Category

Mara: “Maybe write something about how full life is,” said Mara, Saturday evening. I was racing to catch a flight to Singapore after the Army/Navy game, knowing I’d be reading/writing all-night. The week had been insane, they all are these days. Markets, business, deals, family, friends. The pressure to publish, my burden, a blessing. It’s all good, great in fact. “Life won’t always be this full, but right now it is,

Hope all goes well… “This old paramedic waved me away and yelled — Get me a man, someone strong, I need help immediately,” said Olivia, my 18-year-old, a certified EMT, a volunteer first-responder. “He’s the most sexist of all the guys I have to deal with. I looked him in the eye and said — Don’t worry, I got this,” continued Liv, recounting her latest 911 emergency call. “After we lifted the patient onto

Anecdote: “The hope is that these cracks will turn into chasms,” said Dr. Mitesh Patel of Imperial College, Faculty of Natural Sciences, Department of Physics. “And eventually we will see some spectacular signature that not only confirms that the Standard Model has broken down as a description of nature, but also give us a new direction to help us understand what we are seeing and what the new physics theory looks li

Hope all goes well… “My massive bias is to believe things always work out okay,” said Simplicity, walking Occam’s Razor. “But today somehow feels unique, and when I look at supply and demand in oil, grains, base metals too, there’s an undeniable tail risk here,” he said, having analyzed the fundamentals of such things over a long career. “Without a perfect North American growing season, there will be shortages, perha

No one rang the bell. No one ever does. So, we’ll never know precisely when globalization peaked, in part because it’s not exactly clear what that even means. But global trade volume as a percentage of global GDP rose inexorably throughout our lifetimes, and then topped out around 60% in 2008. We have yet to reclaim those heights. Perhaps that was the high. So much has happened in the fourteen years since, and it’s p

Hope all goes well… “The great thing about equities is that they’re not bonds,” bellowed Biggie Too, global chief strategist for one of Wall Street’s too-big-to-fail affairs. “The best thing about US stocks is that they’re not European or Asian or emerging equities,” barked Biggie. “The terrific thing about equities is that they’re nominal,” said Too, repeating the lyrics traders are chanting as stocks rise in defian

Hope all goes well… Stepped back this week, from keyboards, screens. Replaced by long quiet walks, shaking off a little case of Omicron. Always love a little distance from a subject, time to think, solitude, ideally at altitude. From each angle, every perspective, I found myself returning to something I wrote last September: The Case for Quantum Change. It provides a framework for making sense of the dramatic events

“Clausewitz taught that we must dismantle our enemy’s center of gravity to achieve victory,” said The Commander. “Each nation has strengths and weaknesses, and it’s natural to capitalize on weakness,” he added. “But it is critical to pick apart the strengths that make up the center of gravity,” explained The Commander. “In the case of the US, our core strengths are superior communications, logistics, and our carrier

Hope all goes well… “War is the continuation of politics by other means,” explained The Commander, quoting Carl von Clausewitz, the famous Prussian general and military theorist. “Von Clausewitz advocated that you continue to pound your enemy, you don’t stop a fight until you negotiate an end to it,” he added. “We tend to pause our military actions during negotiations, but Russia is doing as von Clausewitz advised. P

Anecdote: Everything is connected, one moment naturally following another. And so it is tempting to think that by retracing each step we can explain why we have arrived at a particular place. Perhaps this is sometimes true, over very short periods at least. But the world is infinitely complex, and the truth is that we often arrive at a destination for reasons we can’t possibly understand, let alone have predicted. Th