History
Ben Horowitz: High Tech’s New Andy Grove
If Silicon Valley is rich, how come it ain’t smart? How is it that we consistently generate innovative companies but rarely produce management thinkers of consequence? Part of the problem is that many technology leaders are neurotic. They need to be: nobody really knows what is going to work and your idea will most likely [...]
Celebrating Cheap Crap from Africa
For reasons best known to her, my loving wife decided to wear a white skirt to our Fourth of July barbecue. But it was not the charred remains of salmon, beef, or tofu that did the skirt in. Before our guests had arrived, she noticed a blue stain spreading across her dress like the sky [...]
"Remember: Your Mother Owns a Bank"
The Jamkid and I caught Muhammad Yunus at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco this afternoon. Yunus is the Bangladeshi banker who received the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize for pioneering microcredit loans to women. He also serves as the godfather of social enterpreneurship – the fashionable and laudable notion that many social causes are best organized [...]
The revolution will not be televised. It will be Tweeted, Blogged, and YouTubed.
Iran has crossed into promising and dangerous ground — that moment when political mobilization creates the possibility that chaos will give birth to progress or collapse in repression. Politics becomes a real and serious struggle as history either leaps forward or falls back based on the cumulative impact of thousands of people who cannot know [...]
How the Kindle Helps Destroy Textbooks
When Bill Clinton was elected President in the early 1990's, encyclopedias were a $1.2 billion dollar business in the US. The best encyclopedia, Britannica, owned half of the market and advertised "more than 80 Nobel laureates" among its contributors. A Britannica set cost over $1,000. They were sold door to door by over 2,000 commissioned [...]
Bicentennial of Heroes
Today two of my heroes celebrate their 200th birthdays. Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln were both born on February 12, 1809. Neither Lincoln nor Darwin were especially popular during their lifetimes and for different reasons, both were often caricatured as apes. Lincoln may be remembered as our greatest President, but he was also one of America's [...]
The Man Who Loves Scholars
I am a huge fan of Simon Winchester — a peripatetic Brit who writes brilliantly about geology, lexicography, and sinology. At his best, Winchester turns science into biography by demonstrating how an obscure scholar shaped our view of the world. Winchester majored in geology at Oxford and worked in the field for many years before [...]
Boycott the Beijing Olympics?
Christopher Hitchens: "Those who care or purport to care about human rights must start to discuss this problem in plain words. Is there an initiative to save the un-massacred remains of the people of Darfur? It will be met by a Chinese veto.. Does anyone care about Robert Mugabe treating his desperate population as if [...]
UC Berkeley and The Meaning of Diversity
Columbia University announced this week that they were opening up the campus to for visiting Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. There was no reason to invite this guy — who is, after all, one of the most dangerous people on the planet. He is a deeply anti-Semitic holocaust-denier who funds terrorism throughout the Middle East. He [...]
Outside of the Box
Nobel Prize winning physicist and genius quantum mechanic Niels Bohr once pointed out that "Prediction is difficult, especially about the future" — a fact that he demonstrated empirically with respect to subatomic particles. Former Economist writer and business historian Marc Levinson has demonstrated that the maxim applies to technology businesses as well in a business [...]
France Astonishes
I like the new French President Nicholas Sarkozy a lot — he’d make a good Democrat in the US. But this I did not expect. French volunteers near the U.S. Cemetery in Colleville-sur-Mer, Normandy today formed a human chain to honor fallen U.S. troops in World War II. They formed the words "France Will Never [...]
Who is Norman Borlaug and Why is He our Greatest Living American?
For my money, the highest award a human being can receive is the Nobel Peace Prize — even if the process for determining the award makes it far from a perfect. Like the scientific awards, the Prize cannot be awarded posthumously. Unlike the scientific awards, the Peace Price is more often awarded for current contributions [...]
"No Power in the Market and No Voice in the System"
Bill Gates’ Harvard commencement address is being circulated widely in Silicon Valley — and with good reason. He gave an outstanding speech (rather, he wrote an outstanding speech — he cannot deliver a speech to save his life). In the tradition of commencement speeches, Gates reminded grads of their social obligations — a noblesse oblige [...]
Remembering Sacrifice
Writing on a difficult Memorial Day in today’s Wall Street Journal, Peter Collier strikes a note that is resonating on Main Street and on line. Once we knew who and what to honor on Memorial Day: Those who had given all their tomorrows, as was said of the men who stormed the beaches of Normandy, [...]
Mother's Day
Mother’s Day began in Greece — and it may end there, too. To the ancient Greeks, fertility was life. They worshiped mothers with a festival to Cybele, the mother of all gods. Modern Greeks worship motherhood, but they also avoid it. The average woman in Greece gives birth to 1.3 children. Over a generation or [...]
BDS Spreads as Blair Prepares to Step Down
Timothy Garton Ash, one of Europe’s most astute political observers, recently described the extreme reaction of dinner guests to unpopular political leaders. …The sole duty of any self-respecting commentator is to interrogate and then indict Blair – as if he were a cross between Radovan Karadzic, Augusto Pinochet and Adolf Eichmann…As at many a London [...]
Protect Income, not Industries, Companies, or Jobs
Suppose we tried to improve our economic security and well-being by making it illegal for any employer to fire any employee for any reason. Over time, our strategy would backfire. We would become less secure because we would be less competitive as our companies lost out to foreign businesses with more flexible cost structures. As [...]
"Rather Be Miserable With Than Without It"
"Rich man he say he would guessMoney can’t buy happinessPoor man he say he don’t doubt itBut he’d rather be miserable with than without it." — traditional Calypso ditty Michael Spence is a ridiculously accomplished scholar. Some years back, he won the Clark award given to the nation’s best economist under 40. After serving as [...]
A Byrd in the Hand…
…and a hand from Bush. Is it me, or is this photo showing the President helping 89 year old Senator Robert Byrd, oddly touching? It captures two politicians from opposite parties in a very human moment. Only one newspaper ran the photo — probably because most Americans, like me, don’t much care for either of [...]
The Immortal Game
During the summer of 1972, I worked as a cook in a small resort in New York’s Hudson Valley. It was a small, family-run place patronized entirely by elderly Jews from New York city that hired me, a goyem from southern California, sight unseen. I passed as Jewish well enough — my hair was curly, [...]
