PicoBlog

Copyright 1944 Loew's Incorporated, Public domain, via Wikimedia CommonsAs a kid, I used to scurry down to our living room early weekday mornings before my brother was awake. I'd carefully rock the 60-ton hard copy of the Random House Dictionary back and forth to extract it from between its neighbors on the bookshelf, haul it over to the couch, and just...read . For fun. (True fact. Ask my dad.)

Thomas L. Friedman of The New York Times is perhaps America’s, if not the world’s, most influential foreign affairs columnist and commentator on media and at gatherings around the world. His ideas are read and sought out by significant leaders at capitals everywhere. His subject is global affairs in all its reality, from war and peace to politics, technology, climate, and biology, as well as the strategy and motivation of the leaders whose actions drives the forces that determine the future.

Watch the Full Conversation Thomas Kaplan is a Franco-American billionaire investor with pursuits that span beyond finance to global politics, cultural heritage protection, wildlife conservation, and the arts. He has been interviewed about these subjects extensively. For this conversation, the focus is the insights he brings regarding the Middle East, where he is a confidant of both Arab and Israeli leaderships and enjoys a track record of forecasting events in the region that is regarded in some circles as highly prescient.

I’ve been getting most of my food news from Duolingo these days. In a couple of weeks, I will be in Finland eating smoked fish and sublimating in a sauna and kissing a supermodel in the prime minister’s downstairs bathroom. I have spent the last eight months trying to learn Finnish in preparation, and I still don’t know how to ask where the downstairs bathroom is. Instead, Duolingo has taught me how to utter many other essential phrases, such as “I am a wizard” (minä olen velho) or “the bride is a woman, but the groom is a hedgehog” (morsian on nainen, mutta sulhanen on siili).

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One of the things I like to spend time doing is studying past investments of other investors to try and understand what they saw in the business, why they invested, and how it worked out. Buffett once said that if he taught a course, it would be “one case study after another”. Last week, I was working on an investment that reminded me of an investment that Graham once referenced. What’s interesting about investment research is serendipity often takes over and you end up reading and thinking about other topics that you never intended to.

Full post here on LG. Thoughts on how Joe Jonas is handling this divorce so far? Because to me, the way his people seem to be spinning this, it’s giving sexist f-ckery. Also, total amateur hour. But I’m happy to debate this. Discuss! ncG1vNJzZmismJrAssHAsKJnq6WXwLWtwqRlnKedZL1wwMeorKCgpKh6sLqMoaawZZqksm62zqeYrGWZqHqprc2do6Kml2SwsLnMnqWtqw%3D%3D

When I set my debut novel in Geneva, Illinois, there was no question of where my main character would work. She’s a 21-year-old lesbian and former band kid doing her gen eds at the local community college; of course she works at Graham’s 318. For the purposes of the book, the coffee shop-turned-core-memory got a new, more generic name: Sip. It’s a decent name, although kind of plain; something ordinary I meant to replace with something more clever later in the drafting process but ultimately just stuck with.

I have sometimes been called a contrarian. This can be both a positive and negative label. The positive is that, sometimes, the contrarian view turns out to be correct. And, even when the future is unknown, the debate unsettled, a contrarian view serves to counter soft consensus thinking. In case you haven’t heard, consensus thinking is common in Medicine. The negative is that contrarian can often be used as a pejorative: this person is a nihilist and doesn’t believe in anything.