The Less-Bullish Case for Apple Stock
In the August 20, 2018, issue of Barron’s, Rupal Bhansali of Ariel Investments discusses why investors should not own the Apple stock: People think of Apple as the poor man’s technology stock. At 16 times forward earnings, it is cheap, compared with Facebook and Netflix. But Apple isn’t a technology company. It’s a consumer-electronics company, […]
Making Kombucha
Kombucha is a fermented, somewhat alcoholic, lightly effervescent, sweetened black or green tea beverage with alleged health benefits. From a profile of Health-Ade’s founder and CEO Daina Trout in Delta Airlines’Sky magazine of May 2018: The effervescent elixir is made from three ingredients—tea, water and sugar—plus a scoby, a starter culture. Trout uses a blend […]
John Adams and Thomas Jefferson: Comrades and Adversaries
In his review of Gordon S. Wood’s Friends Divided: John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, James Piereson writes in The New Criterion: And though they clashed spectacularly when they faced off as presidential candidates in 1800, that rocky period was bracketed by a fruitful alliance during the Revolutionary War era and a late-in-life reconciliation that carried […]
Fun Facts on Tea
From Delta Airlines’Sky magazine of May 2018: Approximately 92,000 pounds of tea were destroyed during the Boston Tea Party, the present-day value of which has been estimated to be around $1 million. Herbal teas aren’t actually teas but tisanes: infusions of seeds, berries, flowers, leaves and/or roots. When his hot tea didn’t sell at the […]
Harvey Weinstein, Complicity, and the Rules of the Game in Hollywood
Stephen Galloway of The Hollywood Reporter wonders if the Harvey Weinstein trial will shame Hollywood: Disgraced movie producer and accused serial sexual predator Harvey Weinstein is facing charges that could send him to prison for life, but his lawyers will try to put his many enablers and Hollywood itself on trial-and the results may be […]
Tolerance and the Homo Sapiens
Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari writes in his international bestseller Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, Tolerance is not a Sapiens trademark. In modern times, a small difference in skin color, dialect or religion has been enough to prompt one group of Sapiens to set about exterminating another group. Would ancient Sapiens have been more […]
Overthinking and Its Adverse Consequences
From Sonja Lyubomirsky’s excellent book The How of Happiness, Many of us believe that when we feel down, we should try to focus inwardly and evaluate our feelings and our situation in order to attain self-insight and find solutions that might ultimately resolve our problems and relieve unhappiness. Susan Nolen-Hoeksema, I, and others have compiled […]
Becoming Culinarily Awake
Filmmaker Brian Koppelman in a podcast interview with television personality Alton Brown (of the Good Eats and Iron Chef America fame:) Off on the edge of this town was a gypsy guy that lived in a hut and he had a little wood fire oven and three little busted up tables outside his place. You […]
Anthony Trollope Writing in Trains
The English novelist and Post Office bureaucrat Anthony Trollope wrote over 50 books. He declared that he wrote only for money, and composed much of his writing on trains while traveling to examine rural post offices. He writes in An Autobiography (1883,) On the 15th September 1841, I landed in Dublin, without an acquaintance in […]
Carrying Religious Vendetta Across Generations
Richard Dawkins writes in A Devil’s Chaplain: Reflections on Hope, Lies, Science, and Love, The human psyche has two great sicknesses: the urge to carry vendetta across generations, and the tendency to fasten group labels on people rather than see them as individuals. Abrahamic religion mixes explosively with (and gives strong sanction to) both. Only […]