In this weekend’s Review Section of the Wall Street Journal, I try to tackle the reasons smart people were so dumb. Sex aside, why did Senators, scientists, Wall Street’s top lawyer, doctors, and entrepreneurs park their morals before they entered his lair?

I believe I know why: it’s how power ticks in New York. Here, I’m not judging nor exonerating, my goal is to explain.

Read More at the WSJ

He’s to the point, original, and doesn’t shy from difficult questions – in fact, he attacks them with grace, wit, and honesty. Sit with a cup of tea or a glass of wine and enjoy an interview where you may learn about art as an asset class, how to handle a testy billionaire or a self-questioning creative type, and the very role art plays in our democracy.

Read on and enjoy at the Wall Street Journal.

Holly

And, by the way, please subscribe to this great newspaper and any newspaper or magazine you enjoy. We all thrive from an active press that relies on devoted readers!

MoMA’s Former Director on How to Handle Artists and Billionaires

FOR THE PAST three decades, Glenn Lowry made a habit of traipsing through each gallery of the 708,000-square-foot Museum of Modern Art in New York City on weekday mornings. Trim and fit, wearing his signature Nehru-collared jacket, he might have been found kneeling to erase a smudge on the wall, peering up to check on a painting’s lighting or simply standing alone in a corner, witnessing how people flowed through a gallery. Lowry admits, “I drove the facilities guys crazy.”

Continue Reading at the WSJ

WOULD YOU HIRE a lawyer who doesn’t have a desk in his office, admits he rarely reads and won’t accept a memo longer than a single page from his legal colleagues? Mariah Carey, Lady Gaga, Elton John, David Zaslav and Bob Iger all did.

Allen Grubman, 82, is the last of a breed of entertainment dealmakers who have represented both the talent and old-school industry tycoons. He grew up in a middle-class Jewish home in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, to immigrant parents who worked in the garment industry. Sunday dinner meant going out for Chinese food; during the week, it was frankfurters with sauerkraut and mustard at the corner deli. At 11, a stint on NBC’s Horn and Hardart variety show exposed him to the glamour of the city—the steakhouses NBC treated the cast to and the limousines they sent to pick him up on Saturday mornings. He knew he wanted more.

Long before he would go on to become the only practicing lawyer honored by the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame (Grubman was inducted in 2022 for negotiating agreements that allowed artists to maintain more creative control over their work), he attended Brooklyn Law School. Graduates were “encouraged to work for ambulance-chaser negligence firms,” he says, but Grubman took a different path, charming his way into a law firm after several others would not hire him.

In 1974, he founded his own firm specializing in entertainment law, a niche many highbrow Wall Street lawyers dismissed as frivolous at the time. At first he signed disco and funk groups such as KC and the Sunshine Band and Kool & the Gang. Within a decade, he’d landed Bruce Springsteen and Madonna as lifelong clients, followed by Robert De Niro, Rod Stewart, U2, J. Lo, Whitney Houston, the Weeknd and Ana de Armas.

Looking back, he attributes his success to his humble beginnings. “The greatest gift my parents gave me,” he says, “was the gift of giving me nothing. I knew I had to roll up my sleeves.”

Is success fun?

Fantastic. I was an unimpressive kid from Brooklyn. For me, it’s a wonderful thing.

How’d you become a mega-lawyer?

Common sense, street smarts, the ability to communicate with people and have people respect you and like you and want to work with you. You can’t be taught that in school.

How much of your time do you spend being a psychiatrist for your clients?

100%. Seriously.

Do you have a good bulls— detector?

Everybody is full of s—, it’s just a question of degree. They exaggerate, they lie. Nobody tells 100% of the truth 100% of the time. You pay compliments to people all the time.

Are you OK lying ever?

I never, ever lie to anybody. I’m incapable of lying.

Not even a white lie to avoid upsetting someone?

I’m so blunt and direct. My wife says it’s amazing that I haven’t been run over by a car.

Do you prepare your clients for the downside?

I am not as honest with artists as I am with executive clients. Artists’ egos are more fragile. To become a very successful artist, you have to always be questioning yourself. Is this material good? Is this movie script good? CEOs make decisions every day; any one decision is not as monumentally important as it is for an artist preparing for a new album or to perform in a movie.

Were your parents tough on you?

I came from a very middle-class, immigrant Jewish family in Brooklyn. My parents gave me a roof over my head. They fed me. They loved me. But I understood if I was going to make something of myself, I had to do it myself.

Were you cool in high school?

I was a normal, average guy with average friends. I wasn’t in the in-group, you know, the most popular kids. Steve Rubell, who started Studio 54 many years later, was in my high school. Everybody loved him.

You say you weren’t a great student. How come?

I always say I graduated in the top 100% of my class. My grades suffered because I always had to work after school. I worked for Barricini candy. I worked at a button factory as a stock boy. All kinds of jobs, anything to make a few dollars. It wasn’t about using my mind. I was using my legs. If I didn’t work, I didn’t have pocket money.

You figured out how to hustle. What do you think about rich kids who don’t have to be stock boys or girls?

Being born with wealth, to me, is a curse. This is why many of my wealthy friends have children who don’t have ambition, hunger or this burning desire to achieve. It’s all been handed to them.

I find most self-made leaders are propelled by a childhood they wanted to fix or escape from. What gives you the drive to keep working at 82?

I remembered how glamorous the entertainment business was when I was 11 and 12. On Saturday mornings, an NBC limousine would come to the house for my part on the Horn and Hardart show. I wanted more of that. In my neighborhood, the only time you ever saw a limousine was behind a hearse at a funeral.

When did you start to feel rich?

In 1987, I separated from my first wife and was looking for an apartment. The broker opens the door, and there’s a butler. And I said, “What’s this?” He tells me the apartment comes with a butler. I said, “We don’t have to go inside. I’m taking it.” What does the butler do? “Yes, sir, can I serve you your breakfast?” It was hysterical. I said to my friends, “You got to come here. You got to see this.” That was the first time this kid from Brooklyn sensed that my life was different than an ordinary person.

It’s impossible to predict a hit in film or music. How do musicians keep writing music, not knowing whether it will succeed?

Musicians have to get the door open and then be smart enough to walk through. For example, a big record company was doing a dance album for some unknown movie. They wanted the Bee Gees to do three or four tracks as a favor. It’s a bulls— album! I make a deal for their producers in five minutes, an advance of a few grand for each of the band members. The Bee Gees banged out the tracks in a studio, not really knowing what it was for. Well, the movie was Saturday Night Fever. As for Barry Gibb, I don’t know if he said to himself, “This is an opportunity,” or “I’m getting stuck with a favor.”

You must know a lot about pop music, having represented Lady Gaga, the Weeknd and Mariah Carey.

I’m not encyclopedic about anything. I never absorbed a lot of information.

Do you have files all over your desk, with so many clients and contracts?

My office is a living room. I don’t have a desk.

So everything is in your head?

When anybody’s doing a deal in the office and they’re going to need my help, no matter how complicated the deal is, it has to be on one page. If it’s more than a page, I give it back to them. In fact, when they bring me the memo, I say, “OK, I put it down. Tell me what the issues are.”

What advice do you give to your CEO executive clients, say, of a media company?

As soon as somebody becomes CEO of a media company, the clock is ticking. They always end up leaving. It’s just a question of when. Do the best you can do, take advantage of every opportunity, but eventually you will end up having to leave.

Why?

That’s the system. The head of a media company is always under pressure to create successful content. At some point in time, you go through a difficult period, and when that happens, they bring in fresh blood.

Are you a tough negotiator?

People tell me and will tell you that I’m the greatest negotiator ever in the entertainment business.

What makes for a good negotiation?

When you walk away from negotiation, both sides should feel the same way—happy, but also a little sad that they didn’t get everything they wanted. That’s a success. If you walk away delighted that you got everything, the guy who got screwed will be waiting for the opportunity to get you back. Getting everything you want is the beginning of the end of the relationship.

What’s more important, cojones or luck?

Luck. Most people are not alert enough to recognize the opportunity.

Tell me about a lucky client.

I represented two French record producers from Paris who came to America to make their fortune. They put together a group of four random guys with an idea in their heads. One producer asked if he could borrow the piano in my living room. The French guy just sat down and wrote “YMCA” and “In the Navy” over an afternoon. I sent the tracks to a record company, not thinking much of it. Two weeks later, a guy from the company calls me in a panic about the songs: “Did you send the tracks to anyone else?” I’d forgotten that I sent it to him. They went crazy; they released it and it became the Village People.

You say your EQ is higher than your IQ.

I have 50 lawyers who work for me. They all have very high IQs. They went to Harvard, they went to Yale, they went to NYU. And what do they do? They’re great lawyers. They know how to draft contracts. EQ is emotional intelligence. It is something you’re born with, and hopefully you’re able to refine it to an art form.

What’s the biggest turnoff in Hollywood?

When someone tries to convince you who they are, when I know they’re not. I grew up in the garment business. Every summer we would go to the Catskill Mountains for a week. Everybody was lying about pretending to own their whole company. It was so obvious. The entertainment industry, you can’t lie, even if you want to. Everybody knows who’s successful and everybody knows who’s not.

What do you think about rich people being cheap?

If being cheap means that you don’t understand how you should enjoy every pleasure in life, materially, that you’re capable of having—if you don’t experience that, you’re a fool.

What about being cheap with people who work for you?

To me that is an enormous character flaw. The best way to spend money inexpensively and get the most out of it is overtipping people. Because the people you tip often don’t make that much money. They appreciate it 10 times more than the extra money costs you.

Tell me about greed.

The person that’s giving always thinks they’re giving too much. The person that’s getting always thinks they’re getting too little. That is the essence of life.

Do you like to buy stuff? Do you like to buy cashmere sweaters, watches?

Clothes are the only thing I spend money on.

Why not watches?

[Looks at his phone] It’s now 11:02. What do you need a watch for?

What kind of car do you drive?

I’m a pretentious Jew. In New York, I have a car and driver, a Maybach, you know? I deserve it.

Are you going to retire?

No. I don’t think New York guys really retire. I have no interests. I don’t play golf, I don’t play tennis. What am I going to do?

In my latest Earn Your Luck column for the Wall Street Journal, Freston opens up about the early struggle to make people believe in the MTV dream…how they bugged David Bowie on vacation ski slopes and got him to scream, “I WANT MY MTV!” on video. Bowie and Mick Jagger helped market the fledgling network to cable stations that had refused to carry it. He also talks about Bob Pittman throwing tequila shots against the wall and his whole MTV team, in turn, uploading plants and overturning aquariums, destroying various bars in the process.

And, the most ridiculous story in the book: when Sumner Redstone asked Freston to take him around Bangkok sex clubs, even though sex clubs weren’t Tom’s thing at all.

Read More at the Wall Street Journal

IN THE EARLY DAYS of MTV, the receptionist sold cocaine and the office had one clothing rule: no frontal nudity. Such was the circus atmosphere of the place, according to Tom Freston, whose memoir, “Unplugged,” reveals how a team of die-hard believers turned music into television.

By 1969, he’d earned an M.B.A., but soon after nixed his banker-bro side part, quitting his job at Benton & Bowles advertising firm. Why? He says talking about mouthwash or toilet paper for hours with clients “didn’t turn me on.”

Instead, Freston hopscotched the globe for a decade, living in Southeast Asia as he launched a multimillion-dollar clothing business. Returning to the U.S. in 1979, he became part of the initial squad that launched MTV in August 1981 with a paltry 160 music videos.

Freston’s unusual and messianic marketing department got megastars like David Bowie and Mick Jagger to scream, “I Want My MTV!”—a campaign designed to strong-arm cable systems into carrying the fledgling station. Between seductive advertisements and must-see videos, Freston and his cohorts had made enough noise by 1985 that Viacom decided to purchase MTV Networks for $550 million (a deal that included Nickelodeon and VH1). Two years later, Sumner Redstone made a hostile bid for Viacom, buying the company for $3.4 billion.

Freston drove consistent double-digit growth for 17 years; by 2001 the company had reached $3 billion in revenue—the shiniest gem in the Viacom universe. Hiring misfits and creative oddballs, Freston and his team launched Comedy Central and stars including Bill Maher, Jon Stewart, Jimmy Kimmel, Stephen Colbert and John Oliver.

MTV is back in the headlines, with David Ellison’s Paramount looking to revive its legacy with younger listeners—a tough road, given that the median MTV audience is now 56 years old, according to Nielsen, and that the brand’s cachet faded in the post-Freston era with the rise of digital media. Here, the CEO who built the company into a juggernaut talks about how the unconventional network fought its way into the mainstream.

Read More at the Wall Street Journal

The latest column in my Earn Your Luck Series for the Wall Street Journal, where I interview leaders on the role luck played in their rocket ship trajectory to the tippy top. In this month’s installment, Ruth Porat, President and Chief Investment Officer of Alphabet talks about everything from employee habits that drive her nuts to having to Google terms in her first Google meetings to why A.I. is like playing with fire.

Oh, and she loves to dance, and I’ve seen her as the first and last one on the dance floor.

Read More at the Wall Street Journal

When Ruth Porat was 6 years old, her physicist father would come home from his job at the Stanford Accelerator Laboratory and the two would tinker for hours in the garage, soldering radios and adding machines. Perhaps he had a hunch that putting his daughter at ease around gadgets would one day set her up for a good job.

How about a massive job? Today, as the chief investment officer and president of Alphabet and its subsidiary Google, Porat oversees global corporate investments as well as Alphabet’s “other bets,” including Waymo self-driving cars and the drone-delivery startup Wing. During her decadelong tenure, the company’s market capitalization has soared from $384 billion to nearly $3 trillion.

Porat is known for the clarity of her vision and intent, despite her leadership role at a company that includes a dizzying array of products, such as Google Search and Cloud, YouTube, Android and Chrome. To maximize her team’s output, she pushes her teams to stop focusing on the branches—“Look at the whole tree.”

Before arriving in Silicon Valley, Porat hacked her way through the jungles of Wall Street. Starting in the mergers and acquisitions department at Morgan Stanley months before the crash of 1987, she went on to co-head tech investment banking during the early, heady days of the internet. These smart risks opened new doors and eventually led to her running the financial institutions group (a position, she says, that she had initially assumed would be “so boring”).

How does Porat explain her rise? “My record of making things work and delivering so people wanted to take a risk on me.” It’s just one of the reasons leaders in the private and public sector have placed her in central roles—and often in the hottest of hot seats.

Read More at the Wall Street Journal

Bill Ackman, CEO of Pershing Square, is reviled by some, and applauded by others. One thing everyone agrees on: he’s the loudest figure in the financial sphere. As the next installment for my “Earn Your Luck” column in The Wall Street Journal, he’s loud, brash, and, I must add, damn articulate. Clear and direct in his answers, Ackman covers his wins, losses, and the role of luck in his career. He tackles why he’s one of the sole figures on Wall Street willing to take controversial stances on politics, anti-Semitism, and free speech. When it comes to his money, I ask what he’s neurotic about. He said nothing. I told him I didn’t believe him. So…with a little pushing, he played ball throughout.

Read More at the Wall Street Journal

Enjoy and add some oomph to your Monday.

I once dated a Frenchman for his cashmere blazer—the buttery feel on my cheek, the faint caramel scent in the chilly October sun. We lasted one Parisian autumn. I was more in love with the style than the man.

This fall, on urban sidewalks and rural paths, you’ll find plenty of variations on that country-gentleman look: tweed blazers, chocolate-suede laced ankle boots and a playful purple sock peeking out from under a forest-green corduroy cuff. Not to mention all those of-the-moment barn jackets. Brands in this space include Loro Piana, Fendi (which last year released a Princess Anne-inspired menswear collection) and, if you fancy a cashmere sweater pricier than a Porsche 911, the Italian brand Brunello Cucinelli.

The style is rooted in the culture of the British grouse shoot, where European men and women stomp through muddy hillsides, typically in shooting parties of nine or ten. Whether shooting or watching, they don tweed suit jackets and trousers, wool buttoned vests and earth-colored sweaters—a look as far from the tactical cargo gear and backward baseball caps of American hunters as a banana split is from a flaky Napoleon pastry. (The best shooting grounds in both the U.S. and U.K. are models of conservation for nongame wildlife and proper land use. All downed birds are sold for their free-range meat.)

Read More at the Wall Street Journal

Dear Friends and Colleagues:

Perhaps my latest Wall Street Journal columns are of interest as you read your papers. I ask our most prominent leaders what role luck played in their ascent. This month:

• Peter Brant, a billionaire industrialist and philanthropist with very sad lows and intense highs along the way, talks about the liquidity of art, which most investors and portfolio managers disagree with. Doesn’t hurt that he started collecting his hundreds of blue-chip Warhols and Basquiats in college and his twenties.

• Donna Karan, knew from the beginning what working women wanted: to be comfortable and confident at work and go into night events seamlessly from the office. Remember the chic, smart woman in the back of her limo, with a baby in her lap?

My subjects’ answers differ more than their leadership styles: some, such as media powerhouse Barry Diller, believes luck, or serendipity, was the key to his getting positions at the tippy top. Ursula Burns, who motored from intern to CEO at Xerox, believes luck is finding a $100 bill on the sidewalk, but people earn their luck with hard work and team coordination. “You don’t just walk in and get promoted one day.”

I asked her:

What about accidental inventions, like those 3M researchers who inadvertently made adhesive glue that created the first Post-it Notes?

Not luck! Do you have any idea how many years and brutal hours those people worked in the lab to make that so-called mistake?!

Each leader speaks honestly with humor and humility.

Earn Your Luck: Peter Brant

Earn Your Luck: Donna Karan

Thank you, and please do subscribe to all outlets you devour. Journalists, authors, editors, and publishers rely on your commitment to their essential craft.

Holly

In high school, Peter Brant cut class to gamble on horse racing at the Aqueduct Racetrack in Queens, New York, by asking an adult to take him inside. At the University of Colorado, he partied at fraternities with such gusto his father took away his car keys until his grades improved. Average kid stuff—if you consider it normal for a 19-year-old to use his stock market earnings to buy art from a then virtually unknown Andy Warhol.

Brant, 78, says spotting the artist’s genius early wasn’t luck. “I just knew it,” he says. “I was always a believer.” He went on acquiring contemporary art, selling some works purchased later for as much as $100 million. His advice on detecting a masterpiece? Go look at it in a museum 50 times; you’ll learn something every time.

Brant’s transformation of the family paper business, by purchasing several paper mills and expanding operations, turned him into a billionaire industrialist and the philanthropist behind the Brant Foundation, Inc., dedicated to the exhibition and study of contemporary art. He purchased Warhol’s Interview magazine from the estate in 1987 and owned it until 2018, when his daughter Kelly relaunched it. Now CEO of newsprint-manufacturer White Birch Paper (The Wall Street Journal is a customer), he restructured the company in 2020 under Chapter 11 because of declining demand.

Brant’s life has been riddled with epic lows. Now married to his second wife, supermodel Stephanie Seymour, he’s lost two of his nine children (Harry, who died from an accidental overdose at 24, and Ryan, who died of cardiac arrest at 47). He also got into legal trouble in 1984 for failure to keep proper records, a misdemeanor that he calls “a horrible experience” but which he credits with making him a better person.

But Brant has also experienced expansive highs, as a polo player who reached the highest rating for an amateur and as the breeder of champion thoroughbreds. Swale, a dark bay colt he co-owned, won the Kentucky Derby in 1984, while several others bred by Brant won the Breeders’ Cup. His youthful obsession with horses, which he now calls a “disease of passion,” paid off.

Read More At the Wall Street Journal

Though tricky to confirm, Donna Karan is almost certain she’s improved the sex lives of her customers. Her essential pieces prize comfort and confidence over constrictive patterns, putting men and women at ease with their body and look. And because she tries on all her creations herself (and, as she freely admits, doesn’t wear a bra), most of her colleagues have seen her topless at some point. At times forgetting she was half-naked when someone popped into her office, she’d simply ask, “Yes? What do you need?”

Karan’s authority blossomed early when she became the head designer of Anne Klein at age 25. It didn’t hurt that she’d grown up on Seventh Avenue (both parents worked in fashion; as a girl she watched the Thanksgiving parade from her father’s second-floor office at Macy’s). In 1985, then 36, she launched her own company, Donna Karan New York, with seven pieces that moved gracefully from day to night, from work to socializing. For women, this meant bodysuits, wrap-and-tie skirts, tailored jackets, suede wrap jackets and camel coats. For men (after the launch of DK Men in 1992), black crepe suits, sportswear, knit T-shirts, tailored trenches and cashmere sweaters that Karan knew “women would steal.”

In 2001, Karan sold the company to LVMH and stayed on as chief designer until 2015. Now she’s focusing her energy on Urban Zen, a lifestyle brand she founded in 2007 that combines fashion, accessories, home décor and wellness. (Its integrative-health initiative is a legacy of the cancer treatments Karan’s husband, Stephan Weiss, received before his death in 2001; toward the end of his life, Karan performed Reiki on him every day.)

The designer isn’t shy about her spirituality. While reviewing documents for the sale of DKNY, she told the assembled group that Mercury was in retrograde—a terrible time to enter into any contract—and that they should put it off. Having none of it, her lawyer urged her to sign, saying, “This is the best f—ing deal I’ve seen in my whole career.”

Read More at the Wall Street Journal

Ahh, the sounds of summer: a cannonball ka-plunk in the pool, a whoosh down a slip and slide on the lawn. But when your kids and their guests move inside this season, it’s not a pretty sight. There’s more chaos in our homes now than at any other time of the year. They’ll scatter explosions of Doritos bigger than any splash in the water.

Young visitors aren’t always helpful. Ever hear a hollow “Lemme know what I can doooooooo?” from a teen or 20-something? The last part trails off as they run to the pool, leaving behind wet towels limper than their offer to pitch in.

If you have kids who can plot a calculus curve but forget how to clear a table, I have a solution: a Google Chore Doc. It’s a list of all the tasks in my life that I either can’t or don’t want to do.

Read more at the Wall Street Journal

ICONOCLASTS DON’T waste their time or ours. We know entertainment mogul Barry Diller bested most of his rivals, although a few—notably Sumner Redstone—outmaneuvered him. So when Diller takes his gloves off in his new memoir, he confronts what we couldn’t see. His backstage positioning to chomp entire companies whole; the contrast between working for someone else versus for himself; and, on a personal level, his demons. Case in point, Diller on his attraction to men: “I had wanted so desperately to alter my sexuality as a child and teenager and I had tried so hard and failed. I was left with an unquenchable need to be vigilant about every other aspect of my life.” On his much gossiped-about relationship with his now-wife, Diane von Furstenberg: “We aren’t just friends. Plain and simple, it was an explosion of passion that kept up for years.”

Diller broke out of the William Morris mailroom at age 24 and turned the Movie of the Week at ABC into must-see TV, producing hits including Go Ask Alice and Brian’s Song. Ever heard of Saturday Night Fever or Raiders of the Lost Ark? Both came out during his decadelong stewardship of Paramount from the mid-1970s to mid-1980s. After more than seven years running a second major studio, Twentieth Century Fox, and releasing blockbusters such as Home Alone, he left Hollywood and went on to acquire the Home Shopping Network (HSN). Before most of his peers understood the term interactivity, Diller had seized on the commercial potential of merging telephones and televisions. He also made a series of strategic acquisitions that transformed his media holdings into a diversified digital empire under IAC (formerly InterActiveCorp).

Unlike many entertainment or business icons who write memoirs to bolster legacies and egos, Diller faces facts: No one can run or reposition several studios and networks without a few spectacular swan dives. He remembers a time in the mid-1990s when he was “a mogul manqué,” “nationally known damaged goods,” after losing his bid to buy Paramount. He recounts “glorious dead ends” and how Google “manhandled” him out of opportunities. But he never let these setbacks hamper his momentum. Instead, he owned the simple truth: They won. We lost. Next.

Read more at the Wall Street Journal

You all know I like to spread the gospel about supporting writers, journalists, and publishers at this tough time for the industry. Well, I participated in a wonderful new book out called Surfer Stories: 12 Untold Stories By 12 Writers About 12 of the Greatest Surfers. I wrote a chapter about surfing as a salve for our tears. I rode my first wave during a time in life when my four favorite men died in separate, unrelated incidents. I write about how pro surfer Robert Weaver, or Wingnut, helped me through the haze of sadness that defined that period of my life.

Claudia Lebenthal has compiled twelve wonderful stories into a book out this past Tuesday that is the perfect summer gift. It’s filled with photos and essays, and, though a coffee table book, fits in your bag.

Here are the links to purchase, I buy my books at bookshop.org that supports small booksellers, but all the links here to choose from.

Sales week one propel more sales which, in turn, begets more orders from sellers.

I appreciate you supporting all of us who took part in this meaningful project.

Take your pick:

https://bookshop.org/p/books/surfer-stories-12-untold-stories-by-12-writers-about-12-of-the-world-s-greatest-surfers-claudia-lebenthal/21578673

https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/surfer-stories-claudia-lebenthal/1145881520;jsessionid=63C15C65CB32A61698CF54CFEB24FE96.prodny_store02-atgap13

https://www.amazon.com/Surfer-Stories-Writers-Greatest-Surfers/dp/B0D7TN788C/ref=sr_1_1

Holly Peterson

When you look back at your career at this juncture, do you see strokes of luck here and there, or simple grinding hard work? There’s no correct or humble answer. Maybe you believe one chance meeting at a bar led to where you stand now. Steve Jobs credits a font class in college with pretty much everything that followed at Apple.

Others believe there’s no such thing as luck on the job: you put yourself in situations to Earn Your Luck. Or your drive and experience allow you to better recognize luck when it comes your way and you seize it.

Either way, Ursula Burns, legendary CEO of Xerox, doesn’t believe luck exists on the job: you don’t walk into a room, and they hire you. Even an actor on an audition walks in prepared to impress.

Read the first installment of Earn Your Luck at the Wall Street Journal:

Read more at the Wall Street Journal

I gulped my Toddy and said, “Tell me about that.”

One, about fifty years old — mascara dripping down her cheeks, said, “Well, of course the whole day of Jan . 6 was very peaceful where we were. And all the horrible people battling cops and ramming windows were actually ANTIFA people just setting Trumper fans up to look violent. In fact, she explained, no real Trump supporters were up near the U.S. Capitol at all. “Look at us,” she said. “All January Sixers are like us, and we are so nice, right?!”

Well, she was really nice. Just, she made no sense. To me, at least.

On another note, I’ve been experimenting with making video stories that go with my written stories, so I add my inauguration “digital take” right here:

I made a video to help you visualize the madness that is Palm Beach right this minute.

In this accompanying piece in the Wall Street Journal Review section, you’ll learn what it’s like on disco night inside Mar-a-Lago, (yes, he’s there, and he DJs). And, yes, it’s nuts: I met a gregarious guy at the bar who calls himself Mr. Bang Bang. Is everything pink and green on the preppy side of things? Yep…plates, shoes, and even these absurd terry cloth blazers the guys wear around the pool, barechested over swim trunks. Are they joking? Well, read the piece, and you’ll feel in on the joke that insiders understand.

Video: It was shot by my pal Eric Striffler and edited by my new bestie from Serbia, Vsevolod Sorokin.

Beyond the discreet gates of frou-frou hotels and patrician country clubs, a tsunami swells from Mar-a-Lago's gilded lobbies. The flotsam includes MAGA partyers in rinse/repeat celebration mode and a stream of Black SUVs for Donald Trump and his entourage. These centipede-like motorcades shut down traffic instantly, regularly and without warning.

New security measures, introduced after the assassination attempts over the summer, have made travel by air, land and sea in Palm Beach a testing affair whenever Trump's in town. The president-elect now crosses blockaded bridges like Brezhnev's Soviet convoys speeding through Moscow's emptied thoroughfares.

For blue-blood locals who have crafted an otherwise frictionless existence here, these daily disruptions are maddening. Hell hath no fury like a blue-haired lady in a magnolia Lilly Pulitzer dress insisting on order.

Read more at the Wall Street Journal