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.

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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?

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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.

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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?

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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?

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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.

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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.

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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?

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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?

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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?

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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?

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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?

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In the fall of 2008 as the Great Financial Crisis unfolded, I felt flashes of panic. The photograph below, Desperate Man, was prominent on our bedroom wall and every time I looked at it, I’d feel like seizing my own hair.

Lehman had failed, the stock market was on its way to a 50% crash, and the Bernie Madoff fraud had been revealed. Although I was not a Madoff victim, the scale of his fraud––headline of $50 billion–– combined with the failures of Lehman and other institutions rocked my confidence.

Perhaps the narrative I’d been telling myself about the financial world was completely divorced from reality. Perhaps I’d been clueless about the true nature of Wall Street and how it all worked. I wondered how it was possible to know the true value of anything I owned. Or whether in fact I could really be certain that I owned what I thought I owned.

I was 46 years-old and senior enough to have earned a fair amount of responsibility as an investment manager. For the investments in my portfolio, it would be mostly my burden to decide which investments to save and which to let perish.

My emotional response was to take flight, to flee this financial world that had suddenly become hostile, cruel, unrecognizable. Flee from my responsibilities that had turned from a source of pride to a source of self-doubt and shame. I hated losing money for my partners and investors.

I could cash out and pick up the pieces. Find a career less stressful.

I told my wife Debbie how scared I was. Soon thereafter, at a December black-tie benefit at Chelsea Piers––benefits sailed on through the gloom––Debbie asked an older, wiser, and very good family friend to chat with me. He told me to be patient, that there’d be good opportunities that came out of the downturn for me and for my positions. I listened to him and he was right.

“Narrative is all that matters”

I’ve recently binge-watched the TV show Industry about a group of young finance and business professionals who make and lose fortunes, are beautiful and fit, snort enough cocaine to kill a small horse, and have frequent and explicitly staged sex with one another in fabulous locations. 1

The show is excellent and not in a “I read Playboy for the articles” way. It’s well acted and well written, and consistently clever. Its breakout star is Marisa Abela as Yasmin, the rich girl with a tortured past.

More than anything, however, Industry captures the zeitgeist of our times––the predominance of narrative over reality.

The creators have scripted much of the show’s financial shenanigans in a brazenly inaccurate way. Many of the numbers, timeframes, and legal proceedings don’t make sense. But it doesn’t really matter. The details are subsumed beneath the dramatic power of the narrative and the appeal of the complex characters who come with a mix of flaws and virtues.

The creators are ex-finance pros so maybe they created cartoon scenarios on purpose to underscore the often-spoken motto of the show: “narrative is all that matters.”

Casinos vs. frauds

Industry’s creators get away with their version of finance theatrics (even with a pedantic stickler like me) because the schemes they write about are generally on the right track in portraying our hyper-gamified, casino economy where value is what someone says it is on any given day.

Naturally, there are financial frauds on the show. That’s inevitable; there’s always been frauds in fiction and in real life.

The financial frauds that Industry showcases are realistic. Madoff happened because investors wanted desperately to believe his mathematically improbable returns were true (akin statistically to filling out a perfect NCAA bracket!). 2

Investors are no match for fraudsters who regularly trick accountants and regulators to bless their financial statements. As Eric (my favorite Industry character) said recently on fictional CNN,

“You want me to give you a list of the number of times regulators have been wrong. How long is your show?”

The narrative, on the other hand, is different than fraud. It does not hide. It’s all out in the open.

That six-million-dollar banana

All the real-life buyer got is a sheet that instructs you how to tape a banana to a wall, because the banana is real and will soon spoil. The sheet is first sold for hundreds of thousands of dollars and then for over six million dollars. It’s not a fraud. The buyers know exactly what they’re getting.

The narrative behind the banana instruction is that if someone made a fortune buying it for a few hundred thousand, why can’t the six-million-dollar buyer make a fortune off the next buyer who might pay $60 million? One number is just as untethered to reality as another. If Bitcoin can trade at $100,000 a coin, why can’t it trade at a million dollars?

On Polymarket, a prediction site, you can bet on whether Bitcoin will go up or down in the next five minutes. On Industry, time is super-compressed. Fortunes and reputations go up and down in minutes or seconds.

One of the trader characters, Rishi, is a compulsive gambler. When he keeps betting red on roulette and keeps losing, we watch him watching the wheel spin and the ball bounce, and we understand it’s a perfectly accurate extension of how Industry presents his day job. And financial markets today.

Perpetual assets

Every asset---Rishi’s casino chips, the sheet of paper that instructs you how to mount a banana on your wall, every crypto coin, every share of stock, every parcel of real property---must be owned by someone. Barring a few exceptions, that truism does not change. The assets I’ve mentioned can be bought and sold but unlike debt there is no one obliged to redeem them from you for any specified or certain value at any certain time. 3

They are perpetual assets traded among ourselves in a closed loop, a merry-go-round, at prices set by human buyers and sellers based on the current narrative. That they can often be sold at relatively consistent prices over the short term is a human construct that’s usually true but not guaranteed.

Imagine a world where after you bought a perpetual asset you could never sell it. How would you value it?

If it’s an asset that doesn’t produce any utility or cash flow to you––a piece of art, whether a banana or a Rembrandt on the wall––you’d value it for the aesthetic pleasure it gave you. If it were a financial asset, like a share of stock, the only rational way to value it would be for the present value of future cash flows.

What I’ve described is the reality of our world when viewed as a whole. And when the narrative spins away from this hard truth, the reality can bite. As Bethany Mclean, a great financial journalist, recently writes:

“When no one can find an anchor for the fundamental value of companies, the market starts searching for a narrative.” 4

If the bubble is pricked

It would not surprise me if the U.S. stock market declined 50% as it did from the 2000 and 2008 peaks. In that scenario, more speculative assets like banana art and crypto would likely suffer worse fates.

That said, I’m not betting on that happening and I make no claim to any special perspective or predictive power. Admittedly, it’s hard to imagine the stock market getting cut in half after 17 years of stocks rising, But the numbers and the history I look at suggest it’s a risk to take into account.

One might say, so what? Each share of stock is still held by someone. All that’s happened is that investors collectively decided on new, lower values for the same assets they collectively hold.

Plus, the stock market has always come back.

And for young investors who have not yet or are just starting to invest, a 50% decline can be seen as a great opportunity. Now they get to buy the same assets at a 50% off sale.

All this is true but it ignores human emotion and how the financial economy can affect the real economy. Because when people feel wealthier, they spend more. When people feel less wealthy, they spend less.

Tightening our belts at Big Pink

In December 2008, we were at the Big Pink diner in Miami when I spoke to our three children, (ages 20, 18, and 15) about the financial crisis and the Bernie Madoff fraud. 5

I told them our net worth had declined substantially. I was uncertain what would happen to our income and our wealth going forward. “Mom and I are planning to tighten our belts.”

Until things recovered, we reduced our spending where we could. 6

This is called the wealth effect. The popping of a bubble will make many families reduce their spending.

When many families react in similar fashion, the reduced spending reverberates across the economy. Although the wealthy may lose the most in dollars, the decline in spending hits hardest those with the greatest amount of precarity. It also impinges upon philanthropy at the very time it’s needed most.

The state we’re in

The wealth effect of a bubble deflating in 2026 or 2027 could be more severe than it was in 2000 or 2008. A few facts to consider:

1) Wealth is more concentrated at the top and so is spending. The top 10% are responsible for about 50% of all consumer spending. 7

2) The amount of wealth represented by the stock market has increased significantly. It’s estimated that the stock market is worth about $70 trillion today vs. $18 trillion at the 2000 peak and $20 trillion at the 2008 peak. As a % of GDP, it’s never been higher in post-war history and perhaps ever. That wealth is concentrated among the wealthiest, the big spenders.8

3) Federal debt is now 120% of GDP vs. 60% in both 1999 and 2007 (the years prior to the 2000 and 2008 crashes). In 2008, the government was able to function more or less cohesively to address the financial crisis. Today the government has little fiscal room to address a crisis without risking a debt crisis and scant unity of rational purpose. 9

So, our country is particularly fragile right now to the risk of a downturn caused by a change in the narrative of what we collectively decide our assets are worth.

No one should root for a downturn. Good luck to us all.

Question for the comments: Is a potential asset value bust something you worry about, and either yes or no, why?

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When Clinton entered the room and began to speak I understood that I was witnessing the power of charisma. The combined wattage of the actors and actresses was no match for Clinton’s star presence. Like a charismatic black hole, he sucked up all the attention, even while knowing he was about to be disgraced by the scandal.

The price of admission that evening was a $5,000 political contribution. When it was over and I was downstairs looking for a taxi, Christie Brinkley, supermodel and actress, asked me if she could borrow my phone to call her driver. There are few certainties in life but it is certain that the loan of my flip phone made a greater impression on me than it did on her.

She was with her fourth husband Peter Cook who she ended up divorcing after discovering that he had cheated on her. But that evening outside the Dakota I was dazzled by their powerful smiles and preternatural good looks. The perfect couple.

The book that sparked my thoughts on varied encounters with fame

This week I spoke with about her new novel MEDIUM RARE, which was inspired by the tragic tale of Icarus who managed to fly with wings of wax. However, Icarus did not heed his father’s warning about what would happen to his wax wings if he flew too close to the sun. 2

In MEDIUM RARE, the role of Icarus is taken by a “mid-level” Washington lobbyist named Phil who achieves sudden and “stratospheric celebrity” when he fills out what may be a perfect bracket for the NCAA March Madness tournament against odds of one in multiple billions.

Phil’s bracket selection feat is the quintessential route to celebrity for our gamified modern times where media amplifies all sorts of random and frivolous accomplishments out of proportion to their difficulty, daring, and virtue. Think of any professional influencer.

The novel’s narrator is Cassandra, a seer like her mythic namesake and a contemporary of Phil and his wife. Cassandra comes from a higher social stratum than Phil and her unfiltered observations about Phil’s pedestrian tastes are delightfully and ruthlessly snobby.

MEDIUM RARE comes out March 3^rd in time for March Madness. I loved it. You can pre-order it here––pre-orders have an outsized influence on a book’s success.

A dance of fame at a power lunch

Before it closed in 2016, the Four Seasons Restaurant Grill Room was the place for a power lunch. In my forties, I grew to love that restaurant. I became a regular and had an account linked to my credit card so all my lunches would be charged automatically. Leaving without the check ever appearing at the table was a power flex.

Instead of the Grill Room, I preferred the Pool Room, which I thought was the most aesthetically glamorous room in the city. The picture of the Pool Room below is from 1960.3

Years before I became a regular, circa mid 1990s when I was about 35 years old, I recall having lunch in the Grill Room with two power players–––the consiglieri to a famous billionaire (being a billionaire then was something special) and John Angelo the founder of the firm where I worked. John had taken me along to pitch the consiglieri on an investment fund.

When the lunch was over, I walked directly to the head of the stairs ready to descend. But I had to wait.

The consiglieri and John were just beginning to perform their individual power dances weaving back and forth among the Grill Room tables of other power players, shaking hands, smiling, laughing. They bounced from one power table to the next, and I could see their faces were flushed with pleasure.

As I watched them, I wondered who would triumph, who could dance the longest, who between John and the consiglieri was more known and knowing. Who in this room was more famous.

John finished before the consiglieri. I consider that to be to John’s credit. He had things to get back to at the office and so, taking me with him, he sailed on.

Fame at the bar in Cheers

Fame among a tightly-knit group of people is not confined to a particular social or economic class. The regular patrons of a working-class bar would experience a pleasure similar to John and the consiglieri in the Grill Room at being known by other regulars in the bar. Like the bar in the TV show Cheers, “where everyone knows your name.” 4

I feel a sense of self-satisfaction when I see someone on the street who I know well enough to stop and chat (fans of Curb will know what’s in the footnote).5 It makes me feel known and knowing and reminds me that despite its size, New York City is my neighborhood, a place where I belong.

Stratospheric fame

Then there’s the stratospherically famous---think immediate identification by a single name. As Natasha and I discussed, such fame attracts parasitic sycophants who never disagree with their celebrity “host.” That lack of critical pushback makes the celebrity intellectually lazy to the point where they can lose their perspective. Unlike good basketball players, they don’t know where they are on the court. And that can lead to all sorts of mistakes and disasters.

We also noted how outsized fame and success in one field can mislead a celebrity into thinking they can transfer their success to other, unrelated pursuits. Phil in MEDIUM RARE, overly lauded for his luck in picking winners of basketball games, begins to think that he can apply his “skills” to media and politics.

Elon Musk and other tech billionaires have proven themselves to be brilliant and lucky entrepreneurs. Because of that success and because of their vast wealth and fame, we tend to pay attention to their views on all sorts of matters. But instead, we really should be downgrading those views and be skeptical of their ability to think clearly given the defect of being surrounded by people who constantly stroke their ego.

Celebrity fame that repels good people

There’s an adverse selection process at work in who courts the company of the celebrity. Most of the people who thust themselves forward view getting close to a famous person as a chance for money and reflected power and glory. (See the movie Lurker.)

Natasha and I feel the opposite.

We have both had the experience of being a good friend with someone before they were famous. Once that fame was achieved, we became hesitant about being overly familiar with our now famous friend. We questioned the purity of our motives and also recognized how much busier our respective friends had become. Probably unfair to our friends who more than ever need to be with people from “before times” who will act “normally” with them.

Fame that robs you of your humanity

Vaclav Havel, the brilliant intellectual who became president of the Czech Republic, was uniquely able to self-reflect about his fame and power. In a 1991 speech, Havel examines what was happening to him because of all the perks he enjoyed thanks to his position.

His dentist comes to him, he never goes shopping, he is in the “world of VIPs who gradually lose track of how much butter or a streetcar ticket costs, how to make a cup of coffee, how to drive a car, and how to place a telephone call.”

The celebrity loses control of their life, becomes trapped by their very celebrity, by “its exigencies, consequences, aspects, and privileges.”

In a beautiful summing up, Havel says that, ultimately, the celebrity “is transformed into a stone bust of himself. The bust may accentuate his undying importance and fame, but at the same time it is no more than a piece of dead stone.” 6

Celebrity fame that obscures art

In our discussion, Natasha referenced a Substack essay she wrote called “Fame’s Inflection Point.” An inflection is reached when a person’s fame becomes so powerful and intrinsic that it overshadows anything extrinsic that they produce.

Natasha may have been wrestling with her novel MEDIUM RARE when she wrote:

“As more and more people desperately try—and succeed—to pass fame’s inflection point, doing so seems to become both more existential and meaningless than ever. This is the labyrinth I’m currently stuck in, trying to build some wings.” 7

A video clip

Below is a 13 minute excerpt from my LIVE with Natasha this past week where we spoke about fame and celebrity as it related to MEDIUM RARE and beyond.

The full LIVE can be accessed here. 8

Question for the comments: Despite what I write above, I am intrigued by celebrities for no good reason other than they are famous. What about you?

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My wife was away skiing this week. As I often do when I’m alone, I went over to the Upper West Side to catch up with my friend Tommy. He and I have a relationship built on loneliness, although mine is temporary while his seems more or less permanent.

After spending time with Tommy, I always have an urge to help him. He deserves to be with someone who loves him. I think Tommy’s good points outweigh his bad ones. You be the judge.

Tommy’s profile

Looks

Tommy’s a good-looking man. He’s tall and broad with thick, blond hair the “color of whitened honey.” At the age of forty-four, he’s on the big side, not fat but perhaps stout or sturdy. But it’s nothing that some time at the gym or a GLP-1 can’t fix. The good news is that he’s hard on himself, never in denial. He calls himself, unfairly I think, a “hippopotamus.”

When Tommy was a college freshman, a Hollywood talent scout saw his picture and called him in for a screen test. Admittedly the talent scout was on the lowest link of the industry’s food chain, but he thought Tommy might be the perfect actor to play “the guy who loses the girl.” That led Tommy to quit college and try his luck at acting in LA. He did not find luck.

Tommy’s current domestic situation

Tommy has two women, both of them quite pretty if not beautiful, who want to be with Tommy but circumstances prevent him from being with either. He’s legally married but he and his wife have been separated for four years. He has two boys, fourteen and ten. He supports his wife and boys,

It’s hard to say what went wrong with the marriage although Tommy will say that he married in haste, against his own better judgment. Tommy’s harsh, old-fashioned father has speculated that there might be “bed-trouble.”

Tommy would like to marry his girlfriend. As far as I know Tommy did not cheat on his wife before the separation. And his wife currently dates other men. The issue with Tommy’s girlfriend is that she’s a devout Catholic and won’t stay or even be seen with him until he gets a divorce, which his wife refuses to give him.

So Tommy is caught in a vise between the two women.

His wife’s strategy is to make Tommy’s situation so miserable that he will come back to the marriage. I only have one side of it but his wife seems like a very hard and unpleasant person.

They each have divorce lawyers. Tommy’s willing to give his wife all he has, but his wife keeps moving the goalposts. As Tommy says, “the lawyers talk and send bills and I eat my heart out.”

For what it’s worth, Tommy tries to be a good father. In addition to sending money to support his sons, he takes them to baseball games on the weekend.

Tommy has so much love to give but right now he can’t seem to find an outlet for it.

Tommy’s financial Situation

Tommy lives in a residential hotel on the Upper West Side. Not one of the new, super luxury ones like One Central Park West at Columbus Circle but one of the older pre-war ones further uptown on Broadway, similar to the Ansonia, a Stanford White building that Tommy likes to stare at.

Tommy likens the Ansonia to a “baroque palace from Prague” and notes its “towers, domes, huge swells and bubbles of metal gone green from exposure.”

My boy Tommy has a way with words.

Tommy is recently unemployed. He was a high-level sales executive, earning an upper-middle-class income (which put him in the 32% tax bracket). He quit because the owners wouldn’t give him equity and diminished his position by bringing in someone above him. Tommy’s currently weighing his career options.

As for Tommy’s balance sheet, it’s admittedly not a pretty picture. A malevolent huckster named Tamkin, who may or may not be a doctor, has preyed upon Tommy’s fears that he is missing out on the speculative boom in the financial markets.

Tamkin made day-trading sound simple. Get in, watch your position tick up, and then get out with a profit. Tamkin taunted Tommy by asking him how he could possibly sit still and do nothing and watch everyone else make money. He lured Tommy in by tales of people making five, ten thousand, or more a week, doing nothing but watching the tape.

Money is oppressive to Tommy. Despite his potential to make a good living as a sales executive, his soul rebels against hyper-capitalism. He hates that the world has made it “shameful” not to have money.

Nevertheless, Tommy was gripped by Tamkin’s incitement of FOMO, the “fear of missing out.” Tommy gave Tamkin all his money and the authority to trade with it. Tamkin took some highly leveraged positions which crashed. Tommy lost everything he had, which wasn’t that much to begin with..

I want to make it clear that Tommy did not consult me before getting mixed up with this Tamkin character.

Tommy’s father

Tommy’s mother is dead and he’s estranged from his sister. His father is a wealthy retired doctor who lives in the same residential hotel. Tommy’s father is a tightfisted and coldhearted bastard. He refuses to provide any financial help to Tommy. In fact, he never has.

More than money, Tommy just wants some sympathy or empathy from his father. Instead, his dad is constantly critical of the choices Tommy has made. He doesn’t want to be burdened by Tommy’s “confusions.”

Tommy told me about a breakfast with his dad in the hotel dining room. His dad bragged about Tommy’s lucrative former job in front of his friend. But as soon as the friend left and he and Tommy were alone, his dad started in with Tommy about his sloppy appearance and the domestic and career messes he’s made. His dad’s also been on Tommy for taking too many prescription pills. His dad has a point about the pills.

Tommy’s dad has said things like this to Tommy’s face”

“I see other elderly parents here with children who are no good, and they keep backing them at a great sacrifice. But I’m not going to make that mistake.”

Tommy is truly, sadly, deeply alone.

My kinship with Tommy

I can relate to Tommy’s loneliness.

I was a shy boy, scared of girls, and without anything to be confident about. I recall being alone in my room most nights and weekends. And dreading, with that telltale pit in my stomach, the approach of Sunday night bedtime, because I knew I’d wake to Monday morning and have to go to school.

Back then, I never said to myself, “I’m lonely,” but instead I distracted myself by playing games against imaginary opponents or reading fantasy books. A complete immersion in different worlds could shield me against feelings that were too painful for me to handle at that age.

Now as an adult, my circumstances have changed with a large family and many dear friends. Still, when I’m alone and triggered, my childhood loneliness comes back to haunt me. It can sting more than the original, because as an adult I’ve lost my childhood ability to escape completely into an imaginary world of a game or a book.

Memories of childhood are more poignant when you’re older. You look back over a longer vista of your life, and you realize that your childhood stands out, a mountain range that formed your life’s landscape.

They’re unpredictable, these feelings of despondency. They’re usually short-lived, but twice they lasted, not for hours or days, but for many months. Those were awful periods, times I could say I was depressed.

Tommy Wilhelm’s lonely and beautiful soul

As you may have already surmised, my friend Tommy was born not of man and woman but from the imagination of Saul Bellow who breathed life into him through the pages of his 1956 novella, Seize the Day.

A great author allows us to know a character with a completeness and clarity we rarely meet in real life. Bellow lets us see into Tommy as he really is, a profoundly lost and lonely soul. And in understanding and empathizing with Tommy, I recall the loneliness of my childhood but in a kinship which makes me feel somehow better.

At the end of the novella, after Tommy’s lost every penny, Tommy wanders into a funeral home where a dead man, a stranger, lies in an open coffin. The sight of the dead man breaks the dam of Tommy’s sadness and he begins to cry “with all his heart.”

Here’s the last paragraph of the novella.

“The flowers and lights fused ecstatically in [Tommy’s] blind, wet eyes, the heavy sea-like music came up to his ears. It poured into him where he had hidden himself in the center of a crowd by the great and happy oblivion of tears. He heard it and sank deeper than sorrow, through torn sobs and cries toward the consummation of his heart’s ultimate need.” 1

What is “deeper than sorrow” and the “heart’s ultimate need?” To me, it’s loneliness and the desperate need for connection. In the funeral parlor, Tommy finally finds a shared connection of loneliness with a dead stranger, for who can be more alone than the dead?

This connection with the dead man, fellow sufferer of loneliness, provides an outlet for Tommy to express pity for someone other than himself. And in that he finds a release.

Notes:

All words in quotes are from Seize The Day, either verbatim or closely paraphrased.

I have written about Tommy and Seize the Day before, in the fall of 2023, here.

And below is what continues to be my favorite loneliness song. Janis Ian’s At Seventeen.

Question for the comments: Who are the fictional characters who you consider to be friends?

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On Tuesday, February 17th at 5:30 PM, I’m going Live with to discuss her new novel MEDIUM RARE, out March 3rd. I devoured an advance copy.

We won’t spoil the plot but we will discuss some of the book’s juicy themes, which include the gamification of everything, March Madness, status choices in marriage, and infidelity.

Tuesday, February 17th at 5:30 PM EDT

Use this link to put it in your calendar.

However.

Before the news and extent of Epstein’s crimes became well known, I’d probably have accepted an invitation to attend a dinner with people like Bill Gates or Elon Musk at Epstein’s townhouse. I’m not immune to the thrill of meeting celebrities. And being asked to be included in an inner ring of wealth and power for an evening can be heady stuff, leaving you wanting more.

If I’d done a google search on Epstein, circa 2014, it would have revealed that he was a convicted and registered sex offender who’d served 13 months (with extensive work-release privileges) for a single count of soliciting sex with a minor. I’d have also discovered that despite that conviction Epstein moved within elite and inner rings of power, influence, and wealth.

As well I’d have thought about then what I don’t think about now. Meeting people of significant wealth could have helped my career as an investment manager. So, yes, I might have gone.

The phenomenon and danger of the appeal of exclusive networks, or Inner Rings, was the subject of a famous speech called The Inner Ring given by C.S. Lewis to students soon before the end of World War Two. His speech has lessons for all of us because it explains how Epstein lured so many otherwise seemingly sensible people into his network despite evidence of Epstein’s monstrous crimes. 1

One of those people is Peter Attia, a celebrity doctor who has been rightfully disparaged for his close friendship with Epstein and some related disgraceful emails and behavior. I met Attia at a conference in Florida for wealthy investors in 2015 and was impressed with his presentation on healthy exercise. Attia’s star was then on the rise. Now his reputation has been destroyed.

Unlike Attia, I think I’d have soon determined that Epstein’s scene was not where I belonged or felt comfortable.

There were clear signs of his corroded and corrosive character. The décor alone…

I’m not excusing anyone who was aware of Epstein’s heinous lifestyle and monstrous crimes and continued to consort with him in any meaningful way.

In fact, I’m not even excusing my hypothetical self for possibly accepting that hypothetical invitation. I can hope that I would have declined. But it’s important to be honest about one’s vulnerabilities, even in the abstract. To learn lessons from the mistakes of others such as Peter Attia.

A quick word on the DOJ data release

I think the Justice Department release is a good thing. We deserve to know the full story and to hold all the malefactors to account.

In a release of this magnitude, however, it’s inevitable that some of the people named will be the subject of false rumors or will be unfairly stigmatized out of proportion to their actual dealings with Epstein.

It would be awful if the data dump turns into such a widespread witch hunt that the backlash dilutes the severity of the crimes and moral failings of those who are truly guilty and thereby interferes with the severe and necessary punishment they deserve.

Once inside the Inner Ring you never want to leave

C.S. Lewis, author of the Narnia series and Christian intellectual, delivered his Inner Ring speech to students of King’s College in London in December 1944. His purpose was to warn the students about the seductive nature of belonging to the exclusive cliques that exist everywhere but have no charters or by-laws or membership lists. If you belong, you know.

In addressing students, Lewis was confident that they had already been exposed in the course of their schooldays to many hierarchies of who’s in and who’s out of this ring or that.

We all have memories from school when being included or excluded from a clique was all that mattered. In fifth grade I was “Vice-President” of a club whose sole activity was giving and taking away membership and titles. In seventh grade, at a new school, I was outside of every ring. An outcast. The memories of being “out” outweigh the memories of briefly being “in” and are still fresh and painful.

Cliques and rings will ceaselessly shift, but at any moment in time, when you are an outcast, your situation can seem permanent, relentless, agonizing.

Lewis is realistic about human nature. All of us will desire to be inside many rings over the course of a lifetime, some aimed at good, some at evil. An Inner Ring by its nature will be exclusive. It is always an “us” or a “we.”

A ring could be the same six volunteers working every week as a well-practiced squad at their children’s school packing food into bags for their fellow parents. A ring could be a group of six pedophiles connected by their criminal sickness and their trust in each other to keep their crimes hidden. 2

“Of all the passions, the passion for the Inner Ring is most skillful in making a man who is not yet a very bad man do very bad things.” 3

In the neat summation above, C.S. Lewis wants us to recognize that a desire to be inside a ring can be strong enough to cloud moral judgment. Below, Lewis captures the moment when you are given a subtle invitation, a solicitation, to join a morally corrupt Inner Ring.

“And you will be drawn in because at that moment, when the cup was so near your lips, you cannot bear to be thrust back again into the cold outer world. It would be so terrible to see the other man’s face––[‘a good-looking man, resembling Ralph Lauren, with thick gray-white hair and a weathered face’] —turn suddenly cold and contemptuous.” 4

In the brackets, I substituted a description of Epstein from a Vanity Fair article. 5

Peter Attia’s failed apology

The celebrity doctor Peter Attia says he did not engage in any criminal activity, and there is no proof that he did. However, his email correspondence with Epstein shows that he knew about Epstein’s criminal predilection and despite that knowledge he was obsequious to Epstein and used language that condoned and cheered on Epstein’s criminal behavior. 6

In his press release, Attia explains his motivations to be part of Epstein’s world.

“Everything about [Epstein] seemed excessive and exclusive, including the fact that he lived in the largest home in all of Manhattan, owned a Boeing 727, and hosted parties with the most powerful and prominent leaders in business and politics.” 7

I bolded the word “exclusive.”

As C.S. Lewis said of any Ring,

“Exclusion is no accident; it is the essence.” 8

And of course Epstein’s possessions have nothing to do with excusing Attia, a doctor, for writing the below email to Epstein.

“Pussy is, indeed, low carb. Still awaiting results on gluten content, though.” 9

Nor does the size of Epstein’s plane or mansion have anything to do with Attia staying in New York after his infant son suffered a cardiac arrest. He ignored his wife’s pleas to come home The timing of Attia’s emails combined with his self-reporting in a book reveals that he stayed to meet with Epstein. “Doing a very bad thing,” indeed. 10

In another email exchange, this time with Epstein’s assistant, Attia thanks the assistant for the loan of an apartment from Epstein and is embarrassingly obsequious.

“No...thank YOU so much. See you next time, hopefully JE in town when I’m back in 2 weeks. I go into JE withdrawal when I don’t see him...” 11

In reading Attia’s correspondence with Epstein, it seems probable that Attia was not in the inner sanctum of Epstein’s rings but rather in one of the satellite, outer rings. Attia later wrote that he wanted to visit Epstein’s Island. Perhaps Attia hoped that his flattery would gain him access to an even more exclusive ring within Epstein’s circles.

In his speech C.S. Lewis notes that once inside one ring, there’s always another, even more exclusive ring to penetrate. Lewis compares this search for more and more exclusive rings to peeling an endless onion or

“the torture allotted to the Danaids in the classical underworld, that of attempting to fill sieves with water…” 12

A supposed code of silence

In another email to Epstein, Attia writes:

“You the biggest problem with becoming friends with you? The life you lead is so outrageous, and yet I can’t tell a soul…” 13

In his attempted apology, Attia spins that email as having nothing to do with his knowledge of Epstein’s sexual predilections. Instead, Attia claims this:

“I treated that access as something to be quiet about rather than discussed freely with others…What I was referring to, poorly and flippantly, was the discretion commanded by those social and professional circles–the idea that you don’t talk about who you meet, the dinners you attend and the power and influence of the people in those settings.” 14

I’ve bolded certain Inner Ring words: “access,” “discretion,” and “circles.”

In my experience, very few people can resist talking about the famous people they’ve met. Name dropping is very tempting. It can form a good part of the motivation to spend time with people of power and influence. Attia seems like someone who, when it comes to name dropping, is no slouch.

I do not credit Attia’s apology with sincerity, and I think it did him more harm than good. It makes the typical general mistake of poorly designed apologies. A rote sentence that there is no excuses for his behavior followed and surrounded by a torrent of words filled precisely with excuses, misdirections, and equivocations.

Justice and judgment

This is a moment in American life when bad behavior among the privileged and powerful seems prevalent, if not ubiquitous. Many of us, privileged or not, are trying hard to be virtuous. But virtue is quiet and generally unremarkable while vice is noisy and newsworthy.

My only suggestion is a modest one. To understand and be on guard against our own moral weaknesses in order to be as virtuous as possible.

When I shared an earlier draft of this essay with my adult children, my daughter Lauren had a strong reaction. Her comment, pinned to the top of the comments section, is powerful and should spark conversation.

Motivated by Lauren’s comment, I am linking to this recent post, Understanding Epstein’s Crimes, by , whose heroic reporting for the Miami Herald in 2017-18 ensured that Epstein would not get away with his crimes.

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Belle Burden’s memoir Strangers is a post-mortem on the sudden rupture of her seemingly idyllic twenty-year marriage. It is marked by the agony of her fight against hindsight bias. The “I should have known’s” and the “how could I have been so stupid’s?” that plagued her and can plague any of us when we look back from the anguish of the present to a serene past and assume, mistakenly, that if we had just been more astute and less naive, then we could have predicted the future. And prevented it.

The destruction of Belle’s twenty-year marriage and the breakup of her three-child family was an earthquake. Her husband “James” abandoned Belle and their children when they were quarantining together on Martha’s Vineyard during the very early days of Covid in March 2020. First came a nighttime phone call from the husband of the woman James was secretly sleeping with. That was followed the next morning by James’ announcement that he was “done” being Belle’s husband and effectively “done” with their children.

When Belle asked him why, James gave no explanation, just an emphasis on the totality and finality of his rejection.

“I thought I was happy but I’m not. I thought I wanted our life but I don’t.”

Belle’s family is famous, glamorous, and old-money. Her parents Amanda and Carter Burden were socialites and a famous “it couple.” Her grandmother was Babe Paley, wife of Bill Paley of CBS fame, and best friend of Truman Capote until Capote betrayed Babe by trumpeting Bill Paley’s affairs.

The wealth and the fame are part of the book’s appeal. Belle brings us inside a type of life that is largely inaccessible. But what propelled my reading was joining Belle in her hunt for the “why” of it all. Also, Belle’s prose carries the unmistakable clarity of the truth as she saw it and felt it.

In the years after the rupture, Belle’s inner voice questions her decisions and the course of her whole life. That voice is fierce and compelling. Her current self argues against that voice. Near the beginning of the book, she writes

“Other couples I knew then, and know now had many more flags, redder flags, and they stayed married.”

But until after I finished the book, I found myself taking the side of Belle’s fierce and critical inner voice. I agreed that Belle had indeed failed to see the red flags of her marriage. And that she had acted impetuously and without judgment about financial matters.

The book effectively recruited me to join Belle’s monstrous inner critic, a critic that was aided and abetted by many factors. There are the thoughtless comments by her friends and acquaintances like her gynecologist who blames Belle for her situation because when Belle gave up her career, she became uninteresting to her husband. There are exogenous reminders such as a deluge of Christmas cards with pictures of families, smiling, loving, and complete. Pictures that Belle tears apart in fury.

But after I finished the book, I understood much better, thanks to Belle, the error of hindsight bias, highlighted by my own hindsight bias about a recent trivial matter.

My trivial example

Eighteen months ago, I bought a mining stock for $5. I sold it last year for $8 because I became nervous about a change in management. Soon after my sale, the commodities the company mined shot straight up in price as did the stock, which went to $20. Even though I’d made money I still felt like an idiot. Irrationally, I’d have felt better if I’d never bought the stock in the first place.

My inner narrative was that I was a fool, a sucker, for having made such an untimely sale. This familiar inner voice is cruel and sadistic. It pounced on me whenever the subject of investments came into view. A newspaper headline, a check-in with the financial markets. Sometimes it caught me totally unaware. It was relentless.

A solution

Then I came across some terrific advice in the Substack newsletter of . An excerpt and a link is in the footnote, and I encourage everyone to read it. 1

To summarize Dr. Hall’s insight, the irrational attacks of your inner critic, your “sadistic bully,” will wither if they are exposed to outside light. Just write the ridiculous words down or say them aloud.

So I started to tell my wife Debbie about a terrible mistake I’d made and how I was tormenting myself over it. Debbie assumed I was referring to a grievous bidding error I’d made as her bridge partner in a recent competitive game. That regret she was perfectly happy to have me agonize over so I would not repeat it. 2

But when Debbie heard that my actual, beat-myself-up regret was about the timing of selling a stock, a situation where I could never have expected to know the future direction of the stock as well as unimportant to our lives, she quickly and assuredly confirmed that my self-accusations were absurd.

I immediately felt better and recognized Belle’s memoir as her way of exorcising the bully of her inner voice and inspiring others to do the same.

I found Belle’s husband to be weird, especially about money

It’s easy to make judgments when we’re scrutinizing a relationship from the outside. We’re not in love! Plus we have the advantage of holding in our hands a few hundred carefully written pages detailing the relationship’s entire history.

Nevertheless, I judged.

When I was on the side of Belle’s inner bully, I concluded that the obvious problem with the marriage was that Belle and James had vastly different backgrounds and approaches to money. Perhaps that was my focus because I write about wealth. As well, I can relate to some of Belle’s attitudes about money as a fellow beneficiary of multigenerational wealth. 3

Not surprisingly, I was convinced that James was the weird one about money. His family was briefly wealthy until his father went broke. Because of that, he was parsimonious and careful to a fault.

For example, on their honeymoon when Belle would pay the restaurant check (why is she paying the check when he has a well-paying legal job?) James would get angry that Belle paid without looking, that she didn’t audit the itemized bill. I’m with Belle. I never check the itemized bill. It’s as likely that the restaurant makes an error in our favor as in theirs. And if James really needed to check the itemized bill, let him pay for it!

Or, this:

“[James] asked me to annotate our joint credit card bills, explaining each charge in tiny print.”

Reading that, I’m screaming, Belle, can’t you see how this would never work. The two of you come from such completely different worlds!

Or the sinking feeling I got when I read that James would tell Belle how much money to wire into their joint checking account each month. As if his income didn’t even exist.

And his various machinations over the pre-nup. Dastardly, cheap parvenue without manners!

But then Belle and her inner critic pointed out a habit about James that struck me quite differently.

“[James] didn’t like small talk, and he was always the first to leave a dinner or cocktail party, entirely confident in his right to do so.”

Wait, that’s exactly how my family has described me! And accurately too. I’m a decisive “leaver.” This made me slam the brakes on my judgement.

Why I’m glad I read Strangers

• Hemingway defined courage as grace under pressure. In the full telling of her story, Belle is gracious to herself and even to James. She takes us along with her to the healthy conclusion of “Judge not, lest ye be judged.”

• As already noted, Strangers is a strong antidote to the poison of hindsight bias.

• The book also serves as a warning against allowing the “peak-end rule” to run amuck. The peak-end rule states that for events during any time period, whether an hour of playing tennis or a twenty year marriage, we will overemphasize any peak experience, good or bad, and overemphasize what happens at the end of the experience, whether good or bad.

  A highly charged negative emotional peak comes at the end of Belle’s twenty-year marriage. But she is determined not to allow the end to nullify the memory of all the past happy times of their marriage, especially the magic of that first period of falling in love.

• Strangers is a master class in humility in accepting that there are certain things about people we can never know. Belle accepts that she will likely never know why James left. People are complex. She also understands herself well enough to realize that she is strong enough not to need to know.

I was having lunch this week with a friend who was reading and enjoying Strangers. My friend said reading the book made her feel a bit like a voyeur. That’s true of any good memoir.

Here is the link to the book’s Amazon page.

Question for the comments: When has your inner critic turned into a sadistic bully?

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2

For those who play bridge, my error was that I passed after Debbie had bid a new suit as an overcall. You do not pass when you open a diamond, your opponent bids three clubs and then your partner bids three hearts. Bridge partnerships have been permanently sundered for sins less severe.

Here’s the fateful hand. We could have made a slam. Bridge is a wonderful game! As you play more, you just make different mistakes.