I spent last week in Israel and it was a fascinating time to be there. It’s always interesting, but it was particularly so this time due to the significant escalation of hostilities in the south of the country as well as that it was coinciding with Israel’s Memorial and Independence Days (no accident I’m sure).
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[Updated: April 13, 2016] I touched on the global markets having a whiff of deflation two weeks ago in this blog. It seems to have picked up speed. Today the Dow dropped by 300 points and 10-year Treasury yields dropped to much lower levels (2.08%) in the wake of a pretty spectacular drop in oil since August but really accelerating in October.
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Steve Schwarzman is the co-founder and Chairman and CEO of Blackstone, which is the largest alternative asset management firm in the world. Schwarzman has built a financial colossus and extraordinarily successful asset management firm that is by far the global leader in alternative investments.
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I have a myriad of reasons for writing my blog week in and week out. One of them is that it can serve as a quasi-diary of my life so that I have something I can turn to remember what was happening in my life and when.
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Marc Andreessen said something in an interview that I have thought a lot about over the years. I have been a big fan of Joseph Campbell who was an expert on myths and deconstructing the hero’s journey into its most important components and structure.
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Every couple has its idiosyncrasies. One of those in my long relationship with Roneet was her insistence every night that we sleep with the portable standing floor fan on no matter how cold it was inside the house. I am pretty sensitive to being cold at night so when she would insist that the fan be on,
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In David Bowie’s song Changes, the protagonist tells himself to “turn and face the strange”. Change is inevitable and in order to drive change or adapt to it, one has to go outside of the comfortable and familiar and take risks.
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I want to continue focusing on books that resonated with me. A while back I was doing a mental exercise and thinking about some of my most memorable experiences. I was trying to determine if there was some sort of common thread weaving throughout all of them.
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This will be my last blog post related to Andrew Carnegie. All good things must come to an end. When I started at CWS out of college my first boss asked me what my major was and I told him political science. He had an engineering background and kind of snickered and asked what I planned to do with that degree and if I considered “opening up a political science store.” I laughed it off and gave the standard retort that I thought it would help me be a better writer and think critically.
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“Strangers stopping strangers
Just to shake their hands”
-Jerry Garcia & Robert Hunter
I recently went to listen to a Grateful Dead cover band at a local bar/restaurant. I was immediately impressed by how good they were and the joyous atmosphere they helped create.
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