I find Maersk fascinating. It is the Coca-Cola of freight with none of the fame. Its parent company, A. P. Moller-Maersk, is Denmark's largest company, its sales equal to 20 percent of Denmark's GDP; its ships use more oil than the entire nation.
Along with all the other stunning statistics China can provide, it can also claim to be the world leader in making energy from human excrement. Biogas, as this energy is known, can be produced from the fermentation of any organic material, from wood ...
Ships are obliged to take on harbor or river pilots - who provide specialized local navigation - when they approach a port, but in the canal, a Suez crew is also obligatory. The crew members are there in case the ship needs to be moored during the ca...
My mother watched her loving husband look at her with blankness or contempt and sometimes hatred. And yet dementia is classed as a social condition, so that the state is not required to pay for long-term residential care. Calling it what it is - brai...
There are few industries as defiantly opaque as shipping. Even offshore bankers have not developed a system as intricately elusive as the flag of convenience, under which ships can fly the flag of a state that has nothing to do with its owner, cargo,...
Since the 1920s, when some U.S. cruise ships decided to fly a Panamanian flag to avoid Prohibition regulations, ships have commonly flown the flag of countries foreign to their owners. The benefits are obvious: lower taxes, laxer labor and safety law...
Shipping is the greenest method of transport. In terms of carbon emissions per ton per mile, it emits about a thousandth of aviation and about a tenth of trucking. But it's not benign, because there's so much of it. So shipping emissions are about th...
I think about what's going down my sink. So I won't pour oil down my sink. I won't - if I'm cleaning a pan, I'll wipe it and bin because I've seen - I've been down sewers.
People always say there's no such thing as bad publicity, and you always think they're right, because it seems self-evident: nobody's going to buy a magazine that nobody ever talks about, so people should want to buy a magazine that everybody's talki...
You need that pride in yourself, as well as a sense, when you are sitting on Page 297 of a book, that the book is going to be read, that somebody is going to care. You can't ever be sure about that, but you need the sense that it's important, that it...
I have met some very strange people and some very strange cats - and I'm not talking about jazz greats. I'm talking about animals that people claim have come from outer space, and boy, they're weird!
Back on Nov. 23, 1963, I sailed into Manhattan Harbor onboard the Queen Mary and landed with no job and contacts and just $135 in my pocket. My first lodging was in a rundown hotel for $27 a week with the bathroom down the end of a corridor of beds.
Ever since Katrina, there has been a proliferation of efforts at the state level and among hospital administrators to come up with guidelines that would help professionals stuck in a situation like this to prioritize patients. These are questions of ...
While Hurricane Katrina demonstrated the dangers of failing to evacuate hospitals from the path of a storm, Hurricane Gustav demonstrated that moving thousands of sick people has its own risks. Gustav also highlighted a critical vulnerability of Amer...
My daughter is a real migraine sufferer; the minute she has a handful of Haribo sweets, she gets a headache. There's a connection between what the liver can't break down with what goes on to trigger a headache. You just have to be aware.
Jim Sheridan, the MP who wants to ban sketchwriters from the Commons for being rude about politicians, is a blithering idiot. Sorry, scrub that - clearly a very thoughtful person with whom I might conceivably disagree on some marginal issues. A blith...
When people move from one extreme set of views to embrace another equally batty picture of the world, they expect us to applaud their choice, as if the fact that they have rejected one form of nuttiness somehow validates the screwball views they hold...
Watching the Commons tribute to Margaret Thatcher was like being suffocated inside a gigantic sticky toffee pudding, but one with nasty bogeys planted inside. There was much of the 'Margaret Thatcher who was lucky enough to know me,' especially from ...
You know that American dream and American spirit of innovation we always talk about? Turns out, the bulk of it was built by people who came to America from somewhere else, not people born American. We have no birthright or natural lock on these thing...
Dying venture firms are like the walking dead. They can have years of staggering around with stakes in still active portfolio companies, hoping they're still holding a lottery ticket that could put them back in the game. If not, they just slowly wind...
I was taken to my first fashion show - Nina Ricci haute couture - in Paris by the White Russian princess, down on her luck, whom I was boarding with in Paris in 1963. I was captivated by the glamour of the gilded salon, the elegant clothes, and the a...
