Long before the “Wolf of Wall Street” Jordan Belfort made his first million or snorted his first line of cocaine, turn-of-the-century trader Jesse Livermore, the “Great Bear of Wall Street,” accumulated over $100 million short-selling stocks before the crash of 1929. His life and times were immortalized in 1923 by author Edwin Lefèvre in Reminiscences of a Stock Operator. The novel became a bible for those looking to get rich quick (though rarely succeeding), and Livermore’s advice became legendary. “There is nothing new in Wall Street. There can’t be because speculation is as old as the hills. Whatever happens in the stock market today has happened before and will happen again.”
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Chapter I
I went to work when I was just out of grammar school. I got a job as quotation-board boy in a stockbrokerage office. I was quick at figures. At school I did three years of arithmetic in one. I was particularly good at mental arithmetic. As quotation-board boy I posted the numbers on the big board in the customers’ room. One of the customers usually sat by the ticker and called out the prices. They couldn’t come too fast for me. I have always remembered figures. No trouble at all. Read more…
Getting the details right was especially important when there were several houses, so that consistency could be maintained from property to property in the remotes for television sets, the controls for lighting and security systems, the organization of kitchen and bathroom cupboards. Principals did not want to fumble around, lost in their own houses. Ms. Fowler used Excel spreadsheets to stock refrigerators with soft drinks, then lined up and photographed the contents so that a glance would tell what needed replenishment. She religiously checked the expiration dates on cans of soda: if you own seven houses and each has as many as six refrigerators—two in the kitchen, one in the garage or storeroom, one in the pool house, one in the master suite, one in the screening room—for a total of forty-two refrigerators, it’s possible that years could pass before a can of soda is opened.
— In Harper’s, John P. Davidson discusses his time at The Starkey Institute, a “butler boot camp” which certifies estate managers to work for the super-rich.
This year we featured not only the best stories from the web, but also great chapters from new and classic books. Here’s a complete guide to every book chapter we featured this year, both for free and for Longreads Members: Read more…
My story, The Match Maker, was online at ESPN.com only a few hours on Aug. 25 when I heard from a California man who shrugged at the possibility that tennis champ and American hustler Bobby Riggs had thrown the famous September 1973 Battle of the Sexes match. The man’s name is Russell Boyd, and he claimed Bobby Riggs had talked openly and repeatedly with him, back in June 1973, about his intention to lose his upcoming match against Billie Jean King at the Houston Astrodome. “I didn’t realize at the time that it was such a serious matter of him playing Billie Jean King,” Boyd, 56, told me, “and that he was actually expected to make an effort to win.” Read more…
I often deal with interview subjects who tell variations of the truth. People don’t usually out-and-out lie, although that happens from time to time. But memory is a flimsy thing. Even a clear-eyed subject gets details wrong: The sequence of events is off, a sweater was blue and not green, that sort of thing. And then there are those people whose emotions or perspectives have put a filter on their recollections, skewing it this way or that.
The teenage twins Georgia and Patterson Inman, heirs to the Duke fortune, were like an exponential version of that latter category. Their memories had been so warped by trauma that they actually couldn’t separate fact from fiction. I’d never encountered anything like it: Two people with shared memories of events which, to them, felt authentic—and much of which did check out as true—but some of which was implausible, and a few which turned out to be false. It was as though their minds were designed less for record-keeping, and more for coping with their tremendous pain—flexible tools which were bending in all directions in an effort to make sense of their pasts.
When I realized the way the twins were interweaving fact and fiction, with no clue they were doing so, I panicked. Double-sourcing wasn’t going to be enough to report this story; I needed to rethink my reporting methods, as well as the way I approached the writing, relying heavily on documents and secondary sources, and opting to include bits of questionable material as evidence of the kids’ shaky states of mind. After the article was published, the twins were worried I’d portrayed them as “liars,” which couldn’t have been farther from my intention. I know they had told me nothing but the truth, as best they could.
This story pick comes from our featured Longreader, Nicole Greenfield, who writes:
I must admit it was the photo of 90-year-old Roman Tritz, clear blue eyes and a blank stare to the camera’s side, that initially drew me into one of my favorite longreads of the week. But the photo didn’t prepare me for the truly harrowing nature of Tritz’s story, a deeply personal look into one of the thousands of forced lobotomies the U.S. government performed on World World II veterans, the details of which are uncovered for the first time in this multimedia feature. The in-depth, but straightforward reporting of such a horrendous trend, performed in the absence of answers, begs all kinds of questions. How could this happen? And, importantly, could it happen again? For it’s impossible not to connect Tritz’s struggle and the stories of veterans today also suffering from PTSD, also without adequate assistance, also afraid, also wondering, as Tritz himself did pre-operation, “Does anybody really care?” This is one that will stick with me for a while.
Nicole Greenfield is a writer and editor based in Brooklyn, New York.
I must admit it was the photo of 90-year-old Roman Tritz, clear blue eyes and a blank stare to the camera’s side, that initially drew me into one of my favorite longreads of the week. But the photo didn’t prepare me for the truly harrowing nature of Tritz’s story, a deeply personal look into one of the thousands of forced lobotomies the U.S. government performed on World World II veterans, the details of which are uncovered for the first time in this multimedia feature. The in-depth, but straightforward reporting of such a horrendous trend, performed in the absence of answers, begs all kinds of questions. How could this happen? And, importantly, could it happen again? For it’s impossible not to connect Tritz’s struggle and the stories of veterans today also suffering from PTSD, also without adequate assistance, also afraid, also wondering, as Tritz himself did pre-operation, “Does anybody really care?” This is one that will stick with me for a while.
Emily Perper is a word-writing human working at a small publishing company. She blogs about her favorite longreads at Diet Coker.
Everyone is writing about leaving New York, it seems. But Isaac Fitzgerald just arrived in NYC, and some of the writers in the delightful anthology Goodbye To All That have returned. Of course, there are stories of people leaving cities outside of New York. Here are four essays about leaving some of these cities, and maybe coming back to them.
I found myself floating in the details of Kwak’s friendships and favorite places. I’ve never been to Omaha, but now I want to go. It doesn’t need promotion, though — I just need to remember it’s there. And you just need to read this essay.
A well-written meta examination on the classic Leaving New York essay: “But New York, though — maybe it’s the preponderance of writers here, the narcissism and the navel-gazing, that turns our comings and goings into a series of extended metaphors? … When we manage to leave, if we manage to leave, escape becomes a genre in and of itself.”
Let’s end on a lighter note: Mallory Ortberg (perhaps the funniest human on the internet?) hasn’t lived in NYC before, but she’s not going to let that stop her from writing an essay about leaving.
For more from Next City, you can check out their site or subscribe here. For a limited time, Next City is offering the Longreads community a 20 percent discount on a one-year subscription. Enter the offer code: LONGREADS (case sensitive) for your discount at nextcity.org/subscribe.
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Travis Kalanick, the 36-year-old CEO of the ride-on-demand company Uber, calls it the “palm to forehead” moment: That instant when you understand for yourself why a simple car hailing app has both captured people’s imaginations and churned up a queasy feeling in the stomachs of taxi industry power players. Here’s mine.
It was a rainy spring Friday in San Francisco, before five o’clock in the morning. Needing to catch a flight home to New York City, I’d asked my host the night before about the best way to get to SFO from Japantown. “Just go downstairs and Uber,” she’d said. Groggily I made my way to the cold and lonely lobby. Once there, I pressed a few buttons on the Uber app on my iPhone. Almost instantaneously, one of the tiny black car avatars on the live digital map on my phone screen swung around and started heading my way. I could hear it, even. A splashing sound.
Mesmerized, it took me a few beats to realize that it wasn’t the app making noise. It was my car itself, tracking through real puddles as I tracked it on screen. Before I knew it, Waqar, my driver, slid into view. I knew his name because Uber had texted it to me while I’d waited. Later, the company would email me the data on my trip. It had taken 19 minutes and 43 seconds. We had traveled precisely 14.35 miles. It had cost me $54.04, charged to the credit card whose details I’d inputted when I download the app months earlier in curiosity. But it was when said goodbye to Waqar and hopped out of the car at the terminal that I realized how deeply I had, in the past, hated taking a cab or black car to go anywhere. All that hailing or giving my address, giving directions, fumbling for money, calculating and recalculating the tip. Technology had taken care of all of it.
For less than 20 minutes, I’d had almost nothing to worry about. What else was I simply putting up with in life? What other broken systems could be fixed?
I’m hardly the first one to put my hand to my head and contemplate the universe upon taking Uber for the first time. The San Francisco-based company launched 4.5 years ago, introducing a select group to the patent-pending technology that allowed me to press the Uber button and experience the magic of a driver that seems to pop out of the ether. It is already up and running in 18 countries and counting around the globe. This summer, Google Ventures poured some $258 million into Uber, the most it had ever invested in a company.
But that explosive growth hasn’t come without friction. Americans have been hiring driven cars for more than a century. Laws have accumulated governing that exchange. But those laws never contemplated an Uber. And so the battle is on, all across the country, to determine whether Uber will remake the transportation market or whether the transportation market will remake Uber first. There’s no better place to understand that fight than where regulations are both business and sport: Washington, D.C.
The writer on growing up with news reports of a serial rapist and killer who eluded capture for years before finally getting arrested, and how it impacted her own experience with sexual assault:
According to media reports, after Bernardo’s arrest a police officer assigned to prepare the official transcript of the footage of French’s and Mahaffy’s torture collapsed, weeping, and couldn’t continue. I had a similar reaction while reading it. The smallest details haunted me: during one prolonged assault, Bernardo took a break to rent a movie and grab a pizza, and another time Homolka cooked a chicken dinner for the couple and their victim.
The real terror was that it felt so ordinary and suburban, that the vilest acts occurred in the spaces we thought were safe. I was struck by the same sense of banality, looking at the home where Bernardo grew up.
Evil was not foreign to our idyllic community. It had been with us all along.
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