Bill Joy’s Law
Designer Paul Taylor contends that working on what you’re working on, you’ll get a lot more done than only working with your own smart people: Joy’s law is the principle that “no matter who you are, most of the smartest people work for someone else.” Bill Joy, the computer engineer to whom it’s attributed argued […]
The Queen’s Most Important Quality: Biting Her Lips
Discussing Prince Andrew’s disastrous BBC Newsnight interview and the aftermath, The Economist notes, The queen’s most important quality is her ability to keep her mouth shut, a skill which neither Andrew nor his elder brother Charles has mastered. By sounding off about a wide range of subjects about which he has more opinions than knowledge, […]
Christmas or Excessmass?
James Madison University’s Barkley Rosser laments about the creeping excesses of Christmas: Disgusted by the crass commercialism associated with the Christmas holiday in the US. In this column he proposed dividing the holiday into two: a strictly religious one, “the Nativity” without gift giving, and a gift giving one he argued should be called “Excessmass,” […]
The Perils of Idol Worship
Prof. Aswath Damodaran on the Kraft-Heinz saga and the dangers of blindly following the Oracle of Omaha: It is human to err … Buffett has been open about his mistakes, and how much they have cost him and Berkshire Hathaway shareholders. He has also been candid about his blind spots, which include an unwillingness to […]
Traveling to Prague Before 1989
Rick Steves provides a glimpse of pre-1989 Prague, a section from his For the Love of Europe (2020,) a collection of 100 favorite memories from a lifetime of European travel: Prague escaped the bombs of the last century’s wars, ant it’s remarkably well-preserved. But it didn’t avoid the heavy, deadening economic and political blanket of […]
The Progression of the Names of Indian Restaurants in the West
Chronicling the history of the vaunted British curry house, the guardian’s food journalist Bee Wilson notes, You can judge the age of a British curry restaurant from its name. If you see one that is called Taj Mahal, Passage to India or Koh-i-Noor (after the famous Indian diamond,) it probably dates back to the first […]
Parenting Differences in Men and Women
Suzanne Venker of The Federalist discusses differences in parenting choices and priorities between men and women: Once a baby arrives, a woman’s nurturing gene almost always kicks in. Providing for her child emotionally is her first instinct, which is why going back to work so soon is heart-wrenching for mothers. A father’s reaction is different: […]
The Good Life Doesn’t Just Happen
National Review’s senior political correspondent Jim Geraghty writes, Americans fantasize about the good life—a big house, a fancy car, stylish clothes, vacations in far-flung exotic locales—and they often envision this luxurious life paid for by a wildly lucrative career, most often in entertainment, athletics, or music. But research demonstrates that a lot of those who […]
Questions are Your Mind’s Receptors for Answers
Jason Fried, co-founder of Basecamp and co-author of the bestseller Rework (2010,) writes about lessons learned from management academic Clayton Christensen: Clay explained it in a way that I’ve never heard before and I’ll never forget again. Paraphrased slightly, he said: “Questions are places in your mind where answers fit. If you haven’t asked the […]
Surrender to What Is
American clinical psychologist John Welwood writes in Ordinary Magic, Everyday Life as Spiritual Path (1992): Hard as this may be to grasp, the Buddha, or awakened mind in each person, is whatever we are experiencing in the moment – the wind in the trees, the traffic on the freeway, the confusion we are feeling – […]