A man mounts a stage in the Catskills. He looks out at the audience but he can’t see much, because the lights blind him. Glasses clink, people look up expectantly. A drop of sweat falls from his armpit into his tee shirt. Another runnels down the side of his face. He contemplates telling a Jew …
The angel’s share is the portion of a batch of whiskey that evaporates when the whiskey is aged in wooden barrels. Up to one percent of a batch of can be lost each year this way. That is a cost of doing business that whiskey producers factor in when they do their planning. The angels …
Phaedo is a deeply affecting story, but the philosophy is problematic. It is one of the dialogues in which Plato – or, Plato speaking though his avatar, Socrates – discusses the theory of forms. The idea is that there is a world of forms, in which the essence of things exist. Things in our world …
This afternoon, I received a registered letter telling me that a resident in my park in northern New York thinks that my manager is blowing off his job. That is usually untrue, but a registered letter is a marker that the sender is trying to lay a paper trail. A paper trail means the threat …
Jinx Lennon has a standard Paddy resume. He worked on building sites in London after school and poured beer at South Street Seaport for a while before he returned to his hometown in the northeast corner of the Republic of Ireland to make music. Here’s what an article in the Village Voice said about him: …
My torts professor was old-school. Short, pudgy, longish gray hair, black-rimmed glasses, Santa Claus beard. He was one of eight people who graduated from the law school summa cum laude in the decades between 1969 and 2007. He clerked for Thurgood Marshall, worked as general counsel for the United Mine Workers, and has taught torts …
Beavis, Butt-Head and the Manufactured Housing Industry Read More »
Imagine Caesar took his troops to the Rubicon, crossed the river and then, a thousand paces later, turned back. The Senate did not know what to do with him until the leader of the Parthians offered to act as an intermediary. He retired to Cappadocia with a few hand-picked troops, where he lived out his …
The mobile home park year has a rhythm. Residents start the year broke, having spent what they had for the holidays. An infusion of cash comes in around in February, when tax refunds arrive. Seasonal work opens up during the summer. Things dry up in the run-up to the holidays in late fall. Lot rent …
Ross Perot said that, if you listened closely, you could hear a giant sucking sound across the United States. That was the sound of YOUR jobs going to Mexico. Hell, you didn’t even have to listen hard. It was like the roar of the sun, all around us, everywhere and nowhere. Once you noticed it, …
Nassim Taleb is a bloviator, but he is often right. His hedge fund, Empirica, which made money by placing bets on fat tails and black swans, finished far in the black when it wound up in 2005. Taleb won big when equity markets tanked in 1987. A successor fund to Empirica, to which Taleb was …