The soul of a company

Dear H,

A fine article from Henry Pierson at The American Thinker:

Jack Ma, chief executive of Alibaba, one of the world's largest companies and the global competitor of Amazon.com, says he has a plan to keep his company going for a hundred years.  It sounds insane but that's what he wants.  It's his baby.  He has no idea what the next twenty years will be like, whether some new kind of warfare will rearrange society as we know it, or whether some unforeseen technology will make his style of business completely obsolete, or whether the people who succeed him are going to run it into the ground.  But he has a plan, and God bless him, he's aiming for the stars.

The nonsense we remember

Dear M,

I've written off David McCullough's John Adams for years now because I said it was written for children.  I made this bad judgment years ago based on the opening passages, in which Mr. McCullough described, in detailed terms, the weather of John Adams' morning.  I had no time, at that point in my life, to hear about the air quality on February X seventeen seventy-something, or about how the snow crunched, or about the kind of road he traveled on, or how the light looked.  The book came across as unserious and possibly a waste of time, so I shelved it, and eventually boxed it, and it's been sitting under my bed until now.