McKinsey’s partners suffer from collective self-delusion
“One of the best explanations for the triumph of a “solution shop” like McKinsey was co-written by the late Clayton Christensen of Harvard Business School in 2013. When hiring a management-consulting firm, he said, clients do not know what they are getting in advance, because they are looking for knowledge that they themselves lack. They cannot measure the results, either, because outside factors, such as the quality of execution, influence the outcome of the consultant’s recommendations.”
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The Dark Side of America’s Gleaming Skyscrapers
“Gruesome stories such as these are hardly unique to New York City. In October 2019, a building that was to be a new Hard Rock Hotel in New Orleans collapsed while under construction, killing three workers and injuring dozens more. Two of the bodies were so thoroughly trapped inside the unstable wreckage that officials initially deemed them impossible to retrieve. A tarp was strung up to shield the bodies from view. Months later, high winds loosened the makeshift shroud, revealing to passersby on the streets of the French Quarter the decaying cadaver of one of the two men still entombed in the site. The bodies were finally retrieved in August, 10 months after the collapse.”
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The biggest benefit of returning to the office is internal competition
“Right now, in corporations around the globe, working-group committees are focusing in hard on one of those ‘positive unintended consequences’. The problem these squads have been tasked with solving is how and in what order to get people back to the office. That has forced them to confront a tricky question: once the pandemic is over, what makes working at the office superior to working from home?”
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The Looming Bank Collapse
“Unless you work in finance, you probably haven’t heard of CLOs, but according to many estimates, the CLO market is bigger than the subprime-mortgage CDO market was in its heyday. The Bank for International Settlements, which helps central banks pursue financial stability, has estimated the overall size of the CDO market in 2007 at $640 billion; it estimated the overall size of the CLO market in 2018 at $750 billion. More than $130 billion worth of CLOs have been created since then, some even in recent months. Just as easy mortgages fueled economic growth in the 2000s, cheap corporate debt has done so in the past decade, and many companies have binged on it.”
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The Cold War Bunker That Became Home to a Dark-Web Empire
“In repressive states, the dark Web has become a haven for political activists. Many journalists use Tor to send and receive information securely, or to communicate with sources. Some users like the fact that dark-Web pages are not subject to the same censorship as the regular Web, where there are limits on what you can say. Other users appreciate Tor because they can avoid offering up their private data to such giant corporations as Google and Facebook. Some legitimate news outlets, including the Times and ProPublica, maintain onion-router pages.”
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Understatement Is the New Luxury
“That may be one of the reasons a number of projects are now backing away from spare-no-expense opulence and instead offering a more understated take on luxury. A handful of recently introduced buildings have handsome interiors with visually calm wood, stone, brick and tile that don’t cry out for attention. New model units are now furnished to appear more attainable than wildly aspirational. And some existing buildings are playing up the practical livability of their remaining units.”
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Two Decades of War Have Eroded the Morale of America’s Troops
"The reason it’s a band of brothers, and not a band of friends, is because you can fight all day long with your brother and still be willing to die for him. J. wasn’t the only misfit in Decaul’s unit. Decaul’s roommate was heavy into alcohol and hard drugs. “We used to get into fights all the time,” Decaul told me. “I’m talking about fistfights.” But the roommate’s peers didn’t get rid of him either, because out in the field the guy worked miracles on artillery pieces. The drug addict and the Klansman—both of whom should have been kicked out—were seen by their fellow marines as contributing members of the unit, useful to the task at hand."
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The Weird Science Behind Chain Restaurant Menus
"With in-house innovation and marketing departments, most chains don’t need restaurant consultants. Still, clients came to us with dozens of problems. Some had an idea for a new product line (breakfast tacos, seasonal smoothies) that they wished to benchmark against a new set of palates. Some wanted to break into office catering but didn’t know where to begin. Some weren’t even technically restaurants, such as the pay-by-the-hour workspace that wanted to keep customers on the premises. Still others hired us as a last resort. These were the chains circling the drain, bordering on irrelevance, caught in the throes of an identity crisis. We called this kind of project a “concept revitalization.”"
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They Push. They Protest. And Many Activists, Privately, Suffer as a Result.
“Next month, the world will commemorate the 50th anniversary of one of the most prominent premature deaths in the history of the black liberation struggle, that of Martin Luther King Jr. And whereas he died from an assassin’s bullet at the age of 39, dying young continues to rock social justice activists today.”
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At Uber, a New C.E.O. Shifts Gears
"Khosrowshahi talked about Uber’s future, including its plans to go public in 2019 and its goal of growing to between twenty and thirty times its current size. Then his voice became sombre. “The company brought me on board because of a lot of things that happened in the past,” he said. “We were probably trading off doing the right thing for growth, and thinking about competition maybe a bit too aggressively, and some of those things were mistakes.” He didn’t need to list the mistakes, many of which had been widely publicized. “Mistakes themselves are not a bad thing,” he went on. “The question is, do you learn from those mistakes? 2017 has been a really tough year, but this is going to result in us being a better company.”"
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Yanis Varoufakis: Marx predicted our present crisis – and points the way out
For a manifesto to succeed, it must speak to our hearts like a poem while infecting the mind with images and ideas that are dazzlingly new. It needs to open our eyes to the true causes of the bewildering, disturbing, exciting changes occurring around us, exposing the possibilities with which our current reality is pregnant. It should make us feel hopelessly inadequate for not having recognised these truths ourselves, and it must lift the curtain on the unsettling realisation that we have been acting as petty accomplices, reproducing a dead-end past. Lastly, it needs to have the power of a Beethoven symphony, urging us to become agents of a future that ends unnecessary mass suffering and to inspire humanity to realise its potential for authentic freedom.
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Why Gun Culture Is So Strong in Rural America
"To understand why many conservatives in rural America believe this, you must start with first principles, because the argument ultimately isn’t about guns; it runs even deeper than the Second Amendment. At a 2015 campaign event during the Iowa caucuses, J. C. Watts, the former congressman from Oklahoma, spoke about perspectives on original sin. It helps illuminate the differences in worldview between many conservatives and liberals. Mr. Watts said Democrats think people were born basically good, so when good people did bad things, something in society (in this case, guns) needed to be controlled. Republicans think the fault lies with the person — the perpetrator of the evil. Bad choices result in bad things being done, in part because the perpetrator lacks the moral guidance the Christian faith provides."
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The Reclusive Hedge-Fund Tycoon Behind the Trump Presidency
"As important as Mercer’s business investments is his hiring of advisers. Years before he started supporting Trump, he began funding several conservative activists, including Steve Bannon; as far back as 2012, Bannon was the Mercers’ de-facto political adviser. Some people who have observed the Mercers’ political evolution worry that Bannon has become a Svengali to the whole family, exploiting its political inexperience and tapping its fortune to further his own ambitions. It was Bannon who urged the Mercers to invest in a data-analytics firm. He also encouraged the investment in Breitbart News, which was made through Gravitas Maximus, L.L.C., a front group that once had the same Long Island address as Renaissance Technologies. In an interview, Bannon praised the Mercers’ strategic approach: “The Mercers laid the groundwork for the Trump revolution. Irrefutably, when you look at donors during the past four years, they have had the single biggest impact of anybody, including the Kochs.”"
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America's Other Housing Crisis: Undercrowded Suburbs
"The great cities of the 21st century not only need more density in their urban cores, but more distributed density—the kind of continuous density that allows great global cities like London, Tokyo, Paris, and New York to scale and accommodate larger and larger populations without expanding ever farther outward. For future-oriented cities, the cranes dotting downtown skylines may be only the beginning."
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Inside the Two Years that Shook Facebook—and the World
"By now, the story of Facebook’s all-consuming growth is practically the creation myth of our information era. What began as a way to connect with your friends at Harvard became a way to connect with people at other elite schools, then at all schools, and then everywhere. After that, your Facebook login became a way to log on to other internet sites. Its Messenger app started competing with email and texting. It became the place where you told people you were safe after an earthquake. In some countries like the Philippines, it effectively is the internet."
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When ‘Gentrification’ Isn’t About Housing
"The poor are still gentrification’s victims, but in this new meaning, the harm is not rent increases and displacement — it’s something psychic, a theft of pride. Unlike housing, poverty is a potentially endless resource: Jeff Bezos could Hoover up all the wealth that exists in the world, then do nothing but drink rainwater collected from the roof of his ’79 Vanagon, and it wouldn’t stop the other seven billion of us from being poor. What this metaphorical gentrification points to instead is dishonesty, carelessness and cluelessness on the part of the privileged when they clomp into unfamiliar territory. When they actually profit from their “discovery” and repackaging of other people’s lifestyles, it’s a dispiriting re-enactment of long-running inequalities. But what seems most galling isn’t that they’re taking dollars off the table. It’s that they’re annoying.
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The Family That Built an Empire of Pain
"Since 1999, two hundred thousand Americans have died from overdoses related to OxyContin and other prescription opioids. Many addicts, finding prescription painkillers too expensive or too difficult to obtain, have turned to heroin. According to the American Society of Addiction Medicine, four out of five people who try heroin today started with prescription painkillers. The most recent figures from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention suggest that a hundred and forty-five Americans now die every day from opioid overdoses."
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Why people really want to move to Idaho but are fleeing its neighbor, Wyoming
"Wyoming has long been the nation’s coal king. The vast operations of the Powder River Basin produce more coal than all but a handful of states put together. But cheap natural gas has reduced power plants’ dependence on the mineral and, with it, its price and production. Wyoming’s mines are shipping out fewer tons of coal and getting paid less for each of them."
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Making China Great Again
"China has never seen such a moment, when its pursuit of a larger role in the world coincides with America’s pursuit of a smaller one. Ever since the Second World War, the United States has advocated an international order based on a free press and judiciary, human rights, free trade, and protection of the environment. It planted those ideas in the rebuilding of Germany and Japan, and spread them with alliances around the world. In March, 1959, President Eisenhower argued that America’s authority could not rest on military power alone. “We could be the wealthiest and the most mighty nation and still lose the battle of the world if we do not help our world neighbors protect their freedom and advance their social and economic progress,” he said. “It is not the goal of the American people that the United States should be the richest nation in the graveyard of history.”
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Estonia, the Digital Republic
"It was during Kotka’s tenure that the e-Estonian goal reached its fruition. Today, citizens can vote from their laptops and challenge parking tickets from home. They do so through the “once only” policy, which dictates that no single piece of information should be entered twice. Instead of having to “prepare” a loan application, applicants have their data—income, debt, savings—pulled from elsewhere in the system. There’s nothing to fill out in doctors’ waiting rooms, because physicians can access their patients’ medical histories. Estonia’s system is keyed to a chip-I.D. card that reduces typically onerous, integrative processes—such as doing taxes—to quick work. “If a couple in love would like to marry, they still have to visit the government location and express their will,” Andrus Kaarelson, a director at the Estonian Information Systems Authority, says. But, apart from transfers of physical property, such as buying a house, all bureaucratic processes can be done online."
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