What’s it like to live in a place where people are fighting over the language that they can speak? It’s not easy. And in some ways it’s harder than being plopped into somewhere where people only speak one local language. My family went through this when we lived in Montreal for fifteen years. Quebec is […]
Greetings from San Diego You Thought Bernie Madoff Was Audacious When Bernie Madoff was arrested, most thought he was the most audacious Ponzi-scheme fraudster in U.S. history. But just nine days earlier another Ponzi fraudster was arrested. I thought this man was even more brazen. I first learned about him in a Vanity Fair […]
Greetings from San Diego. You Thought Bernie Madoff Was Audacious When Bernie Madoff was arrested, most thought he was the most audacious Ponzi-scheme fraudster in U.S. history. But just nine days earlier another Ponzi fraudster was arrested. I thought this man was even more brazen. I first learned about him in a Vanity Fair article […]
Eight months ago I wrote about bankers working such long hours that they collapsed at their desks. In 2024 a 35-year-old former special forces intern at Bank of America was working more than 100 hours a week. Think about this. That’s 14 hours a day and 7 days a week. He collapsed and died. The […]
What we were all afraid of is coming true. People are literally falling in love with ChatpGPT. They find the software more understanding and entertaining than their spouses and partners. After all, the program learns what you prefer and feeds it to back to you. If you want to read a creepy article about relationships […]
In 1960 about 4% of wives earned more than their husbands. In 2023 it was 16%. My wife earns much more than me, but it doesn’t bother me at all. For many years, when I was a banker, it was the opposite. Now I’m a starving writer and she’s a tenured academic. My parents would […]
A Memory of Per- by Carl Vonderau. More than forty years ago I set out across Latin America, a trip that would lead me into the rest of my life. A train, then two long bus trips lifted me up the Andes to Cusco. A doctor there wanted to practice his English and bought me […]
Are doctors the answer? – by Carl Vonderau. All the consternation over RFK Junior and his skepticism about vaccines is strange to me. I was raised a Christian Scientist, a religion in which adherents are supposed to be able to heal any illness by correctly reflecting God. In its most fundamental form, the faithful are […]
After eleventh grade I spent a summer living in Japan through the American Field Service (AFS) program. The family I stayed with was very wealthy and lived in a large house in a rich enclave. They had something that almost no one else did in a place where land was so valuable—a yard. The father […]