In 1867, a fifteen-year-old South African boy named Erasmus Jacobs noticed an unusual stone lying near the Orange River as it made its way through his father’s farm. It was yellowish, transparent, and attractive enough that he gave it to…
Let’s talk trash for a moment. It’s one of the few things that American do exceptionally well. The world will throw out over 5 trillion pounds of garbage this year (here’s a visual to help you grasp that: 5,000,000,000,000 pounds!),…
For ten years, one million men did nothing but eat, drink, sleep, and lay bricks. Brick after backbreaking brick, mile after backbreaking mile, the million-man workforce built a wall like the world had never seen before. Up mountains, along rivers,…
B”H marrying off our oldest daughter, Orah, in a week from Sunday, and we’d like to invite you to join in our simcha, which will be on June 21, 2026, at 6:30PM at the Fountain Ballroom, 725 Vassar Ave, Lakewood,…
The essay at the beginning of this Shabbos email is a reprint from the Shabbos email sent exactly this Shabbos, Parshas Behaloscha, but in 2019. The message is unfortunately even more relevant today, in a time when the faith in…
Life isn’t easy, everyone is going to have to go through some tough stuff. But you can put pretty much put people in four baskets, based on when and how frequently they have to swim in the muck. Some people…
In[1] the early 20th century, arguably the most famous economist in the world was a man named Irving Fisher[2]. Fisher was not just an economist, he was one of those rare people who seemed to turn anything into gold. His…
Trade between countries is a good thing. It enables people in Canada to have freshly squeezed orange juice at their breakfast table, and people in Brazil to have maple syrup at theirs. It has created tens of thousands of jobs…
When you think of laundry, you probably think of piles of dirty clothing, sitting at the bottom of the laundry chute, waiting to be sorted into darks, lights, and whites. But to a very specific subset of human beings, laundering…
Natural resources are a hot topic right now, as the earth continues to fill with more people but not more resources. In the era of technological leaps and blindingly fast innovation, humans also seek more resources than ever before. In…