Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
Australian Essena O’Neill caused a stir when she quit her Instagram modeling career and lambasted the vainglorious “industry.” Even compared to the horror stories about abuse and exploitation in traditional modeling, this sounds exhausting and thankless. And yet it’s typical for New Media and for industries that have been “disrupted” by tech. I found Essena…
Seven years after the collapse of Lehman Brothers jolted the global economy, the world’s biggest banks may need to raise as much as $1.2 trillion to meet new rules laid down by financial regulators. QuickTake Too Big to Fail After years of work, the Financial Stability Board, created by the Group of 20 nations in…
Two weeks ago, we reported that one of the numerous “unicorns” prancing around Silicon Valley was about to have a very rude wake up call when Dropbox was warned by its investment bankers that it would be unable to go public at a valuation anywhere near close to what its last private round (which had…
Startups don’t turn into unicorns — the buzzword for companies valued at a billion dollars or more — without a good story attached. For WeWork — which leases office space, divvies it up into desk-sized chunks, and rents it out month to month, largely in fashionable cities like San Francisco and New York — the…
Photo A Wework member working in one of the many unique spaces at Wework headquarters in the New York City neighborhood of Chelsea. Credit Cole Wilson for The New York Times WeWork, which rents out offices and desks to freelancers and budding companies, has been on a fund-raising tear. In just five years, the New…
Do we make both a conceptual and analytical mistake when we refer to student loans as a form of “financial aid”? Should that term be something to be resisted? Demos’ Tamara Draut brought up this point in a conversation recently, and I think it needs to be explored further, because it frames how we speak about student…
The Economist is out with a new ranking of colleges that ranks Harvard fourth and Yale 1,270th. The rankings are based on whether a college’s alumni fare better than expected in the labor market, as measured by earnings 10 years after starting school. Using a range of variables — a college’s location, its religious affiliation, its students’…
For millions of Americans, it’s not getting better. While the national unemployment rate has been on a downward trend in recent years—after reaching a high of 10 percent in October 2009—not everyone has been able to enjoy those benefits. According to a recent report from the Orlando Sun-Sentinel, the paper found that food stamp rates…
Shakespeare said that all the world’s a stage, but the sociologist Erving Goffman added that most of the interesting stuff lies behind the scenes, in what he called the “backstage” areas of everyday life. Having spent the past eight years doing research on the international wealth-management profession, I have to agree with Goffman: The most…
On Thursday, while Washington was transfixed by Hillary Clinton’s marathon testimony before the Benghazi committee, a Republican bill to raise the debt limit fell apart. The Treasury Department says it must be raised by Nov. 3 to avoid a cataclysmic default. On Thursday morning, a Goldman Sachs note said it “seems unlikely” that the issue…