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On a summer day in the San Joaquin Valley, 101 in the shade, I merge onto Highway 99 past downtown Fresno and steer through the vibrations of heat. I’m headed to the valley’s deep south, to a little farmworker town in a far corner of Kern County called Lost Hills. This is where the biggest irrigated…
In spite of the title, this article will really be on how not to grow old, which, at my time of life, is a much more important subject. My first advice would be to choose your ancestors carefully. Although both my parents died young, I have done well in this respect as regards my other ancestors. My…
In a corner of Panorama Bar, the upstairs venue of the Berlin night club Berghain, there is a large, unlit photograph of the back of a throat—one of three photos by the German artist Wolfgang Tillmans that hang on the walls. Berghain is a techno club known as much for its code of etiquette as for…
WHEN DOES EDUCATION STOP? by James Michener, 1962 During the summer vacationa fine-looking young man, who was majoring in literature at a topuniversity, asked for an interview, and before we had talked for fiveminutes, he launched into his complaint. 'Can you imagine?' he lamented. 'During vacation…
Books drawn on for this article The Student Loan Mess: How Good Intentions Created a Trillion-Dollar Problem by Joel Best and Eric Best Financing American Higher Education in the Era of Globalization by William Zumeta, David W. Breneman, Patrick M. Callan, and Joni E. Finney Locus of Authority: The…
Illustration by Jaime Hernandez A long time has passed since I started running on an everyday basis. Specifically, it was the fall of 1982. I was thirty-three then. Not long before that, I was the owner of a small jazz club in Tokyo, near Sendagaya Station. Soon after leaving college—I’d been so…
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…
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…
Twice a year we invest a small amount of money ( $150k ) in a large number of startups. The startups move to Silicon Valley for 3 months, during which we work intensively with them to get the company into the best possible shape and refine their pitch to investors. Each cycle culminates in Demo Day,…
During a trip to Tokyo last week, I made a little pilgrimage to the city’s Tama cemetery to pay my respects to an old acquaintance who died recently. Outside Japanese financial circles, the name Katsunobu Onogi is barely known. Among the Tokyo elite, however, “Onogi” evokes considerable emotion; he…
The University of Göttingen, in Germany, owns one of the world’s rarest books: an intact Gutenberg Bible. When Gerhard Steidl, a printer and publisher of photography books, was growing up in Göttingen, in the nineteen-fifties and sixties, the book—one of only twenty surviving complete copies, and…
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…
"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…
FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 12 Let’s don’t be alarmist. The most important week in American financial history since the Great Depression began at 8 A.M . on a Friday in the middle of September last year. I have pieced together this account of it from scores of interviews with participants and observers. Many…
A portrait of David Swensen at Yale. Mr. Swensen and former protégés oversee nearly $100 billion in endowment money at many top universities. Credit... Driely Schwartz Vieira for The New York Times As he has done for decades, once a week David F. Swensen convenes his staff — including his cadre of…
Audio brought to you by Curio , 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 a…
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 other in the rue Quincampoix.” The rue Quincampoix was the Wall Street of eighteenth-century Paris;…
-- 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…
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 officers but built of volunteers from around the world. Last summer I came upon 20 of them on a grassy…
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…
Modern Love Credit... Brian Rea 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…
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,…
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 morning in early December 2009, a morning he says he spent freezing his ass off in a parking lot,…
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…
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 term, and a major factor in his re-election. The White House still maintains that the mission was an…
Letter of Recommendation They’re so much more than just the hellish yin to drinking’s yang. Credit... Tim Davis for The New York Times 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…
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…
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 our pockets, runs our cars and homes, and dominates our waking lives, ignorance is no longer…
Wes Lang on Watches Wes Lang on Watches Meet the Greatest Watchmaker You’ve Never Heard Of He only makes about a dozen watches per year, and they’re already spoken for. By Wes Lang 42 minutes ago View More Don't Miss! New Arrivals New Arrivals The 17 Best New Menswear Items to Buy This Week The…
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