Author Archives: Felix

Slate Money on cryptocurrencies, fertility in the U.S., and Nigerian corruption.

While it’s great that a public high school is getting a $25 million donation, I can’t get particularly excited about this one. Ultimately, like most of Schwarzman’s gifts, it smells mostly of vanity, rather than selflessness.

Why congestion charging won’t do much to fix gridlock in our cities—and how a traffic tax on Uber and Lyft could get cars moving again.

Much as many of us would love to see Feinberg getting his gun-related comeuppance here, that really isn’t what’s happening.

What’s striking about both of these portraits is that faced with the classic trilemma – “personal, official, artistic, pick two at most” – both artists opted to drop the personal.

We’re all going to continue to sit on hold on telephones for the foreseeable future, even those of us who hate to phone anybody.

Murdoch cares about two things: His status as a powerful media mogul, and seeing 21st Century Fox flourish in, well, the 21st Century.

How much is a collection of 135 “Blackface” polaroids really worth?

Slate Money on volatility, Steve Cohen, and delivery apps.

If you want to make the world a significantly better place, you need to be able to scale your interventions somehow. That’s always been my problem with private disaster relief donations: They don’t really scale, and the only way to … Continue reading →

Disappearing-messaging apps may keep snoopers away—but they can also prevent us from preserving the past and finding justice in the future.

Slate Money on Kids These Days, millennials, and unpaid internships.

Chinese cities have been overtaken by the chaos and clutter of dockless bikes. American cities should follow their lead.

Slate Money on Trump in Davos.

If this particular dinner finally came to its long-overdue end, that wouldn’t be regrettable at all. It would be a triumph.

I’ve been rude about this report in the past. This year, however, Oxfam has switched tack.

Old wines have become a niche taste.

Slate Money on BlackRock, super PIK bonds, and Nigerian debt.

Pakistan and Nigeria did what they promised to do in terms of fighting polio, and the Gates Foundation picked up their tab to the Japanese.

A firestorm this is not. It’s much smaller and subtler than that.

Slate Money on Trump going to Davos, Huawei, and iPhone addiction.

If anybody can afford a pay-what-you-wish policy, the Met can.

Every so often, a charitable donation comes along which is so atrocious, on so many levels, that it deserves to be aired out in public as a prime example of what not to do.

It was always naive to expect Davos to be the home of any kind of Resistance; instead, it’s going to ratify itself as part of the Capitulation.

Slate Money on Iceland, Spotify, and Iran.