Reviews and News:
How James Bond got his name.
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Zadie Smith’s Swing Time is “a novel that showcases its author’s formidable talents in only half its pages, while bogging down the rest of the time in formulaic and predictable storytelling.”
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Kyle Smith reviews Underground Railroad Game: “Your definition of sublime artistry may differ from mine. For instance, you may observe a nude Caucasian man on all fours, in the presence of a dominatrix-like black woman, beating himself with a ruler while repeatedly calling out ‘Nigger lover!’ then simulating masturbation into a towel and think, ‘Such biting satire! How rarely does one witness such a comedic breakthrough in racial commentary!’ Such a reaction would make you simpatico with The New York Times‘s chief theater critic Ben Brantley, who was unrestrained in his praise for the off-off-Broadway play Underground Railroad Game, a two-hander which culminates in the scene.”
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A history of American cake.
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“Audubon’s gains and losses were always big and dramatic, just like his art, in which scale sometimes seemed to loom as a form of conceit. He depicted the subjects of The Birds of America lifesize—even the flamingo—which required a format that was more than two feet wide and more than a yard tall. The 435 images of The Birds of America, released between 1827 and 1838, were enormously expensive, costing about $1,000 (over $20,000 in today’s dollars) for the whole set. Only an obsessive egotist could conceive a market for such a project. And as we’re reminded within these pages, the world’s most famous bird artist had a generally high opinion of himself, although his seeming self-confidence masked, perhaps not always convincingly, a lingering sense of insecurity. ‘The desire to craft his own persona and exaggerate his accomplishments became a hallmark of the man,’ Logan writes. ‘He could lie with aplomb and did so readily if he stood to gain and, just as importantly, thought he could get away with it.’
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Remembering the Bulletin Board System: “BBSes once numbered in the tens of thousands in North America. These mostly text-based, hobbyist-run services played a huge part in the online landscape of the 1980s and ’90s. Anyone with a modem and a home computer could dial-in, often for free, and interact with other callers in their area code. Then the internet came along in the mid-1990s. Like a comet to the dinosaurs, it upended the natural order of things and wiped BBSes out. My system was one of the casualties, a victim of the desire to devote all my online time to the internet. The same scenario repeated itself on thousands of computers across the country until, one by one, the brightest lights of the BBS world blinked out of existence.”
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Essay of the Day:
In Der Spiegel, Ullrich Fichtner, Hauke Goos, and Martin Hesse explain the decline of the 146-year-old Deutsche Bank:
“Greed, provincialism, cowardice, unfocused aggression, mania, egoism, immaturity, mendacity, incompetence, weakness, pride, blundering, decadence, arrogance, a need for admiration, naiveté: If you are looking for words that explain the fall of Deutsche Bank, you can choose freely and justifiably from among the above list.
“The bank, 146 years after its founding, has become the target for all manner of pejoratives, and not just from outside observers. All of the above terms were used in interviews held during months of reporting into the causes of the downfall of Germany’s largest financial institution. They popped up over the course of several hours of interviews with four Deutsche Bank CEOs, three former and one current. And they were uttered in interviews with eight additional senior bank managers and board members conducted over the course of several years, from the 1990s until today, and in meetings with captains of industry who know the bank well and during encounters with major stakeholders. More than anything, the disparaging words come up frequently in interviews with those who have worked or still work at the bank as customer service advisors, as branch managers or in positions lower down on the food chain.
“What we have found in the course of these myriad interviews — combined with the hours spent analyzing bank balance sheets, thousands of pages of files, committee meeting minutes and archive material — is that the collapse of Deutsche Bank is the result of years, decades, of failed leadership, culminating in the complete loss of control of the company by top managers during the period between 1994 and 2012.
“It is a story about how Hilmar Kopper, Rolf E. Breuer and Josef Ackermann, the leaders of Deutsche Bank during those fateful years, essentially turned over the bank to a hastily assembled group of Anglo-American investment bankers before Anshu Jain, the prince of these traders, rose to the top and spent three more years sailing the bank full-speed-ahead into the shoals.
“It is also a story of how these bank heads, along with numerous other members of the management and supervisory boards, stood aside as Jain and the many other new investment banking heroes modified the staid German financial institution to serve their own purposes — essentially looting it and robbing it of its very soul — without leaving behind a better, stronger bank.”
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Image of the Day: Black holes in colliding galaxies
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Poem: A. E. Stallings, “Selvage”
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