The Professor, the Bikini Model and the Suitcase Full of Trouble

How Frampton, who holds an endowed chair at the University of North Carolina and has been an adviser to the Department of Energy, ended up in Devoto appears at first to be a classic tale: a brilliant man of science gets into trouble as soon as he tries to navigate the real world. Since his arrest, he has certainly cultivated this notion, burnishing his wacky-scientist profile with lines like “That’s my naïveté” and “My mind works in a strange way.”

→ New York Times

A Resurgent Goldman Can Reshape Wall Street

Indeed, had such a plan been in place in the years leading up the collapse of Lehman, I bet the bank would still be around, because former Chairman Richard Fuld and his acolytes would have been far more prudent. They would have taken the time to analyze the risk the company was taking on, which is exactly what Goldman Sachs did in late 2006 when it decided to short the mortgage market to take advantage of its competitors’ foolishness.

William D. Cohan is certainly right about his statement. But the problem doesn’t simply lie behind prudent behavior, it is also Goldman not being in-line with its clients, to the mind of general public. Take a look at the comments, no one seems to care about Goldman changing its internal compensation model for the top-tier of the payroll, because to most people’s mind Goldman is morally bankrupt.

→ Bloomberg

Rebuilding Violent Places

The architectural task in the long aftermath of such shootings is not only to repair structural damage but to calibrate a balance between remembering and forgetting sufficient for daily life to continue nearby—and to figure out how the shapes, materials, and details of buildings can participate in that calibration.

→ The New Yorker