Category Archives: General

The Caine Mutiny is a novel of historical fiction about World War II by Herman Wouk. It was published, and won the Pulitzer Prize, in 1951. The Caine Mutiny follows the life of Willie Keith from December 1942, one year … Continue reading →

The Four Freedoms are very much a force in our world today. (For background about the Four Freedoms, see Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms, Rockwell’s Four Freedoms, and Freedom of Speech Painting.) Franklin Roosevelt died in April 1945, just before the end … Continue reading →

Norman Rockwell’s famous paintings of the Four Freedoms are shown below: These paintings illustrate the Four Freedoms that President Franklin Roosevelt introduced in a speech to Congress in January 1941: Freedom of speech Freedom of worship Freedom from want Freedom … Continue reading →

The photo to the left shows President Franklin Roosevelt giving his annual Message to Congress (what we now call the State of the Union address) on January 6, 1941. This became known as the Four Freedoms speech. Two months earlier, … Continue reading →

Copenhagen by Michael Frayn is a fascinating play about uncertainty, complementarity, friendship, morality, and the atomic bomb. Most of these themes are familiar words, but what the heck is complementarity? Copenhagen is based on an historical event, a meeting in … Continue reading →

Through the power of his words, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn helped change the world. He wrote about Russia, the country in which he was born and where he died. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature. His writings helped bring about the … Continue reading →

Financial markets crashed ten years ago. See my previous post for what happened and comments about the graph to the left. This post is about lessons that we can learn from that crisis. What caused the 2008 financial crisis? People … Continue reading →

Financial markets crashed ten years ago. What happened? If we are to learn from the past, we must first remember the past. In September 2008 I was the CEO of a financial institution – Yankee Farm Credit, part of the … Continue reading →