flâneur

Founders: #312 Mark Twain

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What I learned from reading Lighting Out for the Territory: How Samuel Clemens Headed West and Became Mark Twain by Roy Morris Jr. --- One of the best podcasts I've heard this year: Listen to Invest Like The Best #336 Jeremy Giffon Special Situations in Private Markets --- Join my free email newsletter to get my top 10 highlights from every book --- (7:20) A great way to think about power law people: Their absence leaves of void that no one else can fill. (8:00) His death would not have lengthened the life of the Confederacy or the Union, by a single day. It would, however, have reduced the literary inheritance of the United States by an incalculable amount. (11:20) Opportunity is a strange beast. It frequently appears after a loss. (13:00) In another life Mark Twain would be a cocaine dealer. (17:30) I knew more about retreating than the man that invented retreating. (21:15) The ad itself became legendary: “Wanted: Young, skinny, wiry fellows not over eighteen. Must be expert riders, willing to risk death daily. Orphans preferred.” Hundreds of adventure-seeking young men quickly responded. (24:30) Blood and Thunder: The Epic Story of Kit Carson and the Conquest of the American Wes

[00:00:00] In the very last paragraph of Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckaberry Finn, Huck reckons that it's time to light out for the territory ahead of the rest. It's a decision Huck's creator already had made a quarter of a century earlier. He wasn't even Mark Twain then. But as Huck might have said, that ain't no matter. With the Civil War spreading across his native Missouri, 25-year-old Samuel Clemens, suddenly out of work as a Mississippi riverboat pilot, gladly accepted his [00:00:25] brother's offer to join him in the Nevada Territory, far from the battlefields of the war. A…

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