A Defense Against the Vicissitudes of Inflation
Charlie Munger at the 2004 Berkshire Hathaway Annual Meeting: Most people are going to get a very small real return from investment after considering inflation and taxes. I think that’s an iron law of the world and if, for a brief period, some of us do better than that, we ought to be very thankful. […]
Persevering Biological and Cultural Evolution
Theoretical physicist and mathematician Freeman Dyson, Professor Emeritus in the School of Natural Sciences, in his Edge essay “Biological and Cultural Evolution: Six Characters in Search of an Author”: Our double task is now to preserve and foster both biological evolution as Nature designed it and cultural evolution as we invented it, trying to achieve […]
Lessons from Military Leadership
Lisa Petrilli presents lessons on leadership from two recipients of the Congressional Medal of Honor: On Leadership: You never truly lead anybody until you learn to serve, and you never truly learn to serve until you learn there’s something so much greater than yourself. If it’s to be it’s up to me. I lead by […]
Seneca on the Happy Life
From Seneca’s De Vita Beata (“On the Happy Life,”) I shall make whatever befalls me become a good thing, but I prefer that what befalls me should be comfortable and pleasant and unlikely to cause me annoyance: for you need not suppose that any virtue exists without labour, but some virtues need spurs, while others […]
The Catholic Church Has Turned into a Revolting Institution
After quitting the faith, The Week’s Damon Linker wonders if the Roman Catholic Church will ever survive the barrage of scandals engulfing it: Of course the history of the church is filled with imperfection, of violence, of all-too-human sin and corruption … it is to come face to face with monstrous, grotesque ugliness. It is […]
Nothing Exists or is Destroyed
American novelist and novelist Peter Matthiessen writes in The Snow Leopard (1987): Today most scientists would agree with the ancient Hindus that nothing exists or is destroyed, things merely change shape or form…the cosmic radiation that is thought to come from the explosion of creation strikes the earth with equal intensity from all directions, which […]
Mikhail’s Love for Raisa Gorbacheva
Guardian’s foreign correspondent and author Jonathan Steele writes in a profile of Mikhail Gorbachev, The death of his beloved wife, Raisa, from cancer two years ago was a terrible blow, but he picked himself up within weeks and now maintains a schedule as energetic as ever. He visits the cemetery beside the Novodevichi monastery in […]
Adam Smith on Division of Labor
In Wealth Of Nations, the Scottish economist Adam Smith offered the classic example of the pin-maker and argued that humans could ‘specialize’ their skills to create greater aggregate human prosperity: One man draws out the wire, another straightens it, a third cuts it, a fourth points it, a fifth grinds it at the top for […]
Can’t Concentrate in the Digital Age
Matthew Hennessey, editor at the Wall Street Journal, writes on NationalReview.com, For many of us, media—by which I mean use of any device with a screen—is the oxygen we breathe. We need it everywhere. We can’t work, play, or relax without it. ‘Digital natives,’ born and raised in the internet era, don’t even recognize it […]
The Multifaceted Jorge Luis Borges
American novelist William H. Gass writes in his essay “Imaginary Borges and His Books” in Fiction and the Figures of Life (1970): And which is Borges, which his double? … there is the Borges who plays with the notion that all our works are products of the same universal Will so that one author impersonally […]