20th April 2012
The SEC: Outmanned, Outgunned, and On a Roll
“One late afternoon in March 2007, Sanjay Wadhwa sat at his desk transfixed by the data on his computer screen. Wadhwa was then a low-level supervisor in the Wall Street office of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission investigating a supposedly routine case of “cherry-picking.” The SEC had gotten a complaint that Rengan Rajaratnam, the founder of Sedna Capital Management, a small hedge fund, was doling out a disproportionate share of his best trades to the beneficiaries of a “friends and family” account. It was Wadhwa’s job to figure out what was going on.
19th April 2012
The Rise of the Killer Drones: How America Goes to War in Secret
“During the invasion of Iraq in 2003, the military conducted only a handful of drone missions. Today, the Pentagon deploys a fleet of 19,000 drones, relying on them for classified missions that once belonged exclusively to Special Forces units or covert operatives on the ground. American drones have been sent to spy on or kill targets in Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Syria, Somalia and Libya. Drones routinely patrol the Mexican border, and they provided aerial surveillance over Osama bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. In his first three years, Obama has unleashed 268 covert drone strikes, five times the total George W. Bush ordered during his eight years in office. All told, drones have been used to kill more than 3,000 people designated as terrorists, including at least four U.S. citizens. In the process, according to human rights groups, they have also claimed the lives of more than 800 civilians. Obama’s drone program, in fact, amounts to the largest unmanned aerial offensive ever conducted in military history; never have so few killed so many by remote control.
See also: Drones Won’t Be Taking Over Our Wars Anytime Soon, C.J. Chivers
Mitt Romney, American Parasite
“At the time, Mitt Romney had been running Bain Capital since 1984, minting a reputation as a prince of private investment. A future prospectus by Deutsche Bank would reveal that by the time he left in 1999, Bain had averaged a shimmering 88 percent annual return on investment. Romney would use that success to launch his political career.
His specialty was flipping companies—or what he often calls “creative destruction.” It’s the age-old theory that the new must constantly attack the old to bring efficiency to the economy, even if some are destroyed along the way. In other words, people like Romney are wolves, culling the herd of the weak and infirm.
Forty Years in Solitary
“On Tuesday, Wallace and his friend Albert Woodfox will mark one of the more unusual, and shameful, anniversaries in American penal history. Forty years ago to the day, they were put into solitary confinement in Louisiana’s notorious Angola jail. They have been there ever since.
They have spent 23 hours of every one of the past 14,610 days locked in their single-occupancy 9ft-by-6ft cells. Each cell, Amnesty International records, has a toilet, a mattress, sheets, a blanket, pillow and a small bench attached to the wall. Their contact with the world outside the windowless room is limited to the occasional visit and telephone call, “exercise” three times a week in a caged concrete yard, and letters that are opened and read by prison guards.
18th April 2012
Karma Crash
“John Friend created a yoga empire with Anusara, which grew to 600,000 students and made him one of the most popular yoga teachers in the United States. It all unraveled following a scandal involving sex with students and financial mismanagement
What It Cost Eight Women Writers To Make It In New York
“We’ve looked at how much the costs of things like Reeses peanut butter cups and TV sets have changed over time—very specific items. Let’s cast a wider net. For more than a century, the young flock to New York as the place to launch a career in the arts. Is it as expensive a proposition now as it always has been? Has the size of the potential rewards increased or decreased? And more importantly, just what was it like? In what ways was hanging at the Algonquin Roundtable just like (and not like) bumming around the lobby of the Chelsea Hotel? Let’s look at the Bohemian set over time, as seen through the eyes (and pocketbooks) of some of the women writers we’ve been reading for decades, from Dorothy Parker and Hurston onward to today.
17th April 2012
Six Degrees of Aggregation
“Of the many and conflicting stories about how Huffington Post came to be—how it boasts 68 sections, three international editions (with more to come), 1.2 billion monthly page views and 54 million comments in the past year alone, how it came to surpass the traffic of virtually all the nation’s established news organizations and amass content so voluminous that a visit to the website feels like a trip to a mall where the exits are impossible to locate—the earliest and arguably most telling begins with a lunch in March 2003 at which the idea of an online newspaper filled with celebrity bloggers and virally disseminated aggregated content did not come up.
Battleground America
“There are nearly three hundred million privately owned firearms in the United States: a hundred and six million handguns, a hundred and five million rifles, and eighty-three million shotguns. That works out to about one gun for every American. The gun that T. J. Lane brought to Chardon High School belonged to his uncle, who had bought it in 2010, at a gun shop. Both of Lane’s parents had been arrested on charges of domestic violence over the years. Lane found the gun in his grandfather’s barn.
16th April 2012
Downtown's Daughter
“As a general principle, Lena Dunham does not believe in removing anything that she has posted to the Internet; but, after she received a million and a half hits on YouTube for a video that showed her stripping down to a bikini, climbing into a fountain on the campus of Oberlin College, and performing her ablutions, she reconsidered the value of having personal boundaries. The six-minute video shows her in violation of college rules: having rinsed her hair and brushed her teeth under the fountain’s anemic cascade, she is approached by a security guard, who asks her to desist. (Dunham amiably complies, wrapping herself in a towel.) But it also shows her in violation of the visual conventions that typically pertain to bikini-clad coeds on film. Dunham, who made “The Fountain” three years ago, when she was twenty-one, does not have the body of a Girl Gone Wild. In the video, she has pale, ample thighs and a generous belly; greenish tattoos spiderweb her arms and back. Her blithe willingness to disrobe without shame caused an outburst of censure from viewers.
Truth or Consequences
“Eight years ago, Dan Rather broadcast an explosive report on the Air National Guard service of President George W. Bush. It was supposed to be the legendary newsman’s finest hour. Instead, it blew up in his face, tarnishing his career forever and casting a dark cloud of doubt and suspicion over his reporting—and that of every other journalist on the case. This month, as Rather returns with a new memoir, Joe Hagan finally gets to the bottom of the greatest untold story in modern Texas politics
