Get Rich U.
Stanford University, and its president John L. Hennessy, have a tight relationship with Silicon Valley, which has helped the university’s endowment grow to nearly $17 billion. A look at how those relationships are shaping what’s next:
“John Hennessy’s experience in Silicon Valley proves that digital disruption is normal, and even desirable. It is commonly believed that traditional companies and services get disrupted because they are inefficient and costly. The publishing industry has suffered in recent years, the argument goes, because reading on screens is more convenient. Why wait in line at a store when there’s Amazon? Why pay for a travel agent when there’s Expedia? The same argument can be applied to online education. An online syllabus could reach many more students, and reduce tuition charges and eliminate room and board. Students in an online university could take any course whenever they wanted, and wouldn’t have to waste time bicycling to class.”
Hand on the Shoulder
[Fiction] Excerpt from McEwan’s forthcoming novel Sweet Tooth. A young woman is introduced to the man who would recruit her to MI5:
“My name is Serena Frome (rhymes with ‘plume’), and forty years ago, in my final year at Cambridge, I was recruited by the British security service. In the early spring of 1972, when exams were only weeks away, I found a new boyfriend, a historian called Jeremy Mott. He was of a certain old-fashioned type—lanky, large-nosed, with an out-sized Adam’s apple. He was unkempt, clever in an understated way, and extremely polite. I’d noticed quite a few of his sort around. They all seemed to have descended from a single family and to have come from private schools in the North of England where they were issued with the same clothes.”
Miss Lora
[Fiction] A teenager’s grief and its aftermath:
“Years later, you would wonder if it hadn’t been for your brother would you have done it? You’d remember how all the other guys had hated on her—how skinny she was, no culo, no titties, como un palito, but your brother didn’t care. I’d fuck her.
“You’d fuck anything, someone jeered.
“And he had given that someone the eye. You make that sound like it’s a bad thing.”
The Porn Critic
[Fiction] The life of a supposed hedonist:
“Kromer knew it was also his job, what he was a clerk at. The shop was called Sex Machines. There Kromer retailed chunky purple phalluses, vials of space-age lubricant, silver balls and beads for insertion, latex dolphins with oscillating beaks. The shop’s owner was a maven of Second Avenue, a hedgehog-like, grubby genius of street-level commerce. The possessor of a block of storefronts, his specialty lay in preëmpting hipster entrepreneurship with his own fake-indigenous coffee shops, video-rental emporiums, and, finally, the erotic boutique.”
The Aquarium
[National Magazine Awards finalist, 2012] A family’s difficult journey after discovering their youngest daughter has a brain tumor:
“He would remove the tumor, and we would find out what kind it was only after the pathology report. ‘But it looks like a teratoid,’ he said. I didn’t comprehend the word ‘teratoid,’ either—it was beyond my experience, belonging to the domain of the unimaginable and incomprehensible, the domain into which Dr. Tomita was now guiding us.
“Isabel was asleep in the recovery room, motionless, innocent. Teri and I kissed her hands and her forehead and wept through the moment that divided our life into before and after. Before was now and forever foreclosed, while after was spreading out, like an exploding twinkle star, into a dark universe of pain.”
The God of Gamblers
Macau’s rise as the new global gambling capital leads to complications for the Las Vegas casinos that have flocked to China for a piece of the action. Its differences are illustrated in the God of Gamblers case, in which a former barber named Siu Yun Ping won $13 million, setting off a chain of events, including a murder plot:
“The files of the God of Gamblers case can be read as a string of accidents, good and bad: Siu’s run at the baccarat table; Wong’s luck to be assigned an assassin with a conscience; Adelson’s misfortune that reporters noticed an obscure murder plot involving his casino. But the tale, viewed another way, depends as little on luck as a casino does. It is, rather, about the fierce collision of self-interests. If Las Vegas is a burlesque of America—the ‘ethos of our time run amok,’ as Hal Rothman, the historian, put it—then Macau is a caricature of China’s boom, its opportunities and rackets, its erratic sorting of winners and losers.”
Mail Supremacy
“The most powerful newspaper in Great Britain.” A history of the Daily Mail, founded in 1896 as reading material “by office-boys for office-boys,” as a former prime minister said dismissively. Its daily readership is now four and a half million, and its website recently surpassed the New York Times in traffic, with 52 million unique visitors per month:
“On January 25th, the model Kate Moss went to some parties in Paris. The next morning’s Mail read, ‘The Croydon beauty had very obvious crow’s feet and lines beneath her eyes as well as blemished skin from years of smoking and drinking.’ Another journalist, interviewing her that day, asked why she thought the Mail was so focussed on her aging.
“‘I don’t know. ’Cause it’s the Daily Mail ?’ Moss replied. ‘They just get on everyone’s tits, don’t they?'”
The Song Machine
Inside the making of a hit pop song—or hundreds of them. Stargate and Ester Dean are a producer-“top-liner” team that helps write hits for stars like Rihanna:
“The first sounds Dean uttered were subverbal—na-na-na and ba-ba-ba—and recalled her hooks for Rihanna. Then came disjointed words, culled from her phone—’taking control . . . never die tonight . . . I can’t live a lie’—in her low-down, growly singing voice, so different from her coquettish speaking voice. Had she been ‘writing’ in a conventional sense—trying to come up with clever, meaningful lyrics—the words wouldn’t have fit the beat as snugly. Grabbing random words out of her BlackBerry also seemed to set Dean’s melodic gift free; a well-turned phrase would have restrained it. There was no verse or chorus in the singing, just different melodic and rhythmic parts. Her voice as we heard it in the control room had been Auto-Tuned, so that Dean could focus on making her vocal as expressive as possible and not worry about hitting all the notes.”
Disarming Viktor Bout
The story of “the world’s most notorious weapons trafficker”:
“The longer we sat in the small, musty room, the more the tempered side of Bout’s personality receded. I asked whether he felt any remorse. ‘I did nothing in my mind that qualifies as a crime,’ he replied. ‘Sure, I was doing transportation of arms,’ he said. ‘But it was occasionally. Three hundred and sixty days were normal shipments. For five days, I shipped arms and made a couple of hundred thousand dollars.’ (Mirchev, by contrast, recalls a period of ‘almost daily flights’ for UNITA.)”
M&M World
[Fiction] Taking a trip to Times Square:
“Ginny had promised to take the girls to M&M World, that ridiculous place in Times Square they had passed too often in a taxi, Maggie scooting to press her face to the glass to watch the giant smiling M&M scale the Empire State Building on the electronic billboard and wave from the spire, its color dissolving yellow, then blue, then red, then yellow again. She had promised. ‘Promised,’ Olivia said, her face twisted into the expression she reserved for moments of betrayal. ‘Please,’ Olivia whined. ‘You said “spring.”‘”