Category Archives: Uncategorized

The Fertile Nigerian Blockchain Edition

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

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Nota bene: Schwarzman’s strings

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.

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Traffic Is a Disease. An Uber Tax Is the Cure

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.

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Nota bene: Gun bust

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

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Nota bene: Wily Kehinde

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.

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Nota bene: Phone banking

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.

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Nota bene: Rupert ❤️ Disney

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

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Nota bene: The racist-memorabilia tax dodge

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

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The Return to Volatility Edition

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

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Nota bene: What a relief

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

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How Snapchat Is Sending #MeToo Down the Memory Hole

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

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The Generations Edition

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

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Bring on the bikopalypse

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

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The Trump in Davos Edition

Slate Money on Trump in Davos.

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“Regrettable”

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

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Oxfam’s excellent inequality report

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

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Wine is a terrible investment

Old wines have become a niche taste.

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The You Guys PIK Edition

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

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Fighting polio with financial engineering

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.

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BlackRock’s tiny nudge in the right direction

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

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The Down the IGWEL Edition

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

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Crunching the Metropolitan Museum’s numbers

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

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Mark Eisner’s posthumous self-sabotage

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.

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Why Trump’s going to Davos

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.

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The Distinctly Nordic Edition

Slate Money on Iceland, Spotify, and Iran.

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