Tag: rich people
The Lost Boys of Big Tech
The original “Burn Book” from Mean Girls was used to spread rumors and gossip about other girls (and some boys) at North Shore High School. Kara Swisher’s new memoir, Burn Book, tells true stories about men (and some women) who ruled Silicon Valley. In the 1990s, Swisher was a political reporter in Washington, but tuned into the dot-com revolution early and moved to California to cover it. As a handful of tech titans grew in fame and power, so
Bill Ackman Is a Brilliant Fictional Character
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Before last month I knew next to nothing about Bill Ackman. I probably would have recognized his name. I guess I knew he was a hedge-fund billionaire, and his reputation as kind of a jerk. “He has been straddling that line of public recognition for some 20 years now,” a New York writer explained last week, with a “formula for notoriety”
The ‘Whiteboy Brooklyn Novelist’ Grows Up
Jonathan Lethem had come back to Brooklyn, and I wanted to know why.
One afternoon a few months ago, he took me to Dean Street, the block in Boerum Hill where he grew up in the ’70s. The area is the setting of his 2003 book (and one of my favorite novels), The Fortress of Solitude, and of his new one, Brooklyn Crime Novel.
I was raised in Brooklyn too, some 15 years after Lethem, and he
Why YIMBY Righteousness Backfires – The Atlantic
If it’s wrong to want to live in a bucolic neighborhood largely populated by people who can comfortably afford exorbitantly high housing prices, most Americans don’t want to be right.
That is the central challenge facing the YIMBY (“Yes in My Backyard”) movement, an ideologically diverse collection of scholars, policy makers, and grassroots activists committed to the disarmingly simple idea that building new homes in the nation’s most prosperous cities and towns would be a really good thing to do.
Why the French Want to Stop Working
If you want to understand why the French overwhelmingly oppose raising their official retirement age from 62 to 64, you could start by looking at last week’s enormous street protest in Paris.
Retirement before arthritis read one handwritten sign. Leave us time to live before we die said another. One elderly protester was dressed ironically as “a banker” with a black top hat, bow tie, and cigar—like the Mr. Monopoly mascot of the board game. “It’s the end of the
A Chatbot’s Predictions for the Future of AI
This is an edition of Up for Debate, a newsletter by Conor Friedersdorf. On Wednesdays, he rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.
Question of the Week
To complete this week’s question I had a conversation with OpenAI’s chatbot, GPT-3 (which anyone can try). “Every week I ask readers of my newsletter a different question,” I wrote. “Would you compose this week’s question
Stop Donating to Your Elite University
During the peak of the pandemic, John Katzman and I had a standing phone date at 7:30 on Friday mornings. Katzman usually walked along the beach near his house in the Hamptons while we spoke. I’d sit in my office, try to visualize the beauty of Long Island’s southeastern shore, and listen.
Katzman is astonishingly knowledgeable about the American educational system. He founded Princeton Review, the test-prep behemoth, in the early 1980s, and has founded several other start-ups since.
The Strawberry Festival at the End of the World
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Kaitlyn: The Hampton Jitney, according to a New York Times article from 1985, is “the quintessential transportation for a certain kind of New Yorker.” George Plimpton claimed to have written one and a half books while riding it. Lauren Bacall was also a well-known patron. Passengers were given free seltzer and newspapers then, but that is no longer the case. Now you get a half-size Poland Spring and no reading material, and
Why Stocks, Crypto, and Home Values Are All Plunging at Once
Here’s a bit of esoterica I think about from time to time: Mark Zuckerberg has a mortgage.
Or at least, he had one. A decade ago, the Facebook founder refinanced his loan on a $6 million Palo Alto mansion. He was worth $16 billion at the time, meaning he could have bought that house and a hundred more outright, no mortgage necessary. But First Republic Bank offered him an adjustable-rate loan with an initial interest rate of just 1.05 percent—below
Would the World Be Better Off Without Philanthropists?
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Organized philanthropy, like most things, looks different on the inside than it does from the outside. “Philanthropy” comes from the Greek for “love of humanity,” and public perceptions of it have usually centered on donors and how humanity-loving they really are. The good guys are generous rich people who give to causes we all approve of, like combatting climate change; the bad guys give in order to