Let it Be

Buddhist teacher Jack Kornfield writes in A Path with Heart: a Guide Through the Perils and Promises of Spiritual Life (1993): Let go of the battle. Breathe quietly and let it be. Let your body relax and your heart soften. Open to whatever you experience without fighting.

Tourism Trashed Venice

Christopher de Bellaigue in The Guardian about how overcrowded cities and rubbish-strewn tourist attractions are getting a reprive in the pandemic: Were it not for tourism, much of Venice’s Gothic fabric would have crumbled or been redeveloped years ago. But while the tourism industry provided much of the economic rationale for the preservation of the […]

Public Welfare Isn’t America’s Raison d’Etre

The Wall Street Journal’s deputy editor Daniel Henninger comments on President Biden’s visit with the Group of Seven leaders in Europe: Public Welfare has never been America’s reason for being, notwithstanding our substantial spending on social support programs. Despite the entitlement creations of FDR’s New Deal and LBJ’s Great Society, the U.S., unlike Europe, has […]

How Toyota Uses Poka-Yoke

Poka-Yoke (poh-kah yoh-keh) is a process designed to avoid mistakes either before assembly or immediately after for effortless correction: Japanese manufacturing guru Shigeo Shingo once told Toyota assembly line workers about his clever techniques to make production processes “idiot-proof.” One of the plant’s employees burst into tears. “I am not an idiot!” she cried. A […]

Warren Buffett on Selling Stock Positions

Warren Buffett speaks about (transcript) selling stock positions at the 2020 Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting, When we sell something, very often it’s going to be our entire stake. I mean we don’t trim positions. That’s just not the way we approach it any more than if we buy a hundred percent of a business, we’re […]

Any Progress You Make on a Daily Basis is Fantastic

“Mad Men” Creator Matthew Weiner’s reassuring life advice for struggling artists: The greatest regret I have is that, early in my career, I showed myself such cruelty for not having accomplished anything significant. I spent so much time trying to write, but was paralyzed by how behind I felt. Many years later I realized that […]

The Sleepless Elite

Some people can run on little sleep and get so much done. Melinda Beck explains why in the Wall Street Journal: Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson and Leonardo da Vinci were too busy to sleep much, according to historical accounts. Winston Churchill and Thomas Edison came close but they were also fond of taking naps, which […]

We’re Addicted to Social Interaction

We’re not addicted to smartphones, we’re addicted to social interaction argues this new study. Cell phones may be making us hypersocial, rather than antisocial as previous research suggests. In post-industrial environments where foods are abundant and readily available, our cravings for fat and sugar sculpted by distant evolutionary pressures can easily go into insatiable overdrive […]

Yasunari Kawabata, the Great Stylist

World-renowned Japanese writer Mishima Yukio writes in The Eternal Traveler, Yasunari Kawabata’s Personality and Works, Mr. Kawabata, as everyone knows, is a great stylist, but I believe he is finally without a style. Because style for the novelist means the will to interpret the world and discover the key to it. To arrange the world, […]

Shine Even Brighter Together

Sereno Sky writes in Lonely Traveller (2014,) It was awesome lying beside Anne there in the sand, listening to the waves singing their song as they splashed unto the shore. I held her hand as we looked up to the endless stars smiling down on us. “Bernardo, do you think when we die we’ll be […]