Category: writing

Cape Town, like all of South Africa, is in the throes of preparing for the World Cup in June. Everything is much more spruced up…

The Hemlock Society Updated Alexa Joel, according to newspapers in South Africa where I currently am (2009), tried to kill herself with an overdose of…

Talk delivered at Bloomberg on Tuesday Nov 24th, 2009: Fischer Black and the Financial Crisis: Rising Above The Noise I have been working for the…

A few years ago someone insisted to me in a conversation that “feelings” didn’t mean the same as “emotions”. I thought about this for a…

I was on a jury in 1980. At the start the judge cautioned everyone not to discuss the case with their family or friends each…

Nicholas Wade in the NY Times reviews Richard Dawkins’ new book, The Greatest Show on Earth, about evolution. The review is at www.nytimes.com…… Wade spends…

Prizes are just things handed out by a bunch of people, not by God. God’s ones don’t come with announcements, are harder to identify, even…

Enough with the bailout and Lehman. The papers keep writing about it but they have nothing more to say. Let me rather think about consumer…

Last night I held a panel at Columbia about the economic system and the principles that should govern it. One interesting question raised but not…

My first day back in NYC and at 1pm as I was about to reach CPW to go for a run in the park I…

I like Santa Fe but ? I can’t tell the difference between a JC Penney’s and The Church of JC Latter Day Saints. Everything looks…

Everyone is kicking the poor EMH now that it’s down, some of them quite eloquently and hard. But I’m always on the side of the…

I am flying to area code 212 To stab a Concorde into you, To plunge a sword into the gangrene. This is a poem about…

“So many riders in the Tour de France have been tossed out because of drugs, the overall leader is now a delivery guy from Empire…

I went to the doctor one day last week after a few weeks of feeling ill. My doctor is a very nice man. HIs nurse…

I used to be a fountain pen fetishist, craving pretentiously named (Dostoeyevsky, Mozart, Oscar Wilde, ?) limited editions of Mont Blancs that always ended up…

Last week I spent a day at the Perimeter Institute in Waterloo, Ontario. It’s a sort of institute for advanced study devoted to theoretical physics,…

Nothing personal, but more people with appropriate or inappropriate names: Don Rich and Don Chance, professors and authors of various papers on options pricing. The…

In most schools, you can take some courses Pass/Fail rather than for a grade. If you pass, the course then it counts towards your degree,…

What follows is not in very good taste. In Dec 2006 I wrote the following entry: _____________________________ Some time in the early 1970s Nature magazine…

Someone pointed me to a speech by Paul Volcker in which he says: ‘A year or so ago, my daughter had seen something in the…

On Charlie Rose last night, Charlie played straight man to Larry Summers. “What economist has influenced you most?” Charlie asked. “Keynes,” Summers answered, trying to…

The interesting excerpt below is from a 1950s letter from Normal Mailer to William Styron. “I didn’t write[The] Naked [and the Dead] because I wanted…

When Moses went up to Mt Sinai to get the Ten Commandments, he left his brother Aaron in charge of the children of Israel. While…