Prophet Of Modest Profit

Woody Tasch On How Not To Get Rich Quick

We use the power of entrepreneurship but support the entrepreneurs who design businesses to solve social and environmental problems and are committed to bioregions and communities. I’m especially interested in agriculture as a place to create that change. We’re not investing enough in small-scale, organic agriculture. Rapid economic growth has created tons of cheap food with a long shelf life, but it’s destroyed family farms, which are vital to rebuilding and preserving soil fertility.

Love And Death In Paris And London

We hear so much about the romance of travel, but nothing beats romance while traveling. I’d found it on a number of occassions, sometimes in the strangest of circumstances: while monitoring election results in El Salvador or staying in a dismal youth hostel during a rain-besotted Irish winter. If I could find love there, why not in Paris in the spring?

My First Date

I was a nervous teenager. After my parents’ divorce, I locked myself in my room for five years and watched TV. By the time I was sixteen I felt nauseous every time I stepped out of the house. To get me away from TV and turn me into a normal teenage boy, my mother got me a summer job packing boxes at a warehouse.

Troubled Youth

A brief, wet spring gave way to a murderously hot summer. The days were as long as medieval dragons and even harder to kill. It was so hot the squirrels took off their jackets, dredged their slender bodies in cornmeal, and arranged themselves with pearl onions in buttered pans.

After All This Is Over

We got dressed up to go to the courthouse. It was strange to be out of school, and even stranger to be heading off to appear before a judge to prove that our family was broke, but our mother insisted we kids come along. My brother and I sported polyester suit coats handed down from our cousins in Terre Haute, and the girls wore the same dresses they had worn for our grandparents’ funerals.

Shoeless

The gal looked young in the body and old in the face standing alongside I-80 with a flowered suitcase held over her head to block the sun. Stop! Darrell said when we drove by her, but Jake didn’t take his foot off the gas. She’s not such a looker, gentle Glenn whispered. He was by me in the back seat. They all look the same when they’re talking to your johnson, Darrell told him. He rolled his window down and hung his head out to stare at her disappearing shape.

What About God

The rabbi is coming to talk about the wedding. We lay out cookies, tamari almonds, stuffed grape leaves, hummus, crackers, and strips of sweet red peppers.

Lost Keys

Holding a black wire coat hanger in his hand, / bending a loop in the tip with a pair of pliers, / my neighbor Mr. Alvarado is walking down his drive