Trudeau briefly worked for a Broadway producer, and when that project fizzled out, he volunteered to do some graphic art for the reelection campaign of the New York City mayor, John Lindsay. "I knew his nephew George from St. Paul's," he tells me. "That summer is memorable for one thing I didn't do—drive up to Woodstock with everyone else in Lindsay's office. I'd heard it was going to rain."
-Joshua Kendall, Trudeau and Doonesbury: A Biography: The Cartoonist Who Turned The News Into Art
Our world, and each of our lives, quite suddenly became overwhelming technocratic, sucking millions into the simulation. Scientists like to say that human knowledge is doubling every twelve months. That is explosive, exponential growth. But let's clarify that: Complicated knowledge is doubling every twelve months. Complex knowledge, which must be lived in real time and can't be discovered or stored by computers, is not increasing at all. This asymmetry explains why we're bombarded with ingenious solutions to age-old problems but never seem to make progress toward greater happiness. In fact, it's the reverse: We are losing our sense of life's meaning faster and faster.
-Arthur C. Brooks, The Meaning of Your Life
The paradox of volcanoes was that they were symbols of destruction but also of life. Once the lave slows and cools, it solidifies and then breaks down over time to become soil—rich, fertile soil.
She wasn't a black hole, she decided. She was a volcano. And like a volcano she couldn't run away from herself. She'd have to stay there and tend to that wasteland.
She could plant a forest inside herself.
-Matt Haig, The Midnight Library
The unread story is not a story; it is little black marks on wood pulp. The reader, reading it, makes it live: a live thing, a story.
As an adult, I'll have to come to comprehend the fact that the world, technically speaking, is too vast to be conveyed by language. It's too grand and too horrific, to complex; too full of love and weather and brutality and governments and movies, to name the first phenomena that come to mind; too overwhelmed by its own history (The Great Vowel Shift! Shintoism! The invention of gunpowder and the printing press and electricity!), not to mention its hopes and fears for the future.
-Michael Cunningham, Unsayable: A Life in Writing
Life, he decided, was never a question of accumulating material things, nor in the struggle for reputation, but in the widening and deepening of perception, increasing the sensitivity of the faculties, of an awareness of the world in which one lives.
-Louis L'Amour, Flint
Best practices guarantee average performance. They are literally the prescriptions of others that limit variation and get you to a baseline of performance. Following them virtually ensures that you will be working harder and harder just to "keep up." To be the best, you have to do things that no one can prescribe.
-Shane Parrish, from here
..................as thousands of folks lined the streets to meet and greet the Budweiser Clydesdales.
This cartoon perfectly encapsulates the conflict that occupies nearly every financial decision you make in life. The essence of successful investing, retirement planning and life in general is balance. You have to plan for the future but live in the present. You have to enjoy the moment but plan for old age. You have to invest for the long run but survive the short run. It's difficult to balance enjoying life now and ensuring you have the resources to enjoy life later.
There is no ideal balance for everyone because we all have different goals, needs, resources, expectations, and desires. The hardest part about planning for your financial future is the simple fact that you don't know what will happen. No one has it all figured out because no one knows what various curve balls life is going to throw at them. So you do the best you can.
-Ben Carlson, Risk & Reward: How to handle market volatility and build long-term wealth
One way to understand the numinous right hemisphere is that it manages life's complexity. Complex challenges in life are easy to understand but impossible to solve, so they can only be lived and understood. This is in contrast to the complicated parts of life (managed in the left hemisphere), which can be hard to understand but are solvable once and for all.
Life is full of both kinds of challenges. I need to understand others' emotions (a complex challenge), but I also need to make smart decisions, which in many cases means acting in spite of these emotions (a complicated challenge).
-Arthur C. Brooks, The Meaning of Your Life: Finding Purpose in an Age of Emptiness
Many Frenchmen served in America during the Revolution. There were more French combatants at Yorktown than Americans.* Lafayette personified all his countrymen in the American mind because he had come early, before the formal alliance, and stayed late. His French comrades were professionals and, to the extent they had opinions, realpolitikers, serving in obedience to orders and to advance French interests, Lafayette was a volunteer and an enthusiast. He had the ability to engage and impress people, which might be called a talent if that did not suggest skill and practice, whereas with him the effect was as artless as his intentions were sincere.
-Richard Brookhiser, The Hero Returns: Lafayette and the Legacy of Revolution
*If one queries ChatGPT, one reads that the numbers of foot soldiers at Yorktown were fairly even between French and American (and, combined, significantly outnumbered the British). When adding the number of French sailors, who blockaded the British and prevented their escape, then ChatGPT says the statistic is correct.
After which, satisfied with the way in which he had conducted himself at Meung, without remorse for the past, confident in the present, and full of hope for the future, he retired to bed, and slept the sleep of the brave.
-Alexandre Dumas, The Three Musketeers
We all become stories. The question becomes how will yours end?
-Tony Isola, from his post, On The Clock
The underlying idea here is energy and power aren’t the same. Energy is how much you’ve got. Power is how fast you can use it.
-as culled from today's Stephen McBride post
. . . economics professor Roberto Serrano gave his class a take-home midterm, the way he had for years. The class average came back at 96% in a course where midterms historically averaged 65 to 80. Suspicious that the students were using AI, he made the final exam in-person. The average collapsed to 48.6%, the lowest he’d ever seen. Dozens of students had likely used AI on the midterm, and the final exam revealed how little they actually knew. These are Ivy League students holding the most powerful learning tool ever built, and instead of using it to learn, they used it to skip learning because thirteen years of school didn’t teach them how to learn, or even why it’s important.
-Austin Scholar, from this episode
He found it especially uncomfortable to decide so many issues that one could only "guess at": "It is unpleasant when you do not have time really to familiarize yourself with the work."
Two quite distinct problems underlay these concerns. One is common to most new judges, particularly those who, like Hand, had limited courtroom experience. The United States, unlike most countries, has never had a professional judiciary; practitioners come to the bench without training in judging. Only experience can teach the new American judge how to steer through the complexities of trial procedures and preside calmly over a lawsuit. The difficulty is aggravated for new federal judges, who are often unfamiliar with the specialties of federal judicial business. Although the range of problems before federal courts in 1909 was narrower than it is today, judges then did deal with many issues: problems of torts, contracts, and other fields of common law—with which most new appointees were likely to be acquainted from their law practice—but also more esoteric federal fields such as banking, patent, copyright, and admiralty. Hand had no familiarity with any of these
The second problem was still more difficult. While experience had taught Hand how a courtroom is run and had acquainted him with federal law, the need "to decide so many things" that he could only "guess at," without adequate opportunity for study and reflection, would always trouble him. When presiding over a trial, the judge must often shoot from the hip, issuing immediate rulings from the bench that grand or deny motions, determine admissibility of evidence, and in general keep the proceeding going without long pauses for studying and writing an opinion on a controversial issue. This aspect of the work was especially uncongenial to a person as thorough, and sometimes indecisive, as Learned Hand—the man whom Felix Frankfurther occasionally called "the modern Hamlet."
-Gerald Gunther, Learned Hand: The Man and the Judge
As a child, I became intent on learning the names of everything, from cars (there was a Chevrolet going by; our car was a Ford) to the fact that the tree in our front yard was an oak. I was fascinated by the revelation that a car could have many names—it could also be a Buick or a Pontiac or a Chrysler. Our tree was an oak, but the tree in our neighbors' yard was a maple. They looked the same to me, but they had different names, and for a while it seemed that every individual tree must have its own name, which would be a lot to remember.
I went so far as to believe that my parents, in giving me all those names, were passing along secrets. Other people were unaware of the names within the names. The knew the work "tree" but only my parents and I were able to call this tree oak and that tree maple. I felt like an insider, a secret comrade to trees and cars, birds and flowers, and shoes and books.
-Michael Cunningham, Unsayable: A Life in Writing
Alka-Seltzer commercial "No Matter What Shape"
The T-Bones.................................No Matter What Shape (Your Stomach is in)
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