LATEST BLOG POSTS

People complain if we don’t use energy sources like fossil fuels we’ll collapse or return to the Stone Age. That’s a failure of their imaginations, but more. Do we need to grow? Milton Friedman hardly promoted regulating markets. He said: “We have no desperate need to grow. We have a desperate desire to grow, and those are quite different. I believe that the level of growth in this country ought[…] Keep reading →

On March 23, 2016 my flight arrived in JFK from Paris. Since then, I challenged myself to go a year without flying. I expected it to become the worst year of my life, or at least miserable: I could list more fears, but I can summarize that I considered flying an unalloyed good. If you feel you can’t live without flying, that your family will disown you, etc, believe it[…] Keep reading →

Engel hosted me before and invited me back to catch up. Twelve minutes makes for a quick conversation and still meaningful depth. Here’s the new episode (3410). (Here are my previous episode 2708 (2020) and previous episode 1128 (2017)). Usually I embed the podcast player, but I can’t see how to embed his, so you have to go to his site to hear it. I think you’ll enjoy the conversation,[…] Keep reading →

This week I finished: Courage Is Calling: Fortune Favors the Brave (The Stoic Virtues Series), by Ryan Holiday: This book spoke to me about what I’m doing with living by a different culture than nearly everyone around me. I hadn’t considered myself courageous. I’m just living by my values. For that matter, I’m living by the values everyone who values I also hadn’t considered those compromising on those values to[…] Keep reading →

We’ve all read stories about how algorithms, polarized media, and so on are leading to situations where people with different political views learn such different information about the world we might as well be living in different worlds. If one person watches only liberal media and another only watches conservative media, they view events through different lenses. One may view the environment as an issue about protecting wildlife while the[…] Keep reading →

I’ve passed the milestones everyone my age has. Some I like, like developing patience and wisdom. I may not have much of them, but more than before. I felt my potential strength decrease in my thirties. In my forties I lost yet more, and found even walking counted as exercise. Also in my forties, I noticed injuries took longer to heal. Injuries that in my twenties would hurt and affect[…] Keep reading →

Silvia created the course Sustainable Marketing at Columbia. It’s an elective and has become the class at the business school with the most students from other schools at the university. In looking for a guest speaker on sustainable consumerism, she found the New York Times profile on me. She decided to invite me before realizing I’d gotten my MBA where she teaches. Only when we spoke did she learn I[…] Keep reading →

My building has been doing work on the facade, which for some reason meant no residents have been allowed on the roof. The building management told us they projected it to be a five month job. Today marks one year. They didn’t warn as when the day we couldn’t access the roof would begin. They told us it would happen some time. Then one morning they emailed us that that[…] Keep reading →

I confess I haven’t read Thomas Paine’s The American Crisis, but I’m working so much on opposing coercion and tyranny, I keep coming across him. I’m trying to learn more about the conditions that led to the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Learning history is one thing. Getting inside the hearts and minds of the people acting is another. What values were they acting on or not? If you[…] Keep reading →