Tuesday, December 3, 2013
#Oz
The Tin Woodman, raising his ax, ran toward the little man and cried, “Who are you?” The little man trembled, “I am Oz, the Great and Terrible!” Our friends looked at each other in surprise and dismay. “I thought Oz was a Great Wizard,” said Dorothy.
“I did, too,” said the Scarecrow.
“How did you do it?” asked the Lion.
“How are you Oz, the Great and Terrible?” asked the Tin Woodman.
“Two words,” said the little man. “Personal branding.”
Dorothy glanced at the Tin Woodman in confusion. At last she addressed the man quietly. “Are you not a Great Wizard, then?”
The little man laughed. “Why, I’m the Great Wizard.”
He added, “Good branding makes your target market see you as the only choice, not just the best choice. I’ve spent years researching and developing my distinctive yet authentic ‘Wizard’ brand.”
There was a long pause. “I think you are a very bad man,” said Dorothy, finally. “Well, I’m trending, so it really doesn’t matter what you think,” said Oz.
The Scarecrow wiped a tear from his eyes. “But how shall I ever get my brains?”
“Your brains are the least of your problems,” said Oz, “for your personal brand is as fresh as the hay in your coat sleeves! You need a major overhaul—I can’t tell if you’re going for faux-hipster ironic Brooklynite or ‘young conservative’ urban farmer-chic.”
The Scarecrow tugged self-consciously at his coat sleeves.
“Forget about the brains and focus on the wardrobe, the style, the message. Personally, I see you in a dirty wife-beater and Ray-Bans— playfully self-aware about your country roots, but with a sense of cool detachment.”
“Wife-beater, Ray-Bans,” repeated the Scarecrow to himself. He felt an oddly intuitive understanding, for not having a brain put him at a great advantage in the world of branding.
by Ethan Kuperberg, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer/Getty
Amazon Drones Could Face Some Grief from FAA
Say what you will about Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, he does have an ability to think outside the proverbial box: his company is prepping to deliver packages to customers via airborne drone.
If the FAA approves Amazon’s airborne delivery (something the latter anticipates won’t take place until 2015 at the earliest), the company will use the drones to place items on residential doorsteps within 30 minutes. As detailed in a video posted on Amazon’s Website, workers at Amazon Fulfillment Centers (a corporate synonym for “warehouses”) will load each new item into a hard case, which the drone will lock to its undercarriage before flying off; once it lands at the target address, it will leave the case with the item inside. Amazon’s calling the service “Amazon Prime Air,” which suggests it’ll be a perk for Amazon Prime members willing to pay a premium.
“The FAA is actively working on rules and an approach for unmanned aerial vehicles that will prioritize public safety,” read an accompanying note on Amazon’s Website. “Safety will be our top priority, and our vehicles will be built with multiple redundancies and designed to commercial aviation standards.”
Despite those assurances, several questions remain. For starters, it’s extremely likely that the FAA will require a human pilot or supervisor for each drone flight. If that’s the case, Amazon will need to hire hundreds of new employees to guide the aircraft, in addition to building new systems capable of monitoring variables such as local weather and air traffic—for liability’s sake alone, it’s virtually certain the drones won’t fly unless conditions are ideal. (...)
Domestic drones also come with physical dangers, as well. In October, a small helicopter drone tumbled out of the sky over midtown Manhattan, crashing to the sidewalk near Grand Central Station; on the way down it almost hit a businessman, who plucked out the video card from the wreckage and handed it over toa local television-news station. In the video, the drone (a Phantom Quadcopter) buzzes some skyscapers before the pilot—clearly inexperienced—crashes it against the side of a building. Drone enthusiasts and engineers blamed the Quadcopter’s poor performance on the pilot’s possible reliance on GPS mode in an area with tall buildings, which block GPS signals, potentially leading vehicles disastrously off-target.
by Nick Kolakowski, Slashdot | Read more:
Image: Amazon
Russell Wilson, Makes Case For MVP
[ed. I'm probably biased but Russell Wilson is one of the most exciting and talented quarterbacks I've seen in a long, long time.]
It's OK. We all were, really. Even the Seahawks passed on the Wisconsin quarterback twice before taking him off the board with the No. 75 overall pick in the third round of the 2012 draft.
It's a shame, too. Wilson's only crime as a prospect was his height. No quarterback could stand at 5'11 and compete with the best quarterbacks in the NFL. We didn't care about his compact throwing motion, rocket arm or uncanny ability to sense and avoid pressure in the pocket while keeping his eyes downfield. What does any of that matter? He's short, remember?
If we only knew then what we know now, maybe we wouldn't have been so shallow. Maybe we would have looked beyond the measuring stick and realized that a future star was sitting right in front of us. It's not like he was hiding. Wilson played for Wisconsin, albeit for only a season after transferring from N.C. State, where Mike Glennon took over for Wilson while he was pondering a professional baseball career. Wilson was in the spotlight.
Not only were his obvious passing tools on display in one of college football's biggest conferences, but so to was his charismatic personality and leadership qualities. His relentless attitude on the field was there, too. He attacked every area of the field with his arm and made defenses pay with his legs.
But when it came time to evaluate Wilson as an NFL prospect, he was too short. He didn't fit the mold of traditional pocket passer. That was the end of the story. Drew Brees, after all, was the only short quarterback to reach the coveted "elite status" in the NFL. Nobody considered that Wilson could succeed at a similar level. Nobody considered that in just his second season, Wilson would be better than Brees. (...)
Just face it, you were wrong about him. You didn't think a 5'11 quarterback would ever be considered one of the best in the NFL. You didn't think he would enter the league and help the Seahawks win 10 games by more than 15 points, a number only bested by Manning and the Broncos. And you certainly didn't think, out of all the talented quarterbacks in the 2013 class, that Wilson would be the one making a case to be the NFL's Most Valuable Player in just his second season.
by Matthew Fairburn, SBNation | Read more:
Image: Kirby Lee-USA TODAY Sports
Monday, December 2, 2013
Coding Kids
The doorbell rings, and Katie Wenger, 13, leaps up from the family dinner table and throws open the front door. On the stoop of her family’s building in Chelsea stands a 26-year-old Yale graduate named Allison Kaptur. Formerly a financial analyst, Kaptur quit to teach herself how to program and now works as a facilitator at Hacker School, a “writers’ retreat for programmers,” with a sideline as a coding tutor. The two descend the stairs to a basement study, and Katie shuts the door. “I’ve got exciting news,” she says. “I’m going to launch a start-up! It’s called Let Us.”“What will it do?”
“It’ll be like Chatroulette, but connected to Facebook.” Katie describes her concept for an online environment in which strangers can randomly meet and either just chat or interact educationally as student and teacher. Kaptur nods. “Okay,” she says. “A little later, we can talk about the pieces we would need to make that work.”
For most people, software programming’s social cachet falls somewhere between that of tax preparation and autism. But it’s catching fire among forward-thinking New York parents like Katie’s, who see it as endowing their children both with a strategically valuable skill and a habit for IQ-multiplying intellectual rigor. According to WyzAnt, an online tutoring marketplace, demand for computer-science tutors in New York City has doubled each of the past two years. And if one Silicon Alley–backed initiative pans out, within a decade every public-school kid in the city will have access to coding, up from a couple of thousand.
Down in the Wengers’ study, Kaptur flips open a MacBook Air. “For now, let’s work on a hangman game.” Lines of Python code fill the screen. On a piece of paper the two begin sketching out a stick figure and a flow diagram to figure out how the program will render it. Katie breathes a sigh. “This is more complicated than I thought it would be,” she says. “This is going to take more than an hour.” Sure enough, by the time Kaptur packs up to go, they haven’t yet gotten around to rendering the stickman’s arms, let alone plotted out the next billion-dollar app.
Back upstairs, the parents are lingering over a long dinner. Katie’s mother, Susan Danziger, runs a web-video start-up; her father, Albert Wenger, is a managing partner in the VC firm Union Square Ventures, an early investor in Twitter, Tumblr, Foursquare, Zynga, and Kickstarter. The couple started Katie and her two brothers on programming when they were 7 or 8. “The goal isn’t necessarily for everyone to become a computer-science engineer, just as when you teach people how to write English, the goal isn’t for everybody to become an author,” says Wenger. “The point is that it’s a very important way of analyzing the world, thinking about the world, interacting with the world, and manipulating the world. It is a fundamental enabling skill that is applicable across the widest imaginable set of domains.”
by Jeff Wise, NY Magazine | Read more:
Image: Brian Finke
The Big Sleep
One evening in late May, four senior employees of Merck, the pharmaceutical company, sat in the bar of a Hilton Hotel in Rockville, Maryland, wearing metal lapel pins stamped with the word “team.” They were in a state of exhausted overpreparedness. The next morning, they were to drive a few miles to the headquarters of the Food and Drug Administration and attend a meeting that would decide the future of suvorexant, a new sleeping pill that the company had been developing for a decade. Merck’s team hoped to persuade a committee of seventeen, composed largely of neurologists, that suvorexant was safe and effective. The committee, which would also hear the views of F.D.A. scientists, would deliver a recommendation to the agency. If the government approved suvorexant—whose mechanism, inspired partly by research into narcoleptic dogs, is unlike anything on the market—it would be launched within a year. Some industry analysts had described it as a possible blockbuster, a term usually reserved for drugs with annual earnings of a billion dollars. Merck had not created a blockbuster since 2007, when it launched Januvia, a diabetes drug. The company was impatient. A factory in Las Piedras, Puerto Rico, was ready to start production.
David Michelson, who runs Merck’s clinical research in neuroscience, said of suvorexant, “It’s huge. It’s a major product.” He was sitting perfectly still in his chair; his hair flopped a little over his forehead. He looked as if he were waiting in an airport for a very late flight.
For months, in rooms across Merck’s archipelago of mismatched buildings north of Philadelphia, Michelson had taken part in role-playing rehearsals for the F.D.A. meeting. The focus had been on readying Joe Herring, another Merck neuroscientist; he would be the primary speaker, having run the later clinical trials of suvorexant. Herring, a straight-backed, athletic-looking man in his fifties, had just gone up to his room, for an early night. “Joe had to find a way to be authentic,” Michelson recalled. “He had to find a way to engage with the audience without becoming too informal.” During the meeting, Herring would have access to a library of twenty-one hundred and seventy PowerPoint slides.
The Merck team was frustrated. The F.D.A. had just shown them the draft of a presentation, titled “Suvorexant Safety,” that would be delivered by Ronald Farkas, an F.D.A. neuroscientist who had reviewed thousands of pages of Merck data. In a relentless PowerPoint sequence, Farkas made suvorexant sound disquieting, almost gothic. He noted suicidal thoughts among trial participants, and the risk of next-day sleepiness. He quoted from Merck’s patient notes: “Shortly after sleep onset, the patient had a dream that something dark approached her. The patient woke up several times and felt unable to move her arms and legs and unable to speak. Several hours later, she found herself standing at the window without knowing how she got there.” A woman of sixty-eight lay down to sleep “and had a feeling as if shocked, then felt paralyzed and heard vivid sounds of people coming up the stairs, with a sense of violent intent.” A middle-aged man had a “feeling of shadow falling over his body, hunted by enemies, hearing extremely loud screams.”
An F.D.A. presentation that focusses on individual “adverse events”—and draws attention to patients feeling “hunted by enemies”—is discouraging to a drug’s sponsor. Michelson called the presentation “somewhat unusual,” and emitted a dry laugh.
Darryle Schoepp, the head of Merck’s neuroscience division, was at the other end of the table. During the human trials of suvorexant, he noted, it had been taken two hundred and seventy thousand times, and “every time you take a drug it’s an opportunity for something to happen that the user can report.” He added, “Go back to the early days of Ambien. I wonder how many patient days of data they had with Ambien.”
Ambien, which is now available generically as zolpidem, is one of America’s most popular drugs, and it played a role—silent or spoken—in many conversations that I had heard on visits to the Merck offices. Zolpidem was the cheap drug that suvorexant had to take on, if not unseat, in order to succeed in the sleep-medication market. In addition, rising public worry about risks associated with taking Ambien—ranging from amnesiac devouring of Pop-Tarts to premature death—had reduced the F.D.A.’s tolerance for side effects in sleep medications.
John Renger was also at the bar. A forty-four-year-old neuroscientist, he has a round face, cropped hair, and a neat goatee. He helped lead the company to the suvorexant molecule, and ran the first tests on rats, mice, dogs, and rhesus monkeys. He, too, was politely indignant about the F.D.A. “They’ve taken the emphasis off efficacy,” he said, adding, “They’re saying any residual effects are bad. But they’re not looking at the balance—‘What is the improvement in this mechanism?’ ”
The central nervous system is in an ever-adjusting balance between inhibition and excitation. Ambien, like alcohol or an anesthetic, triggers the brain’s main inhibitory system, which depends on binding between gaba—gamma-aminobutyric acid, a neurotransmitter—and gaba receptors on the surface of billions of neurons. gabareceptors can be found throughout the brain, and when they’re activated the brain slows. Ambien encourages the process by sticking to the receptors, holding open the door to the neurotransmitter. Suvorexant, which Merck describes as “rationally designed”—rather than stumbled upon, like most drugs—influences a more precise set of neurotransmitters and receptors. Orexin neurotransmitters, first identified fifteen years ago, promote wakefulness. When suvorexant is in the brain, orexin is less likely to reach orexin receptors. Instead of promoting general, stupefying brain inactivity, suvorexant aims at standing in the way of a keep-awake signal. This difference may or may not come to mean a lot to insomniacs, but Merck’s marketing is likely to encourage the perception that suvorexant ends the dance by turning off the music, whereas a drug like Ambien knocks the dancer senseless.
If the Merck scientists succeeded at the F.D.A., they would be the first to bring an orexin-related drug to market. “It’s an amazing achievement,” Richard Hargreaves, the fourth colleague at the Hilton, said. “Everyone should be really proud.” But, he added, “my worry is that a new mechanism is being evaluated on the science of an old mechanism.”
“With Ambien, you’ve got a drug that’s got basically only onset,” Renger said, dismissively. That is, it sends you to sleep but might not keep you asleep. “Suvorexant has the onset, but it has the great maintenance, especially in the last third of the night, where other drugs fail.” And even though suvorexant keeps working longer than Ambien, suvorexant patients don’t feel groggier afterward, as you might expect. Impassioned, Renger imagined himself addressing the F.D.A.: “Why aren’t you giving this a chance?”
“Drugs usually have some side effects,” Schoepp said. “It’s all benefit-risk.” He added, “There is some dose where suvorexant will be ultimately safe—because nothing will happen. If you go low enough, it becomes homeopathic.”
They stood to go to their rooms. Schoepp murmured, “I’d love to take it right now.”
David Michelson, who runs Merck’s clinical research in neuroscience, said of suvorexant, “It’s huge. It’s a major product.” He was sitting perfectly still in his chair; his hair flopped a little over his forehead. He looked as if he were waiting in an airport for a very late flight.For months, in rooms across Merck’s archipelago of mismatched buildings north of Philadelphia, Michelson had taken part in role-playing rehearsals for the F.D.A. meeting. The focus had been on readying Joe Herring, another Merck neuroscientist; he would be the primary speaker, having run the later clinical trials of suvorexant. Herring, a straight-backed, athletic-looking man in his fifties, had just gone up to his room, for an early night. “Joe had to find a way to be authentic,” Michelson recalled. “He had to find a way to engage with the audience without becoming too informal.” During the meeting, Herring would have access to a library of twenty-one hundred and seventy PowerPoint slides.
The Merck team was frustrated. The F.D.A. had just shown them the draft of a presentation, titled “Suvorexant Safety,” that would be delivered by Ronald Farkas, an F.D.A. neuroscientist who had reviewed thousands of pages of Merck data. In a relentless PowerPoint sequence, Farkas made suvorexant sound disquieting, almost gothic. He noted suicidal thoughts among trial participants, and the risk of next-day sleepiness. He quoted from Merck’s patient notes: “Shortly after sleep onset, the patient had a dream that something dark approached her. The patient woke up several times and felt unable to move her arms and legs and unable to speak. Several hours later, she found herself standing at the window without knowing how she got there.” A woman of sixty-eight lay down to sleep “and had a feeling as if shocked, then felt paralyzed and heard vivid sounds of people coming up the stairs, with a sense of violent intent.” A middle-aged man had a “feeling of shadow falling over his body, hunted by enemies, hearing extremely loud screams.”
An F.D.A. presentation that focusses on individual “adverse events”—and draws attention to patients feeling “hunted by enemies”—is discouraging to a drug’s sponsor. Michelson called the presentation “somewhat unusual,” and emitted a dry laugh.
Darryle Schoepp, the head of Merck’s neuroscience division, was at the other end of the table. During the human trials of suvorexant, he noted, it had been taken two hundred and seventy thousand times, and “every time you take a drug it’s an opportunity for something to happen that the user can report.” He added, “Go back to the early days of Ambien. I wonder how many patient days of data they had with Ambien.”
Ambien, which is now available generically as zolpidem, is one of America’s most popular drugs, and it played a role—silent or spoken—in many conversations that I had heard on visits to the Merck offices. Zolpidem was the cheap drug that suvorexant had to take on, if not unseat, in order to succeed in the sleep-medication market. In addition, rising public worry about risks associated with taking Ambien—ranging from amnesiac devouring of Pop-Tarts to premature death—had reduced the F.D.A.’s tolerance for side effects in sleep medications.
John Renger was also at the bar. A forty-four-year-old neuroscientist, he has a round face, cropped hair, and a neat goatee. He helped lead the company to the suvorexant molecule, and ran the first tests on rats, mice, dogs, and rhesus monkeys. He, too, was politely indignant about the F.D.A. “They’ve taken the emphasis off efficacy,” he said, adding, “They’re saying any residual effects are bad. But they’re not looking at the balance—‘What is the improvement in this mechanism?’ ”
The central nervous system is in an ever-adjusting balance between inhibition and excitation. Ambien, like alcohol or an anesthetic, triggers the brain’s main inhibitory system, which depends on binding between gaba—gamma-aminobutyric acid, a neurotransmitter—and gaba receptors on the surface of billions of neurons. gabareceptors can be found throughout the brain, and when they’re activated the brain slows. Ambien encourages the process by sticking to the receptors, holding open the door to the neurotransmitter. Suvorexant, which Merck describes as “rationally designed”—rather than stumbled upon, like most drugs—influences a more precise set of neurotransmitters and receptors. Orexin neurotransmitters, first identified fifteen years ago, promote wakefulness. When suvorexant is in the brain, orexin is less likely to reach orexin receptors. Instead of promoting general, stupefying brain inactivity, suvorexant aims at standing in the way of a keep-awake signal. This difference may or may not come to mean a lot to insomniacs, but Merck’s marketing is likely to encourage the perception that suvorexant ends the dance by turning off the music, whereas a drug like Ambien knocks the dancer senseless.
If the Merck scientists succeeded at the F.D.A., they would be the first to bring an orexin-related drug to market. “It’s an amazing achievement,” Richard Hargreaves, the fourth colleague at the Hilton, said. “Everyone should be really proud.” But, he added, “my worry is that a new mechanism is being evaluated on the science of an old mechanism.”
“With Ambien, you’ve got a drug that’s got basically only onset,” Renger said, dismissively. That is, it sends you to sleep but might not keep you asleep. “Suvorexant has the onset, but it has the great maintenance, especially in the last third of the night, where other drugs fail.” And even though suvorexant keeps working longer than Ambien, suvorexant patients don’t feel groggier afterward, as you might expect. Impassioned, Renger imagined himself addressing the F.D.A.: “Why aren’t you giving this a chance?”
“Drugs usually have some side effects,” Schoepp said. “It’s all benefit-risk.” He added, “There is some dose where suvorexant will be ultimately safe—because nothing will happen. If you go low enough, it becomes homeopathic.”
They stood to go to their rooms. Schoepp murmured, “I’d love to take it right now.”
by Ian Parker, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: Kenji Aoki
Sunday, December 1, 2013
Far From My Tree
[ed. The flipside to Holding Them Closer.]My eldest son is 20 years old, lives in a house crammed with seven scrabbly roommates, works part time in a restaurant kitchen, doesn’t drive, is a vegetarian, and has homemade tattoos etched into his thighs.
He’s firmly a musician – a drummer in a loud punk band, and he loves nothing more than to tour across North America, playing gigs in sketchy houses in Oakland, Calif., and south Chicago.
He appears to have only one pair of pants – dirty, black cutoff jeans, and his shirts are also of the ripped-off-arms variety. I’m not sure who has been ripping up all his clothes. Maybe there’s a wild dog living in his house.
I’m both proud of and horrified for my boy. His jaw is squarely set, and he’s acutely committed to what he wants to do. And that is to tour with his band in their black-panel van, crisscrossing borders, dodging death in dubious neighborhoods, sleeping on strangers’ couches, and eating vegetarian burritos.
As my children traveled through their teenage years, I emphasized to them: Find your passion and follow it. What I really meant was: Find your passion, but do it in the way I did it. That is, go to college first, get a liberal arts degree, meander through your 20s, and then supplement your undergraduate degree with graduate studies. All while wearing clean, intact clothing.
But what if, as Andrew Solomon so eloquently addresses in his masterpiece, “Far From the Tree,” your child ends up so very different from you? I read “Far From the Tree” because it speaks of children with disabilities (and my youngest son has Down syndrome), but I gained a deeper knowledge of all children who stray from their parents. If we face reality squarely, and give our children the space to be who they want to be, every single child should be different from his parents, and should be allowed and even encouraged to fall far from our trees.
My oldest boy does not show up to family events in his collared shirt and pressed pants. In fact, he rarely shows up at all. He doesn’t respond to calls from grandparents, although he will send thank you texts for birthday gifts, so he still has a sliver of decorum. He’s proudly anti-establishment, and my current lifestyle with my husband (and his stepfather) – living in the suburbs and driving a BMW – clearly disgusts him.
I watch my friends’ children embarking on their second year of college, most of them still living at home with their parents. They are clean-cut, unfailingly polite, sit quietly at dinner parties and patiently dole out answers to questions from adults. Inevitably, someone asks me, “What’s your son doing?” and then I feel a strange mix of pride and apology. “He’s living his life,” I say. “But what graduate program? What path is he taking?” “He’s not in a program,” I say. “He’s working and playing in a band.” They take a deep gulp of wine and look down at their expensive shoes.
by Sue Robins, NY Times | Read more:
Image: uncredited
All Is Fair in Love and Twitter
In Silicon Valley, ideas are not in short supply. At every coffee shop, beer garden and technology conference, there are legions of start-up founders, like screenwriters clutching their scripts, desperate to show off an app or site that they believe will be the next big thing. Yet around 75 percent of start-ups fail. Usually it’s not simply because the ideas are bad (although some certainly are), but because of a multitude of other problems. They are either ahead of their time or too late. Some have too much money and collapse under their own weight; others have trouble raising the capital they need to survive. Still others implode because of the poor management and infighting of founders who have no experience actually running companies.
For the ones that make it, success often comes down to a lot of luck. YouTube was one of dozens of video-sharing sites in existence when it was purchased for $1.7 billion by Google. Instagram wasn’t the first app on iTunes to share photos, yet Facebook still paid $1 billion for it. Twitter wasn’t the first place to share a status online; it was certainly the luckiest. Celebrities joined the service, then a queen, presidents, news organizations and, of course, Justin Bieber. Seven years after it was founded, the company with a catchy name had more than 2,000 employees, more than 200 million active users and a market value estimated at $16 billion. When it makes its initial public offering, many of Twitter’s co-founders, employees and investors are going to become very, very rich. Evan Williams, a co-founder who financed the company out of his pocket during its first year, is expected to make more than $1 billion. Dorsey, the company’s executive chairman and putative mastermind, will make hundreds of millions.
But in Silicon Valley, luck can be a euphemism for something more sinister. Twitter wasn’t exactly conceived in a South Park playground, and it certainly wasn’t solely Dorsey’s idea. In fact, Dorsey forced out the man who was arguably Twitter’s most influential co-founder before the site took off, only to be quietly pushed out of the company himself later. (At which point, he secretly considered joining his biggest competitor.) But, as luck would have it, Dorsey was able to weave a story about Twitter that was so convincing that he could put himself back in power just as it was ready to become a mature company. And, perhaps luckiest of all, until now only a handful of people knew what really turned Twitter from a vague idea into a multibillion-dollar business.
Genesis stories tend to take on an outsize significance in Silicon Valley. Steve Jobs dropped out of Reed College, traveled the world, dated Joan Baez and helped create a revolutionary computing company. Mark Zuckerberg wrote the initial code for Facebook while ranking the attractiveness of girls in his Harvard dorm room. In the Valley, these tales are called “the Creation Myth” because, while based on a true story, they exclude all the turmoil and occasional back stabbing that comes with founding a tech company. And while all origin stories contain some exaggerations, Twitter’s is cobbled together from an uncommon number of them.
by Nick Bilton, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Paul Sahre
The Empire Strikes Back
You can hardly turn on the television or open a newspaper without hearing about the nation’s impressive, much celebrated housing recovery. Home prices are rising! New construction has started! The crisis is over! Yet beneath the fanfare, a whole new get-rich-quick scheme is brewing.
Over the last year and a half, Wall Street hedge funds and private equity firms have quietly amassed an unprecedented rental empire, snapping up Queen Anne Victorians in Atlanta, brick-faced bungalows in Chicago, Spanish revivals in Phoenix. In total, these deep-pocketed investors have bought more than 200,000 cheap, mostly foreclosed houses in cities hardest hit by the economic meltdown.
Wall Street’s foreclosure crisis, which began in late 2007 and forced more than 10 million people from their homes, has created a paradoxical problem. Millions of evicted Americans need a safe place to live, even as millions of vacant, bank-owned houses are blighting neighborhoods and spurring a rise in crime. Lucky for us, Wall Street has devised a solution: It’s going to rent these foreclosed houses back to us. In the process, it’s devised a new form of securitization that could cause this whole plan to blow up -- again.
Since the buying frenzy began, no company has picked up more houses than the Blackstone Group, the largest private equity firm in the world. Using a subsidiary company, Invitation Homes, Blackstone has grabbed houses at foreclosure auctions, through local brokers, and in bulk purchases directly from banks the same way a regular person might stock up on toilet paper from Costco.
In one move, it bought 1,400 houses in Atlanta in a single day. As of November, Blackstone had spent $7.5 billion to buy 40,000 mostly foreclosed houses across the country. That’s a spending rate of $100 million a week since October 2012. It recently announced plans to take the business international, beginning in foreclosure-ravaged Spain.
Few outside the finance industry have heard of Blackstone. Yet today, it’s the largest owner of single-family rental homes in the nation -- and of a whole lot of other things, too. It owns part or all of the Hilton Hotel chain, Southern Cross Healthcare, Houghton Mifflin publishing house, the Weather Channel, Sea World, the arts and crafts chain Michael’s, Orangina, and dozens of other companies.
Blackstone manages more than $210 billion in assets, according to its 2012 Securities and Exchange Commission annual filing. It’s also a public company with a list of institutional owners that reads like a who’s who of companies recently implicated in lawsuits over the mortgage crisis, including Morgan Stanley, Citigroup, Deutsche Bank, UBS, Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, and of course JP Morgan Chase, which just settled a lawsuit with the Department of Justice over its risky and often illegal mortgage practices, agreeing to pay an unprecedented $13 billion fine.
In other words, if Blackstone makes money by capitalizing on the housing crisis, all these other Wall Street banks -- generally regarded as the main culprits in creating the conditions that led to the foreclosure crisis in the first place -- make money too.
An All-Cash Goliath
In neighborhoods across the country, many residents didn’t have to know what Blackstone was to realize that things were going seriously wrong.
Last year, Mark Alston, a real estate broker in Los Angeles, began noticing something strange happening. Home prices were rising. And they were rising fast -- up 20% between October 2012 and the same month this year. In a normal market, rising home prices would mean increased demand from homebuyers. But here was the unnerving thing: the homeownership rate was dropping, the first sign for Alston that the market was somehow out of whack.
The second sign was the buyers themselves.
“I went two years without selling to a black family, and that wasn’t for lack of trying,” says Alston, whose business is concentrated in inner-city neighborhoods where the majority of residents are African American and Hispanic. Instead, all his buyers -- every last one of them -- were besuited businessmen. And weirder yet, they were all paying in cash.
by Laura Gottesdiener, TomDispatch | Read more:
Image: via:
Over the last year and a half, Wall Street hedge funds and private equity firms have quietly amassed an unprecedented rental empire, snapping up Queen Anne Victorians in Atlanta, brick-faced bungalows in Chicago, Spanish revivals in Phoenix. In total, these deep-pocketed investors have bought more than 200,000 cheap, mostly foreclosed houses in cities hardest hit by the economic meltdown.Wall Street’s foreclosure crisis, which began in late 2007 and forced more than 10 million people from their homes, has created a paradoxical problem. Millions of evicted Americans need a safe place to live, even as millions of vacant, bank-owned houses are blighting neighborhoods and spurring a rise in crime. Lucky for us, Wall Street has devised a solution: It’s going to rent these foreclosed houses back to us. In the process, it’s devised a new form of securitization that could cause this whole plan to blow up -- again.
Since the buying frenzy began, no company has picked up more houses than the Blackstone Group, the largest private equity firm in the world. Using a subsidiary company, Invitation Homes, Blackstone has grabbed houses at foreclosure auctions, through local brokers, and in bulk purchases directly from banks the same way a regular person might stock up on toilet paper from Costco.
In one move, it bought 1,400 houses in Atlanta in a single day. As of November, Blackstone had spent $7.5 billion to buy 40,000 mostly foreclosed houses across the country. That’s a spending rate of $100 million a week since October 2012. It recently announced plans to take the business international, beginning in foreclosure-ravaged Spain.
Few outside the finance industry have heard of Blackstone. Yet today, it’s the largest owner of single-family rental homes in the nation -- and of a whole lot of other things, too. It owns part or all of the Hilton Hotel chain, Southern Cross Healthcare, Houghton Mifflin publishing house, the Weather Channel, Sea World, the arts and crafts chain Michael’s, Orangina, and dozens of other companies.
Blackstone manages more than $210 billion in assets, according to its 2012 Securities and Exchange Commission annual filing. It’s also a public company with a list of institutional owners that reads like a who’s who of companies recently implicated in lawsuits over the mortgage crisis, including Morgan Stanley, Citigroup, Deutsche Bank, UBS, Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, and of course JP Morgan Chase, which just settled a lawsuit with the Department of Justice over its risky and often illegal mortgage practices, agreeing to pay an unprecedented $13 billion fine.
In other words, if Blackstone makes money by capitalizing on the housing crisis, all these other Wall Street banks -- generally regarded as the main culprits in creating the conditions that led to the foreclosure crisis in the first place -- make money too.
An All-Cash Goliath
In neighborhoods across the country, many residents didn’t have to know what Blackstone was to realize that things were going seriously wrong.
Last year, Mark Alston, a real estate broker in Los Angeles, began noticing something strange happening. Home prices were rising. And they were rising fast -- up 20% between October 2012 and the same month this year. In a normal market, rising home prices would mean increased demand from homebuyers. But here was the unnerving thing: the homeownership rate was dropping, the first sign for Alston that the market was somehow out of whack.
The second sign was the buyers themselves.
“I went two years without selling to a black family, and that wasn’t for lack of trying,” says Alston, whose business is concentrated in inner-city neighborhoods where the majority of residents are African American and Hispanic. Instead, all his buyers -- every last one of them -- were besuited businessmen. And weirder yet, they were all paying in cash.
by Laura Gottesdiener, TomDispatch | Read more:
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Dating Tips for Uptown Divorcées: Middle-Aged Millionaires Are Just Not That Into You
I was at my usual banquette table at Cipriani catching up with my dear friend and fellow gala charity chair, an impossibly blond and glamorous socialite. She looked up, over her grilled salmon and leeks. “Do you have anyone for my friend Leanne? Her divorce just became final.”
I recalled a lithe brunette who looked good in Lilly, making the rounds of the Hamptons charity cocktail circuit along with her pint-sized now-ex-husband.
“Is she realistic yet?” I asked.
“I think so.”
“Good.” I sipped my Bellini.
My friend and I, while an unlikely matchmaking duo, have been informally setting up divorced friends and “children of” on the Upper East Side for years, with solid results. We always say we should charge a commission for our dating service, but that temptingly profitable idea would be too déclassé.
Our biggest challenge, time and again, is matching up middle-aged divorcées in the “pre-realist” stage, who have not realized that they have a choice of sex, money or companionship —but not necessarily all three in the same package.
“How did she make out in the divorce?” I asked my friend.
“All I know,” she revealed, “Is that the husband made her include her Birkins as part of the settlement.” She added: “At the current retail price.” Bien sur!
“She most likely will want the money, then.” I paused, Rolodexing in my head the range of the newly wed and nearly dead. As I gave the hand signal for the check, I thought of a few years’ divorced friend who could use a chatelaine for his manor, and she was an ideal prospect.
“Oh yes, I think I have a good old-fashioned septuagenarian billionaire in Palm Beach for her. Not exactly scintillating, but his real estate portfolio has a personality all its own.”
“Perfect,” she said. “I’ll call her with the good news.”
A few years back, I co-wrote a fairly well-known relationship book for women called Closing The Deal; the premise was that two married men’s advice could help turn single women into deal closers. While we had no formal training as relationship experts, we just implicitly understood that if women understood men better, they’d have a better shot at closing the deal. Knowing your audience is always key, whether personally or professionally, and we offered advice on topics from hygiene to foreplay.
Where most rich divorcées fail is in assuming they can replace their husbands with a newer model pretty much like the old one. Sorry to say, this tends not to be the case. Most of the time, the divorced well-to-do male is not looking for his equal, but rather for a sexretary from the Midwest, preferably without an opinion. As one recently divorced hedge funder told me: “Being married to a smart, opinionated woman is work! Now I just want tits on a stick, a blonde wig and someone to tell me I’m great when I get home.”
Women who take a tough line often wind up lonelier for it. At a political fund-raiser, my wife Dana and I were chatting with a well-regarded financier’s ex-wife, who clearly exhibited pre-realistic dating tendencies. She laid out her requests like the Marshall Plan: “My age or younger. I won’t date a geezer. Rich—the richer the better. Sexy. Okay, let’s just cut to the chase: my ex if he had abs and a personality.”
“Don’t you think you shouldn’t have a list?” Dana asked innocently.
“That’s for other people,” she snapped.
She is still on the prowl.
by Richard Kirshenbaum, NY Observer | Read more:
Image: (Illo: Brian Taylor
I recalled a lithe brunette who looked good in Lilly, making the rounds of the Hamptons charity cocktail circuit along with her pint-sized now-ex-husband.“Is she realistic yet?” I asked.
“I think so.”
“Good.” I sipped my Bellini.
My friend and I, while an unlikely matchmaking duo, have been informally setting up divorced friends and “children of” on the Upper East Side for years, with solid results. We always say we should charge a commission for our dating service, but that temptingly profitable idea would be too déclassé.
Our biggest challenge, time and again, is matching up middle-aged divorcées in the “pre-realist” stage, who have not realized that they have a choice of sex, money or companionship —but not necessarily all three in the same package.
“How did she make out in the divorce?” I asked my friend.
“All I know,” she revealed, “Is that the husband made her include her Birkins as part of the settlement.” She added: “At the current retail price.” Bien sur!
“She most likely will want the money, then.” I paused, Rolodexing in my head the range of the newly wed and nearly dead. As I gave the hand signal for the check, I thought of a few years’ divorced friend who could use a chatelaine for his manor, and she was an ideal prospect.
“Oh yes, I think I have a good old-fashioned septuagenarian billionaire in Palm Beach for her. Not exactly scintillating, but his real estate portfolio has a personality all its own.”
“Perfect,” she said. “I’ll call her with the good news.”
A few years back, I co-wrote a fairly well-known relationship book for women called Closing The Deal; the premise was that two married men’s advice could help turn single women into deal closers. While we had no formal training as relationship experts, we just implicitly understood that if women understood men better, they’d have a better shot at closing the deal. Knowing your audience is always key, whether personally or professionally, and we offered advice on topics from hygiene to foreplay.
Where most rich divorcées fail is in assuming they can replace their husbands with a newer model pretty much like the old one. Sorry to say, this tends not to be the case. Most of the time, the divorced well-to-do male is not looking for his equal, but rather for a sexretary from the Midwest, preferably without an opinion. As one recently divorced hedge funder told me: “Being married to a smart, opinionated woman is work! Now I just want tits on a stick, a blonde wig and someone to tell me I’m great when I get home.”
Women who take a tough line often wind up lonelier for it. At a political fund-raiser, my wife Dana and I were chatting with a well-regarded financier’s ex-wife, who clearly exhibited pre-realistic dating tendencies. She laid out her requests like the Marshall Plan: “My age or younger. I won’t date a geezer. Rich—the richer the better. Sexy. Okay, let’s just cut to the chase: my ex if he had abs and a personality.”
“Don’t you think you shouldn’t have a list?” Dana asked innocently.
“That’s for other people,” she snapped.
She is still on the prowl.
by Richard Kirshenbaum, NY Observer | Read more:
Image: (Illo: Brian Taylor
Holding Them Closer
Nearly 30 years ago, sociologist Robert Bellah and his team of co-authors in Habits of the Heart (1985) described the American parenting ideal as the production of independent children who “leave home,” both figuratively and literally. To never leave home, they wrote, violated the cardinal American virtue of self-reliance, contradicting self-understandings that individuals should “earn everything we get, accept no handouts or gifts, and free ourselves from our families of origin.” The essence of parenting was preparing children for just such a separation, reflecting the American belief that a meaningful life could be had only by breaking free from family and giving birth, in a sense, to oneself. “However painful the process of leaving home, for parents and for children, the really frightening thing for both would be the prospect of the child never leaving home.” Successful launching was the quest, and the empty nest, even though it required adjustment, the reward. If these were the habits of the parenting heart in the 1980s, American parents clearly have had a change of heart.Consider these recent findings from the Culture of American Families Survey, conducted by the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture. Two-thirds of American parents of school-age children now say they would “willingly support a 25-year-old child financially” if needed. Two-thirds say they would encourage a 25-year-old to move back home if he or she had difficulty affording housing. Parents still hope, of course, that their adult children will attain financial independence, but this aspiration is no stronger than the hope that children will retain “close ties with parents and family”—both are considered “essential” by about half of American parents. The quest for long-term connection with children has taken central stage. Parenting is still about formation, but its overriding concern has pivoted from formation to connection. One has only to consider parents’ responses to the statement “I hope to be best friends with my children when they are grown” to know something new is happening at home. Almost three-quarters of today’s parents of school-age children (72 percent) agree that they eventually want to be their children’s best friends; only 17 percent disagree. The successful formation and launching of children still matters; it is just that parents don’t want to launch them very far.
Ambiguous Adulthood
With this as their goal, it is no wonder American parents increasingly welcome twenty-something “boomerang children” back into “accordion families.” Compared to a generation ago, increasing numbers of adults in their twenties and thirties regularly call home to their parents, and regularly call their parents’ households “home.” American parents, meanwhile, more than parents in some nations, have felt the need to justify welcoming adult children back—as helping to finance a child’s schooling or the purchase of a separate residence, for example. But the practice has become so commonplace that justifying narratives are less and less necessary; the stigma attached to living with Mom and Dad is waning. Sociologist Katherine Newman suggests in The Accordion Family: Boomerang Kids, Anxious Parents, and the Private Toll of Global Competition (2012) that the very notions of “adulthood” and “independence” are increasingly ambiguous. Criteria such as residential independence, the creation of a new family, and economic autonomy have given way to something more elusive: You become an adult when you feel like one. It is the self-perception of autonomy and freedom that matters. Adulthood has become a subjective category.
Or the criteria may simply have changed, with young adults substituting personal autonomy (in their purchases, leisure pursuits, and lifestyles) and popular cultural knowledge (of the sort derived from exposure to popular media) for traditional signs of adulthood. Consider these findings from the Culture of American Families Survey. The typical older teen (16–19) has both a cell phone and a social networking account. She texts and talks with friends on her cell phone multiple times per day. She spends an hour or two daily on the Internet and streams videos several times a week. And she gets together with friends with no adult supervision about once a week. (It is important to note here that the Culture of American Families Survey is a nationally representative study of parents of school-age children. So these findings present parents’ understandings of what their children are doing.) What is more, the social backdrop for her semi-autonomous and plugged-in world often includes parents who themselves have positive attitudes toward the new technologies or, if not, at least accept them as the wave of the future, a wave their child cannot miss. So beyond the subjective feelings of adulthood, older teenagers’ very real freedom in consumption and leisure choices, their media connections with the world beyond the home, and the cultural knowledge that accumulates from these activities and links reinforce their perceptions that they deserve to be treated as adults.
Something unacknowledged in their rush to “adulthood” is not only their lack of economic independence but also their incompetence in practical matters. Older teens—legally “adults”—may mock their parents’ ignorance of the latest web trends or media celebrities, but they are often stumped by things their parents, at the same age, would have considered basic: changing a tire, replacing a button, ironing clothes, applying for a job, and the like. A recent analysis of such practical torpor by psychologists Joseph Allen and Claudia Worrell Allen goes so far as to suggest that 25 years of age is the new 15. In Escaping the Endless Adolescence: How We Can Help Our Teenagers Grow Up Before They Grow Old (2009), they note, “We’ve worked with macho teenage boys—high school seniors who were more than able to take their licks on an athletic field or jousting with peers—who were reduced to near paralysis when told to go to a shopping center on their own and approach store managers about possible job opportunities. So far removed and so beyond them did the adult world seem that these teens felt unable to enter it alone, even in the most rudimentary ways.” Other researchers have pointed to the incomplete development of the adolescent brain as the source of adolescent troubles, but the Allens instead highlight the insular nature of the adolescent world. Adolescents, they contend, grow up in a peer-dominated bubble, cut off from adult contacts, adult roles, and the adult world in general (other than their parents). This leaves little beyond their gadgets, studies, and peer-centered activities to serve as the basis for a broader sense of life’s meaning and purpose. What is more, the values absorbed from their media-defined world contrast markedly, the authors contend, with the traits valued by their parents and the adult world in general.
Overall, the Allens suggest, this adolescent bubble makes it harder for young people to engage in more meaningful pursuits or to make more significant contributions, leaving them to study, text, and tweet into the wee hours of the night. For their part, young adults defer plans for creating their own families, tangle fitfully with a challenging labor market, and rely on their parents’ financial and practical support until well into their twenties, if not beyond. Young adults from economically secure families sometimes opt for extended periods of self-discovery and vocational experimentation, relying on parents as security blankets for hard times. The more demanding route of competitive higher education, an ambitious career track, and the shouldering of vocational and family responsibilities is seen as something that can wait. But this leisurely stroll toward “leaving home” doesn’t preclude the embrace of an adult identity, even if it is framed in the language of “emerging adults” or “young adults.”
With this as their goal, it is no wonder American parents increasingly welcome twenty-something “boomerang children” back into “accordion families.” Compared to a generation ago, increasing numbers of adults in their twenties and thirties regularly call home to their parents, and regularly call their parents’ households “home.” American parents, meanwhile, more than parents in some nations, have felt the need to justify welcoming adult children back—as helping to finance a child’s schooling or the purchase of a separate residence, for example. But the practice has become so commonplace that justifying narratives are less and less necessary; the stigma attached to living with Mom and Dad is waning. Sociologist Katherine Newman suggests in The Accordion Family: Boomerang Kids, Anxious Parents, and the Private Toll of Global Competition (2012) that the very notions of “adulthood” and “independence” are increasingly ambiguous. Criteria such as residential independence, the creation of a new family, and economic autonomy have given way to something more elusive: You become an adult when you feel like one. It is the self-perception of autonomy and freedom that matters. Adulthood has become a subjective category.
Or the criteria may simply have changed, with young adults substituting personal autonomy (in their purchases, leisure pursuits, and lifestyles) and popular cultural knowledge (of the sort derived from exposure to popular media) for traditional signs of adulthood. Consider these findings from the Culture of American Families Survey. The typical older teen (16–19) has both a cell phone and a social networking account. She texts and talks with friends on her cell phone multiple times per day. She spends an hour or two daily on the Internet and streams videos several times a week. And she gets together with friends with no adult supervision about once a week. (It is important to note here that the Culture of American Families Survey is a nationally representative study of parents of school-age children. So these findings present parents’ understandings of what their children are doing.) What is more, the social backdrop for her semi-autonomous and plugged-in world often includes parents who themselves have positive attitudes toward the new technologies or, if not, at least accept them as the wave of the future, a wave their child cannot miss. So beyond the subjective feelings of adulthood, older teenagers’ very real freedom in consumption and leisure choices, their media connections with the world beyond the home, and the cultural knowledge that accumulates from these activities and links reinforce their perceptions that they deserve to be treated as adults.
Something unacknowledged in their rush to “adulthood” is not only their lack of economic independence but also their incompetence in practical matters. Older teens—legally “adults”—may mock their parents’ ignorance of the latest web trends or media celebrities, but they are often stumped by things their parents, at the same age, would have considered basic: changing a tire, replacing a button, ironing clothes, applying for a job, and the like. A recent analysis of such practical torpor by psychologists Joseph Allen and Claudia Worrell Allen goes so far as to suggest that 25 years of age is the new 15. In Escaping the Endless Adolescence: How We Can Help Our Teenagers Grow Up Before They Grow Old (2009), they note, “We’ve worked with macho teenage boys—high school seniors who were more than able to take their licks on an athletic field or jousting with peers—who were reduced to near paralysis when told to go to a shopping center on their own and approach store managers about possible job opportunities. So far removed and so beyond them did the adult world seem that these teens felt unable to enter it alone, even in the most rudimentary ways.” Other researchers have pointed to the incomplete development of the adolescent brain as the source of adolescent troubles, but the Allens instead highlight the insular nature of the adolescent world. Adolescents, they contend, grow up in a peer-dominated bubble, cut off from adult contacts, adult roles, and the adult world in general (other than their parents). This leaves little beyond their gadgets, studies, and peer-centered activities to serve as the basis for a broader sense of life’s meaning and purpose. What is more, the values absorbed from their media-defined world contrast markedly, the authors contend, with the traits valued by their parents and the adult world in general.
Overall, the Allens suggest, this adolescent bubble makes it harder for young people to engage in more meaningful pursuits or to make more significant contributions, leaving them to study, text, and tweet into the wee hours of the night. For their part, young adults defer plans for creating their own families, tangle fitfully with a challenging labor market, and rely on their parents’ financial and practical support until well into their twenties, if not beyond. Young adults from economically secure families sometimes opt for extended periods of self-discovery and vocational experimentation, relying on parents as security blankets for hard times. The more demanding route of competitive higher education, an ambitious career track, and the shouldering of vocational and family responsibilities is seen as something that can wait. But this leisurely stroll toward “leaving home” doesn’t preclude the embrace of an adult identity, even if it is framed in the language of “emerging adults” or “young adults.”
by Carl Desportes Bowman, Hedgehog Review | Read more:
Image: Hedgehog Review
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