It’s a new year but not a clean slate. Ringing in this new year is different. The enormity of why it is different occurs to me as I try to start afresh, as I do each and every January 1st. In the past, there were no ties that couldn’t be…

My daughter’s friend posted this picture of her daughter watching Kamala Harris on Saturday night. Stella is almost two. It brought me back to my own life. I tell clients and customers that every person you are selling to needs to see a mirror of themself and a window into…

I Surmise: Lessons Learned. I have a country house in what I call “Deliverance.” There is a development not far from me in Dover Plains, New York, that is called Sherman Hill Estates, and there is a Lee’s Lane, Grant’s Road and Confederate Road as well. People in the stores…

Today my friend Cathy Montez died of COVID-19, which she believed she’d contracted at a spin class in Miami. She was a close friend. She was a good friend, an authentic friend, in that she wasn’t one to hide what she thought about what I did that pleased or displeased…

I wrote this on election day in 2016. I read it yesterday to see where my head was back then and I was stunned by the part about the girls in the nail salon. I had forgotten… Our country is not only illiterate (which I hadn’t understood four years ago)…

Aaron Sorkin’s Revival of Hartsfield Landing from The West Wing Less than five minutes into the remake of the Hartsfield Landing episode from Aaron Sorkin’s The West Wing, now streaming on HBO Max, as a guitar played a soulful rendition of the theme song, I started weeping. Weeping is different…

I Surmise: Letter to My Daughter on the Eve of the Election My dearest daughter, Sarah, I write this to you with the Amy Coney Barrett confirmation hearings going on in the background. A woman has been nominated to the Supreme Court of the United States of America to take…

There is always a tipping point — that moment in time when everything changes and you “know” deep down inside that the trajectory of something has changed, and the train wreck that you thought couldn’t be stopped, can, in fact, be stopped. Remember Howard Dean? Remember when he unexpectedly lost…

You must vote early and in person this year. It’s not enough to ‘just’ vote. “In the long history of the world, only a few generations have been granted the role of defending freedom in its hour of maximum danger.” — John F. Kennedy, Inaugural Address, 1961 This is that moment. More than when the Civil War was on the horizon. More than McCarthyism. More than Watergate, which right now looks like a misdemeanor.