HeyJaredDavid Roberts || Sparks From Culture
Weekly personal essays on wealth, status, and family from someone with generational wealth, writing with transparency.
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- 12
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- Sep 26, 2026
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- Jul 11, 2026
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The Cruelty Of Disbelieving Amy Griffin (opens the original)
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In May 2011 when I was Chair of the Riverdale Country School I received an alarming call from the headmaster. A woman had come into the school’s administrative offices and accused her fiancé, a math teacher, of having an affair with a tenth grade student. The teacher was immediately called in to the office. When he didn’t deny the accusation, he was suspended and soon thereafter fired. That same day, our lawyer contacted the Manhattan District Attorney sex crimes division who started their inves
My Personal Myth Revisited (opens the original)
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I define a personal myth as a coherent story you tell yourself about the purpose of your life. Calling it a myth is a useful construct because no one in real life acts one way consistently. After all, we’re human not software.So, to arrive at a story about ourselves that has coherence we have to sort through the facts and arrive at a perception that generally fits. This requires smoothing over edges, a certain amount of fooling ourselves. Identifying patterns despite exceptions.I’m not saying we
Dangerous Novels For Old Men (opens the original)
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<img alt="" class="sizing-normal" height="1018" src="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!kvxz!,w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fb6776189-9d9c-494b-9297-55a558e3f72c_179
AI Is Not A Living Thing (opens the original)
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<img alt="" class="sizing-normal" height="1645" src="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!2Skk!,w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F5afad688-26e9-44e4-8695-becc2af994e6_1604x1812.
The Manhattan Nursery School Gods (opens the original)
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I read an excellent expose this week in New York Magazine about the nutty world of youth travel sports and how parents of very young children are seduced into sacrificing loads of time, money, and familial life to a mostly pointless pursuit. 1I was quick to think of these parents as numbskulls. But then I remembered my post below describing Debbie and me 35 years ago when we were subject to the whims of the Manhattan nursery school gods. I was reminded as well of White Lotus, the Pineapple Suite
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