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)
"Never buck the other man's game, Val," Reilly said, "but watch the percentages. It is not one or two pots that make a poker player, but the consistency with which he plays."
-Louis L'Amour, Reilly's Luck
There are at least two, each complicated, layers to this story. The first is about decades of misguided bipartisan policy on research into dangerous viruses. The second is about how the U.S. government and academia have communicated the relationship between this strategy and the origin of the virus from 2020 onward. The first may have had disastrous consequences for global health security; the second has contributed to eroding trust in American democracy.
-as culled from this The FreePress issue
In fact, I think AI is quickly becoming the most sophisticated form of procrastination.
-Mark Manson, from this newsletter
Amazon is on a mission to shrink two-day delivery down to the amount of time it takes to carry a pizza to a customer. Its drones, which are capable of transporting packages weighing up to 5 pounds and can fly as far as 7.5 miles from their home bases, are playing an increasingly important role in the ultrafast delivery push, and currently operate in 11 metropolitan areas including Dallas, Houston and the suburbs around Phoenix.
-from this Daily Upside newsletter
To be honest, I am writing this post for an audience of one (me), with the purpose of clarifying for myself how to make sense of this space, and if it does help you make sense of this disruption, it is a side benefit.
Through human existence, revolutionary change has been a constant, and even when that change has been an advance for humanity, it has always come with pain for those that the change renders obsolete and unanticipated side costs. At the risk of overreach, I will argue that every major disruptive change has gone through four phases: a period of hope and hype, where the change is viewed as big, but it is unclear how and in what form it will be delivered, a period of build-up, where a subset of people (with more belief in the change and more willingness to take risks) start investing and building products to make the change happen, a period of business building, where the change is monetized and businesses form, and a recalibration, where the change works its way through the economy and society, in both good ways (increased productivity and welfare, new businesses) and bad ways (displacement and damage).
-Aswath Damodaran, from this edition
.................................with Poor Richard:
Wealth is not his that has it, but his that enjoys it.
The way to be safe, is never to be secure.
Success has ruin'd many a man.
Observe all men; thyself most.
Half the truth is often a great lie.
Blessed is he that expects nothing, for he shall never be disappointed.
A mob's a monster; heads enough, but no brains.
Dost thou love life? Then do not squander time; for that's the stuff life is made of.\
If man could have half his wishes, he would double his troubles.
Learn to enjoy every minute of your life. Be happy now. Don't wait for something outside of yourself to make you happy in the future. Think how really precious is the time you have to spend, whether it's at work or with your family. Every minute should be enjoyed and savored.
The kind of campaign Huey envisioned would require tremendous amounts of money. Be he believed that he would have ample resources to conduct it, for in addition to his own Louisiana revenues, he had been promised help from an unexpected quarter. Representatives of some of the biggest corporation and banks in the country came to him secretly and pledged huge contributions, up to two million dollars or even more if he would remove Roosevelt from the White House. He was astonished at the depth of their hatred for the President and reminded one man that he was more radical than Roosevelt. "We're not for you either," the man spat out. "Just give me the money," Huey said amiably, probably reflecting that these conservatives were no smarter than the ones in Louisiana.
The threat of Huey's third party alarmed the Roosevelt high command. Jim Farley caused a secret poll to be taken of Huey's national strength. The result was disquieting.
-T. Harry Williams, Huey Long
I cannot define it; I can only tell you my own faith. The spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure that it is right; the spirit of liberty is the spirit which seeks to understand the minds of other men and women; the spirit of liberty is the spirit which weighs their interest alongside its own without bias; the spirit of liberty remembers that not even a sparrow falls to earth unheeded; the spirit of liberty is the spirit of him who, near two thousand years ago, taught mankind that lesson it has never learned, but has never quite forgotten - that there may be a kingdom where the least shall be heard and considered side-by-side with the greatest.
-The danger is not that a particular class is unfit to govern. Every class is unfit to govern. The law of liberty tends to abolish the reign of race over race, of faith over faith, of class over class.
-Success is nothing more than a few simple disciplines, practiced every day; while failure is simply a few errors in judgment, repeated every day. It is the accumulative weight of our disciplines and our judgments that leads us to either fortune or failure.
-You must take personal responsibility. You cannot change the circumstances, the seasons, or the wind, but you can change yourself. That is something you have charge of. You don’t have charge of the constellations, but you do have charge of whether you read, develop new skills and take new classes.
-Learn how to turn frustration into fascination. You will learn more being fascinated by life than you will by being frustrated by it.
-You don’t get paid for the hour. You get paid for the value you bring to the hour.
-The challenge of leadership is to be strong, but not rude; be kind, but not weak; be bold, but not a bully; be thoughtful, but not lazy; be humble, but not timid; be proud, but not arrogant; have humor, but without folly.
-all quotes from Jim Rohn, more here
In Desolation Island (1978), the fifth novel in the series, Maturin invokes the costs of a life “spent in dissimulation”—regretting how “the long-lived lie soak[s] into the liar’s deepest fibre.”
-Tim Lake, from his essay, Read the Novels and Forget Everything Else
Old age keeps being put back, like the completion of a government building project.
-Theodore Dalrymple, In Search of the Consolations of Age
A theory of intelligence might also finally decouple intelligence from consciousness. Intelligence is likely a computational quantity; consciousness is a phenomenal one. Of course, there is a chance that we might discover there is no general theory of intelligence at all; that like life, intelligence is a squishy, messy, almost illusionary phenomenon that cannot be encapsulated into a mathematical formula. That would be unfortunate, but good to know sooner rather than later.
-Kevin Kelly, from this substack episode
No’s mean more than yes’s. Saying yes is easy—people say yes to things they don't care about all the time.
Saying no requires you to be willing to lose something. That's how you know it's real.
-Mark Manson, from here
Born in Vienna in 1909, Drucker stumbled onto the writing of Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard when he was only 19. To give you a sense of what Drucker was all about, he began studying Danish simply so that he could read Kierkegaard’s at-that-time-still-untranslated writings. By 1933, he was a lecturer in the German city of Frankfurt. When the Nazi government fired all the Jewish professors on staff, Drucker decided he could not and would not be complicit in the abuses of the autocratic regime. He left for London a couple of days later.
-Ari Weinzweig, from this issue
For practical purposes, the financial memory should be assumed to last, at a maximum, no more than 20 years. This is normally the time it takes for the recollection of one disaster to be erased and for some variant of the previous dementia to come forward to capture the financial mind. It is also the time generally required for a new generation to cone on the scene, impressed, as had been its predecessors, with its own financial genius.
-John Kenneth Galbraith, A Short History of Financial Euphoria
The world was built by practical people who knew how to get into a creative frame of mind, listen to their imaginations, and build on the ideas they found there.
-Roger van Oech, A Whack on the Side of the Head: How You Can Be More Creative
As Charlie Munger once said, "The first rule of compounding: Never interrupt it unnecessarily."
Compounding might be the eighth wonder of the world, but it takes time to morph from a caterpillar into a butterfly. . . .
Compounding in a retirement calculator is neat and tidy. Compounding in the stock market it messy and lumpy. . . .
If you want consistency over the long haul, you have to accept lower returns. And if you want higher returns over the long haul, you have to accept volatility. You can never truly escape risk; you just change how you accept it.
-Ben Carlson, Risk & Reward
"Is it well with you?" he asked.
And the old man answered, "It is well."
"There be wood beside you," the younger man continued, "and the fire burns bright. The morning is gray and the cold has broken. It will snow presently. Even now it is snowing."
"Ay, even now it is snowing."
"The tribesmen hurry. Their bales are heavy, and their bellies flat with lack of feasting. The trail is long and they travel fast. I go now. It is well?"
"It is well. I am as a last year's leaf, clinging lightly to the stem. The first breath that blows, and I fall. My voice is become like an old woman's. My eyes no longer show me the way of my feet, and my feet are heavy, and I am tired. It is well."
He bowed his head in content till the last noise of the complaining snow had died away, and he knew his son was beyond recall. Then his hand crept out in haste to the wood. It alone stood betwixt him and the eternity which yawned upon him. At last the measure of his life was a handful of faggots. One by one they would go to feed the fire, and just so, step by step, death would creep upon him. When the last stick had surrendered up its heat, the frost would begin to gather strength. First his feet would yield, then his hands; and the numbness would travel slowly, from the extremities to the body. His head would fall forward upon his knees, and he would rest. It was easy. All men must die.
-Jack London, The Law of Life
Congress, in issuing the invitation Monroe transmitted, reflected a national willingness to see the young hero, now old, one more time. In looking at Lafayette, Americans could look back. When men invented calendars they invented anniversaries, with all the mental freight that anniversaries carry. The Battles of Lexington and Concord had been fought in April 1775, the Battle of Bunker Hill that June. Their fiftieth anniversaries were approaching. Congress had commissioned John Trumbull, America's most eminent artist, to decorate the Rotunda of the Capital with four huge paintings celebrating the Revolution; Lafayette would appear in one of them. Only three signers of the Declaration of Independence—Adams, Jefferson, and Charles Carroll of Carrolton—still lived. Only one major general of the revolutionary army still lived—Lafayette. Revolutionary War veterans survived in every city and many towns, but now they were all gray. If one wanted to see and celebrate the Revolution as a living event, now was the last opportunity.
-Richard Brookhiser, The Hero Returns: Lafayette and the Legacy of Revolution
 |
| The Surrender of Lord Cornwallis John Trumbull oil on canvas 1819-20 |
“If you want to do something, make a habit of it, if you don’t want to do that, don’t, but make a habit of something else instead.”
Epictetus said habits—good and bad—were like a bonfire. Every time we perform a habit, we reinforce it. We add fuel to the fire. “Every habit and capability is confirmed and grows in its corresponding actions, walking by walking, and running by running,” Epictetus said, “therefore, the same principle is at work in our state of mind. When you get angry, you’ve not only experienced that evil, but you’ve also reinforced a bad habit, adding fuel to the fire.” It was likely one of the many lessons he learned from his teacher, Musonius Rufus. Rufus was perhaps the earliest philosopher to identify the power of habits. In “many circumstances,” he said, “we do not deal with our affairs in accordance with correct assumptions, but rather we follow thoughtless habit.”
-as cut-and-pasted from Sunday's Daily Stoic
All day Buck brooded by the pool or roamed restlessly about the camp. Death, as a cessation of movement, as a passing out and away from the lives of the living, he knew, and he knew John Thornton was dead. It left a great void in him, somewhat akin to hunger, but a void which ached and ached, and which food could not fill. At times, when he paused to contemplate the carcasses of the Yeehats, he forgot the pain of it; and at such times he was aware of a great pride in himself—a pride greater than any he had yet experienced. He had killed man, the noblest game of all, and he had killed in the face of the law of club and fang. He sniffed the bodies curiously. They had died so easily. It was harder to kill a husky dog than them. They were not match at all, were it not for their arrows and spears and clubs. Thenceforward he would be unafraid of them except when they bore in their hands their arrows, spears, and clubs.
-Jack London, The Call of the Wild
For both meditation and playing music, this means the brain needs to deactivate circuits associated with self-consciousness and with judgment—the finger-wagging schoolteacher in your brain that is saying "that's terrible!" or "you're not good enough." That school marm is useful when you are editing, but anathema to creativity and spontaneity.
-Daniel J. Levitin, I Heard There Was a Secret Chord: Music as Medicine
"These wounds are my pride," he said. "I received them fighting for the independence of my country. Your blood, my general, flowed the same day . . . where we were so unfortunate." At Brandywine, the enemy had outflanked the defenders and forced them to flee in confusion. Lafayette, faint from loss of blood, had been led from the field but had stayed at a bridge on a road behind the lines in Chester, Pennsylvania, to make order among the retreating men.
"It was indeed a rough day," Lafayette said now, forty-eight years later, "but have we not since been deeply indemnified?"
Whom did he mean by we? Lafayette had a gift—shown hundreds of times on his American tour—of connecting quickly and warmly with the people before him, no matter their age or sex, class or race. These bursts of spontaneous fraternity were especially strong with veterans of the Revolution. In that moment in Natchez, we meant, first and foremost, the two comrades of 1777. Young once, they had lived to old age; wounded, they were now whole; mementoes of pain had become souvenirs of glory. This was simple indemnification for them, for any old soldier: We struggled, sometimes we lost, but we have prevailed and endured.
But Lafayette's we was also meant to encompass the American people, among whom he always included himself. This we had won independence from their colonial masters and had maintained it through decades of international upheaval, including a second shooting war with Britain. The country Americans had created and passed on to a new generation was, or seemed, united, prosperous, orderly, free, and self-ruled. Once children of a royal patriarch, cogs in an imperial machine, they now ran their own affairs—and evidently ran them well. This was indemnification, not for two men but for millions.
-Richard Brookhiser, The Hero Returns: Lafayette and the Legacy of Revolution
I know what you're going to ask me," Spike said. "And the answer is yes."
-Alison Gaylin, Robert B. Parker's Booked: A Sunny Randall Novel
Faith is a pre-condition of all systematic knowing, all purposive doing and all decent living. Societies are held together, not primarily by the fear of the many for the coercive power of the few, but by a widespread faith in the other fellow's decency.
Aldous Huxley, The Perennial Philosophy
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