InstaPunk Returns

What’s in Your Wallet? ‘Serendicity’ is a word I coined years ago to describe a common experience in my life. It’s what Lewis Carroll called a portmanteau word, combining two into a new one with connotations of both. Serendipity is chance leveraged into some kind of breakthrough, as when a scientist had a dream that led him to the solution of a chemistry problem he was working on: Synchronicity is a term created by the psychologist Carl Jung to describe a meaningful accident that seems like an interjection of the universe into a human conversation. According to Jung’s account, he and Freud were disagreeing about causes and effects when a book suddenly fell out of a shelf in Freud’s office. The text was relevant to their discussion and sent it in a more fruitful direction.  Serendicity involves both the concepts of meaning and chance, as well as the enhanced influence of timing. Its recurrence through time separates it from its components. I’ve had these lucky accidents for many ye...

Celebrity-Politician and Cultural Icon Caroline Kennedy This should never have been necessary. I’m well aware that tow-thirds of the U.S. population is 59 years old or younger. This matters a lot in determining what we might call consensus knowledge of the American experience and perhaps nowhere as significantly as in our consensus view of the Kennedy family. Which has suddenly become at least briefly relevant to a degree it hasn’t been for 20:years or so. Putting this in because 1) it’s a cool graphic, and 2) it demonstrates  the usually invisible dynamic importance of age in the political realm. Which means that only 28 percent are old enough to remember seeing the moment when Caroline became an American icon. All most of you have of the beginning hours of Caroline’s celebrity is a photograph or at most a brief video clip of the hours that transformed her life forever: The funeral of JFK. Everyone in this photo but Caroline Kennedy is dead, including her brother. None of under-60...