Category: Culture

How The New York Times Works

Dive into the making and delivery of the most influential print newspaper and digital news site in the world :

Booth got here at 4 p.m. and will work until the last truck leaves. “Sometimes we’ll get out at 3, sometimes we’ll get out at 7,” he says. “You’re dealing with night people—we’re vampires here.” Tomorrow morning, most readers will think nothing of the fact that the paper was at their door at the same time yesterday and the day before that and the day before that. They may also think nothing of the fact that, at the moment they bend down to pick it up, some of the stories in the print version have already been updated on their phones and tablets, and new stories have been added, too: the score of a double-overtime game that ended too late, or news out of India that broke overnight. And all of these stories, the total daily and nightly output from all the desks at the Times—news from Washington and Ukraine and Sacramento and St. Louis and Staten Island and Mexico City, reviews of movies that open tomorrow and of TV shows that aired last night, opinion pieces, recipes, weekly sections on home design and science and real estate and style and books—feed a larger world of news that never stops consuming. The growing universe of digital news outlets includes a great many amalgamators, recyclers of other people’s reporting. Some report their own stories, but it is the Times that provides by far the most coverage of the most subjects in the most reliable way. The Times is a monster, a sprawling organization, the most influential print newspaper and digital news site in the world.

→ Popular Mechanics

Roubini Says The Art Market Is Rigged

Yet another rigged market, according to Nouriel Roubini, the man who predicted the housing crisis. As recent regulation and scandals make it harder to hide money from the eyes of institutions (and whistleblowers), capitals quietly move from tax-havens safes to renowned auction houses, valuing the entire market of public sales to $16.4bln in 2014 (approx. $70bln including private sales), more than four times the highs of a decade ago. The same can be told for the watch after-market too, though the numbers are much lower and highly concentrated between Rolex and Patek.

In another article, Mr. Roubini emphasis that Art is an asset class as a whole that needs to be regulated like other capital markets are.

But without further ado, John Gapper and Peter Aspden :

Regulation is needed in the art market because it is vulnerable to money laundering, tax evasion, trading on inside information and price manipulation, says one of the world’s most respected economists.

→ Financial Times

The Real Lolita

His name was Frank La Salle, and he was no FBI agent—rather, he was the sort G-men wanted to drive off the streets, though Sally didn’t learn that until it was far too late. It took 21 months to break free of him, after a cross-country journey from Camden, New Jersey, to San Jose, California. That five-cent notebook didn’t just alter Sally Horner’s own life, though: it reverberated throughout the culture, and in the process, irrevocably changed the course of 20th-century literature.

→ Penguin Random House

Art: Pre-capitalist conspicuous waste?

Felix Salmon :

That’s real money, which, in a working capitalist economy, can and should be spent on productive assets. Instead, it’s being spent on utterly unproductive assets: billions and billions of dollars a year are going, in the name (at least partially) of “investment”, into paintings by long-dead artists. If rich people stopped paying billions of dollars for each others’ art, and started spending that money in the real economy, that would create jobs, growth, and even opportunities for working artists.

→ Medium

The Art Of Investing In Art

Only recently has art investing been viewed through the lens of modern portfolio theory and considered as a potential alternative investment in a portfolio of assets. Though research continues to shed more light on what has been historically an opaque market, studies show that art can offer long-term return potential that is uncorrelated with other asset classes.

→ J.P. Morgan