Debt: The First 5000 Years

July 31, 2013
Since Introduction to Macroeconomics with Professor Michael Claudon in my Freshman year, I have been passionately infatuated with the study of money and its profound effects on every aspect of our civilization and society. It is one of life's greatest marvels that something so ephemeral, dependent completely on a communal belief in its power, could be responsible for almost everything that man has ever made. How could we be so motivated by scraps of metal and paper that we would organize our entire lifestyle and human existence around it? I have always been both fascinated and repulsed by our obsession…

Reading “books”

August 9, 2010
Summer always affords good book reading opportunities, and I have bolted through a few in the past month. My first journey was into The Change with "Dies The Fire", a sci-fi novel taking place in 1998 from moments before a cataclysmic event which renders all engines, electronics and explosives useless. The aftermath is brutal; a struggle to survive in a suddenly lawless world, described precisely by S.M. Stirling. I look forward to continuing this series... "The Beach" by Alex Garland is another world of savagery that festers then erupts on a utopian tropical wonderland and was a huge challenge to…

Delivering Happiness

May 23, 2010
Caitlin sent me a link to an interview with Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos.com discussing his upcoming book. She wrote this note: This interview reminded me of you because you're happy and enjoy spreading happiness to others. That's why I love ya!! That is probably the nicest compliment I've ever gotten! What else is there besides happiness? It is the only real currency... all else is just a means of achieving it. And who better to spread this message than one of the richest men in the world? He gets it; he has accomplished more in the technology and business…

Freakonomics and Moneyball

May 13, 2010
I was an Economics major in college and anytime I tell people that they find it funny--probably because my job is playing music with kids instead of making money with money. I never had any interest in joining the corporate workforce but still found Econ the most interesting department at Middlebury. It incorporated so much about humanity, from history to psychology to our core values. The focus was usually money, but the how and why made the topic endlessly engaging. Stephen Levitt is an economist who brings the study into new realms; he sees the discipline as general tools to…

The Road

June 17, 2009
After six months of Infinite Jest, it was nice to speed through Cormac McCarthy's "The Road" in three days. It is the polar opposite of IJ in so many ways; staccato sentences with stark descriptions in contrast to epic details of minutiae, a barren world versus an oversaturated one, a simple story of survival against a complex web of culture. Despite their fundamental differences, both books are amazing, capturing the essence of humanity from different angles. The Road is a journey though a post-apocalyptic world, where life has been all but completely destroyed, and a father and son's struggle to…

Infinite Jest

June 11, 2009
The book turns out to be depressingly finite. At 1000 pages, it took me about six months to hack my way through, and still I feel like there isn't enough -- I am cruelly left hanging (as was David Foster Wallace...) -- as it ends without any resolution. The story is bizarre and compelling from the first few pages and weaves its way through so many interconnected lives of greatness and depravity, but feels after the last page turn as if we have just reached an intermission... I have previously read D.F.W.'s "Brief Interviews With Hideous Men", which is a…