Look to our marvelous little glowing rectangles we call the smartphone. They are a pocket-sized window into the soul of our modern humanity, though more often than not, it merely reflects a collective panic over where the money went. In Mark Twain’s days on the Mississippi, if a man wanted to avoid paying his workers, Read More …
Category: Life
I will finally acknowledge that there are some nice things in this world that do not involve the bass.
Why Temperature is Everything
The Secret to Sky-High Meringue If you’ve ever ended up with a flat, weeping, or grainy meringue, the culprit might not be your whisking technique, it’s likely your eggs. While we often think “fresher and colder is better” in the kitchen, meringue is the big exception. Whether you are making a Pavlova, “Bird’s Nests,” or just Read More …
The Altar of the New Gilded Age
The algorithms hum in the deep neon of the Chicago evening, ticking away like a million little telegraphs from a future we didn’t ask for. Down on LaSalle Street, the margins are up. Goldman Sachs reports that corporate markups have doubled since the late eighties, a cold ten percent of pure extraction built on the Read More …
A View from the Pavement
They still shout about the Dream, you know. They shout it from the floors of Congress, which has fast become the most lucrative country club in the modern world, a place where a slick tongue and a reliance on campaign money can secure a lifetime of wealth and comfort. Don’t forget the pension and free Read More …
The Golden Calf in the Cloud
It has always been a theory of mine that if you want to know what the Lord God thinks of money, you have only to look at those to whom He gives it. But these days, one doesn’t even have to look very hard; the details are delivered directly to the glowing little glass bricks Read More …
A Hidden cost of DOGE
The mid-June heat hangs heavy over the Chicago skyline, thick with the ghosts of the stockyards and the lingering echoes of Haymarket. Out on the prairie and across the desert Southwest, another kind of heat is rising. The flesh-eating screwworm, a parasite unfelt in our livestock for sixty years, has broken through our southern defenses, Read More …
A Dream Deferred on Capitol Hill
I have always been a man who watches the avenues, who listens to the rhythm of the feet on the concrete. If I were standing on the corner of 125th Street or State Street today, I wouldn’t just be leaning against a lamppost with a notebook; I’d be watching the blue light of the smartphone Read More …
A Modern Simple Gospel
I look out from my window at a world that claims to be moving forward at the speed of fiber-optics, yet seems stuck in the mud of ancient greed. We have shiny boxes in our pockets with these “Large Language Models” that can attempt to mimic a soul, and yet the heart of our nation Read More …
The Ubiquitous Portfolio
There is something profoundly modern about a man who can manage to be entirely missing and yet universally present, provided the territory in question is the New York Stock Exchange. Consider the curious case of New Jersey Representative Tom Kean Jr., a gentleman who has elevated the art of the French exit to a federal Read More …
The Neon Mirage
We have traded the smoke stacks for server farms, and the assembly line for the algorithm. We feed our thoughts into glowing glass rectangles, hoping for a connection, but the only thing we receive is a beautifully engineered echo chamber delivered specifically for us through the magic of that algorithm. The tools have changed, but Read More …