Old Wine in New Bottles Sneakers “There was an old woman Who lived in a shoe She had so many children She didn’t know what to do” –Mother Goose nursery rhyme From all appearances, the brainstorm came from an upstart shoe manufacturer, not Tyvek manufacturer DuPont. And at $8 million sales total since 2009, it’s...Read More
Or at Least, New York and London It’s quite a paragraph — make that sentence — but it’s worth the effort: “Autocratic hyper-capitalism without Western checks and balances produces new elites whose dream is an American or British lifestyle and education for their children, and whose other goal, knowing how their own capricious systems really function,...Read More
“Moving out of a house is overwhelming in general, but it is perhaps even more unnerving later in life, when one is not only shedding the physical objects that are accumulated over the years but also unwinding a lifetime of memories, even recreating a sense of self.” –“Real Estate Agents for Older Adults Are Part...Read More
Renaissance Men “I wasn’t the fastest guy in the world. I wouldn’t have done well in an Olympiad or a math contest. But I like to ponder. And pondering things, just sort of thinking about it and thinking about it, turns out to be a pretty good approach.” –James Simons, “A Billionaire Mathematician’s Life of...Read More
Commencement Speeches 2014 Leave it to Ellen DeGeneres to come up with the ultimate rebuttal to Robert Frost. If you don’t know Frost’s famous poem, here it is: Somewhere ages and ages hence: Two roads diverged in a wood, and I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference. –“The...Read More
The Cost(s) of Corporate “Free Speech” In this era of increasingly unfettered corporate power, it’s worth remembering that — at least once upon a time — corporate charters were issued by the sovereign (king, actually), to a relative handful of entities, and conferred extremely narrow rights and powers. Like, the right to conduct a specific...Read More
