Jeff Smith: The Long and Winding Journey to My Second Act
When I got back onto the elevator an hour later, the spring in my step was gone. My lawyer had informed me that a) my political career was over, b) my best friend and closest ally had been taping our private conversations for months, c) the contents of these tapes would be splashed across the front page of the newspaper for weeks on end, and d) I was probably going to jail.
Why Do Public Servants Like Peter Orszag Leave Washington for Wall Street?
His falling-out with the White House was a dramatic reversal for Orszag, his first real career stumble. Looking back, Orszag now says he didn’t even want the job. “I didn’t want to do it,” he told me. “Having worked in a White House before, I knew how the infighting can become all-consuming, and I didn’t want to fall into that trap again. Many of my mentors warned me that despite the ‘no drama’ Obama campaign, once in office this White House would inevitably be like others—and possibly worse. And unfortunately that’s exactly what happened.”
The Forgiveness Machine
For a long while after David Foster Wallace’s death, his widow Karen Green couldn’t make any art at all, wondered if she ever would again, but eventually, tentatively, she developed the idea for her conciliatory Heath-Robinson. “The forgiveness machine was seven-feet long,” she says, “with lots of weird plastic bits and pieces. Heavy as hell.” The idea was that you wrote down the thing that you wanted to forgive, or to be forgiven for, and a vacuum sucked your piece of paper in one end. At the other it was shredded, and hey presto.
The Trials of Kaplan Higher Ed and the Education of The Washington Post Co.
Eleven years ago, one of Washington’s most tradition-bound companies placed a bet that would transform its fortunes. The wager, by The Washington Post Co. and its Kaplan division, took the form of a $165 million purchase of an Atlanta-based chain of for-profit vocational schools that catered to low-income students. The bet was big — the price equal to the profits earned that year by The Post Co.’s print-media pillars: this newspaper and Newsweek magazine. So was the payoff. But what proved a deftly timed business move brought other, less welcome scrutiny to a family-run company that had long prided itself in serving the public interest.
Walking the Line Between Good and Evil: The Common Thread of Heroes and Villains
Mythology, science fiction and comic books are chock full of stories of heroes and their battles against the ills of society—the eternal struggle between good and evil. We are meant to view these two main characters—the Hero and the Villain—as opposites on the spectrum of ethics and morality. But are they really so different when you look at their individual traits and behaviors?
The Larry Gagosian Effect
With an unrelenting focus on selling, Mr. Gagosian, 65, has become the most powerful art dealer in the world. He represents the estates and careers of 77 of the world’s top artists, including Pablo Picasso, Alberto Giacometti, Cy Twombly, Richard Serra, Jeff Koons, Damien Hirst and Ed Ruscha. Dealers who track how he prices his gallery shows estimate he sells upwards of $1 billion worth of art a year. Sotheby’s, by comparison, auctioned off $870 million worth of contemporary art last year.
How to Steal Like an Artist
I also love the book “Just Kids” by Patti Smith. I love it because it’s a story about how two friends moved to New York and learned to be artists. You know how they learned to be artists? They pretended to be artists. I’ll spoil the book for you and describe my favorite scene, the turning scene in the book: Patti Smith and her friend Robert Maplethorpe dress up in all their gypsy gear and they go to Washington Square, where everybody’s hanging out, and this old couple kind of gawks at them, and the woman says to her husband, “Oh, take their picture. I think they’re artists.” “Oh, go on,” he shrugged. “They’re just kids.”
Last of the Old-Style Media Moguls?
Richard Beckman says he’s not particularly fond of Mad Dog, a nickname he earned as a sales executive at Condé Nast, the magazine publisher where he spent 24 years. He finds it demeaning, and says it is belied by the fact that he is actually shy and quiet. In several meetings, he does display an almost theatrical delicacy in the way he speaks and gestures, rotating his wrists in the florid manner of a magician. But there is a note of canine aggression in his voice when he calls from Aspen on Friday, Mar. 18.
The Military’s Secret Shame
What happened to Jeloudov is a part of life in the armed forces that hardly anyone talks about: male-on-male sexual assault. In the staunchly traditional military culture, it’s an ugly secret, kept hidden by layers of personal shame and official denial. Last year nearly 50,000 male veterans screened positive for “military sexual trauma” at the Department of Veterans Affairs, up from just over 30,000 in 2003. For the victims, the experience is a special kind of hell—a soldier can’t just quit his job to get away from his abusers.
Kevin Smith: ‘I Am So, Like, Sick of Movies and Shit’
Smith now says self-distribution was the goal as far back as the first week of production on “Red State.” “Day four, I was sitting on the set and I realized that it felt like the Little Rascals — everybody was doing it for love, we weren’t gonna get paid. And I thought, We’re gonna pull this off for 4 million bucks. And then we’re gonna sell it, get paid probably $4 million, if we’re lucky, and based on all my previous experiences in this business, that would be the last money we would ever see. I know what happens next. If I sell to Lionsgate, that’s $20 million [in marketing budget] tacked on top of my movie, and I have to make $24 million back. But then we know that’s not the case, because we know [the studio] doesn’t keep all the money, they only make 50 percent. So now my horror movie that cost $4 million to make has to make $48 million to break even? I’ve never made a movie that’s made $48 million, and it’s certainly not gonna be this one.”
You must be logged in to post a comment.