Want to listen to today’s blog post? Hear it here. None of us was alive for the original Jim Crow laws back in the 1920s which made racial segregation legal in the southern United States. “Colored only” washrooms, poll taxes, “back of the bus” and IQ tests asking “how many bubbles in a bar of […]
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Want to listen to today’s blog post? Hear it here. Until the late 1800s, people worked six days a week, with Sunday their day of rest — and in many places, church. The idea of a weekend as two very different days “in which we can do what we please” was lovingly chronicled by Witold Rybczynski in Waiting
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Want to listen to today’s blog post? Hear it here. Travel porn isn’t travel for sex. It’s the pictures of destinations that are so gorgeous they defy the reality of even our most precious memory of a lovely place. It’s not my phrase. It’s an industry phrase. Some people would call Condé Nast Traveler travel porn. New
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Want to listen to today’s blog post? Hear it here. The Royal Bank of Canada has more employees than the Canadian Armed Forces – 86,000 compared to 68,000. While the Royal is the 11th largest bank worldwide, the Canadian Armed Forces rank 50th in size as a military force. In other words, our banks are
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Want to listen to today’s blog post? Hear it here. I used to write these Omnium-Gatherum (OG) blog posts every month, with 8 to 10 brief items to lead you down the rabbit hole. Now, they’ll land every week, a mark of how much strange and beguiling life is online these days, and how quick-like-a-bunny
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Want to listen to today’s blog post? Hear it here. In 1943, Winston Churchill allegedly ordered a special run of condoms to be manufactured at double the regular size. He then had them shipped to Moscow in boxes stamped “Made in Britain – Medium.” This reminds me of the fusillade of Long-Form essays sprouting up
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With few of us flying, we don’t hear stories of air rage anymore. They used to be all the rage, and on the rise. A nutter goes wild because a flight attendant doesn’t say “Please.”A frequent flyer doesn’t get his upgrade. Some fanboys drink too much, forcing the pilot to land in Dubuque. Booze is
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Want to listen to today’s blog post? Hear it here. I started writing The Plague-Ground last March 18th, five days after my wife, Jean, and I fled north to our cottage. Within a couple of weeks, most of my work had vaporized. RamsayTalks. RamsayTravels. In-person courses. All gone. For the first time in my life, I had little to
RamsayWrites – WHAT’S BETTER THAN SUBSCRIBING TO MY BELIEFS? SUBSCRIBING TO MY BLOG. Read More »
Want to listen to today’s blog post? Hear it here. Back in 2010, a publicist persuaded me to invite an unknown Columbia Law Professor to speak at a RamsayTalk about his new book. The Master Switch showed how tech companies that were dedicated to openness soon evolved into “a more closed system.”. Eleven years ago, this idea was
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Want to listen to today’s blog post? Hear it here. Today is International Women’s Day. As “days” go, it’s the biggest of all since it celebrates more than half the human race. But these days there are more ‘days’ and ‘weeks’, ‘months’ and ‘years’ than ever, from National Librarian Day, to British Pie Week, to Black History Month, to
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Rabbits get a bad rap these days. Or rather, their roads do as they hop from Uncle Remus’ house to Farmer John’s. A rabbit hole today is that dark cramped place where your addiction to social media takes you to confirm your political views. Any new or contrary idea dies in its darkness. But I
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Want to listen to today’s blog post? Hear it here. I don’t mean irrational exuberance in the economic sense. The phrase became instantly famous when Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan coined it in 1996 to describe the burgeoning internet bubble in the stock market. I mean irrational exuberance in the sexual sense. I mean it especially
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