- Andrew Marantz: Colin Robinson, OR Books Publish History of Occupy Wall Street”
On October 2nd, a few weeks after Occupy Wall Street began, Colin Robinson, a British man with a head of loose gray curls, fished a Natural Light beer case out of a trash can in Chelsea. He tore off a rectangle of brown cardboard, folded it into the shape of . . ....
- Hendrik Hertzberg: Will Occupy Wall Street succeed?
Everything else is made in China, so why not pithy aperçus about Occupy Wall Street? “A revolution is not a dinner party.” Or was it a Tea Party that the murderous Communist Mao Zedong (still officially revered in the most populous, most fearsomely capitalist nation on . . ....
- Abby Aguirre: Occupy Wall Street’s Accounting Working Group.
In a twelfth-floor office a few blocks from Zuccotti Park, two members of Occupy Wall Street’s Finance Working Group were organizing piles of money. The members were Willie Carey, a twenty-eight-year-old former political consultant from Chapel Hill, who wore an oatmeal-colored knit beanie . . ....
- John Kenney: “We Are the One Per Cent.”
Average wealth of the top 1 percent was almost $14 million in 2009, according to a 2011 report from the Economic Policy Institute.—Washingtonpost.com.“Shit is fucked up and bullshit.”—Sign seen at the Occupy Wall Street protest in lower Manhattan.
We, too, have mobilized . . ....
- Hendrik Hertzberg: What lies ahead for Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party.
If politics is show business for ugly people (which, by the way, it’s not, not this time, not the ugly-people part anyway, not with a cast of characters as glossy as Mitt Romney, Rick Perry, Michele Bachmann, Sarah Palin’s ghost, and Barack Obama), is Occupy . . ....
- Andrew Marantz: Occupy Wall Street, Global Revolution, Vlad Teichberg.
On the screen, a protester from Occupy Orlando was requesting in-kind donations. “We have plenty of deodorant,” he said, “but we could use soap.” A second protester, wearing a Guy Fawkes mask, entered the frame to announce breaking news: “We’re global! Seventeen . . ....
- Ian Frazier: Clayton Patterson and Occupy Wall Street’s lineage.
On the Lower East Side on a recent Sunday afternoon, at the corner of East Houston Street and Second Avenue, trash and plastic bags were cartwheeling in the wind and a policeman in a bright-green vest was directing traffic around construction and a Cat power shovel was backing up . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Goings on About Town: Duane Reade, Wall Street
paragraph class="noindent">In the old days—like, say, a few weeks ago—you went to a drugstore for drugs and maybe some dental floss. There is plenty of that sort of thing at the spanking-new Walgreens-owned Duane Reade on Wall Street, but there are also . . . (Subscription required.)...
- James Surowiecki: College tuition, student loans, and unemployment.
The protesters at Occupy Wall Street may not have put forth an explicit set of demands yet, but there is one thing that they all agree on: student debt is too damn high. Since the late nineteen-seventies, annual costs at four-year colleges have risen three times as fast . . ....
- Mattathias Schwartz: Kalle Lasn and Micah White, the creators of Occupy Wall Street.
Kalle Lasn spends most nights shuffling clippings into a binder of plastic sleeves, each of which represents one page of an issue of Adbusters, a bimonthly magazine that he founded and edits. It is a tactile process, like making a collage, and occasionally Lasn will run a page with his . . ....
- John Cassidy: Goldman Sachs and Wall Street reform.
Few things excite the public as much as a financial scandal. When the scandal involves Goldman Sachs, the richest, most powerful firm on Wall Street, and the central figure is an unknown thirty-one-year-old Frenchman who refers to himself as Fabulous Fab, the result is a barrage of . . ....
- Ford Numbers Beat Wall Street Expectations
Ford has surprised Wall Street after reporting a $2.6 billion profit in the second-quarter of the year, earning shareholders 61 cents per share, which beats the forecast 40 cents. Ford's American sales climbed 28 per cent since the beginning of the year, almost doubling that of its competitors....
- James Surowiecki: High finance on the big screen.
When Oliver Stone’s “Wall Street” came out, in 1987, the movie’s portrait of American finance as an exhilaratingly cutthroat world ruled by corrupt traders and amoral money managers left an instant and indelible impression. But when Stone’s follow-up, “Wall Street . . ....
- Lizzie Widdicombe: The taxi-driver’s advocate.
On Houston Street at Avenue A the other day, a woman stuck out her hand to hail a taxi. It was cold and drizzly—hyper-competitive cab-hailing conditions—but she was likely to have better luck than most people. The woman was Bhairavi Desai, the executive director . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Lizzie Widdicombe: Forbidden Fruit
The three-week citywide performance-art festival Performa begins next week, opening not with a dinner but with a “food event”: “a series of food installations and happenings,” according to the invitation, “that will lead guests”—Cindy Sherman, Mario Batali—“on . . ....
- James Surowiecki: Ratings Downgrade
When Barack Obama went to Wall Street last week to make the case for meaningful financial regulation, he took well-deserved shots at some of the villains of the financial crisis: greedy bankers, reckless investors, and captive regulators. But to that list he could have added credit-rating agencies like . . ....
- James Surowiecki: Why Wall Street should fear the Tea Party.
When Congress finally reached an agreement to lift the debt ceiling, a week ago, many predicted that investors would react with a sigh of relief. After all, on the surface the deal looked good for business, allowing the U.S. to avoid defaulting on its debt while preserving corporate tax loopholes . . ....
- Mazda RX-7 – Classic Street Car
Near a decade ago, a movie about illegal street racing in Los Angeles was released in the big screen. That movie, The Fast & The Furious, spawned three other sequels and pushed import street racing into the forefront of pop culture....
- Vince Aletti: “Pictures by Women,” at MOMA.
Photographs by women occupy key positions in MOMA’s collection, but male photographers have always taken up most of the wall space. “Pictures by Women: A History of Modern Photography” changes that, banishing men and establishing a persuasive alternate narrative. The curators Roxana Marcoci, Sarah Meister, and . . ....
- Lizzie Widdicombe: Social Register, the original Facebook.
The news, last week, that the Encyclopædia Britannica was discontinuing its book edition seemed to signal a new world order—the decline of print, the surrendering of institutional hierarchies to the democracy of the Internet. But another transformation has occurred in recent months, with less fanfare: the . . . (Subscription required.)...
- About Street Reflectors
Understanding the Importance of Street Reflectors Street reflectors are road equipment placed in the streets to provide light when the area is dark, especially when the only available light is that from the passing vehicle. Different street reflectors can be found all over different parts of the streets, even in the sidewalks. These street reflectors' main purpose is to assist in the road...
- John Cassidy: What good is Wall Street?
A few months ago, I came across an announcement that Citigroup, the parent company of Citibank, was to be honored, along with its chief executive, Vikram Pandit, for “Advancing the Field of Asset Building in America.” This seemed akin to, say, saluting BP for services to the environment . . ....
- Lizzie Widdicombe: A pedicab ride with the actor Jesse Eisenberg.
Who’s the biggest nerd in the movies? Jesse Eisenberg, who played the older brother in “The Squid and the Whale” and starred in “Adventureland,” might seem like an outside contender, but he has three films opening this month—“Solitary Man” (with . . ....
- James Surowiecki: The pros and cons of financial innovation.
Innovate or die. The phrase, popularized in Silicon Valley in the nineteen-nineties, has since become a mantra throughout the business world, and nowhere has it been more popular than on Wall Street, which in recent years has churned out a seemingly endless stream of new ways to manage capital . . ....
- Lizzie Widdicombe: America’s homemade fallout shelters through the years.
If you stopped by the International Contemporary Furniture Fair at the Javits Center last week, you may have noticed, tucked among the minimalist mirrors and squiggly light fixtures, a booth containing shelves packed with more practical goods—toilet paper, anchovies, bottled water, powdered Jell-O. This was a fallout . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Heather Rowe and Kevin Zucker @ Forever and Today
The year-old nonprofit Forever and Today sits across the street from a Baroque confection of a building, once home to a silent-movie theatre. That site inspired Rowe (a sculptor) and Zucker (a painter) to conceive an installation that deconstructs the mechanics of cinema without dismantling the magic—no small feat. A black-and-white patterned backdrop hangs on the rear wall like a...
- “I Need a New Car, I Cannot Wait Until the Economy Recovers” He Said
Just the other day, I was reading my Wall Street Journal and sitting at Starbucks on the patio, I mean a truly magnificent day in every regard. Then all of a sudden someone broke the peace and serenity of the birds chirping - he drove up in a 1980s vintage K-car with squeaky brakes and squealing fan belts. He turned off the ignition but the car kept dieseling, it quit after about 10 seconds....
- Books: “Fire Season”
Connors, a former Wall Street Journal copy editor, is, for most of the year, a happily married bartender in Silver City, New Mexico. But every April he treks five and a half miles into the Gila Wilderness to spend five months alone (save for his dog) in one of America . . . (Subscription required.)...
