The topsy-turvy financial and political events of the past two weeks have demonstrated the irrationality of our thinking at a time when clear thinking is what is most needed.
We rail against greedy Wall Street’s effect on Main Street as the DOW bounces around like a knuckleball without realizing that the two intersect. Yes, Main Street has traditionally supplied the workers for the companies traded on the Stock Exchanges – workers who’ve often been given the shaft by those companies, which are seeking greater profits and higher dividends for their shareholders. ...
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Read MoreWas that a great Super Bowl game or what? It had everything – an underdog (the victorious Philadelphia Eagles), a villain (the New England Patriots and Mr. “I’m Tom Brady and you’re not”), seesaw drama, frustrated placekickers, sleight-of-hand plays in the end zone and a modest hero (Eagles quarterback Nick Foles, the un-Brady). It was a most satisfying night, one that proved, as my beloved Aunt Mary always said, that if something is meant for you, it will be there for you – even if you’re an improbable second-string QB like Foles ...
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Read MoreI’m reading “Divine Fury: A History of Genius” (Basic Books, $29.99, 312 pages), which is just the kind of book I like – one in which the author takes the intellectual ball and runs with it. Darrin M. McMahon must be good at it. He also wrote “Happiness: A History.”
Genius, as he notes in his introduction, has meant many things to many different times. The word comes from the Latin, but the Romans, who cannibalized Greek culture, were really borrowing from the Greek “daimon.” Your daimon was – is – your guiding spirit, the link to the divine. Indeed, “Daimon” is the title of my unpublished novel about Alexander the Great, who like the Emperor Augustus and a host of ancient luminaries saw his daimon – his genius – as proof of his divinity. It wasn’t until the 18th century that we got the modern definition of genius as extraordinary creativity and accomplishment and not until the 20th century that we got the IQ tests that sought to quantify it.
McMahon rounds up the usual suspects... Read more
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