Feldman's Faves: April 8, 2024

GOOD MORNING EVERYONE

Eid Mubarak to those who will be celebrating this week. We are celebrating at Goodmans on Thursday and hope you can all join the festivities.

If you happen to be living under a rock you might not be aware of today’s solar eclipse that everyone super excited. Remember to get “the glasses” if you are planning to look up today.

It’s an exciting time to be alive as a sports fan. Tonight’s final of defending champ UCONN vs Purdue led by Toronto’s favourite son, Zach Edey (sorry Drake) who is on a redemption tour, should be epic. Although in all honesty this could a complete blow out by UCONN. Fingers crossed it’s a good game.

But to me, it is all about the women’s game.  I think that 2024 to women’s basketball is analogous to 1979 in men’s basketball (the start of the Magic / Bird era).   Dawn Staley, Angel Reese, Paige Bueckers and of course, Caitlin Clark have taken over the sports world in a way that I believe will change the sport forever. I hope they can find a way to turn the WNBA into must see TV in the same way they have done so for the women’s college game.  Even though Iowa didn’t get their Hollywood ending, South Carolina sure did - going undefeated to win the National Championship. Just awesome!

Finally, I want to wish Cailey and Aryan all the best birthday wishes from last week.

No theme this week – just topics of interest

THE SUN ALSO RISES By: Ernest Hemmingway– Every once and while I like to read old classics. My family was in Spain over the X-mas holidays and I couldn’t resist re-reading this all-time classic, which I am sure many of you have read. Hemmingway has a unique style and it does take some getting used to but nobody captures the ex-pat lifestyle in Europe circa 1920 better than him and the stories of hanging out in the cafés of Paris and travelling to Spain (and running with the bulls) made doing this seem so freakin’ cool.  Hemmingway does a really good job capturing the ethos of the “lost generation” and also shows how “modern” that generation was.  I forgot how offensively anti-Semitic he was, which I wish I could simply say was a sing of that time.  In any case, as one reviewer notes, “In Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris, Corey Stoll makes a scene-stealing appearance as the young Ernest Hemingway, tough-guy modernist and friend of Gertrude Stein. It’s a cameo grounded in the truth that, for one of America’s 20th-century greats, Paris in the 20s was a source of artistic liberation. It was also the setting for the first section of Hemingway’s first, and best, novel (published in the UK as Fiesta). The novel, a roman à clef describing an anguished love affair between the expatriate American war veteran Jake Barnes and Lady Brett Ashley, a femme fatale representative in the writer’s mind of 1920s womanhood, is mostly located in Spain, Hemingway’s favourite country. For some critics, the heart of the novel is the bullfight, and how each character responds to the experience of the corrida. At the same time, the escape into the wild is a great American theme that recurs in the works of Hawthorne, Melville, and Twain (Nos 16, 17 and 23 in this series). In addition, The Sun Also Rises, like most novels of the 1920s, is a response to the author’s recent wartime service. The key to Hemingway, the thing that unlocks the most important doors to his creative life, was a deeper, more personal darkness, his complicated experience of the first world war. There are two versions. Either he was rejected for poor eyesight; or he failed to enlist and instead joined up as an ambulance driver. Each way, in the short-term, he was wounded by the shame of rejection and cowardice. However, once with the Red Cross, Hemingway got as badly injured as if he’d been in combat. Thereafter, throughout his life, he craved the company of risk-takers – bullfighters or big-game hunters – and longed to be accepted by them. Courage, cowardice and manly authenticity in extremis became his themes. Perhaps this is also the inspiration for his famously hard-boiled prose. The best of Hemingway’s fiction, at its purest and most influential, is found in his stories, but this first novel is also a literary landmark that earns its reputation as a modern classic. Hemingway began writing the novel with the working title of Fiesta on his birthday, 21 July, in 1925. He completed the draft manuscript about eight weeks later, in September, and went on to revise it further during the winter of 1926. The novel is based on a trip he made from Paris to Pamplona, Spain in 1924 with his wife, Hadley Richardson, and the American writer John Dos Passos. Hemingway returned again in June 1925 with another group of American and British expats. Their experiences and complex romantic entanglements became absorbed into the manuscript of The Sun Also Rises. In the US, Scribner’s published the novel on 22 October 1926. Its first edition, just over 5,000 copies, sold well. The Hellenistic-style cover illustration by Cleonike Damianakes showed a seated, robed woman, head bent, eyes closed, shoulders and thigh exposed. Hemingway’s editor, the celebrated Maxwell Perkins, wrote that “Cleon’s respectably sexy” artwork was designed to attract “the feminine readers who control the destinies of so many novels”. Within two months, The Sun Also Rises was in a second printing, with many subsequent printings to follow. In 1927 the novel was published in the UK by Cape under the title Fiesta. In fact, The Sun Also Rises has been in print continuously since its publication in 1926, and is said to be one of the most translated titles in the world.” This is one of those books that everyone should read – just so you can tell people you have read it…..Here’s a good review from Culture Honey - https://www.culturehoney.com/book-review-sun-also-rises-ernest-hemingway/

Masters of Scale - Riding the Ozempic wave, w/RO's CEO Zach Reitano – Talking about a “wonder drug”, Ozempic is single-handedly boosting the GDP of Denmark in a way we have never seen. Beyond Danish economics this drug and its competitors are changing the world in a fundamental way. The societal and health benefits associated with this drug category – when used properly – seem to be a force for positive change but the long term implications remain unknown at this point. The discussion in this PODCAST looks at the business side of this phenomenon and how Ro is taking full advantage of this opportunity while it lasts. Here is an excerpt from the PODCAST itself, “Rabid demand for weight-loss drugs like Ozempic and Wegovy is altering US society and transforming the healthcare industry. Rapid Response host Bob Safian guides us through the upheaval and lessons, talking with CEO Zach Reitano of Ro, a telehealth platform that has ridden the wave to a $7 billion valuation. Reitano shares why he chose obesity-treatment as his company’s “hero product,” the impact of weight-loss drugs on industries beyond health-care, and why the potential of GLP-1s like Ozempic mirrors that of AI.” https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/masters-of-scale/id1227971746?i=1000649953929

Thank you for your ongoing engagement and participation.And remember to stay safe, stay healthy and to docket daily.

Jon