The marriage of Taylor Swift poses a question of whether it’s possible to remain at the peak of any endeavor and still have a balanced life. Can a superstar like Taylor Swift shift priorities as her situation shifts or will she always prioritize her work no matter what.

I come at this question from a position of being far from the peak of any single endeavor. Instead, I stand on various hills (husband and father) and look up from many valleys, too numerous to name.

So, as a “balancer” who never went all-in on any one endeavor, I have a selfish interest in believing that the answer to my question is no, you rarely if ever can be number one at anything and still lead a balanced life. The requirements to stay at the top are too intense and the seduction of being at the top is so strong that your life and your ambition become the same.

I admire Taylor Swift without being a fan of her music. From what I can tell, she’s a terrific role model for girls and young women. She’s philanthropic, having shared the wealth of her Eras tour with her crew. Coincident with her recent wedding, she donated to many charities, including NYC food banks. Perhaps as penance for shutting down the area around Madison Square Garden. 1

Taylor Swift is top of my mind not only because of her wedding, but also because of my recent literary encounter with Charles Dickens, a different celebrity in a different century in a different field. In his time Dickens was as famous and feted and observed as Swift is today.2

Taking into account the volume of their creative output, including performances, one can say with some confidence that Dickens and Swift share the trait of being obsessive about their work. Like most superstars, Dickens failed to balance his dominant artistic fame with a happy domestic life. I wish Taylor Swift better success in achieving a happy balance if that’s what she wants.

Gloomy Charles Dickens in middle age

I just finished reading Francine Prose’s new novel Five Weeks In The Country in which she creates a version of the historical Charles Dickens from fact, conjecture, and her imagination. This compelling version of Dickens by Prose (what a Dickensian name!) is for now the “true” version imprinted upon my brain.3

Five Weeks in the Country takes place during the disastrous five-weeks-long visit to Dickens’ country home by fellow writer Hans Christian Andersen, a Dane with almost no proficiency in English.

The outstanding feature of Five Weeks in the Country is Prose’s novelistic portrait of Charles Dickens at age 45 in mid-life crisis. By then, Dickens had already been famous for twenty years after his serialized novel The Pickwick Papers went viral internationally. When Prose introduces us to him in 1857, his fame and reputation are at a zenith, yet he is deeply unhappy.

“He had a beautiful house, professional success, a loving family, but he was as morose and distracted as he’d been as a boy…No one expected happiness in a blacking factory, but now with such an enviable life, it was unseemly to be gloomy.” 4

One source of Dickens’ gloom is the fear that the secret of his shabby, impoverished origins will be uncovered––his father’s stint in debtor’s prison, his childhood humiliation working in the blacking factory, his grandparents “working in service.” He worries that he will be discovered as an imposter by the upper-class society whose approval and adoration he craves. 5

Prose’s writing is so skillful you can forget you’re reading a book. It’s also funny. The humor—mocking and often Nabokovian cruel—is centered on an unintended contest to see who makes the visit of Hans Christian Andersen more terrible, the ungainly and inappropriate Andersen as houseguest or Dickens as the imperious, impatient, and bleak-minded host.

Andersen’s visit begins with him collapsing on the parlor floor, exhausted.

“Watching [Andersen] open his eyes and try to stand was like watching a giant wounded cricket trying to right itself. He used his elbows and knees like crutches to hoist himself onto his feet.”

Over the next five weeks, the visit never gets better.

A family unhappy in its own way

Dickens is a self-admitted failure as a father. He’s dissatisfied with his nine children, ages five to twenty. Dickens’ children must compete not only with Dickens’ expectations, not only with the public whose love Dickens prefers, but also with the many children and young characters who inhabit the world of their father’s beloved novels. Characters who he seems to prefer over his real life kids.

Dickens suffers from the typical invidious comparisons of the self-made man who, in providing his children with the comfort and ease he never had, resents them precisely for what he has provided them. Dickens thinks his children lack “initiative, drive, persistence—-all the qualities that made [Dickens] who he was.” 6

The children feel their father’s displeasure and his distance. When he’s at home with them, he’s often in a “writing trance,” never present in a way that he was when they were much younger and he was less famous.

In Prose’s novel, the children speak in a communal voice:

“Why did someone who writes so feelingly about the powerlessness of children not realize how helpless we felt?”

Much of the gloom of the Dickens household extends from the terrible state of Dickens’ marriage. To the extent Dickens pays attention to his wife Catherine, it’s to show his annoyance when she interferes with his work.

By 1857, Catherine had gone through ten births (one baby died), and Dickens has decided that she is stupid, dull, and fat. Dickens never got over his platonic love for Catherine’s younger sister Mary who died at the age of seventeen in 1837. Twenty years later, around the time of the novel, Dickens decides “to save his life” by leaving Catherine for an eighteen year old actress, Ellen Ternan.

Dickens the workaholic

When we meet Prose’s 1857 version of Dickens, he considers himself a “sad old man.” He’s unwell from working too hard. He suffers from sharp, recurring pains in his side and on his face. As well, his eyesight is shot.

“Black spiders crawled across his visual field, his punishment for writing for so many hours in flickering, feeble light.”

Dickens’ memory of past happiness pains him and the only way he can stop the pain is by working so hard he can think of nothing else. But even his work threatens him. He’s jealous of his own characters whose lives he makes so eventful while his own life seems like a prison he can’t escape.

His envious wish is to make the characters who spring from his mind unhappy at the end of his stories. “Happy endings sicken him,” because his own happiness is elusive. But he knows what his public demands. 7

”Denying [his]readers a satisfactory ending was like refusing a child a slice of birthday cake.”

His prodigious writing is bad enough in terms of obsessive work. But Dickens also has a grueling schedule of live performances, reading his novels and acting in the plays he’s written. During the time of the novel, Dickens is trying to lose himself rehearsing an acting role he created of a jealous lover. 8

“He would practice his soliloquy until he was no longer himself…until he was no longer an overworked writer and the father of so many children, until he no longer fell in love with every young woman he met, until he forgot that he was a dissatisfied husband and father and now the host of an eccentric houseguest who spoke no English.”

That sums up Dickens’ misery nicely. He continued his mad schedule of writing and performing until he succumbed to his illnesses thirteen years later at the age of 58.

Who benefits from great talent

A similarity between Charles Dickens and Taylor Swift is that the information generated about each of them is so voluminous that it’s difficult to pick this letter of Dickens or this song of Swift’s and say this is the true Charles Dickens or this is the true Taylor Swift. Perhaps every fan has their own “true” version.

We do know, however, that Dickens worked himself to death. His readers were impatient for the next installment of his serialized novels. His performances in England and America were sold out. And when he performed, he usually acted out the most dramatic scenes of his novels, the ones that exhausted him physically, e.g., the murder of Nancy by Bill Sikes in Oliver Twist.9

Dickens sacrificed himself and perhaps sacrificed much of his happiness to his work. Hundreds of millions of us are the beneficiaries of that sacrifice.

Creators are naturally envious creatures. But it’s hard if not impossible to think of any creator envying Prose’s version of Dickens.

Instead, we envy the carefully curated images of celebrities without knowing what their true lives are like to them. And even if we could know the truth, would we really want to? We need our myths and role models.

Because beneath the curated images, when the reality is revealed, so often we find pain and insecurity and distress. Perhaps those are the natural accompaniments of successful creative obsessiveness.

Great talent is more a gift to the public than it is to the artist.

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

Share

The title of this essay, High Flying Adored, is a song I love from Evita, one of my favorite plays. It’s about the life of Eva Peron who in the 1940s rose from an undistinguished background to become the First Lady of Argentina at age 26 beside her dictator husband Juan Peron. Eva died at age 33.

High Flying Adored are words that could describe Charles Dickens or Taylor Swift.

“So famous so easily so soon is not the wisest thing to be.”

This past Sunday evening, a sharp and mysterious pain presented itself on my face. On Monday, I saw my regular dentist. He got me an immediate appointment with a fellow dentist, a Park Avenue endodontist (a root canal specialist). When you have undiagnosed facial pain, needing a root canal is a hope, not a fear. Assuming that paying for it is not an issue.

In the waiting room, I sat across from a beefy, sandy-haired man in shorts and a tee-shirt. We nodded to each other. He had a kind face and was about my age. After a few minutes he went up to the reception desk.

He spoke softly but I was near the desk so I could hear what he was saying. He was going to put off the procedure he had come for because he couldn’t figure out how to pay for it. Plus, he owed money for a past procedure.

The man left the office, his shoulders sagging. My immediate thought was “why do I deserve to be seen and treated and this man does not?” There was nothing I could do. I leaned back into the chair. Then, inside my head, I shouted at myself, F**k this!

I stood up and went to the desk. I told the two receptionists that I wanted to pay for the man’s procedure, whatever it cost. I wanted to remain anonymous to him. I asked them to let the dentist know.

In the end, the dentist discovered I had a badly infected tooth. An hour later, he performed a root canal that quelled my pain. Before I left the office, the office manager told me that the dentist was going to work something out with the man. My offer to pay was appreciated but unnecessary.

Who is deserving

The day after my root canal, I read an excellent essay on the concept of “deserving.” The essay, written by Christine Tan, an expert on Chinese philosophy, was linked by fellow Substack writer who writes superbly about many things. 1

Tan’s essay begins by pointing out how natural it is for us to want to see people get what they deserve. We want people to be rewarded for their good behavior and punished for their bad behavior. Both vice and virtue should have consequences. Otherwise, there’s no sense of moral justice in the world. Instead, there’s chaos.

Tan brings in Confucius from 2,500-years ago to give us a solution, a prescription for a morally just society. Leaders of a society should be those who attain the highest degree of “worthiness (xian).” Tan defines xian as “compassion, righteous judgment, and moral restraint.”

Confucius held that xian should dictate a society’s status hierarchy. The more xian one has attained, the greater one’s leadership role ought to be.

What follows is the greater the leadership role, the greater the responsibility. With greater responsibility comes greater power. Greater power requires greater material resources. A night watchman of a gate needs only himself, but an emperor in his magnificent palace might need thousands in his retinue to support his work.

A key assumption of the Confucian solution is that all people are capable of attaining xian, so there’s a fairness to rewarding those who excel at it. And who can argue against “compassion, righteous judgment, and moral restraint” as being the proper measures for awarding status, responsibility, and resources?

Enter Zhuangzi the contrarian

Tan tells us that Zhuangzi, a Daoist philosopher writing about 100 years after Confucius, thought the Confucius solution was fatally wrong in a few major respects. 2

Pursuing xian is actually antithetical to human flourishing, because you’re pursuing titles and credentials, things that are outside yourself. Tan writes:

“This leads one to treat their own life as raw material for that abstract identity. One’s material body becomes an instrument for something immaterial.”

Zhuangzi tells the story of being summoned to a palace and offered a prestigious position. He points to an exquisite bowl made from a turtle’s shell and asks whether the turtle would rather be alive or have his body used for an ornament. Point made; Zhuangzi turns the position down.

Zhuangzi thought that Confucius had the order of operation reversed. The titles, the power, and the resources, come first. The attainment of xian was then used to justify the spoils. And who, after all, was the arbiter of xian except the powerful and the rich? What say would the night watchman have about who had xian compared to the word of the emperor?

Tan writes:

“Power, therefore, often does not reflect virtue, but instead has the ability to produce the appearance of virtue. This is how hierarchy manufactures its own moral narrative. Those who rule come to be called righteous.”

Zhuangzi’s most powerful point, however, is to demolish the Confucian point about equality of opportunity to attain xian. Zhuangzi thought this was a complete fantasy. One’s circumstances have a great deal to do in determining the course of one’s life. What we now call meritocracy is both a myth and a scam. Tan writes:

“[Meritocracy] offers a narrative in which suffering is temporary, sacrifice is rational, and the future will vindicate the present.”

If you’re a “loser” in the game of meritocracy, it becomes difficult to admit that you’ve sacrificed for nothing or admit that you were just not good enough. And if you’re a “winner” in this game of meritocratic striving, how irresistible it can be to believe that you are the primary author of your own success.

Zhuangzi argues that these are false beliefs used by the people in power to justify themselves and to effectively imprison everyone else in a Confucian competition that most people are bound to lose. Because there can only be one emperor but thousands of night watchmen.

Finally, to underscore that no one is self-made, Zhuangzi uses the example of a mythical god who glides gracefully in the air. Even this deity, however, depends on something else to appear effortless, in this case, the wind.

From deserving to acceptance

I have wrestled with my own good fortune and whether I “deserved” it. To bolster my claim of deserving, I could point to many decisions I’ve made that have led to the life I have now. But that’s a trap. 3

Because I cannot ignore Tan’s list of relative advantages:

“upbringing, pedagogy, institutional pathways, emotional and material support, health, luck and the ordinary labour of others,”

all of which played a significant role in shaping my life. There’s room for my personal agency but personal agency takes place within the context of all the advantages above. The winds have been at my back.

The entire concept of deserving is flawed. A while ago I disabused myself of the myth that I was the chief agent responsible for my successes in life. So if the question of whether I deserve my life is irrelevant, then so is the concept of guilt. How can I be guilty about advantages over which I had little to no control?

This is not a cop-out or an amoral concept. Instead, I can use the agency I do have to love and help others––family, friends, and strangers––because it makes me feel good in the moment. My actions do not have to serve as the raw material for some future credential or recognition.

Accepting inequality

We know that contingencies play a huge role in our life, whether it’s where we’re born, who our parents are, who, or if, we marry, or whether we happen to pick a career that suits our skills and fills our bank account.

Once you accept the contingencies that underlie inequality, then the moral infrastructure of meritocracy is demolished. We are not the prime agents of our success or failure. We are all fated to be unequal in many ways.

But some aspects of inequality are choices made by society. They are not fate.

The inequality of my access to dentistry compared to that man in the waiting room is one such choice. It’s a barbaric one. His pain and my pain are the same. A wealthy society like ours should not be organized so something as universal as pain is treated unequally.

A truth, a proposition, or a myth

We know that no society has ever made everyone equal or given everyone equal opportunity. But on July 4^th, we read aloud the Declaration of Independence and the famous “self-evident” truth that all [people] are created equal. In his Gettysburg Address, Lincoln called it a proposition, rather than a truth. And in his I Have a Dream speech, MLK called it a promissory note that America had defaulted on.

Pretending that we are all created equal leads the privileged to narcissism and the non-privileged to despair. It divides us into winners and losers, as if we all start off life at the exact same starting line, like runners in a race.

Christine Tan writes in her essay that if we can rid ourselves of the myth of meritocracy:

“We would be rid of the cruel fantasy that a person’s place in the world is a reliable valuation of their worth as a human being.”

It is morally correct that all people ought to be endowed with certain rights by virtue of simply being alive. One such inalienable right should be healthcare, including dentistry.

Ideally, no one should have to wait for or defer a root canal. One day, I hope, we’ll have true universal healthcare. But we have a long way to go.4

Leave a comment

Share

Subscribe now

We were charmed by the staircase, which was from an actual stage set. Or so we were told. The charm faded once we experienced the reality of endless trips up and down the many steep stairs to fetch the endless material needs of our baby.

The apartment had good light from the west. We looked out from a distance upon an ABC studio building. However, known to everyone but us, ABC had decided to expand and was poised to begin constructing a brick building up to the property line, just a few feet away from all our windows. There would be many months of noisy work and construction workers who could peer in at us. When it was done, our light would be extinguished.

Before we closed on the apartment, we asked our four NYC-based parents to come see it. We don’t remember whether they came, but now we look back in wonder that not one of them asked us any questions or asked us if we had done our due diligence. They let us learn our own lessons.

When a stray brick crashed through one of our windows and soon thereafter all of Debbie’s jewelry was stolen by one of the workmen, the lessons hit home very hard. And when we sold the apartment, we took a loss despite a boom in NYC co-op prices during our ownership.

As for our missing in action parents, they were living their lives and we were living ours.

Under Parenting

Throughout the decades, I complained at great length to many therapists about my parents. Mostly, about their hands-off approach. Their selfishness, their aloofness. One bored male therapist, couldn’t take my kvetching anymore and yelled at me “to just grow up.” 1

My perspective today is that my parents’ hands-off approach was just fine. After all, I’m happy with the person I am, including my relationships with my own children. These are dispositive points.

My parents were definitely more interested in themselves than in their children. They frequently traveled, mostly to weeklong national bridge tournaments, and we had governesses when we were young.

Ideally, we didn’t bother them with any troubles and instead were sources of fun and amusement. Watching sports and playing ping-pong with my father, a shared fanatical love of the New York Islanders with my mother.

My father valued having a stock of funny stories to tell. On one parent-teacher day, he delighted in telling my biology teacher one of his favorites. That at Cornell in the 1950s he’d blown up the chemistry lab, which, together with his terrible grades, had gotten him expelled. 2

At another school gathering, my father accused my headmaster of running a school that lacked academic rigor. My father never saw me doing any homework, yet I was getting straight “A’s.” This turned into a good “story” for my father when the headmaster told him that he’d never heard such a peculiar and astonishing complaint from any other parent.

As for my mother, she was always searching for her purpose beyond being a wife and mother, and that search absorbed most of her attention and made her often unhappy until she found her calling. 3

My mother’s interventions when I was growing up were infrequent, but when she felt strongly about my going off course, she was fierce, as when she sabotaged my relationship with a girl she decided was unsuitable for me. She was right in the end but her means were cruel.

Over Parenting

I’m glad I had parents who were mostly self-centered rather than parents who lived their lives through me or considered me some sort of status symbol. Of course I’m not suggesting those are the only two parenting choices, but parental self-centeredness seems far healthier for a parent-child relationship than the burden of making a child the center of a parent’s life.

Trophy children

In Ann Patchett’s new novel Whistler, Patchett’s fifty-something heroine Daphne is a child of divorce with a difficult mother but a wonderful sister Leda. The two sisters have turned out fine. They are (annoyingly) self-satisfied with their resilience and grit.

Daphne teaches literature at an elite all-girls private school in Manhattan (think Brearley or Spence or Gossip Girl/NYC Prep). The two sisters dish out contempt for these teenage girls and their wealthy parents in contrast to their own upbringing.

Daphne’s sister Leda observes that Daphne’s students are the kids to worry about today.

“…the ones who are the singular light of their parents’ lives, the ones who hit thirty and are still calling their mom five times a day.” 4

Daphne piles on. Her students’ parents “might as well have carried them to school on golden plinths.”

And then Leda says it’s not too much love, but

“too much crippling dependency…which masquerades as love.”

Novelists and essay writers often take a point of view that casts their own life as the best of all possible worlds. Patchett does it in Whistler–––Daphne is an autobiographical character––– and I’m wary of committing the same Panglossian sin in this essay.5

Vicarious parenting

My son Michael and I recently saw the latest (and wonderful) production of Death of a Salesman. The play is not usually considered a commentary on parent-child relationships. But that’s the theme that stood out to me when I saw it this time. Maybe because I was with my son Michael, who’s the same age as the play’s adult children.

The play is the tragic tale of a faltering salesman Willy Loman, a father who invests all his hopes and dreams in his son Biff. The tragedy can be traced to Willy’s own moral failure––teenage Biff catches his father cheating on Biff’s mother. That incident throws the lives of both father and son horribly off course.

But even before the revelation of Willy’s cheating, the doom of both father and son was already sealed by Willy’s monomaniacal obsession with a peculiar type of success for Biff, an adolescent football hero with no academic talent. Willy is constantly telling Biff that all Biff needs for phenomenal business success is to be “well-liked” by the right people.

Willy compares Biff to a demi-god––an “Adonis” or a “Hercules.” Both Willy and his wife note Biff’s golden football uniform and helmet. Willy tells Biff that his charisma and good looks will always win out. He’ll be “five times” as successful as his neighbor and classmate Bernard, a studious academic star who helps Biff cheat on his exams.

Willy is a travelling salesman, and his own success is based on how much people like him and how impressive he looks. But when we meet Willy at the start of the play, he’s no longer “well-liked” or even merely “liked.” He’s a sad old man, and buyers aren’t buying from him. This puts him in financial peril.

Worse, Biff has turned out to be a monumental failure. Biff is back at home as a thirty-four year-old, having drifted around for fifteen years as a “dollar a day” worker. Willy is sixty-three (I can’t believe I’m older now than Willy Loman!). Willy and Biff can’t be in the same room without inflicting great pain on each other.

In one of the cathartic moments near the play’s end, Biff tries to explain to Willy exactly how and why Biff’s life went awry:

“And I never got anywhere because you blew me so full of hot air I could never stand taking orders from anybody! That’s whose fault it is!”

And even at the bitter end (spoiler alert), Willy is still clinging to a desperate, foolish hope that Biff can have a glorious future that will redeem Willy’s own failures. Willy’s scheme, “approved” by Willy’s hallucination of his sinister older brother Ben, is to stake Biff in business with the $20,000 his family will soon collect on Willy’s life insurance.

But that too will be a failure, because the insurance won’t pay out for suicide.

Children are the ultimate judges

My own children have allowed us to believe that we are okay as parents. We’ve always been involved in their lives and we did step in when we thought we could help. Undoubtedly, not always in a way that was welcomed.

We see and speak and text with our children frequently. I don’t keep score but I think they contact us as often as we contact them. And now that our very young grandchildren are in the mix, we are available as babysitters so our status has risen.

Whether we’ve been over-involved is not our call. Ultimately, it’s up to children to pass judgment on their parents.

And a child’s judgment that contains the full sweep of right and wrong and the complete record of unanticipated and permanent memories of their parents––vagrant, capricious moments, some loving, some painful––is a judgment that parents may not care ever to hear.

Rather, a judgment of such radical transparency is a custom more honored in the breach. 6

Question for the comments: On the continuum between under parenting and over parenting, where do you stand?

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

Carly Simon’s Legend In Your Own Time, a beautiful and haunting song with relevant lyrics.

“Well I have known you
Since you were a small boy
And your momma used to say
"Well my boy's gonna grow up
And be some kind of leader someday"
Then you turn on the radio
And sing with the singer in the band
Your momma would say to you
"This isn't exactly what she had planned"

Below, from a while ago, my father and his three sons. According to my wife Debbie, I (far left) look possessed.1

I know it was the summer of 1978, because my father had taken my younger brothers and me to see the movie Grease at the theater nearest to our home on the Jersey Shore. Long Branch, to be specific, remarkable to us for its iconic Windmill restaurant serving hot dogs and hamburgers beneath its giant blades. My father, now 89, was 41 at the time, I was sixteen and my brothers would have been ten and eight.

I obviously ate candy at the movie. But as well, pre-movie, my father had taken us to a store where I had bought additional candy to bring home for later feasting. The store-bought candy was in a white bag that I placed at my feet during the movie.

I was absorbed by the movie and fascinated by it in a wistful way. The high school experienced by Danny Zuko (John Travolta), Kenicki, and their friends at Rydell High seemed so vastly superior compared to my experience at my high school. While the movie was running, I could forget for a while the real life of my own adolescence and in the darkness of the theater pretend that the movie was somehow my real life.

Of course, I fell hard in love with Sandy (Olivia Newton John).

My sixteen year old self preferred the Sandy on the right. The one on the left scared me.

When the movie ended, so did my fantasy high school life, and my father, my brothers and I went to our car, parked between the Windmill and the theater. I remember my father looking around at all the teenagers––girls and boys––outside the Windmill and saying, “Look at all these youngsters hanging out. It’s kind of like the movie.”

It was an accurate and innocent observation, but it cut at me, because I knew I’d never be like those kids in Long Branch, scarcely older than I was if not sixteen themselves. And here I was being taken to the movies by my father with my two little brothers. The divide between being me and being cool never seemed greater.

When we got to the car, I realized I’d left my bag of store-bought candy in the movie theater. I believe there was a suggestion I should just leave it, but I needed that candy more than ever to sustain me through the night. I went back to get the bag, found it quickly, and walked back, swinging the bag to and fro, which turned out to be unwise in a packed parking lot.

On one of my swings my bag hit a car, hard enough to make a noise but not hard enough to cause damage. A girl sat cross-legged on the hood of the car, just like in a Springsteen song. “Hey, watch the car,” she shouted at me.

The indignity was too much for me, so I shouted back, “Oh, why don’t you just shut up.”

My words must have been indistinct, because she screamed, “This kid just told me to fuck off.”

I had a split second to wonder who she was screaming at before her boyfriend was on me, one hand firmly around my neck, telling me to get down on my knees and apologize. I started to protest that the girl had misheard me, but he squeezed a bit harder and repeated his command for me to kneel.

Suddenly my father appeared, and his presence changed the dynamic. My father was taller than the boyfriend and, more importantly, had about him an air of quiet confidence and reasonableness. An air of getting his way in things.

He asked the boyfriend to release me so “we could work this out.” I was released and repeated my protest at being misheard. Still standing, I apologized for hitting the car with the bag of candy. (As bags of candy go, this one was on the softer side; I’m guessing from memory of my tastes back then that the bag’s contents were mostly black Twizzlers and red Swedish fish.) 2

The boyfriend inspected the car and saw it was undamaged. He seemed annoyed at the girl for causing this disruption and maybe even felt a little foolish for his own hasty reaction. He must have sensed that I was not the type of kid, with that type of father, to go around telling strangers to “fuck off.”

The boy turned his back to us, and my father said something to the effect of “alrighty,” and, with his arm around my shoulder, led me back to the car.

I was still very embarrassed. I was sixteen after all and in my interaction with the local Grease kids, I’d acquitted myself as a loser and a dork.

But thanks to my father, I never had to suffer the humiliation of getting down on my knees or endure any physical assault. My father had saved me with the speed of his coming to my aid and then had defused the confrontation with his reasonableness and the confident ease with which he carried himself.

It’s only in retrospect, as a father myself, that I can fully appreciate how my father was a hero that night. Quiet but firm. The best kind of hero.

Question for the comments: Who are your quiet heroes?

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

In the parable that opens Wallace’s speech, an older fish asks two younger fish, “How’s the water today?”

The two young fish are puzzled. They swim away, and Wallace has one young fish say to the other, “What the hell is water?” 1

Wallace goes on to say that for humans the equivalent of a fish’s water is our default setting to make every moment of our lives, especially the mundane, trivial, and boring moments, all about ourselves, i.e., “me-centered.”

For instance, you’re in traffic and you see every other driver in every other car as just an obstacle in the way of your getting home. These “others” are the equivalent of non-player characters in the unfolding game of your life.

Wallace urges us to recognize that these other drivers actually have lives and needs just as complex as our own. For some of them, the traffic may be far more burdensome than our mild annoyance. For example, a husband may be trying to get his wife to the hospital to give birth.

Wallace advises us to resist that me-centered default setting and instead be intentional about choosing what to pay attention to.

This is water in 2026

Reading Wallace’s speech made me wonder what an equivalent of “This Is Water” might be in 2026. I went back to read again an excellent and thorough essay by from April titled, If America’s So Rich, Why Did it Get So Sad? 2

Derek identifies the “news” as one of the chief culprits of the disconnect between prosperity and unhappiness.

“Today’s news is more surprisingly negative than at any period of news on record.” 3

Derek is referring specifically to economic news. But let’s consider how much of our attention is dominated by negative news of all sorts.

I’m not suggesting the world has gotten so much worse, although it may feel like it has. What I am suggesting is that we’ve become hyper-aware of all the negativity. Within hours or minutes we become aware of a disaster, a violent crime, an incendiary speech or a scandal. The odious flow is always there. It never stops. The ceaseless availability is what’s new.

Back in 2005, when Wallace gave his speech, there were no iPhones, no Instagram, no Tik-Tok, no Youtube, no Twitter, no AI chatbots, no video-on- demand streaming services.

So, Wallace’s exhortation below had more of a fighting chance in 2005:

“The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day.”

Now in 2026, the competition for our attention and awareness includes our always available screens, which by their nature are solipsistic as they involve only one person-–ourselves.

And what’s on those screens inevitably discourages us through the natural negativity of news and, as well, through invidious comparisons with others, which inflames our envy. (I wrote about my own irrational envy of Haley Bieber last year.)4

This is the 2026 water we swim in.

One way to recognize the stink of what we’re swimming in is to turn it all off. To detox, as it’s fittingly called. But I never do that for more than a few hours, which tend to coincide with the hours I’m asleep. No one I know consistently turns it all off.

A good news story

Absent ignoring the world or somehow curating our information flow so it’s all lollipops, sunshine, and butterflies, one way to mitigate the negativity is by paying attention to some positive news. With that in mind, I wanted to highlight the inspiring work done by one of the organizations my wife and I support.

The Hebrew Free Loan Society provides an array of interest-free loans to low and moderate-income people facing financial challenges or needing a helping hand, both within and beyond the Jewish community. They are the only not-for-profit providing a full array of zero interest loans in NYC and its surrounding area.

HFLS makes zero interest loans to address everything from education to housing to debt consolidation and unexpected expenses. Their best known type of loan is “general needs” to borrowers who need to get over a financial rough patch. Every story for every borrower is different. But one thing borrowers have in common is they almost never fail to pay back their loans. HFLS has a 99.9% repayment rate.

I think the HFLS secret sauce is that they require all borrowers to have a guarantor. The guarantor is typically a relative, a friend, or a neighbor. No borrower likes to default. But when someone you know has put themselves on the line for you, the desire to repay that kindness by not calling on your guarantor becomes magnified. I see this as a testament to the fundamental goodness of human nature.

What qualifies as lower and moderate income

The cost of living in the NYC area is very high. So an income that would be considered comfortably middle class or upper middle class in the heartland of America is a very different story in NYC.

A household of four, perhaps a married couple with two kids for example, can be eligible for an HFLS loan even if their family pre-tax income exceeds $100,000 or even $150,000. In NYC, that type of income for a family of four does not make you rich and can leave you vulnerable to all sorts of financial vicissitudes.

A zero interest loan of $5,000 or $7,500 to that family, repayable monthly over a two year period, can make the difference between stabilizing a family’s finances or that family falling into a predatory debt trap with ultimately disastrous consequences.

Impact and history

One of the great aspects of the HFLS model is that with its near perfect repayment rate, any money it receives in support of its mission can be recycled again and again to many borrowers. I love that type of impact.

Another thing I love about HFLS is its long history. It was founded in 1892 by ten leaders of the Jewish immigrant community on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. These friends pooled $95 to create an interest-free loan fund, non-denominational from the start, and made loans starting at 50 cents. 5

Currently, HFLS makes many tens of millions of dollars of loans every year. But it still only serves a small proportion of its ”addressable market,” to use a venture capital-ish term. There are plans to grow.6

Tetiana’s Story

There are many individual stories on the HFLS site. I picked Tetiana’s story, below in italics, because of the tremendous impact HFLS has had on her family. Plus, Debbie supports an organization that helps people in Ukraine where Tatiana’s family is from.7 Plus, cute babies!

“When my husband and I first heard about the Hebrew Free Loan Society (HFLS), we were at a breaking point.

For eight years we had been trying to get pregnant and had exhausted every option available to us. When the doctor told us that our last hope would be extremely costly In Vitro Fertilization treatments, we didn’t know where to turn. That’s when we heard about HFLS’s 0%-interest Fertility Treatment Loan. We applied and quickly received the support we needed to continue pursuing our dream of having a child. Now, one year later, we are blessed to announce that we are the parents of two healthy twins.”

“Our family was happy and at peace, until the crisis in Ukraine began. My father, mother, sister, and my two nieces are all in Ukraine and have found themselves in an impossible situation. Because no one is able to work, they are now lacking the means to afford basic necessities such as food and water.

My husband and I have tried to do everything in our power to help, but with two young children to care for, money is stretched thin; we can’t afford to send the funds that they need. When we received an email from HFLS about the availability of interest-free loans for those with families affected by this devastating situation, we felt as if a weight had been lifted off of our shoulders.

Once again we were able to quickly acquire the funds we needed to help my family, without placing added stress on our own finances. Now we can breathe more easily, knowing that our loved ones have access to the resources they need.

We are incredibly grateful for the help HFLS has provided in both of our times of need and want to send a heartfelt thank you to everyone who contributed to the organization that made these life changing loans possible.”

Unwavering optimism?

I’m told the TV character Ted Lasso represents unwavering optimism. 8

Unwavering optimism is not my default setting. I try to be realistic.

There are many terrible things happening in the world, mostly to people who are without one or more of FDR’s Four Freedoms:

• Freedom of Speech

• Freedom of Worship

• Freedom from Want

• Freedom from Fear

But there are many organizations whose mission is to help these people. Sometimes at scale and sometimes one person or one family at a time. That’s good news. So is the fact that most people are decent and want to do the right thing. Consider HFLS and its 99.9% repayment rate.

We can’t dismiss things like this or we’ll lose ourselves to hopelessness, and then the foul waters really will close in over our collective heads.

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

Belle Burden is the author of the best-selling memoir Strangers about her husband’s sudden and brutal abandonment of her and their children after twenty plus years of what Belle thought was a happy marriage. 1

Belle was born into a prominent family that had been wealthy for many generations. Part of the book’s appeal is an authentic look inside that world.

The greater appeal, however, is Belle’s effort to come to grips with her self-blame, as in how could I have been so stupid and careless to miss all the signs? And how could I have squandered my financial security?

Strangers debuted in January. I read it that month and admired Belle’s authentic voice. As well, I could relate to Belle’s being born into generational wealth. I wrote a post about the book, focusing on the very relatable torture of hindsight bias.2

A few weeks ago, The New Yorker published an attempted “gotcha” article by Jessica Winter on Belle’s book.3

Winter obtained some of the sealed legal documents4 surrounding Belle’s divorce and concludes that Belle misled her readers when she claimed to have felt financial precarity.

To bolster her accusation, Winter uses selective items from the court documents without sufficient context. The most pertinent example is Belle’s listing in a 1999 document of her interests in various trusts totaling $63 million, the majority of which was and is highly contingent. Winter does not sufficiently caveat the $63 million number, a sum that she must have known would stick in her readers’ minds. More on this later.

Winter also uses excerpts from Belle’s various post-publication interviews to “catch” Belle in exaggerating her financial desperation. But in those excerpts Winter mostly quotes Belle’s interviewers, not Belle. 5

There’s a clear thru-line of disdain in Winter’s article for Belle and for Belle’s distress over her finances. But since this is an article in The New Yorker, there are enough equivocations for plausible deniability. 6

Toward the end of her article, Winter throws in a quote from acclaimed memoirist Mary Karr about memoir being “not an act of history but an act of memory, which is innately corrupt.”

I’m unsure if Winter is condemning or excusing Belle for writing a “corrupt memoir,” but either way she’s hiding behind Mary Karr’s quote to insinuate that Belle’s memoir is corrupt.

Then there are the last lines of Winter’s article:

“[Belle’s] long-term financial security, as opposed to her emotional security, was never at risk. It might be difficult for anyone in her position to separate one from the other.”

When Winter refers to “[Belle’s] position,” does she mean her generational wealth, her distress over her divorce, or the combination of the two? Is Winter suggesting that Belle as a wealthy person could not separate her anguish over her husband’s betrayal from her financial fears?

Winter’s ending is the type of writing that seems clever; but its very cleverness obscures its clarity.

Correcting the record

Belle Burden does not need me to defend her from her critics. Her book speaks for itself and so does its phenomenal and deserved popularity.

That said, Winter, as well as writers in other publications that are less equivocal and less editorially careful (more on them later), seem to lack an understanding that money matters can be emotionally painful even to those with generational wealth. They also do not seem to understand how to write about someone’s contingent interest in a trust.

Since I understand both these issues, I feel compelled to correct the record.

Fear of squandering

Those of us born with tremendous privilege feel some measure of guilt. We know some people will resent us for it, although we had no agency in choosing our parents. We also feel that whatever we may accomplish in life has an asterisk attached to it.

We’ve had advantages that few have had and it’s impossible to separate ourselves from those advantages. It’s who we are.

But the biggest fear is to squander our advantages and in doing so disrespect the people who gave them to us. We fear that those alive and somehow even those who are dead will be bitterly disappointed in us if we waste their gifts.

As an inheritor, I’ve wrestled with all these feelings and know them quite well. You know them well too if you’ve been reading my essays for some time!

Belle felt she had squandered

In Strangers, Belle indicts herself severely for failing to protect her fortune from her husband. She had signed a prenup against her lawyer’s advice. It held that she had no rights to her husband’s earnings.

After they were married, she exhausted the two trusts she had access to in order to buy their two homes. Even though she’d paid 100% of the cost, she shared ownership of the two homes with her husband 50/50.

Belle entrusted her husband to handle their financial affairs. So, when the divorce came, her ignorance exacerbated her uncertainty, distress, and fear about what would happen to her and her children financially.

As the divorce proceedings unfolded and her husband played “hardball,” Belle realized she did not have the money to buy out her husband’s 50% share in their homes. She’d have to sell both.

She “fell into a deep well of despair and shame.”

She writes:

“I was going to lose what my grandparents and my father had given me, betraying them…I was going to lose my financial security.”

From the POV of people unfamiliar with the built-in fears of generational wealth-holders, Belle’s comment about losing her financial security will seem odd. No matter what, she was going to net many millions of dollars from her 50% share in the two homes. 7

But everything is relative, and so a sudden negative change in fortune, or just the threat of one, can seem like a financial earthquake. Even to someone very wealthy.

My mother as a case study

Like Belle Burden, my mother never had a good handle on her own finances. They were overseen by her father or her husband (my dad). Large sums in the millions were ethereal to my mother. She could only relate to smaller, everyday sums.

In late 2008, when oil prices plunged, my mother was told by our wealth management firm that her income from her oil and gas interests would also plunge. My mother objectively had nothing to worry about financially as she had many other assets and no debt. Yet she gathered up her jewelry, intending to sell it for a pittance to a store on Madison Avenue.

I tried to reassure my mother about her finances and convince her not to go through with the sale. I knew she was getting ripped off, and that the money she’d receive was not going to make a difference to her. 8

She didn’t care. If her oil and gas income could suddenly be disrupted, how could she depend on her other assets? The money from the jewelry was real to her. So was her panic.

My mother’s feelings were similar to Belle Burden’s who writes of her own financial panic:

“But my fear had made me myopic again, only able to see what I would lose.”

Show me the person who has always acted with perfect rationality about their financial situation, and who, having reached a certain level of financial security and a certain standard of living, has never feared a status decline. You can’t, and Jessica Winter of The New Yorker can’t, because that person does not exist.

Belle’s trust

In 1996, Belle’s father Carter died. The great shock of his death at age 54 was followed by the shock of discovering that his estate had $40 million of debt collateralized by all his assets. As Belle describes it, her father spent money like “he had an endless supply,” and so her father and her stepmother were living “a life on the edge of potential ruin.” If their debts were called in, they’d lose everything.

In her article, Jessica Winter does not mention the perilous state of Belle’s father’s financial situation at the time of his death in 1996. Instead, Winter makes a huge deal of Belle’s disclosure a few years later, in 1999, of her interest in a trust that her father set up for the lifetime benefit of her stepmother.

Winter reports that in 1999 the value of Belle’s share of that trust was listed as $45 million, the majority of her “net worth” of $63 million in 1999. There’s not much that’s clear about this trust. We don’t know what the assets were in 1999, how they were valued, or how they related to her father Carter Burden’s finances at the time. We also don’t know what’s in the trust today, 25 years later. 9

In fact, in 2019, Belle’s lawyer told Belle that her stepmother “could no longer pay the kids’ school tuition; her assets were too depleted.”

That’s a quote from Strangers.

It seems likely that the stepmother’s depleted assets would include the trust. That seems like a crucial piece of information in assessing the current value of a trust valued at $45 million twenty years earlier. But Winter omits this from her article.

Winter admits that the trust “was, and remains, inaccessible to Burden” and that Belle will only have access to her share of the trust after her stepmother dies. We don’t know the terms governing Belle’s future access to the trust, what’s in it today, or whether the terms of the trust can be changed.

Nor should it be any of our business.

It seems irresponsible for Winter to highlight the 1999 listing of Belle’s share in the trust as a key item proving that Belle misrepresented her financial situation at the time of her divorce in 2022. Or as proof that Belle exaggerated her feelings of distress over her finances at that time.

The Belle-bashing bandwagon

After Winter’s article appeared, other writers for publications like the Washington Post seized the opportunity to jump on the Belle-bashing bandwagon, further distorting the $63 million number used by Winter. 10

I came across quite a few writers on Substack doing exactly that, including , writing for The Free Press. Her first article about Strangers was titled Belle Burden’s Fans Don’t Care If She Lied.

If Jessica Winter’s weapon was an icepick, then Kat Rosenfield happily wielded a hatchet.

When I challenged Kat about whether Belle had a $63 million net worth as Kat claimed, Kat responded by saying that she was “just reporting the news!” as if The New Yorker article was dispositive. My full exchange with Kat is in the footnote. 11

It’s like the children’s game of telephone. The New Yorker publishes a long and insidiously critical piece on Strangers with much of the information sourced from sealed documents that may have been selectively used to make an anti-Belle case. Then, less prominent publications quote selectively from and distort what The New Yorker published to make foolish assertions. Then, some readers of these less prominent publications end up thinking that Belle is a rich, lying grifter.

Wealth Derangement Syndrome

I wrote a post in April 2025 called Wealth Derangement Syndrome, available below, in which I noted how convenient and widespread it is to think that anyone who is wealthy must be awful. To have Wealth Derangement Syndrome is to judge someone’s character solely by the quantity of their bank account.

This syndrome is glaringly apparent in modern storytelling about the wealthy. Rich people must be portrayed with one or more of the following tropes: wicked, miserable in their marriages, awful parents, or shamefully outlandish spenders.

I’m still searching for modern exceptions in the fictional realm. In most non-fiction stories the wealthy are usually portrayed negatively. Sometimes that’s deserved because it’s based on their behavior; sometimes it’s undeserved because they’re targeted and criticized only because they’re rich.

Such is the case with The New Yorker’s deceptive article about Belle Burden and her memoir. Jessica Winter’s attempted takedown is squarely, and sadly, part of Wealth Derangement Syndrome, which has entered the current mainstream of our culture.

Belle Burden was born rich and now she continues to be rich. What right does she have to complain about anything? She’s not a person. She’s a rich person.

Question for the comments: Hating on the rich seems to me to be an ineffective, if not self-defeating, strategy for addressing the problem of extreme inequality. What say you?

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

The TV marriage in Scenes is between beautiful Jessica Chastain and handsome Oscar Isaac (albeit disguised as a Jewish professor under loads of facial hair and glasses). They talk a great deal about their relationship, treating it as something separate, as a third partner in their marriage. 1

I wondered if Debbie and I had done much talking and analysis about our relationship.

Debbie said we hadn’t. We were too busy. Ten years in, we had three young children and a built-in schedule of activities and a social life revolving around our kids’ school. What we talked about far more than anything else was our three children.

On the weekends we all retreated to a house in South Salem where we had minimal obligations and very few scheduled activities. Doing nothing together as a family was heaven.

During the week, Debbie woke up with the kids. I usually took them to school and then went off to work. Debbie was in charge of the household, and when I returned from work, we’d all hang out, and then I’d put the kids to bed, often performing ridiculous comedic set pieces to a uniquely enthusiastic audience.

I asked Debbie if we’d always been amorous. She said we had. When? Whenever the opportunity struck. She reminded me how we used to take “staycations” in downtown hotels. We were early guests of the Mercer Hotel when it opened in 1997.

The picture below is from 1999, 14 years into marriage when we were thirty-seven-years old. Yes, it was taken by a professional photographer, but the laughter is real.

Stresses

Of course we had conflicts and stresses. I had peaks and valleys at work that affected my mood, sometimes severely. I’d worry that I wasn’t succeeding as fast as some peers. Alternatively, I’d worry that by working in finance I was missing out on an intellectual career where my work would have more purpose.

Debbie questioned whether she had lost a part of herself by choosing to be a stay-at-home mother. When we met, we both were working on Wall Street. After we were engaged, Debbie decided that two people with finance careers wasn’t a good set-up for a family so she went to Parsons to study design.

But I don’t recall our stresses being a direct cause of fighting. Certainly when either of us was down, it could affect our moods and make us snap at each other. But the snapping never led to personal insults.

Snapping and bickering were about specific actions. There was my messiness and my legitimate incompetence at most chores. There was Debbie’s insistence on staying to the end of galas and other events when I desperately wanted to go home. 2

Many fights took place during our annual vacation every winter to The Breakers in Palm Beach. It was my family’s tradition and I loved it. Debbie hated it. My post about the most memorable of our many Breakers fights is in the footnote. 3

But we always made up quickly, and fights never stopped us from being each other’s biggest fans and cheerleaders. Debbie would listen to my complaints about work and reassure me that I was doing a great job balancing career and family. I was able to manage my work-life so I could be home almost every night at around six. And she appreciated that we were able to enjoy a lifestyle she’d never expected.

I’d tell Debbie in spoken words and many letters how wonderful she was as a wife and mother. How her skill at organizing our lives was invaluable and could be applied to anything she wanted. I encouraged her to take on a variety of what we’d now call side-hustles.

Both of us were insecure about our appearance. I’d grown up thinking I was ugly. Inexplicably to me, Debbie didn’t think she was pretty. She once asked me the brilliantly unanswerable question, “Have I always been this ugly?”

But I thought she was beautiful and she thought I was handsome. That may be shallow but it was important to us and it took decades of compliments to convince each other our compliments were sincere.

It also took decades for us to believe each other about our strengths. Without that mutual support, I’m convinced we’d be far less secure in ourselves today and far less happier.

A recent fight between Debbie and me

At the start of this month, Debbie and I were in our house, just the two of us, with no plans for the weekend, an ideal state of affairs and so an odd time for a fight to break out.

For most of the afternoon, Debbie was listening to an audio book on her AirPods as she munched on popcorn. The crunching was extremely loud––infernal to me, soundless to her. We were in the same room but she had her back to me.

When Debbie and I are in separate locations, I miss her but look forward to her return. And I’m perfectly happy when we’re at home together doing our own separate things. I still sense her presence and feel we’re connected and available to one another.

But that afternoon, self-secluded by her AirPods and the earthquakes of her crunching, Debbie had made herself unreachable. I felt intense loneliness. Perhaps it’s true that the most hellish loneliness is not when you are alone by yourself but being with someone and still feeling alone.

The audio book Debbie was listening to was The Calamity Club, a book I’d read, loved, and recommended. Debbie loved the Southern dialects of the book’s narrator. The fact that I’d suggested the book made me angrier. I’d been the architect of my own perceived isolation. 4

I went upstairs for a while both to escape the crunching and in the hope that Debbie might miss me and come looking for me. But she didn’t. Only Sophie padded upstairs to keep me company.

Sophie and I went back downstairs. The popcorn explosions had ceased but now Debbie was assembling shelves as she continued to listen to the book. I was invisible to her. I was way down on her list of priorities. My anger grew.

Debbie is a completist, and she loves puzzles. When she is assembling something, she is in a zone of absolute concentration and contentment. She hates to be taken out of that zone. These facts, which are well known to me, ought to have figured into what I did next. But they did not.

Debbie sat next to me on the sofa and put her arm around me. She was still listening to the audio.

In the fantastical life lived within my mind, we’d had a titanic fight. I was the aggrieved party, and by offering me casual affection, Debbie was twisting the knife in. So I detached her arm and looked away. Two could play at this game.

At that, Debbie finally removed her AirPods and asked me what was wrong. I told her that by listening to her audio, she had become a “ghost” to me. That it was awful to be in the same place as her and have her make me feel so alone. I gave her a look she calls the “Bad David.”

In our current state of marriage, if I express anger with words, a look, or both, Debbie will feel that she’s disappointed me. Then, she becomes incredibly sad. She will tell me that I have shattered her world and her heart. It’s worse when she’s surprised by my disappointment. And even worse when she has no chance to reverse what she’s done.

So when I called her a ghost, her face registered first shock, then pain. Then many hours of sadness followed until my apologies were accepted.

I have this to say for myself. At the age of 64, my capacity for acting like a child remains undiminished.

Codependency?

Codependency is supposed to be bad. You should be your own independent person and not rely on any one person for approval and self-esteem.

But Debbie and I are both codependent in our mutual reliance on each other’s approval. Our rare fights are generally triggered either by Debbie thinking she’s done something to disappoint me or by my being jealous of Debbie’s attention. The AirPods fight contained both elements.

Perhaps someone will tell me that I’m using the term codependent incorrectly. If it means holding each other down, then Debbie and I have done the opposite. We’ve built each other up.

Great love, great risk

As for the AirPod fight, I can’t recall why I was so vulnerable that day, why I interpreted Debbie’s actions as a brutal rejection of me. Of course it was irrational. And I’m sure I was projecting some external angst onto Debbie who was innocently enjoying her popcorn, her book, and her furniture assembly.

Over 42 years, our love has compounded, “as if increase of appetite grew by what it fed on.”5 Perhaps it was inevitable that we’ve made each other’s love a foundation, a condition precedent, for our self-esteem.

With great love comes great power over the other person for good or ill. To love as deeply as I love Debbie is to surrender myself to her. I’m usually absolutely secure in her love but every now and then I’m still a bundle of nerves. Even after all this time. Especially after all this time.

Here we are today, older and sometimes wiser.

Question for the comments: Tolstoy famously begins Anna Karenina: “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

However, it seems to me that families and marriages can be happy in an infinite variety of ways. What say you?

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

My original essay on this topic in March 2025 began with the personal confession below in italics:

My older son Andrew is my Devil’s Advocate. He challenges me to keep an open mind. After he read my last post, People On TV Can’t Hear Me Scream, he was concerned about my state of mind regarding the current political situation. He and I had a long conversation about why I had been “triggered” to lose my temper as well as my inabiliy to find anything good about Trump’s second term. Andrew is by no means a MAGA advocate but he’s an independent thinker suspicious of anything that smacks of absolutist thought.

Near the end of the conversation, I told Andrew that “if things got too bad,” I would consider, for the first time in my life, leaving the United States. Andrew was alarmed. He said, “Don’t leave us, we’re building a family for you.”

That was poignant and loving. I assured him that I was far from the point of seriously considering leaving.

Andrew probed me more about why I was fearful. I could point to many specific actions taken by Trump 2.0 but I found myself at a loss to fit those actions into a narrative, other than just Trump’s grab for more power.

After that conversation, I realized that if I was unable to articulate the intellectual underpinnings of Trumpism to myself, I couldn’t adequately express why I was scared. And to dismiss the importance of intellectual influences places our comprehension at great peril. 1

Here begin my current thoughts:

N.S. Lyons and his Strong Gods

Back in March 2025, the most cogent argument for Trumpism I could find was made by Substack writer . Lyons had made a good effort to fit Trump into a larger intellectual framework. This was at and before the beginning of Trump’s second term. 2

Lyons saw Trumpism as a return of the Strong Gods, by which he meant the values of family, nation, moral truths, and religion, values that have a deep and primary appeal to many if not most. 3

The Strong Gods are in contrast to globalism, which, quoting Lyons, is “animated by peaceable weak gods of tolerance, doubt, dialogue, equality, and consumer comfort.”

The Strong Gods are unmistakably masculine.

Lyons’ warnings

One of the strengths of Lyons’s argument was that he did a “pre-mortem” of how the Trumpian project might fail. The root of Lyons’ worries was money, or, as Jesus expressed it":

“You cannot serve [both] God and mammon [greed for riches].” 4

Lyons warned in December 2024:

“The most difficult challenge is likely…resisting Donald Trump’s inexplicable but persistent urge to suck up to the East Coast financial elite (a core part of the regime opposing him) and waste political capital showering them with tax cuts and other goodies at the expense of the working class.” 5

In my March 2025 essay, I wrote these two paragraphs in response:

I agree with Lyons that it is money that could trip up Trumpism. The god of money is Mammon, and it’s very hard to dismiss that fallen angel from what drives our modern society.

In fact, I find it extraordinarily difficult to untangle the pursuit of money from the Trumpian project. Trump’s lifelong schtick has rested on his prowess as a businessman. The identity of his right-hand man Musk is as the richest man in the world. Trump’s most fervent supporters are some of the wealthiest men in the world, including the East Coast financial elite who according to Lyons Trump “sucks up to.”

Trumpism has in fact become all about money and corruption––enriching the Trump family and his allies at the expense of all other Americans. Financial markets have acted as perhaps the only effective check on policy.

The latest corrupt act, Trump’s self-negotiated '“settlement” with the IRS, is breathtaking in its audacity, its cynicism, and its contempt for this country.6

As for the working class, Trumpism has repeatedly kicked them in the teeth. While the bi-coastal financial elites have benefited the most from Trumpism. Exactly as Lyons warned.

Where I am

I was at a lunch in my hometown of NYC the other week with a political candidate. Before she left, she asked our small group what was giving us hope.

I said that on my way to the lunch I’d walked through Central Park where everyone looks happy on a sunny spring day. Emerging from the park onto the street, I went past a seemingly endless line of families and friends waiting for doors to open for a college graduation ceremony. Eager, dressed in their best, carrying bouquets to toss to their loved ones on a day of celebration.

Away from the “news,” it’s not hard to find countless moments of individual joy and love. Hope endures, hope prevails. I’m not going anywhere.

Below is my essay from March 2025.

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

4

Matthew 6:24-25.

“No one can serve two masters; for either he will hate the one and love the other, or else he will be loyal to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and mammon.”

In the summer of 1984, I was 22, working in NYC and living at my parents’ apartment. At a bar one evening, I met a 27-year-old woman named Debby (not my wife). We had a mutual attraction, we kissed, and in the course of that evening I lied about my age and claimed that I, too, was 27. Five years older than I actually was, a big difference of almost 25%.

We went on a handful of dates. I’d pick Debby up at her apartment where I met her five-year-old son. He was very cute. He was learning to be fluent in French at the Fleming School on East 62^nd Street.

I didn’t have the courage to confess my true age to Debby. My answers to her questions about my past were vague and false. I’m pretty sure she knew I was lying. For one thing, she never allowed the romantic side of our relationship to advance.

After about a month, she said she wanted to see where I lived, a matter I had tried to cloud in mystery. I was in luck. My parents’ apartment was under renovation and my mother and father had just moved out for the summer to their house in New Jersey to avoid the racket and dust.

This, perhaps, was my opportunity to advance the relationship. But when I gave Debby a tour of “my bachelor pad” six bedroom Park Avenue apartment, I did not make the impression I’d aimed for.

She said something like, “David, tell me the truth, where are your parents?” I doubled down on my lie and said something like “It’s a very sad story and it upsets me to talk about it.” I was trying to convey, without success, the plight of an orphan, a sole survivor of some tragic peril.

That was the end of Debby and me. I still feel guilty about misleading her, a sweet woman with a young child. In recalling my unfortunate behavior I recall how my initial lie grew and grew.

London Falling

Lying is on my mind as I’ve just read Patrick Radden Keefe’s new book London Falling.

It’s a true story about the 2019 death of a 19-year-old named Zac who assumed an elaborate false identity and pretended to be the son of a billionaire Russian oligarch. Zac came from an ordinarily affluent family. But from an early age, he became obsessed with the extravagant flash of the lifestyles of the new Russian oligarch money and the associated “glitzy, aspirational culture of modern London.” 1

Zac was a talented and detail-oriented liar and his lies were mostly believed. As Keefe puts it:

“[Zac] came to understand something about the essential gullibility of human nature. Most of us have a default setting to believe other people.” 2

Zac’s fake persona and his obsession with the outward glitter of wealth led him to fall in with the dark side of London––gangsters and fraudsters. In particular, two older men who stole and cheated and extorted in order to grasp some of the Russian oligarch money that was flowing into the London economy.

These oligarchs and their money were of shady provenance but they were welcomed by a “morally elastic” British establishment that was willing to look the other way when it came to criminal behavior associated with wealthy Russians.

Zac was attracted to that dark side. As one of Keefe’s mobster interviewees put it, many people have a temptation to “flirt with a little bit of criminality.” To be “Saturday Night Gangsters.” 3

Eventually, Zac’s lies caught up with him. At the apartment of his London mobster “friend,” one late, winter night in 2019, Zac jumped off a fifth-floor balcony and fell to his death in the Thames River. Zac’s mobster friend was at home in the apartment. He was never apprehended and may have been a police informant.

Keefe does a masterful job of investigating all the threads, all the personal histories and stories that led to that tragic night. We get to know the gangsters and the fraudsters as well as Zac’s grieving and guilt-wracked parents. As a reader, you’re left to judge for yourself the what and why of Zac’s death. Suicide or desperate attempt to escape?

Hindsight bias strikes again

As a parent, when your teenager or young adult child seems to be headed off course, you want to intervene. But you also fear that your interference might trigger your child to shut off all communications or perhaps go into self-exile, thereby eliminating your remaining parental influence. It’s why countries at war keep channels of communication open to keep alive the prospect of peace.

While I was reading London Falling, however, I felt my parental hindsight bias at work. I judged Zac’s parents harshly. It was similar to my initial harsh judgment of Belle Burden in reading her memoir Strangers, which starts with the sudden destruction of her marriage and then goes back to the beginning of that relationship. Couldn’t she see the obvious red flags? 4

Similarly, as I read London Falling, I was harshly judging Zac’s parents. They seemed willfully ignorant, obtuse, and over the top, gentle-permissive in their parenting. Clearly, their son was lying to them. Clearly, he had an unhealthy relationship with the flash of wealth––the cars and the apartments and the members’ clubs. Clearly, he was involved in activities inappropriate for a nineteen-year-old.

But just like with Strangers, I knew the tragic ending. So, of course everything seemed clear. That’s how hindsight bias clouds our judgment.

A little humility is in order

I was fooled by a false identity.

Around 2006 I was introduced by my good friend Irwin to a father who had kids in the private school where Irwin was the headmaster. That man was Josef von Habsburg, a descendant of the royal von Habsburg family. I was starstruck. Irwin knew what a history nerd I was, and the von Hapsburgs were hugely important figures in the European history I’d always loved to read about.

Josef von Habsburg spoke with a wistful, polished, and faintly Germanic accent. He dropped names with great finesse. Apparently. the Shah of Iran’s family and the von Hapsburgs were very tight, hanging out together wherever former royals gathered to talk about the good old days.

I learned from Irwin that Josef had made generous charitable donations to Irwin’s school in addition to his children’s tuitions.

Josef was very strange but his strangeness only added to my belief in him. He came to a party at our apartment wearing an oversized gun holster loaded with a portable hairdryer. Only an eccentric royal could get away with that.

My wife Debbie and I went to Josef’s apartment for dinner one night. His pregnant wife was a designer, and the apartment, a vast loft in Soho, was crammed with colorful chandeliers and expensive looking furniture. You could get lost in the alleyways. It was part fairyland, part flea market, part showroom.

That night, we met Josef’s children who were dressed in a bizarre blend of lederhosen and tuxedos. We met his two greyhounds. I wish I could remember the names of the kids and the pets. Wolfie? Fritz? We saw pictures of Josef’s family castle where he and the family were headed when school let out for the summer. They served us food that was inedible. Gristly meat, I recall.

The penny drops

In 2009, Josef came to see me at my office. He was in tears because all his money had been held at Lehman International in London. Lehman went bankrupt in ’08, and Josef had been told his London money was irretrievable. All of it lost. I remember thinking that here in front of me was a “broken man.”

He didn’t ask me for money but he did ask if I could help him with a venture in China that he hoped would restore his fortune. I referred him to someone I knew who did business in China.

Sometime soon after, it was revealed that Josef von Hapsburg was really Josef Meyers from Michigan. Josef was wanted for failure to pay child support to another family he had in Michigan. Also, Josef was a confidential informant, a CI, for the FBI.

Josef’s “job” as a CI was to hunt for people on the margins of Wall Street, strivers who might be easily susceptible to the lure of a fast buck via white-collar crime. Josef worked with an undercover FBI agent to set up his targets. Usually, the sting involved laundering briefcases of cash.5

In the meantime, the FBI was paying for Josef to maintain the lifestyle and thus the identity of a fabulously wealthy royal. Plus, whenever Josef himself was arrested for his own white-collar crimes, the FBI would step in to make the charges go away.

A Detroit newspaper broke the news that Josef was an imposter. He was extradited to Michigan from New York and sentenced to three and a half years in prison for failing to pay child support.

Our default setting

By the time I met Josef, I was likely too much in the mainstream of finance to be a typical victim of his. But given more time, he might have tried to turn me into one of his marks. Certainly, without his unmasking, I would have gone on believing and enjoying the fact that I was becoming friends with a genuine von Hapsburg.

As Keefe writes in London Falling, my “default setting” is to believe people when they tell me who they are. Especially if it seems that they have nothing to gain by lying. Perhaps that’s naive.

Part of me admires von Hapsburg for his elaborate con. Getting the FBI to pay him a lot of money, living a princely life, fooling everyone. A seeming mastermind of the world of the “nether shadowland,” just like the world that Zac entered in London Falling. A “shadowland” that can seem enticing precisely because it is illicit, forbidden.6

So, reading London Falling, I understood Zac’s attraction to the world of flash and gangsters. And with a few days’ perspective, I understand the unfairness of my initial, harsh judgments of Zac’s parents.

As I like to remind myself, the past carries an aspect of immutable inevitability. We tend to believe that things could have only turned out as they did because that’s the only way they turned out.

But every event in the past used to be in the future, subject to infinite different outcomes. It takes mental effort to remember this. It’s worth the effort because it allows us to understand the past far better.

And with that understanding comes compassion for those who are deceived, like the parents in London Falling who lost their son Zac.

Question for the comments: Have you ever been bamboozled by a fake as I was and have you ever lied as I did about your age or backstory?

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

In this clip from Catch Me If You Can, con man Frank (Leonardo DiCaprio ) evades FBI agent Hanratty (Tom Hanks) by pretending to be a pilot and using a phalanx of beautiful stewardesses to surround him and divert attention.

6

There is something in many of us that attracts us to the dark side of things. Gangsters can seem glamorous. As a sixth grader, after I watched The Sting, I wanted to be a con man.

I told him I thought the way he was scrutinizing and questioning his Jewish identity was a quintessentially Jewish thing to do.

Being Jewish is an indelible identity, not just a religion. Even those who seek to mask their Judaism or to renounce it or to avoid Jewish rituals and traditions are acting in response to their Jewish identity.

In 1940 my paternal grandfather Alfred changed his last name from Rottenberg to Roberts. In December of that same year, Alfred decided to celebrate Christmas for the benefit of his three-year-old son Billy, my father.

In the 1930s, Alfred had graduated from Harvard Law School, a place where that era’s antisemitism would have been obvious––most law firms would not hire any Jewish lawyers.

Alfred then married a Jewish heiress Betty Block whose original family name had been changed to Block from Bialoblotcky. I suspect there was pressure from Alfred’s Block in-laws to change his name and to assimilate.

Alfred’s father, my great-grandfather Samuel Rottenberg, was not happy with his son Alfred’s name change and move toward assimilation. I have three beautiful letters Samuel wrote to Alfred expressing Samuel’s displeasure. In one letter, Samuel wrote, “you have no right to deprive [Billy, my father] of his birthright.”

A Rottenberg by any other name

Shakespeare claims that a rose by any other name would smell as sweet, i.e., would still be a rose. I disagree. Names have great power. I think of Moses at the burning bush asking God for His name. God refuses and replies “I Am Who I Am.”

I think that’s the all-time greatest name-flex. Second place in the footnote.1

I wonder how different my life might have been as David Rottenberg vs. David Roberts. Rottenberg is a name that even my most dull-witted classmates could have used to tease me. But as a Rottenberg I might have felt a deeper affinity early on to my Jewish heritage because my Jewishness would have appeared more obvious, at least to myself.

Escape vs. embrace

I’ve been thinking about the Rottenberg-Roberts name change and the tension between escape and embrace of Judaism ever since I devoured Nicholas Lemann’s terrific new book Returning, which tells the two-hundred -year story of how Lemann’s Jewish American family wrestled with their Jewish identity. 2

Reading Lemann’s book had a huge impact on me. It made me feel closer to my own ancestors, like Samuel Rottenberg, who had to struggle to establish themselves, something I never had to do thanks to their efforts.3

Lemann’s prosperous and accomplished family came from early German-Jewish immigrants who first settled in New Orleans around 1840. Eastern European Jews like Samuel Rottenberg came later and in far greater numbers, from the 1880s until the immigration restrictions of the 1920s.

The German Jews in America were desperate to differentiate themselves from the later Jewish arrivals who were generally poor, less healthy, less clean, and devout (clinging, perhaps) to their Jewish rituals and traditions, thus a people apart. The German Jews in America considered the mass arrival of Eastern European Jews to be a problem, a threat to how they’d be perceived.

The solution for the earlier immigrants was to conform as much as possible to Christian norms. Lemann’s family, along with the rest of the tightly-knit New Orleans Jewish community, celebrated Christmas enthusiastically. Lemann recounts how at his parents’ wedding his father hid away baskets of kippot (traditional head coverings) and then did the same at Lemann’s own wedding.

Kippot were too Jewish. 4

But as Lemann writes, the distinction between the two Jewish groups, which was obvious to the more established American German Jews, was not dispositive to Christians. A Jew, no matter how cultured, how handsome or beautiful, or how rich, was still a Jew.

Lemann quotes from New Orleans novelist Walker Percey whose protagonist Binx in the novel The Moviegoer has this to say:

“Whenever I approach a Jew, the Geiger counter in my head starts rattling away like a machine gun, and as I go past with the utmost circumspection and with every sense alert––the Geiger counter subsides.”

Quintessential Immigrant

My great-grandfather Samuel Rottenberg left his family and his small town in what’s now the Czech Republic in 1888 and arrived penniless and alone in New York City at the age of sixteen.

In that time and place, helicopter parenting was not a thing!

Samuel was part of the poor Eastern European wave that the German Jews looked down upon. He spent the first period of his American life as a peddler on the Lower East Side sleeping in a storeroom and earning $5 a month.

Samuel built a good life as a small business owner. He had seven children and a lifelong marriage. He became a pillar of his community, a key founder and first president of The Brooklyn Jewish Center, built in 1920 for a million dollars––really big bucks back then. It was the largest Jewish institution of its kind, combining a school, a shul, and all sorts of community activities.

As Samuel put it himself, accurately, if not modestly, “If ever some historian should write a history of the Jews in Brooklyn, I am sure my name will get some space.” It has.

Samuel’s Three Letters

Samuel wrote three letters to his son Alfred about Alfred’s name change to Roberts and his assimilation. The letters have an increasingly desperate tone. They remind me of the struggles of the father Tevye in Fiddler On The Roof as he contends with the increasingly non-traditional marriages of his three daughters. 5

In his first letter, Samuel writes that “a name to me is like a flag that a nation adopts at the beginning of its career.” And “I had hoped that my children would be proud to bear that name.”

When I first read those lines many decades ago, I felt angry at Alfred for rejecting his father’s name. I also felt shame that I was helplessly complicit in carrying on that rejection. No one had asked my permission or opinion about changing my name.

I briefly considered returning my name to Rottenberg in solidarity with Samuel (who died before I was born). But that would have been a rejection of my father’s name. And a pain in the neck. And I preferred the name Roberts to Rottenberg.

Samuel’s second letter was sent on December 20^th 1940 after Samuel learned that Alfred planned to celebrate Christmas, including the traditional tree. In that letter, Samuel writes “I do not think it does us any good to ape our Christian brethren.”

Samuel understood that the Geiger counters of the Christian majority were always turned on.

Finally, the third and harshest letter comes three and a half years later in 1944. Samuel criticizes Alfred for celebrating only Christmas and excluding the Jewish holidays. Samuel has given up trying to persuade Alfred not to celebrate Christmas. Now he just wants equal time for the Jewish holidays.

Samuel blames himself for not doing a better job as Alfred’s father showing Alfred the “beauties” of the Jewish tradition. Samuel wishes that “what I am writing you today could have been written to [myself] twenty-five years ago.”

I found that especially heartbreaking. I sense in that last letter a sad and weary surrender to his son’s drifting away from tradition. All five of Alfred’s brothers eventually followed Alfred in changing their last name to Roberts. Samuel lived to witness the abandonment of the banner of his name.

He likely worried that that the final abandonment would end with complete assimilation. Conversion.

Nicholas Lemann wrote about the conversion to Christianity of the children of Moses Mendelsshon, famed father of the German Reform movement:

“The possibility of acceptance, it turns out, turned Jews into Christians far more effectively than the more brutal methods of medieval Crusades and Inquisitions did.”

Challah as dense as a brick

My parents celebrated Christmas when I was growing up. But my parents also celebrated Hannukah and I celebrated my Bar Mitzvah in a temple, all for the benefit of my mother’s father (the oilman from Tulsa) who, like Sam Rottenberg, was unabashedly Jewish.

For about a decade in the 1990s, my mother, searching for a set of guidelines to give her life greater purpose and order, became Orthodox. When she stopped her strict observances and pivoted to medical philanthropy, she retained her Jewish faith and wore a prominent Star of David until she died in 2020.

My wife and I re-entered Judaism through our three children who we sent to the Rodeph Sholom Nursery School simply because it was the one school that waitlisted our two-and-a-half-year-old daughter.

(I wrote about our zany parental behavior in my post The Manhattan Nursery School Gods, linked in the footnote below.6 )

We loved the community of the Rodeph Sholom School, part of a large Reform Congregation. We kept our three children enrolled at the school for most of their pre-high school years.

In our family home, my wife and I never had a Christmas tree. We celebrated the Jewish holidays and had Friday night dinners with our children. Every Friday, the kids brought home challah from Rodeph Sholom, crushed at the bottom of their backpacks to a brick-like consistency. The challah could have been used as a bludgeon but, still, it was delicious!

Narrow escape

We might easily have become part of the large Jewish population that is unaffiliated and Jewishly uneducated. That’s easy to do in New York, especially in the Manhattan secular private school world, and especially for someone like me who had a career in New York finance, an industry dominated by Jews.

Inside my bubble, I could have been like the fish in David Foster Wallace’s famous graduation speech This is Water. The fish can’t understand water as a separate reality from itself. Similarly, I could have been oblivious to the Jewish waters I swam in. I could have taken my Judaism for granted.

As Nicholas Lemann puts it:

“New York might be the best place to be a Jew, the most comfortable…That means being Jewish doesn’t require much of you.”

Some of that laziness is in me. I give myself good marks in my ethical and intellectual Judaism but my lackluster observance of rituals and traditions is something that troubles me.

Because without ritual, Judaism would not thrive or even survive. That’s a fact I have to face.

In the meantime, below is some comedy from Larry David about his perspective on Judaism.

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

Over the past few years, my wife Debbie and I have increased the time and resources we devote to not-for-profit organizations that help people who have urgent material needs.

My motivations for giving are complex.

I have family role models of community involvement going back generations with my mother Jill Roberts and a paternal great-grandfather Sam Rottenberg standing out. They would be proud of what we’re doing, which makes me happy.

When I’m engaged in philanthropy, I feel most deeply connected to my Jewish identity. I’m far more motivated to fulfill the commandments of ethical acts––doing our part to “repair the world”––rather than to observe the commandments of prayer, faith, and ritual. 1

Ideally, I would embrace both the ethical and the spiritual aspects but that’s not how I’m constituted.

Giving makes me feel good because it gives me agency to change lives for the better. I can read the news and curse the darkness––and I often do––but I can also light candles that make the darkness a little less dark.

All that said, my wife and I are not saints. We’re very far from renouncing worldly goods and material comforts and pleasures. Our spending on ourselves and our family creates limits to our giving, which I discuss below.

This Monday at 4 pm EST, I will be interviewed by about my approach to philanthropy and related topics. Jeremy writes the Substack , which is a tremendous source of information on the topic and a pleasure to read if the substance doesn’t make you too angry.

The invitation to our Live! interview is here.

The breach

America’s wealth has never been greater while inequality has never been greater. At the same time, our social safety net is being weakened in exchange for lower taxes and record national debt.

Philanthropy has not stepped into this breach. Jeremy Ney’s latest article Why Philanthropy Is Silent In The Golden Age Of Wealth contains the fascinating chart below comparing the giving of the big three plutocrats of the first Gilded Age––Carnegie, Rockefeller, and Mellon––with the giving of our current crop of plutocrats.

I wrote about Carnegie’s Gospel of Wealth a few years ago. My post was titled Would Andrew Carnegie Have Flown Economy, linked in the footnote below. 2

On the scale of this chart, I would be an imperceptible blue dot, somewhere beneath Bloomberg’s bubble, planning to march my little dot eastward past Mellon’s bubble.

My calculations

For every two and a half dollars we spend on ourselves and our family, we donate around a dollar. That ratio came about organically rather than as some grand plan. Over time we’ve added not-for-profit organizations to our portfolio of giving. And our spending has also increased.

Every week I keep track of our spending and keep track of our financial assets. I’m a spreadsheet guy.

I keep a long-term projection of what happens to our financial assets given an assumed rate of after-tax investment return and an assumed inflation of both our spending and our giving.

There’s an infinite number of “what if” games to play but my base case, meant to be conservative, although far from a disaster, is a 4% after tax rate of investment return and a 2.5% inflation rate. With those assumptions, after thirty years, at the age of 94, we still have some financial assets left, although greatly diminished in real, inflation adjusted, terms.

That makes me comfortable with our current rate of giving and increasing it with inflation.

The calculation for billionaires is far different. Their spending is likely to be a rounding error.

But for the less exceptionally wealthy––and there are far more of us––I think my methodology is useful. As long as you realize that a spreadsheet is a tool you control and not the other way around.

Solutions

In our upcoming interview, Jeremy Ney will ask me about solutions to address the insufficiency of philanthropy to make up for the gaps in our social safety net.

There are a few straightforward changes to the tax code that can indirectly tax wealth and encourage more charitable giving. They both have to do with capital gains taxes. I think direct wealth taxes are a poor way of addressing inequality as I discussed in a prior post. 3

Currently, long term capital gains (long term defined as a year and a day of holding period) and most dividends are taxed at a maximum federal rate of 20% vs. a maximum rate of 37% for ordinary income, including wages. As well, when someone dies, all their assets are “stepped up” for tax purposes to the asset values at death so that all the unrealized value up to that point in time remains forever untaxed. 4

I suggest that both of these provisions be changed so that all income, including capital gains, be taxed at ordinary rates and the step-up at death be eliminated and the estate be required to pay the capital gains tax.

These changes would increase the taxes paid by the holders of wealth. The changes would also discourage the strategy of “spend, borrow, die” wherein a wealthy holder borrows against their assets to support their spending and avoids paying gains taxes when they die and their assets are “stepped up.” 5

From a philanthropy point of view, I believe these changes would incentivize more giving of appreciated assets since there would otherwise be no escaping eventual taxes on gains.

Of course, the more charitable giving there is, the less paid in taxes since charitable giving creates a tax deduction.6 But if the gap we’re solving for is between government tax revenues and philanthropy, then more giving is not a bad thing.

Objections to my solutions

One objection is that the wealthy might “park” their assets in foundations and donor advised funds where most of the assets could grow without being given away. But the rate of giving (donations as a % of assets) from donor advised funds is above 20%. Foundations must give away 5% of their money annually. So eventually those assets will find their way into philanthropy. 7

The larger objection to my solutions is that they are far too modest. To provide the federal government with enough money to keep our national debt at reasonable historical levels (see alarming chart below) and provide the government enough funding to repair the social safety net, far more tax revenue is needed.

That means higher income tax rates at brackets that reach deep down into the ranks of the wealthy and the affluent. Certainly, a higher rate than 37% at the top.

We may eventually have no choice but to radically change the tax code and introduce a national sales, or value-add, tax as nearly every other developed nation has done.

Illegal loopholes

With all the current legal loopholes available, many wealthy American taxpayers still push their luck in trying to abuse the tax code through evasion rather than avoidance.

Recently I read about one such scheme. If you become a legal resident of Puerto Rico and you sell an asset for a gain, you do not have to pay capital gains taxes on the portion of the gain that occurred while you were a legal resident of Puerto Rico. 8

But apparently the rule has been sorely abused. People who knew they were about to realize a huge gain moved to Puerto Rico shortly before realizing their gain and then claimed falsely that all of the gain was realized while they were a resident of Puerto Rico. When, on the contrary, it was evident that much of the gain took place before they left the mainland United States and so on that portion of the gain, taxes are owed.

These accused tax evaders received legal opinion letters from lawyers, now under criminal investigation, so they could claim they were just following advice, which is the same morally obtuse excuse as “just following orders.”

Question for the comments: In which ways does our current tax, social safety net, philanthropy situation bother you, if at all?

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

On the one hand, I like being without goals, without any new grand project pushing me forward. Because at 64, I’m in a “preserve, protect, and defend” mode. And with the notable exceptions of new grandchildren, any big news is likely to be negative. Just like the “news” of the wider world. 1

On the other hand, I wonder whether trying to keep the status quo and only making small changes around the edges is a game plan for a dull and dreary life. I have the outward frame of activity–– social, physical, and mental–– but inwardly am I rusting?

The world is changed by people pursuing their goals with great ambition. Behind most great feats of the arts or of science or of business is a single-mindedness that is ruthless and relentless.

But single-mindedness is not for me.

Ambitions of my youth

When I was very young, there were moments in my life when I was filled with great confidence, perhaps arrogance, even hubris. I felt there was nothing I couldn’t do or accomplish. I dreamed childishly big. At a minimum, President. Then at age six I found out we’d never had a President who was Jewish and that was unlikely to change.

My substitute dream a few years later was to become rich beyond my wildest dreams of avarice. Rich enough to buy the Frick Museum, around the corner from where I lived. I’d learned that The Frick had once been a private residence, and I dreamed of reclaiming it as my home and one day standing on the front lawn waving through the iron fence at the passers-by.

I took the picture below this week.

Some thirty years later, my firm shared an elevator bank with a Xerox sales and marketing unit. I often saw a white-haired Xerox sales executive, the lines on his face etched deeply. He always looked harried and rumpled, a perpetual cup of coffee in one hand, an invisible cigarette in the other. But he had a certain presence that commanded attention from his Xerox colleagues.

Once, I heard him declare to a younger colleague, “If I have a decent crap in the morning, that’s enough to make my day a success.”

There must be a reason that his comment has stayed with me all these years. It’s not just the ineffable mysteries of our digestive systems. It’s the realization that there are many things that can make us happy. And that much of happiness depends on how reasonable our expectations are.

Multiverses

This past week, my wife and I binge-watched the sci-fi-TV show Dark Matter. We don’t typically like sci-fi that includes multiple worlds because we get confused. But binge-watching helps. So does the pause button to confirm our mutual understanding of what’s going on.

Our son Andrew recommended Dark Matter and called it a love story, which it is. Mild spoiler ahead.

Joel Edgerton (“Joel-1”) plays a brilliant scientist who 16 years ago sacrificed his career in favor of his pregnant girlfriend, his great love, now his wife. They have a 16-year-old son. Joel-1 has some regrets but he’s mostly happy being a family man.

But there’s another Joel Edgerton (“Joel-2”) in a parallel universe who in a “Sliding Doors” moment chose his career over his pregnant girlfriend. He advised an abortion, they broke up, and then he dedicated his life to the single-minded pursuit of his scientific career.

Joel-2 became wealthy and insufferably arrogant, a “player.” Think of Steve Jobs, but in quantum physics. As the show opens, Joel-2 has been able to perfect the tools necessary to travel among infinite universes, i.e., the multiverse.

Now, 16 years after the two Joels went their separate ways, creating their separate universes, Joel-2 decides that wealth and fame are no longer enough. He wants Joel-1’s family, too. So, he travels to Joel-1’s universe and switches universes with Joel-1 in a violent way.

But having devoted himself to his lab to the exclusion of everything else, Joel-2 has become a world-class dick. He’s identical in many ways with Joel-1, but he’s hopeless at being a good husband to Joel-1’s wife and a good dad to Joel-1’s son. He makes grand, cliched, and suspicious gestures like buying his son a new car or by helicopter-husbanding his wife’s artistic career.

The message is that if you want to go all-in to just one thing, then that one thing is all you get. And if your one thing is the relentless pursuit of work success, you’ll end up a world-class dick.

At one point, I paused the show and told Debbie that of all the infinite universes in the multiverse, I would always choose the universe I had with her. I meant it.

Debbie looked at me with her lovely eyes and said, “What about a different universe where tonight you ordered the right sandwich for me?”

Sandwich-gate happened like this. Debbie wanted a chicken club, my usual. I thought she wanted her go-to, the Greek Salad wrap. I ordered her a chicken and mozzarella sandwich. Why? Because we argued about a side order of bacon. If you want more details, they’re in the footnote. 2

To rust at home or strive with gods

Odysseus, or Ulysses, was not an ideal husband. He left home for twenty years and had long affairs with Circe and Calypso.

Alfred Tennyson imagines a sequel to The Odyssey in his famous poem, “Ulysses.” It’s three years after Ulysses has returned home to Ithaka from ten years of war against Troy followed by another ten years on his boat, battling gods, sirens, and a one-eyed monster (Cyclops, not his penis! Although he did have those two long love affairs).

In Tennyson’s poem, Ulysses stews in his old age, impatient, kvetching that he’s stuck as a king ruling over a “savage race” and matched as a husband to an “aged wife.” That wife, Penelope, had been beset by raucous suitors until Ulysses returned home to kill them all.

Tennyson imagines Ulysses still itching to accomplish great feats. His adventures have ruined him for a domestic life. His ambition has not been sated. So he dreams of getting his sailing crew back together to recommence “roaming with a hungry heart.” 3

The poem’s most ringing lines:

“Some work of noble note, may yet be done,

Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods.”

Up close to my adolescent gods, the New York Islanders

The closest I ever came to striving with gods was as an 18-year-old in the New York Islanders dressing room. It was May 3rd, 1980, a Saturday afternoon playoff game against the Buffalo Sabres. It was the semi-finals, one step away from the Stanley Cup finals.

I was with my mother, my best friend Steve, and my two younger brothers. We were all Islanders fanatics.

Before the game, my 12-year-old brother Samuel’s braces had sprung a loose wire. The wire was scraping painfully against his inner cheek. Pre-game, Samuel and I approached a security guard who called down to the dressing room. Miraculously, the trainer Ron Waske said bring the kid down and I’ll take care of him. 4

Ron Waske went to work adjusting and clipping Samuel’s wire. And there I was in the locker room, in the midst of the Islander players who were like gods to me. I saw my favorite player, my hero Clark Gillies stomping about in his long underwear.

The Islanders won the game, the series, and the Stanley Cup that year. I was there for the final victory. 5

Sometimes, especially when we’re young, we can fuse ourselves with the ambitions and exploits of our heroes. I remember times in high school when I was down on myself. But when Clark Gillies had success, I felt it was my success too.

Binary choices

The idea of being president now horrifies me. As for the Frick, I’m happy to visit the museum and remember that Henry Clay Frick only had five short years of residence before his death in 1919. I remain somewhat fused with the ups and downs of the New York Islanders

I prefer to keep the status quo vs. grand ambitions. That preference has been formed by experience, knowledge of my limitations, and my age. I prefer contentment to pushing myself too hard. For example, I may never write a book. When I’ve tried, it’s consumed too much of my attention.

But I’m happy to benefit from the single-minded ambitions of others, whether they’re entrepreneurs or artists. Politics, we’ll leave to the side for now.

Below is a clip of one of my favorite writers, Aaron Sorkin, recreating a brutal argument between Apple co-founders Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs. Jobs was a single-minded genius whose products I use and love. He was, however, like Jason-2 in Dark Matter, a world-class dick.

At the end of the clip, Wozniak calls Jobs “an asshole,” and then says, “Your products are better than you.”

Jobs says, “That’s the idea.”

Wozniak says, “It’s not a binary choice. You can be decent and gifted at the same time.”

Question for the comments: Is it a binary choice between being gifted in the Steve Jobs sense and being decent?

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

Following are the three topics that have survived a few rounds of my mental Squid Games. 1

The beauty wars come for men

A year ago, I published Beauty, Class, Wealth, one of my most popular posts thanks to the insights of on how beauty is an ever changing status game where at the top of the hierarchy the bar is always rising.

For example, when visually obvious cosmetic surgeries like lip fillers and Brazilian Butt Lifts became mainstream, they were rejected by the elite in favor of “traceless transformations.” As Laura put it:

“There’s been a bunch of famous female faces of late that have turned up to events suddenly looking the way they looked 20 years ago, but better. And it’s not clear what’s been done here, but it’s so clear that many things have been done here.

This is the new level of aesthetic aspiration, which is traceless transformation and change. That is something you only have access to through exorbitant sums of money – in the hundreds of thousands of dollars – and social access, because you need to know who can do this for you.”

At the end of that post, I wondered to what extent men would be increasingly engaged in the male version of the “beauty wars.” I caught up with Laura first on Zoom and then this week over dinner in NYC and asked her what she was observing.

Both men and women vying for beauty status, Laura said, have always been able to be thin by simply not eating. And now GLPs have aided that effort. But acquiring muscle is an expensive pursuit in terms of time. So the toned look is not as readily accessible as the thin look.

Specifically, in terms of the male beauty wars, Laura thinks that the stigma of men having “work done” has declined a great deal. And that perhaps the popularity of Clavicular, the original “looksmaxxer,” caring only about his looks, is a sign that young men will increasingly pay more attention to their appearance.

That makes sense to me given the increase in high status women who have good life alternatives to marriage. Accordingly, young men need to increase their attractiveness as mates and while a lot of that can come from behavior, men would be foolish not to focus as well on their grooming and attractiveness.

Dr. Imber

I also spoke to leading Manhattan plastic surgeon Dr. Jerry Imber. He’s been doing procedures for more than four decades. He gave further perspectives on the current state of men and plastic surgery.

Dr. Imber’s clientele is now 35% men. A few decades ago, his male patients were people whose appearance directly affected their income. Actors, salesmen, and even airline pilots!

Now, his male clients are “the same type of guy you’d go to a Knicks game with.” Cosmetic procedures for men have become more mainstream and more socially accepted.

Most of Dr. Imber’s male clients are there to remove bags under their eyes, eliminate double chins, or for liposuction to remove fat around the middle. And yes, I inspected myself in the mirror immediately after speaking with him. 2

Dr. Imber said many of his male patients work out seriously at the gym, treat their bodies as “temples,” and get liposuction because they find no amount of workouts will get rid of their middle fat to their satisfaction.

In terms of the few plastic surgeons who have achieved public notoriety for their work on celebrities and their $250,000 plus prices, Dr. Imber said there are just a few of these “bold-faced” names, and they are the exception rather than the rule. He said he would be “embarrassed” to quote those prices.

He said the idea that you need some sort of special status to get access to a good plastic surgeon was simply not true. He gets his patients through word of mouth.

Last year’s post and discussion with below.

Is AI a bubble

This week I read an essay by (pay-walled) on recent developments on AI. Previously, Derek had believed that the AI buildout mapped closely to the 19th century railroad boom in which an excess of rail capacity ahead of demand caused financial panics, crashes, etc.

Derek’s latest essay describes how he’s now changed his mind.

“In the last few months, three big things have pushed me toward thinking that AI might be the opposite of a bubble.”

Derek points to Anthropic (Claude) growing its annual recurring revenues from $10 billion a few months ago to $30 billion today, “older” chips increasing rather than declining in value, and a scarcity rather than an excess of computing supply.

Derek now thinks the better analogy to the business of AI is electricity, not railroads.

Derek’s an extremely thoughtful writer and I always learn something from reading his work. And I give him great credit for shifting his views as the facts change.

But he’s not a finance guy.

I’m afraid I was snarky in my comment when I wrote:

What is most remarkable about this article is the absence of two words: Valuation and Profit.

This is akin to Sherlock Holmes’ the dog that didn’t bark in the night or, in this case, the writer writing about the possibility of a bubble who didn’t mention the defining characteristics of a bubble, which, after all, is a financial concept.

To Derek’s further credit he responded by saying that he ought to have focused more on the financial aspects of a bubble in his essay.

I think the analogy to electricity is interesting. However, the companies that generated and distributed electricity soon became geographical monopolies and then utilities. AI has no natural geographical boundaries, and it’s hard to see government allowing a monopoly to emerge.

That still leaves the question of how the aspirational trillion dollar valuations of the independent AI companies, OpenAI and Anthropic, can be justified by net cash flow in such a capital intensive business.

Or, looking at McKinsey’s estimate of $3.7 to $7.9 trillion required by 2030 to build data centers to meet demand, what sort of cash flow would justify that investment? Note that the wide range is based in different demand scenarios.

I wonder for the companies that already have great cash flowing businesses and huge market valuations ––Google, Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, and Apple––whether their investments in AI are a necessary evil. They have to protect their franchises and cannot be left behind.

Does that mean that the independents are doomed to lose because they don’t have the same access to cashflow and financing?

It will be fascinating to find out.

Michigan Democrats and Israel

Last week I wrote about how Israel hatred seems to lead inevitably to antisemitism. I used James Baldwin as an example of a brilliant man who “crossed over.” This week my wife Debbie saw the play Giant about Roald Dahl’s similar journey from Israel foe to antisemite.

In Michigan there’s a three-way race for the Democratic nomination for an open U.S. Senate seat. Israel has become a flashpoint in the race. That’s unfortunate because there are far more pressing issues for Michigan and America than Israel.

I am supporting Michigan State Senator Mallory McMorrow who has impressed me from when I first met her early last year as a smart, grounded, tough politician with good values.

However, the nomination race illustrates what last week I called a wicked problem for American Jews. 3

Stevens

On the “right” is Representative Haley Stevens who is backed by AIPAC, the well-funded pro-Israel lobby that imposes unconditional support for Israel as a purist test. Stevens has fallen to a distant third place in recent polling.

AIPAC recently campaigned against a moderate Democratic New Jersey candidate who was not pro-Israel enough. The effect was to elect the anti-Israel candidate who just won her special election. Great job, AIPAC! 4

El-Sayed

On the left is Abdul-El-Sayed who has recently campaigned with antisemite provocateur Hasan Piker. Piker recently doubled down on his preference for Hamas over Israel “a thousand times over.” If you want to know who Hasan Piker really is, see the clip in this footnote. 5

There is context to El-Sayed’s disastrous decision to invite Hasan Piker to campaign with him. Piker appeared on stage with El-Sayed just a few weeks after a heavily armed Hezbollah-inspired terrorist attacked a Michigan synagogue with 140 children inside the synagogue’s early childhood center. Luckily, the terrorist was stopped by security and ended up killing himself before he could murder any children or staff.

El-Sayed is hoping to follow Zohran Mamdani’s successful strategy in getting elected as Mayor of NYC. Mamdani was elected for many reasons but foremost among them was the appeal of his anti-Israel stance among young progressives, including many young Jews.

A key difference, however, is Mamdani ran against a very weak candidate, Andrew Cuomo. The winner of the Michigan Democratic primary will face a tough Republican opponent in Mike Rogers.

Mallory McMorrow

I support the “centrist” candidate Mallory McMorrow. She has been critical of the Netanyahu government, which I think is appropriate, but has never questioned the right of Israel to exist as a Jewish state.

McMorrow has refused to take any money from AIPAC. And she has justifiably criticized her opponent El-Sayed for campaigning with the hate-filled Hasan Piker.

McMorrow and El-Sayed are effectively tied in the polls. The primary election is not until August so there is still m much time remaining.

I believe that if nominated, McMorrow would defeat the likely Republican candidate Mike Rogers in the November general election. I don’t think El-Sayed would stand a chance.

I caught up with the always energetic Mallory via phone yesterday. She was recently endorsed by Senator Elizabeth Warren, and her enthusiasm for all the people of Michigan comes through clearly. She told me a story about a volunteer stuck in a snowstorm at the northern top of the state who was a happy warrior collecting signatures for Mallory’s campaign.

Plus, she has a Substack I didn’t know about!

On the question of the divisiveness over Israel, Mallory pointed me to a quote she recently gave to The Jewish Insider.

“[Piker] is not somebody that you should be campaigning with at a moment when there is clearly a lot of pain and trauma across our state,” said McMorrow. “How do you bring everybody together, especially when there are difficult conversations, where there aren’t easy answers? You don’t fan the flames and stoke division just to get attention.”

McMorrow first came to national attention in 2022 with the fiery and inspiring speech below on the floor of the Michigan State Senate. It’s well worth watching!

Question for the comments: Three topics to choose from. Comment on any or all, especially if you have a different take than those I have.

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

Since then, Americans have become far less friendly to Israel. This is demonstrated by polls 1 and the election of fierce Israel hater Zohran Mamdani as mayor of NYC. 2

And now the New York Times has reported that Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu bamboozled Trump into the war against Iran.3 That dismayed me.

People will argue that their hatred of Netanyahu or of Israel will not spill over into antisemitism. I don’t buy it.

As I wrote back then:

James Baldwin, possessed of a magnificent intellect marked by great subtlety and nuance, struggled and ultimately failed to keep his hatred of Israel separate from his resentment of Jews. In the end he became antisemitic.

So if Baldwin failed, I will not credit the current crop of Israel haters with avoiding antisemitism. I’m convinced that one hate follows the other as day follows night.

This is a wicked problem for American Jews. On the one hand, abandoning Israel is absolute anathema to most Jews, including me. On the other hand, criticism of the Netanyahu government is not only fair game but I believe well deserved.

Yet the loudest voices are on the extremes. They either want America to abandon Israel or will defend the actions of Israel no matter what Israel does.

Here is the original essay:

In 1971, sometime near my ninth birthday, I was approached on Madison Avenue between 74^th and 75^th street by a white man raising money for the defense of Angela Davis. The man explained to me that Angela, a black revolutionary, had been arrested solely because she was black, and that if enough money was not raised, she would surely be executed in the California gas chamber.

About such matters my mind was a blank slate and so what the man told me etched a deep impression. It became the Truth.

I gave him what coins I had from my allowance, sacrificing a purchase of comics and candy at the stationery store, the only place I could walk to on my own. I returned home, proud of my unexpected connection with the adult world. Proud that I’d done something meaningful and kind.

But instead of praising me, my parents said I had been fooled into wasting my money. Worse, I had aided a dangerous and unworthy person.

I fled to my room upset. I can’t recall exactly what went through my mind. Probably a child’s furious disappointment in my parents’ reaction. They’d been cruel to Angela, cruel to the passionate man who was working so hard to free her, and, above all, cruel to me.

Eventually I started to cry. I think they were tears of frustration and self-pity at my parents’ unjust refusal to understand the goodness of what I’d done. And mixed in somewhere inside of me, I imagine there was mournful sadness that Angela Davis was doomed to die. And the helpless frustration that there was nothing my nine year old self could do to change that. 4

Fifty years later in 2020, I started reading James Baldwin, driven like many others by the murder of George Floyd and the protests that followed to try to understand something useful about the history of American race relations.

Intellectually, I was smitten by Baldwin. Entering his mind through his writing, I gained a greater degree of understanding, or at least, a diminishment to aspects of my ignorance.

As a Jew reading Baldwin, I was always intrigued whenever he wrote about Jews. The general theme I came away with, repeated often in his work, was that if Blacks hated Jews, it was not because we were Jews, but because we were white. I could live with that generalization.

I also formed an impression that Baldwin was decidedly not antisemitic. He had attended a predominantly Jewish high school where his friends were mostly Jewish. When Baldwin told his father that his best friend from school was a Jew,

“[my father] slammed me across the face with his great palm… I told my father, “He’s a better Christian than you are, and walked out of the house.” 5

I remember cheering inside when I read this. I wanted to be liked and respected by Baldwin despite being a Jew. Perhaps that’s an odd thought since Baldwin had been dead since 1987.

But I had developed a close relationship with Baldwin by spending hours alone with his words. I “talked” to him as I read, complimenting him on a particularly beautiful sentence or a compelling passage. And as I grew to admire James Baldwin for his beautiful mind, his passion, his ability to enlighten me, I wanted to feel that, in turn, he would appreciate me as a reader. Or that at least he would not despise me.

I returned to Baldwin this past week to see if there was some history and context he could offer to help me understand better the furious reaction of so many American progressives to Israel’s response in Gaza to the Hamas attack on October 7^th.

And indeed I discovered that Baldwin’s political development through the Black politics of the sixties and seventies had a malign effect on his view of Israel and of Jews.

I discovered as well that my desire to be respected by this writer I so admired had led me astray as a reader. I had focused on certain passages and essays and ignored others in pursuit of that relationship of mutual respect. I didn’t want Baldwin to be antisemitic.

I’d been a victim of my own confirmation bias, in some ways indistinguishable from the blank slate ignorance I had about Angela Davis at the age of nine.

1948 to the early 1960s: Enthusiasm for Israel With a Caveat

The creation and survival of Israel in 1948 was celebrated by Baldwin and other black intellectuals. The Jews were an aspirational model, an historically persecuted people who had overcome their oppression to claim a homeland of their own, after two millennia of displacement. Baldwin wrote:

“The more devout Negro identifies himself almost wholly with the Jew.”  6

In 1961, Baldwin traveled to Israel and noted the situation of the Arabs who were “controlled and “dispossessed” by Israel. But back then, he didn’t blame the Jews of Israel for their security measures against the Arabs. He recognized Israel’s perilous position surrounded by hostile countries with overwhelming numbers.

At the same time, Baldwin didn’t blame the Arabs under Israeli control for their resentment and saw a parallel with his own situation and resentment as a Black American.

“it has cost me… a great and continuing effort not to hate the people who are responsible for the societal effort to limit and diminish me.“7

It was around this time that Baldwin wrote Letters From A Region of My Mind in the New Yorker, the long essay that was to form the bulk of The Fire Next Time. My favorite scene in “Letters” is Baldwin’s dinner in Chicago with Elijah Muhammed, leader of the Nation of Islam.

In his retelling of that dinner, you can see the development of Baldwin’s intellectual struggles with black politics­–––his discomfort with the Nation’s unrealistic dream of a separate Black nation in America, but his admiration for the purity of the Nation’s discipline of abstinence and strict codes of dress and behavior that had lifted up and empowered many Black Americans, most notably Malcolm X, the Nation’s heir apparent.

Baldwin wrote approvingly of Malcolm X’s claim of hypocrisy that when Jews acted with violence to claim their homeland, they were praised, but when Blacks acted with violence they were condemned.

As Baldwin put it:

“In the United States, violence and heroism have been made synonymous except when it comes to blacks.” 8

Baldwin’s 1967 essay in the New York Times: All Subtlety Gone

A few years later in 1967, Baldwin wrote one of his most famous essays “Negroes Are Anti-Semitic Because They're Anti-White” for the New York Times. 9

In his essay, Baldwin contrasts the world’s admiration for the Warsaw Ghetto uprising with the world’s denunciation of the 1964 and 1965 riots in Watts and Harlem.  He anticipates that readers will find his comparison “outrageous,” but he does not retreat. He insists that

 “when white men rise up against oppression, they are heroes: when black men rise, they have reverted to their native savagery.” (the quote I wanted to use is beyond the pale in 2023) 10

As for American Jews, Baldwin accuses them of using the Holocaust as a moral shield to protect them from their bigotry. And he dismisses Jewish financial support of the Civil Rights movement as mere “conscience money.” Finally, Baldwin sees Jewish pride about the “tremendous heroism” of the “Jewish battle for Israel” as a rebuke by the

“Jew [who is] really saying that the Negro deserves his situation because he has not been heroic enough.”

Here, Baldwin is imagining a truly outrageous slander by Jews against Blacks––– that Jews believe Blacks are responsible for their own oppression in America because Blacks lacked bravery. It’s an echo of a similar outrageous slander against Jews, not imagined but spoken and written, that the Jews were slaughtered in the Holocaust because they lacked the bravery to resist the Nazis. 11

That Baldwin could imagine this unspoken slander by Jews against Blacks meant he was well on his way to resentment, envy, and hatred of Jews.12

The 1970s: The Gloves Come Off

“Envy” of Jews is a word Baldwin uses at the end of his 1967 essay and four years later in 1971 we can see his envy bear bitter fruit. In a dialogue with Margaret Mead, Baldwin said,

“No matter how bitter I may sound…I have been, in America, the Arab at the hands of the Jews.” 13

That’s a concise two for one shot: condemning Israel for oppressing Arabs and condemning American Jews for oppressing Blacks.

In his 1979 Open Letter To The Born Again, Baldwin reacted with fury when Jimmy Carter fired his UN Ambassador Andrew Young for meeting with the representative of the Palestinian Liberation Organization.

By that time, Baldwin had decided that

“the state of Israel was not created for the salvation of the Jews; it was created for the salvation of the Western interests.” 14

Baldwin’s main intellectual and literary concern was of course the past, present, and future struggles of Black Americans against oppression. But the more he considered the oppression of Blacks in America, the more he came to identify with the Palestinians as a fellow oppressed race.

And he came to believe that this fellowship of oppression was bound together by a similar oppressor: Jews against Palestinians in Israel and Jews in cooperation with Christians against Blacks in America. From the 1967 article in the Times:

“[the Jew] is playing in Harlem the role assigned him by Christians long ago: he is doing their dirty work.”

The title of that Times article, Negroes Are Anti-Semitic Because They're Anti-White  was disingenuous. Baldwin gave many different reasons for his resentment against Jews other than the color of our skin. And what can one call resentment against Jews for the crime of being Jewish other than antisemitism?

I think of the national outrage when Derek Chauvin oppressed George Floyd to death by pressing down with his foot for nine minutes against Floyd’s neck. And then I think of all the people who marched in the protests that followed, mostly the young, mostly progressives, seeing in that horrible murder a clarion call to oppose oppression.

I see much of that coalition marching again today in hatred of Israel as a wicked oppressor against Gaza. When it comes to protesting oppression, perhaps the muscle memory is to hate first, ask questions later.

And I think about this. James Baldwin, possessed of a magnificent intellect marked by great subtlety and nuance, struggled and ultimately failed to keep his hatred of Israel separate from his resentment of Jews. In the end he became antisemitic.

So if Baldwin failed, I will not credit the current crop of Israel haters with avoiding antisemitism. I’m convinced that one hate follows the other as day follows night.

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

1

Pew Poll

2

Below is Mamdani’s statement the day after the October 7th, 2023 Hamas attack that murdered some 1,200 Jewish settlers and raped and kidnapped many others . In Mamdani’s mind the fault for the violence was Israel’s declaration of war after the attack.

The message seems to be that if you value your sexual satisfaction don’t get married. And if you are married and are sexually dissatisfied, you will be tempted into an affair that will ruin the rest of your life.

recently wrote a post disputing this message. She cites a survey of 4,000 of her readers demonstrating that married moms over 40 years of age are having the best sex of all demographics. 1

She defines “best sex” as orgasm, yes or no, a simple yet dispositive and rigorous measure. Here is her orgasm frequency chart for women in different heterosexual relationships.

Notwithstanding this evidence, there are a number of reasons we are intrigued by marital sexual dysfunction leading to sexual transgression.

Forbidden fruit is dangerous so therefore more alluring., It creates suspense. Who will find out about the affair? Will he/she leave their spouse?

As well, the problems of other couples in the bedroom feeds into our schadenfreude, our competitive sense that our relationships are relatively better off.

Although while we’re watching a show, my wife Debbie still yells at me for the wandering ways of fictional men. 2

Then there’s Tolstoy’s famous line about all happy families being alike and unhappy families being unhappy in their own way. I suspect Tolstoy was thinking at least in part about sex, since after that opening line in Anna Karenina, we immediately learn that a husband has been kicked out of the house for having an affair with the governess. And, of course, the centerpiece of the novel is Anna’s loveless, presumably sexless marriage that leads to her doomed affair.

The point is that happily married couples who remain happy and married throughout a book or show are just not that interesting. Married couples having satisfied sex at regular intervals is boring dramatic material to everyone but the couple themselves. It’s useless for gossip and it’s highly awkward, if not antagonistic and rude, to share with others. 3

For all the reasons above, I’m drawn to the dead bedroom/transgressive affair theme. But I wonder how many readers and watchers understand that it tends to be the exception not the rule.

Below are a few recent examples of the theme that I’ve enjoyed.

Lake Effect

This week, I did a rapid read of the new novel Lake Effect by Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney. Two suburban couples, best friends and neighbors, each have sexless marriages. An affair between the sex-deprived husband and the sex-deprived wife is revealed in the first few pages. Their spouses have histories that make them sexually unenthusiastic.

It’s 1977 in a Catholic neighborhood in Rochester, NY, a highly repressed community. A minor character represents scandal because she’s divorced. She decides to buy copies of The Joy of Sex for her women’s group, a purchase that first scandalizes and then sparks curiosity in the young checkout lady who rings up the sale. 4

Within the first few pages, Sweeney made me care about the four adults and their combined four teenage children. She does a great job of characterization. I also liked the swift pace of the chapters and the shifts in points of view.

The book is at its steamiest and best when Sweeney writes from the adulterous wife’s and adulterous husband’s points of view. I was riveted by how their mutual attraction grows until, despite the extraordinary disruptions and difficulties that obviously lie ahead, they have no choice but to come together. It’s a great example of how effective it can be to put just enough sex on the page to allow the reader’s imagination to fill in the rest.

DTF St. Louis

The HBO series DTF St. Louis also features two dead bedroom suburban marriages, this time in current era St. Louis. The letters DTF stand for “down to fuck,” and DTF St. Louis is a hookup website that acts as a plot device.

At its heart the series is a buddy movie between the two male leads who develop an intense and intimate friendship. The Jason Bateman character starts an affair with his best friend’s wife, Linda Cardellini of Freaks and Geeks fame. And then Jason’s best friend, played by David Hopper from Stranger Things, ends up dead. All in the first episode.

This being HBO, the sex is explicit. But like the rest of the show, the sex is played with a lowkey, goofy sense of good cheer. The characters of both Jason Bateman and David Hopper are immensely likable. The Linda Cardellini character not so much.

Bateman does a great job playing a regular guy being haplessly bad at acting out kinks with his affair partner Linda, including impersonating a sex robot (picture below) or a (middle-aged) pool boy. Or asking in a halting, embarrassed manner for more anatomically explicit kinks.

The show’s message, however remains stark. Behind those suburban lawns, married couples are NOT having sex. And if you compensate by starting an affair, bad things will happen. Perhaps even murder.

In the novel Lake Effect, the reasons for the two dead bedrooms are tragic. In DTF St. Louis, the David Hopper character is dealing with multiple erectile dysfunction issues. As well, he’s stymied by a persistent image of his otherwise sexy wife Linda Cardellini in her enormously bulky baseball umpire gear. She “umps” as a side-gig.

The Dead

Perhaps the most famous dead bedroom in literature is the hotel room at the end of James Joyce’s great story The Dead.

Gabriel Conroy, the middle-aged main character is in the midst of a quiet crisis of self-esteem. He has presided over an annual Epiphany dinner party (January 6^th). He’s dispirited by his performance and generally by the mediocrity of his life passing soon from middle to old age and then to death.

The one thing he’s looking forward to is hotel sex at the end of the evening with his pretty wife Gretta. In the warm hotel room with a fire as the snow falls outside.

But Gretta has heard a song performed at the dinner party that brings back memories of a boy Michael who loved her many years ago. A boy who was so desperate to see her after he heard that Gretta was going away that he went out in a snowy, freezing night. Gretta tells Michael to leave before he catches a death of a cold.

But Michael tells Gretta he doesn’t want to live without her and gives her a look from his eyes that Gretta will always remember. Michael dies from pneumonia a week later.

Remembering all this, Gretta sobs herself to sleep. No sex for Gabriel. Worse, he realizes that he can never compete with that adolescent passion between Gretta and her great love.

The last paragraph of The Dead is justly quoted often, with its killer last sentence:

“His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.”

But the third to last paragraph below is also achingly haunting.

“The air of the room chilled [Gabriel’s] shoulders. He stretched himself cautiously along under the sheets and lay down beside his wife. One by one they were all becoming shades. Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age. He thought of how she who lay beside him had locked in her heart for so many years that image of her lover’s eyes when he had told her that he did not wish to live.”

Finally, for the benefit of my children, here is the last sentence in the post about women over 40 having the best sex:

“Of course, I am obligated to remind you all that there is no way that any of this was true of your mother over 40. This applies to everyone except her.”

Question for the comments: Has modern popular culture become more fixated on dead bedrooms or has it always been that way, just less explicit?

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

For every fraud and every lie, there must be two parties, that of the scoundrel and that of the victim. Once the victim believes the scoundrel’s initial lies, the victim is often complicit in perpetuating the fraud because it becomes too painful to accept the truth.

I know.

Johnnie Walker hope

It’s 1999, I’m 37, and I can see myself late at night. My wife and kids are asleep and I’m pacing around the kitchen with a glass––a big glass––of Johnnie Walker in my hand, trying to convince myself I haven’t been defrauded. I shake the glass, but there’s no clatter; the ice has long since melted. ­­­

Anne is supposed to call me tonight. I haven’t heard from her for days. Even if it’s another improbable excuse–––bank wire numbers transposed or yet one more layer of approval needed from Exxon –––I need to hear her voice, need to hear her say something, anything about the deal. Any slender thread will do. I need to hang on to the hope that the money will come.

Exxon was supposed to send money to our firm a year ago to buy the pollution credits we own. It’s the largest deal Anne’s arranged for us.

Anne is my age, a cheerful, ruddy faced blonde, a rocket scientist from Cal-Tech who invented the South Coast Air Quality pollution credit market. She has the can-do vibe of an Elizabeth Holmes. Anne and I have done a handful of pollution credit transactions together, all profitable. I’ve been to her offices in Pasadena many times. I consider her a friend.

Despite the long delay and all the improbable excuses, I have not done what would be typical–––yell, threaten, bring in lawyers. Because all along, I’ve believed Anne wanted to pay us. That whatever was going on behind the scenes she was working on our behalf.

Months ago, Anne had faxed the signed Exxon contract to me. It’s on Exxon letterhead and signed by a real, google-searchable executive at Exxon. The contract states unequivocally that Exxon will buy the pollution credits from our firm. I’m bound by confidentiality not to contact Exxon directly. Only Anne can deal with them.

These faxed pages have become my bible, the sacrament of my faith.

The final blow comes in Rome on a family vacation. My daily search on Google yields devastating news. Anne has been sued by another investor. The complaint describes a fact pattern all too familiar to me.

I shouldn’t be shocked, but I am. I can no longer deny that I’ve been defrauded, that the Exxon contract is a forgery. Actually a crude forgery, once I look for the telltale signs.

A week later, while I’m at my ten-year-old son’s baseball game, I finally get Anne on the phone. She confesses to her lies, to her forgery of the Exxon contract. She apologizes with words and tears, and part of me feels sorry for her.

When I tell the firm’s founding partner, he smiles a bit and shakes his head at Anne’s audacity. It helps­­––a lot–– that the investment is relatively small.

I bring in our firm’s lawyers, and we report Anne to the authorities for wire fraud.

A few months later, I testify to a Los Angeles grand jury. One juror asks how I could have been fooled for so long. He questions why I didn’t just pick up the phone and ask Exxon if the transaction was real.

I cloak my answer beneath the excuse of ethical behavior. I tell him, “I signed a confidentiality agreement. I take any contract I sign seriously.”

The real answer was that I’d been scared to call Exxon, scared to find out for certain that I’d been defrauded. I didn’t want to lose the hope that all could still be well. Against all evidence to the contrary. 1

The expert fraudster’s toolkit

Imagination

Many years later, a friend of mine, an Assistant District Attorney who specializes in prosecuting White Collar Crimes, explains why white-collar criminals can go on thinking that they won’t be caught.

She tells me they have powerful imaginations that enable them to spin up a fantasy world consisting of increasingly improbable contingencies. They convince themselves that this fictional world they’ve created is the reality.

Victims like me not only accept the fraudster’s fantasy world, but we often help build it, because we don’t want to know the truth. We become co-conspirators in defrauding ourselves.

Self-deception

The best deceivers, the masters of it, develop a conviction that their lies are the truth. A liar becomes far more effective when he can self-deceive. He believes whatever he’s saying is the truth. Even if in the course of the same day, he makes diametrically opposed statements.

And the confirmation bias of the people lied to is also a form of self-deception. If it’s willful ignorance of a financial fraud, it has real resource costs. If it’s willful ignorance of a family member’s harmful behavior, it can destroy lives.

But if it’s believing in a fraudulent political leader, it may have no individual resource cost at all and it may in fact be protective of self-esteem.

At least in the short term.

Because the more that the self-deceived victim invests their self-esteem in a false hero, the more crushing the blow when they can no longer sustain the illusion.

Evolution is to blame

It is a truth seldom acknowledged that the ability to deceive is an evolutionary survival skill. 2

If you can cheat and get away with it, then there’s more resources for you and less for your rival. The more subtle the deceiver, the greater the survival flex.

Consider the animal kingdom where the survival of the prey and the sustenance of the predator depends on which is a better deceiver.

The ability to detect a cheater at the outset is also a survival skill. There’s an entire industry devoted to teaching people how to know if someone’s lying.

There was an underrated TV show in this vein starring Tim Roth as an expert who can detect lying. 3

You can think of it as psychological warfare. The first few lies by the cheater are the most important, like a pre-emptive strike. Because once the victim falls for the initial lies, they will look for ways to avoid admitting that they’ve been cheated.

That’s what happened to me with Anne and the Exxon deal. It quickly became too painful to my pride––how could I have been so stupid––and too adverse to what I wanted––the successful completion of the transaction––for me to admit I’d been duped.

Fraudster hall of fame

One of the greatest literary fraudsters of all time is Augustus Melmotte, the creation of Anthony Trollope in his great 19^th century novel The Way We Live Now.

Trollope’s novel and the character of Melmotte were inspired by Trollope’s dismay at how London society had come to venerate wealth without regard to honesty and his further dismay at society’s embrace of rampant gambling on the shares of dubious railway ventures.

When we meet him, Melmotte has swindled investors on the Continent out of a great deal of money. He flees to London where he hopes to bury his past beneath a veil of mystery and use the swindled money to establish his reputation as a great man of finance.

He lives lavishly and garishly, throwing extravagant parties that Dukes and Duchesses attend, giving him the imprimatur of respectability. His spending convinces the London world that he is wealthy and a master investor. Because how else could he afford to live the way he lives.

Melmotte soon takes control of a scheme to build a railway connecting Salt Lake City to Vera Cruz, Mexico. The railway is a fiction. It does not own a single acre of land. It has not laid a single track.

The only reality behind the scheme are colorful brochures and the shares of stock Melmotte sells to investors. Everything else is based on perceptions created by Melmotte’s false confidence, his lies, and his spending.

All the shares are in “Melmotte’s pocket” and every purchase and sale results in cash going to Melmotte. Which he then uses for further personal extravagance, embellishing his reputation as the Great Financier.

He creates a Board for the fictitious railway and seasons it with various members of the minor aristocracy. At one of the perfunctory Board meetings, Melmotte declares:

“I do not know that greater prosperity has ever been achieved in a shorter time by a commercial company.”

As the swindle grows more monstrous so does Melmotte’s arrogance. His “swagger” leads otherwise respectable men to become his toadies, to present their “hinder parts to be kicked merely because [Melmotte] put up his toe.”

Soon rumors catch up with Melmotte. He buys an estate, doesn’t pay for it, and mortgages it to the hilt. He engages in forgery. As lawyers close in, he decides that his only course of action is “brazen-faced audacity.”

He gets himself elected to Parliament and tries to marry his daughter off to the eldest son of a “Marquis.” He convinces himself that these maneuvers will offer protection. 4

Melmotte adopts the mindset that if his “imagination is strong enough,” he can do anything, endure anything. Confidence is everything. The narrative trumps the reality. 5

Eventually, however, reality catches up with Melmotte. It’s a rare 19th century novel that allows the villain to triumph. Financial fraud, after all, is about money and numbers. And like facts, numbers are stubborn things.

The Way We Live Now

Trollope wrote The Way We Live Now in 1875. His London world of rakes and deceivers, of irrational speculation and high hypocrisy, of the murkiness of what is fact and what is fiction, is a familiar one.

Here’s Trollope in his autobiography about what motivated the novel:

“…dishonesty magnificent in its proportions, and climbing into high places, has become at the same time so rampant and so splendid that there seems to be reason for fearing that men and women will be taught to feel that dishonesty, if it can become splendid, will cease to be abominable.”

The words and actions of the swindler and liar Augustus Melmotte echo and rhyme in many of the headlines of our current era.

We could be comforted by the familiarity of Trollope’s world. We could conclude that there is nothing especially rotten in our current state of affairs. That there really is nothing new under the sun.

Or we could be disappointed that 150 years have passed and human morality has made insufficient progress.

Or a third, worse choice. We could be alarmed that humanity is now endowed with unprecedented and awesome tools of mass influence and mass destruction; and yet we remain just as much controlled by our base impulses of deception and aggression.

Question for the comments: What would you say about these three choices?

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

The Madison is a dreck of a television show created by manosphere adherent Taylor Sheridan of Yellowstone fame. I made the mistake of watching the first episode. The plot was clumsy and the writing was awful–––don’t ever waste Michelle Pfeiffer like that!

But more importantly, the show feeds into the myths that the Manhattan rich are miserable pricks, that New Yorkers live in a hellhole with no sense of community, and that poor New Yorkers are stupid.

Also, if you want a chance at a virtuous life, be a cowboy or a cowboy’s wife. Real men don’t work in offices.1 Real women cook meals and eat elk.

In considering the scheme of the world’s problems, it’s easy to dismiss The Madison as unimportant fluff. Yet millions of people will watch the show and be sold contempt as a way of feeling better about their own status.

Hate the rich because they hoard wealth but still don’t know how to be happy. Hate the poor because they create their own problems and then expect us to feel sorry for them. Hate New York City because it’s not where “real Americans” live.

Contempt is a corrosive form of hate, dividing between a better “us” and a lesser “them.”

The kindness of strangers

A few weeks ago, I fell in a fresh snow bank outside the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I was carrying Sophie, my beloved Shih Tzu. I was seeking dry sidewalk because Sophie hates the snow.

It was a soft, slow fall and I was unhurt. I managed to keep my grip on Sophie and hold her aloft.

Immediately, two strangers rushed over to see if I was okay and to offer their help.

I’m clumsy. In my 64 years, I’ve probably fallen down on the streets of Manhattan at least a half-dozen times. And I’ve seen at least fifty other people fall. In every instance, people came over to offer aid to the fallen person. It’s what you do in a crowded city.

In ridiculous contrast, The Madison opens with an attractive, young, leggy blonde walking on a crowded downtown Manhattan street sporting shopping bags. She name checks Hermes and Brunello as her purchased items. Then she’s punched in the face by a mugger who steals her bags and flees.

It’s a sucker punch. The blonde collapses to the sidewalk. No one stops to help. The crowds stream around and past her as if she were a rock in a river.

When her father (played by Kurt Russell) hears about the assault on his daughter, he complains to his wife (Michelle Pfieffer) that their daughter should not have been walking but should have “taken the car,” meaning their car and driver.

Kurt is speaking to Michelle from Montana where he’s on his annual trip with his brother to go fly-fishing. Michelle’s back in New York City. She’s not a fan of fly fishing or a lack of indoor plumbing.

(Spoiler ahead but only for the first 25 minutes of the first episode.)

Kurt Russell wonders why their family lives in such a dangerous city when they could be enjoying the beautiful wilds of Montana. So much safer than New York City except for the bears, the hornets, the actual crime statistics,2 and the sudden storm that causes Kurt and his brother to crash their plane into a mountainside and die.

The show’s false myth is that New York is unsafe and New Yorkers are unfriendly.

The Myth of Miserable Manhattanites

Still staying within the first episode of The Madison, Michelle Pfeiffer is dishing over lunch with her best friend who says that if they ever left New York, they would have nothing to talk about because leaving New York is the main topic of conversation among their wealthy set.

It’s true that many wealthy New Yorkers consider leaving because a certain amount of wealth entitles you to live anywhere. That’s a benefit not a hinderance of wealth.

It’s also true that a fair number of wealthy New Yorkers age out and leave for Florida for the weather, the lower taxes, and the golf. But the majority stay because most of us love this city, which, admittedly, is a lot easier to love if you’re either wealthy or young.

Before Kurt Russell dies his fiery death, he bemoans that he’s 64 (my age), and having lived in the city, he’s running out of time to “make memories.” 3

And, damn it, Michelle tells him he has to go back to the city to attend the Met Gala, which an ordinary rich guy would never be invited to,4 and, if he was, the Gala would be far more memorable than anything Kurt could possibly do in Montana. Except die in a plane crash.

Kurt’s problem is that he works all the time so he can support his two ungrateful and spoiled adult daughters who see him as only the “bank of dad.” The show implies it’s the Manhattan lifestyle that has led to Kurt and Michelle’s poor relationships with their children.

But if you’re a careless parent, you’ll be a careless parent no matter where you live. Or what your economic status is.

In Montana, Kurt tells his brother about his recent family vacation to an unnamed Caribbean island where the hotel rooms cost $10,000 a night and all the fellow guests on the beach are in their 70s and 80s. The aged beach people have “made it” but it’s too late for them to enjoy the fruits of their demonic workaholism because their bodies have given out.

The island is unnamed because no such geriatric paradise exists. But it’s a convenient addition to the myth. Some people will want to believe that the rich, especially the New York rich, live lives of striving desperation until they grow old and decrepit.

The stupid poor

We’re still at the start of the first episode when Michelle is at a charity lunch about giving assistance to the poor. A cartoonishly obnoxious wealthy woman leans over to tell Michelle that the poor eat junk food because they “don’t know any better.”

The wealthy woman goes on to say that the poor refuse to help themselves from the food bank’s abundant selection of fresh produce, a selection she claims is better than the wealthy woman’s Whole Foods.

Nonsense.

I know a fair amount about food insecurity among the impoverished. My family’s biggest charitable project is supporting a local food pantry to deliver robust bags of food to 250 school families at their school door in Washington Heights 40 weeks a year.

I visit the school and talk to the parents and the principal and the people who run the food pantry. I know that the parents want nutritious food and they want as much fresh produce as possible.

So, the claim that the poor would not snap up fresh and nutritious food is pure nonsense.

I’m also a faithful reader of , a Substack newsletter in which Michelle writes passionately and knowledgeably about our current exacerbated economic inequality and what it’s like to be on the impoverished side of that equation.

I learn a lot from reading that newsletter.

Michelle recently wrote a particularly illuminating article called Let Them Eat Fast Food about food insecurity and the misguided notions of many people about eating while impoverished. I strongly recommend the article and her Substack.

In her article, she details what it’s like to feed a family when you’re short on time or short on money or short on both. She’s lived it.

Fast food is expensive compared to cooking at home and far less nutritious. For the poor, fast food is an extravagant last resort when time runs out and you need to feed your kids and yourself in a hurry.

As for the “ignorant purchase of junk food” at the grocery store, Michelle (of Untrickled) describes how it’s often the least worst of options.

“A frozen pizza means dinner gets made. Hot dogs mean a kid can feed themselves if a parent is working late. Those choices aren’t about nutrition. They’re about logistics.”

That stray comment on the show about the poor and how they “choose” to eat has a special kind of malice. It was largely left unchallenged so that it might enter with insidious intent into the minds of viewers. 5

Light a candle and curse the darkness

In last week’s post I highlighted that I was featured in a New York Magazine article called What Does Extreme Wealth Do To The Brain. I’ve looked at the comments on the magazine’s website and Instagram. One has to search hard for any positive or even neutral comments. 6

Of course, it’s not surprising that haters predominate among the commenters. Such is the way of most social media.

Still, it was jarring to me to read such a pure stream of anger and hate. I think that’s one reason I reacted so negatively to The Madison’s unsubtle implications about the extremely wealthy and about New York City.

I shouldn’t take it personally but I do. And I know that the reach of this newsletter, which seeks to present an authentic picture of myself as a wealthy New Yorker, is no match for the reach of a mass market show like The Madison.

But every bit helps.

Question for the comments: Are there shows that tick you off as The Madison did me? Barring that, any good TV show recommendations?

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

1

I “bonded” with Michelle Pfeiffer’s hapless “finance bro” son-in-law who works in an office and thus is not manly.

At dinner (still in the first 25 minutes!), Michelle asks him if anything interesting happened to him that day other than his wife getting punched. He responds by describing a business deal he’s working on that I thought was interesting.

But Michelle interrupts him with undisguised scorn and says, “So, nothing interesting happened to you.”

Also, a bit later in the episode the son-in-law is flummoxed by the barbecue in Montana.

I can relate!

3

My brother-in-law Ken who watched The Madison with Debbie and me (sorry, Ken!), recalled that Kurt Russell starred as Snake Plissken in the 1981 movie Escape From New York. And in that movie, unlike in The Madison, his character survives.

4

Anna Wintour, fashion editor icon, decides who can attend the Met Gala.. It’s an event you cannot buy your way into. At least that’s my understanding. Donald Trump has been banned at least since 2017. Confirmation sought from of

Most of Lane’s interviewees took shelter under the protection of anonymity. Only two people went on record: me and billionaire Mark Cuban, owner of the Dallas Mavericks and Shark Tank judge.

The article and my contributions to it touch on many of the themes I’ve written about. A few excerpts.

Entitlement

[Roberts] thought of Tom and Daisy Buchanan in The Great Gatsby — “careless people who break things and let other people clean up the mess. They’re the literary paradigm of [wealthy people turning into monsters].”

“There’s a lot of infidelity among wealthy people because the men just feel entitled to a newer model of their first wife. And they don’t think about how it might affect their children.”

Powerful men confused about the meaning of legacy

“Why did [Howard Lutnick] visit Epstein’s island? Probably because he thought it would make him look powerful,” Roberts said. “I think it was impulsive. A lot of wealthy people don’t really think about what legacy means. They think it means having a building named after you. They don’t think about the more important part: Are you remembered as a good person?”

The entire article, thoughtful and thorough, is well worth reading.

New York Magazine Article 3/13/26: What Does Extreme Wealth Do to Your Brain

The NYMag article recalled to mind the essay below, originally published in August of 2024, which seems like forever ago.

Shorter than the original because I had more time to edit it. 2

Beautiful Women And The Indecency Of Powerful Men

August 2024

Last Saturday, I was at a cocktail party in the Hamptons, a gathering without the extravagance and Gilded Age showmanship people may associate with the phrase “Hamptons cocktail party.”

Dress was casual. No celebrities in sight. There was, however, a violinist and flautist who at my request played a perfect rendition of the theme from Game of Thrones.

The backyard setting was beautiful in its simplicity of tall green hedges on either side connecting the house’s back porch to a back wall of subtly colorful wildflowers. A human-sized, square-shaped outdoor room. 

When we got home from the party, my wife Debbie told me that a married man of long acquaintance had complimented her a number of times on how “good” she looked. It was flirtation.

My wife was alone when this happened. I doubt the man would have taken those liberties if either I or the man’s wife had been nearby.

At the time of that party I was living in two different worlds

It happens to me with some books, the sense that I’m living inside two worlds at the same time. The world of the book I’m reading affects my mood, my language, my perceptions.

This happened to me with The Custom Of The Country, Edith Wharton’s brilliant creation of a world set in an earlier Gilded Age circa 1910. It’s a world of dwindling old money society superseded and nearly effaced by the triumph of new and gaudy money. 3

I was reading Custom at the time of the party and so I thought about the flirtation of the man with Debbie through that earlier, Gilded Age lens.

If there still exists a world of old money with its exacting standards of behavior and disdain for commerce, I’m either not aware of it or have been excluded from its precincts. Good and bad taste, good and bad manners can be found all over.

In fact, it seems that vast wealth and power are contrary to taste and good behavior. Divorce and affairs among the wealthiest of billionaires seem endemic. Just as they upgrade their gigantic playthings–––yachts with heliports, private islands and vast estates that a James Bond villain would be proud of–––they upgrade their wives for younger, more attractive versions.

The spectacularly beautiful Undine Spragg

Young Undine4 is the heroine of Wharton’s Custom of the Country. She is poor by New York society standards but uses her superior physical beauty to capture men who can deliver what she craves.

She wants to be the center of attention in front of the right people in the right places, wearing the best dresses and the most precious jewels. All of it with the goal of displaying her beauty to painful effect so that men adore, admire, and dream of her and women envy her.

She has no concept of money except as necessary to pay for the travel, accommodations, clothes, and jewelry in service of the display to which she feels entitled.

Men want Undine for her beauty, and the novel is the story of Undine using men and men trying to use her. Sex is implicit (remember, Wharton published Custom in 1913), but Undine is not motivated by sex.

Instead, sex for her is a complement to her beauty, to be used only when she deems it appropriate. No man forces himself on Undine. She remains in control.

I find myself rooting for Undine because she’s consistent and honest about what she wants. Plus she’s tough.

Her experiences with old money New York and aristocratic Paris teach her “shades of conduct, turns of speech, tricks of attitude” about which the new Wall Street money is ignorant.

So as Undine observes the behavior of her current Wall Street man, who can buy her everything she wants, she finds herself “jarred” and “irritated” by:

“…his loudness and redness, his misplaced joviality, his familiarity with the servants, his alternating swagger and ceremony with her friends…”

I have pity for Undine when she learns that her social ambitions can never be fully satisfied.

Imagining Undine In 2024

Where would Undine Spragg be today? Perhaps a model, an influencer, an actress.

Married to a wealthy man? Not necessarily if she earned enough on her own to satisfy her material ambitions. That possibility is progress.

But there’s another scenario that troubles me.

A young teenage beauty such as Undine might fall prey to the worst of the wealthy and powerful, those who lack a code, who lack scruples, and who too often lack consequences for behavior that in Wharton’s (idealized) world would have condemned a man to exile from decent society.

I think of Bill Clinton who as president was a sexual predator, having shtupped5 young intern Monica Lewinsky in the Oval Office and then lied about it both under oath and to the country. Clinton has never apologized. 6

Apparently, if you possess enough political juice and are a charming enough scoundrel, you get a free pass. You’re invited everywhere; you’re lauded everywhere. That’s not right.

Clinton spoke at this week’s Democratic Convention. One of the Convention’s themes was to defend the reproductive rights of women; its main theme was to defeat the outrageous misogynist and abuser of women Donald Trump.

I thought Clinton’s appearance was off-brand and tone deaf. It’s long past time for the Democratic party to cut him loose. 7

What is disgraceful

Maybe I’m living in a dream world. Maybe my indignation is a form of self-righteousness.

But I have a wife, a daughter and daughter-in-law, five nieces, sisters-in-law, many female cousins, and soon I hope, a granddaughter. [Note: now I have two!]

Through them, my protective instinct for all women is always top of mind. So it makes me furious to think that men abuse women and get away with it.

Of course any male abuser is a disgrace. But I’ll go further. Anyone who gives social sanction or pays homage to a known male abuser is complicit in that disgrace.

Finally, I hope it’s clear that whether behavior is or is not legally punished should not be the arbiter of what is disgraceful.

Question for the comments: How have your views on the wealthy changed since August 2024 and why?

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

When you put taxes in your headline, you need to find a way to spice things up.

I happen to agree with the slogan snaking around the back of AOC’s dress. The rich do not pay enough in taxes, especially after the tax cuts of 2017 and 2025.

America is the wealthiest society ever to exist. We should be ashamed that we do not provide the basic needs of food and shelter and safety to the less fortunate among us.

Our tax code is at the root of that moral catastrophe.

Recently I was on a LIVE video talking about taxes with who writes . Allison is a law professor specializing in estate and tax law.

Following are a few takeaways and video snippets (about two-three minutes long) from our conversation. However, you can get the gist of it from the text alone. The full conversation can be accessed via this footnote. 1

Confession of a capitalist

I’m not an exception to the general principle that no one likes to pay taxes. Or certainly not to pay more than legally owed.

And when my tax rates have been cut or when I’ve benefitted from various tax code gifts to the wealthy, I’m not at all unhappy. Even though I know that if I were the dictator of tax policy, I’d create a far different system that cut significantly against my financial self -interest.

As a prime example, current tax law says that if you sell an asset for a gain after you’ve held it for a year and a day, you’re taxed on that gain at a much lower rate than if you had held it for 364 days, the two days in this case being the difference between long term vs. short term. For the wealthy, the Federal tax rates are 23.8% for long term and 40.8% for short term.

My family has been a big beneficiary of this quirk. But it’s a quirk that I cannot justify intellectually. And eliminating that quirk would raise a significant amount of tax revenue.

Below, in a halting, hesitant, and inarticulate manner, I struggle against my self-interest, to say that, yes, capital gains should be taxed no differently than other income.

A Wealth Tax and that AOC dress

I am not a Bernie Sanders fan, except when Larry David plays him on Saturday Night Live. Bernie’s rants about billionaires and his proposals for wealth taxes on billionaires are strictly performative. AOC’s dress is more effective.

Wealth taxes are highly inefficient and do not raise much in revenue. That’s not a guess. Many European countries have tried them and soon repealed them because they were failures at raising enough new revenues to offset the costs in lost revenue and administrative headaches.

Wealth taxes have also been a boon to the accountants and lawyers who help the rich avoid taxes (legal) and evade taxes (illegal). My friend has a great post titled Do Wealth Taxes Turn Honest Taxpayers Into Criminals?

A billionaire wealth tax is a great political soundbite. That’s it.

Below, Allison and I discuss wealth taxes.

Unsexy ways to address inequality

In contrast to wealth taxes that have little chance of raising significant revenue and may not survive legal challenges, raising the minimum wage and making it easier for private industry labor unions to organize would significantly alter the balance of power between capital and labor.

Compensation as a percentage of gross domestic income is down and while there are many reasons, those reasons include the fact that the federal minimum wage is $7.25 an hour and the private labor union participation rate has been cut in half from 1983 to today. 2

The fifty states compete for wealthy residents and businesses. Among the ways they compete are to have a low minimum wage, be unfriendly to labor unions, and of course have lower taxes. In the forefront are states like Texas and Florida and, typically, other Republican voting states who have weak state-level safety nets. 3

Here’s a chart from the Federal Reserve showing the decline in compensation as a % of gross Domestic Income.

Here’s a clip of Allison and me discussing some of the unsexy policy fixes that would not fit on AOC’s dress.

Don't tax you, don’t tax me, tax the fellow behind the tree

One of the issues with substantive tax reform is that in order to raise significant revenue, we need to increase taxes not only on billionaires but on the entire tax base of the affluent.

But as Allison and I discussed, very few people consider themselves to be truly affluent. Our natural inclination is to be envious creatures. This leads many of us to compare ourselves to those in our circles who have more. Even if we ourselves are very wealthy. 4

So raising taxes on a large swath of the affluent is a tough political challenge. And in certain rarified settings, where everyone’s a billionaire, even having five million dollars can seem worse than nothing at all as this 30 second clip from Succession sets forth.

Question for the comments: What say you about wealth taxes, other taxes, Sanders and AOC?

Leave a comment

Subscribe now