Jeffrey Goldberg tells Bob Cohn why he bought gold, stocked up on lanterns, consulted a survivalist -- and finally fired his broker.
"For most of our adult lives, my wife and I have behaved in the way responsible cogs of capitalism are supposed to behave--we invested in a carefully calibrated mix of equities and bonds; we bought and held; we didn’t overextend on real estate; we put the maximum in our 401(k) accounts; we gave to charity; and we saved, but we also spent: mainly on gasoline, food, and magazines. In retrospect, we didn’t have the proper appreciation for risk, but who did? We were children of the bull market. Even at its top, my investment portfolio was never anything to write home about. Its saving grace was that it was mine. And I imagined that when we did cash out, at 60 or 65, I would pass my time buying my wife semisubstantial pieces of jewelry and going bass fishing like the men in Flomax commercials. Well, goodbye to all that. I took a random walk down Wall Street and got hit by a bus."
Veteran rock climber Wayne Merry shares photos and stories from the first-ever ascent of Yosemite's El Capitan in the late 1950s.
"Wayne Merry returned to Yosemite a decade after that first ascent and started the Yosemite Mountaineering School. Soon after the school opened, I signed up and learned how to belay and rappel, and about the play of rock climbing on the senses: the clink of the hammer on a piton, the warmth of the sunlit granite under my hand, the radiant clouds sailing overhead. I learned not to look down much. All around was the beauty of Yosemite, those waterfalls crashing down the massive walls into the wildflowers, the mists sifting through the granite spires, the river pooling up in the meadows to capture reflections of sunrise and moonlight on the soaring cliffs."
James Parker shares a climactic scene from the film adaptation of Moore's Jack the Ripper story
"Moore retains a pagan suspicion of Hollywood, and has refused to so much as look at any of the adaptations of his work. The first two, it’s true, he would barely recognize: the Hughes brothers’ From Hell (2001) made a bloody hash of his multitiered Ripper-ography, while The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (2003) rendered the literary supermen of the graphic novel--Captain Nemo, Quatermain, etc.--as a sort of antiquarian A-Team. V for Vendetta (2006) was getting closer, but missed the original’s very English seep of paranoia--a tone, incidentally, that was perfectly caught by the same year’s Children of Men. And now we have Zack Snyder’s Watchmen--as devout and frame-by-frame a reworking as could be imagined."
Corby Kummer cooks the classic fish melange with Jewish food writer Joan Nathan as Jeffrey Goldberg kibbitzes on the sidelines.
