Vanities – Page 11 – Abnormal Capitalist

Mayweather : The Boxer and the Batterer

An essay on Floyd Mayweather Jr. as both :

I can’t, of course, say what’s behind Mayweather’s serial abuse — physical, verbal, or emotional — of women. Men who are rich beat women; men who are poor do, too. They do it in Alaska and South Carolina, in New York and Oslo and Dubai. They do it when they get away with it, and they do it when they don’t. Every day, an average of three women in the United States are killed by a current or former lover. But the more I watched Mayweather fight, and the more I read about his allegedly violent acts outside the ring, the more I began to see it as all of one piece. The circus that follows him. The bag filled with cash and gambling slips. The entourage. The houses and the women installed in them, the diamond rings as collars. The way he takes the measure of a situation in the ring, determining when it’s safe to punch and when to duck.

→ Grantland

Take a Deep Breath if You Want to Try Competitive Vaping

They begin tuning up their devices like drag racers tuning hot rods before a race. They twist resistant wire into coils to carry electricity from their vaporizer’s battery, and weave dry cotton through the coils. The cotton acts like a wick, soaking up e-cigarette juice so the coils can heat it as electricity loops through them.

→ The Wall Street Journal

Birdman : The Pigeon King and the Ponzi Scheme

In a typical Ponzi scheme, like Bernie Madoff’s, the scammer moves money between investors, to pay what he claims are dividends on an investment that doesn’t actually exist. But Galbraith didn’t have a fake investment as a front. He had birds — lots of birds, and those birds created more birds, which he, in turn, was obligated to buy, then house, feed, water and medicate at considerable cost until he could sell them off to someone else. He appeared to miss the whole point of a Ponzi: He took the hidden, fungible fictions that give the scam its power and turned them into tangible liabilities.

→ The New York Times

Risky Business

Wishing all the best to the next endeavors.

David Sparks :

My other option was to leave my regular paycheck and health benefits behind and jump into the chaos that ensues from running a smaller, solo attorney law practice and (in my case) a book & video publishing business. I could serve just my clients with my own, smaller law practice and do things a bit more on my terms.

→ Mac Sparky

Interview : Gabriel García Márquez

Gabriel García Márquez on the solitude of writers and dictators :

The writer’s very attempt to portray reality often leads him to a distorted view of it. In trying to transpose reality he can end up losing contact with it, in an ivory tower, as they say. Journalism is a very good guard against that. That’s why I have always tried to keep on doing journalism, because it keeps me in contact with the real world, particularly political journalism and politics. The solitude that threatened me after One Hundred Years of Solitude wasn’t the solitude of the writer; it was the solitude of fame, which resembles the solitude of power much more. My friends defended me from that one, my friends who are always there.

→ The Paris Review