Category: Writing (Page 3 of 4)

This article originally appeared on the Daily Ticker site of Yahoo! Finance in 2009.

WALL ST. DOING LESS AND LESS, SAYS JOHN CASSIDY

According to journalist and author John Cassidy, Wall Street banks are supposed to act “like a power utility… Except they provide money rather than power.”

But what happens when the power utility, instead of focusing on how best to manage and distribute power, decides to focus on using customer funds to make a quick buck?

The answer, as Cassidy explains in his recent New Yorker article, is a financial system pushed to the brink of collapse.

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When we die, we are sent to a pretty bleak world in which there are horribly disfigured Winged Harpies, and we have to tell them how wonderful it was to live. If we lie, or if we have nothing to tell them about what we did to try to live with passion and love, then they keep us there for eternity. But if we tell them how beautiful the world was for us, and describe the joys and excitement we felt while living, then they will show us a door that will release our atoms back into the world so we can become one with nature again.

At least that’s how Phillip Pullman sees it in his wonderful, magical trilogy His Dark Materials. Which I’ve just finished reading for the third time.  Continue reading

Clifton Phifer Lee, a Betta fish from New York City, passed peacefully on the floor of his bowl on October 20th, 2014. He was at least several weeks over three years old.

Born sometime in late summer 2011 at a Petco on 4th Avenue, Cliff was named for his parents’ hero at the time, Cliff Lee of the Philadelphia Phillies. Cliff the Fish watched closely whenever Cliff the Pitcher was on the mound, though he became as distraught as everyone when the Phillies started being terrible again.

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