There are days when I feel our species is a kind of orchestra that forgot the score but still plays with great confidence. Violins screaming in different keys, trumpets improvising in panic, the conductor having a small existential crisis. And yet, we insist with straight faces that this is rational decision-making. Kahneman, Sibony, and Sunstein gave a polite scientific name to this chaos: noise. Personally, I think they were … Read the rest
By Eric Le Roy
‘We have fallen in the dreams the ever living
Breathe on the tarnished mirror of the world
And then smooth out with ivory hands and sigh.”
(Yeats)
My life at an advanced age vacillates between flashes of murderous rage and periods of unaccountable serenity. When I sense the futility of thinking that anything much is going to change during my ‘golden years’, I … Read the rest
Europe is very easy to insult.
From a certain angle, the continent looks like an aging museum with Wi-Fi: polite, overregulated, uncomfortable with power, lost in its own procedures while other players move faster and hit harder. If you lived here in the 1970s and come back now, the contrast feels almost obscene. Where once your memory stored quiet town squares and local accents, now it finds the familiar … Read the rest
Tired after more than twelve hours working day I was driving home through Andrássy Street recently and got slowed down by the taxi drivers’ protest. Blue lights, horns, yellow cars squeezed together like irritated bees. In that moment, when the city suddenly becomes a bottleneck of human frustration, you cannot help wondering how many strange incentives are packed into one square kilometer of Budapest traffic.
At first glance they looked … Read the rest
By Eric Le Roy
I might be giving the game away if I tell you I’ve been married five times and now present myself as an authority on the best way to sustain a happy ‘holy’ matrimony. You’ll be forgiven for asking: How can this chronic nuptial fuck-up possibly have anything to say besides “Here is some advice you should immediately ignore”? It probably wouldn’t help if … Read the rest
