Shaun Lewis

Those familiar with great suffering often produce the most enduring pieces of literature. Miguel de Cervantes was shot in battle and sold as a slave prior to writing Don Quixote. Fyodor Dostoevsky stood before a firing squad at one point and was exiled to four miserable years in Siberia before writing Crime and Punishment and […]

The robber barons who built America were shrewd, often heartless businessmen driven to win. Consider Cornelius Vanderbilt who owned the only rail bridge in and out of New York City—the Albany Bridge. It was the rail industry’s lifeline to the nation’s busiest port at the time. When Vanderbilt shut it down, Wall Street bled. The

War may be the most dominant thread in the fabric of history. Every ancient culture, without exception, knew of it. Babylon, Assyria, China, Egypt, Israel, Phoenicia. The Peloponnesian War destroyed Athens, the Punic Wars razed Carthage, and even after 800 years of stability, Rome fell to the barbarians. War engulfed ancient societies, and its destruction

How many interactions produce familiarity? Three interactions allowed a fox to be comfortable around a lion. Three interactions to move from fear to boldness. These interactions were not in a zoo or the wild but in “The Fox and the Lion” of Aesop’s Fables. “Familiarity breeds contempt”  – Aesop. When translating Aesop in English, Samuel Croxall