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Most articles in the media that talk about the U.S. military focus on either on combat deaths (important reporting), family homecomings or major, high-tech weapons systems.

When the public hears about the military budget, the reporting usually focuses on major weapons systems: ships, fighter jets and the like.

That is why I found a recent article, “Trump Says the U.S. Is Ready for War. Not All His Troops Are So Sure,” so compelling. It focuses on readiness…and it paints a dire picture.

Here is a short excerpt:

If forced to fight in the Persian Gulf or the Korean Peninsula, the Navy and Marine Corps are likely to play crucial roles in holding strategic command of the sea and defending against ballistic missiles.

Those branches, though, do not need billions of dollars of new weapons, our examination revealed. They need to focus on the basics: their service members, their training and their equipment.

The Government Accountability Office, Congress’s watchdog, has been sounding the alarm for years, to little effect. In 2016, the G.A.O. found that years of warfare in Iraq and Afghanistan had taken their toll: “The military services have reported persistently low readiness levels.”

You can read the full article here

With the Australian Open in full swing this week, even with the dreadful fires that are sweeping the continent, much of the attention is on young phenom such as Coco Gauff.

But this year, at the Australian Open, as well as at tennis’ three other “majors” (French Open, Wimbledon and the U.S. Open) there is much attention on the men’s side.

Three players are vying for the title of “world’s greatest” tennis player. The unit of measure in this chase is number of majors won.

Roger Federer is the current leader, but other, younger players are catching up.

Full disclosure, I am a Federer fan. That’s why I was struck by a recent piece, “Roger Federer Will Always Be the Greatest (Even if He’s Not).”

Here is a short excerpt that likely tells you everything you need to know about Roger:

“But there are certain things that the numbers can’t convey. They won’t show that Federer played tennis more beautifully than it has ever been played, or that during his career he was the world’s most adored athlete, revered for the elegance of his game and his graciousness on and off the court. Without intending to downplay the significance of wins and losses and Grand Slam titles, those aspects of his legacy will ultimately matter more and prove to be more enduring.”

Want more? You can read the rest of the piece here

Most of us who write spend some time analyzing the work of successful writers, looking for tactics, techniques and procedures to up our game.

The release of the highly successful movie, Little Women, has drawn new – and useful – attention to Louisa May Alcott’s book.

I read the book decades ago, and enjoyed the movie, and that is why I gravitated to a recent piece, ‘Jo Was Everything I Wanted to Be’: 5 Writers on ‘Little Women.’

The subtitle is useful: “Julia Alvarez, Virginia Kantra, Anna Quindlen, Sonia Sanchez and Jennifer Weiner talk about how the book, now a hit movie, inspired them.”

I’ll bet if you read there short analytical pieces it will help you up your game as well!

Want to read these five excellent commentaries? You can read the full article here

Given the multiple conflicts going on the world TODAY, not the least of which is the friction between the United States and Iran, the subject of war is likely on everyone’s minds.

At times like these, it is useful to look beyond the often-shrill headlines to try to deep-dive into the essence of warfare.

That is why I was drawn to a recent book review of a new translation of The Art of War by Sun Tzu. The article title, “Well, If You Insist On Going To War,” drew me in. It begins:

The most electric war plan in semi-recent American literature appears in “A Run Through the Jungle,” a story by the much-missed Thom Jones. Here is that plan in its entirety: “Infiltrate Hanoi, grab Uncle Ho by the goatee, pull off his face and make a clean escape.” Because warfare is rarely so simple, books of strategy are consulted.

The most venerable of these, alongside “On War” (1832), by the Prussian general Carl von Clausewitz, is Sun Tzu’s “The Art of War,” written some 2,500 years ago. There have been many translations of “The Art of War,” and a new one, by Michael Nylan, will not be the last. It’s a book that seems perpetually useful because it’s a work of philosophy as much as tactics. Doves and hawks (even vultures) can approach it for meaning. The book suggests that the real art of war is not to have to go to war.

I’ve read Sun Tzu several times, in different translations. I’m not sure why I return to it: It’s short, it’s a classic, it’s there. The book’s lessons in deception seem not to stick with me. In my mind, I’m the least devious person in the world, my motives there for all to see. But that is what a devious person would say, isn’t it?

You can read the full article here

I often think that if I read all of Tim Herrera’s “Smarter Living” articles in the New York Times and did only half the things he suggested, I’d live to be 100 and be the happiest human on earth.

He hit it out of the park with his most recent missive 9 Delightful Tips for Living a Smarter Life in 2020. He emphasizes that these are all SMALL things that have IMPACTS. Here’s how he begins:

Readers of the Smarter Living newsletter know that its third section is quietly one of the best resources for small ideas that can have a huge impact.

Each week, I invite some of my favorite writers to give easy-to-do tips on everything from getting in your daily veggies to knowing whether you should mix business and friendship.

Below are the nine tips that completely blew my mind this year. Some are so obvious you’ll kick yourself for not already doing them, and others are so weird you just have to try them.

Want to see what these are? You can read the rest of the piece here

A great deal of ink has been spilled trying to guess where technology is moving in the future. After decades of spectacular advances, many think this progress have peaked.

I don’t think they have, and those thoughts were supported in a recent article by Andy Kessler who follows technology for the Wall Street Journal. Here is how he begins:

Does history rhyme? A century ago, the ’20s boomed, driven by consumer spending on homes, cars, radios and newfangled appliances like refrigerators, sewing machines and vacuum cleaners. Most Americans couldn’t afford the upfront cost of a lot of these goods, so manufacturers and retailers invented installment plans. Debt ruled as 75% of cars, furniture and washing machines were bought on credit.

So what’s next? My fundamental rule for finding growth trends is that you need to see viable technologies today, and then predict which ones will get cheaper and better over time. Microprocessors, storage, bandwidth—all still going strong after half a century.

The fundamental building block of the 2020s will be artificial intelligence, particularly machine learning. Better to ask what it won’t change this decade. The artificial neural networks that made face and voice recognition viable were the low-hanging fruit. Now chips tailor-made for machine learning are increasing speed and cutting costs. A recent Stanford report suggests that the power behind the most advanced AI computations is doubling nearly every three months, outpacing Moore’s Law by a factor of six.

Want more? You can read the full article here

In the midst of the current conflict with Iran, our attention often falls on the commander-in-chief and the general officers who work for him.

There have been more retired military officers working in key positions in the current administration than in recent memory.

Many wonder why that is, as well as how it is contributing to the security and prosperity of our nation. That’s why I was drawn to a recent book review, “Military Delusions.” Here is how Eliot Cohen’s review of Peter Bergen’s book begins:

Luckily, no one makes us read a book that covers all of our bad moments in the dental chair — the tut-tutting about a cracked tooth, the anesthetic-charged needle sliding into soft tissue, the high-pitched whine of the drill, the grating sound of enamel being ground away, the bleeding gum, the anodyne assurance that there are only four more visits left before the restoration is complete. Unfortunately, Peter Bergen has decided to have his readers relive the Trump foreign and national security policy equivalent in this account of the first three years of the current administration.

There it all is — the spectacular flameouts, from semitragic former generals ending up in court to harlequins flitting through White House corridors; the kooky theories of “The Fourth Turning,” which informed Stephen Bannon’s understanding of American history; the impulsive hires of Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and the national security adviser H. R. McMaster, and their humiliating tweet-singed send-offs; the jumped-up mediocrities incapable of writing a memo and the multimillionaires on the make with schemes to outsource the Afghan war; the birther conspiracy theories about Barack Obama; Kellyanne Conway’s invocation of the Bowling Green massacre and alternative facts; the constant expletive-laden discourse in which major American foreign policy decisions were conceptualized by the president as variations on the Anglo-Saxon monosyllable for sexual intercourse; the contempt for human rights, loyalty to allies and fidelity to covenants. And all this before the Ukrainian quid pro quo.

You can read the full article here

The turning of the year is a time when most of us pause to reflect. For many, part of that assessment is wondering whether our world is getting better or worse.

There are many reasons for feeling that we are moving in the wrong direction: war, climate change, homelessness and other issues. The list of bad things is often overwhelming.

That is why, every year, I am uplifted by Nicholas Kristof’s article assessing the year. Here is how he begins:

If you’re depressed by the state of the world, let me toss out an idea: In the long arc of human history, 2019 has been the best year ever.

The bad things that you fret about are true. But it’s also true that since modern humans emerged about 200,000 years ago, 2019 was probably the year in which children were least likely to die, adults were least likely to be illiterate and people were least likely to suffer excruciating and disfiguring diseases.

Every single day in recent years, another 325,000 people got their first access to electricity. Each day, more than 200,000 got piped water for the first time. And some 650,000 went online for the first time, every single day.

Perhaps the greatest calamity for anyone is to lose a child. That used to be common: Historically, almost half of all humans died in childhood. As recently as 1950, 27 percent of all children still died by age 15. Now that figure has dropped to about 4 percent.

“If you were given the opportunity to choose the time you were born in, it’d be pretty risky to choose a time in any of the thousands of generations in the past,” noted Max Roser, an Oxford University economist who runs the Our World in Data website. “Almost everyone lived in poverty, hunger was widespread and famines common.”

But … but … but President Trump! But climate change! War in Yemen! Starvation in Venezuela! Risk of nuclear war with North Korea. …

All those are important concerns, and that’s why I write about them regularly. Yet I fear that the news media and the humanitarian world focus so relentlessly on the bad news that we leave the public believing that every trend is going in the wrong direction. A majority of Americans say in polls that the share of the world population living in poverty is increasing — yet one of the trends of the last 50 years has been a huge reduction in global poverty.

Want more? You can read the rest of the piece here

Who do we look up to? Movie stars? Maybe? Sports figures? Sure?

But when we think about it, those people seen different, not like us, possessing special skills.

How about technology industry leaders? Aren’t they just average Joes who were tinkering around in their garages and got lucky?

We can identify with them, so we tend to make them, so we make them our idols.

But that is changing. That’s why I was drawn to a piece, “Twilight of the Tech Idols.” Here is how it begins:

The banking industry, which has consistently been one of the wealthiest industries for the last few centuries, has very few leaders one would call “heroes” or “idols.” Most of them are part of a group of men who fought and finessed their way to the top by being good at corporate politics and managing other bankers.

Silicon Valley, in stark contrast, was built on the myth of the visionary heroic geek. A succession of Tech Heroes — from Steve Jobs at Apple and Bill Gates at Microsoft through Larry Page and Sergey Brin at Google to Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook — embodied the American dream. They were regular guys and middle-class youngsters (several of them from immigrant families), whose new technology changed the world and made them extremely wealthy.

The Tech Heroes also made for fabulous media stories. As their businesses grew, they got breathless press coverage as they promised to “disrupt” one industry or another. It nearly got to the point where if a Google founder sneezed, an article could quickly follow: “Will Google Reinvent the Sneeze?” Critics warned of troubles and monopolies ahead, but their voices were outnumbered and drowned out by the cheerleaders.

Want more? You can read the rest of the piece here

Occasionally, it’s worth looking back to see how people thought things would turn out.

Years ago I read a piece, “Novelists Predict Future With Eerie Accuracy.”

Fast forward: Were they right? See for yourself. Here is part of the article

The dirty little secret of speculative fiction is that it’s hard to go wrong predicting that things will get worse. But while avoiding the nihilism of novels like Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road,” in which a father and son wander a hopeless post-apocalyptic moonscape, a number of recent books foresee futures that seem more than plausible as the nation’s ambient level of weirdness rises.

Albert Brooks, the actor and director, brought out “2030,” in which the nation’s economy is sent into a spin by seemingly good news: cancer is cured. The bad-news twist: the resulting drain on national resources by an aging population that no longer conforms to the actuarial tables and continues to consume resources at baby-boomer rates, and a rather literal twist on the notion of intergenerational warfare. “I chose not to go too far,” Mr. Brooks said. “I liked having more present in my future.”

In “Ready Player One,” the novelist Ernest Cline extrapolates from the ripples that rising energy prices and climate change send through the economy, and gives us a future where the suburbs die off and many people are packed into in high-rise urban trailer parks, spending their days on an increasingly addictive Internet instead of facing the quotidian squalor. Readers who spend so much time issuing updates via Twitter, Facebook and Google+ that they have forgotten what their spouses look like might see themselves reflected in Mr. Cline’s funhouse mirror. “I did try to envision it as a possible future,” Mr. Cline said. “I don’t see it as a future we’re necessarily headed for.”

Want to know what’s ahead – keep reading!

Want more? You can read the full article here