Momentum

After casting about for the next right thing to read -- tried a John McPhee book about the merchant marine that meandered in his typical fashion, then some Lorrie Moore stories that were pretty good but not compelling -- I am picking up steam in Alan Brinkley's biography of Henry Luce -- who was the founder and driving force behind Time, Life, Sports Illustrated, etc. It's a good biography. Mostly, I'm just psyched to have something else to sink my teeth into, and it feels good to read through the large stacks of books that I bring home from used book stores, thrift stores, etc. I am even on a kick to taking books that I have tried to read and then failed and carrying them out of the house to little free libraries, thrift stores, etc, thereby making room on the shelves for other books. Feels great.

Walked into town yesterday to go see Carolina play Boston College at the Dean Dome. We lost. It's a crappy season. In fact, the only two times I've ever gone to games there, we lost. Which is not all bad. It lessens the allure of a pretty expensive habit. The guy sitting next to me was pretty much an idiot. , offering the most inane commentary: "we cain't shoot the ball!" "we gotta get a stop!" Not Crabill, the other guy.

On the walk up I noticed a now-disused small kidney-shaped pool right up close to the street on the west side of Franklin St, between Boundary and Hillsborough. As long as I've lived in this town, that was rather surprising. 

Citizen diplomacy with China

China China China. It is everywhere, the big theme. What's up with China? Are they catching up with us? Have they surpassed us? Are they friend? Enemy? Are they stealing from us? Do they have a right to, given how much was stolen from them and how they were treated? Behind many, if not all questions today, sits China.

But what of the Chinese? Can we speak of them as one? There are, after all, about 1.4 billion of them living in China, and another 46 million of them living abroad plus Hong Kong and Taiwan. That's a lot of people. Surely there is a lot of diversity in there.

Within China, particularly since the Tiannanmen Square events of 1989, the government has tried to stoke nationalism and patriotism based on a victim narrative: China was great, then the West came and subjugated it following the Opium Wars, then Japan occupied... China's self-injuries in the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution have been backgrounded. It was foreigners that did it.

But the West doesn't understand the extent to which Chinese patriotism is an artificial phenomenon. Surely there is just pride in the tremendous strides China has made since the death of Mao. It has done incredible things. By many measures the most progress made by any segment of humanity ever.

But in some sense I digress from where I wanted to take this. Back when the Soviet Union was our bete noire, we had an understanding that fundamentally, we had a problem with the Soviet government but not necessarily the Russian (and other Soviet) people. I don't think we have that mindset to the same extent today. For the most part, at least for people of my generation, we don't have good connectivity even to Chinese people in America, let alone in China or elsewhere in the Chinese diaspora to understand how they think and where they're at. My guess is that they are in a much wider range of places than we think they are. The tightening of Chinese authoritarianism does not help, to be sure. The broad support of civil disobedience in Hong Kong, the recent Taiwanese elections, and tight capital controls maintained by Beijing indicate that centrifugal forces remain strong.

So I need to talk to more Chinese people. Then again, I need to talk to more Trump voters too. I need to talk to more people.

Munger and Buffettisms

I am currently making my way through Poor Charlie's Almanack, a collection of the writings and musings of Charlie Munger, the other genius behind the success of Berkshire Hathaway (BH), the guy who reoriented Buffett away from Benjamin Graham-style value investing towards picking great businesses, a style of/factor within investing that quantitative research has subsequently distilled, roughly, into what is known as "quality."

It is unquestionably a good read, and Munger a wise guy. In some ways reading it institutionalizes the wisdom of the prior generation of Republicans we loved, the guys like Mary's dad George Sr. or my mom's second husband David with whom we would argue over politics at the dinner table but who we knew were at their core super-solid human beings who worked their butts off and loved their families and communities and were tolerant of others. They just like low taxes and didn't view government as the best capital allocator.

But often as Buffett and Munger differentiate Berkshire Hathaway culture from that of other market participants (mutual funds, other corporations), their moralism and superiority can be grating. We have to remember they are -- like all investment managers -- talking their book, and that they are, like Vanguard, an example of a company and a culture which have been at once very successful, forces for good, but also genius marketers, which as a matter of course entails a tendency towards simplification that veers towards obscurantism. In the case of each of them, they write very little. Which I get, because they are not writers and writing is probably not the highest and best use of their time. But it means that when they do write, they are in such a rush to get it out that the gloss over a lot.

In a 1994 address to a class at USC's Business School, Munger talks about what made GEICO so great, which was a culture which focused on cutting out things that didn't work, until they got to the things that did work. OK. In fact we know from Buffett's letters over the years and from our own eyes that have been a number of things that contributed to GEICO's success. It perfected direct marketing (presumably in Munger's eyes that meant throwing away layers of sales force and support thereof), which in recent years means they have reinvented television advertising in an entirely unique way: if you see a commercial and it seems surreal and absurd, you know that in the end it will be selling GEICO. Also Lou Simpson, which managed its portfolio for 30 years, was as good an investor as Buffett and Munger, or at least in the same class, a fact that Buffett extols at length over the years.

Also, there is a moralistic didacticism in Munger's tone, and at times in Buffett's, but they are not always pure as the driven snow. A few instances

• In 2002 Gen Re, a BH subsidiary, was on the other side of the finite reinsurance scandal that eventually brought down Maurice Greenberg from the helm of AIG, leaving it organizationally weak (which was Greenberg's fault) and open to the type of mismanagement that allowed AIG Financial Products to happen in the run up to the financial crisis. The scandal stuck to Greenberg, but not BH
• There was the affair of Dave Sokol, one of the potential heirs to the throne at BH, but was bounced out in the mid-oughts after he broke some laws. BH basically buried that episode to the best extent possible
• More recently, there's been the disastrous transaction with 3G's acquisition of Kraft-Heinz and the zero-based budgeting that eviscerated its brands

I see I gotta get Graham somewhere. Anyway, Buffett and Munger ain't perfect but they do still kick ass and share wisdom, so it's worth reading them.

Vice

And so, I have accepted the role of Vice Chair of my "HOA" (not really an HOA because it existed before the legal form of HOA did) after I was asked to be Chair. This marks an improvement over prior years, when I was "Acting Secretary", which meant that I took notes at meetings but didn't accept the formal designation of "Secretary" because I didn't want it, but also that I could be cc'd and included in all important decisions regarding the organization because it just makes sense for me to be on them.

Being Chair would have been too much. I need to be able to focus on my day job, shepherding Graham through high school, and politics. I just don't have the bandwidth to get sucked too deep into the neighborhood stuff. I already spend tons of time on it, maybe 100-120 hours a year. It is, indeed, a very interesting problem, maintaining a lake in the middle of an ever denser urbanizing area.

But in the end, it's a pretty small canvas.

Interviewing Asian kids for college

I've been assigned two young men of Asian -- seemingly Chinese -- descent to interview for Yale. With the lawsuits alleging cultural bias against the elite colleges in admissions, a cultural bias specifically against very high-achieving Asian kids, this is obviously slippery territory for me. I am ground zero for this conflict, as an older, white alum with a very strong cultural identification with the traditional liberal arts model of which I view Yale as an exemplar. Although I work with numbers and finance, I am not in favor of the kind of quantified reductivism that values anything strictly in terms of metrics and numbers, in this case grades and SAT scores.

So I have to be very cognizant of these biases I bring to the table and remember that these are young people I'm talking to, unformed, with their whole lives ahead of them, that I'm sure they've worked their asses off to have gotten through the fat stacks of applicants just to get interviews. It's fun talking to young people and hearing where they are at, what they are up to, and where they want to go. As the uncle of a couple of kids with a Chinese father, each of whom is very individual, I know all these kids have something distinct and vital within them. It's my job to find it, if it's not really obvious.

Deng Xiaopeng and the Transformation of China

After however many months, and however many books I started and/or didn't finish in the middle of it, I am done with this one, no thin tome, first published by Ezra Vogel in 2011. This was no easy book, and it didn't in many ways cover what I had hoped it would. But it was still very worthwhile. And hell, if they had wanted me to write the book, they would've asked me.

First and foremost, Vogel has written what I would call a "court history," in that it focuses on how Deng operated within the Chinese power structure, and also when he was on its periphery or worse, as during his period of rustication during the Cultural Revolution. This is generally not my kind of thing. I am more into the stories of historical change on the ground: how people lived, how things were made and sold, what they watched, listened to, cared about, dreamed of etc. Vogel does address this kind of thing in passing, at a high level, and he 100% gets that it was Deng who made it possible for all of that to happen. So in a sense the story Vogel tells is necessary and prior to all the things I want to know about.

Vogel focuses on how Deng did it, inch by inch, brick by brick, plenum by plenum, circular by circular. It is a hard story to tell, but there is much to it.

The key is Deng's long view. When Mao died, and even before, Deng understood how far China was behind the West, and he had some vague inkling of what it would take to bridge the gap. Too much waste in the military, too many soldiers? Scale back the army. But how to do that? So many generals and officers, proud of their positions in life, how to overcome their resistance? What happens when millions of soldiers return to their villages? What will they do to feed themselves? That's just one example of one problem set Deng and China faced.

How to address these big challenges? Talk them through. Big meetings. National meetings. Regional meetings. Local meetings. Discuss the problems on the ground, and how they can be addressed in the light of Maoist thought and Party guidance. Because the center needed to hold. China's overarching problem over decades and centuries -- and its greatest shared fear -- had been chaos (most recently the Cultural Revolution) and domination by foreign powers (the West since the Opium Wars, Japan pre-WWII). So the Party needed to remain sacrosanct as a place where issues could be worked out. Even if it meant using force to quell rebellion at Tiannanmen Square.

Overall, the big lesson from this book is how intensely consensual governance in China is. Yes there is a firm center, but it always exists in dialogue with its constituent elements, if not the true periphery (Tibet, Xinjiang). Deng mastered the process, because he sought to guide and channel it prudently, and at certain moments, like his final Southern Tour in 1992, where he challenged the post-Tiannanmen conservative consensus in Beijing to push for further reform and openness, he gave it a kick in the ass to get it going again.

As ever, the picture is complex.

Service-focused Impact Investing

Before I drift off into my next book, the most important idea to come out of Kai Fu Lee's AI Superpowers, to my mind, is "service-focused impact investing." Impact Investing is the emerging discipline of allocating money with a view to effecting not just economic but non-economic goods: social equity, the environment, gender equity, etc. Service-focused impact investing, in Lee's formulation, involves investing in businesses or other enterprises that specifically seek to employ people in a way that benefits them as well as those they serve. Investing to encourage volunteerism, caregiving, education, etc. Really without explicit aims of economic return to the investor, or at least without that being the primary goal. To broadly encourage love in society.

He gets to this position after fighting off cancer. It was an unexpected turn in the book, but he's the , first person I've read to really take this issue on in a direct way and try to think it through, and the first with the weight and visibility to push it at high levels. Worth watching. Because he is on to something.

Mixing it up

As my business has matured, I find myself a little too tethered to my desk sometimes, dealing with internal and administrative matters (this person has money coming in, that one has money going out, etc.)  I am not getting out in the streets and seeing more people and things as often as I would like to. First and foremost I know that this means I need to be sure we upgrade and upskill someone to whom I can delegate more of this stuff. Such is life.

It nets out that I am not being exposed to as diverse a stream of new people as would be ideal, which in some ways deprives me of the social, intellectual and -- dare I say it -- spiritual oxygen that comes from encountering and engaging with new souls and situations. Even as I write this I recognize that the challenge this presents me with is to learn to draw more strength and interest from those I know and deepening my engagement with them. For example, the client with whom I went to a Smart Recovery meeting the other night (essentially this is AA for people who don't cotton to the idea of a Higher Power, powerlessness, etc.).

A particular challenge here is that I am doing this as I am also making a conscious effort to fly and even drive less, for carbon reasons, so I'm not getting as much geographic diversity.

It also means that I am increasingly dependent on the things I read, listen to, watch, etc, to mix it up. So that if I am captive to the recommendation engines of Amazon, Netflix, etc, there will be a natural narrowing process. Particularly if I keep getting suckered into watching the best goals of Messi, Zlatan, etc., on YouTube.

At least yesterday I did talk on the phone for 15 minutes to a new Board member, and I started watching Eddy Murphy's Dolemite is My Name on Netflix, which is pretty good. And I am grinding to the end of the Deng Xiaopeng bio I've been intermittently reading for months now, and just finished listening to Kai Fu Lee's AI Superpowers in the car, a very intelligent and thoughtful book about the AI arms race between US and China, the disappearance of work as everything gets automated, and how humanity should manage that transition. There were surprises. I'm also enjoying Marcus Aurelius and Charlie Munger in the mornings.

Puzzling

Mary, Natalie and I were working on a puzzle until about 11:15 last night, and then we all got to bed late and had some difficulty falling asleep because our minds were racing a little. We all now recognize the need to put down our puzzles a little earlier, to tone down our puzzle partying. Getting old and learning to accept limitations is hard sometimes.

The souls of my things

Looking around my study, I see that a large plurality if not outright majority of the larger objects (I don't want to quibble over definitions, because nobody is auditing my blog for accuracy) have origin stories: Mary's old futon, George's old guitar, my great-great uncle's (or whoever he was)* old cane, the library table Mary and I bought in Somerville, the armchair I bought in early '95 for my room at Columbia, which occasioned Mary's first trip to High Point (you would think I might have learned something from that trip), the plastic Ritalin man pencil-holder I bought at a yard sale at the Lowenthals in '74 or so, and so on. They have been with me or Mary for decades, some have been in the family for centuries.

So when I say I don't like things, it's not entirely true. I just don't like things without histories, without souls, as it were. That is, things that are not extensions of my soul.

But I would not mind getting rid of Mary's old futon and getting a couch on which I could nap, read, and watch TV in the evenings. I just need to get that done.



*Given to Reverend JC Troy by the stewards of the Riverside Church in 1892, apparently

Learning restraint

Yesterday, like most Sundays, was a super-full day, but a good one. After breakfast, I got Graham behind the wheel and out on the road early. We went west of Jordan Lake, down to Pittsboro, then back through Carrboro to pick up some of the walnut-raisin bread Mary likes at Weaver Street. Graham did well, but I did even better. I need to learn to sit on my hands better, to correct him when necessary but otherwise let him just get comfortable and confident behind the wheel, which isn't always easy. He still has little surprises for me, like when we were pulling in to the driveway last week after a long and successful drive and he drove off the edge of it while turning in, not far from the ditch. "What happened there?" I asked. "I saw that the flag was up and was thinking that I didn't need to come back out to get the mail, so I was distracted."

That was a bit of a surprise, given that he had been out on the interstate going 65 feeling fine and doing a whole host of other more complicated stuff. It never occurred to me that one could drive off of the driveway because of a distraction that small.

This incident is fairly emblematic of the challenges of being the dad of a kid on the autism spectrum, but the very high end of it. Mary has focused considerably on the autism part of Graham's behavior and being in the world, whereas I am focused primarily on him as a kid/boy/young man. I think about his development first and foremost by analogy with my own, because there's a lot in common for damned sure. Lots of dads are in flat out denial of their kid's special needs conditions. I don't think I'm quite there, but Mary might not always agree with that statement.

But sometimes that blinds me to the sides of him that are consistent with his diagnosis. He really does have difficulty splitting attention, so for example pulling into a driveway or both driving and monitoring his speed (often he drifts towards a slow speed, sometimes he goes too fast). So I have to keep this mind and guide him accordingly, but gently, and not excessively. Which ain't always easy.

Batuman

So I pushed through to the end of Elif Batuman's The Possessed. The simple fact that I did so is, of course, a vote of confidence in the book. In many ways, its strengths and weaknesses are one and the same. In chapters on Lazhechnikov's The Ice House and the historical incident it was based on (an actual ice house created in the mid 1700s by the somewhat crazed Empress Anna Ioanovna, in which she forced a couple of members of her court to marry and spend their wedding night, just cuz) and on her studies of Uzbek literature in a summer in Samarkand, she sometimes overindulges in digression and detail.

But then again, it is Batuman's tremendous enthusiasm, curiosity and stamina in ingesting texts and experience which allow her to have some pretty unique and deep thoughts. Sadly, I can't synopsize them quickly. The idea of doing so reminds of the story of when someone asked either Wittgenstein or Tolstoi what their book was about, and whoever it was responded by saying that the only way they could answer the question was to read the book aloud from the start. So there.

In many ways, the book testifies to the enduring power of scholarship and experience, when channeled through a pen of talent. Natalie espied a copy of Batuman's second book, The Idiot, in the little free library out by the lake (let the record show that having one there was my idea). I went and snagged it, replacing it with a Henning Mankell novel that I once read most of a second time by accident. I won't be repeating that mistake.

Vroom

At the intersection of North and South Lakeshore, etc, while running, I came upon a small Toyota, pretty sure it was a mighty Yaris. It was helmed, I am almost sure, by a valiant young lad, because he gunned that little engine to announce to the world that he was there as he pulled away from the stop sign that seemed perhaps to offend him. A Yaris, I tell you.

The instinct runs deep, this drive towards protruberance. Even the smallest of cars cannot efface it entirely, because it derives ultimately from a perception of one's puniness and inadequacy, such as infuses the Trump and Brexit electorate, who have felt collectively powerless and castrated for so long but feel that they have been offered their penises back in the form of these two men and their absurdities. The paradox and the terrible thing is that to bring them back into the fold of reason, we ourselves may have to let them feel somehow empowered within our world view.

Lady Bird

The whole family watched 2017 Oscar nominee Lady Bird the other night -- Natalie for the second time. Mom and I loved it, Graham not so much. He was focused on a few specific points in which it was "unrealistic" -- specifically the ages of the actors and acrtresses, stuff like that. Frankly, they seemed pretty young to me, I hadn't even thought about it. He also pointed out that if someone threw themselves out of a car going at highway speeds, as Lady Bird did at the beginning, that they would get more than a cast on a forearm. I had to give him that.

Mary and Graham were discussing it as I was trying to go to bed Wednesday night, which was a moment when I had zero interest in hearing about it, so I closed my door. But I brought it back up at dinner, and the discussion got interesting. Natalie dug in her heels and bemoaned the fact that resistance to personal, intimate narratives like Lady Bird was reflected in the fact that only one female director had ever won an Oscar (she failed to mention that it was Kathryn Bigelow's The Hurt Locker that won it, as male a picture as you are likely to see).

I was initially a little annoyed at Natalie's slightly knee-jerky adherence to a somewhat simplistic party line she was learning on campus, but it did make me wonder about some of the stupid stuff I said when I was in college, and it took me back specifically many years to one argument I had with mom around then in which we raised our voices and I was saying basically that Capitalism is Evil and she was saying that Socialism is Evil and I remember even as it was coming out of my mouth I knew it was kinda bs but I said it anyway because I was in the mood and getting in an argument would give me a fine excuse to go out and party that night).

But Natalie's argument has a good deal more validity than the one I was espousing all those many years ago. We do prize the big dramatic stories more than the little personal ones, and to our detriment. We are a long way from the days of Norman Lear, Ordinary People, and On Golden Pond.

Update from the road

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

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

The Possessed

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

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

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

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

Curiously neutral nabe

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Christmas miracle

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

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

New regime

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

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

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

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

The Yanceyville bypass

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

A House for Mr Biswas

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

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

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

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

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

Graham running down to the lake

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

These Truths

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

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

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

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

Contra indications

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

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

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

The enthusiasm of sales

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

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

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

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

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

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

Belmont, MA

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

Once more

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

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

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

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

Funerals, weddings and lifecycles

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

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

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

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

Tesla moment

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

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

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

Day in the yard

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

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

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

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

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

A proper Thanksgiving

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

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

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

Relief

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

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

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

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

Paper Boy

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

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

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

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

Golden Day

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

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

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

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

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

Intimations of mortality

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

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

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

Rent seeking as taxation without representation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So it is up to us to watch the Watchmen.

Phoneless

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

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

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

How I got bit by a dog

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Adventures in the state for lovers

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

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

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

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

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

Knocked off course

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

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

Arthritis

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

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

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

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

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

Two assasinations in one day

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

The Invention of Nature

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

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

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

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

But I'm glad I read it.

Changing the accents

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

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

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

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

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

The Weight of the Crown

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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










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

Political space to breathe

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

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

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

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

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

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

Corporation as State

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

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

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

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

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

Apologies for the rambling. It happens.

Guy blowing leaves in street

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

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

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

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

A little "progress"

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

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

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

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

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

Narrow and wide

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Elegant density

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

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

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

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

Ditmars

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

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

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

Digging deep

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

Hmmm.

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

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

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

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

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

Change up

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

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

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

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

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