Latest blog posts

Steinbeck and the Delicacy of Coordination.

(Originally published in FMR’s Opus Magazine, August 2024). The American author John Steinbeck was 65 in 1967, when at the behest of Newsday magazine, he went to Vietnam to report on the war. (Steinbeck had received the Nobel prize for Literature in 1962). Alicia Patterson’s friend since 1956, he wrote a series of articles in the form of “Letters…

The Art of the Understatement.

(Originally published in FMR’s Opus Magazine, June 2024). By the time you receive this edition of Opus, the cacophony of mudslinging and empty promises we experienced during the May elections should be fading out. All the noise and hot air we had to endure, set me thinking about the value of FMR to our communal…

Systems Thinking.

(Originally published in FMR’s Opus Magazine, May 2024). The psychologist Daniel Kahneman recently died aged 90. He won the 2002 Nobel prize for economics, but about the subject he described himself as “mostly cheering … from the sidelines”. He achieved celebrity status in 2011 at the age of 77, and after a lifetime of rigorous…