Audio brought to you by Curio , a Lapham’s Quarterly partner I t was once said of Voltaire , by his friend the Marquis d’Argenson, that “our great poet forever has one foot on Mount Parnassus and the
-- An MIT Blackjack Team perspective The mathematics of probability that govern the trade-offs of risk and reward are fundamentally counter-intuitive. The reason that societies ban pyramid schemes out
G ross Domestic Product is the market value of all goods and services produced within a country in a year. It is, today, the standard snapshot of a country’s economy. But does it deserve this position
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I. The Farm The word “foreign” in the name French Foreign Legion does not refer to faraway battlegrounds. It refers to the Legion itself, which is a branch of the French Army commanded by French offic
The International Banking Corporation, in Bahrain, generated billions of dollars while issuing a series of fake loans. Illustration by Shout When Glenn Stewart enrolled at the University of Oxford, in
Ray Dalio has an uncanny ability to anticipate economic trends. Critics say that he runs a cult. Photograph by Platon Ray Dalio, the sixty-one-year-old founder of Bridgewater Associates, the world’s b
When my relationship unraveled nearly two years ago, I decided to suspend my career as an actuary in Boston and take a long vacation in Costa Rica, where I planned to learn how to surf and do yoga. Ye
El Chapo escaped from a maximum-security prison and evaded many attempts at capture, often hiding out in the Sierra Madre. Clockwise from top left: Alfredo Estrella / AFP / Getty; Greg Mathieson / Mai
An Oxford grad learns to navigate boiling sugar, sleep deprivation, and exacting pastry chefs with whom she can barely communicate. Frances Leech | Vintage | March 2013 | 14 minutes (3378 words) The L
When you get right down to it, even a mega-million-dollar international criminal caper is mostly boring shitwork. As Frank Bourassa tells it, his own criminal masterpiece hinged on the events of one m
Below are notes from Hillhouse Capital's Lei Zhang 's lecture at Columbia Business School courtesy of Zong Z. Peng . Notes From Lei Zhang's Lecture at Columbia Business School In the high flying world
When Ásta Stefánsdóttir failed to show up for work, her family called the police. This was in Reykjavík, Iceland, last year, on a Tuesday in the nightless month of June. A few days earlier, Ásta, a th
As I follow Neil Shen into the head office of DJI, the largest drone company in the world, its staff greet him with bowed heads. Wearing a black shirt, grey slacks and black Italian-made loafers, the
I t’s been four years since a group of US Navy Seals assassinated Osama bin Laden in a night raid on a high-walled compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. The killing was the high point of Obama’s first t
Letter of Recommendation Letter of Recommendation: Hangovers Send any friend a story As a subscriber, you have 10 gift articles to give each month. Anyone can read what you share. They’re so much more
L et me take you, dear boy,” said McHintry, “to the best little bar in Manhattan.” I could have told him Donna was expecting me home in good time to find out how my first day in the new job had gone.
Soon after the end of the second world war, André Siegfried, a political scientist, wrote the preface to a book on French spiritual values. “Absent France from the stage, [and] a certain way of approa
Software has been around since the 1940s. Which means that people have been faking their way through meetings about software, and the code that builds it, for generations. Now that software lives in o
Summer Sale: Get 1 Year of GQ for only $10 Subscribe for $10 >> Style Michael Jordan’s New Watch Was Inspired By Miami Vice MJ continues to amass one of the most fascinating watch collections on earth
Jacob Wallenberg is used to fighting against misapprehensions. Perhaps the biggest is that Sweden’s leading industrialist and his family personally own their stakes in the likes of telecoms group Eric
The house’s owners have built a vast basement that amounts to an underground village. Illustration by Michael Kirkham Witanhurst, London’s largest private house, was built between 1913 and 1920 on an
After about an hour of weaving up and down the winding, mountainous, two-lane highway that is route 58 , eastbound from San Luis Obispo, I honestly started to wonder where 9 million solar panels — one
BOTH financiers and economists still get the blame for the 2007-2009 financial crisis: the first group for causing it and the second for not predicting it. As it turns out, the two issues are connecte
I turned 30 last week and a friend asked me if I'd figured out any life advice in the past decade worth passing on. I'm somewhat hesitant to publish this because I think these lists usually seem holl
Dubbed the “king of cashmere” by The New Yorker , Brunello Cucinelli is the founder of the eponymously named fashion house that is well-known for making luxury cashmere sweaters (and more than $450 mi
Astro Teller says that at Google[x], failure is indeed an option. So is changing the world. Google has long declared itself an unconventional company. But its division that takes on long-term, risky p
Finally the SMS arrived: “Tomorrow morning 5am, flight number AZ610 from Rome to NewYork.” An SMS hitting my BlackBerry on Sunday evenings used to decide my destination and client for the coming week.
At the height of the financial crisis in October 2008, HSBC executives were worried that queues were forming outside their UK branches. Unlike Northern Rock, which had suffered a run on deposits the p
She smiled. “Like school… but sex… sex school.” By Jason Smith As I reached my hand between her thighs, she pushed me away the way you would a dog who’s not allowed on the couch. “No today, Jay-zone,”
Imagine it’s January of 1884 in Atlanta, Georgia. Glotz, an affluent fellow citizen, has invited you to participate in a peculiar competition: You and twenty others are invited to present a plan to st
Pipino also started scaling the front of his family’s apartment building so as to avoid the haunted stairwell. He learned the delicate art of ascending decrepit facades with his fingertips, developing
Four years ago I temporarily moved to Puerto Rico. I went to PR to seek the New American Dream, a dream that had swept through American business culture, launched a billion dollar self-help industry,
Get it on Amazon → The Big Short, by Michael Lewis The Big Short, by Michael Lewis, is an amazing book about the banking crisis of 2008. Having watched the events unfold over the course of about a yea
The federal investigation echoed tactics used for the Mob: get low-level workers to inform on those farther up the hierarchy. Illustration by Concepción Studios. Clockwise from Top: Louis Lanzano / B
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