Ideas

Written by Peggy Noonan What do I think about when I think about that day? The firemen who climbed “the stairway to Heaven” with 50, 60 pounds of gear. The people who called from Windows on the World and said: “I just want you to know I love you.” The men on the plane who … Read More

TOLSTOI HOLDS LINCOLN WORLD’S GREATEST HERO. Bigger Than His Country. Bigger Than All the Presidents Together: a Christ in Miniature. STILL TOO NEAR TO APPRECIATE HIS POWER. Great Russian Tells…Read More

Blockchain is not only crappy technology but a bad vision for the future. Its failure to achieve adoption to date is because systems built on trust, norms, and institutions inherently function better than the type…Read More

For decades my carpenter father, who died in 2009, always carried a small wood level in his pocket. He would fish it out and place it on the nearest horizontal surface: shelves, mantels, stairs—even sidewalks. At the neighbor’s, when he thought no… Read More

Bob Hall was a rancher. In 1936, in the midst of the Depression, he was suffering from a cancer that was eating the flesh on the side of his face. His ranch had dwindled to nearly nothing, and weeks after bankers took the last of his livestock, Hall died, leaving his family deeply in debt. … Read More

By Morten T. Hansen Most Americans work impossibly hard. We put in long hours and maximum effort, but better performance often eludes us. I’m no exception. I remember being in my 20s and landing my dream job as a management consultant… Read More

By Warren Buffett I have good news. First, most American children are going to live far better than their parents did. Second, large gains in the living standards of Americans will continue for many generations to come. Some years back, people… Read More

My 19 year old son Zach just finished his first summer internship. Back in May, a few days before he started his internship, I sent him this email…Zach, as you begin your first serious internship, I wanted to share… Read More

I was scheduled to speak about the world outlook at an investment conference recently and shortly before my time slot the conference organizer said the audience was more interested in what I had learned over the course of my career than what… Read More

Written by Stephen Mihm Shortly before Christmas, the U.S. Census Bureau put some coal in the nation’s holiday stocking. It released data highlighting a worrisome trend… Read More

Testing Epictetus’s Doctrines in a Laboratory of Human Behavior James Bond StockdaleI came to the philosophic life as a thirty-eight-year-old naval pilot in grad school at Stanford University. I had been in the navy for twenty years and scarcely ever… Read More

Forgive me. I’m going to return to a story that has been well documented the past few weeks, and I ask your indulgence. So much has been happening, there are so many things to say, and yet my mind will not leave one thing: the firemen… Read More

A recent survey asked “All things considered, do you think the world is getting better or worse, or neither getting better nor worse?”. In Sweden 10% thought things are getting better, in the US they were only 6%… Read More

Bud Day was perhaps the bravest of the brave at the Hanoi Hilton. After serving as a U.S. Marine in World War II, a normal man might have concluded that he had done more than his share of military service. And anyone still alive after his… Read More