How To Create Good Memories That Will Last A Lifetime

Joshua Foer, 2006 U.S.A. Memory Champion and author of the enthralling Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything (2011,) offers a suitable allegory for memory than that of a recording mechanism: Memory is a playground. It’s not my own metaphor, that’s what I was once told by the man who trained me […]

Innovate at Scale as Google Does

CEO of Alphabet Sundar Pichai on the benefits and burdens of leading a vast, no-longer-youthful organization: You constantly find when companies are smaller, they make more decisions that are more like betting the company. Then they tend to get more conservative at scale. So how do you make sure as a company, you’re ambitious, you’re […]

Charlie Munger on One-Size-Fits-All Strategies

No investment strategy can be a one-size-fits-all solution. At the Daily Journal Corporation (DJCO) annual meeting on 16-Feb-2022, the 98-year-old Charlie Munger answered questions: I don’t think I have a one-size-fits-all investment. I think some people are gifted enough that they can invest in hard to value difficult things. Other people, I think, would be […]

What Freedom Represents

During COVID-19 masking guidelines, too many people have the absurd notion that going maskless displays they’re a lover of freedom. Actually, it shows that you have no idea what freedom represents, argues Michael Tomasky in The New York Times: Freedom emphatically does not include the freedom to get someone else sick. It does not include […]

Fighting Poverty: Redistributing Wealth Doesn’t Work

Pop star Bono on realizing that simply handing out money can be counterproductive, through this interview the New York Times (via Tyler Cowen and via Tim Worstall,) I ended up as an activist in a very different place from where I started. I thought that if we just redistributed resources, then we could solve every […]

Charlie Munger on Excess Speculation

Speculative stocks—especially emerging market stocks, penny stocks, rare materials stocks and derivatives—are high risk, high-reward, and therefore appeal to short-term traders. Alas, if day trading was that easy, 90% of day traders wouldn’t be failing year after year. At the Daily Journal Corporation (DJCO) annual meeting on 16-Feb-2022, the 98-year-old Charlie Munger answered questions: The […]

Charlie Munger on Market Timing

A Charles Schwab study showed that the cost of waiting for the perfect moment to invest typically exceeds the benefit of even perfect timing. At the Daily Journal Corporation (DJCO) annual meeting on 16-Feb-2022, the 98-year-old Charlie Munger answered questions: In my whole adult life, I’ve never hoarded cash waiting for better conditions. I’ve just […]

New England for Fall Foliage

New England is one of the most spectacular—and underrated—destinations in North America, especially in the Fall. From multihued flora to scenic towns, you won’t want to overlook the Northeast in autumn. FareCompare lists New England fall foliage desitations that’ll be worth your while: Kancamagus Highway—New Hampshire Lake Winnipesaukee Loop—New Hampshire Route 100—Vermont Montgomery—Vermont Coastal Route […]

The Rededication of the Hagia Sophia

In 2020, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan made Istanbul’s Hagia Sophia “a Mohammedan place of prayer.” Made as an Orthodox Christian cathedral in the 6th century by the Byzantine Emperor Justinian I, the Hagia Sophia turned into a mosque following the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople in 1453. In 1934, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk overthrew the Ottoman […]

Japanese Purification Rituals

The BBC Travel series Why We Are What We Are examines Hishaku, the purification ritual originating from the Shinto: Examples of ritual purification abound in everyday life. Before entering a Shinto shrine, worshippers rinse their hands and mouth in a stone water basin at the entrance. Many Japanese take their new car to the shrine […]