A Kink in the Hyperloop
In 2013, Elon Musk put together a detailed proposal for a futuristic 35-minute San Francisco—L.A. commute. The idea was open-sourced, and enthralled by Musk’s vision, a venture capitalist named Shervin Pishevar started a company to bring a version of the idea to life. Like many Silicon Valley stories, this one would contain speed bumps and internal turmoil.
An MIT Scientist Claims That This Pill Is the Fountain of Youth
Seemingly everyone wants to extend their lifespan, but it takes a bold, entrepreneurial scientist to sell you a pill that supposedly can do that for you. He’s staked his career on it.
An Inquiry Into the Very Public Private Marriage of Katie Holmes and Tom Cruise
In celebrity journalism, what do we really know? Absolutely nothing, argues the writer, who constructs a counter-narrative that Katie Holmes has played everyone:
“They compare the pap-friendliness of various celebrities. Among the best are Cruise, in fact, and Hugh Jackman. Scarlett Johansson, who always runs, scowling, is ‘the worst.’ They scoff at the hypocritical attention-seeking of celebrities (‘Why do you think Alec Baldwin tweets his location?’). A middle-aged woman with curly gray hair, tinted granny glasses, and a Hawaiian shirt wanders over. She’s pet-sitting for someone in the building, and she wants to know why the media won’t pay this kind of attention to the problem of puppy mills. Craigslist has really become lax, she says. There’s a ‘secret kill site’ on 110th Street. There’s also—
“‘Katie! Katie! Katie!’
“Holmes, accompanied by a bald, burly off-duty police officer, has emerged from Whole Foods and begun the half-block walk back to the entrance of her building. She’s wearing a salmon blouse and blue jeans, with her hair pulled back in a ponytail. The puppy-mills lady is left talking to the air as eight paparazzi swoop in front of Holmes, forming a solid wall of jutting lenses that moves furiously backward, calling her name as their legs backpedal and their shutters snap, keeping a few feet ahead of her as she proceeds up the sidewalk, eyes down, her crooked half-smile fixed on her face, and then disappears inside the building.”
Château Sucker
[Not single-page] The case against Rudy Kurniawan, who arrived on the wine scene less than a decade ago and now stands accused of selling millions of dollars in fake wines:
“Among a privileged set, though, Kurniawan’s quirks and résumé gaps were of much less interest than his generosity. After one tasting, Wasserman hailed him for having ‘poured the sickest lineup of wines I have ever had in one evening’ and told him that ‘the scepter, the crown, the ermine cape is yours.’ Meadows, too, became a beneficiary of Kurniawan’s largesse, through which he tasted wines even he had never encountered. Grateful, he took pains to field Kurniawan’s often arcane queries about labeling and capsule nomenclature. ‘I thought at the time, “Jesus Christ, he must take these bottles to bed,” ’ Meadows says. Soon, he was publishing tasting notes based on Kurniawan bottles, lending his blue-chip imprimatur to the young man and his wines. Robert Parker, the world’s most powerful wine critic, also drank them and pronounced Kurniawan ‘a very sweet and generous man.'”
Those Fabulous Confabs
How the TED conference exploded in popularity—spawning a host of competitors, copycats and aspiring TED talkers:
“Until recently, the universal self-actualizing creative ambition was to write a novel. Everyone has a novel in them, it was said. Now the fantasy has changed: Everyone has a TED Talk in them. There are people on YouTube who upload webcammed soliloquies about whatever and title them things like ‘My TED Talk.’ There’s now even a genre of meta–TED Talks. For a TEDActive talk in 2010, Sebastian Wernicke, a statistician, crunched the data of extant TED Talks to reverse-engineer both the best- and worst-possible talks. Elements common to the most popular TED Talks, he determined good-humoredly, included using certain words (‘coffee,’ ‘happiness’), feeling free to ‘fake intellectual capacity and just say et cetera et cetera,’ and growing your hair long. He created an app, the TEDPAD, a kind of TED-omatic that can generate ‘amazing and really bad’ TED Talks.”
The Rise and Fall of Bitcoin
Bitcoin was drawing the kind of attention normally reserved for overhyped Silicon Valley IPOs and Apple product launches. On his Internet talk show, journo-entrepreneur Jason Calacanis called it “a fundamental shift” and “one of the most interesting things I’ve seen in 20 years in the technology business.” Prominent venture capitalist Fred Wilson heralded “societal upheaval” as the Next Big Thing on the Internet, and the four examples he gave were Wikileaks, PlayStation hacking, the Arab Spring, and bitcoin. Andresen, the coder, accepted an invitation from the CIA to come to Langley, Virginia, to speak about the currency. Rick Falkvinge, founder of the Swedish Pirate Party (whose central policy plank includes the abolition of the patent system), announced that he was putting his life savings into bitcoins. The future of bitcoin seemed to shimmer with possibility.
Martha Stewart: The Comeback That Wasn’t
De-Martha-ing, not surprisingly, did not sit well with Martha. But by this point, her influence over the board was minuscule, and a number of directors who had joined what they thought would be a board “about fun and eating cookies,” as a colleague recalls, were replaced. On the advice of counsel, the board largely ceased communicating with Stewart. When she asked that the company pay all her legal expenses, on the grounds that what was good for her was good for the business, the board refused. “She said, ‘I am the company. Without me, the company’s nothing,’ ” says someone familiar with the matter. “It was a very emotional conversation.”
Monetizing the Celebrity Meltdown
Tom Barrack, a billionaire investor who made his fortune in real estate, has discovered a market in distressed celebrities. With Neverland Ranch and Miramax under his belt, he’s now on a shopping spree—and bringing along his buddy Rob Lowe.