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9781736739112
| B091BKKDJ1
| 4.00
| 29
| Mar 29, 2021
| Jun 01, 2021
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really liked it
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Crisis Deluxe is the debut novel of a former investment banker. Honestly, the work sounds as though it would kill with anxiety anyone who suffers from
Crisis Deluxe is the debut novel of a former investment banker. Honestly, the work sounds as though it would kill with anxiety anyone who suffers from imposter syndrome. A rougher bunch of the over-compensated would be hard to find. Super-charged self-satisfaction is not hard to find these days in lots of professions; it may even be a prerequisite for some positions. I am quite sure it has something to do with compensation: “I mean, if I’m paid this much, I must be good! Right?” What works in this novel is the complicated story of the buy-out of an investment bank headquartered in Hong Kong by a bigger investment bank based in New York. Money, as ordinary folks know it, is a different beast in this world; our interest lies in learning its new definition, realizing the dimensions of its reach and the emptiness of its pleasures. Things we would ordinarily treasure—out-of-reach gustatory delights, trips around the world, rides in Rolls Royce and expensive clothing—are paired with the scent of sweat, exhaustion and even blood. Mostly we recognize money is not worth what we give up to get it, something minimum wage and gig workers have discovered post-pandemic in America. But I cannot be completely sure if that lesson is one I learned in this book or if it was merely confirmed to me there. The investment banker at the heart of this fiction introduces himself like James Bond: “Street. Alexander Street.” Great name. Street is sent to Hong Kong from South America where is he finishing one deal so he can save another going very bad as Asian financial markets teeter and crater. Why the market is unstable is never discussed which prompts my usual skepticism over Wall Street and SEHK shenanigans. Financial markets are built on trust, and bankers showed us their empty shirts in the last 20 years. IMHO, they simply know there are ways to make money in shaky markets but don’t have the brains, heart or knowledge to tell us why. Street works out of NYC but his parentage is European. With that he has the best of both worlds: credibility and deniability. He can deny being a hated Yank while having the backing of a big, fat American investment bank. The story involves us in the details of the Hong Kong company’s balance sheet and its status as the continent’s first successful purveyor of corporate bonds. As the market falters, holders of commercial debt begin to limit their exposure by calling in loan payments just when companies are least likely to be able to pay. Powerful interests around Hong Kong’s city-state begin to move as the investment bank buyout is reimagined. When a wealthy but uninvolved friend of Street’s is murdered before his eyes at dinner one night, we never really get full satisfaction. Murder, and its cousin poisoning, usually require more explanation both to and by the police than we received in this novel. Like in any country, when a rich person dies, there are ripples. There is a romantic interest in this novel but it is odd. In the manner of all things masculine, Alexander Street does not excessively, or even adequately, question when his gorgeous high-school sweetheart of thirty years before suddenly shows up, willing and able to involve herself in a romantic liaison with him, despite the fact both are long-and-happily married. That she is the older sister of a difficult young bond salesman involved in the bank buyout raises warning flags for women readers but barely touch the consciousness of Street. Alexander Street. The ending kept me guessing and was climactic. See for yourself. P.S. I met Chris Coffman on Goodreads. He wrote some of the most insightful and interesting reviews I came across...oh, some long time ago now. Then he dropped off as a result of being consumed with writing his own mystery. I hope you pick this up to encourage such efforts. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jun 04, 2021
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Jun 06, 2021
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Jun 02, 2021
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Kindle Edition
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1487002068
| 9781487002060
| 1487002068
| 4.13
| 626
| May 26, 2020
| Jul 07, 2020
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it was amazing
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The e-edition of Hamilton’s latest in the Ava Lee series is out and you will want to take this trip with Ava as she hits several continents: Amsterdam
The e-edition of Hamilton’s latest in the Ava Lee series is out and you will want to take this trip with Ava as she hits several continents: Amsterdam and Antwerp in Europe, Singapore and mainland China in Asia, and back to Toronto in North America. Ava’s collecting debts but for a friend, as she had in her early career. It brings back memories. This time it is not debts Ava is following but cold, hard investment theft wrapped up in a not-so-generous evangelical megachurch on the outskirts of Toronto. Hamilton creates the cruelest, most unambiguously unforgivable villains to walk the earth, and places them in a world we recognize. From there, the scandal just gets bigger… Has anyone read the 14th-century Chinese novel called, variously, The Water Margin, Outlaws of the Marsh, and All Men Are Brothers? It is a rip-roaring 4-volume Song Dynasty yarn, a masterpiece of storytelling, packed with colorful characters whose names tell it all: Little Whirlwind, Blue-Faced Beast, Impatient Vanguard, etc. The epic story tells of 108 bandits who live by the margin of Liang Shan Marsh and pursue justice by unconventional means. Hamilton’s story this time has elements of this ancient tale. He named his thieving church leaders Cunningham, Rogers, and Randy. Ava’s triad connection in Chengdu, Han, is blustery and loud, his crass manner and crude-but-effective methods modeled on characters in the ancient tale. Han uses his fists when words are not enough. He carries a large weapon to focus the attention of his opponents on their limited options. I adored this tale for these elements, and for outlining and pointing to the real and acutely painful problem that Ava uncovers in the course of her investigations, something that has been plaguing the West, particularly the United States and Canada, for some years now. The problem has its source in China and concerned North Americans have wondered how on earth this is happening without and/or despite Chinese government oversight. The answer to that question echoes what we hear when contemplating the indescribably painful political atmosphere in the United States: it is completely within the realm of the country’s leadership to stop the trouble. For some reason beyond our understanding, the leadership prefers chaos. God help us all. Another fantastic addition to Hamilton’s box of jewels. P.S. If you are going to pick up Outlaws of the Marsh, please choose Sidney Shapiro’s translation, the language of which made me fall in deeply love with Chinese culture, habits and humor. Shapiro’s word choices make the ancient book immediately relevant, laugh-out-loud funny, and the long read tireless. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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May 26, 2020
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May 28, 2020
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May 21, 2020
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Paperback
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1250214807
| 9781250214805
| 1250214807
| 4.25
| 6,774
| Apr 24, 2018
| Mar 26, 2019
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it was amazing
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Stacey Abrams learned not always to kick right at her goal. Watching her stand back and assess a situation can be a fearsome thing. You know she is go
Stacey Abrams learned not always to kick right at her goal. Watching her stand back and assess a situation can be a fearsome thing. You know she is going to do something oh-so-effective and she is going to use her team to get there, those who mentored her and those she mentored herself. I just love that teamwork. This memoir is unlike any other presidential-hopeful memoir out there. Abrams has not declared herself for the 2020 race, but running for president is on her to-do list. I read the library edition of her book quickly and wondered why she’d write it this way; she’s a writer and this is written in a workbook self-help style. But something she’d said about ambition was so clarifying and electrifying that I ended up buying the book to study what she was doing. “Ambition should be an animation of soul…a disquiet that requires you to take action…Ambition means being proactive…If you can walk away [from your ambition] for days, weeks, or years at a time, it is not an ambition—it’s a wish.”Ambition is not something you can be passive about. You feel you must act on it or you will regret it all your days. Ambition should not a job title but something that helps you to answer “why”. Now I know why Abrams wrote her book like this. After all, she’s a writer; she could write whatever kind of book she wanted. Her ambition is to have readers feel strong and capable enough to do whatever they put their minds to, whether it is to aid someone in office or be that person in office. She learned a lot on her path to this place and she doesn’t necessarily want to get to the top of the mountain without her cohort. Her ambition is not an office, it is a result. What Abrams relates about her failures is most instructive. After all, none of us achieve all we set our minds to, at least on the first try. But Abrams shows that one has to be relentlessly honest with oneself about one’s advantages and deficiencies, even asking others in case one’s own interpretations are skewed by fear or previous failure. By writing her book this way, Abrams is unapologetic about some areas she could have handled better, personal finances for instance, that could have been used as a weapon against her. She explains her situation at the time and recommends better pathways for those who follow. A former member of the Georgia State Legislature, Abrams found herself a different breed of politician than most who had achieved that rank. She was less attuned to social sway than she was to marshaling her intellect to overcome roadblocks to effective legislation. This undoubtedly had some genesis in the reactions she’d gotten her entire life as a black woman. She wasn’t going to wait for folks to accept her; she planned to take her earned seat at the table but she was going to be prepared. She found that she needed both skills to succeed in business and in politics. She needed the support of a base and she needed an understanding of what would move the ball forward. And she learned what real power means. “Access to real power also acknowledges that sometimes we need to collaborate rather than compete. We have to work with our least favorite colleague or with folks whose ideologies differ greatly from our own…But working together for a common end, if not for the same reason, means that more can be accomplished.”Abrams discusses strategies and tactics for acquiring and wielding power and reminds us that “sometimes winning takes longer than we hope” and leaders facing long odds on worthy goals best be prepared for the “slow-burn” where victory doesn’t arrive quickly. But every small victory or single act of defiance can inspire someone else to take action. If defeat is inevitable, reevaluate. Abrams suggests that one may need to change the rules of engagement so that instead of a ‘win’ one may be happy to ‘stay alive’ to fight another day. The last fifty pages of the book put words to things we may know but haven’t articulated before. Abrams acknowledges that beliefs are anchors which help to direct us in decision-making but should never be used to block critical thinking, reasonable compromise, and thoughtful engagement. “Collaboration and compromise are necessary tools in gaining and holding power.”The GOP also believes this, but I think they use the notion within their coalition: they use discipline to keep their team in order and members may need to compromise their values to stay in the power group. Democrats must hold onto the notion of compromise within and without their coalition to succeed, while never compromising values. It is difficult to believe there is anyone out there who doesn’t admire Stacey Abrams’ guts and perseverance. Her friends stood by her in times of stress because Abrams made efforts to acknowledge her weaknesses while not allowing them to break down her spirit. She built every pillar of the leadership role she talks about and can stand before us, challenging us to do the same. She is a powerhouse. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Apr 05, 2019
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Jun 12, 2019
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Apr 05, 2019
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Paperback
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0812997417
| 9780812997415
| 0812997417
| 3.62
| 11,240
| Sep 04, 2018
| Sep 04, 2018
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really liked it
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I listened to this novel months ago—just about the time it came out. I haven’t been able to adequately put into words how I felt about it. This was th
I listened to this novel months ago—just about the time it came out. I haven’t been able to adequately put into words how I felt about it. This was the first time I’ve partaken of a Shteyngart novel, and it is more in every way than I was expecting. There is a shadow of Pynchon’s frank absurdity there, and some bungee-cord despair—the kind that bounces back, irrepressible. Shteyngart’s novel is overstuffed with funny, sad, true, caustic, simplistic, derogatory observations about life in America that somehow capture us in all our glory. He is not dismissive; I think he likes us. The main character in this novel, Barry Cohen, is nothing if not representative of what we have taught ourselves to be: money-mad and self-pitying, educated enough to capture our own market but too stupid to see the big picture. What introspection we have is wasted on divining the motivations of others rather than our own triggers. Barry is a man America loves to hate. He is a successful hedge fund manager who emerged from the economic crisis in fine shape—it was only his clients who suffered. And his clients suffered because the government finally caught on to some irregularities in Barry’s operations that allowed him to win so much. While the SEC investigated, Barry left Seema, his wife and an attorney, with his son Shiva to see if he could find an old flame. Last he’d heard she was living in the South. Right there Barry made a big mistake. One doesn’t leave an attorney for another woman. I mean, how stupid do you have to be? Barry and Seema had been doing okay marriage-wise, though it turns out Shiva is autistic. Unable to speak and often looking as though he does not even comprehend what words and comments are directed to him, Shiva is unknowable. Barry wants to love him, but maybe wants Shiva to love Barry himself more. Seema handles most of Shiva's care which means she cannot work. More and more absorbed with her son’s care, she recognizes and relishes small victories of understanding his internal world while her husband languishes. Barry Cohen’s odyssey from New York by bus to various destinations in the south features a man with a skill set that serves him surprisingly well when traveling by bus on limited cash, no credit, and a roller-board of fancy watches. He almost can’t be shamed because he’s a bigger crook than anyone. Dragging around his collection of fancy watches turns out not to be very lucrative—who recognizes their value? But they do get him food occasionally, and a little tradable currency. Barry spends relatively little psychic energy pondering the sources of his Wall Street wealth, but somehow recognizes it’s probably not worth as much as he was getting paid to do it. His long-story-short gives us cameos of American ‘types’: street-wise salesmen, long-suffering nannies, practical mothers, and money managers who believe their work confers some kind of godliness on their financial outcomes. Because we win, we are meant to win. Yes, this all takes place in the first year of the Trump administration. Barry Cohen is hard to take. “See, this is the thing about America,” he tells his former employee in Atlanta, a man named Park that Barry keeps referring to as Chinese, “You can never guess who’s going to turn out to be a nice person.” Well. Barry is not a very nice person, really. He simply is not reflective enough. We can feel twinges at his angst, but ultimately we make our own beds, don’t we? Barry is tiresome, that’s the problem. His adventures are quite something, but we grow weary of his queer decision-making and slow recognition that he does, in fact, love his imperfect family. It’s all he’s got, the silly doofus, and they are worthy of his love. We’d rather spend time with them. In an enlightening interview with The Guardian, Shteyngart acknowledges the story is about racism: "I think racism undergirds all of this, no question. It’s a huge part of it. When we were immigrants and couldn’t speak the language, the one thing this country told us was: ‘You’re white, there’s always somebody lower than you.’"Shteyngart thought he might add a gender dimension to the story, and was going to make his main character a woman, but the few female hedge fund managers he found were rational and didn’t take such big crazy risks that they end up blowing up the world. Right, I think. Exactly right. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Sep 24, 2018
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Feb 20, 2019
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Sep 24, 2018
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Hardcover
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0374103119
| 9780374103118
| 0374103119
| 4.26
| 4,298
| Jun 12, 2018
| Jun 12, 2018
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it was amazing
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This scientific and legal drama recounts the harrowing ordeal of several families suffering terribly from toxic chemicals leaching from storage pools
This scientific and legal drama recounts the harrowing ordeal of several families suffering terribly from toxic chemicals leaching from storage pools of fracking waste into their drinking water and into the air in western Pennsylvania. New Yorker staff writer and journalist Eliza Griswold has excellent instincts for a story and she has honed her skills so that unwieldy real life is put into a clear timeline; we not only understand, we are desperate to learn the outcome. It is nearly impossible to imagine this kind of deceit and coercion happening today in ‘sacrifice zones’ around the country. After all, it is written in Pennsylvania’s own constitution that “The people have a right to clear air, pure water, and to the preservation of the natural, scenic, historic and aesthetic values of the environment. Pennsylvania’s public natural resources are the common property of all the people, including generations yet to come. As trustee of these resources, the Commonwealth shall conserve and maintain them for the benefit for all the people.”Residents who survived—many of their farm animals did not—had to leave their newly worthless property because the water was not fit to drink and the air was not fit to breathe. This is the story of how these families fought the state and federal agencies (EPA, DEP) charged with protecting them; Range Resources, the company responsible for the fracking work; the companies responsible for testing blood and water for chemical components causing the damage; their own neighbors; and the political leadership including the governor in Pennsylvania who instituted Act 13, giving zoning overrides to fracking companies. When their lawyers, John Smith and his wife Kendra, finally argued a case about the pollution before the Pennsylvania Supreme Court in October 2012, two years after they began researching the cases, the lawyers were afraid the conservative judge known to side frequently with Republican politicians would throw out the challenge to Act 13. [Pennsylvania is known today as the poster child for such severe political gerrymandering Republicans in state and national government far outweigh their Democratic challengers.] State governor Tom Corbett didn’t want “to send a negative message to job creators and families who depend on the energy industry.” Corbett was voted out in 2015. Speaking of families who depend on the energy industry, the neighbors of these folks who had been so wrongly done by sometimes begrudged the families their lawsuits since it might lessen their opportunity to sell the rights to whatever gas or right-of-way lay beneath their own land. This is a horror story that is difficult to tear one’s eyes from. “[Range Resources] tried to appeal to those who stood to make money with an unusual letter writing campaign. One mass mailing was addressed to a fictitious ‘Mr. and Mrs. Joe Schmo at 10 Cash-Strapped Lane.’ It urged residents to bring pressure on their local officials to allow companies wide latitude to drill where they needed to, or there’d be no gas, and ‘no gas means no royalties.’”The royalties, by the way, weren’t very impressive to someone who was going to lose their health, their livelihood, their land, their house, their way of life. This was farmland, so most of people discussed here in detail had barns, large animals, etc. This says nothing of the downstream pollution of the groundwater. People can drill on their own property, but not if it affects their neighbor. Fracking waste is toxic, but much of the time so is what fracking dredges up from deep earth pockets holding Pleistocene-era bacteria and ocean salts. No one wants this waste. Range Resources paid Alan Shipman to truck away waste that didn’t fit in the holding ponds. Shipman was convicted in 2011 of mixing the fracking solutions with less lethal waste so technically it would fall under less stringent guidelines for placement and then he dumped it illegally into public waterways. A few local public officials thought some of the difficulties lay in the corruption of government by money flowing from the gas companies to people in political office who thereafter tended to cater to those business interests. Even Obama changed his tune from “no fracking” during his campaign, to “gas is good” during his term. Some individuals argue that despite some pollution, gas extraction has made the U.S. practically energy independent, moving the U.S. from importing two-thirds of it’s oil needs to one-fifth. A degree of pollution here may prevent global ocean rise because gas is less carbon-emitting, etc, etc. To all of this could be argued that the costs of gas are not adequately taken into account by companies operating by deceit. Have the companies pay the real costs and then go find investors. They will, and we will be protected. If gas is judged to be “just too expensive,” we may need to rethink the way we do business or the way we live. One final note is a very short discussion Griswold adds about the Tragedy of the Commons. I’d never heard of this concept, so I quote her here at length: “Economists describe the Tragedy of the Commons like this: cattle herders sharing a pasture will inevitably place the needs of their cows above the needs of others’, adding cow after cow and taking more than their share of the common grass. This ‘free rider’ takes advantage of the commons, and consumes it until it’s gone. This, the argument goes, is human nature, which sets individual gain over collective good. Traditionally, the Tragedy of the Commons has supported the case for individual property rights: since it’s impossible for people to act together to protect commonly held assets, we might as well carve up those assets and leave individuals to look after their own. But what if the commons did not need to end in tragedy? What if people were able to work out effective practices of sharing the commons and transmit those traditions to their descendants? Elinor Ostrom, a professor of political science at Indiana University, argued that the solution to the Tragedy of the Commons for the twenty-first century lies in common sense. Sharing has succeeded in the past and could succeed in the future. Ostrom was awarded the 2009 Nobel Prize in Economics for this work. She died in 2012.”This is a terrific, propulsive, horrifying, and important read you are not going to want to miss. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Sep 04, 2018
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Sep 09, 2018
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Jul 31, 2018
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Hardcover
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1627794093
| 9781627794091
| 1627794093
| 3.91
| 1,124
| Nov 28, 2017
| Nov 21, 2017
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it was amazing
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The ideas in this book are so refreshing, thrilling, amusing, enlightening, and sad that they had me eagerly looking forward to another session with i
The ideas in this book are so refreshing, thrilling, amusing, enlightening, and sad that they had me eagerly looking forward to another session with it whenever I got a chance. I found myself fearing what was to come as I read the final chapters. If I say I wish it had turned out differently, it wouldn’t make much difference. I am just so relieved & reassured that such people exist. We share a sensibility. I suppose such people forever be shunted aside by more talky types, louder but not more capable. Anyway, this kind of talent shares a bounty that accrues to all of us. Everyone knows Lanier was exceptional for his ideas about Virtual Reality. He created, with others, an industry through the force of his imagination. What many may not recognize was that amid the multiple dimensions that made his work so special was his insistence on keeping the humanity—the imperfection, the uncertainty…the godliness, if you will—central in any technological project. It turns out that slightly less capable people could grasp the technology but not the humanity in his work, the humanity being the harder part by orders of magnitude. It was amusing, hearing such a bright light discuss ‘the scene’ that surrounded his spectacular ideas and work in the 1980s and ‘90s, the people who contributed, the people who brought their wonder and their needs. He gives readers some concept of what VR is, how complicated it is, what it may accomplish, but he never loses sight of the beauty and amazing reality we can enjoy each and every day that is only enhanced by VR. Much will be accomplished by VR in years to come, he is sure, but whether those benefits accrue to all society or merely to a select few may be an open question. While ethnic diversity is greater now in Silicon Valley than it was when Lanier went there in the 1980s, Lanier fears it has less cognitive diversity. And while the Valley has retained some of its lefty-progressive origins, many younger techies have swung libertarian. Lanier thinks the internet had some of those left-right choices early on its development, when he and John Perry Barlow had a parting of ways about how cyberspace should be organized. It is with some regret that we look back at those earlier arguments and admit that though Barlow “won,” Lanier may have been right. Lanier was always on the side of a kind of limited freedom, i.e., the freedom to link to and acknowledge where one’s ideas originated and who we pass them to; the freedom not to be anonymous; or dispensing with the notion that ideas and work are “free” to anyone wishing to access it. he acknowledges that there were, even then, “a mythical dimension of masculine success…that [contains] a faint echo of military culture…” Lanier tells us of “a few young technical people, all male, who have done harm to themselves stressing about” the number of alien civilizations and the possibility of a virtual world containing within it other virtual worlds. He suggests the antidote to this kind of circular thinking is to engage in and feel the “luscious texture of actual, real reality.” In one of his later chapters, Lanier shares Advice for VR Designers and Artists, a list containing the wisdom of years of experimenting and learning. His last point is to remind everyone not to necessarily agree with him or anyone else. “Think for yourself.” This lesson is one which requires many more steps preceding it, so that we know how to do this, and why it is so critical to trust one’s own judgement. There is room for abuse in a virtual system. “The more intense a communication technology is, the more intensely it can be used to lie.” But what sticks with me about the virtual experience that Lanier describes is how integral the human is to it. It is the interaction with the virtual that is so exciting, not our watching of it. Our senses all come into play, not just and not necessarily ideally, our eyes. When asked if VR ought to be accomplished instead by direct brain stimulation, bypassing the senses, Lanier’s answer illuminates the nature of VR: “Remember, the eyes aren’t USB cameras plugged into a Mr. Potato Head brain; they are portals on a spy submarine exploring an unknown universe. Exploration is perception.”If that quote doesn’t compute by reading it in the middle of a review, pick up the book. By the time he comes to it, it may just be the light you needed to see further into the meaning of technology. Lanier is not technical in this book. He knows he would lose most of us quickly. He talks instead about his own upbringing: you do not want to miss his personal history growing up in New Mexico and his infamous Dodge Dart. He talks also about going east (MIT, Columbia) and returning west (USC, Stanford), finding people to work with and inspiring others. He shares plenty of great stories and personal observations about some well-known figures in technology and music, and he divulges the devastating story of his first marriage and subsequent divorce. He talks about limerence, and how the horrible marriage might have been worth it simply because he understood something new about the world that otherwise he may not have known. All I know is that this was a truly generous and spectacular sharing of the early days of VR. It was endlessly engaging, informative, and full of worldly wisdom from someone who has just about seen it all. I am so grateful. This was easily the most intellectually exciting and enjoyable read I've read this year, a perfect summer read. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jun 08, 2018
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Jun 14, 2018
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May 18, 2018
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Hardcover
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0525520104
| 9780525520108
| 0525520104
| 4.00
| 6,642
| Apr 17, 2018
| Apr 17, 2018
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it was amazing
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This is a fast and fabulous, smart and funny read…the kind that reads so effortlessly because the author has a lifetime of writing experience. There i
This is a fast and fabulous, smart and funny read…the kind that reads so effortlessly because the author has a lifetime of writing experience. There is a big-hearted generosity in Wright’s view of Texas, though he doesn’t hesitate to point out personalities or policies that diminish what he believes the state could be. Wright lived many years in Austin, the big blue liberal heart of Texas, a city that attracted so many people to what the city once was that it no longer resembles that attractive mixed-race, mixed-income diversity so rich with possibility. Having read Wright’s big books on Carter’s peace talks at Camp David, and his exhaustive study of Christian Science, I was unprepared for the deep vein of “will you look at that” humor that richly marbles this piece. It is an utter delight to have Wright use his insider status as a resident to call out especially egregious instances of Texas bullshit. The book is a memoir, really—the memoir of a natural raconteur from a state where cracking jokes about serious issues is an art form. But before page ten Wright makes clear his assessment of the state: "Texas has nurtured an immature political culture that has some terrible damage to the state and to the nation. Because Texas is a part of almost everything in modern America—the South, the West. the Plains, Hispanic and immigrant communities, the border, the divide between rural areas and the cities—what happens here tends to disproportionately affect the rest of the nation. Illinois and New Jersey may be more corrupt, Kansas and Louisiana more dysfunctional, but they don’t bear the responsibility of being the future."Wright is so skilled now at writing big books that he manages to give us lots of detail and information even in this more relaxed telling, all the while being really funny. He is clear-eyed about why Texas can be a big fail and yet he clearly loves the place. "To strike it rich is still the Texas dream...Texans are always talking about how much they loved the state, but I wondered where was the evidence of that love."Wright admits he considered leaving during the oil boom/bust in the 1980s when the state never seemed to live up to its obligations. He dreamed sometimes of decamping to liberal California, where he could flog his screenwriting skills...and make more money. He thinks that a country that can hold together two such immensely powerful and opposing forces as California and Texas has got to be something worthwhile and important. I used to think so, too, but feel less confident now. Sometimes I want to saw off those pieces of the country that claim to want so much freedom, and seal the borders. No trade. We’ll see then who comes out on top. Music and art are sprinkled throughout this biography, obviously an important part of Wright’s attraction to the state. Each chapter sports woodcuts by David Dantz describing the chapter’s subject and Dantz’s endpapers illustrate the arc of the book. The art, like the prose, is rich with humor and attitude. Music is a part of Wright’s own biography and so he writes particularly well about the scene and historical influences. It’s rounded, this book, and interesting and fun and full of reasons to like Texas, despite its particularly awful politicians. Texas was a reliably blue state until the 1990s. Houston is the only major city in America without zoning laws. AM Texas radio hosts Alex Jones. Ted Cruz makes jokes about Machine Gun Bacon on Youtube but as usual when Cruz is trying to be funny, it’s an epic fail. Dallas had been a city fostering extremism until Kennedy died there. After that humiliation, Dallas became more open and tolerant, more progressive…and developed more churches per capita than any city in the nation. Wright thinks Dallas has the ability to transform suffering into social change. I say we shouldn’t be blamed for being a little suspicious of all that supposed holiness. Evangelicals have shown In the last chapters, Wright is open about searching for his final resting place. He is only seventy years old, but he is calling it for Texas. I really like that about him. He can conceive of life and death, Democrat and Republican, north and south in one sentence. He can love Texas and laugh at it, too. He has written a truly wonderful, un-put-down-able book about the I'm from Texas. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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May 06, 2018
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May 09, 2018
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Apr 29, 2018
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Hardcover
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1620402505
| 9781620402504
| 1620402505
| 4.23
| 30,433
| Apr 15, 2015
| Apr 21, 2015
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it was amazing
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The spectacular public service reporting Sam Quinones does in this nonfiction is so detailed and many-faceted that it left me feeling a little voyeuri
The spectacular public service reporting Sam Quinones does in this nonfiction is so detailed and many-faceted that it left me feeling a little voyeuristic, not having been visited by the scourge of opioid addiction myself. Good lord, I kept thinking, so this is what we are dealing with. I knew something was different, I just didn’t have any conception of the size, scope, method, and means of this problem. Quinones starts his story in the early 1980s when the first rancho Xalisco marketers came up from Mexico with an innovative method for just-in-time drive-by selling of drugs to rich white kids in the suburbs. They explicitly avoided cities and black people because they admitted they were afraid of them, their violence and their gang activity. Besides, the thinking went, blacks never had any money. They’d just as soon steal from a dealer as pay him. The white kids had money and wanted convenience above all. At almost the same time, and a cultural habitat away from small-time drug dealers of black tar heroin from Mexico, a drug company owned by the Sackler medical empire released an opiate derivative in pill form meant to alleviate pain. Early on, it is possible that creators, marketers, and prescribers of this plague did not know what they had unleashed. But within a couple of years, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that great numbers of people within and without the company sold the product in full knowledge of its wicked potency and addictive properties. Quinones has been researching and reporting on this topic for a couple of decades, and lived in Mexico for ten years, observing the supply-side. Before having a comprehensive understanding of the subject, Quinones thought the heroin problem began with U.S. demand for drugs. After researching the situation in the heartland United States, he has decided that our problem now with heroin and fentanyl overdoses was caused paradoxically by a huge supply of opioid pills, prescribed by doctors in legal clinics, and condoned at every level of society and government in our country. The story Quinones shares is un-put-down-able and truly remarkable, particularly his discussion of the marketing techniques for black tar heroin used by the small farmer-seller systems first set up by residents of Xalisco. Their method of growing-packaging-selling expansion into the heartland of America should make us sit up and pay attention. Ground zero for the meltdown of middle America is identified by Quinones as Portsmouth, Ohio, a middle class town at the center of a web of major cities like Cincinnati, Cleveland, Louisville, Indianapolis, Pittsburgh. The first known vector of the opioid infection was an unscrupulous doctor who overprescribed pills, knowing they were addicting his patients. Aided by ordinary well-meaning doctors who listened to marketing spiels by the drug makers, and who believed the pills to be non-addictive, the infection spread rapidly. Quinones tells the tale as it unfolded, involving Medicaid scams and cross-state purchases and sales. What Quinones tells us gives us lessons for many other supply-side problems (marijuana? guns?) we may face in our society, now or in the future. When asked in an interview why restrictions on Class A prescription pills or opiates of any sort would produce the better outcomes, Quinones points out that when prohibited liquor was once again allowed to be sold openly, it was classified as to strength and sold differently. He warns that we are rushing to sales of marijuana with potency levels unknown fifty years ago and may wish we’d instituted some restrictions or controls before it becomes socially acceptable. This nonfiction is dispassionate enough to allow us time to adjust our thinking around the problem of young people—entire families, really—losing their place in a productive society, with almost no way out. Now, with the recognition of the problem being forced upon our politicians, teachers, medical personnel, and law-enforcement officers, some changes are being instituted which may help after the fact of addiction, never a good time to try and solve a problem. With discussion and buy-in by ordinary citizens it may be possible to attack this problem before it begins. There are at least seven interviews with Quinones available free on Soundcloud, ranging in length from 15 minutes or so to an hour and a half. You have to hear some of these stories. It's mind-blowing. I listened to audio version, very ably read by Neil Hellegers, and produced by Bloomsbury. It is a must-read, must-listen. ...more |
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May 08, 2018
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May 16, 2018
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Mar 11, 2018
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Hardcover
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155936355X
| 9781559363556
| 155936355X
| 4.18
| 3,940
| Sep 01, 2009
| Aug 2009
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it was amazing
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Playwright Lynn Nottage won her first Pulitzer Prize for this play, commissioned by and premiered in November 2008 at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago.
Playwright Lynn Nottage won her first Pulitzer Prize for this play, commissioned by and premiered in November 2008 at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago. The back of the book reproduces the songs created for the play, musical composition by Dominic Kanza, lyrics by Nottage. The music for “You Come Here to Forget” is fast, using lots of black keys, while “A Rare Bird” has a chord-heavy left hand and a thinly-picked out treble overlaid. The set for this play is a seedy, well-used bar in a small mining town in very close to a rain forest in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Congolese government soldiers and the rebels they are fighting both patronize Mama Nadi’s bar and her “girls,” the women contracted to her because they were run out of their own families after kidnapping and repeated savage rape by one of the warring parties. All have been psychologically damaged by their experiences, but they usually try to support one another within their current confinement in Mama Nadi’s bar. The heat is made apparent by the repeated calls for a cold drink, whether beer or Fanta is a matter of some debate. Mama Nadi makes her living offering libation to fighters, and she is proud she has managed well for so long. She does not appear to be afraid. She has regular customers, including a supplier who one day brings her some girls, including one who is “ruined.” Her captors had used a bayonet to rape her; she was in pain, she couldn’t pay her way, and her future was dim. Mama Nadi is a businesswoman, not a bleeding heart, but upon learning that Sophia can read, sing, and keep accounts, Mama reneges and accepts her into the fold to work essentially as slave labor. The exploitation of one by another happens everywhere everyday in this patch, roiling beneath the surface, and only breaking through on special occasions, like the one that comes near the end of the play. That occasion comes shortly after we learn of a breathtakingly grotesque act of revenge perpetrated on a nearby mission for suspected betrayal. The tension level at Mama Nadi’s skyrockets when the government troops there learn they just missed by minutes the rebel leader they have been hotly pursuing. Anything which brings on the wrath of either warring party may easily tip into something more dreadful than death. This extraordinary play is a work of witness to the suffering of the people of the Congo who are pawns in the drama that constitutes their lives. The wealth of minerals in the Congo is paradoxically proving to be a greater curse than a blessing, and the curse has lasted for such a long time. The story is drawn from life: in the back of this book are photographs of the women whose story this is. Originally conceived as a remake of Bertolt Brecht’s Mother Courage, the play took on an entirely different character after Nottage met a group of survivors in the DRC when she visited with collaborator Kate Whoriskey, who writes the introduction to this volume. However, the word 'ruined' survives from Brecht; both the meaning and the interpretation changes several times during the play. Stage directions allow us to picture this play as it unfolds, to imagine actors, to envision our own rage. However easy it is to conjure up these images, it must be a particularly rich experience to see the work performed. Its simplicity of expression paired with a complexity of human emotion may be the thing that raises this play above its fellows. Definitely worth seeing it performed, the work is ultimately redemptive. But read it if you must, as I have. On my blog, I have posted YouTube clips of performances (with some music!) in Washington, D.C., Boston, and Berkeley. ...more |
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Jan 18, 2018
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Jan 18, 2018
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Jan 04, 2018
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Paperback
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1524732737
| 9781524732738
| 1524732737
| 3.64
| 2,846
| Sep 05, 2017
| Sep 05, 2017
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it was amazing
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Modern day Israel can sometimes feel like a recent bruise. It can hurt to brush up against it. Occasionally someone with experience in the region writ
Modern day Israel can sometimes feel like a recent bruise. It can hurt to brush up against it. Occasionally someone with experience in the region writes a new melody that is both beautiful and plaintive, and perhaps the saddest sound ever heard, a sound from the other side of a wall. Englander’s new novel might be that new music, filled with regret for the wasted time and wasted lives, for what could have been, and what has not come to be. He points out that the time to settle state issues have come many times, and each time something more dangerous, deadly, and self-defeating was chosen. What is there to lose now? How can “even-ing the score” help in any way? Haven’t we been here before all the deaths? The novel describes a twelve year period beginning in 2002, a year of enormous instability and fear throughout the Middle East, on every side a battle. Spies were everywhere, and some were looking not just for weaknesses but for opportunities. What Englander reminds us again and again in this novel is how close the Palestinians and Israelis are, how well they have studied each other. Their hate is more like love. During eight of those twelve years 2002-2014, ‘the General’ Ariel Sharon lie in his bed, in a waking coma, able to hear, apparently, though perhaps unable to make sense of what he heard. While the General remained alive, hope for peace remained among his supporters because Sharon alone had shown willingness to withdraw from Gaza. Though Sharon led some of the most decisive attacks against Palestinian aggression anywhere, he understood that he was responsible for Israel’s future, which meant peace. Military ends had not brought the stability he’d sought. Every year he lay in bed, the hope dimmed further. The story’s other individuals are connected in some way with a couple degrees of separation. All appear to have been spies at some time or other, so the tension starts strong and never really abates. One is continually aware when a conversation is intended to communicate far more than casual niceties about work, weather, or sports. In Berlin, a Palestinian operative gathers the money and resources he will need to make a difference. Approached by an American Jew working for Mossad, a connection is made. In counterpoint to Sharon’s story and that of the American spy in Europe, is another story told some years later of a man, Prisoner Z, being held in an Israeli dark site in the desert, a disappeared man we initially assume to be Palestinian. But no, he is one of their own, which means a crime of treason. He's held twelve years already, by the same jailor. They have become friends, these two lonely disappeared men, and more perhaps. Brothers. Englander’s characters are believable—they are not better nor more evil than anyone else in the world. That is his point, after all. It may be illegal, treasonous, monstrous to suggest that Israelis would be safer if they had less protection, less surety, but that may be what it will take to get where they claim they want to go. The Palestinians are going to want parity, so if parity is not what one is willing to give, then one will always be looking over one’s shoulder at what could have been. A beautiful small novel that feels European, filled with hope and despair, possibility and its opposite. And love. I listened to the Penguin Random House audio production of his novel read by Mark Bramhall. Bramhall does an Oscar-worthy Jewish mother talking on the telephone to her son, the spy. It can’t be beat, his impersonation. Listening is a fine way to enjoy this novel. ...more |
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Aug 29, 2017
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Sep 02, 2017
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Aug 29, 2017
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Hardcover
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1559365323
| 9781559365321
| 1559365323
| 4.06
| 3,872
| May 16, 2017
| Jun 13, 2017
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it was amazing
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Lynn Nottage’s Pulitzer-winning play Sweat is set in a bar in Reading, Pennsylvania, and shines a light on the once-unionized manufacturing base of Am
Lynn Nottage’s Pulitzer-winning play Sweat is set in a bar in Reading, Pennsylvania, and shines a light on the once-unionized manufacturing base of America’s industrial engine, once corporations moved operations abroad. The play closed on Broadway in June 2017 after a successful run off-Broadway and around the country. Reading, Pennsylvania, I read somewhere, had one of the fastest de-industrializations and became one of the poorest cities in America. Factories did not give advance notice of their closings, but overnight moved equipment overseas and locked their doors. Workers and management--with mortgages, loans, lives--were just plum out of luck. Nottage shows us a period of eight years at the beginning of the new century when rumors swirled about closing down some lines—like they perennially did. But the management team was still hiring, and even pulled an African American woman up from the line to give a visual--some sense of upward momentum and overlap between the workers and the higher ups. Then came the screws: shorter hours, lower pay—a forty percent pay cut—or nothing. Advertisements written in Spanish lured strike breakers while the union held firm. Eight years later everything has changed. The factory has closed and the workers we’d seen at the start are battling various addictions—alcohol and opioids…the usual. The woman who had moved into management had several menial jobs, altogether not paying what she’d made before. I especially liked the way Nottage placed familiar points of view or attitudes in the mouths of her characters. The bartender Stan asks a question many have asked: Why don’t you leave this beat-up town where you have only a history and no future? "Sometimes I think we forget that we're meant to pick up and go when the well runs dry. Our ancestors knew that. You stay put for too long, you get weighed down by things, things you don’t need…Then your life becomes the pathetic accumulation of stuff. Emotional and physical junk…."The level of confusion and desperation in this work turns the screws on viewers very effectively, but Nottage gets the rough language and behaviors exactly right. A kind of desperate race rage, though never spoken, is palpable. Then there is the open spoken rage against the corporation, against the machine, against the scabs…against the bartender, or anyone, anything in the way. A young immigrant does get in the way… A poem by Langston Hughes is epigraph to this play, and it seems especially appropriate in these times: “O, yesNote Hughes does not say Make America Great Again, but just make it again, live up to the principles upon which it was founded. It is less than that now. Nottage previously won a Pulitzer for Ruined, a play originally conceived as a Bertolt Brecht Mother Courage adaptation and set in a brothel-bar in the Congo. Both sides of Congo’s post-colonialist civil war, soldiers and rebels, choose their night’s pleasure from among the same prostitutes. The more Nottage understood through interviews the horrors of what happened there, the less she could apply the Brecht template and instead created a wholly original work. Pick up, or better yet, go see one of her plays--she is among our finest artists at work today. ...more |
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1
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Dec 26, 2017
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Jan 04, 2018
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Aug 10, 2017
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Paperback
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0812995805
| 9780812995800
| 0812995805
| 4.20
| 15,214
| Feb 07, 2017
| Feb 07, 2017
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it was amazing
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Steven Cohen is back running hedges (or do we call them dodges?) on Wall Street after being banned for two years from investing other people’s money.
Steven Cohen is back running hedges (or do we call them dodges?) on Wall Street after being banned for two years from investing other people’s money. He is sixty-one years old, and has houses filled with beautiful things. His lifetime focus is trying to edge others in the market using whatever means necessary. He is said to have a reptilian cool when it comes to trading on the margins, making him one of the best traders ever. Cold-blooded is one thing. Cheating with inside information is another. He can deny it all he wants. Nobody believes him because “everybody does it.” Proprietary, nonpublic information, the ‘black edge’ of the title, “is like doing in elite-level cycling or steroids in professional baseball. Once the top cyclists and home-run hitters started doing it, you either went along with them or you lost.” But it is also that kind of wrong: it corrupts the process so completely that winning no longer means anything. Kolhatkar wrote for Bloomberg Businessweek for most of the time she spent gathering material for this book, but now she works as a staff writer at The New Yorker. She has the skill to make a boring story about old white men on Wall Street buying stuff interesting. We learn what didn’t work the last time for those who try to ensure the markets are fair. If we are going to stop this kind of self-aggrandizement where it leads to corruption of our most important principles, we need people who are brave enough to take on the cheaters. That wouldn't be current and former employees of Cohen’s staff who were so internally corrupt already, like lifelong liar and cheat Matt Martoma, serving nine years for his part in the Elan trade that made Cohen dump and short stock he held in a company with a new Alzheimer drug, netting him an estimated $275 million. Martoma had to change his name from Ajai Thomas because he was expelled from Harvard Law School for illegally modifying his transcript to get a clerkship. Kolhatkar gives Martoma the slightest bit of cover by suggesting Martoma was traumatized in his childhood by a demanding father, but I’m afraid what we see is a character weakness so severe that Martoma felt entitled to criminal behaviors despite being a young, handsome, privileged man. His father says at his trial that he "maxed out" his gifts. Steve Cohen is the same kind of man. He has one gift that we can see. He is also more willing to be criminal than we are, perhaps as compensation for a kind of social and spiritual impoverishment. He will be remembered for…what? For buying things? Illegally. Wow. Big man. If I understood the investigations into Steve Cohen, it was conducted separately by three different branches of government: the FBI, the U.S. Attorney’s office, and the Securities & Exchange Commission. These players got together occasionally to share information, but were all the time afraid they could not make a case with the information they had gleaned unless someone in the Cohen organization flipped. Kolhatkar has an especially interesting discussion on why the ethically-challenged Martoma did not flip. To date we do not know why. Several cases were being investigated and litigated by this same group at the same time, i.e., cases for other insider trading by the same miscreants, individual cases against Cohen’s current and former employees, cases against Cohen’s company, etc. Cohen did end up paying more than a billion dollars in fines, but he was never jailed. He was just prevented from playing with other people’s money for two years. One of Cohen’s former traders, David Ganek, actually countersued government entities, the FBI and Preet Bharara’s office of the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District, for abridgment of his constitutional rights during that investigation. Ganek lost that challenge in October 2017. Shortly after the decisions on Cohen's company SAC and Mathew Martoma, two cases decided earlier setting precedent on insider trading (Todd Newman and Anthony Chiasson from Diamondback and Level Global, two firms with ties to SAC) were reversed, in effect reprimanding Bharara's office of zealotry. A year later, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that the Newman overturn was too lenient. The fight for right is ongoing. Kolhatkar draws the contrast between those working for the government with fewer resources and those sleek white men working for Cohen. In the years after the investigation, some attorneys moved from one side to the other: the New York Times reports “A day after Lorin L. Reisner announced that he was stepping down as head of the criminal division of the United States attorney’s office in Manhattan, the law firm Paul Weiss on Thursday named him as a partner in its litigation department.”Paul Weiss supplied Cohen’s legal team. Antonia Apps, the attorney who tried the Steinberg case, went to Milbank, Tweed, Hadley & McCloy. A high-level FBI investigator, Patrick Carroll, went to Goldman Sachs' compliance department. Amelia Cottrell of the SEC went to the firm where Cohen’s longtime defense counsel, Marty Klotz, worked. Sure, why not? Maybe one day, one of those who know both sides of the street will do the right thing for the right reasons. ...more |
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1
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Feb 26, 2018
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Mar 29, 2018
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Jul 08, 2017
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Hardcover
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1101980966
| 9781101980965
| 1101980966
| 4.29
| 4,675
| Jun 13, 2017
| Jun 13, 2017
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it was amazing
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Many publishers claim “explosive new content” for their nonfiction but in this case it is not hyperbole. This political history of the Radical Right i
Many publishers claim “explosive new content” for their nonfiction but in this case it is not hyperbole. This political history of the Radical Right is a worthy companion to Jane Mayer’s Dark Money. It reveals what Mayer did not: what on earth were the Radical Rich thinking? This is the book we’ve been waiting for—a book which explains the philosophical underpinnings of the Radical Right and the scope and direction of their plan for political and economic control. For years I have struggled to understand how they could imagine a small group of people should be more privileged than the majority, but now I get it. The Radical Right has divided human beings into makers and takers, “makers” being those who own the means of production (and pay taxes) and “takers” being those who do not. For some reason I still don’t understand, they have concluded that the superrich fit the first category and the bulk of the economy’s workers fit the second. Which, as we all know, is a logical fallacy in today’s America. Though sometimes it may appear the Radical Right are inarticulate because they never seem to explain what they are aiming at, they apparently wanted to keep their philosophy and intent quiet, to work in secrecy. This is because most people in our democracy would oppose their thinking. The Radical Rich freely acknowledge this. The Right believes that the majority in a democracy can coerce individuals to pay for things the minority do not want to pay for, like public schools, health care, welfare programs, jails, infrastructure. The Right believe they should be free to do as they choose, and services should be privatized. The market will take care of any climate change-related environmental controls that the majority might wish businesses to adopt. The Right’s view of an efficient business and political environment might look like the early 20th Century when oligarchs roamed the earth. It sounds bizarre, I know. The Right knew we would react this way, which is why they have been unable to say what they were thinking straight out, but instead made common cause with the Republican Party, and the Religious Right, cannibalizing both and only leading those two groups to their own demise. An important piece of their thinking is that only the national government has enough clout to stop them from dominance, which is why they are so insistent on weakening the central government and passing “power” to individual states, which of course would diffuse power. Things are so much clearer to me now. When the Black Lives Matter movement said opposition to President Obama was about race, they were right. Opposition to Obama was ginned up by this group, who spread rumors and undermined his attempts to compromise by refusing cooperation. The genesis of the thinking in this far right group has its roots in slavery. The roots of Radical Rich thinking goes back to John C. Calhoun, slave holder intent upon “preserving liberty” [of the elite], and keeping the demands of the many off his “property.” Up until the 1960’s, the majority of wealth in this country was in the South, leftover generational wealth from slave-holding days now invested in tobacco, cotton, energy products like oil and coal, etc... MacLean calls it “race-based hyper-exploitative regional political economy…one based first on chattel slavery and later on disenfranchised low-wage labor, racial segregation, and a starved public sector.” It is fascinating to hear how Nancy MacLean, investigating a tangential issue to those she explores in this book, came upon the personal papers and writings of Nobel Prize winner James M. Buchanan (October 3, 1919 – January 9, 2013) at George Mason University in Virginia, which included private letters between Buchanan and Charles Koch. The letters illuminated the train of thought of both men, including their insistence that their thinking be kept secret lest people object to their belief that democracy would ruin capitalism and their right to rule. Eventually the two men diverged in thought and Koch sidelined Buchanan decisively. At last I can understand why the Republicans would put forth a health care plan that actually harmed people. It bothered me that I didn’t understand, but I do now. I wonder if in twenty years this book will be named as one of the critical works which broke the hold of the Radical Right by disseminating notice of their goals to a broad base of Americans. I struggled to understand why this group of individuals, which include Mike Pence, Paul Ryan, Scott Walker, Mitch McConnell, and a host of others, oppose government-subsidized affordable college education, corporate and personal taxes, environmental protections, and state-subsidized drug rehab programs. They actually believe the majority of the American people are stealing their wealth. Of course there is room in the world for people with fundamentally different ideas about what man is. But there may not be enough room for these thoughts together in one nation. They can go off to live by themselves if they wish, on an island somewhere outside a country founded on the principle of “by the people for the people.” But, you know, without our willing slavery, they are just old men stashing meaningless bits of paper. They can’t even eat without our labor. They can’t live in all the houses they own. They can’t get where they are going without us. They can’t even dress themselves without us. No, in order for them to win we must agree to be ruled by them, and we don’t. You will want to preorder this book and read it immediately. I understand now why there was no buzz about this. Remember when Jane Mayer was asked in an interview1 if she was afraid to criticize the secretive Koch brothers because they were so powerful? MacLean, I am quite sure, has to be extremely careful until this became public. The audio is excellent, read by Bernadette Dunn, produced by Penguin Audio. The audio file is about 11 hours, and it is completely enthralling. Now I can tell a conservative from someone indoctrinated by Koch. I can see the strategy. 1Pamela Paul’s January 24, 2016 podcast for NYTimes Book Review ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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May 24, 2017
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Jun 02, 2017
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May 24, 2017
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Hardcover
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0553447432
| 9780553447439
| 0553447432
| 4.47
| 102,413
| Mar 01, 2016
| Mar 01, 2016
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it was amazing
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This book won a number of awards, including a Pulitzer Prize, for uncovering a housing problem in America that appears to disproportionately affect lo
This book won a number of awards, including a Pulitzer Prize, for uncovering a housing problem in America that appears to disproportionately affect low-income renters and keep them in a cycle of perpetual uncertainty: eviction. A beautifully written and involving set of individual family case studies, this sociological work casts light on a problem that has developed over time and has not been well understood to date. Desmond is able to involve his readers in the lives of the people he describes in Milwaukee, Wisconsin because he includes many details of their circumstances which we may recognize. The decision-making and determination of these folks to get out of the cycle of eviction they face is not flawed. They work with imperfect tools and face a constantly renewing mountain to climb starting from a new lower low with each instance of rent non-payment and subsequent eviction. Addiction doesn’t appear to be the most common cause of eviction, at least among the people whose stories Desmond shares with us, though it does figure in the lives of many families he describes. Lending money to addicts is a constant drain on everyone’s scarce resources. Neither does wild over-spending appear to be a common cause of poverty. Desmond will argue that wild overspending on inappropriate items is a result of poverty, not a cause. Hard as it is for us to admit, exploitation by landlords appears to contribute hugely to reasons low-income tenants cannot be free from the cycle of eviction. The slumlords to whom Desmond introduces us extract outsized profits from very low-end housing without necessary inputs like plumbing, painting, repairs. This leads to families not valuing their abode, children being placed in unsafe conditions, and adds to the burdens of rent-payers. Recognizing that renting out housing at the low end of the market is not a charity, we must still condemn excessive profit at the client’s expense. What are excessive profits? If these notions are not universally recognized, they need to be challenged in court. Desmond points out that most tenants facing eviction do not show up in court to challenge charges against them or to raise property maintenance issues. These huge, messy problems involve individuals with extenuating circumstances. Sometimes the problems appear circular, and insoluble. Desmond will argue that housing should be considered a basic human right, like clean drinking water, protection for elders, and universal education. Desmond’s proposal may cause catalepsy among libertarians. Conservatives for small government might agree, however, that we don’t want to live in a country where people are living and/or dying on the streets, unable to free themselves from a cycle of dependence. I think we all can agree with that. The question remains: what is the best way to evict people from poverty? Desmond suggests a universal voucher for all low-income families in his epilogue, but I won’t repeat his argument here. You need all the pieces to make sense of what he is proposing. It helps to see the scope of the problem by reading the book—no hardship because it is so well written—but you can also just go to the Epilogue. I do want to point to a couple of interesting observations he makes earlier regarding fixes made so far to address poverty and homelessness but which developed unexpected consequences. People using vouchers are allowed to use those vouchers in any community in states that accept vouchers, which means low-income renters could try to escape the inner city which can be dangerous and unkempt. However, prospective tenants often encounter a reluctance on the part of landlords to rent to families with children, pets, or smoking habits. Renters themselves don’t like the greater adherence to immutable rules that are common in more upscale locations, and the lack of leniency in the case of under-payments. Currently landlords in low-income housing areas do not want to accept housing vouchers and rent assistance in most of their properties because “they didn’t want to deal with the program's picky inspectors.” There are legal limits to the degradation on a property which accepts government-issued vouchers. This is true everywhere, but those on housing assistance get checked on. This “government interference” some conservatives (and slumlords) decry. So much for the market policing itself. The option of “working off the rent” is only taken advantage of by male tenants, Desmond found. This option should have appeared more possible for women as well, it seems, but it parallels the phenomenon of exchanging sex for rent which appears to be an exclusively a female option. Desmond did not encounter this among his interviewees. Among interviewees who were evicted, few felt pity for others in similar circumstances: they often felt “it was their own fault” for unsound choices they’d made and were disinclined to help. This included Christians and church-going neighbors, though examples of times they’d helped in the past were evident. Evicted tenants were reluctant to ask family, or were refused if asked. This is one problem among many in this country. The world is changing utterly, and fast. We need to fundamentally rethink how we want business and government to run going forward. Looking back nostalgically is the wrong solution, I am convinced. Perhaps something like an offer for free college but also a requirement for national service could be brainstormed. If we sent youth out to be witnesses in these problem areas, have them suggest & develop solutions, and follow through, e.g., gaining new skills building better housing, repairing old housing stock, using their legal skills attending law court for strapped tenants, I think both sides might get something from the experience. Sociologists, finance, nursing, social welfare, law, teachers...everybody has something to offer those without resources. One of the most heartbreaking results of this cycle of evictions is its effect on the children. Trying to round up the children for schooling each day when they have been displaced so many times--we know how difficult that would be. Some of the children are watching a parent hauled off for doing something illegal under pressure to round up enough cash to keep themselves housed. Violence explodes suddenly and cannot be controlled. The children need more attention, and protection. The problems that befall individuals and families are inconceivable to those among us without similar constraints. Religious groups could ramp up their services and showcase their empathy and yet not feel as though they were laboring alone in the wilderness. We can see how that has impacted their outreach in the past. Does it make any difference if low-income people live among wealthier neighbors? I believe it could allow them to see how others live, what other choices and opportunities are out there, and allow them to get help from neighbors in the normal way we all do. Dilution of the problem—is it coercive if we eliminate “low-income” housing altogether? Anyway, just thinking… ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Feb 05, 2018
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Feb 08, 2018
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Jan 15, 2017
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Hardcover
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1590517911
| 9781590517918
| 1590517911
| 3.07
| 140
| unknown
| Dec 06, 2016
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really liked it
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Storytelling and cooking may have something in common—imagination—but they also have a similar way of feeding people, and doing it well can be positiv
Storytelling and cooking may have something in common—imagination—but they also have a similar way of feeding people, and doing it well can be positively inspiring. Leonardo Lucarelli reminds us that good chefs use very, very sharp knives in the mastery of their craft, and good writers learn the same skill. Lucarelli says repeatedly he did it all “for the money,” while we laugh uproariously as he waxes eloquent about that meal he prepared--alone--for 250 capoeira enthusiasts in the hull of a rusty old ship with no kitchen docked beside Rome in the Tiber… There is some special delight in listening to a man at the top of his career as a chef in a country known for spectacular cuisine and flamboyant male displays tell us how, by bravado, native (naïve?) talent—but no training—he goes from zero to one thousand in a matter of years. And he continued to manage it, learning on the job, telescoping years of trial-and-error into moments of insight literally seared into his memory...and his hands. He is arrogant, abrasive, acerbic…and that is just the A’s. Lucarelli began cooking as a teen, when meals his mother left at home for his brother and himself needed a little massaging to be exciting. He cooked for friends, and the first gift to his first real girlfriend was bread, wrapped in a napkin, four corners tied together. (It had been his fourth try, and was the only loaf not obviously wrong somehow.) Taste and presentation: he knew it might have something to do with winning hearts. Though that early attempt failed, his gradual emergence as a rock-star in the kitchen gave him plenty of opportunities to bedazzle the ladies. Drugs go along with sex & rock & roll, and there are hair-raising moments in this memoir when we are not entirely sure Lucarelli is going to escape with his faculties intact. The momentum he achieves in his writing contrasts with the stumbling advancement of his career as he tangles with the law, makes poor choices in work and in life, wrecks his motorbike…everything revolving about an important friendship with Matteo, the grounded center of who he really was. Matteo was an ‘on again-off again’ roommate in Rome, Lucarelli’s alter-ego. A reprinted email from Matteo late in the book shows us Matteo’s talent seeing, feeling, and speaking truth, and how important he was to Lucarelli’s sense of himself. It always interests me when “bad boys” discover their inner homebodies. Lucarelli was no exception, and truthfully, the portion of the memoir devoted to his life after rockstar status was some of the most interesting and affecting of what he chose to share. Lucarelli shows us that everything we learn can be used in the next gig, and how teaching cooking skills may have rewards that equal or exceed chefdom when the pros and cons of each are laid side-by-side. It is not just food or cooking that is so interesting about this memoir, however. Lucarelli reveals insights into the economics of modern Italy from his earliest mention of anti-globalization demonstrations in Genoa in 2001, reminding us that discussions revolving around these issues are not new and have been viewed as critical for many years in countries other than the United States. More striking even were his revelations about the fluid nature of restaurant employment: under-the-table payments to all restaurant staff, even chefs, to avoid tax; direct wage payments from the night’s take; lack of contracts or protections for staff; the precarious position of most owners when it comes to loan sharks or bank loans. It seems there is no safety. What a remarkably poor investment, one might conclude, unless owners know something investors do not. Taxes. It is hard to discover from just one memoir how widespread the practice must be, but one cannot but note how commonplace avoidance appears to be for those making even small incomes in Italy. In the United States, poor and middle-class wage earners generally pay taxes while the wealthy exploit investment loopholes that result in little or no tax payments. Tax avoidance may, in the end, be most responsible for both the exuberant display of, and the eventual destruction of, western ‘values.’ The other discussion—a worthy one in Italy, just as it is in the United States—is the importance of immigrant labor, even illegal immigrant labor, in keeping restaurants afloat. Lucarelli even gives a somewhat impassioned defense of the illegals he has known that is well worth reading. These very issues we must consider when addressing our own problem of illegals in America. Economic issues were not discussed in the Wall Street Journal review of this title by food critic Moira Hodgson, but Hodgson does give you an exciting look at Lucarelli’s anecdotes. Take a look for yourselves. P.S. One last thing that warmed my heart: When Lucarelli began working in restaurants and clubs in the early 2000's, it seems every menu contained several vegetarian options, and at least one vegan option. Mediterranean food is especially easy to 'veganize,' but more importantly, it wasn't odd, but obvious. Nearly twenty years later, American restaurants are limping half-heartedly (heart-attackedly?) into enlightenment. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Dec 26, 2016
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Dec 27, 2016
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Dec 26, 2016
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Hardcover
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0446578541
| 9780446578547
| 0446578541
| 3.65
| 520
| Oct 01, 2005
| Oct 26, 2005
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really liked it
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Tim O'Brien restored my sense of humor. O'Brien was sued by the Donald over the reporting in this book, twice, but if anything, O'Brien makes the Dona
Tim O'Brien restored my sense of humor. O'Brien was sued by the Donald over the reporting in this book, twice, but if anything, O'Brien makes the Donald look bombastic rather than purposely evil. At first I was disconcerted by the breezy style, but by the middle I understood that the style matched the subject matter. I was laughing by the time O’Brien tells us about the fight headlined daily in the New York papers between developer Trump and Mayor Koch in the 1980s. I got to the point where I was thinking, like Trump’s wives, “That’s just Donald. He does it to everybody.” He is a braggart and a smooth-talking operator. Everyone knows he is lying, but because no one takes him seriously, what he says doesn’t matter. But that’s all over now. Now people must take him seriously, and it is difficult to change early impressions. The only thing we do know is that among the powerful, nearly everyone is waiting for him to trip up and hang himself. No one, except perhaps Giuliani, has any loyalty to this guy. After all, Trump has insulted them, lorded over them, sued them even. He won the election, yes, but if he blows it, they will dump him faster than Brutus stabbed Caesar. Now, to this book. It was initially published in October of 2005, long before politicos around the nation were speaking of Trump in the same breath as Bush, Romney, and Obama. Their worlds did not overlap. A second edition of the book was published June 2016 with a new Introduction (described here in the Washington Post) which should give you some idea of O’Brien’s writing style and attitudes towards the Don. The thing that I began to warm to in O’Brien’s telling is that this could be perceived as funny. Donald is a gad-dang charlatan, for cripes’ sake. Everyone knows that, especially the dour-faced Republicans who opposed him during the campaign. And they are all lawyers. Donald has so much objectionable, actionable, lying behaviors behind--and presumably ahead--of him that they can take him down at any time they decide to put their little minds to the task. It just depends how long they can keep him on their leash. This has nothing to do with “popular opinion.” That pleasantry will go right out the window when the politicos decide enough is enough. Brutus and Caesar. Anyway, O'Brien's telling is a hoot. I first read David Cay Johnston’s The Making of Donald Trump which allowed me to relax into this more casual history. Both books have great stories about Trump in conflict with one powerful billionaire after another. I particularly liked the story about Trump so admiring the Plaza Hotel that he bought it despite its flaws at a price which began to suck his wallet dry. "This isn’t just a building, it’s the ultimate work of art," Donald said of his hotel. "I was in love with it…I tore myself up to get the Plaza."It’s nice to know there is some sentiment in the guy, even if it is only for a building and not for the blond bombshells he married to amuse himself and dazzle us. Somewhere along the time O’Brien recalls the testimony from Steve Wynn, Las Vegas developer, discussing Trump(1) do I begin to see that Trump’s election is a fluke, and that he is hanging again by his toenails to this high bar he has managed, by luck and bravado, to scale. But there isn’t much underneath him, and it is just a matter of time before the Washington establishment declares “This emperor has NO clothes!” Endlessly amusing if one can detach the real-world implications of Donald Trump as President of the United States, this book should be required reading for those too distressed to listen to news since the election. It is a reality inoculation to stave off despair. We knew we had a lot of work to do to repair the political system. Now we have no choice. It is not a question of “if” or “when.” The answer will have to be “now.” Be prepared to become involved. (1)Steve Wynn on Donald Trump: "No sane or rational guy would respond to Trump," Wynn responded. "His statements to people like you, whether they concern us or our projects, or our motivations, or his own reality, or his own future, or his own present, you have seen over the years have no relation to truth or fact. And if you need me to remind you that, we’re both in trouble. He’s a fool." This is featured as a Goodreads giveaway for another 24 hours or so. Sign up! You may want something to laugh through over Christmas vacation, before rolling up your sleeves to get to work next year putting some structures in place when he goes down. Think positively. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Nov 20, 2016
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Dec 03, 2016
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Nov 14, 2016
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Hardcover
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0553418815
| 9780553418811
| 0553418815
| 3.88
| 27,915
| Sep 06, 2016
| Sep 06, 2016
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really liked it
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O’Neil deserves some credit right off the bat for not waiting until her retirement from the hedge fund where she worked to tell us the secrets of how
O’Neil deserves some credit right off the bat for not waiting until her retirement from the hedge fund where she worked to tell us the secrets of how corporations use big data (our data). Underlying the collection and use of big data is an attempt to utilize efficiencies in the market place for goods, money, and talent. Big data ostensibly can also “set us free” from time constraints and uneven knowledge dispersal. Conversely the opposite is often true. We are at the mercy of how our own data is shredded and packaged, and errors in the model can mean mutually assured destruction—for the school, corporation, family. The book starts with examples any readers who actually picked up this book to read might recognize: the chances of getting into a major university. O’Neil doesn’t go into the actual algorithms but just explains the variables chosen to populate the algorithms. Just when I was wondering who this book is targeted at, since after all, we kind of know how to get into university already, she comes up with examples of big data messing with aspirations that are still (hopefully not) in our futures. She addresses the real pain-in-the-ass nature of minimum wage jobs where the inadequate part-time hours are constantly changing to maximize profits for owners and to screw with employees ability to plan their life, their children’s lives, and the children’s caretaker’s lives. O’Neil addressed the situation in 2009 when Amex decided to reduce the risk of credit card nonpayment by reducing the credit ceilings on users who shopped at certain stores, like Walmart. She shows us the way micro-targeting ends up using data to perpetuate inequities in opportunity and “social capital.” The hardest part of reading this book (there is no actual math), was keeping my mind on what O’Neil was saying. Every time she'd mention another example of the ways big data was screwing us over, my mind would wander to experiences of my own, or ones I’d heard from friends, family, or others. This is real stuff, and just when I thought that it would be an excellent book for those with skills and interest in social justice to take to an interview with Google, Amazon, or a big bank, in she comes with another example of how the “fixes” are almost worse than the disease (Facebook’s method of who your friends are determining your credit risk). But O’Neil reminds us big data, mathematics, algorithms, etc. aren’t going to go away. "Data is not going away. Nor are computers—much less mathematics. Predictive models are, increasingly, the tools we will be relying on to run our institutions, deploy our resources, and manage our lives. But as I’ve tried to show throughout this book, these models are constructed not just from data but from the choices we make about which data to pay attention to—and which to leave out. Those choices are not just about logistics, profits, and efficiency. They are fundamentally moral."Exactly. We still have to use our brains, not just our computers. It is critical that we inject morality into the process or it will always be fundamentally unfair in some way or another, especially if the intent is to increase profits for one entity at the expense of another. One simply can’t include enough variables or specifics. Some universities have begun to audit the algorithms—like Princeton’s Transparency and Accountability Project—by masquerading as people of differing backgrounds and seeing what kind of treatment these individuals receive from online marketers. O’Neil suggests that sometimes data might be used to good effect by targeting frustrated online commenters with solutions to their issues: i.e., affordable housing info, or by searching out possible areas of workplace or child abuse and targeting that area with resources. She wades into national election data and notes that only swing states get candidates attention, suggesting, by the way, that the electoral college has outlived its usefulness to the citizenry. Algorithms are not going to administer justice or democracy unless we find a way to use them as a tool to root out inequities and try to find ways to deliver needed services where they are deficient. When I look at the totality of what O’Neil has discussed, I am inclined to think this book is best targeted to thoughtful high schoolers and college-aged students who are thinking about planning their careers, who have a penchant for mathematical and computer modeling, and who think their dream job might be with an online giant. I’d be happy to be disabused of this notion if someone wants to challenge my thought that much of this information is known to many of us who have been out of school for awhile and who have been paying attention to our online experiences and junk mail solicitations. But it is always interesting to read someone as coherent and on the side of social justice as Ms. O’Neil. It might be noted that Jaron Lanier in Who Owns the Future? (2013) also talks about the use of big data to steer our thinking and makes a preliminary suggestion that individuals should be paid for their data—for data that is collected about them, for profit. It is an interesting discussion as well. Love these intersections of technology and humanity. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Oct 27, 2016
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Nov 03, 2016
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Oct 02, 2016
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Hardcover
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1937402908
| 9781937402907
| 1937402908
| 4.46
| 41
| Mar 01, 2016
| Mar 01, 2016
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really liked it
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Okay, I know a lot of my GR friends have read many of the end-of-life discussions that have been popular these past couple years, but this one is a li
Okay, I know a lot of my GR friends have read many of the end-of-life discussions that have been popular these past couple years, but this one is a little different. It comes at the discussion from a different angle, and it is an angle I have not seen well-articulated, certainly not by a doctor. For one thing, it is intensely personal, especially in the beginning. Overton claims to be an introvert, but she does an awful a lot of reaching out in this book. I laughed aloud at one joke she told on herself: At her nursery school, they often played musical chairs, “which I loathed and which may have scarred me for life. I still worry about adequate seating. Usually some poor kid who was not paying attention got stuck without a chair. Then he stood awkwardly and felt blazingly stupid while everyone else sat comfortably and looked smug. It was a terrible game.”It is hard not to like this woman flinching yet at a child’s game. But, in a way, this book is about paying attention so you can lie as comfortably as possible on your own deathbed. As a doctor, Overton has the viewpoint, motives, and reaction to incentives of a doctor. But here she is talking about the health care system and why it doesn’t seem to work for everyone (according to statistics, we might say anyone) in this country. I have never personally seen a doctor question in detail the incentives of the system, but Overton does here. She is very thought-provoking, particularly because she doesn’t give us easy answers. She acknowledges the questions, and asks us to do the same. ”The last six months of life accounted for roughly twenty-five percent of our Medicare spending….We try really hard to revive the people least likely to benefit….doctors often operate to fix something that will not save a dying patient, and in doing so avoid the difficult conversation with patients and caregivers about their prognosis and what they want.”So, it is not so different from Atul Gawande’s Being Mortal, except that she gives a little responsibility to doctors, many of whom are not trained nor equipped for this conversation. If a person with good health insurance and a terminal disease is in the hospital, is there any reason to limit treatment? She suggests that a for-profit private system of healthcare may not give us the kind of incentives, treatments, and quality of life (or quality of death) we desire. ”I find the concept of for-profit hospitals appalling. There’s an inherent misalignment of motives in the “business” of medicine. Physicians have a moral and financial incentive to provide excessive care to people who can pay for it as long as they have a heartbeat.”She interleaves her narrative about taking a three-part post-graduate course at Harvard on hospital administration with the declining health of her father and her mother, and with experiences she is having in the hospital. Mostly she wants to share her grief, her expertise, her thinking, and her care. She seems the best kind of friend to talk with about end-of-life issues. Her father had urged on her the need for preparation, and attention to these matters. He managed very well, until his cancer diagnosis. After many treatments meant to extend his life rather than cure his cancer, things got grimmer. He decided he’d had enough, and his preparation meant his family did not have a hard time of it. Overton’s mother was a different story, and many of you will recognize the more lingering death of a dementia patient. However, even this wasn’t as painful as some of us experience, due to that planning again. The real problem comes when someone has no family to help, as is the case with many patients Overton sees in the hospital at the last stages of their lives, treated callously by an ever-changing roster of medical care personnel, and unable to make clear decisions. I find it fruitful to hear the experiences of a doctor, and note she says “Personally, I don’t want to live into my nineties.” Her recommendation is that we do not wait on thinking about these things because life is fragile, and you don’t want to be one of the 45% of patients without advanced directives. Your life, in that case, would no longer be your own. Totally inappropriately, I am adding a note that Overton introduced me to the Dunning-Kruger effect, which is something I thought I'd invented, frankly. It is the notion that incompetent folks may be too incompetent to know how incompetent they are. It is a very useful construct, particularly in these times. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Sep 08, 2016
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Sep 12, 2016
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Sep 08, 2016
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Paperback
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1925106942
| 9781925106947
| 1925106942
| 3.32
| 1,481
| Aug 21, 2014
| Sep 2015
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it was amazing
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If exuberance were key to great literature, this book would rank. This manic deluge takes the Western notion of a novel and puts it on a train out of
If exuberance were key to great literature, this book would rank. This manic deluge takes the Western notion of a novel and puts it on a train out of town. One day it may circle back, or we may catch up with it, but we will all be changed by the journey. This is literature self-consciously desperate to join the club but having no earthly way to reconcile a reality crazier than fiction. The Democratic Republic of Congo has been sadly underrepresented when it comes to literature, but not because the outside world is not interested. What we see is how complicated it all is, how slim the chances are that anyone would be able to thrash through the thicket that is daily life in the Congo, and manage to capture the moment on paper. Whoever manages it will have a different kind of voice, with a different center of balance. This is train literature, the protagonist Lucien exclaims, “locomotive literature….my writing displays similarities with the railroads that depart from the station that is essentially an unfinished metal structure, gutted by artillery, train tracks and locomotives that call to mind the railroad built by Stanley….Anyway, I’ve had a weakness for railroads for a while now. I sought man, I found train. (Laughter)”There is something to the random voices of the bar girls (“Do you have the time?”), the circular nature of daily routine, the powering through despite the distractions…a more unlikely place to find a serious writer of political plays can hardly be found. And yet, Lucien runs into a publisher in the bar who, over time, adds to the general hilarity and nonsense by asking Lucien for short pieces on random subjects unrelated to Lucien’s opus, a political stage-tale with the title: The Africa of Possibility: Lumumba, the Fall of an Angel, or the Pestle-Mortar Years. “Characters include Che Guevara, Sékou Touré, Gandhi, Abraham Lincoln, Lumumba, Martin Luther King, Ceaușescu, not forgetting the dissident General.”But the dissolution is not restricted to the government, as Lucien’s description of Tram 83 includes the panty-less baby-chicks, the single-mamas, the ageless-women, the wild, endless search for the conflict minerals of gold, diamonds, cobalt…”this dung elevated to a raw material,” the search continuing even under the floor of one’s own shack. Lust for the vast, unrivaled mineral wealth of the country affects everyone, but the return on those minerals is nowhere to be seen except in the nighttime exchanges in Tram 83 where everything is for sale. “Do you have the time?” Heart of Darkness, indeed. The loco-motive nature of the novel at first runs us over. As we grab hold, it drags us behind it. It is only when we are able to climb aboard, for me after the second reading…the second drink, as it were….that the previously unimagined riches of this debut novel begin to reveal themselves. The translator is to be commended for keeping pace and not succumbing to despair or overload. The Democratic Republic of Congo. We’ve heard the stories; we've read the history. Now see the literature. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Dec 25, 2017
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Dec 28, 2017
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Sep 01, 2016
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Paperback
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0307961613
| 9780307961617
| 0307961613
| 4.07
| 5,310
| Jan 14, 2014
| Sep 29, 2015
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it was amazing
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During the election pre-season in America, I was as surprised and intrigued at the support for Donald Trump as the rest of the thinking universe (not
During the election pre-season in America, I was as surprised and intrigued at the support for Donald Trump as the rest of the thinking universe (not the pundits, of course). As I laughed at his unscripted policy-free speeches and intentionally note-worthy off-the-cuff remarks, I remember thinking I would love to see the effect of his ‘shock and awe’ campaign on someone like Putin. I thought Trump would be too unpredictable and outspoken for Putin. I am ready to take that back. In a weird kind of way, both men, neither political operatives at the start of their careers, are a similar kind of not-liberal, not-conservative, whatever-works nationalist kind of politician. And both have created a cult of personality to facilitate a kind of one-man rule. Myers allowed me to catch this glimpse of Putin at his start in government as an ordinary man unused to and previously uninterested in political power. When he began in the Sobchak Leningrad government, he may or may not have been involved in skimming from contracts he arranged with the newly burgeoning private sector after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. He certainly was in a position to do so, and many of the people he awarded contracts did so: he formed firm friendships and nurtured loyal apparatchiks in Leningrad that reappear throughout his political career. But it is also true that Russia in the early 1990’s was a wild place with many crime lords jockeying for power. Putin’s family was targeted at least once. Putin did not at that time appear to have the trappings of new wealth, though we learned only recently of monies in his name from the Panama Papers. It is possible that his wealth accumulated from later dealings. It has always been difficult to understand why Putin was reputed to enjoy such wide public support in Russia, but I realize now that our media reporting emphasized bad judgment and outcomes while Russian media outlets emphasized good intent and nationalism. Myers gives a far more nuanced picture of Putin growing into his role as president—prime minister—president again in this book. If Putin didn’t begin as a friend to oligarchs, he gradually relaxed into the role. He began as a man with he stated goal of “making Russia great again.” He could see that some people were gaming the system by purchasing national reserves of commodities improperly priced and selling them at more realistically priced international values. This was not illegal at the time, just morally suspect. Rather than trying to fix the system of laws that allowed this rape of mineral and energy resources to continue, Putin selectively applied legal and taxation rules on the books to hamper, entangle, or otherwise inhibit the activities of people who did not work closely with him. Myers charts the hardening of Putin’s character, from his shock and dismay upon learning that Yeltsin had chosen him as a political successor to his chagrin upon learning that his chosen successor, Medvedev, had both an opinion and a weakness that didn’t partner Putin well. And what was very clear in Myers’ telling was the perception of U.S. foreign policy decisions by Russians and Putin. By the time Edward Snowden comes on the scene late in the book, we laugh at Putin’s pleasure in pointing out political dissidence and jail is not just a Russian thing. ”Ask yourself, do you need to put such people in jail, or not?”Putin was more confident during his second presidency and yet the moment he assumed power the second time his poll ratings began to fall. It was the moment citizens realized that there was really no conversation, no political discussion going on. It only takes twenty years for a political climate to change irrevocably: ask Hillary Clinton. In twenty years, young people with no historical memory bring a new clarity to what is happening right now, with no regard to what came before. Pussy Riot called out Putin; Sanders’ supporters are calling out Clinton. Putin operated, and operates now, by relying on a close and loyal group of political “friends” from his time in the FSB and his time working for Sobchak in Leningrad. Loyalty is so prized that it would not surprise me to learn that some of the political murders committed during Putin’s reign were not “ordered” by himself. It seems entirely possible to me that elements in a large bureaucracy might prove their loyalty by eliminating static that was damaging to the leader. The problem with a large bureaucracy is that it can take on a character of its own and is not easy to change. A really strange event occurred early in Putin’s first presidency: the bombing of the apartment buildings in Moscow and the sacks of FSB-sourced explosives found in the apartment building in Ryazan. These incidents have never been satisfactorily explained, and could be an example of a bureaucracy grinding out [imperfect] solutions to perceived problems that impact Putin & Co. In a case like that, or in the case of sheer incompetence (also an enduring feature of large bureaucracy), it is not hard to see Putin keeping mum out of loyalty to those he is protecting. Some actions, like poisoning political opponents or shooting reporters in the the stairwells of their buildings, are simply too crude, destructive, and beneath the dignity of someone in power to imagine they are a “command.” Bill Browder’s account of his time making money hand-over-fist in the 1990’s in Russia, Red Notice, mentioned that powerful figures known to Putin wanted the real estate on which those apartment buildings were built and were meeting resistance. Whatever the truth of the matter, this did not have to originate in the Kremlin to be horrifying in its motivation. It does appear, however, that it was condoned by the Kremlin since a good explanation was never uncovered. One of the things that motivates Putin is the expanding power of NATO in Europe. Putin still thinks in terms of great powers and feels he is being hemmed in by Western Europe nibbling away at his satellite countries. It is hard not to sympathize. Certainly that is happening, and will continue to happen in a Clinton presidency, further exacerbating Putin’s bellicosity, and sense of infringement and inferiority. Russia is a huge country. “Too big, really” says Ian Frazier in his big book Travels in Siberia . Putin says its size and different cultures is the reason there cannot be a representative democracy like that in America. Since even America doesn’t seem to the have the process working very well at the moment, it is difficult to pretend to know what difficulties arise when trying to restore the kind of power that was shattered by the overthrow of the tsar in twentieth century Russia. The only thing I would concede is that ruling Russia must be a very difficult job, particularly when one is looking backward. One must look ahead, not backward, when one is leading, it seems to me. I feel like I have gotten a terrific education reading this book and am much better able to parse news coming out of Russia, Europe, and the Middle East today. I can now put Putin into the context vis-a-vis U.S. diplomatic relations. Clinton must be the last person Putin would want to see be elected president in the United States, and in some ways Trump is as unpredictable as Putin has claimed he has tried to be. But I am not recommending a vote for Trump. I think a better choice might be neither of these two. ...more |
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1
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May 10, 2016
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May 26, 2016
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May 10, 2016
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Hardcover
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my rating |
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4.00
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really liked it
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Jun 06, 2021
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Jun 02, 2021
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4.13
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it was amazing
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May 28, 2020
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May 21, 2020
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4.25
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it was amazing
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Jun 12, 2019
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Apr 05, 2019
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3.62
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really liked it
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Feb 20, 2019
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Sep 24, 2018
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4.26
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it was amazing
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Sep 09, 2018
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Jul 31, 2018
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3.91
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it was amazing
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Jun 14, 2018
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May 18, 2018
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4.00
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it was amazing
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May 09, 2018
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Apr 29, 2018
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4.23
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it was amazing
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May 16, 2018
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Mar 11, 2018
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4.18
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it was amazing
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Jan 18, 2018
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Jan 04, 2018
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3.64
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it was amazing
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Sep 02, 2017
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Aug 29, 2017
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4.06
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it was amazing
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Jan 04, 2018
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Aug 10, 2017
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4.20
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it was amazing
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Mar 29, 2018
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Jul 08, 2017
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4.29
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it was amazing
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Jun 02, 2017
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May 24, 2017
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4.47
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it was amazing
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Feb 08, 2018
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Jan 15, 2017
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3.07
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really liked it
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Dec 27, 2016
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Dec 26, 2016
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3.65
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really liked it
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Dec 03, 2016
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Nov 14, 2016
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3.88
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really liked it
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Nov 03, 2016
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Oct 02, 2016
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4.46
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really liked it
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Sep 12, 2016
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Sep 08, 2016
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3.32
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it was amazing
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Dec 28, 2017
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Sep 01, 2016
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4.07
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it was amazing
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May 26, 2016
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May 10, 2016
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