by R. Passov Sometimes, when you least expect to, you learn something about your country and the toll it has imposed on certain of its citizens. In ancient times these learnings weren’t so serendipitous. During WWII, for example, you would have known folks on your block who served and came back. And some who didn’t…

by R. Passov A few weeks back, I flew to Los Angeles for my 40th business school reunion. I went knowing it was going to be a hopeless affair. I was the odd man out forty years ago and remain so. I had stumbled into business school not out of some ambition to make a…

by R. Passov Summer of ‘22 In a coffee shop a short train ride north of Manhattan along the Hudson River, there’s a vigil. A group, drawn from neighboring villages, is watching a someone slide to their end. Though long in the making, the apparentness is recent – severely distending belly, shrunken arms, swollen legs,…

by R. Passov Mary Jane, when she lived at the end of my block, would periodically warn me that the giant sugar maple in front of my house was not doing well. Water it, she would say and get it tended. She was probably in her early eighties when she first offered that advice. As…

by R. Passov In 2010, the company for which I was then Treasurer was invited to send me to China. The purpose of the trip was to meet with senior members of the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) as well as the Shanghai stock exchange as a prelude to becoming the first US company…

by R. Passov Sometimes, you find yourself thinking about why something happened and get nowhere. For example, a year ago this October, my (ex)wife and daughter and I were visiting my son in his second year at a prestigious college where tuition exceeds the average income for a family of four. We had landed in…

by R. Passov My founding partner, Jennifer, is right. Eventually I’ll run out of tricks and have to to start teaching math. Still the tricks are fun and, actually, they do help. The trick I brought to Sonia’s 3rd grade class in North Hampton, MA. is – truth be told – one I found in…

by R. Passov There was a big earthquake in the San Fernando Valley in 1971. Overpasses fell in the north end. People died. My junior high school was closed for two weeks. I was in the 7th grade and had just begun to hang around a boy named Mark. During recess or lunch, we’d walk…

 by R. Passov We are on the train from Lisbon to Cascais. They, riding with their backs in the direction of the train, sit across from me. I am next to a middle-aged woman, smiling, well-coiffed, dressed in white. I fail to speculate on why she heads toward the wealthiest enclave in Portugal where, it has…

by R. Passov October 2019: Unnamed City, Central Africa – Day One It’s nighttime. We tour the Unnamed City. Sebastian and I ride in the back of a black Toyota Land Cruiser. In front, Captain and Jannie, who for half his thirty years has been the only one who can drive Sebastian. “I was in western…

by R. Passov When I was twelve, I ran away to Disneyland; not by myself. I went with an older kid, one or two grades above me. Ed, the older kid, was ‘bad to the bone’ – so much so, he deserves his own story. If it was still 1971, I’d say any twelve-year-old should…

by R. Passov After Steve Jobs hit his VP of development on the forehead, called him a stupid fuck, then stormed out of a meeting that had been set up to see George’s invention, everything changed. The invention, George said, was on the motherboard. Dell and HP were buying 40 million so that no matter…

by R. Passov Eldon Hall spent the first seven years of his life climbing hills alongside Oregon’s Snake River, trailed by a faithful Shepard dog. He and his father “…went fishing in the mountains…” and “… slept outdoors while his mother, safely residing at home, worried about the poisonous snakes that might bite [them.]” In…

by R. Passov When I was in the fourth grade I was held in a class through recess, most likely because letting me on the black top usually resulted in a fight. I was particularly thin-skinned and couldn’t cope with being in perhaps the only place in late-1960’s Los Angeles where children had a sense…

by R. Passov By the time my father left to do some time, everything of any value had been pawned. What remained were a few stale cigars which led to a serious vomiting fit, and an old Craftsman tool box. If anything entered our small flat, and if it wasn’t a cat or a dog,…

by R. Passov I learned from reading Terry Donahue’s obituary in the Los Angeles Times he became head coach of UCLA’s football team in the same year I became a Bruin freshman. And we spent our formative years as neighbors but since we were 14 years apart, we never met. Back then 14 years was…

by R. Passov Over the course of the Apollo missions, two criteria governed the role of the Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC): 1) A program built into the AGC had to be absolutely necessary to the mission and; 2) it had to be without doubt that the computer bested humans in performing the task. One person…

by R. Passov A little more than five years ago, in a nice home in Sugarland Texas not far from where he once worked, Jack Garman gave me several hours of his day. I had reached out from New York, saying that I was a random retiree interested in learning about his career. Something in…

by R. Passov I had hand-written a simple essay: My father is in prison, my mother works, welfare helps and I got a 1310 on my SATs. The letter of acceptance from UCLA was short  – we’re happy to let you know…. The hill leading to the main quad of the UCLA campus is terraced…

by R. Passov This will be one of the most important compounds of our generation. —Jeff Kindler, former CEO, Pfizer, commenting on Torcetrapib Failure of a drug in development, especially in a late stage clinical trial, is shocking. Torcetrapib, for example, failed at the very end of its phase III trial. So many resources had been…