Summary

A few short stories: The CEO of Bronco Wine – which sells the Charles Shaw “Two Buck Chuck” wine at Trader Joe’s – was once asked how he’s able to sell wine for less than the cost of bottled water. He replied: “They’re overcharging you for the water. Don’t you get it?” Franklin Roosevelt looked around the room and chuckled when his presidential library opened in 1941. A reporter asked why he was so cheerful. “I’m thinking of all the historians who will come here thinking they’ll find the answers to their questions,” he said. Everything we know about history is limited to what’s been written down, shared publicly, or spoken into a camera. The stuff that’s been kept secret, in someone’s head, taken to the grave, must be – I don’t know – 1,000 times as large and more interesting. Years before the Wright Brothers flew, scores of other entrepreneurs attempted to build an airplane, tinkering with different models to see what might work. One was a German inventor named Otto Lilienthal. On one flight in August 1896, Lil...