“I’ve actually never met Chris in person but I am definitely in love with him,” Sarah said.

“He’s just spectacular. Chris and I have discussed getting married - I believe Chris does consider me his wife.”

Chris claimed he was originally from Milan and moved to the US 18 years ago, saying he was on a business trip to South Africa when they met and is now stuck in Benin because of “trouble” with the government.

Sarah has sent him money for stolen cards, phone charges, hotel bills, lawyers, a nanny, an expired visa and when Chris claimed the money she posted had been stolen. […]

“He assured me that when he gets home he’s going to pay me back – every dime,” Sarah told Dr Phil.

“He’s made five or six attempts to come back to the US to meet me. Every time they arrest him and put him in jail and then they want more money. […]

The pair talk for up to four hours on the phone a day […] “He sounded Italian, now his accent’s kind of changed I don’t know if he’s adapted to where he’s at… in Benin,” she added.

{ Independent | Continue reading }

art { Luis Camnitzer, This is a Mirror, You are a Written Sentence, 1968 }

Dr. Yalom, I would like a consultation. I’ve read your novel “When Nietzsche Wept,” and wonder if you’d be willing to see a fellow writer with a writing block.

No doubt Paul sought to pique my interest with his email. […] Ten days later Paul arrived for his appointment. […]

“I was in philosophy at Princeton writing my doctorate on the incompatibility between Nietzsche’s ideas on determinism and his espousal of self-transformation. But I couldn’t finish. I kept getting distracted by such things as Nietzsche’s extraordinary correspondence, especially by his letters to his friends and fellow writers like Strindberg.

“Gradually I lost interest altogether in his philosophy and valued him more as an artist. I came to regard Nietzsche as a poet with the most powerful voice in history, a voice so majestic that it eclipsed his ideas, and soon there was nothing for me to do but to switch departments and do my doctorate in literature rather than philosophy.

“The years went by,” he continued, “my research progressed well, but I simply could not write. Finally I arrived at the position that it was only through art that an artist could be illuminated, and I abandoned the dissertation project entirely and decided instead to write a novel on Nietzsche. But the writing block was neither fooled nor deterred by my changing projects. It remained as powerful and unmovable as a granite mountain. And so it has continued until this very day.”

I was stunned. Paul was an old man now. He must have begun working on his dissertation well over a half-century ago. […]

“Tell me more,” I said. “Your family? The people in your life?”

“No siblings. Married twice. Divorced twice. Mercifully short marriages. No children, thank God.”

This is getting very odd, I thought. So talkative at first, Paul now seems intent on giving me as little information as possible. What’s going on?

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

Diane. Wife’s kid sister. Well, half sister. Dad was the sperm donor. Who knows who the fuck she is. Collects ribbon.

{ Richard Prince }

quote & photo { Chelsea G. Summers }

Typically, the loser of a bar fight who later initiates a lawsuit has been beaten up pretty badly, or at least has the medical bills to suggest significant personal injuries. The loser sues the bar on one of several theories — the most common ones being inadequate security, not having banned a patron known to have a history of fighting, bar employees initiating the violence, or bar employees responding to a situation with unreasonable force. But that’s the boring legal stuff. […]

Roughly equal numbers of men and women filed these lawsuits. […] Everyone I can remember had tattoos. […]

You might think that a bar fight is most commonly started between two guys fighting over a woman. That’s not so, at least not in my experience. Ejection seems to be a more precipitating event. More than half the bar fights I had to sort out started when a too-drunk patron was asked to leave and refused to do so. […]

Women were faster to employ weapons, whether prepared (the knife) or improvised. Improvised weapons are almost always thrown, and have included highball glasses, pool balls, bar stools, knives, and in one notable case, the assailant’s own feces.

{ ordinary-Times | Continue reading }

Shaun Khubchandani’s 10-week internship at Citigroup […] he was paid a $70,000 annual salary prorated on a weekly basis, or about $1,300 per week. […] a typical day during his internship:



8 a.m.: Wake up.



8:45 a.m.: Board subway at Columbus Circle to Citigroup’s offices in Tribeca.

9-9:30 a.m.: Arrive at the office.



9:30 a.m.–12 p.m.: Do light tasks, like reading S-1 filings or internal memos, or double-checking numbers in Excel spreadsheets.



12-12:30 p.m.: Grab lunch with fellow interns at a nearby Whole Foods—ideally a prosciutto-and-ham panini, with bread pudding for dessert.



1 p.m.–5 p.m.: Work alongside analysts, assisting them however possible. Ask for feedback on financial models or help with difficult calculations.

5 p.m.–6 p.m.: Assigned to a project—such as updating a PowerPoint slideshow or hard copies of client-presentation materials with the latest market data—by a managing director on his or her way out the door, sometimes to be completed by the next morning.

8 p.m.: Order dinner delivery with other interns and the analysts, courtesy of the bank: Italian on Mondays, Thai on Tuesdays, salads on Wednesdays and tacos on Thursdays. (On Fridays, dine out.)

10:30 p.m.–2 a.m.: Leave for the night.

{ WSJ | Continue reading }

Implicit gut feelings of newlyweds predict marital satisfaction. […] Findings of this study also suggest that satisfaction in marriage decreases over the 4-year time period, as is consistent with earlier studies.

{ United Academics | Continue reading }

I have a brother that appreciates curvier women, but is married to an athlete. He purposely positions himself outside of Lane Bryant when waiting for his wife to finish her shopping elsewhere in the mall. His not very subtle passive aggressiveness often works in motivating his wife to get in and out.

Hey. It beats tossing yourself over a rail and landing in an Auntie Anne’s kiosk.

{ Really?/Gawker | Continue reading }

related { Man Commits Suicide in Mall After Girlfriend Refuses to Stop Shopping }

art { Keith P. Rein }

AddictionBlog has an amazing article by a doctor and recovering morphine addict that describes the experience of injection, rush and withdrawal.

[…]

Heroin, by the way, is just the prodrug of morphine. In other words, the heroin molecule just gets broken down into morphine in the body and this is how it arrives in the brain. But because each heroin molecule gets transformed into two morphine molecules (hence the medical name for heroin – diamorphine) the feeling can be a little different because increased concentration can apparently make the high more intense.

{ Mind Hacks | Continue reading }

For four years, Josh and I were Silicon Alley’s “it” couple. We met in 1996, when he was running the Internet entertainment site Pseudo.com and throwing Warhol-scale parties. […]

One morning, as I was putting on my robe, he announced that he was planning to have cameras installed all over the loft–above the bed, behind the bathroom mirror, inside the refrigerator, even in the litter box–and wire them to the Internet in the name of art. Art? More like porn, I said. But Josh calmly explained that we would never do anything that made us uncomfortable, and that he eventually hoped to sell unedited tapes of our lives to a museum. […]

As we were gearing up for the November launch, Pseudo tanked, as did the rest of the tech stocks. Josh’s share in Pseudo was now worthless, and the fortunes he made from Jupiter Communications were slashed. Meanwhile, he was sinking over $1 million into Living in Public, hiring me to produce the Web site, manage press and plan a launch party (I was not paid to live in public), and bringing in a team to rip open the walls and fill them with a complex nervous system of wires, cables and cameras.

{ NY Observer 2/26/01 | Continue reading }

photos { 1. Phebe Schmidt | 2 }

Female sexual dysfunction is almost a non-experience, the opposite of an adventure that you have, then process, then write about.

{ Cris Mazza interviewed by Megan Milks | TNI | Continue reading }

art { Richard Phillips, Untitled (Smiley), 2000 }

related { Playboy erects huge neon bunny art installation near Marfa, Texas }

Most of us spend many hours each week watching celebrated athletes playing in enormous stadiums. Instead of making music, we listen to platinum records cut by millionaire musicians. Instead of making art, we go to admire paintings that brought in the highest bids at the latest auction. We do not run risks acting on our beliefs, but occupy hours each day watching actors who pretend to have adventures, engaged in mock-meaningful action. This vicarious participation is able to mask, at least temporarily, the underlying emptiness of wasted time. But it is a very pale substitute for attention invested in real challenges. The flow experience that results from the use of skills leads to growth; passive entertainment leads nowhere. Collectively we are wasting each year the equivalent of millions of years of human consciousness. The energy that could be used to focus on complex goals, to provide enjoyable growth, is squandered on patterns of stimulation that only mimic reality.

{ Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi | Continue reading }

photo { Jacob Kassay }

I’ve been a massage therapist for many years, now. I know what people look like. People have been undressing for me for a long time. I know what you look like: a glance at you, and I can picture pretty well what you’d look like on my table.

Let’s start here with what nobody looks like: nobody looks like the people in magazines or movies. Not even models. Nobody. […]

Women have cellulite. All of them. It’s dimply and cute. It’s not a defect. It’s not a health problem. It’s the natural consequence of not consisting of photoshopped pixels, and not having emerged from an airbrush. […]

Adults sag. It doesn’t matter how fit they are. Every decade, an adult sags a little more.

{ Cory Doctorow | Continue reading | Thanks Tim }

image { Alis Pelleschi }

Sex and the City’s ante­penultimate episode… […] This was the episode in which gauche, chain-smoking “Page Six” staple “Lexi Featherston” did some coke at a geriatric party, yelled, “This used to be the most exciting city in the world, and now it’s nothing but smoking near a fuckin’ open window,” and then took a header out said window. […]

Minimum estimates now put the number of New York City millionaires at around 400,000; there could be as many as 650,000. […] It’s a bedrock pillar of nickels and dimes all the way down, a billion fees a second, a burn rate, a waste, a dick joke, a $40,000 storefront in Brooklyn, one more year of fat bonus before you say you’ll finally quit, one more “space” disrupted, a Balthazar breakfast, a billion uniques, a whale, a Citation X, an acquisition, a bomb, a deposition, a bust.

{ Choire Sicha/NY Magazine | Continue reading }

I’d get online and look up and 40 minutes would have gone by, and my reading time for the night would have been pissed away, and all I would have learned was that, you know, a certain celebrity had lived in her car awhile, or that a cat had dialled 911. […] It’s interesting because (1) this tendency does seem to alter brain function and (2) through some demonic cause-and-effect, our technology is exactly situated to exploit the crappier angles of our nature: gossip, self-promotion, snarky curiosity. It’s almost as if totalitarianism thought better of the jackboots and decided to go another way: smoother, more flattering – and impossible to resist.

{ George Saunders/Guardian | Continue reading }

photo { Claudine Doury }

Christopher Knight went into the central Maine wilderness 27 years ago. […]

He built a hut on a slope in the woods, where he spent his days reading books and meditating.

There he lived, re-entering civilization only to steal supplies from camps under the cover of darkness. During those nearly three decades, he spoke just once to another person – until he was arrested during a burglary last week.

In between, Knight told police, he committed more than 1,000 burglaries, always taking only what he needed to survive. […]

Knight said he stole everything he has, except for his aviator-style eyeglasses, which are the same pair he wore in 1986. […]

Knight went to great lengths to make the camp invisible from the ground and the air, even covering a yellow shovel with a black bag. Knight never had a fire, even on the coldest days, for fear of being detected. He covered shiny surfaces, like his metal trash cans, with moss and dirt and painted green a clear plastic sheet over his tent.

Knight even situated his campsite facing east and west to make the best use of the sun throughout the day. […]

Knight carefully avoided snow, stepped on rocks when he could and even avoided breaking branches in thick growth. Knight usually put on weight in the fall so he would have to eat less in the winter and thus avoid making treks for food and risk leaving prints in the snow.

{ Morning Sentinel | Continue reading }

I’m pretty mediocre. I’m ashamed to admit it. I’m not even being sarcastic or self-deprecating. I’ve never done anything that stands out. No “Whoa! This guy made it into outer space!” or, “This guy has a best selling novel!” or, “If only Google had thought of this!” I’ve had some successes and some failures but never reached any of the goals I had initially set. Always slipped off along the way, off the yellow brick road, into the wilderness.

I’ve started a bunch of companies. Sold some. Failed at most. I’ve invested in a bunch of startups. Sold some. Failed at some, and the jury is still sequestered on a few others. I’ve written some books, most of which I no longer like. I can tell you overall, though, everything I have done has been distinguished by its mediocrity, its lack of a grand vision, and any success I’ve had can be put just as much in the luck basket as the effort basket.

That said, all people should be so lucky. We can’t all be grand visionaries. We can’t all be Picassos. We want to make our business, make our art, sell it, make some money, raise a family, and try to be happy. My feeling, based on my own experience, is that aiming for grandiosity is the fastest route to failure. For every Mark Zuckerberg, there are 1000 Jack Zuckermans. Who is Jack Zuckerman? I have no idea.

{ James Altucher/The Rumpus | Continue reading }

photo { Martin Stöbich }

[I]t’s helpful to remember how banks traditionally make money: They take deposits from the public, which they lend out longer term to companies and individuals, capturing the spread between the two.

Managing this type of bank is straightforward and can be done on spreadsheets. The assets are assigned a possible loss, with the total kept well beneath the capital of the bank. This form of banking dominated for most of the last century, until the recent move towards deregulation.

Regulations of banks have ebbed and flowed over the years, played out as a fight between the banks’ desire to buy a larger array of assets and the government’s desire to ensure banks’ solvency.

Starting in the early 1980s the banks started to win these battles resulting in an explosion of financial products. It also resulted in mergers. My old firm, Salomon Brothers, was bought by Smith Barney, which was bought by Citibank.

Now banks no longer just borrow to lend to small businesses and home owners, they borrow to trade credit swaps with other banks and hedge funds, to buy real estate in Argentina, super senior synthetic CDOs, mezzanine tranches of bonds backed by the revenues of pop singers, and yes, investments in Mexico pesos. Everything and anything you can imagine. […]

Many risk managers will privately tell you that knowing what they own is as much a problem as knowing the risk of what is owned.

Put mathematically, the complexity now grows non-linearly. This means, as banks get larger, the ability to risk-manage the assets grows much smaller and more uncertain, ultimately endangering the viability of the business.

{ Chris Arnade/Scientific American | Continue reading }

related { In 1900, the Fifth Avenue Bank in New York City featured a special row of tellers’ windows for the ladies. }

In 1993, approaching my sixtieth birthday, I started to experience a curious phenomenon—the spontaneous, unsolicited rising of early memories into my mind, memories that had lain dormant for upward of fifty years. Not merely memories, but frames of mind, thoughts, atmospheres, and passions associated with them—memories, especially, of my boyhood in London before World War II. […]

I accepted that I must have forgotten or lost a great deal, but assumed that the memories I did have—especially those that were very vivid, concrete, and circumstantial—were essentially valid and reliable; and it was a shock to me when I found that some of them were not. […]

“You never saw it,” Michael repeated. “We were both away at Braefield at the time. But David [our older brother] wrote us a letter about it. A very vivid, dramatic letter. You were enthralled by it.” Clearly, I had not only been enthralled, but must have constructed the scene in my mind, from David’s words, and then appropriated it, and taken it for a memory of my own. […]

All of us “transfer” experiences to some extent, and at times we are not sure whether an experience was something we were told or read about, even dreamed about, or something that actually happened to us. […]

It is startling to realize that some of our most cherished memories may never have happened—or may have happened to someone else.

{ NY Review of Books | Continue reading }

photo { Phil Stern, Robert Aldrich, Casting Pin Up Girl for “Attack,” 1947 }

Your face falls. Perhaps you cry. You feel worthless. You wonder whether it’s worth going on. Everything you think about seems bleak - the things you’ve done, the things you hope to do, the people around you. You want to lie in bed and keep the lights off. Depressed mood is like that, only it doesn’t come for any reason and it doesn’t go for any either. Go outside and get some fresh air or cuddle with a loved one and you don’t feel any better, only more upset at being unable to feel the joy that everyone else seems to feel. Everything gets colored by the sadness.

At best, you tell yourself that your thinking is irrational, that it is simply a mood disorder, that you should get on with your life. But sometimes that is worse. You feel as if streaks of pain are running through your head, you thrash your body, you search for some escape but find none. 

{ Aaron Swartz | Continue reading }