Stop Blaming Wall Street

Much of what liberals blame on financialization is a result of profound changes to both the United States and the global economy that date from as early as 1968—well before the onset of financialization. In fact, the growth of the finance sector was partly a product of these developments. It is true that the speculative disruptions caused by financialization have to be addressed if we don’t want to suffer another crash down the road. But, if policymakers truly want to arrest America’s decline in the world and attend to the various ills that have accompanied it, then they must come to terms with the much broader story of what has happened to American industry and global capitalism in the last four decades. Simply cracking down on Wall Street won’t be enough.

Published: Jul 13, 2011
Length: 14 minutes (3,633 words)

Somebody Up There Likes Me

(Fiction) In my last mail to Snookie Lee, I had sent some morsels like these — affectionately, to make her smile — and she’d taken them all wrong: the whole story of Snooks and me. She was in San Antonio and I was in San Jose, and some people say that when a woman moves 1,500 miles from her mate to get a Ph.D. in women’s studies, it’s the beginning of the end, if not the end of the end, and refuting those prophets of woe is not easy. Yes, we had taken some bad falls, Snookie Lee and I. We were edging into the Humpty Dumpty zone. But I thought we could put it together again, and I was doing my best to convince Snookie of that.

Source: The Atlantic
Published: Dec 1, 1994
Length: 34 minutes (8,675 words)

Tania’s World: An Insider’s Account of Patty Hearst on the Run (1975)

Patty Hearst and Emily Harris waited on a grimy Los Angeles street, fighting their emotions as they listened to a radio rebroadcasting the sounds of their friends dying. On a nearby corner Bill Harris dickered over the price of a battered old car. Only blocks away, rifle cartridges were exploding in the dying flames of a charred bungalow. The ashes were still too hot to retrieve the bodies of the six S.L.A. members who had died hours before on the afternoon of May 17th, 1974.

Source: Rolling Stone
Published: Oct 23, 1975
Length: 46 minutes (11,541 words)

The War for Catch-22

The tragicomic 1961 novel that sprang from Joseph Heller’s experience as a W.W. II bombardier mystified and offended many of the publishing professionals who saw it first. But thanks to a fledgling agent, Candida Donadio, and a young editor, Robert Gottlieb, it would eventually be recognized as one of the greatest anti-war books ever written. In an adaptation from his Heller biography, Tracy Daugherty recalls the tortured eight-year genesis of Catch-22 and its ultimate triumph.

Source: Vanity Fair
Published: Aug 20, 2011
Length: 24 minutes (6,112 words)

Emilio Franco’s Tragedia in the Southland: The Killing of a Cultural Icon

In 1991, Franco bought a small club in a Lynwood shopping center and renamed it El Farallon, Spanish for “the cliff by the sea.” It became one of the southeast county’s first Mexican nightclubs, serving food, alcohol and music. Hilda Portillo, a friend and fellow bar owner, said she urged Franco to hire groups from Sinaloa, a Mexican state known both for drug trafficking and for its deep musical tradition. Many Lynwood-area residents were from Sinaloa. Franco welcomed amateur singers and those who’d privately recorded albums but were ignored by Mexican radio stations or record labels. They often sang of tragedias, the killings and family feuds common in the ranchos back home. One of them was a thin, steely-eyed Sinaloan ranchero named Chalino Sanchez.

Published: Jul 20, 2011
Length: 5 minutes (1,433 words)

Rupert Murdoch’s Wife Wendi Wields Influence at News Corp. (2000)

When News Corp. officials gathered in the Hong Kong convention center in March to unveil their latest Chinese Internet investment, a tall woman in their midst handed out a business card that read simply, “News Corporation/Wendi Deng Murdoch.” Ms. Deng is not a News Corp. employee. Once a junior executive at the company’s Star TV unit in Hong Kong, the 31-year-old Ms. Deng quit her post before marrying News Corp. Chairman Rupert Murdoch last year. Since then, she has been portrayed—by Mr. Murdoch and the company—as a traditional housewife who attends to decorating, her husband’s diet and the like. But Ms. Deng is no homebody.

Published: Jan 1, 2000
Length: 14 minutes (3,713 words)

Chain World Videogame Was Supposed to be a Religion—Not a Holy War

The stick would soon hold a videogame unlike any other ever created. It would exist on the memory stick and nowhere else. According to a set of rules defined by Jason Rohrer, only one person on earth could play the game at a time. The player would modify the game’s environment as they moved through it. Then, after the player died in the game, they would pass the memory stick to the next person, who would play in the digital terrain altered by their predecessor—and on and on for years, decades, generations, epochs. In Rohrer’s mind, his game would share many qualities with religion—a holy ark, a set of commandments, a sense of secrecy and mortality and mystical anticipation. This was the idea, anyway, before things started to get weird. Before Chain World, like religion itself, mutated out of control.

Source: Wired
Published: Jul 15, 2011
Length: 14 minutes (3,554 words)

Blood in the Water

When killer whales perform a behavior correctly, they are “bridged” (often with a whistle sound, in essence signaling “well done”) and then receive reinforcement in the form of a reward, such as a fish or a playful rubdown. When they don’t perform correctly, the trainer reacts with a three-second neutral response and withholds the reward. This is known as a least-reinforcing scenario, or LRS. Repeated failed attempts—and the corresponding lack of reward—can sometimes lead to a frustrated killer whale. “The question the trainer has to constantly be asking is: Is this animal mildly frustrated but still has the ability to stay with it and work through the problem?” explains Samantha Berg, who worked as a trainer at SeaWorld Orlando’s Shamu Stadium in the early 1990s. “Or have I gone beyond this animal’s limits and it’s time to cut the losses, take a break, and start over?”

Source: Outside
Published: Jul 18, 2011
Length: 29 minutes (7,373 words)

Confessions of Google Employee No. 59

“The most important thing to consider,” I began, “is that our own internal research shows our competitors are beginning to approach Google’s level of quality. In a world where all search engines are equal, we’ll need to rely on branding to differentiate us from everyone else.” The room grew quiet. I looked around nervously. Had I said something wrong? Yes. Not just wrong but heretical to engineers who believed anything could be improved through the iterative application of intelligence. Co-founder Larry Page made my apostasy clear. “If we can’t win on quality,” he said quietly, “we shouldn’t win at all.”

Published: Jul 16, 2011
Length: 11 minutes (2,965 words)

Los 33: Chilean Miners Face Up to a Strange New World

Ever since they emerged 69 days later on the night of 12/13 October, I have been working on two BBC documentaries: about what happened while the men were down the mine—and what has happened to them and their families since. Now, as the first anniversary approaches, it is the tenacity and the suffering of the women—the wives and partners—that emerges. They and their men were certainly victims but I am not sure Lilly is right: there are certainly heroines – from Lilly herself to the many other women who have struggled ever since to keep their families together. For their men emerged famous, but changed.

Source: The Guardian
Published: Jul 17, 2011
Length: 17 minutes (4,401 words)