The Real Housewives of Wall Street
If you want to get a true sense of what the “shadow budget” is all about, all you have to do is look closely at the taxpayer money handed over to a single company that goes by a seemingly innocuous name: Waterfall TALF Opportunity. At first glance, Waterfall’s haul doesn’t seem all that huge — just nine loans totaling some $220 million, made through a Fed bailout program. That doesn’t seem like a whole lot, considering that Goldman Sachs alone received roughly $800 billion in loans from the Fed. But upon closer inspection, Waterfall TALF Opportunity boasts a couple of interesting names among its chief investors: Christy Mack and Susan Karches. Christy is the wife of John Mack, the chairman of Morgan Stanley. Susan is the widow of Peter Karches, a close friend of the Macks who served as president of Morgan Stanley’s investment-banking division.
Lust, Devotion, & the Binary Code
The sexual energy was not confined just to parties. Walking down the street as a lone woman in Tehran, it didn’t take long to have a man or two following me. Sometimes they would drive by in their cars, slowing down at the curb, calling out something suggestive, but they were not too persistent when I kept my eyes glued to the ground and ignored them. Despite so much effort by the Iranian government to remove sex from the public sphere, it seemed to be on the very air itself.
Is Sugar Toxic?
In animals, or at least in laboratory rats and mice, it’s clear that if the fructose hits the liver in sufficient quantity and with sufficient speed, the liver will convert much of it to fat. This apparently induces a condition known as insulin resistance, which is now considered the fundamental problem in obesity, and the underlying defect in heart disease and in the type of diabetes, type 2, that is common to obese and overweight individuals. It might also be the underlying defect in many cancers. If what happens in laboratory rodents also happens in humans, and if we are eating enough sugar to make it happen, then we are in trouble.
City of Dreams
An outsider might imagine that the novel that captures China’s current gilded-age mood would be set in Shanghai, the financial capital elbowing its way into competition with New York and London, or Shenzhen, the megalopolis built on marshland. But Shanghai was punished by the Communist party for the city’s history of cosmopolitanism, and is still shaking off the effects of that cultural paralysis. Shenzhen, for its part, is a transient place that sanctifies commerce, not ideas. Beijing, by contrast, stands alone in China as simultaneously the center of authority and a hotbed of creative thinking. It is home to thousands of apparatchiks in the machinery of the Communist party, as well as to many of the nation’s most provocative artists, writers, activists, and filmmakers.
The High Art of the Tamale
Diana Kennedy was born in England some several decades ago (she does not like to be precise about such things) and grew up high-spirited, feisty, and no-nonsense. In 1957 she came to Mexico with her soon-to-be husband, Paul Kennedy, who was a foreign correspondent for The New York Times, and then she really fell in love—with her new life and with a universe of flavors, colors, textures, shapes, and aromas several light-years removed from her own. How could she have resisted? She was coming from the drab kitchens of postwar England, and in Mexico City just a short walk through any neighborhood market was enough to make her swoon.
Face Blind
For most of his childhood, Bill Choisser thought he was normal. He just assumed that nobody saw faces. But slowly, it dawned on him that he was different. Other people recognized their mothers on the street. He did not. During the 1970s, as a small-town lawyer in the Illinois Ozarks, he struggled to convince clients that he was competent even though he couldn’t find them in court. He never greeted the judges when he passed them on the street – everyone looked similarly blank to him – and he developed a reputation for arrogance. His father, also a lawyer, told him to pay more attention. His mother grew distant from him. He felt like he lived in a ghost world. Not being able to see his own face left him feeling hollow.
Where We All Will Be Received
Paul Simon’s Graceland celebrates a quarter century this summer: it hit your parents’ cassette player in August 1986. I was six and my sister was twelve. We were both still single and life was great. This means that Graceland is now the same age that “Will You Love Me Tomorrow” by the Shirelles, “Stand By Me” by Ben E. King, “Hit the Road, Jack” by Ray Charles, and “Are You Lonesome Tonight?” by the King (of Graceland) were when Simon’s album came out. I name only songs because in 1961 albums as we understand them today hadn’t yet been invented.
Change We Can (Almost) Believe In
The American obsession with transformation isn’t new. In the 19th century, Ralph Waldo Emerson preached about tapping into the “infinitude of man.” In 1879, Mary Baker Eddy founded the religion of Christian Science, premised on the limitless power of faith and mind. Norman Vincent Peale was an early best-selling self-help author with The Power of Positive Thinking in 1952. But it was Werner Erhard, a lean, wolfish former salesman, who created the first modern transformation empire when he founded EST seminars in 1971. His courses were legendarily uncomfortable. He paced and cursed at his students. He had them writhe on the floor and scream out all their anxieties. He challenged participants to control their bladders so they didn’t have to leave the long sessions. (“You are not a tube,” he preened in the documentary Transformation while sipping water at the end of a seven-hour session. “You have transcended peeing.”)
Anatomy of an Afghan War Tragedy
Nearly three miles above the rugged hills of central Afghanistan, American eyes silently tracked two SUVs and a pickup truck as they snaked down a dirt road in the pre-dawn darkness. The vehicles, packed with people, were 3 1/2 miles from a dozen U.S. special operations soldiers, who had been dropped into the area hours earlier to root out insurgents. The convoy was closing in on them.
Suzanne Collins’s War Stories for Kids
In “The Hunger Games” Collins embraces her father’s impulse to educate young people about the realities of war. “If we wait too long, what kind of expectation can we have?” she said. “We think we’re sheltering them, but what we’re doing is putting them at a disadvantage.” But her medicine goes down easily, thanks to cliffhangers, star-crossed lovers and the kinds of details that create a fully formed universe. Collins labored for days over the construction of the arenas in “The Hunger Games,” analyzing “Rambo” clips to help her visualize the use of weaponry like crossbows.
You must be logged in to post a comment.