Last week I promised something lighter: Nearly 22 years ago, a bank in Hong Kong was undertaking a major renovation of a branch office in Kowloon. During the demolition process, 83 safe deposit boxes—still chock-full of customers’ valuables—were inadvertently taken to a scrapyard…and destroyed. The official
Note: this post addresses the subject of MAID (medical aid in dying). If this is not a good time for you to read about such a heavy topic, please click away. I’ll be back next week with something lighter. I mentioned last time that I’ve had a house
I know a lot of writers who can dash off a post in no time. I am not one of those writers. I need: four consecutive days of walks, one day of drafting, one day of crippling self-doubt, and one day to decide to publish anyway. Since last Friday,
It is a truth universally acknowledged that kids lie. So when my parents really needed the straight scoop from us, they looked deep into our eyes and asked: “Onnabrite?” Because I had never seen this phrase in writing, and because I had long ditched my own South African accent, I
If you have not already immersed yourself in the news of Lawrence, Kansas embracing Algeria’s World Cup team…what in the heck have you been doing??? It’s a beautiful American story that made me trust a bit more my gauzy memories of the Bicentennial, which my family experienced
I had a bit of a meltdown last week. On Wednesday, after what felt like a month-long marathon of “school’s out” events, I told the kids (a just-graduated high school senior and a high school junior) that they could not go out that night unless they had
No sunsetting, no caps. This was my philosophy back when I was designing commission plans. If you want to attract and retain the best salespeople in a free-market economy, you don’t limit their upside. Whenever someone on the team told me they wanted to make as much as
Our son, Peter, took his time learning to walk. He was a full 18 months old before he was willing to exchange his scoots and crawls for the life of a biped. But man that kid could talk. At daycare one time, after he inserted himself into a conversation the
I've re-started the Zooms, but 1:1. I realized I wanted more conversations—not more meetings. *** At this very moment, some of my favorite people in the world are converging on Cambridge, Massachusetts. Harvard’s Class of 1991—my class—is gathering for our 35th reunion. At
I think responding to the fastest-moving technology of all time with a 42,300-word treatise titled in Latin is objectively funny. So I decided to do some research on Pope Leo XIV’s AI encyclical. 1. Did Pope Leo actually write it? It sounds like the idea for
A few weeks ago, the writer Tim Urban posed this thought experiment: Much of the internet dropped what they were doing (i.e. reading the internet) to weigh in—and to fight. Here in the U.S., the red-blue coding helped turn the discussion partisan, instantly: those who said
I keep thinking of Jimmy Lai, who was born in China and became a billionaire in Hong Kong. Lai’s well-off family was decimated after the Communist takeover in 1949. Legend has it that he was working as a child porter at a train station when a visitor from