diet of fast casual narrative, optimized for cocktail party chit chat, so basically read very little of it. Though I do let it pile up and then go through the piles. This weekend I recycled maybe 20 of them.

Same with the New York Times magazine, only more so. I just rarely read it, and rarely miss it.

This year for my birthday Mary asked if I had updated my Amazon list. Half paying attention, I grunted yes, meaning to go back and pare it down and prioritize it. Then I forgot. For my birthday she bought me some 8 books from the list, some of which I would have moved to the "business books" list had I made the time to look at my list, instead of watching endless Federer and Messi videos on YouTube before going to bed, or learning to strum new songs on my guitar.

So now I have a stack of even more books that I only kind of want. Though, honestly, when I turn my head and look at them, they look pretty good, and I know there is much to learn from them.

Sales gurus would say that even sitting around thinking about what I should be reading is a means of avoidance of going out and talking to people and learning what they need, that that would be more instrumental in helping me build my business. And there is some truth in that. But it is also true that I am building my product, one page at a time. And it's working.

Birthday, still recovering

On Friday I turned 51. It was most welcome for my birthday to coincide with Good Friday, which was most opportunely a market holiday, so I have been able to really milk this birthday thing all weekend.

It's a good thing too, as I was dead tired and sick after the two weeks of traveling for college trips and then again back to New York last weekend, I have been very happy to just lie around and do nothing. And mostly have few thoughts. I am still trying to find traction in a new book since I worked through the Wallander.

In fact, I went up to the Bookshop on Franklin, whose upcoming disappearance I am bemoaning almost somatically, and bought up all of the Wallander books we didn't have, since Mary is getting into them too. I even bought two copies of one book by accident, and several books by Mankell that don't have Wallander as hero. I hope they don't suck. I was sort of in a hurry to get home for dinner.

While at the Bookshop I placed a hold on one of the bookshelves there. Mary doesn't think they are very nice, but that place has been a big part of my life and I will have one of those bookshelves up here in my office, though I'm pretty sure we will have to bring it in through the window, since there's no way that it's gonna fit round the corner at the top of the stairs.

OK. It is now time to get the Easter baskets from the attic and put jelly beans in them.  Graham informed me that the "sibling rivalry Easter egg hunt is the only thing that makes Easter special."  So we gotta do that.

Meanwhile, an owl has alighted on a branch just outside the window of my office up here. It seems to have just swooped down to the ground and grabbed some sort of snack, perhaps a vole. Mary is now checking it out.

If you can go home again

For the first time in twenty years, I saw my friend Katya yesterday.  She hails from Kiev, Ukraine, but then was educated in Tartu, Estonia. She came to New York on a Fulbright in '94, and I was flattered to learn that she had heard of me from people I had met the summer before in Kazan'. We ended up hanging out some in '97-'98 in Moscow, and she memorably took excellent care of Mary one day when we went on a boating expedition to some island somewhere up the Moscow River somewhere.

So we had seen pix on Facebook, and were kind of generally up to date on the highlights of one another's lives. Children. Her move to Berlin with husband Tobias and her winning of the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize for a book she had written in German, of all things. In my mind, this all seemed pretty swank.

I told her how, being home in North Carolina, I was able to hang out with people I had known since I had been five, six, seven years of old, and she became rather melancholy. This rootless cosmopolitanism, she explained, is anything but glamorous. That Kiev is a beautiful town, how it had been larger than Paris in the 11th century, but that it was right at the crossroads of too many historical forces. How, the day Russia had invaded Crimea, she had stood in a store in Berlin with a woman from St Petersburg and they had both broken into tears, because they were from the same country, after all, it just didn't exist anymore.

It occurred to me that my family has not been forced to move anywhere for a long time. We have been in the Piedmont since before the Revolution, and though I went away, I came back. In this regard I am extremely lucky, and it is an effect of other people in my family scrimping and saving and earning and squirrelling, that I can.

Over the course of history, sometimes people are fortunate and can put down roots. At other times, they must move. In post-war America, it seemed like we pretty much had things squared away, and people could nestle in, mine coal, work in factories, buy trucks, watch football, bake cookies, what have you. It seemed like it was other people that had to move. At least since the Depression and the Dust Bowl. Otherwise, it was a voluntary thing to do, an option, albeit one that the higher-earning portion of the population understood was what one did to move forward.

These days, not so much. The Trump electorate is effectively asking the government to vouchsafe their ability to rest in place. They will be disappointed.

Tips by Venmo, or something like that

Flew into Newark this morning. At the airport, I wasn't in a rush, and my old black boots have a few cracks in the leather, and I knew it was gonna be damp again in the Northeast (again 😡), so I stopped to have my shoes shined and tended to.  A little shoe spa.

Turned out, my shine professional also had NC roots, and was planning to head down to Charlotte via Amtrak tomorrow to see his 91-year old father, who wasn't doing well. He needed to make another $120 today over 15 hours to get the cash needed for his ticket, and was concerned the inclement weather would mess with his volume and therefore revenue. He treated my shoes good, so I gave him a $3 tip on a $7 shine. He mighta fed me a story, but it sounded good and was convincing, and my shoes look great.

I was rather hungry, having had only a banana at RDU (where, by the way, I ran into Rhett Autry, whom I hadn't seen in 30-odd years. She also got a banana with her coffee). So I went to Wendy's, the best option. There the very friendly associate upsold me from the Artisan Breakfast Sandwich to a Panini. Good work! It was OK.

The big difference between the two transactions was I couldn't tip her.

Now, as the economy is hollowed out, as manufacturing is outsourced and then 3D printed away, as Amazon destroys dry goods retail, increasingly only service jobs will be left. And, as the advantages of larger corporations play out, there will be fewer entrepreneurs, presuming that people continue to vote with their wallets for cheaper options. So the share of people working in fast food etc. contexts will rise.

Service will continue to be an important component of this world, but we will be unable to pay for it, and thereby incentivize its thoughtful and chearful delivery and improvement.  But it would be easy enough, in the age of platforms like Venmo, to shift this a little. Why shouldn't I be able to tip the woman at Wendy's a little if I like her? Why couldn't she have a button with a QR code that I could scan and shoot a tip to? If she's a team player, we could imagine that she might like to pool her tips and pass fractions of them to teammates, as is the culture of restaurants with wait staff. This would incentivize not just good individual instances of service, but attempts to improve service.

It would be difficult to integrate this into a top-down, hierarchical management framework.  In a sense it would involve the disintermediation of management. But it would certainly be interesting, and it should be tried.

It would be good, as well, if an analog to the QR code could be found that would let one do the same thing for call center workers, It probably exists, I just can't think of it right now.

I think we all at some level understand that the progressive automation and granularization of large value chains debases human labor, but that the people doing the work are on balance good people trying to get by. The more we can find ways to individually reward the people who provide us with services, the better.

BTW, I bet someone is already working on this.

The first person

Just finished Elena Ferrante's My Brilliant Friend. Much has been written about it, I won't dive deep now, a fine book.

What to read next? I can't read book two in Ferrante's series, because I don't have it. In principal I should probably start reading something non-fictiony and edifying. But it is rainy, I am sick, and I have been borne on the wave of an engaging first person narrator for some time now, so I will continue with that, in the form of a new Wallander novel. Back to it!

Reflections of the prior

I remember when, back in '86, after I had discovered there was this thing called literary theory that all the self-respecting intellectuals were studying, I was informed by my girlfriend Hilary that I had to take Lit 130 with Andrzej Warminski and Kevin Newmark. Somewhere in there we read Gerard de Nerval's Daughters of Fire, and I remember that Newmark, who I think led discussion of this book, made the point that the protagonist, as he loved women over the course of his life, always found himself trying to recapture the image and sensation of his first love. He made some very high-falutin theoretical point about this, about how this was the basis of knowledge or experience or something, how we are always already removed from experience in itself, working our way back to some ideal.

It seemed deep.

And it is, kinda, but I think that the significance is really less epistemological than just experiential. Of course we have nostalgia for the past, for moments of extraordinary ripeness and fullness, and the fact that our hormones are raging and eyes are being opened by new experiences during our college years make it only natural that we try to recreate them for ourselves... and our children.

Somehow I was reminded of this when, after touring Swarthmore today and having a little bite to eat, we had to dip into the college bookstore to find something for Natalie to read because she had finished the book she had started the day before. There weren't really many obvious young adult candidates, but since she had just read another Jane Austen novel earlier in the trip it seemed to me that Jhumpa Lahiri's new novel might be something she might like. So we snapped that up, and I'll be damned if, by the time we touched down at RDU three hours and change later, she wasn't a hundred pages into it.

It occurred to me that I have been raising the kind of young woman who I might have gone out with in college -- smart, positive, conscientious, comfortable in her own skin if somewhat unnecessarily shy -- if I hadn't been out there trying to be CLARK TROY, DAMNIT, and thereby in need of women with a little more... projection.

In any case, I'm very proud of her. She will make someone happy one day, first and foremost, herself, one hopes.

Coming to a close

And so, it is nearly done. BU, Northeastern, Harvard, Tufts, Smith, Amherst, Wesleyan, Yale, Bryn Mawr, Penn. There remains only Swarthmore in the morning.

Though they have run together, they remain surprisingly distinct, and I think Natalie retains relatively clear impressions of them. Often on trips like this I have deep thoughts. This time, not so much, instead, it has been an orgy of logistics, getting from here to there, eating, sleeping, drying off after standing in cold rain while listening to some perky sophomore prattle on about the meal plan or the honor code. It was all crowned by a masterful transition, stepping off the New Haven train at 6:22 at Grand Central, then settling into our seats on the 6:39 out of Penn Station to Princeton. That took perfect execution, and subways doing what they do at rush hour.

Through it all, Natalie has maintained characteristic good spirits. Just today, she has read through maybe 250 pages of some book she can't seem to put down, reading even when I could not restrain myself from watching Coming to America on the Family Channel for, I don't know, the 10th time, because it is such a perfect little film.

She will go far.

The lovely grind

In New England, seeing colleges with Natalie. A weird exercise in joyous anticipation and anxiety, self-judgment and letting go, caloric indulgence and walking a lot. Like going to art museums on the calves, but cubed.

Must hustle now. We are due in Cambridge shortly.

Bezos and the millions of empty chairs

Jeff Bezos famously insists that there be an empty chair at all conference tables to remind Amazon employees of the missing person: the customer.  Which is swell.

Another independent local store announced it was closing this week, a toy store, owned by the family of a friend. Meanwhile a new Chipotle rises across just across 15-501 from a new CVS, which is itself near a longtime pub that closed not long ago, really the only watering hole on this side of town. Other new chains are coming in soon, you can tell from the outlines of the buildings going up. Great.

Meanwhile Anne Case and Angus Deaton released new research this week building on the research they published in 2015 demonstrating that mortality amongst white people, especially related to suicide, substance abuse, and mental health, continues to rise.

I don't want to pose a causal relationship between the corporatization and scaling up of retail and services represented by Amazon and chains and the hollowing out of the middle class, but there is a correlation, and I think the former is a factor in the latter. The continual destruction of the merchant class, for one thing, pulls people out of the public sphere in which they used to interact as peers, as opposed to seeming lords and minions.

In fact, the corporate class of the top 2 to 3 income deciles are squeezed themselves, working their butts off to earn the dollars it takes to buy the houses, cars, and, most importantly, college educations that form the bulwarks of fortress upper middle. But is not necessarily always apparent, save for when we are self-righteous and glued to our phones, airports and interstates like zombies.

At some point in time, Bezos's empty chair merges into Eastwood's.

Robot caregivers

Listening to Diamandis and Kotler's "Abundance" in the car. They were just talking about how AI would let robots take better care of old people. It seems to me that fulfilling the aged and infirm's basic functions is not the issue. It is having someone there to love, care, and be present for them (see Gawande). To the extent that robots can feed and clean and allow family members to do the important stuff, it's good. Otherwise the technology is just a way to allay guilt of not being there for loved ones.

Making it in New York

Somewhere over the weekend I read something about making it in New York, and how doing so really allows one to prove to onesself that one is capable, blah blah blah. How hard it is, and therefore what an accomplishment it is.

This is all true, in a sense. But it is ultimately a false god, and this mentality drives all too many people to grind themselves themselves to parch at its alter.

I am reminded of a scene from some movie about a young actress in LA, beautiful, slim, who gets out of bed with her lover and stands in front of a mirror and regards her body critically, then asks of her lover: "I look OK, right?" or "Do I seem fat to you?"

The soil is indifferent to where you made it, as is whatever maker might stand in judgment over us. Can you imagine God going "Well, he was kind of an asshole, but New York is a dog-eat-dog kinda place, so I'm gonna cut him some slack?" Doubtful.

Much better to drive yourself less and sleep better.

A good weekend

Usually I would have blogged on Saturday, when I was feeling deep. But that got run over.

It was a good, if busy weekend. Friday night Natalie and I went to Twelfth Night at Playmakers'.  The show was good, if long. On the way in I was reminded of how, between college and grad school, mom would come with me to movies out at the Chelsea, whatever ridiculous art film I wanted to go to, she would take me to, mostly to spend time with me, I'm sure. She often fell asleep during the movie, and who could blame her? I have no recollection of any of the films, but I'm sure they were slow and pretentious, by and large, and she was working hard to earn money. I told Natalie about this on the way in and, despite the Diet Coke we shared before the show, I did find myself about to doze off a little in there. But it was fun.

Then, on Saturday, soccer. Then mom told me she had some salmon for me, so I went and got that, and therefore bagels to eat it with. Then I started making some headway into Elena Ferrante in the afternoon, but took time to push through Buffett's 1996 shareholder letter.

Today, tennis, where I played not so well. Then more salmon, and a nap, and Ferrante, and taxes.

Then I took Graham and a friend to a sports bar to watch Carolina play Arkansas, and we barely pulled it out.  We were doing a lot of triangular, two-handed high-fiving, and ate an enormous chocolate chip cookie. Carolina pulled it out.

And now, back to Ferrante, whose groove I am catching.

Abundance

I have been listening to the 2012 book Abundance: The Future is Better Than You Think, by Peter Diamandis in the car recently.  Markus suggested it to me over lunch not too long ago, and I had heard of it before.

It's a good book, pretty heavily geeked out, draws on a lot of strands in contemporary thought (Matthew Ridley, Hans Rosling, Daniel Kahneman, blah blah blah) to argue that we have what we need to provide for everybody on the planet.

Then somewhere in there, he lists out 8 key themes that lead us to the possibility of abundance, how they were the disciplines represented in the Singularity University that one of the authors was part of founding, and that the rest of the book will be devoted to them. They were all techno-oriented, and they all made sense, but I forgot what they were between the car and coming into the building to work.

Because the point is, that though we have the tools to make the future better, our ability to do so is severely constrained by our ability to get the world to agree on what it is we should be doing.  I am reminded of the beginning of Kierkegaarde's Fear and Trembling, where he basically says there is no progress in ethics, that we all begin at the beginning in each lifetime, each consciousness. And he is right.

Which by no means makes me a pessimist. There was a video circulated on Facebook recently of a kid at McDonalds working the drive-through window who, upon noticing that the woman who had just pulled through was having some sort of health emergency as her car drifted past the window, vaulted through the window, assessed the situation, rushed back inside, found someone who could do CPR, and saved the woman's life. There were two kids in the back of the car, I should note. Or there was the story in the Washington Post last week about an African-American nurse practitioner working in a clinic in a small town in West Virginia, tending to a bunch of white Trump voters who had healthcare due to Medicaid expansion made possible by Obamacare. At the end of an exhausting day, she rested in her chair and prayed for President Trump. Crazy stuff,  but beautiful, and these are the things that give us hope, as much as any technoutopian strands of thought. Both are needed for hope.

The fundamental problem then is - again - alignment.  Getting everybody on the same page, more or less. Or, maybe, coming to understand that we are all kinda there already.

Sister Schools?

Lunched yesterday with a nice young CPA from Hyderabad (by way of Australia, Canada, Boston) recently settled in Morrisville. Having people like that move to the Triangle and to America is a good thing. At the same time, there is truth to the "bubble" meme, i.e. coastal elites are cut off from parts of the county that are hurting. The concept of "sister cities" around the world was once popular. Today, why not have "sister cities" or even "sister schools" that are closer? Have affluent public schools develop relationships with specific, less-fortunate schools not so geographically distant. Have affluent PTAs raise money for them, I know there are downsides (seeming patronizing, exciting envy, etc.) but might there not be value? 

The tyranny of afternoon coffee

Both Mary and I have gotten in the habit of drinking a little coffee in the middle of the afternoon. Which is great, so long as we don't go too late.  The problem is that figuring how to space out lunch, exercise, and other stuff we need to do gets complicated, because we don't want to push the coffee back too late in the day, lest it mess with our sleep schedules, which are themselves rather imperfect.

I am well aware that this is not the greatest of habits, that many fault caffeine as being one of the great crazymakers of modernity.  I know, I know.

Requiem for Oleg Kireev

(I came across this in my "drafts" folder. Thought this was long since published)

I was looking at Mary's pictures of Moscow this afternoon and working on a brief written piece to accompany it when they are "published" as an "online book" sometime soon, and I was trying to figure out someone in Russia who might comment on them, and I thought of my old roommate Oleg Kireev.  He and I hadn't been in touch for some years, so I googled him.  I was shocked and saddened to learn that he had died, apparently by his own hand, back in 2009.

The various tributes to him I've found on the internet focus on his rad seriousness as an intellectual, theoretician, artist, what have you.  A performance piece he did in Amsterdam, pre-9/11, when he wandered around dressed like a Russian policeman and demanded to see ID was the best example I could find of him in action.

Honestly, when I knew him, back in '97, he just seemed like a smart kid, just out of college, trying to figure out what he wanted to do with himself.  He was hanging out with Tolya Osmolovsky, starting a journal named Radek, raving about their idea of running for office under the "Against All Parties" moniker, just trying to make a little noise for himself.

Mostly, he hosted.  I think he was one of the rare ones in his peer group who had his own apartment (it actually belonged to his grandfather Senya). He and Tolya and the rest of their crew liked to hang out, drink vodka, smoke, eat smoked fish, and pontificate. They were, in short, a pretty regular bunch of Russian guys and gals, who took themselves pretty seriously. Also a Russian trait.

I remember exchanging emails with him somewhere in the years in between, he had become a dad, not entirely according to plan. I don't know what eventually brought him down. He was a good kid.

Off to the races

Very full day today, with my normal morning meeting followed by a political organizational brainstorming session for someone thinking of running for Congress, then Mary and I hustled up to Raleigh to watch Natalie participate in the State Mock Trial finals. They won the round we saw, but had the misfortune of being paired in the morning against some home schooled team made up -- legend has it -- only of the children of lawyers -- who live, eat, breathe, shit and sleep Mock Trial. These kids have States every year since the dawn of time, as it were.

Frankly, I don't know how parents who have kids who do sports all the time do it. Driving from tournament to tournament all the time. When do they read? Nap? Blog? Recharge for the next week at work?

And then, to add insult to injury, tonight is Daylight Savings Time night, the evening of springing forward, when we lose an hour of sleep.

Random reflections on readings

This is an honest title for a post, that could have been the title of many.

A couple of weeks ago The Economist had a story about unexpected effects of the adoption of renewable energy on the fundamental economics of providing electricity.  Basically, the argument is that renewables bring down the cost of electricity and make it harder for utilities to make the investments they need to maintain the infrastructure needed to make sure everybody has electricity whenever they need it. Because when the sun ain't shinin and the wind ain't blowin, it's gotta come from somewhere. Increased storage capacity (see Tesla's superbatteries) and usage optimization can help, but only to a point. In sum, it turns out that somebody's got to plunk down a lot of money to make this transition. And realistically, that can only come from the public sector.

Which means somebody is going to have to make some complex sales to make that happen. Again, it will be a question of leaders creating a shared vision and making society feel like its interest will be aligned with it. It is so complex it's hard to see it happening. Most likely, a non-trivial number of poor people will need to die from our failure to do this before people will be able to get it.

Today in the Wall Street Journal there's a story on restaurants adding labor surcharges to checks to account for rises in wages rather than raising the prices on entrees, appetizers, etc. There is perceived price inelasticity for food. Some restaurateurs are even calling the surcharge things like "California Mandate" as a political statement to let people know why the cost is rising. I get that, sounds like a first amendment thing to me.  I can even envision other restaurant-owners putting in surcharges like "Charge for driving out illegal immigrants" on their bills.

It will be interesting to see how this plays out.  For one, from a process and accounting perspective, rather than folding all the costs into the cost of food, adding a line item adds complexity, it could even stretch the capacities of many Point of Sale systems at restaurants.  Secondly, and more importantly, it poses the question of how much sausage-making and transparency people really want. With financial advisors, there is a great hue and cry at all times about all the various fees and how outrageous it is, but people are not as interested in seeing line-itemization of costs for other things. Imagine if, for every cheeseburger and fries plate, if providers broke out all the different labor and materials charges that went into it. It would be insane. Nobody but nobody wants that. I predict that the labor surcharge in dining establishments will be short-lived.

Being heard

There have been times over the last few years when I have had low inbound email and phone traffic and have felt more or less like I didn't exist, it was really hard on the ego. Probably this traces back to growing up as the son of a charismatic alcoholic, the life of many a party, who sucked a lot of oxygen out of many rooms, so that the rest of us had to fight for the remainder or feel suffocated.

Right now that is not where I'm at. There are a lot of demands on me, and I am having to prioritize things to figure out what I should be doing at any given moment. One of the hardest things is making sure I have time to myself to just chill out and read.

This afternoon, for example, I was thinking of going for a long run in the woods at Carolina North, then a guy just asked me to play tennis. First, however, I need to figure out if there are any movies that Graham might like to go see. Natalie is out of town for Model UN, and Graham and I haven't done anything special on our own for a while, except, of course, watch Star Trek episodes.  We are making our way through Deep Space 9 and, while it is certainly not Next Generation, it's better than nothing. So I hope there's a movie for us to watch, and that it does not suck. Kind of a tall order.

I should also keep reading Buffett's letters, but I need to prep for a workshop on entrepreneurial finance on the 22nd and I'm getting a little behind on thinking that through, so maybe I should be reading a book for that.

I also need to allocate a little energy to supporting Mary in the decision-making process for some furniture purchasing. I wish we could just pull the trigger, but she likes to think things through very thoroughly, which may mean a trip to High Point in the near future. I need to look at that as an opportunity to spend time with her outside of the normal flow of day to day, week to week blocking and tackling, as opposed to a burden. Hell, High Point is kind of interesting, in its own way. I know they have a nice little taqueria there.

Good signs in labor market

The woman at the sandwich place where I go for lunch -- one of two primary sandwich makers on their line -- recently left because she found a role as an admin assistant. Yesterday a new hire, an African-American woman with a bunch of tattoos, made my sandwich. She had never used a pepper mill before, but the other guy showed it to her and it barely slowed things down at all. You could tell she was a little nervous as the line of balding guys in blue shirts got longer as noon approached, but she was gonna do fine.

Over the weekend a friend of mine complained about the level of service in a restaurant owned by another friend.

This is all good. It shows that people are being drawn into the labor force. Food service and hospitality are not the greatest jobs, but they are jobs, and people learn valuable skills and habits in them. I know I did. People are coming back into the workforce.

Much of this is due to tailwinds from the Obama years, but it is not being hurt by a revival of animal spirits and expectation of a more favorable regulatory climate under Trump.

game of throwns

Up at the lake this weekend with some fellas, While many of us engaged in our statutory one game of basketball a year, a certain R------ C-----ll chose not to play, because he was too concerned about getting injured. Sadly, our friend's delicate ego proved equally susceptible to injury to some light ribbing from your present correspondent. To exact his revenge, this friend proceeded to booby trap the Grouse's bed with some items of clothing in pillow cases and under sheets, and to loosen the bulbs in my reading lamps. But, utilizing my estimable powers of observation and deduction, I discovered these subterfuges (OK, not the socks added in pillowcases) and got a fine night of sleep.

However, this morning, my back was killing me from jumping up and down on the concrete basketball court, suggesting that there was indeed wisdom in refraining. Wisdom shmisdom though, ballers gonna ball.

Postscript: against all commonsense, my back got better on the ride home, and now my attention will be focused on facing down Z on the tennis court come Wednesday. And then soccer season.

Opioid penetration

Saw this story on Facebook last night. We have all heard about the opioid epidemic, but I was shocked to see that, in a range of places, many of them in NC, the incidence of opioid dependency exceeds 8% of the population, going as high as 11.6%. That is insane.

I have separately seen stories about how counties that went for Trump showed higher incidence of opioid overdose deaths.  Here's one.  This really points up the depth of despair which has collectively driven a group of people to vote for someone so manifestly unqualified for his job, such a willingness to flirt with fascism. People in these places perceive themselves to be under mortal threat, and then look across the interstate at blue states and counties where people are sipping lattes and driving Lexi, Prii, and Audis and are pissed beyond measure.

OK, the work day is underway. Gotta hop.

Soap slivers

In the shower just now I was using the last slivers of a bar of soap (itself part of a great war chest of hotel size bars that I built up over years of staying in hotels and bringing the soap home. Don't remember the last time I/we bought soap).  I was reminded of Ballard, my dad's brother, who showed us with pride when we visited him a few years ago how he saved up all the little slivers of soap, dissolved them in water together, and then redesiccated them to make a new bar of soap. That, my friends, is good old Scots-Irish frugality.

Presence on court

Went out and played tennis this morning at the Farm.  Mostly doubles. I kind of prefer singles, but doubles is often what is available in a free-form, pickup format, so doubles it often is.

Tennis is perhaps the most perfect demonstration of both mean reversion and the role that the psyche can play in it. Which is to say, it is all too easy to hit a few winners or win a few points or games, get on a roll, get excited, and start screwing up. Conversely, it is all too difficult at times to play one point at a time, forgetting the prior point or points or games, to remember that each point is a new game which is only impacted by the prior ones if you allow it to be.

The ante is upped considerably in doubles, where you and your teammate are interdependent.

Sam Stone

One day in college, I was sitting on the couch of Wayne, the a non-Yale student stoner who hung out and played a lot of hackeysack and to a lesser extent frisbee. e had some good weed, I'm sure, and we were smoking it while listening to some music. I didn't know what was playing, but then I heard the chorus:  "There's a hole in daddy's arm, where all the money goes" -- and in an instant I was transported back to childhood. This was John Prine, "Sam Stone," and it was a record my dad had played a lot, in some ways his answer to mom's Carol King Tapestry, a record that I associate strongly with him.

At the time I was, of course, not paying attention to the lyrics, I had no idea what it was about.  I was a kid. When I listened to it again as an adult, I got it. Vietnam vet, heroin addict, overdose. Done. But the chorus reaches back to childhood to say: this is in fact the story of any kid, and the transition from innocent child to dead addict is seemless and invisible and is in fact not the insertion of one thing in place of another, but different stages of the same thing, or, rather, the commingling of two seemingly mutually exclusive things.

Last week I went to an AA meeting and a woman shared about her son, who had been off at a rehab, then spent time in a halfway house. On his first night home, he overdosed and died. She went out and got drunk. When she told the story, all the oxygen went out of the room, but then the next person raised his or her hand and shared another experience because that is what we do.

It is hard for those of us who live relatively stable lives to grasp the seriousness of the opioid epidemic now. I won't trot out statistics, but it is very real and present. I buried a friend last Friday who had many years of sobriety after some years of serious drug addiction, but we don't know what killed him in the end. In some sense, it doesn't matter, in other senses, it does.

In the years following the end of the Soviet Union, as the metanarrative of a great and successful Communist society -- which had seemed plausible following WWII and the end of Stalin's years for a couple of decades but then eroded through the 70s until it collapsed under Gorbachev -- Russia began to experience very negative demographic trends. Under Yeltsin, Russia basically smoked and drank itself to death. People had fewer babies. Putin came along and changed the game. He is evil and a kleptocrat, but he gave and gives Russians something to be proud of and hang their hat on.

The West has seen some of the same things happen. Anne Case and Angus Deaton of Princeton have shown that, for the first time in history, mortality for white American males is going backwards: white men are dying younger, and substance abuse and mental health are the big drivers. Branko Milanovic of CUNY has provided a broader framework for causality around this:  median incomes for the middle classes in the developed world have stagnated over the last few decades while the middle classes in emerging markets have made progress, and the rich have gotten richer.  Small wonder that kleptocrat populists are able to gain power while blaming immigrants.

I may have made some of these points before, and I don't have time to tie it all together because, as is the case every Saturday, it is time to take Graham to martial arts. And then it is time to get outside and enjoy the day.

Differentiation and being onesself

One of the received doxas of management theory of the last quarter century or whatever is that providers of goods and services should always be seeking to differentiate themselves from their competition, to demonstrate how they are different. This is reminiscent, on the one hand, of young people trying to mark themselves off as distinct by how they dress, piercings, tattoos, the music they listen to, etc. Amongst individuals, this quest to differentiate onesself has pushed itself forward as the Boomers have aged and Madison Avenue has gotten smarter, to where people at ever higher ages are still trying to be cool. By the time they are at death's door most but not all people are over it.

People often ask me, how do you differentiate yourself from other advisors? And it is a tiresome question, because what they are really asking is "how are you better?" and the subtext is "how are you going to beat the market?"  Given that beating the market consistently is more or less statistically impossible, what they are really asking is "how can you lie to me to give me the impression that you, and by extension I as your client, are privy to a special sauce which is available only to the select wealthy few?" Which is silly, but it is what some people want, and those people are looking for someone other than me to take care of them.

I am focused increasingly, in all domains of life, to trying to stop demonstrating that I am different than other people and just being myself. It is, in fact, a good deal easier to do that.

I recently bought some new jeans and also black jeans.  I have been wearing them more and more during work hours, and enjoying it. Wearing jeans is more who I am. Tomorrow I am going to Duke Law School to meet a prospect, a referral, and since people in universities have gotten oddly more formal in their dress even as universities have drifted ever leftward in their curricula, I am going to make and exception and wear some khakis. Black ones. Such is life.

The Undoing Project

I just finished Michael Lewis's new book The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds.  As with many Michael Lewis books, it was a little uneven;  I feel like Lewis has license to write basically whatever he wants because he is Michael Lewis, after all, and he writes so well and has been so successful and has such incredible access.  In a sense, this is evidence of the sort of mean reversion that is observable in all human endeavors:  you can't be great in everything you do.

And part of my reaction to Lewis is, as I think I've shared before, jealousy and envy because I feel like I should be Michael Lewis, out writing about whatever the hell I want to and getting paid for it, as opposed to writing about whatever the hell I want to and not getting paid for it.

And so, the book. It is the story of Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman and their groundbreaking work in psychology that has impacted so many domains. Funny, I had always thought of them as psychologists whose main impact has been in economics, under the banner of behavioral economics, but it turns out that's just one epiphenomenon of their work, the one I've run into.

I have read other books about behavioral economics, usually I don't finish them. This one I finished, because, in the end, it was the story of the remarkable friendship between these two guys and its growing pains, how the one who appeared to be transcendentally brilliant (Tversky) got all the prizes as the two of them got traction, how his brilliance made him a difficult person which spoiled their theretofore incredibly tight friendship and partnership, then how they stuck together to the end nonetheless when Tversky got cancer that killed him fast and young. In the end, Kahneman got the Nobel, and has become more famous.

I cried at the end, and it made me appreciate my excellent friends. I called one today, whose dad is dying of cancer and is in the country for a few weeks. I had been too busy to do it of late, and couldn't make it to New York to see him. But it's OK.

Here I am

It's a typical Sunday morning.  We made pancakes, and were reading the paper.  After looking at the sports page, the one time a week I look at one these days (I get soccer news on weekend nights online), I started in on the Sunday Review section. Very quickly I could see myself getting sucked into the mire of the Trumpmania from which we all suffer now.

I had to pull back and come upstairs to try to lengthen my perspective here on the blog, to try to remember that the world is happening in cycles other than  those dictated to us by our lunatic Tweeter-in-Chief, the oracle of logorrheic bile pent-up within so many. See, there I go. It's hard to escape it even for a few minutes,so thoroughly does it permeate our every pore.

And indeed, there's really not much else of note going on in the world, though I should pause to note that Natalie and her team won their first mock trial competition yesterday, that Graham and I are making headway on Star Trek: Deep Space 9 and that, though the show does not compare with Next Generation, I am glad that we have something decent to watch while sharing a blanket in the rec room and that, in particular, I am delighted to have side-stepped a need to watch season three of Avengers Assemble, which would surely have been more of Hulk, Thor and the gang smashing and crashing against an ever-wider array of new and rehashed supercriminals hell bent on destroying the universe as we know it.  I should also say that I went out and played basketball with a couple of guys including Skeet Baldwin yesterday, and that I pretty much shot him out. Today, both of my wrists are sore and one quad where this guy kneed me, but that's the game.

Listening

The other day I met with a couple of prospects who had been referred to me by not one, but two clients, independently.  A nice thing.  We sat and talked for an hour or so, and I walked away from the conversation with about half a page of notes about them.

Which is not really enough. The problem was, of course, that I had been talking more than I had been listening and asking questions, which is really my job. I need to know who they are and what they value so I can offer them good counsel.

I realized that quickly, then thought about it in my meeting yesterday morning. After the meeting, a few of the guys and I repaired to the chilly Starbucks in the foyer of the Harris Teeter by the mall, as we do sometimes. I decided to resist the temptation to talk and to just ask questions and listen to the other guys.  I lasted about 15 minutes, before I started holding forth about something.

This is a facet of the problem of Protuberance (as already documented in these posts).  I.e. the need for the fragile male ego, to wit, my own, to assert itself to establish dominance in the domain for which it is best suited.



It is hard right now to sit back and listen to anything quietly, as Trump and his crew seem hell-bent on wreaking as much destruction as possible as quickly as they can.

A girl and her cat

This morning Natalie started singing one of her more recent songs about our more social cat, Rascal.

Rascal has four paws,
Rascal has four paws,
Rascal has four paws,
And Bingo was its name-o

Earlier tunes include

Rascal cat, is wearing a hat (sung to the tune of "Jesse's mom" (has got it goin on)).

Other highlights of this girl/cat relationship include Rascal sitting on Natalie's lap at the island in the morning when she is having her cereal, and at her desk in the evenings (and daytime) when Natalie is doing her homework.

Natalie also likes to raise Rascal in the air over her head, look up at her, and cry out "Simba!", in the manner of The Lion King. Rascal does not object.

We are not the only ones who will miss her when she is gone, all too soon.

The open kimono and alignment

I just read through an interesting article on the use of body cams by police in the New York Times Magazine that Graham had been saving for me on the floor of his bedroom. Basically, the article revolved around the experience in Seattle, where some hacker kid used freedom of information laws to compel the police department (SPD) to release all of its body cam videos.

Of course, the first problem is the sheer quantity of data, which is huge. Then there's the issue of confidentiality for the citizens in the videos. And there are lots of other issues too, nothing is simple in this life.

The hacker kid eventually ended up working with the SPD to develop automated methodologies to redact video to protect confidentiality and manage the huge volume of requests, and then, having an aggrandized conception of himself as a "change agent" and low social IQ for working within large organizations (really not an easy thing to do, certainly not my forte), he ended up pissing off the team that ran the 911 unit and got himself banned from SPD HQ.

So he went back to being a complete pain in the ass and writing automated scripts to put in innumerable freedom of information requests for other stuff, crippling the SPD again.

Fundamentally, our whole paranoia about police overreach is a problem of alignment. People don't trust their motives, so want to micromanage them, but really don't have the disposition or skillset to do so, but the problem starts with poor lines of communication between PDs and the populations they serve. Again, the fragmentation of the media universe is a big part of the problem. Time was, all there was to watch was local news and then Cronkite, Brokaw, etc. So people watched that. And when the chief of police came on and discussed a big case, they were able to communicate out effectively.

But maybe we also didn't hear about many Eric Garners, Alton Sterlings, Freddy Grays,....

OK.  By now I have been writing too long and my discourse is falling victim to the blog form, which is to say, the need to oversimplify to get on with my day.

Let me say this. I ordered some firewood a few weeks back and it turned out the guy I was talking to was somebody who went to high school with me, a good guy who had had a career on the local police force and then had gotten injured on the job, discharged as disabled, and totally screwed by the police pension plan because he didn't quite make 20 years. Our views are very different on gun control and perhaps on many things, but he teaches courses on gun safety and is a 100% excellent human being. He told many stories of being on the job, being in danger, trying to help people of color, and I think he is entirely earnest, and certainly took much more risk than I ever have and has served the public nobly and honorably. I look forward to talking to him more as life moves on.  It was, frankly, one of the highlights of recent months. I probably already blogged about it.

Do rag on the floor

On Friday at a Vietnamese place on Miami Boulevard, there was an African-American guy wearing a do rag with some piercings who waited on us. Really he was more in a backwaiter/bussing role, but still he was on the floor.

This is a very rare thing for an establishment not specifically serving a black population, particularly with the head gear, and speaks volumes about the tightness of labor markets here in the Triangle right now. Populations that used to be outside the labor market are being drawn into it, and in new roles. Let us hope this continues.

Barack and Michelle move on

What with it being Martin Luther King Jr. Day -- I hope you all enjoy the holiday! -- and with everyone in the world weighing in on reflections on the Obama years, I will join in a little while my brain is still in writerly mode, before it has been overly sullied by the manifold claims on my time and attention that pile up over the course of any and every day.

First off, I will confess to bias. I basically love Barack and Michelle. They strike me as fine, public-spirited people who have done incredible things, and who I think have long and admirable lives in front of them. As others have noted, they've gone through 8 years without a hint of anything scandalizing, in distinction to the Clintons.

The "red line" moment with Syria may have been his biggest blunder. He presented something that sounded very much like an ultimatum, and then he didn't back it up. There are certainly cogent analyses arguing against this, like this article on Politico, but in this case perception is more or less reality: after his vacillation Syria got much much worse. Overall, those on the Right who lay chaos in the Middle East at Obama's feet conveniently forget the fact that it was Wolfowitz's vision for the region that really accelerated the decline under W.

I sometimes wonder if Obama hasn't to some extent informalized the office of the Presidency excessively. All this hanging out with Jimmy Fallon, coffee with Jerry Seinfeld, sitting between two ferns with Zach Galifianakis, it made him seem cool and hip to a certain portion of the populace and electorate, but mystified others and made him more distant. Yes, a man of the people, but of only one set of people. I know it's hard for a sitting President to go to tractor pulls, etc. Maybe if he had gone onstage with the redneck comics like Jeff Foxworthy etc. I dunno, maybe they were shooting bile at him. Certainly it paved the way for Hillary going on "Between Two Ferns" during the campaign, which was certainly not her best moment. If I was Steve Bannon, I would have pushed that out hard across my platform to demonstrate how distant she was from middle America. I mean, I know she was going for Bernie voters with that stunt, but still.

One small thing. I've read about how, after dinner -- which he tried to do at home as much as he could to provide a stable atmosphere for his girls to grow up in, which is awesome -- Obama liked to retreat into his office and read, think, and watch Sportszone at 11. I think this image of the philosopher-President is appealing, it's a nice way to live life and certainly he is an exceptionally well-informed and cerebral human being. In retrospect, he might have been well-served by spending more time with Republicans to understand their issues better and figure out how to move his agenda forward. The drinks Reagan often shared with Tip O'Neal are often cited as a model. He could have done more of that.

In the end, it appears that he had a difficult time getting as much done as he would have liked through legislative channels because Republicans dug in their heels and opposed him from day 1. McConnell said as much, as did others. Thinly veiled or out and out racism, a brilliant ground game by the Koch brothers and their allies at the state level, and a steady stream of vitriol from Fox News and its social media spawn made this not just a no risk strategy by the  Republicans, but a winning one. In the business sphere, there was an element of a capital strike, in which businesses chose to do stock buybacks rather than take risks to invest in R&D, CapEx, or hiring. Everybody else was doing it, why not?  As a theme, "capital strike" flowered the most in 2011-2012, but as a phenomenon it never really went away.

OK. By now I'm just rambling. There is so much more to say, for the most part, others are saying it, and I'm sure others have said these things too.

For now, we move forward. We have a new Citizen in Chief who has great promise as a leader in whatever he does, so long as he doesn't get sucked too far towards the flame of wealth and privilege. And Michelle can change the world too.  I think they just need to be careful not to suck up too much oxygen and camera-time to help Democrats find a new, electable President, cuz Barack can't be elected again, and Michelle doesn't want the job.  And who can blame her?

Zhou Youguang

Amazing obit of Zhou Youguang in the Times today. Had never heard of the guy.

He died at 111, having invented pinyin, the standard system of transliterating Chinese into roman characters. Before the system was adopted in 1958, roughly 85% of the population was illiterate. Now that's down to about 5%. That's a massive shift, numerically much bigger than what Gutenberg, the King James Bible, public schools, and the development of a mass press did in the West.

Late in life he became a critic of the regime, and here's one great quote:  "Chinese people becoming rich isn't important. Human progress is ultimately progress towards democracy."

Though he is new to me, I miss him already.

Now I gotta go play tennis.

Moment of clarity

In the morning, around the time my caffeine infusion has peaked for the day and I've read the first few articles, there is a period of maximum syncretism, where everything (sometimes) gels in my brain and I am just about ready to solve world hunger blah blah blah. Problem is, most often I then need to do something like either get to work or go play tennis or otherwise engage with the world, and so my thoughts get clouded and distracted and whatever brilliance I had flowing through my brain is dissipated into this, that, or -- on occasion -- the other.

Today I had to do a workshop in Durham, but I had some time to walk around 9th Street before so doing, which was excellent. Sadly, though, I passed by what I'm pretty sure was the old Nice Price bookstore, which now seems to be a Papa Johns. What a downgrade. Which reminds me of the upcoming closure of the Bookshop on Franklin Street, a topic to which I cannot begin to do justice right now. There will be at least one novel-length post on that sad subject.

Was also surprised that Monuts had taken over the old Magnolia Grill space, and actually has a bar. Not something we think of as combining naturally with donuts. But this is Durham, after all. Portlandia East.

Later, I went for a run in the woods at Carolina North, up behind the old nabe. For most of my run I wound around in the woods between the main Pumpkin Loop road and the airport, an area which is 95% pines, calm and majestic. I didn't realize the extent to which the greenery up at the top and the soft carpet of pine needles below impart a special quality to those woods at this time of year, until I crossed over the road towards the railroad tracks and Seawell School Road, where all of a sudden I was in hardwood land, where the path was hard and rocky and the trees, bereft of leaves, offered no shade, so the light was pretty harsh.  I'll be headed back to the piney woods at this time of year.

Then went to Flyleaf Books and got a copy of Michael Lewis's new book on Kahneman and Tversky. The great thing about Lewis is that, when he's in his groove, whatever he's writing on is like candy. Back to that.

this is just to say

Natalie
got her
license

Graham
seems to be
sprouting a
mustache

Is nothing
sacred

big deal

The Journal ran a piece today about how Chinese insurance companies are selling risky products to retail investors to invest in risky business opportunities. For example, Anbang Life Insurance bought the Waldorf-Astoria in New York for about $2 billion:

One of its funding sources is 28-year-old Dai Yiyun, an executive assistant in Shanghai who decided to plow $22,500 into a three-year interest-bearing deal that also includes a small amount of life insurance. When Ms. Dai checks Anbang’s app, she says she is monitoring the rate of return and has no idea how much insurance the product includes. She adds that Anbang’s high-profile investments give her a thrill. “I feel I am part of the process, part of the deal,” she says.

This deal mentality amongst average citizens is probably not a good thing. The idea that we are going to become wealthy by buying and selling things -- or participating in the buying and selling of them by others, is pretty silly. It may end up in tears, and having a President who proclaims himself the master of the deal will probably not help.

Quiet days, not without adventure

For much of the last two snowy days, we were without land line and, much more importantly, internet. It was rather awesome. Nobody isolated in their rooms with their devices. Natalie went over to her friend's house, where they lunched and watched a stupid movie. Graham read with me in the living room, then we went out and sledded. Mary cleaned up a bunch of crap that had been accumulating on the island in the kitchen and around her desk. I made a ton of headway on a Wallander novel. Last night we all hung out around the fire in the living room and read. Except when people interrupted me with their stupid talking.

No but seriously, it was enough to make me think about turning off the router for a certain number of hours per weekend or even evening.

Not that it was without adventures. For example:

• After lunch on Friday, I went back to the office to get my computer, then headed home. When I sat down in my car, I felt a sharp pain near my left hamstring. "What the hell?" I thought. It turned out to be a toothpick which was somehow sticking out of my seat and stuck into my leg, like maybe an inch deep. I had to pull the mofo out of there, and it hurt like hell. On top of having fallen on my right butt cheek on the tennis court Wednesday night (though I won the point), this makes me a little gimpy.
• Early that evening, I put down some salt on the steps leading from our driveway to our side door. At around 7:45 on Friday evening, as frozen precip of some sort was just starting to come down in earnest, Mary discovered we were out of cat food. I had to run out to Pet Smart on the Boulevard to get this ridiculous prescription food. When I got back, there were a bunch of deer hanging out by the steps, licking up my precious salt. The bastards. I honked at them pretty good.
• Yesterday Graham and I were out sledding by the lake. I use this rather minimalist, Zen roll up sled kind of thing. Just a sheet of plastic, really, but it slides rather well. It was pretty windy, and as I made my way back up the hill, the wind blew it up and it hit me in my chin, breaking the skin and drawing little blood. Later a crew from the local CBS affiliate was interviewing people about the sledding, and I shared a few trenchant insights with them, garnering some portion of my proverbial 15 minutes of fame. Not long after that, I was hanging out with Chris Senior talking about this and that, and he looks at me and goes "It looks like you've got some of your lunch on your face." He helped me clear it up. Thankfully, this hadn't shown up on TV.
• The night of the snow, I had a dream. I had recently been to the barber, but he hadn't cut my hair as short as I like it. It was a bummer.

Beginning again

We have been to the Northeast and back, repeating the rhythms of the season, which go something like this: drive north (Subway for lunch, Starbucks mid-afternoon), arrive Larchmont (lasagna from Mercurio's in Mamaroneck). Christmas (Turducken), open presents. Joy! Stay for a while. Drive home, stop in Princeton for a night or two, hang out with friends (take-out from Ricky's Thai in Skilllman -- Duck Noodles!!). Drive home (Subway, Starbucks).

OK.  I am boring even myself with this simple enumeration. One of the high points this year was taking Natalie into the city and walking around NYU, the East Village, and then Columbia. I did my best to show her what I know of the city, though at some points in time it devolved into what Natalie termed:  "a tour of your life in the city." But she was OK with it.

This year it was noteworthy that on Christmas morning there was no mad crush to open presents, all the kids were satisfied with their stocking-stuffers so we even got to have breakfast before the great rending of paper and saving of bows for next year.

Several nights in a row I fell asleep early on the couch in the sun room, the best of which was with Beth's dog Jenny warming my feet and even snoring for good measure.

One downside of our drives is that, since everybody has a profusion of electronic devices now, we spend too much time with our eyes and ears glued to them in the car. That's something we need to work on.

It has been a short holiday season, thanks to this darned calendar, and today it is grey and rainy here in Chapel Hill. Ah well. Back to life, back to reality.

The year ahead

So, 2016 has been a particularly shitty year in politics, not just in the US, but around the world. North Carolina has obviously been ground zero for some of the worst of what we've seen stateside since the election.

The Republicans have effectively cut the new Democratic team off at the knees and hamstrung (forgive the use of mixed leg metaphors, it's a work day, and it's just a blog) its ability to be effective through normal, administrative means. Which means that 2017 and subsequent years will be challenging (duh).

But if we flip the situation around a bit, we can see that the year ahead, in particular in the run-up to NC's special legislative election in fall 2017, what has been handed to the Democratic leadership team:  Roy Cooper, Josh Stein, Elaine Marshall, Graig Meyer, Floyd McIssick, Steve Rao etc., is an opportunity for leadership of historic proportions. An opportunity to figure out how to define a new agenda and connect it with the people and voters of NC. It is an opportunity they, and we, cannot fail to grasp, an opportunity of historic proportions.

Grasp it we must.

"Merry Christmas!"

The Trump people and everyone on Fox News has been so triumphalist about the "War on Christmas" being won, at long last, that it reminded me anew of how silly it is. Natalie said she had heard about a last, scrappy group of Christian resisters, who are huddled round a Christmas shrub in someone's basement. God bless them every one.

Was just out running here in Larchmont, where there's a non-trivial Jewish population and a bunch of other people too, maybe. Actually, given how rich a town it is, it's probably pretty much goys, shiksas, and Jews, with a small smattering of Asians of indeterminate religious leanings. So, particularly since it's Hanukkah too this year, I was more careful than ever to not say "Merry Christmas" when I was out. Except when I was passed by a blonde woman with three blonde daughters who looked as if they had stepped from Martha Stewart central casting. I said "Merry Christmas" to them.

It is nice that all the kids are older. There is less pressure to hustle directly to the opening of presents. We were even able to have a civilized breakfast before going in by the tree to rip up wrapping paper.

Right now Beth took all the kids to see their uncle George, who is in a rest home here in Larchmont because of some health issues he's having at the moment. So it is rather quiet here in the household. Honestly, by sitting here writing, i am wasting perfectly good reading time when I could be in the sun room, potentially even descending towards a nap. Off I go.

Being mean to Natalie

Yesterday just before dinner it turned out Natalie didn't like what Mary had made, so she was gonna cook herself some eggs. She put the top back on the pot Mary was cooking in in a really loud way, and both Mary and I jumped on her about it. Then, for some reason, I made fun of Natalie not once but twice, after which she had a rare tantrum, slamming things around, bursting into tears, saying I had been really mean to her, and stomping back to her room. I pretty much ruined family dinner.

In truth, she was right. I don't know where that came from. When I am catty or worse to Mary, I understand the underlying issues at work, even if I don't blog about them much because I value my marriage to Berridge (just had to roll with the rhyme, which I had somehow never made) too highly. But with Natalie, I don't know. I am not often mean to her like that, so it was odd.

At least it is rare, and has been noted.

Turns out, this post is more or less a Christmas letter

It has become increasingly apparent to me over time that I must write in the mornings, before the world has begun to claw away at me. On Sundays there are first pancakes to be made and eaten, newspaper to be read, sometimes tennis to be played and/or and AA meeting to be attended, and by the time all that's done it's already noon and the mindset to write has passed. Which is why my hit rate is better on Saturdays than Sundays.

Even today, on the way to my desk I had to fend off myriad chores, piles of laundry to be laundered, bed to be made, stacks of magazines to be weeded through, etc. At the very least I did not look at Facebook or email.

For the blog is, for me, by now, quite clearly my interface to the ages, the mediation between the present, the past, and the future, when I can come back and view this stuff.

This will be another interesting Christmas.  Various family members have varying health and other challenges. I won't go into them here, out of respect for their privacy. Us, when you get right down to it, we are fine. What are our challenges now? I will catalog them only for the sake of posterity.

After her bus was insanely late and she and her friend arrived at school right when testing was started, so she was stressed out and crying, Natalie got a disappointing score on her PSAT and won't be a National Merit Semifinalist.  Had they taken her SAT scores from sophomore year, she totally would have been, so we were pretty confident that she would be. It's not a big deal, but is only emblematic of the fact that we are entering into the crunch time of the college application process and we on the one hand want the absolute best for her, but on the other are trying to minimize our participation in the national psychosis around where you go to college. And it's hard with us having gone to pretty fancy places. We want her to do well without losing sleep or joy. And knowing that she has our love always, no matter what.  She continues to do debate and mock trial and generally works her ass off while rarely getting cranky. We don't worry about her doing drugs or alcohol.  What's not to like? I do wish more boys would show appreciation for how pretty she is, but I have seen from others from my high school days that there appears to be little correlation between being "popular" in high school and happiness later in life.

Graham is playing ultimate frisbee, which is awesome, he just hasn't figured out how to integrate himself into offense. Which I totally get. Offense can be profoundly confusing because you have to think ahead of the other team on your feet and be creative. I think I probably gravitated towards defense for this reason, it is more or less rules-based. You learn what you are supposed to do and do it.  Also, his room is an absolute wreck and has teen boy smell, but at least it's less bad in the winter. I have mentioned his comb and you know where we are in Star Trek, so you're up to date there.

Mary over the last week has gotten more active politically, having spent a couple of days up in Raleigh protesting the Republicans "special sessions" during which they went out of their way to cut the legs off of Governor-elect Roy Cooper. Fuckers. She seems energized by this, which is all good.

She continues to push us further in the direction of a plant-based diet. Sometimes it sucks. Not rarely I eat some lentils for dinner and then drift off to sleep thinking that maybe I'll get myself a biscuit from Sunrise the next day.... I almost never do.  In the end, I know that she is doing the right thing both environmentally and from a health perspective, and that every time I eat a plant-based meal I cultivate an appreciation for it.

Me, I keep plugging away at building my business, having switched firms in the middle of the year, right around our big trip over the pond. That was stressful, and building a business is not easy. Managing other people's money is also not easy. I obsess a little. But I have been sleeping fine, partly because I keep exercising. I've been playing more tennis recently.

OK. I've been blogging long enough, time to get ready for Granny and David to come over later. There is much tidying to be done, and it's better if I am proactive about it rather than waiting for Mary to come ask me.

Ends and beginnings

Graham and I are approaching the end of Star Trek: Next Generation, to wit, we're in the middle of season 7 of 7.  Of late it had seemed as if the old plot-generating algorithm was running thin, spitting out junk, but yesterday we watched an episode that kicked it into gear again.  A whole new set of characters were introduced, four young officers, all hoping for promotion. Friends but rivals. In one episode it began to build real characters out of them, and then at the end there was a surprise which brought me to tears. It was all character-, not plot-driven. I realized how deeply I have been drawn into this cast of characters, and how much I will miss them.

I hope Deep Space 9 will be as good. That's where we're headed next.

Twice this week, I got a chance to drive Graham and a friend home from ultimate frisbee games. The first time, the two of them argued about the relative merits of the first Captain America movie and Captain America: Winter Soldier. They got into a lot of technical detail about the intensity of fight scenes, etc. This is important stuff for 13-year old boys. I realized that it was one of the first times I had ever driven Graham around with a chatty friend. It was so exciting to me that, at one red light, I was distracted and pulled forward when the green turned on for the left turn lanes. I was going straight.  I stopped myself quickly and inched back, but it was still rather embarassing.

Then, when I got to the boy's house, I overshot and went to the next house. It was, admittedly, very dark there, and I wasn't used to approaching their house by car from that direction (I run past it all the time), and their house looks a lot like their neighbor's. But still.

I was hoping nobody noticed this stuff but me, but when I dropped him off on Wednesday he said, as he was getting out of the car: "You didn't run any red lights and you didn't miss my house." I hope he didn't tell his parents. I am pretty sure, at least, that they don't read my blog.

Combing Graham's hair

For many years I was the only person who could cut Graham's hair, we couldn't get him to go to a professional to save his life.  Not that it was at risk. Mary put this down to his sensory integration disorder, which is a fellow-traveler of autism. Fine. For me it was quality time with Graham, an instance of our special relationship, though I never got particularly good at it.

Somewhere in there we got him to go to a barber. Not frequently, mind you. He still prefers to let it grow. I can get him to cut it now and again, usually in prep for some sort of big event, a distant cousin's wedding or something.

Washing it is also a struggle, because he only likes to do it right before bedtime so he can get in his jammies and under blankets and be warm, which I get. But given that his hair is not short, he wakes up with it really messy.

Not long ago, his friend Ben suggested he get a comb. Surprisingly, this recommendation stuck, and Graham project-managed us to make sure that we got him one, and we did. Today his hair looked messy, him having washed it just before getting into bed, so I took him in the bathroom and began instructing him in the use of the comb: how to put a little water on the comb and/or your hair, how to go gently through the tangles, etc.

His hair still looked pretty messy, because, honestly, he needs a cut, but I'm not going to press that too hard. One thing at a time.

This is why we live, folks.

People in the hood

On my way back from my meeting this morning, I chanced to look up the hill on Tadley. Halfway up, I saw a guy in black spandex, with an orange t-shirt, wearing a floppy hat, presumably to keep the sun off of his face. He was squatting, like they do in Russia and Asia and other places where there aren't enough public dollars to pay for benches at places where people wait for public transportation, and in the manner that fitness gurus like Ido Portal suggest.

I think this was the same guy who once told me that the pieces of plastic on the ropes strung between the stumps in his front yard, put there to stop people from parking, spelled something in morse code. Upon inspection, I found that they spelled "Iborg", which is presumably a reference to a Star Trek episode (I think it must be in Deep Space 9, certainly Graham and I haven't gotten there yet).

Our hills attract a number of fitness eccentrics. Such as:

• The sept- or octagenarian who walks backwards, up and down the hills
• The quasi-anorexic woman who walks up and down Tadley in all seasons shifting what is probably a 3-pound plastic ball between her hands, surely for upper-body work
• The guy who always reads a book while walking (actually, he is mostly on North Lake Shore)
• The guy with a healthy belly who walks with a big camera with a telephoto lens who shoots birds.  Once Mary stopped and talked to him, and he offered her a card with the URL of his bird pix, saying to her something like "I assume you can secret this on your person" (i.e. the card)
• The guy who we call Sal, because of his resemblance to Sal from Dog Day Afternoon. One time I ran past that guy when he was walking with a young woman, presumably his daughter. They were speaking Russian. I never spoke to him in Russian, being shy and ashamed of my deteriorating language skills. Haven't seen him for a while. Seems like he may have moved away, malhereusement.

I'm sure there are others whose descriptions escape me just now.

Omelet

I had breakfast at a place in RTP this morning with a woman I had met at some networking event. I had a very nice western omelet with some grits and rye toast but, because we were talking about business and doing that little dance, I was unable to finish all of it. Now I am mourning its loss.

Daily

It has been some time since I had the discipline to write daily.  Back in the early days of the blog, I used to. When I went on vacation one time in upstate New York where there was no internet access (remember when that was possible!), I even sent some posts to John out in San Francisco so he could post them as if I were still at my desk.  Amazing to think of it.

Not no mo. I have gotten slack in my dotage, and all too easily sucked into the maelstrom of Facebook, the eternal joys of watching soccer highlight videos on YouTube, or, as I have mentioned, just playing the guitar. All in all, pretty good living.

This evening I got home not too crazy late after a happy hour out at the Frontier, where I befriended a retired radiologist from Montreal who had lived in rural Virginia for a long time before settling in the Triangle in his retirement. Interesting, smart guy. Back at the crib, I stuffed some food down my gullet, and then Graham and I took in an episode of Next Generation, of which there are precious few remaining.

At lunch I snuck out to an Al Anon meeting at a church in the park.  As I was leaving, I pulled out in front of an older Buick. I probably should have let the guy go before I pulled out, because he wanted to pull out and pass me on a two-lane road with a double yellow line pretty close to RTP, so not out in the country at all. In the end, the guy thought better of it.

Evening strum

Trying not to get sucked down into the endless maelstrom of post-election dread and fear, of late I have been playing the guitar more and more. After years of hands softened by playing my old classical guitar (which I wrote about now north of a decade ago here), I have taken up with the Gibson sunburst guitar that Mary's brother George left for me in the attic in Larchmont. The neck is narrower, the frets closer together, so it feels tight on my stubby hands, but I'm getting there.  They key thing has been to put the classical guitar in its case so that I am not tempted to pick it up.

Also, the strings are steel (or some kind of metal) rather than mostly nylon, so it's harder on my hands, so I am developing callouses on my fingertips, which is good but wierd after all these years of soft hands.

I've been learning more songs too. For a long time, my repertoire has been fairly limited. One thing that's been helpful is finding resources on the so-called interweb which have all the lyrics and chord progressions in the songs. Makes things damned easy. Another boon granted my by Al Gore's mighty creation is guitar dudes on YouTube showing licks and ways of holding one's hands in non-obvious (at least to me) ways to facilitate moving between chords. That has meant unlearning many decades of muscle memory, not a quick and easy thing to do, especially with the limited time I can/do make available for playing.

My repertoire has been expanding to include John Prine, Neutral Milk Hotel, Sharon Van Etten, etc. One important thing I've tried to do is write down songs that I've learned. I did that, but I forgot where I wrote it down. Sigh.  I know Google docs would be a good place, but keeping track of all one's Google docs is a chore in itself.

In general, the challenge of multiple file management constructs is a whole nuther kettle of worms, worthy of a blog post of its own.

Now to take Graham to martial arts and read Buffett's 1990 Letter to Shareholders.

Narrative and warmth

The other night I was hoping to watch  Next Generation with Graham, but he said he didn't feel like it. I was a little upset, and he came over and gave me a hug and apologized. Mary suggested that we watch Dave Chappelle's segments from his hosting of SNL, and I reacted negatively at first, thinking that it would surely be election-related and therefore stress-inducing, which was precisely what I was trying to get away from.

But we went ahead and watched it.  We sat down on the couch with her laptop and pulled up Chappelle and leaned against one another, and I calmed down. As always, he was transgressive, wise, funny. We watched all the sketches he was in, and while they weren't as good as Season 1 of his show from the Comedy Channel, what is? That is an extraordinarily high bar for anyone.

Mostly I got what I needed. I sat on a couch with a family member and shared a narrative while touching their body, which is all I really needed to get out of myself.

Admittedly, when Graham and I watch Next Gen (or when Natalie and I watch The Crown, for that matter), we have the additional element of some very serious couch-slouching and a blanket, but this was with Mary, who will not be leaving me within a few short years to go to college. So in that sense it was even better. It is hard to get her to sit on a couch and watch things with me.

Praise

Was just reading the reading reviews/recommendations at the end of Nick Murray's monthly newsletter for advisors. He is always primarily positive and hortatory in his reviews, and he reads broadly -- if in a right-leaning sort of way.  It always makes me want to read more. The effect is not unlike that of Buffett praising all of the wonderful managers of the portfolio companies of Berkshire Hathaway. It just makes you want to keep going.