In the Mie prefecture of Japan, you can find the Ise Jingu, a grand shrine to the Shinto goddess Amaterasu-omikami.

The shrine was built 2,022 years ago. But it was also built two years ago. Because the Ise shrine, which is made entirely of wood, is disassembled and then rebuilt anew every twenty years.

When the Ise shrine was being erected for the first time, Augustus was erecting his Roman Forum. Emperor Ping of the Han Dynasty was expanding the Weiyang Palace. In Africa, Natakamani, King of Kush, was planning his pyramid in Meroe. And in Mexican cities like Uxmal, the Maya were busy constructing temples of their own.

By now, you can still find the majestic ruins of all of those structures. But you can’t find the Roman Empire, the Han Dynasty, the Kush or the Maya; they’ve all gone extinct.

Two centuries back, when the Ise Shrine was built the first time, it was presided over by an order of Shinto monks. Shinto monks from the same lineage preside over the shrine today.

Nearly every culture has a history of grand architecture, of constructing impressive places they think will establish their perpetual permanence. But, perhaps, it’s not the structures that make a culture permanent, and the building of them that does. Held together by their purpose, by the regular schedule of care, of destruction and rebuilding, the Shinto monks have continued forward for two millennium. Unlike those extinct civilizations, their destination is impermanent. But their journey is perpetual.

Also, in honor of today’s holiday, please read this Oatmeal piece, stat.

Happy Bartolomé Day!

Yesterday was my grandfather Victor’s yahrzeit – the anniversary of his death, observed by loved ones (but especially by one’s children). A dyed-in-the-wool entrepreneur (as was his father, Max, who was also an accomplished inventor), Victor loved his family, and loved his work. But he didn’t particularly love Judaism. As he once told me, after his mother died when he was a child, any religious observance in his family went out the door with his mother’s body. While he was alive, he would tell people he didn’t even want a funeral; he just wanted the people still living to enjoy their lives for the day.

So, rather than heading to synagogue as would be traditional, my parents observed Victor’s yahrzeit with a ritual much dearer to his heart: dinner at Denny’s. There was no Denny’s in New York when he was still alive, so any time he came out to visit us in California, a trip to Denny’s (particularly for the coffee, which he inexplicably loved) was inevitably on the must-do list.

I think sometimes about the New Orleans tradition of the Jazz Funeral: friends and family, led by a brass band playing somber songs and spirituals, slowly march from the deceased’s home to the cemetery. And then, as soon as the body is in the ground, as soon as the members of the procession have said their final goodbyes, there’s the ‘cutting loose’ of the body. The brass band switches to raucous jazz, and everyone drinks and dances and parties in their dead loved one’s honor.

I think the New Orleaners, like my grandfather Victor, have it entirely right. The best way to remember someone isn’t to sit at mourn, but to get right to living. As Joan Didion wrote, “the grave’s a fine and private place, but none I think do there embrace. Nor do they sing there, or write, or argue, or see the tidal bore on the Amazon, or touch their children. And that’s what there is to do and get it while you can.”

Saturday, I rewatched the 1999 Thomas Crown Affair remake, and found it held up quite well; still near the top of my guilty pleasures film list.

Then, Sunday, I ended up in the same subway car as Mark Margolis, the actor who played art forger Heinrich Knutzhorn in the film.

Baader-Meinhof indeed.

Let’s say you need to meet a stranger tomorrow in NYC, but you can’t communicate in advance to coordinate time and place. So where and when do you meet them?

The answer is: the information booth at the center of Grand Central Station, at high noon.

That’s actually the empirically correct answer, as nearly 3/4 of respondents will say the same thing, thereby making it your best bet.

It’s an effect first illustrated by Nobel-winning economist Thomas Schelling: people naturally default to certain ‘focal points’ (later called ‘Schelling points’) in the absence of communication. In many problems, there are answers that seem inevitable (or specially meaningful), and people tend to gravitate towards them whether they mean to or not.

It’s a particularly useful concept in friendly negotiations, where you need to strike a balance between competition and coordination, rather than just fighting out every point. Try and find Schelling points that work for you as a compromise, and it’s easy to get your counter-party to accept them too, as they just seem right.

When you’re a kid, you have nightmares about showing up to school in your underwear.

In adult life, when the equivalent actually happens, it’s about as terrible as it seems in the dream.

But while you wake up from dreams, real life just keeps going. Eventually you just say to yourself, ‘I guess I’m at school in my underwear. But I still need to learn algebra, so I might as well get back to work.’

Sometimes, you learn that a bedrock principle of your life is wrong, and it shakes you to your core.

That’s how I felt, as a former dinosaur-loving kid, when I recently discovered there’s no such thing as a Brontosaurus.

Apparently, there’s a whole long story about the Bone Wars, an early paleontology feud between Othniel Charles Marsh (a fellow Yalie!) and Edward Drinker Cope, and mixing up parts of different dinosaurs (an Apatosaurus and a Camarasaurus). The moral of which is, there’s really no such thing as a Brontosaurus at all.

Holy crap.

Back in my early twenties, during the go-go days of the first Internet bubble, I used to get invited to speak at business schools. Each time, I’d tell the class of students: you’re older than me, smarter, wiser, more experienced. You don’t need to listen to what I have to say. And each time, I’d watch them dutifully write in their notebooks: ‘don’t listen to what he says.’

Ever since, I’ve been deeply dubious of b-schools. Start with the case method of teaching, for example. By definition, the companies students study became cases by doing new, interesting, innovative things. In other words, they became cases precisely by doing things you couldn’t learn from prior case studies.

Or consider the problem of the professors, academics removed from the front lines of real business. If you’re an eminent historian, there’s no better way than academe to pursue recognition or greatness in your field. Whereas, in business, the really interesting folks are out starting Apple or running GM, while the professors are just writing about it. There’s no more prime example of ‘those who can’t do, teach.’

That’s why I was so taken by this Boston Globe story about Harvard Business School professor Brian Edelman and his interactions with local Woburn restaurant Sichuan Garden.

The issue began when Edelman looked at the menu on the Sichuan Garden’s website, and placed a takeout order. He ate the food, and found it delicious. And then he noticed that he’d been charged $4 more ($57.35 vs $53.35) than he expected. So he emailed the restaurant to let them know, and to ask about the discrepancy.

Ran Duan, son of the mom-and-pop founders (and apparently “America’s Most Imaginative Bartender” according to last month’s GQ, for the Baldwin Bar inside the restaurant) wrote back a gracious email, explaining that the menu on the site was outdated, apologizing for the confusion, and promising to update the site.

The professors response? Calling the old menu a ‘serious violation’ under Massachusetts state law, and, citing consumer protection statute MGL 93a, demanding triple damages: $12.

Things go downhill from there, with Duan’s sane, friendly and remarkably patient emails intertwined with Edelman’s ever more douchey / crazy-town ones, leading to Edelman’s eventually “referring the matter to applicable authorities.”

Nice work, Professor Edelman! Keeping the world safe from small businesses trying hard to politely serve their local communities, and wasting the time of already overstretched enforcement agencies! It’s a double win!

Still, it’s also an excellent reminder of why I never went to business school. As an early colleague said to me some 15 years back, it’s much better to own an MBA than to be one.