Recalcitrant Egg 3

I feel like each of us has some fundamental sentiment, and it is known by the art that speaks to us most completely. I think I fell in love with Bruce Springsteen's Jungleland the very first time I heard it. It spoke to me at a fundamental level. I can't tell you how many times I have listened to it, alone in my car, the radio up loud. There is something about the defiance, the basic unfairness, and the ultimate tragic arc that I just mainline right into my soul.  I think we all have some fundamental sentiment in our soul. My wife hears me playing stuff like this and she just doesn't get it - it doesn't speak to her at all. She has a different set of preferences and I'm not going to talk out of turn about hers, but let's just say that we don't agree on a lot of music. She has a different fundamental sentiment. I don't think these preferences have rank or ordinality - they are no different than liking blue or green - they are entirely nominal. But they a

 I am late to the Tara Westover phenomenon, but I just finished Educated and wanted to recommend it.  Even at this late in the game, the story in this memoir was not quite what I expected. It was much more about mental illness, physical and emotional abuse, and dysfunctional families than I expected. It's stranger and more tragic than I expected.  There were interesting currents of religion throughout the book. Westover had been raised in a family where religion was twisted. It was nice to see her share how the mainstream religious establishment was generous and supportive. She overcomes so much, it is really not likely most people could do what she did. Which you see reflected in some of the characters who succumb to the culture of poverty. 

  K and I watched the first episode of the new Disney series, Obi-Wan Kenobi  last night. I enjoyed it. It started with a fun recap of the prequels (which I am not really a fan of, but my kids are). We have been watching The Mandalorian which I think is OK-ish. We have also been watching The Book of Boba Fett , which I think is less than OK-ish. Like, they could have done so much more with that. That said, I will probably continue to watch it, but I'm just not impressed. OBK seems to have more promise than either of the other spin-offs at this point. We'll see!

  With school out, I am back to working most days at the LHH. However, Daughter #2 and her roommates are still living with us, and one of the roommates is currently living in the bedroom I had converted to a home office, so I now have a makeshift office in my own bedroom. It's functional. K and I have enjoyed having the kids living with us, but we are all looking forward to them getting their own space (which will be June 6th). So I'm making do.

Top Traders Unplugged: GM12: WW3 is just the beginning ft. Peter Zeihan (79 min) https://www.toptradersunplugged.com/podcast/peter-zeihan-global-macro-series-april-27th-2022/ This is an amazing tour through current events and trends - politics, crypto, the war in Ukraine, and more - through the lens of finance and investment. This podcast reminded me of why I pursued my first masters in finance. Unlike people who write opinion pieces in newspapers, magazines, or on the internet, investors actually have real money at stake. They don’t just talk, and so they have to try to get past their own ideologies and prejudices so that they don’t lose money. Politicians, public intellectuals, and journalists can go on and on because ultimately they don’t have to be right.  This conversation with Zeihan will blow you away. He has a lot of heterodox ideas that are both exciting and scary about the future.

I flew through The State Boys Rebellion this week - I could not put it down. I found this book because I was doing some research for my Health Systems class, specifically for the chapter on policy. One of the topics that our textbook talked about was the horrible Tuskegee Syphilis Study , originally called the “Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male”. If you haven’t read about it, do click on the link above. It was a horror show run by the US Public Health Service. The USPHS allowed 399 Black men with syphilis to remain untreated from 1932 until 1973 when the Associated Press blew the whistle on the USPHS and forced them to stop withholding treatment. Because I didn’t want my students to write off such government abuse as simply something that happened in the South, I decided to do some research on something I was vaguely aware of from growing up in the Boston area. I remember driving by an abandoned school building with my mother in Waltham and asking her what the bu