Earlier this month, a woman named Bella Montoya banged on the walls of her coffin during her wake. She was not as dead as had been previously believed. Assembled family and clergy undid the screws and opened the box. Ms. Montoya left her wake standing up. I have had trouble recently with a maintenance guy …
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 …
From the Santa Fe Writers Project Quarterly, a publication based in Baltimore.
An old friend called me recently. I was surprised to learn that he had written a well-received song called mobile home. I was more surprised to learn that he now lives in a manufactured home in upstate New York. I first met Noah when he was a sixteen-year-old high school student and I was a …
Early this morning, my phone farted and told me that Sam Zell died yesterday. I understand that he breathed his last at the moment when I hit ‘enter’ to send the post that I wrote yesterday, replying to the Guardian article that savaged his management style. Chat GPT – write an obituary for Sam Zell: …
The Thousand Islands Duty Free Store on Hill Island near the Alexandria Bay Bridge across the Saint Lawrence River has a few one-liter bottles of Wild Turkey Rare Breed that it is selling for $38 CAD or $31 USD. That is not a good price. That is arbitrage. Here’s how Breaking Bourbon describes Wild Turkey …
Readers write in: A.B., Rochester: Do you have groupies?No, but that could change. I will send you a link to the application. M.B., Zurich: The funny thing is that in the German part of Switzerland, the word “Talon” is used very often, in particular to describe that part of a document that you can “cut” …
Two years ago, Mike, the manager at my park in northern New York, called me and said, ‘I just saw something I hope I never see again!’ -What’s that? -Josh Ferrante butt-naked. -I wish I could un-hear that. Josh is a guy who lives in that park. He had twins with a local woman shortly …
In college, a friend of mine wrote a story about a kingdom in the northern latitudes ruled by a queen: This was no Snow Queen or Queen of Hearts; nevertheless, she was every inch a queen, and to prove it, she had her own castle with gargoyles, turrets, parapets, towers and what not. The kingdom’s …
I recently tried out the new free AI chatbot, Chat GPT. When I began the task, I thought that the content would be Stepfordian. I believe that I was wrong. Text in italics is all computer generated, with no editing by me. Prompts are in bold. Chat GPT – Write a paragraph about managing mobile …