Archive • Divertidos • Buttondown

Thinking of you

November 22, 2025

I had promised that I would digitize, translate and publish my mother’s first book by the time of her birthday, November 23. But I have failed to do so....

Only hard work creates value.

November 15, 2025

Last night I made mediocre Korean food. We could all taste it. Bland, tough, sour. A gallery of disappointments. The fault, of course, was entirely mine. I...

November 1, 2025

If you do nothing else, watch this: As noted here many years ago, it’s much cheaper to produce bullshit than the truth. And we, in America, are ruled by the...

The path of most resistance

October 21, 2025

A drunk person came into our house last week and threatened to steal all of our belongings. Unless we paid him off. (You can read about it here. Please vote...

October 5, 2025

If you’re reading this, you’re quite good at abstraction. You can turn ideas into words and words into actions. That power – that privilege – can also be a...

suffering fools

September 30, 2025

The word “fool” has been cheapened. It used to mean a crazy person. That’s the correct meaning. A person who has lost their wits. We in the USA currently...

The Center Must Not Hold

September 20, 2025

A few years back it became fashionable for clever people who read clever books to quote a poem from 1919 called “The Second Coming”. They bemoaned that “the...

good news that can still happen

September 1, 2025

Let me tell you the good that can still happen. My 13 year-old son is very meticulous. Almost, to a flaw. He’s been penalized at school – and at home – for...

August 24, 2025

When you think about it, it’s kind of funny. The world’s most powerful, most advanced civilization let an absolute baby destroy their machinery from the...

August 10, 2025

Kids understand the world differently: as places of opportunity for play. So it was that at age 8, walking down the sidewalk with my father, I saw a brown...

I came into this world by my mother and she left this world by me. I invite you to read some of what she wrote a decade ago when she had the occasion to...

Like almost everyone else alive, and who has ever lived, I want to please people. So I preface this letter with a hopeful statement that is also true: The...

1877-present Because I live at the epicenter of the zone that is being flooded, my nervous system is an alternating current of exhaustion and outrage. There...

If we don’t want to be trapped in war, abroad and at home, we must recover our shame. I come from a different time. I believe that there are certain things...

We must be open.

We learn by imitating others. Steve Jobs was very smart, very successful and very productive. In 2002, Steve Jobs learned that he had pancreatic cancer....

Today I’ve seen three videos of US citizens being detained by whoever ICE is these days – masked men, flashing assault weapons. The US citizens were detained...

What flag do you need to see?

As many as 10,000 Los Angelenos marched this past Sunday under flags of all colors; rainbow, Stars and Stripes included. Apparently those flags made them...

bonus: billion dollar idea

An app that scrapes the transcripts of YouTube videos, so that I can read them in 20 seconds instead of watching for 10 minutes. The app also summarizes the...

We learn by example. The Bible is full of examples. So are Harvard MBA courses. For example, in the 1930s, the self-made Jewish immigrants who ran Hollywood...

Unity and love and respect.

This man has absolutely no idea what the Declaration of Independence means because he’s never read it. And he doesn’t think he needs to. Because he knows...