🦃Thanksgiving Edition 2025
Let's get together, take the day, and make it our own.
🎧 Listen here or on Spotify
🦃In this Issue
To share my thanks to you, I wanted to create a special edition that takes a break from the heavier technology and economic topics and leaves room for reflection, gratitude, and some good reading
- What an old family photo can teach us about Thanksgiving, and what we're most thankful for.
- Some light reading for the Thanksgiving Weekend
- My thank you and reflection note
Hope you have a wonderful Thanksgiving Day and weekend with your loved ones! Wishing you all the best!
We Americans have a lot to say about Thanksgiving.
Some say the first Thanksgiving was just another milestone in the exploitation of Indigenous People. Some say it’s a time to renew our gratitude and spend time with family. Or maybe just a time for indulgence and shopping.
This week's headline graphic features a simple treasured family photo that shapes my perspective on what Thanksgiving Day can be.
This is a photo of my Mom’s family having a picnic. It is a sunny Thanksgiving Day in Maine, 1940. In the left edge of the photo, a little girl is sharing some food with a large man in a hat. That little girl is my Mom. She was five. The man is her dad, Clifton Howe – the man I get my middle name from.
Grandpa Howe was one of the last of a determined breed of Depression-era Maine potato farmers. He refused to take government subsidies because taking the money in those days – thanks to the bizarre logic of some bureaucracy – required farmers to dump their potatoes in a field and let them rot. Grandpa reckoned that was wasteful and just plain wrong. So he took his potatoes to market every year no matter what. In some of those Depression years the market price fetched barely enough to get by.
In that context, this group of family and friends celebrated Thanksgiving as best they could by getting together for a picnic on a windy hill. They parked two cars together and strung a blanket between them to create a break from the wind. In the center of the picture, sunlight catches an almost empty bottle of milk – likely from the Curtis Dairy run by my Mom’s Uncle Curtis and Aunt Ruth. The little girl in the center of the picture is my Mom’s slightly older sister Helen. The man standing next to Clifton Howe, I believe is Uncle Ted. I believe the lady in the dark sweater sitting closest to the car (behind another red-haired lady with glasses) is my Grammie Howe – Clifton’s wife, my Mom’s Mom.
Whoever took this photo, snapped several shots of this occasion. In one of them we could make out a box of Mars bars. It is interesting to me that of all the surviving photos from my Mom’s family, these are the only ones documenting a meal on Thanksgiving Day.
Fourteen years after this photo was taken, when my Mom would be nineteen, her Dad would die of a heart attack at age 53. By then, the family farm would have 3 mortgages on it. My Grandmother would have to sell the farm, and move down to Randolph, Maine where she’d support herself teaching in the local middle school.
All these things and more, were yet to come. But on this sunny windswept hill in Maine, a hard working family took time out to celebrate Thanksgiving in their own way. In so doing, they left us all with a bright example of how families like yours and mine can take the day and make it our own.
At Thanksgiving these days, we often go around the table and try to say what we’re thankful for. It’s a lot more than we can list, or even remember, and certainly more than we deserve.
And there’s always one thing I’m thankful for – something I see in my family – something I treasure and never want to lose: that same independent streak that was evident on a hill in Maine so long ago is alive and well today. It probably runs in your family too. Though all our ups and downs, in our better moments, something inside reminds us to ignore the marketing and the slogans: Let's get together, take the day, and make it our own.
🪶Light Reading for the Thanksgiving Weekend
Federal Reserve's History of the Great Depression: why the Federal Reserve officially believes they helped create the Great Depression, and how this shaped the Federal Reserve's structure and policies we are familiar with today.
Colleges Are Surrendering to AI: Yascha Mounk suspects that teachers will soon join students in outsourcing their work to AI, but argues there's a better way for equipping students for the age of artificial intelligence. It's not all or nothing: "In some courses and contexts, students must be forced to prove their intellectual mettle without the use of digital tools. In other courses and contexts, they should be given the knowledge and the know how to use these tools to the best effect."
What can we learn from 16th century Nuns? A lot say Ana Garriga and Carmen Urbita the authors of Convent Wisdom: How Sixteenth-Century Nuns Could Save Your Twenty-First-Century Life (NY Times Review here).
Why do some animals have spots while others have stripes? How scientists are building on Alan Turing's pattern mechanism to work out the logic of animal patterns.
[more S3T resources]
- See the S3T Economic Dashboard for the Top 500+ US & International real-time economic indicators.
- Monitor the crypto market volatility with the S3T Crypto Market Cap tracker - the top assets by market cap in a single map.
- Get an overview of the full Change Leadership Learning Series.
P.S Thank you and Happy Thanksgiving!
Hope you are having a wonderful week with friends and family.
Just want to say thank you for reading and sharing the S3T newsletter and podcast - and inviting others to sign up.
Thank you also for your feedback and sharing what you are working on, and how you are applying the change leadership skills and insights you are learning.
It is amazing to me - and humbling - to think about S3T readers around the world focusing on intentional innovation and creating beneficial change.
This is the truly important work - harnessing emerging technologies and economic evolution to enable better outcomes - and its a privilege to be working and learning together.
Best wishes,
Ralph
Opinions expressed are those of the individuals and do not reflect the official positions of companies or organizations those individuals may be affiliated with. Not financial, investment or legal advice, and no offers for securities or investment opportunities are intended. Mentions should not be construed as endorsements. Authors or guests may hold assets discussed or may have interests in companies mentioned.
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