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AT THE CORNER of 8th and Market in San Francisco, by a shuttered subway escalator outside a Burger King, an unusual soundtrack plays. A beige speaker, mounted atop a tall window, blasts Baroque harpsichord at deafening volumes. The music never stops. Night and day, Bach, Mozart, and Vivaldi rain…
The Social Network a film directed by David Fincher, with a screenplay by Aaron Sorkin You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto by Jaron Lanier Merrick Morton/Columbia Pictures Jesse Eisenberg as Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, and Rooney Mara as his girlfriend Erica in The Social Network How…
What happens when refugees start to outnumber residents on a small tourist island The Greek island of Kastellorizo is normally a sleepy tourist destination, with its population of just a few hundred mostly isolated from the events of the outside world. But life on the picturesque island shifted…
A merica is in the grips of a speculative frenzy. Investment bankers, private investment firms, and even a few dozen recently graduated MBAs labelling themselves “searchers” are calling, emailing, wining, and dining small business owners. Their goal is to translate prosaic small businesses into the…
Y Combinator: Elementary Worldly Wisdom A Lesson on Elementary, Worldly Wisdom As It Relates To Investment Management & Business Charles Munger, USC Business School, 1994 I'm going to play a minor trick on you today because the subject of my talk is the art of stock picking as a subdivision of the…
Accessibility help Skip to navigationSkip to contentSkip to footer Sign In Subscribe Menu Search Financial Times myFT Home World Sections World Home Global Economy UK US China Africa Asia Pacific Emerging Markets Europe Americas Middle East and North Africa Most Read What would a no-deal Brexit mean…
Gerhard Steidl is known for fanatical attention to detail and for embracing the best that technology offers. “He is so much better than anyone,” the photographer William Eggleston said. Photograph by Mark Peckmezian for The New Yorker The University of Göttingen, in Germany, owns one of the world’s…
Constantin Alajalov, cover for The Saturday Evening Post, February 12, 1949 Most nights, before I go to bed, I sneak into the room where my infant son sleeps, steal across the floor, and kill the wireless router. The plug pulls away from the wall with a soft, satisfying sound, and on the plastic box…
T he Evangelical Christians I have met in the United States often talk about how reading the Bible changed their lives. They talk about being born again. I am not an Evangelical Christian. I am a Chinese atheist who came to the West to study at the world’s best universities and, later, to work at…
"Ettore Sottsass: Work in Progress," photo by Luca Fregoso When I was very small, a little boy of five or six years old, I was certainly no infant prodigy, but I did do drawings with houses, with vases and flowers, with gypsy caravans, merry-to-rounds and cemeteries (perhaps because the first world…
What comes to mind when you think of the French Foreign Legion? Most likely men struggling through the desert in heavy blue coats and white peaked caps. Men who joined up after a lifetime of crime, fighting valiantly, then leaving the Legion to become tough, faceless mercenaries trading on their…
Henry Paulson, Ben Bernanke, and Timothy Geithner were willing to countenance government intervention when markets failed. Their actions outraged both Republicans and Democrats. Illustrations by Mark Ulriksen FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 12 Let’s don’t be alarmist. The most important week in American financial…
As he has done for decades, once a week David F. Swensen convenes his staff — including his cadre of apprentices — for a morning-long meeting among the Gothic revival flourishes and crenelations of the Yale University campus to debate investment ideas. Mr. Swensen, 62, runs the school’s $25.4…
Audio brought to you by curio.io , a Lapham’s Quarterly partner H artwick College didn’t really mean to annihilate the U.S. economy. A small liberal-arts school in the Catskills, Hartwick is the kind of sleepy institution that local worthies were in the habit of founding back in the 1790s; it counts…
Audio brought to you by curio.io , 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 other in the rue Quincampoix.” The rue Quincampoix was the Wall Street of eighteenth-century…
-- 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 outright, instead of relying on the market to make them unprofitable, is that most people trust their…
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? After all, it focuses on economic activity while ignoring many of the consequences of that…
TGD Traveler : The perfect travel-sized version of our beloved large format magazine—small and light enough to take anywhere—packed with the same inspiring content our readers love. Buy Now Interview Editor’s note : An updated version of this interview, including new images and work, is featured in…
DESERT STORM The Foreign Legion in North Africa in the 1950s. No other force in the world has known so much war for so long., From Gamma-Keystone/Getty Images. Digital colorization by Lorna Clark. I. The Farm The word “foreign” in the name French Foreign Legion does not refer to faraway…
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 1975, he was not a typical first-year student: a twenty-year-old American with mediocre grades, he…
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 biggest hedge fund, is tall and somewhat gaunt, with an expressive, lined face, gray-blue eyes, and…
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. Yes, it was the most clichéd response possible for a heartbroken 32-year-old Westerner like me. After…
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 / Mai / Time Life Pictures / Getty; Ronaldo Schemidt / AFP / Getty; Nikolai Golovanoff / Corbis;…
Frances Leech | Vintage | March 2013 | 14 minutes (3378 words) The Longreads Exclusive below is based on Frances Leech’s ebook of the same name, published in 2013 by Vintage UK. *** To make chocolate mousse, enough for 150 people, say, first whip the cream — liters and liters of it. Then,…
Watermark portrait by Tim Tomkinson Years of running drugs and boosting cars left Frank Bourassa thinking: There’s got to be an easier way to earn a dishonest living. That’s when he nerved up the idea to make his fortune. (Literally.) Which is how Frank became the most prolific counterfeiter in…
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 of investing, Lei Zhang maintains a relatively low profile. Yet since he was seeded by David Swesen…
Calamity is commonplace in Iceland, and rescue is sanctified. “People think of the rescue teams as the Guardians of the Galaxy,” a mountain guide said. “They forget these are normal people.” Above: a volunteer from the Hella rescue team during a drill. Photograph by Benjamin Lowy / Getty Images…
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 47-year-old is no stranger to this kind of reception. Shen is one of China’s most successful…
It’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 term, and a major factor in his re-election. The White House still maintains that the mission was an…
I used to loathe hangovers. I used to keep my bedside table stacked with bananas, Pedialyte, do-it-yourself guides to bootleg saline. Home from nights out, I used to dis- and replace fluids with the verve of an undertaker. I tried every which way to delay the inevitable. Still I woke up hung over,…
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. I could have told him that anyway I never drank much, not just because Donna disapproved of it but…
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 approaching problems is lost: everything becomes commercial, administrative, practical, but one then looks…
A picnic in the sun on the lawn of the Paris School of Economics would have been better, but it’s too late. We are at Les Jardins de Paul Ha, a bakery turned deli in the 14th arrondissement, and Thomas Piketty is already biting into a hard-boiled egg. It’s a five-minute walk from the office of the…
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New Arrivals New Arrivals The 18 Best New Menswear Items to Buy This Week GQ ’s editors pick the freshest menswear, sneakers, watches and more worth your disposable income. 19 Photos 6 hours ago View More Don't Miss! Ask M.A.G. Ask M.A.G. What to Do With All Your Skinny Jeans Style editor Mark…
Accessibility help Skip to navigationSkip to contentSkip to footer Sign In Subscribe Menu Search Financial Times myFT Home World Sections World Home Global Economy UK US China Africa Asia Pacific Emerging Markets Europe Americas Middle East and North Africa Most Read What would a no-deal Brexit mean…
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 eleven-acre plot in Highgate, a wealthy hilltop neighborhood north of the city center. First owned…
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 of the world’s largest operating solar panel farms that was built in this region — could be hiding.…
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 connected. The economists failed to understand the importance of finance and financiers put too much faith…
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 hollow, but here is a cleaned up version of my answer: 1) Never put your family, friends, or significant…
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