Beware of Men Who Cry
Nora Ephron writes in her autobiographical novel Heartburn: The first is that I have always believed that crying is a highly overrated activity: women do entirely too much of it, and the last thing we ought to want is for it to become a universal excess. The second thing I want to say is this: […]
Focus on the Important and Knowable
Warren Buffett stated in the 1998 Berkshire Hathaway Annual Meeting: We try to think about things that are both important and knowable. There are important things that are not knowable…. And there are things that are knowable, but not important—and we don’t want to clutter up our minds with those. We ask ourselves: ‘What’s important […]
The Domestication of Homo Sapiens
Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari writes in his international bestseller Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, The body of Homo sapiens had not evolved for such tasks. It was adapted to climbing apple trees and running after gazelles, not to clearing rocks and carrying water buckets. Human spines, knees, necks and arches paid the price. […]
Syncretism: A Kaleidoscope of Monotheism
Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari writes in his international bestseller Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, In fact, monotheism, as it has played out in history, is a kaleidoscope of monotheist, dualist, polytheist and animist legacies, jumbling together under a single divine umbrella. The average Christian believes in the monotheist God, but also in the […]
Warren Buffett on Investing in Apple’s Ecosystem
Warren Buffett at Berkshire Hathaway’s 2018 Annual Shareholder Meeting on 05-May-2018: We’re betting on the success of Apple products like the iPhone, and I see characteristics in that that make me think it’s extraordinary….And I didn’t go into Apple because it was a tech stock in the least. I went into Apple because I came […]
Evangelical Leaders in the Trump Era
American op-ed columnist Michael Gerson writes in his commentary on “Trump and the Evangelical Temptation” in The Atlantic: It is remarkable to hear religious leaders defend profanity, ridicule, and cruelty as hallmarks of authenticity and dismiss decency as a dead language. President Trump’s presidency has coarsened our culture, given permission for bullying, complicated the moral […]
Warren Buffett on Becoming a Great Investor
Warren Buffett at Berkshire Hathaway’s 2018 Annual Shareholder Meeting on 05-May-2018: What we do is not a complicated business. It’s got to be a disciplined business, but it does not require a super high IQ or anything of the sort. And there are a few fundamentals that are incredibly important. And you do have to […]
Warren Buffett on How Wells Fargo will Thrive
Warren Buffett at Berkshire Hathaway’s 2018 Annual Shareholder Meeting on 05-May-2018: Wells Fargo is a company that proved the efficacy of incentives. And it’s just that they had the wrong incentives. And that was bad….The fact that you are going to have problems at some large institution is not unique. In fact all the big […]
Parkland Teenagers on to a Revolution?
Tim Kreider writes in an op-ed on NYTimes.com: It has been inspiring and thrilling to watch the furious, clear-eyed teenagers [of Parkland] shame and vilify gutless politicians and soul-dead lobbyists for their complicity in the murders of their friends. This uprising of the young against the ossified, monolithic power of the National Rifle Association has […]
Value and Growth of Stocks are Inseparable
Hedge fund manager and investor Joel Greenblatt on Barry Ritholtz’s The Masters in Business podcast: My definition of value is figure out what the business is worth and pay a lot less. It is not low price-to-book, low price-to-sales investing…. As Warren Buffett would say, value and growth are tied at the hip. Growth is […]