Near the end of his life, the American poet Theodore Roethke went to visit the Irish poet Richard Murphy on the island of Inishbofin, off the west coast of Ireland. After several weeks of increasingly erratic behavior (Roethke suffered from what we now call bipolar disorder), he became violent and was carted off to an …
A few months ago, Mike, the manager at my park in northern New York called me and said, ‘I’m hurt.’ I pushed a blonde out of my lap and said, ‘What happened?’ ‘I was threading the pins on the bucket to Old Bessie and it slipped.’ Old Bessie is what he calls the backhoe. ‘Pin’ …
The woman I call Mrs. Wilson is leaving my park in northern New York – but nothing is simple with Mrs. Wilson. Readers might remember her. She shovels snow in high heels in the North Country when she claims to be in Alabama. She chained herself to a tree. She makes herself bulletproof by accusing …
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 »
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 …