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I Love Capitalism!: An American Story by Ken Langone

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, business climate, corporate governance, East Village, fixed income, glass ceiling, income inequality, Paul Samuelson, Ronald Reagan, short selling, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, six sigma, VA Linux, Y2K, zero-sum game

“Look,” Henry said, “I’m trying to turn my company around, and the NYU Medical Center has got a real problem. I can’t fix both things at the same time.” One thing suddenly occurred to me. “I want to be honest, Henry,” I said. “New York is a Jewish town. I don’t need the suspicion that I pushed a Jew out of this position.” “I don’t think anybody would say that,” Henry told me. “But if they did, I’d tell them the real story.” I met next with the NYU Medical School’s new dean, Bob Glickman. I was shocked at how depressed he was. Glickman, who’d previously been the chief of medicine at Beth Israel at Harvard, felt he’d been lured to NYU under false pretenses: he’d been promised the medical school was ready to make all kinds of changes, but when he arrived he was told the money simply wasn’t there.

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I knew a few things about health care, and as I went around and interviewed these NYU docs, I saw that the quality of care at NYU Hospital wasn’t just good; it was spectacularly good. These were old-fashioned docs who understood the meaning of quality patient care. They would never rush a patient through a hospital stay just to clear a room: they paid real attention to their patients as people. I also had a leg up. Dr. John Mountain, the surgeon Elaine had worked for when we were newlyweds, was still active at North Shore Hospital, and he was an incredible source of knowledge for me. Dr. Mountain said to me, “There’s a doctor at NYU who is one of the most respected and accomplished cardiovascular surgeons in the world.

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Jack Weist Jack Welch Tony Welters Hudson Whitenight David Wiederecht Frank Wilkens Webb Williams Faye Wilson Ernie Wuliger David Zaslav Gerson Zweifach All the associates of the wonderful companies and organizations I’ve been fortunate to be a part of: Autofinance Group Bucknell University Choicepoint Electronic Data Systems The Home Depot Invemed IVAC Micelle Technologies NYU Langone Health doctors, nurses, staff, and board of trustees NYU Stern School of Business Ohio Mattress Company Parkdale America Patlex Corporation Salem Leasing Corp. Unifi United States Satellite Broadcasting Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen and Katz Yum! Brands The world belongs to risk takers.

Occupying Wall Street: The Inside Story of an Action That Changed America by Writers For The 99%

Bay Area Rapid Transit, citizen journalism, collective bargaining, Day of the Dead, desegregation, feminist movement, gentrification, Glass-Steagall Act, income inequality, independent contractor, intentional community, it's over 9,000, McMansion, microaggression, Mohammed Bouazizi, Occupy movement, Port of Oakland, We are the 99%, young professional

Other speakers included law student activists from the University of Puerto Rico, who spoke of the global threat to public, accessible higher education and workers’ rights—a threat that New York area students followed on Facebook and Twitter posts from activists in Greece, India, England, and across the world. At NYU, students, faculty and staff had also been active in a nearly four-year-long campaign for the rights of migrant workers who build, operate and maintain non-U.S. site branch campuses, particularly NYU Abu Dhabi. NYU undergraduates also organized the Tuition Reform Action Committee (TRAC) and Students Creating Radical Change (SCRC) in the years leading up the occupation of the NYU Kimmel Student Center in February 2009. The NYU occupation took direct inspiration from the December 2008 student occupation of the New School.

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., however, the square teemed with hundreds of students, professors and community members, and the New School contingent was still on its way. The NYU organizers had planned for a relatively small contingent of students, marching along the sidewalks to join the community groups and union members downtown. “Because it was just this small number of grad students that organized this thing. We felt like we couldn’t in good conscience encourage NYU undergrads to do something illegal and risk getting arrested,” recalled Christy Thorton, an NYU graduate student in history and one of the walkout’s organizers, “This was right after the Brooklyn bridge arrests.”

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Josh Frens-String, a graduate student in New York University’s history department, said he first heard about NYSR when he was handed a flyer in Zuccotti. Josh, like many other NYU graduate student activists, was a member of the Graduate Student Organizing Committee (GSOC) and had primarily focused his activism on building support for an anticipated union certification vote. But the news of NYSR inspired Josh to build public-private solidarity at NYU. “All that really happened was I posted something to Facebook saying, ‘Does anyone know if there’s something going on?’— and Dan [DiMaggio] was organizing an NYU walk-out in coordination with students at CUNY,” Josh said. “So I made my first Facebook group ever for it.”

The Sharing Economy: The End of Employment and the Rise of Crowd-Based Capitalism by Arun Sundararajan

"World Economic Forum" Davos, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, AltaVista, Amazon Mechanical Turk, asset light, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, benefit corporation, bike sharing, bitcoin, blockchain, book value, Burning Man, call centre, Carl Icahn, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, commoditize, commons-based peer production, corporate social responsibility, cryptocurrency, data science, David Graeber, distributed ledger, driverless car, Eben Moglen, employer provided health coverage, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, future of work, general purpose technology, George Akerlof, gig economy, housing crisis, Howard Rheingold, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Internet of things, inventory management, invisible hand, job automation, job-hopping, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Kula ring, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mary Meeker, megacity, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, moral panic, Network effects, new economy, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, peer-to-peer model, peer-to-peer rental, profit motive, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, regulatory arbitrage, rent control, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Ronald Coase, Ross Ulbricht, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, smart contracts, Snapchat, social software, supply-chain management, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, total factor productivity, transaction costs, transportation-network company, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, Vitalik Buterin, WeWork, Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

If I have inadvertently failed to include you, and you know me, then you know that I’m both forgetful and grateful. Thank you. (And visit http://oz.stern.nyu.edu/thanksforsharing where I will continue to update this note.) I see the changes we label “the sharing economy” as the current phase of an ongoing evolution of the economy and society that is shaped in part by digital technologies. This is the topic of my program of research and scholarship at NYU. When I began investigating this evolution many years ago, two colleagues—Vasant Dhar and Roy Radner—were especially important intellectual influences and mentors.

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The sharing economy, although not politically neutral, is creating a new economic model—an interesting middle ground between capitalism and socialism—that also appears to lend itself to the fulfilling the desires and needs of people who identify with the extreme ends of both the economic and political spectrums. More importantly, it has developed as an economic model that appears to lend itself to fulfilling the desires and needs of people who identify with neither of those extremes. In 2013, I joined a newly formed NYU collective, the Project for the Advancement of our Common Humanity (PACH), founded by the NYU professors Niobe Way, Carol Gilligan, and Pedro Nguera. PACH was formed to better understand “what lies at the root of our crisis of connection and what we can do to create a more just and humane world.”46 A number of the world’s problems, ranging from violence to educational outcomes have been shown to stem from an insufficient level of human connectedness.

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As a consequence, deepening our understanding of trust in society that is digitally mediated, as well as how the use of digital technologies changes levels of trust between people, is critically important. I hope our research with Frederic Mazella of BlaBlaCar and my NYU colleague Mareike Mohlmann, which is ongoing as this book goes to press—but which will be available via the NYU and BlaBlaCar websites in 2016—will be a first step in this direction. City governments, in parallel, will try to become more “shareable” as they get more crowded. Over time, they are likely to realize that unlocking the true potential of the sharing economy requires a fundamentally rethinking of how they plan and govern, and fairly radical changes in our approach towards both residential zoning and the role of regulatory agencies. *** Is crowd-based capitalism a passing phase, an interesting social experiment before society returns to the familiar confines of 20th-century managerial capitalism?

The Making of Prince of Persia: Journals 1985-1993 by Jordan Mechner

game design, Menlo Park, place-making, restrictive zoning, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs

The extent of the damage in my building: no hot water, no elevator, no lights in the lobby or stairwell, and the fire escape is sealed off as a “Restricted Zone.” November 20, 1989 NYU film school application arrived. I’ve started to fill it out. How terrifying. Robert is in town. We drove to Berkeley for dinner. (Crossed the Bay Bridge for the first time since the quake.) He’s euphoric at having escaped the industrial park and started a new life at Yale. That’s part of why I’m so eager to go to NYU. November 21, 1989 Virginia called to give me the post-mortem on In the Dark. She is no longer involved. She says James Alex is crazy and self-destructive and they could have made this movie, but he blew it by getting involved with the Abramoff brothers, and so on.

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We discussed the possibility of doing Sega and NEC versions instead. It’s a tough sell. In any case, Game Boy looks like it’s happening, which is great news. They can’t start till March, but they hope to finish by June. Danny Gorlin has offered to do the Amiga conversion. January 10, 1990 Larry Turman agreed to write me a recommendation for NYU. He thinks NYU and USC are the best schools. His son Andrew just started at USC. Prince of Persia won “Game of the Year” from Computer Entertainer magazine, according to Brian. January 11, 1990 Made a six-minute demo tape of POP on the Broderbund video editing console, to submit to film schools.

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Now that I’m going to leave, I’m starting to miss it. It’s more fun now that I’m not programming by myself. I think it would be fun to start a software company to make games, or educational games. But how can I do that while enrolled as a full-time graduate student at NYU? To try to do both at the same time would be folly. I don’t want to short-shrift NYU the way I short-shrifted Yale. I don’t want to spend another three years moving pixels around, even though it would be fun. I want to make movies. I’m so confused. January 31, 1990 Another Broderbund week. I’m so tired of coloring in these frames, I see paint in front of my eyes when I fall asleep at night.

Genius Makers: The Mavericks Who Brought A. I. To Google, Facebook, and the World by Cade Metz

AI winter, air gap, Airbnb, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, AlphaGo, Amazon Robotics, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Big Tech, British Empire, Cambridge Analytica, carbon-based life, cloud computing, company town, computer age, computer vision, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, digital map, Donald Trump, driverless car, drone strike, Elon Musk, fake news, Fellow of the Royal Society, Frank Gehry, game design, Geoffrey Hinton, Google Earth, Google X / Alphabet X, Googley, Internet Archive, Isaac Newton, Jeff Hawkins, Jeffrey Epstein, job automation, John Markoff, life extension, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Menlo Park, move 37, move fast and break things, Mustafa Suleyman, new economy, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, OpenAI, PageRank, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, profit motive, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, tech worker, telemarketer, The Future of Employment, Turing test, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Y Combinator

With dozens of engineers, computer scientists, and academics packed into this split-level space, including the balcony overlooking the crowd below, LeCun revealed that the company was opening an AI lab in Manhattan, not far from his office at NYU. “It’s a marriage made in heaven—otherwise known as New York City,” LeCun said, before raising a glass to “Mark and Schrep.” Facebook had already hired a second NYU professor to work alongside LeCun at the new lab—dubbed FAIR, for Facebook Artificial Intelligence Research—and a few more notable names would soon join them, including three researchers poached from Google. But in the end, despite his long history with LeCun, a fellow Frenchman, Clément Farabet did not.

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The next day, LeCun visited Facebook HQ, chatting with Zuckerberg, Schrep, and others in “The Aquarium,” the glass-walled conference room where the Facebook boss held his meetings. At this point, Zuckerberg did not mince words. “We need you to build a Facebook AI lab,” he said. LeCun said he had two conditions: “I am not moving from New York. And I am not leaving my job at NYU.” Zuckerberg agreed to both—on the spot. Over the next few days, the company also hired Rob Fergus, another NYU professor, who had just won the next iteration of the ImageNet contest alongside a young graduate student named Matt Zeiler. Then Zuckerberg flew to NIPS. After unveiling his new lab at the private Facebook party the night before the conference began, he revealed the news to the rest of the world with his speech in the main hall

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Meanwhile, AlphaGo had beaten Lee Sedol, and the tech industry was stricken with a kind of AI fever. Even smaller Silicon Valley companies—Nvidia, Twitter, Uber—were jockeying for position in a race toward a single idea. After Twitter acquired Madbits, the company founded by Clément Farabet, the NYU researcher who turned down Facebook, Uber bought a start-up called Geometric Intelligence, a collection of academics pulled together by an NYU psychologist named Gary Marcus. Deep learning and deep learning researchers were the coin of the day. But Microsoft was handicapped. It wasn’t an Internet company or a smartphone company or a self-driving car company. It didn’t actually build the stuff that needed the Next Big Thing in artificial intelligence.

How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence by Michael Pollan

1960s counterculture, Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, Anton Chekhov, Burning Man, cognitive dissonance, conceptual framework, crowdsourcing, dark matter, Day of the Dead, Douglas Engelbart, East Village, experimental subject, Exxon Valdez, Golden Gate Park, Google Earth, Haight Ashbury, Howard Rheingold, Internet Archive, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Marshall McLuhan, Mason jar, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, microdosing, military-industrial complex, moral panic, Mother of all demos, off-the-grid, overview effect, placebo effect, radical decentralization, Ralph Waldo Emerson, randomized controlled trial, reality distortion field, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, satellite internet, scientific mainstream, scientific worldview, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), sensible shoes, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, sugar pill, TED Talk, the scientific method, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes, Whole Earth Catalog

In doing so, I’m following in the steps of several of the current generation of psychedelic researchers, who, beginning in the late 1990s, set out to excavate the intellectual ruins of this first flowering of research into LSD and psilocybin and were astounded by what they found. Stephen Ross is one such researcher. A psychiatrist specializing in addiction at Bellevue, he directed an NYU trial using psilocybin to treat the existential distress of cancer patients, to which I will return later; since then, he has turned to the treatment of alcoholics with psychedelics, what had been perhaps the single most promising area of clinical research in the 1950s. When several years ago an NYU colleague mentioned to Ross that LSD had once been used to treat thousands of alcoholics in Canada and the United States (and that Bill Wilson, the founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, had sought to introduce LSD therapy into AA in the 1950s), Ross, who was in his thirties at the time, did some research and was “flabbergasted” by all that he—as an expert on the treatment of alcoholism—did not know and hadn’t been told.

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By the 1990s, when he began his residency in psychiatry at Columbia and the New York State Psychiatric Institute, the history of psychedelic therapy had been erased from the field, never to be mentioned. The trial at NYU, along with a sister study conducted in Roland Griffiths’s lab at Johns Hopkins, represents one of a handful of efforts to pick up the thread of inquiry that got dropped in the 1970s when sanctioned psychedelic therapy ended. While the NYU and Hopkins trials are assessing the potential of psychedelics to help the dying, other trials now under way are exploring the possibility that psychedelics (usually psilocybin rather than LSD, because, as Ross explained, it “carries none of the political baggage of those three letters”) could be used to lift depression and break addictions—to alcohol, cocaine, and tobacco.

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By 2010, the cancer had spread to Patrick’s lungs, and he was buckling under the weight of an especially debilitating chemotherapy regime and the dawning realization that he might not survive. The article, headlined “Hallucinogens Have Doctors Tuning In Again,” briefly mentioned research at NYU, where psilocybin was being tested to relieve existential distress in cancer patients. According to Lisa, Patrick had no experience with psychedelics, but he immediately determined to call NYU and volunteer. Lisa was against the idea. “I didn’t want there to be an easy way out,” she told me. “I wanted him to fight.” Patrick placed the call anyway and, after filling out some forms and answering a long list of questions, was accepted into the trial.

The Blue Cascade: A Memoir of Life After War by Mike Scotti

Bear Stearns, call centre, collateralized debt obligation, Donald Trump, fixed income, friendly fire, index card, information security, London Interbank Offered Rate, military-industrial complex, rent control

Part III Up Chapter Ten Date: Fri, 15 Apr 2005 10:08:23 -0400 From: Anika Pratt Subject: Meeting at NYU Stern To: Michael Scotti Dear Michael, My name is Anika Pratt and I am a member of the admissions committee at NYU Stern. I am writing to find out if you can come to Stern to meet with me sometime next week. Please let me know your availability to meet during business hours. Thank you, and I look forward to hearing from you soon, Anika Pratt -- Anika Davis Pratt Director, MBA Admissions NYU Stern School of Business http://www.stern.nyu.edu/admissions Downtown. Down to Earth. Down to Business. A jolt of equal parts hope and fear hit me as I opened the e-mail.

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The lines of the suit must be tailored perfectly along the shoulders and the arms for it to become a part of you. Your steps and movements have a self-​assuredness to them because it fits perfectly, just like a Marine’s uniform. I flashed my purple laminated NYU ID card as the guard waved me through the checkpoint. To my left, embedded in the wall, was a plaque I hadn’t noticed before. A memorial to the students and alumni from NYU Stern who had died on 9/11. Her name was there. Beth Anne Quigley. I stopped for a few moments and gently rubbed my fingers over the raised lettering of her name. I remembered clearly the nights just a year before, walking to work along the edge of Ground Zero.

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“The camera made a weird noise. The tape played for a second, but then the image froze and the tape jammed and there were just these weird lines going across the screen.” “Oh that’s terrible. I’m sorry. What are you going to do? I know how much those tapes mean to you.” “I talked to some guy the other day—a student from NYU Film School—who said that I needed to get them put on a more stable format. Like DVD. He’s an intern from some production company that he says does pretty good work, so I’m going to meet with them next week. I have to make sure the rest of the tapes don’t break.” Then the conversation drifted to other things.

Only Americans Burn in Hell by Jarett Kobek

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", AltaVista, coherent worldview, corporate governance, crony capitalism, Donald Trump, East Village, General Magic , ghettoisation, Google Chrome, Great Leap Forward, haute couture, illegal immigration, indoor plumbing, Jeff Bezos, mandelbrot fractal, microdosing, military-industrial complex, MITM: man-in-the-middle, pre–internet, sexual politics, Seymour Hersh, Skype, Snapchat, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Telecommunications Act of 1996

You can’t charge $63,472 and expect much more than a mixture of the rich and the gullible. The gullible emerge from NYU in a state of financial ruin, indebted for a substandard education that they could’ve received for about 1/8th of the price at a state-run university. Welcome to adulthood! Time to pay back $253,888! With compounding interest! The rich kids come out fine. The rich kids are always fine. The third thing that distinguishes NYU is its Abu Dhabi campus, which opened in 2014 AD. The idea behind the Abu Dhabi campus was to construct a mirror-world NYU that bestowed the same substandard education, and thus conferred the same substandard degree, as the Greenwich Village campus.

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And although putting people into human bondage and making them build college campuses was a time-honored tradition, it’d been a very long while since any American institution of higher learning had involved itself in this sort of disgrace. On August 30th, 2017 AD, I received an email from NYU’s Office of Development and Alumni Relations. The email was from a Senior Annual Giving Officer named Corey, and it informed me that Corey was coming to Los Angeles. I live in Los Angeles. Corey wanted to have lunch or get coffee. For years, I’d received emails from NYU. All of the emails begged for money. But none of them had extended a personal invitation of food or caffeine. Corey’s email made me wonder if NYU employed a clipping service to search for media mentions of prominent alumni. In the sixteen months prior to Corey’s email, I’d lived as a minor literary sensation off the strength of my novel I Hate the Internet.

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to a Goose Only Americans Burn in Hell JARETT KOBEK Introduction Thank You for Your Honesty The last time anyone thanked me for my honesty was in an email sent by the Office of Development and Alumni Relations at New York University, an institution of higher learning centered in New York City’s Greenwich Village. NYU has three distinguishing characteristics. The first is that it’s my alma mater. I graduated in 2002 AD, after giving the university an absurd amount of money for an undergraduate degree. This is why the school begs me for money. It’s like a junkie who can’t stop. NYU’s second distinction is its inhuman cost. In 2017 AD, the tuition was $46,170 for a year. Throw in campus housing and administrative fees, and the total was $63,472.

The Marginal Revolutionaries: How Austrian Economists Fought the War of Ideas by Janek Wasserman

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Wald, Albert Einstein, American Legislative Exchange Council, anti-communist, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, business cycle, collective bargaining, Corn Laws, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, different worldview, Donald Trump, experimental economics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Gunnar Myrdal, housing crisis, Internet Archive, invisible hand, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, laissez-faire capitalism, liberal capitalism, low interest rates, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, means of production, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mont Pelerin Society, New Journalism, New Urbanism, old-boy network, Paul Samuelson, Philip Mirowski, price mechanism, price stability, public intellectual, RAND corporation, random walk, rent control, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, rolodex, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, trade liberalization, union organizing, urban planning, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, zero-sum game, éminence grise

Mises had some possibilities at New York University, but nothing came out of this.” In a confidential letter of recommendation to NYU, Machlup recounted the strengths and the flaws of his mentor. He observed that “the neo-Austrian school is to a large extent the Mises School.” However, he also noted that Mises’s unyielding style repelled as often as it attracted. “It is the conviction with which he expounds his ideas which arouses the students’ interest, partly by convincing them, partly by provoking their criticism.” Mises did not receive a full-time offer from NYU, not for Machlup’s lack of trying.17 Because of the tireless activity of the Austrian School members, by late 1940 virtually everyone who would escape from the European maelstrom had made it out.

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Those two books, which focused on history and politics more than economics, barely made a ripple outside this ideological community, however.34 While in California, the emerging epicenter of US libertarianism, Mises encountered Leonard Read, who became one of Mises’s patron saints. Read disseminated Mises’s works and provided him a regular stipend. Read, Henry Hazlitt, and Lawrence Fertig, a New York University trustee, orchestrated Mises’s appointment to a visiting professorship at the NYU Graduate School of Business Administration in 1945. Like Hayek at Chicago, NYU did not pay Mises’s salary; private contributions did. After the appointment, Mises began holding lectures and seminars, first in Manhattan and later in Irvington-on-Hudson, where FEE purchased an opulent estate in one of New York City’s wealthiest suburbs. Harold Luhnow and the Volker Fund also provided support for Mises’s endeavors from 1947 onward.

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Like Kirzner, he felt himself to be a bridge between the Austrians and “Anglo-Saxons,” yet he bridled at the “Austrian” descriptor: “While you may say that this analysis is essentially Austrian in character, I must point out that this is by no means foreign to Anglo-Saxon equilibrium theory.” Machlup was less interested in claiming Austrianness than in advancing good economics.21 Creating and maintaining clear definitional boundaries within the Austrian tradition was a challenge. While both Kirzner and Machlup stuck primarily to academic work—Kirzner at NYU and Machlup at Princeton and then NYU—they did not entirely eschew policy and political discussions, particularly Machlup. Elite liberalism informed Machlup’s work, yet it was hard to categorize on a left-right political spectrum. He was committed to individual liberty, economic and political, and this led him to speak out on issues rather than to get involved in party political affairs.

The Future Won't Be Long by Jarett Kobek

Berlin Wall, British Empire, Donald Trump, East Village, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial independence, Future Shock, gentrification, Golden Gate Park, means of production, Menlo Park, messenger bag, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, New Journalism, Norman Mailer, quantum entanglement, rent stabilization, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, thinkpad, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, urban decay, wage slave, War on Poverty, working poor, young professional

Or emptiness on which proletariat worker projects meaning?” Baby wasn’t home, it being the time of day when he was either in class or working at the Theatre 80 St. Mark’s. “Roommate?” asked Минерва. “He isn’t present.” “Is student?” she asked. “At NYU,” I said. “Fucking NYU,” said Минерва. “I tell stories about NYU. Real prick institution.” I offered Минерва some food, but she declined. “New York ten years ago is real place,” she said. “All since is monkeys who fling shit. You and I are nothing.” FEBRUARY 1989 Baby Invites Adeline to Bret Easton Ellis’s Apartment Our holiday break did not include a sojourn to California.

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Or want to own him. But I wanted him with me, right there, right in that moment. Would have given anything to hear him talk about the stupid things that he liked. About skateboarding or Dungeons & Dragons or beer or anything. I beat off. MAY 1988 Baby Gets into NYU Then there was the time when I got into NYU. MAY 1988 Adeline Makes a Decision I was downstairs, watching a VHS recording of The Wonder Years, a television show about a junior high student in 1968. The idea is that this kid, named Kevin, narrates from an indeterminate point in the future, presumably 1988.

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Other than Larry, the only good writer we’ve got is this woman named Ann Nocenti, who’s doing Daredevil. And most of the office hates her work.” “Because she’s a woman?” I asked. “Because she’s interesting,” he said. * Walking up Third Avenue, my stomach burned with the old tequila churn. I examined a construction site. A new NYU dormitory. Those were the days when NYU was always erecting a new dormitory on Third Avenue. I’d asked Baby how he felt having matriculated into an organization with the stated goal of our neighborhood’s complete transformation. “To be honest,” he said, “I haven’t thought much about it.” In the lobby of 114 East 13th Street, I informed the doorman that I was ascending to apartment 2D.

Pocket New York City Travel Guide by Lonely Planet

Airbnb, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Cornelius Vanderbilt, East Village, Frank Gehry, G4S, gentrification, ghettoisation, machine readable, messenger bag, retail therapy, Saturday Night Live, starchitect, the High Line, urban renewal, walking around money

It plays host to lounging New York University (NYU) students, fire-eating street performers, curious canines and their owners, and legions of speed-chess pros. Encased in perfectly manicured brownstones and gorgeous twists of modern architecture (all owned by NYU), Washington Sq Park is one of the most beautiful garden spaces in the city – especially as you are welcomed by the iconic Stanford White Arch on the north side of the green. (www.washingtonsquareparkcouncil.org; Fifth Ave at Washington Sq N; A/C/E, B/D/F/V to W 4th St-Washington Sq, N/R/W to 8th St-NYU) 2 Chelsea Market Market Offline map Google map In a shining example of redevelopment and preservation, the Chelsea Market has taken a former factory of cookie giant Nabisco (creator of the Oreo) and turned it into an 800ft-long shopping concourse that caters to foodies.

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He’d scarcely recognize the place today, which has swelled to a student population of more than 54,000. For a unique experience, sign up for a one-day class – from American history to photography – offered by the School of Professional Studies and Continuing Education. (NYU; 212-998-4636; www.nyu.edu; information center 50 W 4th St; A/C/E, B/D/F/V to W 4th St-Washington Sq, R/W to 8th St-NYU) 4 Astor Place Square Offline map Google map This square is named after the Astor family, who built an early New York fortune on beaver pelts and lived on Colonnade Row, just south of the square. Originally Astor Pl was the home of the Astor Opera House (now gone), which attracted the city’s wealthy elite for regular performances in the mid-1800s.

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St Marks Pl is one of the best strips of pavement in the city for story telling, as almost every building on these hallowed blocks is rife with tales from a time when the East Village embodied a far more lawless spirit. When things get too crowded, hop a block over in either direction for some local retail and restaurant finds. (St Marks Pl, Ave A to Third Ave; N/R/W to 8th St-NYU, 6 to Astor Pl) 2 New Museum of Contemporary Art Gallery Offline map Google map Any modern-day museum worth its salt has to have a structure that makes as much of a statement as the artwork inside. The New Museum of Contemporary Art’s Lower East Side avatar accomplishes just that and more with its inspired design by noted Japanese architecture firm SANAA.

The Coke Machine: The Dirty Truth Behind the World's Favorite Soft Drink by Michael Blanding

"World Economic Forum" Davos, An Inconvenient Truth, carbon footprint, classic study, clean water, collective bargaining, corporate social responsibility, Exxon Valdez, Gordon Gekko, Internet Archive, laissez-faire capitalism, market design, military-industrial complex, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, New Journalism, Pepsi Challenge, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, Ralph Nader, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, stock buybacks, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, Wayback Machine

By that time, the day of reckoning was approaching at both NYU and the University of Michigan. As NYU’s senate reconvened to consider the vending machine ban, Coke continued in its refusal to meet with the WRC. The university issued an ultimatum—either Coke agree by December, or the Coke machines would go. When the deadline passed, NYU announced it would begin removing Coke from campus, effective immediately. But that wasn’t all. When the University of Michigan’s December 31 deadline passed three weeks later, it, too, declared it would be severing its ties with Coke. This decision was even more significant, since unlike both NYU and Rut­ gers, the university was breaking an exclusive contract and it was doing so specifically because of the company’s human rights violations—and not only in Colombia but in India as well.

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Page 264 “big blow to the company”: Rogers, interview by the author; Heybour, “At Rutgers, Pepsi’s $17 Million Deal Is the Real Thing.” Page 264 about a hundred vending machines: Crystal Yakacki, former organizer with anti-Coke campaign at NYU, interview by the author; Victoria Foltz and Barbara Leonard, “NYU Senate Bans Coke from Campus,” Washington Square News, December 9, 2005; Brittani Manzo, “Possible Coke Ban to Take Effect at NYU,” Washington Square News, November 28, 2005. Page 264 USAS led the way: Romero, interview by the author; Barbara Leonard, “Coke Re­ fuses NYU Request to Audit Workers’ Rights Practices,” Washington Square News,” April 21, 2005. Page 264 Students wrapped vending machines: Campaign to Stop Killer Coke “Student Protest Pics,” www.killercoke.org/proteststud.htm.

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Page 266 Coke was soon setting its own rules: Notes from September 9, 2005, commission meeting by anonymous student. Page 266 The students dismissed those demands: “How NYU Chose Colombia over Coke,” BusinessWeek, Online Extra, January 17, 2006, http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/ content/06_04/b3968078.htm. Page 267 The university issued an ultimatum: Jacob Gershman, “University Senate at NYU Threatens to Oust Coca-Cola from Campus,” Sun (New York), November 7, 2005. Page 267 NYU . . . would begin removing Coke from campus: Patrick Cole, “NYU Bans Coca-Cola Products,” Bloomberg News, December 9, 2005. Page 267 “Certainly if there was any wrongdoing”: Caroline Wilbert, “A Surprising Critic of Coke,” Atlanta Journal-Constitution, January 28, 2006.

Golden Holocaust: Origins of the Cigarette Catastrophe and the Case for Abolition by Robert N. Proctor

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", bioinformatics, carbon footprint, clean water, corporate social responsibility, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, disinformation, Dr. Strangelove, facts on the ground, friendly fire, germ theory of disease, global pandemic, index card, Indoor air pollution, information retrieval, invention of gunpowder, John Snow's cholera map, language of flowers, life extension, New Journalism, optical character recognition, pink-collar, Ponzi scheme, Potemkin village, precautionary principle, publication bias, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, speech recognition, stem cell, telemarketer, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, Yogi Berra

TIGHT SECURITY Collaborating in the American Tobacco-Runyon Fund “air pollution” project were a number of scientists working under Rhoads and Lanza. Norton Nelson, director of research at NYU’s Institute of Industrial Medicine, was a member of the team, as was William E. Smith, professor of medicine at NYU and an expert in the realm of carcinogenic bioassays. Others involved in the project conducted animal experiments of various sorts (tobacco tar painting, for example), identified tobacco constituents, or used radioactive tracers to study nicotine metabolism. The NYU organic chemist Alvin I. Kosak studied the chemical composition of tobacco smoke and Sid Laskin, a physicist with expertise in pharmacology and instrumentation, organized C 14 tracer projects to study nicotine metabolism.

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Smith’s view that “any product causing the destruction of the sebaceous glands under the conditions of accelerated tests would probably produce papillomata and eventual cancer under the conditions of the recognized standard test.” Smith at this time was the chief proponent of the accelerated tests used in the Ecusta experiments; he was also a faculty member at NYU’s Bellevue Medical Center and an important figure in the NYU collaboration—and one of those who would suffer professionally for recognizing the cancer-causing capacity of tobacco. Smith in fact would shortly thereafter be purged from the NYU faculty (by Lanza in 1956), a decision upheld despite protests to the chancellor.27 Ecusta was quite happy with these results, and for obvious reasons. Experimental tests had seemed to exonerate cigarette paper and put the entirety of blame for cancer on tobacco.

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Hanmer thanked him for a clipping from a recent issue of the Science News Letter implicating arsenic in lung cancer causation.3 Teeter then explained that the Runyon Fund had on file a request from NYU for a grant in the amount of $150,000 to support a long-term project on lung cancer—including $50,000 for “tooling up” and $50,000 per year for operations thereafter. Teeter realized this was an ambitious sum, given that the eleven projects currently funded by the National Cancer Institute (NCI), the American Cancer Society (ACS), and the Runyon Fund itself totaled only $96,768 altogether.4 American Tobacco agreed to fund the collaboration—with minor contributions from the other manufacturers—provided certain conditions of confidentiality could be met. The Runyon-NYU-SKI collaboration would become the best-financed lung cancer research project in the world, albeit one with its ultimate source of funding hidden.

Do You Mind if I Cancel?: (Things That Still Annoy Me) by Gary Janetti

Golden age of television, hiring and firing, index card, rent control, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory

It was extremely groundbreaking, and it was the first time a storyline on the show had ever spoken directly to me after all these years watching it, and I was amazed at the power it had (has) over me even though I was already out and in my mid-twenties when it aired). Even just having One Life to Live on in the room without the volume is comforting somehow. (A Viki/Dorian episode, however, is always something I’ll drop whatever I’m doing for.) And I go to graduate school and I get a job at NYU and I plan to be a writer, want to be a writer, say I’m a writer, but don’t write. And while I’m working at this office at NYU I make a friend, Evie, who also watches One Life to Live, has been watching as long as I have. And, then, one day, I write a letter. It’s addressed to the executive producer of One Life to Live and in it I talk about how I grew up watching the show and that I would like to write for it.

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Unfortunately in order to get the good Lend-A-Hand assignments you had to prove yourself by taking any available ones offered to you. This is what I am told by the woman in charge of handing out jobs. I, of course, say I would be willing to take on any job, which is how I find myself less than twenty-four hours later cleaning the bathroom of an NYU linguistics professor as his family sits in the living room pretending I’m not there. Later, while I’m on my knees scrubbing this family’s disgusting toilet (who by the way all look perfectly capable of scrubbing their own fucking toilet) I think, “I have a degree I have potential I have dreams, how did I end up someone who cleans apartments?”

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Oh, but to see that commercial. Evita’s arms outstretched, proud, defiant. It was like a door had opened and Patti was welcoming me. “Come in,” she said. “Come in.” PARAMOUNT I’m twenty-six years old. I quit my previous job working as the receptionist for a nonprofit educational theater company at NYU (at least I think I quit, somebody might have implied—said—maybe it’s time you move on Gary) before I have another job in place. This is the first time I have ever left a job before I already have the next one lined up. I estimate I can survive on my savings for two days, three if I just sit in a corner.

How to Survive a Plague: The Inside Story of How Citizens and Science Tamed AIDS by David France

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Donald Trump, East Village, estate planning, facts on the ground, global pandemic, Live Aid, medical residency, placebo effect, Ronald Reagan, sensible shoes, sugar pill, trickle-down economics

Joyce Wallace, to whom he had referred his KS patient, and she had learned of them by calling the National Cancer Institute in Bethesda, Maryland. Someone there referred her to the NYU Medical Center’s Dr. Alvin Friedman-Kien, an overnight KS expert who was quietly treating the majority of the new patients. Eighteen KS patients were a significant cluster, a trumpet call that said something remarkable was going around, Sonnabend felt. In his opinion, doctors throughout New York should have been alerted to the outbreak. At a minimum, he believed, the CDC and officials at the NYU Medical Center should have reached out to the doctors with bustling gay practices, like his, telling them what to look for and what to do with suspected KS cases.

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“This,” Friedman-Kien said of his patient, “is just the beginning of a disaster. This is going to be a pandemic.” To which Farber replied, still in earshot, “But why does NYU have to be the Titanic?” Farber later adpoted his own anti-GRID policy, ruling that those patients could not be admitted to shared rooms, and consequently had to be held in the ER when the limited number of isolation rooms filled up. He knew that GRID patients posed no risk to roommates. But Farber considered the containment policy necessary because applications for residencies at NYU from top medical schools had lagged, either from fear of GRID or because a hospital overwhelmed with the disease presumably lacked the diversity of illnesses that ambitious physicians sought.

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Reluctantly, he filled out applications for NYU and one or two other schools. Apartment hunting in Manhattan took the two through June and July, masking their troubles with industriousness. Launy never stopped loving Staley, but every day made him more and more afraid of him. As ashamed as that made him feel, he was obsessed with the danger Staley posed for him. He wondered stupid things. Were the dishes really safe? Someone told him toothbrushes carried the virus. Was safe sex nullified by the toothpaste tube? In August, when he flew to Amsterdam to sit for the NYU admissions exams there, as the school required, he knew what he had to do.

Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty by Patrick Radden Keefe

always be closing, Apollo 11, barriers to entry, benefit corporation, Black Lives Matter, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, disinformation, Donald Trump, double helix, driverless car, East Village, estate planning, facts on the ground, Laura Poitras, lockdown, mandatory minimum, mass incarceration, medical residency, moral panic, Neil Armstrong, New Journalism, Norman Mailer, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pill mill, plutocrats, Ralph Nader, tech billionaire, TED Talk, tontine, Upton Sinclair

The Sackler brothers were giving money to a wide range of institutions, but notably their contributions were often directed to places where they did not have any prior personal connections. Arthur hadn’t gone to Columbia; he went to NYU. Mortimer and Raymond couldn’t even get into NYU for medical school, on account of anti-Semitic quotas. Yet the brothers donated to Columbia, and eventually to NYU, and to the most elite university of them all, Harvard. Their generosity had a conspicuously aspirational quality. But the Met was in a class by itself. The institution’s credo of free access to the public was offset by its reputation for tremendous exclusivity when it came to the wealthy donors who supported the place and won a coveted seat on the museum’s board.

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Social acquaintances would see members of the family out, at gala dinners and Hamptons fund-raisers, on a yacht in the Caribbean or skiing in the Swiss Alps, and wonder, or whisper, about how they made their money. And this was strange, because the bulk of the Sacklers’ wealth had been accumulated not in the era of the robber barons but in recent decades. “You graduated from NYU undergraduate in 1980,” Hanly said. “True?” “Correct,” Kathe Sackler replied. “And from NYU Medical School in 1984?” “Yes.” And was it true, Hanly asked, that after a two-year surgical residency she had gone to work for the Purdue Frederick Company? Purdue Frederick was a drug manufacturer, which subsequently became known as Purdue Pharma.

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His mother, Beverly, answered the phone, but she refused to put Richard on. “I think you’ve hurt him enough,” she said. With his casual approach to his own studies, Richard Sackler did not get into a premier medical school like Harvard or NYU, even with the connections that his family was spending so much money to cultivate. Instead, he went to SUNY Buffalo for two years and eventually managed to transfer to NYU. It didn’t ultimately matter, in any case. Wherever he went to med school, and however well or poorly he did, there was little doubt about where Richard Sackler would end up. “My dearest nephew and colleague Richard,” Félix Martí-Ibáñez wrote to him on June 7, 1971.

The Four: How Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google Divided and Conquered the World by Scott Galloway

"Susan Fowler" uber, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, Apple II, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Bob Noyce, Brewster Kahle, business intelligence, California gold rush, Cambridge Analytica, cloud computing, Comet Ping Pong, commoditize, cuban missile crisis, David Brooks, Didi Chuxing, digital divide, disintermediation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fake news, follow your passion, fulfillment center, future of journalism, future of work, global supply chain, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Hacker Conference 1984, Internet Archive, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Jony Ive, Khan Academy, Kiva Systems, longitudinal study, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Network effects, new economy, obamacare, Oculus Rift, offshore financial centre, passive income, Peter Thiel, profit motive, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Mercer, Robert Shiller, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, software is eating the world, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, supercomputer in your pocket, Tesla Model S, the long tail, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, undersea cable, vertical integration, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Wayback Machine, Whole Earth Catalog, winner-take-all economy, working poor, you are the product, young professional

New York Times. May 20, 2001. http://www.nytimes.com/2001/05/20/business/listen-up-it-s-time-for-a-profit-a-front-row-seat-as-amazon-gets-serious.html. 45. Yahoo! Finance. https://finance.yahoo.com/. 46. Damodaran, Aswath. “Enterprise Value Multiples by Sector (US).” NYU Stern. January 2017. http://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~adamodar/New_Home_Page/datafile/vebitda.html. 47. Nelson, Brian. “Amazon Is Simply an Amazing Company.” Seeking Alpha. December 6, 2016. https://seekingalpha.com/article/4028547-amazon-simply-amazing-company. 48. “Wal-Mart Stores’ (WMT) CEO Doug McMillon on Q1 2016 Results—Earnings Call Transcript.”

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I also served on the board of Gateway, which sold three times more computers annually than Apple, at a fifth the margin—it didn’t end well. Finally, I’ve also served on the boards of Urban Outfitters and Eddie Bauer, each trying to protect their turf from the great white shark of retail, Amazon. However, my business card, which I don’t have, reads “Professor of Marketing.” In 2002, I joined the faculty of NYU’s Stern School of Business, where I teach brand strategy and digital marketing and have taught over six thousand students. It’s a privileged role for me, as I’m the first person, on either side of my family, to graduate from high school. I’m the product of big government, specifically the University of California, which decided, despite my being a remarkably unremarkable kid, to give me something remarkable: upward mobility through a world-class education.

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The pillars of the second year should be a study of the Four and the sectors they operate in (search, social, brand, and retail). To better understand these firms, the instincts they tap into, and their intersection between technology and stakeholder value is to gain insight into modern-day business, our world, and ourselves. At the beginning and end of every course at NYU Stern, I tell my students the goal of the course is to provide them with an edge so they too can build economic security for themselves and their families. I wrote this book for the same reason. I hope the reader gains insight and a competitive edge in an economy where it’s never been easier to be a billionaire, but it’s never been harder to be a millionaire.

Broad Band: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the Internet by Claire L. Evans

4chan, Ada Lovelace, air gap, Albert Einstein, Bletchley Park, British Empire, Charles Babbage, colonial rule, Colossal Cave Adventure, computer age, crowdsourcing, D. B. Cooper, dark matter, dematerialisation, Doomsday Book, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Hofstadter, East Village, Edward Charles Pickering, game design, glass ceiling, Grace Hopper, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Haight Ashbury, Harvard Computers: women astronomers, Honoré de Balzac, Howard Rheingold, HyperCard, hypertext link, index card, information retrieval, Internet Archive, Jacquard loom, John von Neumann, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, junk bonds, knowledge worker, Leonard Kleinrock, machine readable, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mondo 2000, Mother of all demos, Network effects, old-boy network, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, packet switching, PalmPilot, pets.com, rent control, RFC: Request For Comment, rolodex, San Francisco homelessness, semantic web, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Skype, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, tech worker, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, telepresence, The Soul of a New Machine, Wayback Machine, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, Y2K

She turned in her thesis film, an effects-laden skate video, and bought a plane ticket to New York City, having decided that NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP) was for her. Some of her favorite filmmakers—Jim Jarmusch, Spike Lee—had graduated from NYU, and it seemed like an interesting time to be in New York. There was video art being screened at The Kitchen, and this interesting band, Sonic Youth, was playing gigs in the city. In typical style, she marched into the Tisch Building at NYU without an appointment. The move was part bombast, part desperation: she didn’t think she could have gotten an interview if she tried.

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It earned her the respect of her superiors and the unbridled resentment of her colleagues. In the winter of 1941, Grace and Vincent were in New York City. Vincent had found a job teaching general literature at New York University’s School of Commerce, and Grace had arranged a yearlong faculty fellowship from Vassar to study at NYU herself, under Richard Courant, one of the few major figures in applied mathematics. It was a nice vacation from the breakneck weekly commute they’d been driving along the Hudson, between Poughkeepsie and the city, in a Model A Ford she called Dr. Johnson. Grace liked Courant, who specialized in differential equations with finite differences, something she’d learned “one jump ahead of the students” to teach her calculus course at Vassar.

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She was named battalion commander and graduated first in her class, in itchy lisle stockings. Although Grace was certain the navy would have sent her to sea had she been a man, the newly minted Lieutenant Hopper would never spend a day on board a navy ship. Instead, something in her employment history rang a bell—of all things, her study of finite differences at NYU, under Richard Courant. The navy changed Grace’s orders overnight. In training, she’d assumed her military career would be spent cracking enemy codes with the elite group of mathematicians and logicians at the Communications Annex, the navy’s cryptographic brain trust, overseen by one of Grace’s former Yale professors.

How I Became a Quant: Insights From 25 of Wall Street's Elite by Richard R. Lindsey, Barry Schachter

Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, Andrew Wiles, Antoine Gombaud: Chevalier de Méré, asset allocation, asset-backed security, backtesting, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Black-Scholes formula, Bob Litterman, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, Bretton Woods, Brownian motion, business cycle, business process, butter production in bangladesh, buy and hold, buy low sell high, capital asset pricing model, centre right, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, computerized markets, corporate governance, correlation coefficient, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency risk, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, diversification, Donald Knuth, Edward Thorp, Emanuel Derman, en.wikipedia.org, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, full employment, George Akerlof, global macro, Gordon Gekko, hiring and firing, implied volatility, index fund, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, Ivan Sutherland, John Bogle, John von Neumann, junk bonds, linear programming, Loma Prieta earthquake, Long Term Capital Management, machine readable, margin call, market friction, market microstructure, martingale, merger arbitrage, Michael Milken, Myron Scholes, Nick Leeson, P = NP, pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, pensions crisis, performance metric, prediction markets, profit maximization, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, QWERTY keyboard, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, risk free rate, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, seminal paper, shareholder value, Sharpe ratio, short selling, Silicon Valley, six sigma, sorting algorithm, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, stem cell, Steven Levy, stochastic process, subscription business, systematic trading, technology bubble, The Great Moderation, the scientific method, too big to fail, trade route, transaction costs, transfer pricing, value at risk, volatility smile, Wiener process, yield curve, young professional

I also worked closely with the financial economics group at AT&T’s research arm, Bell Laboratories—in particular, with Vijay Bawa of stochastic dominance fame and Stephen Brown, now at NYU’s Stern School. Stephen and I subsequently coedited a book titled Quantitative Methods for Financial Analysis, for the CFA program. While at AT&T, I enrolled in the Ph.D. program at NYU’s business school and began to hone my quantitative skills. After a couple of years I transferred to the graduate school of arts and science at NYU to pursue a Ph.D. in economics. I soon realized that I could not continue with my career, especially given my travel commitments, and at the same time devote the requisite attention to my classes.

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JWPR007-Lindsey 132 May 7, 2007 16:55 h ow i b e cam e a quant The Courant program grew out of two mathematical finance courses that were taught in the early 1990s by Marco Avelleneda at Courant, and the idea was to build a program around these courses. The push to do it came from Courant’s then-director David McLoughlin—now NYU’s provost—who I think, like Zimmer, saw the wisdom in supplying training in core subjects in the mathematics of finance. My job would be to help form the curriculum, administer the program and recruit adjunct faculty to teach practitioner courses. I was flattered to be offered the opportunity and to work with Courant’s faculty, including Robert Kohn and Jonathan Goodman, who were instrumental in getting the program off the ground.

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I will use my final words to say that I am a huge believer in quantitative management past, present, and future, again acknowledge a fair amount of luck in my own path, and, finally thank the partners, professors, clients, and family who made up a fair amount of that “luck”! JWPR007-Lindsey May 7, 2007 17:6 Chapter 15 Stephen Kealhofer Managing Partner, Diversified Credit Investments W hen our daughter turned three years old, my wife decided that she wanted to return to school to study law. Her choices came down to NYU or Berkeley. At the time, my academic career in the finance group at Columbia wasn’t going anywhere. After a depressing tour of apartments and preschools on the Upper West Side, it was easy to choose Berkeley. In July 1985, we loaded up our little green Mazda with our possessions and drove across the country.

The New Urban Crisis: How Our Cities Are Increasing Inequality, Deepening Segregation, and Failing the Middle Class?and What We Can Do About It by Richard Florida

affirmative action, Airbnb, back-to-the-city movement, basic income, Bernie Sanders, bike sharing, blue-collar work, business climate, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, clean water, Columbine, congestion charging, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, East Village, edge city, Edward Glaeser, failed state, Ferguson, Missouri, gentrification, Gini coefficient, Google bus, high net worth, high-speed rail, income inequality, income per capita, industrial cluster, informal economy, Jane Jacobs, jitney, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, land value tax, low skilled workers, Lyft, megacity, megaproject, Menlo Park, mortgage tax deduction, Nate Silver, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, occupational segregation, off-the-grid, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paul Graham, plutocrats, RAND corporation, rent control, rent-seeking, restrictive zoning, Richard Florida, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, secular stagnation, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, SimCity, sovereign wealth fund, streetcar suburb, superstar cities, tech worker, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, white flight, young professional

Richard Florida and Karen King, Rise of the Global Startup City: The Geography of Venture Capital Investment in Cities and Metro Areas Across the Globe (Toronto: Martin Prosperity Institute, Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto, 2016), http://martinprosperity.org/content/rise-of-the-global-startup-city. 18. Alessandro Piol and Maria Teresa Cometto, Tech and the City: The Making of New York’s Startup Community (San Francisco: Mirandola Press, 2013). 19. “Stern’s Urbanization Project Hosts a Conversation with Richard Florida and Fred Wilson,” NYU Stern School of Business, October 9, 2013, www.stern.nyu.edu/experience-stern/news-events/conversation-florida-wilson. 20. Paul Graham, “How to Be Silicon Valley,” PaulGraham.com, May 2006, www.paulgraham.com/siliconvalley.html. 21. Rory Carroll, “Oakland: The City That Told Google to Get Lost,” The Guardian, February 11, 2014, www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/feb/10/city-google-go-away-oakland-california; Ellen Huet, “Protesters Block, Vomit on Yahoo Bus in Oakland,” SFGate, April 2, 2014, http://blog.sfgate.com/techchron/2014/04/02/protesters-block-vomit-on-yahoo-bus-in-oakland; Rebecca Solnit, “Diary: Google Invades,” London Review of Books, February 7, 2013, 34–35, www.lrb.co.uk/v35/n03/rebecca-solnit/diary.

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Journalists—or artists, for that matter—tend to see gentrification as it is playing out in their own neighborhoods, and this bias can cause them—and us—to miss important parts of the picture. Gentrification is also limited to particular areas of even the most economically successful cities. Gentrifying neighborhoods made up slightly more than a quarter of New York City neighborhoods, according to a 2016 study by NYU’s Furman Center.23 The study traced the transformation of fifty-five of the city’s neighborhoods between 1990 and 2014. Just fifteen neighborhoods, or 27 percent, qualified as gentrifying (meaning they started off in 1990 with incomes below 40 percent of the median, and experienced rent increases greater than the median neighborhood did).

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Rents increased by more than 50 percent in Central Harlem, the Lower East Side, and Chinatown; more than 40 percent in East Harlem and Bushwick; and more than 36 percent in Bedford Stuyvesant, Morningside Heights, and Hamilton Heights. Conversely, rents increased by just over 18 percent in South Crown Heights and more than 20 percent in Brownsville and Ocean Hill. Figure 4.2: Gentrifying and Non-Gentrifying Neighborhoods in New York Source: NYU Furman Center, State of New York City’s Housing and Neighborhoods in 2015, May 2016. An even more varied pattern of housing values can be seen in Brooklyn, a place whose name has become synonymous with gentrification, as captured in the telling term Brooklynization. Despite the popular perception that Brooklyn has been turned into a playground for hipsters and a breeding ground for young white families, many of the borough’s neighborhoods remain poor, with large numbers of minority residents, and some have seen their housing values decline.

The End of Policing by Alex S. Vitale

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, anti-communist, Black Lives Matter, Broken windows theory, citizen journalism, Columbine, deindustrialization, desegregation, Donald Trump, drug harm reduction, Edward Snowden, equal pay for equal work, Ferguson, Missouri, gentrification, ghettoisation, hiring and firing, Housing First, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, independent contractor, Laura Poitras, mandatory minimum, mass immigration, mass incarceration, moral panic, Occupy movement, open borders, open immigration, rent-seeking, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, strikebreaker, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, traumatic brain injury, white flight

Women of the Street: How the Criminal Justice-Social Services Alliance Fails Women in Prostitution. New York: NYU Press, 2017. Domanick, Joe. Blue: The LAPD and the Battle to Redeem American Policing. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2015. Friedman, Barry. Unwarranted: Policing Without Permission. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017. Fuentes, Annette. Lockdown High: When the Schoolhouse Becomes and Jailhouse. Brooklyn: Verso, 2013. Garriott, William Campbell. Policing Methamphetamine: Narcopolitics in Rural America. New York: NYU Press, 2011. Hari, Johann. Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs.

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Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012. Rios, Victor. Punished: Policing the Lives of Black and Latino Boys. New York: NYU Press, 2011. Ruderman, Wendy and Barbara Laker. Busted: A Tale of Corruption and Betrayal in the City of Brotherly Love. New York: HarperCollins, 2014. Stuart, Forrest. Down and Out and Under Arrest: Policing and Everyday Life in Skid Row. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016. Tiger, Rebecca. Judging Addicts: Drug Courts and Coercion in the Justice System. New York: NYU Press, 2012. Way, Lori Beth and Ryan Patten. Hunting for Dirtbags: Why Cops Over-Police the Poor and Racial Minorities.

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Just as many hospitals, universities, and corporations have outside directors drawn from the communities they serve, the police should be bringing people in, not shutting them out. This is being done in places like Seattle and Oakland, which have created civilian police commissions with encouraging results. Ideally, these people should be chosen by communities, rather than the police or even political leaders. This is a basic requirement of democratic policing. As NYU law professor Barry Friedman notes, our failure to adequately oversee the actions of police puts our society at peril, especially as new technologies give police the ability to see into ever more aspects of our private lives.52 We can’t rely on a few well-intentioned individuals to rein in excessive police power.

The Metropolitan Revolution: How Cities and Metros Are Fixing Our Broken Politics and Fragile Economy by Bruce Katz, Jennifer Bradley

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, benefit corporation, British Empire, business climate, carbon footprint, clean tech, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, company town, congestion pricing, data science, deindustrialization, demographic transition, desegregation, Donald Shoup, double entry bookkeeping, edge city, Edward Glaeser, financial engineering, global supply chain, immigration reform, income inequality, industrial cluster, intermodal, Jane Jacobs, jitney, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, lone genius, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, Masdar, megacity, megaproject, Menlo Park, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, place-making, postindustrial economy, purchasing power parity, Quicken Loans, race to the bottom, Richard Florida, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart grid, sovereign wealth fund, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, TED Talk, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the market place, The Spirit Level, Tony Hsieh, too big to fail, trade route, transit-oriented development, urban planning, white flight, Yochai Benkler

The campus will be known as the Center for Urban Science and Progress (CUSP). “We are about applying the technologies of big data to urban problems and urban systems,” said Steven Koonin, CUSP’s founding director. The center’s 02-2151-2 ch2.indd 27 5/20/13 6:48 PM 28 NYC: INNOVATION AND THE NEXT ECONOMY partners include NYU, NYU-Poly, Carnegie Mellon, the City University of New York, the Indian Institute of Technology, the University of Toronto, and the University of Warwick. The city will provide $15 million in either new funds or abatements of funds due related to the site.35 Both city and university officials hope that the redevelopment of the transit authority building will create investment and growth at the heart of the emerging “Brooklyn tech triangle,” an area bound by downtown Brooklyn, the Dumbo neighborhood along the waterfront, and the Brooklyn Navy Yard, which has become a hub for niche manufacturers, tech companies, set designers, and media production.

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The center will also work with private industry partners, including IBM, Cisco, ConEdison, National Grid, Siemens, Xerox, AECOM, Arup, IDEO, Lutron, and Microsoft, and government labs, including the Livermore, Los Alamos, and Sandia National Laboratories. 02-2151-2 ch2.indd 28 5/20/13 6:48 PM NYC: INNOVATION AND THE NEXT ECONOMY 29 NEW YORK CITY’S APPLIED SCIENCES CAMPUSES 02-2151-2 ch2.indd 29 5/20/13 6:48 PM 30 NYC: INNOVATION AND THE NEXT ECONOMY In July 2012 Columbia University’s new Institute for Data Sciences and Engineering, located at its Morningside Heights and Washington Heights campuses in New York City, became the third Applied Sciences campus.37 At Columbia, students and faculty will focus on applications for new media, smart cities, health analytics, cybersecurity, and financial analytics, among other areas. Columbia’s deal, like NYU’s, includes $15 million in various forms from the city. In a rapidly urbanizing world, with more than 6 billion people expected to populate cities and metropolitan areas over the next several years, smart and sustainable municipal services, or what NYU is calling “urban science,” will be in high demand. Thus it’s no surprise to find that a “smart cities” or “built environment” thread runs through all the institutions selected for the Applied Sciences initiative.

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See also Collaborative approach; Trading cities New Economy Initiative for Southeast Michigan, 139 New Federalism, 177 The New Geography of Jobs (Moretti), 36, 102 New York City Economic Development Corporation (NYCEDC): and Applied Sciences initiative, 23–24, 25, 27, 28, 31, 36, 37–39; and game-changers initiative, 19, 23, 35, 36, 38; objectives of, 18–19; sustainability of, 201 New York City metropolitan area, 17–40; Applied Sciences initiative, ix, 23–31, 36–39; demographic composition of, 24; economic development 12-2151-2 index.indd 256 strategies for, 18–19, 20; financial services sector in, 17–18; game changers for, 198; innovation clusters in, 4, 22; and Lehman Brothers collapse (2008), 17–18; network building in, 195; research and development in, 20–21, 36; technology clusters in, 21, 23, 36–37; trade links with, 165; vision established for, 196 New York Times on pharmaceutical companies, 123 New York University (NYU), 28, 30, 36–37 Next economy: and exports, 32–33; and globalization, 24–25; imperatives of, 3, 19–20; and metropolitan areas, 32–35 Nijman, Jan, 163 Nixon, Richard, 177 Noise pollution, 29 Nokia, 122 Noon, Cathy, 60, 61 NorTech, 73, 74–75, 76 North Carolina State University in Raleigh. See Research Triangle Park Nutter, Michael, 169 NYCEDC. See New York City Economic Development Corporation NY Tech Meetup, 36 NYU. See New York University Obama administration on export expansion, 151, 157 Ohio. See Cleveland (Ohio) metropolitan area Orr, Kevyn, 132 Parilla, Joseph, 147, 152 Parking, smart systems for, 29, 34 Partnership for New York City, 21 Partnership for Regional Innovation Services in Manufacturing (PRISM), 83 Pasadena (Texas): demographic changes in, 91, 98; Neighborhood Centers programs in, 91–92, 98, 99–100.

Singular Intimacies: Becoming a Doctor at Bellevue by Danielle Ofri

if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, index card, medical residency, placebo effect, rent stabilization, union organizing

The waiting area by the elevators was deserted at this time of night. The security guard slurped her coffee and barely glanced up from her magazine to check my ID. My brand new ID. The one that now said “MD” after my name. She didn’t even notice. I shuffled in place. My new white coat was clean and pressed, and the insignia said “NYU Medical Center,” instead of “NYU School of Medicine.” Subtle distinction, perhaps, to the world beyond First Avenue and Twenty-seventh Street, but portentous inside these hallways. Being part of the medical center instead of the medical school meant that I had finally expanded beyond the self-indulgent chrysalis of studenthood, in which the overriding purpose of illness, trauma, and patients had been the absorption of knowledge.

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I found myself at the obituaries and there it was: “Sitkin, Joseph, beloved husband of Julie, devoted father of Andrea and Ellen, dead at the age of thirty-nine. According to his wishes, the family has donated his body to the Microbiology Department at NYU Medical Center.” It was suddenly so real, so final. I began to sniffle and swallow. And then the tears began to creep out. Someone offered me a seat and suddenly I began to cry unabashedly. The commuters looked on in helpless confusion. A woman asked me if I was feeling okay. I pointed to the obituary and said, “I knew him. That doctor from NYU who’s been missing, I knew him. He was one of my teachers.” And I bawled openly amid the embarrassed silence of the subway car.

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I couldn’t tell if Li-Chan disliked me or was just too busy to notice my presence. “A spring intern,” Linda smiled when I expressed my difficulty keeping up with Li-Chan. “There’s nothing like a solid spring intern.” I hung my head, my seasons woefully out of sync. I wasn’t a spring medical student at all. March was nearly ending and the cherry trees in front of NYU were just starting to bud, but I still didn’t know how to get stat X-rays done or where to find the cardiology fellows when they wouldn’t answer their pages. I was really a July greenhorn student. I had only just learned how to draw blood on Mr. Wiszhinsky. And it still took me two or three sticks.

The White Man's Burden: Why the West's Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good by William Easterly

"World Economic Forum" Davos, airport security, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, bank run, banking crisis, Bob Geldof, Bretton Woods, British Empire, call centre, clean water, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, Edward Glaeser, end world poverty, European colonialism, failed state, farmers can use mobile phones to check market prices, George Akerlof, Gunnar Myrdal, guns versus butter model, Hernando de Soto, income inequality, income per capita, Indoor air pollution, intentional community, invisible hand, Kenneth Rogoff, laissez-faire capitalism, land bank, land reform, land tenure, Live Aid, microcredit, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, publication bias, purchasing power parity, randomized controlled trial, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, structural adjustment programs, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, TSMC, War on Poverty, Xiaogang Anhui farmers

After a stint at Brown University, he joined the Department of Economics at NYU, where today he is my colleague. He is also the vice provost for global affairs at NYU, where he has helped develop an NYU study-abroad site and research site in Accra. It is based at Ashesi University, the dynamic private university started by Patrick Awuah, and the University of Ghana at Legon. Yaw has donated his own time to teach economics to the eager undergraduates at Ashesi. He has even more ambitious plans: starting an interdisciplinary research center at NYU called Africa House. Roland Akosah is skeptical about what foreign aid has done for Ghana.

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Meanwhile, I immigrated to Canada in 1988 and then later to the United States, in 1992. I enrolled in graduate programs at Laval University and UBC in Canada, and Northwestern University in the United States. I graduated in 1995 and became an assistant professor at Yale University in 1995 and an associate professor at NYU in 2001. Today, Leonard Wantchekon, now an NYU professor of politics with a global reputation, runs a research institute in Benin devoted to testing what works in development programs for Benin, training the next generation and devising ways to hold the new democratic government of Benin accountable for delivering services to its citizens.

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However, if population density is low and land abundant, the tragedy of the commons does not arise, and community ownership works fine. Even when pressure on the land tightens up, informal community arrangements can still control overgrazing (say the village elders decide that you and I may let our cows into the pasture on alternating days). NYU professor Leonard Wantchekon offered this account of how his village in Benin managed a common property resource, the fishing pond (overfishing is a classic example used for the tragedy of the commons), when he was growing up: To open the fishing season, elders performed ritual tests at Amlé, a lake fifteen kilometers from the village.

Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age by Clay Shirky

Andrew Keen, behavioural economics, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, citizen journalism, commons-based peer production, corporate social responsibility, Dean Kamen, experimental economics, experimental subject, fundamental attribution error, Great Leap Forward, invention of movable type, invention of the telegraph, Kevin Kelly, lolcat, means of production, meta-analysis, Nelson Mandela, New Urbanism, Nicholas Carr, seminal paper, social contagion, social software, Steve Ballmer, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, the strength of weak ties, Tragedy of the Commons, ultimatum game, work culture , Yochai Benkler

The public wanted to be consulted on significant matters, and if that didn’t happen through ordinary channels, places like the DBSK bulletin boards would provide all the coordination they needed. In Seoul ordinary citizens used a communication medium that neither respects nor enforces silence among The People Formerly Known as the Audience, as my NYU colleague Jay Rosen likes to call us. We are used to the media’s telling us things: the people on TV tell us that the South Korean government has banned U.S. beef because of fears of mad cow disease, or that it’s lifted the ban. During the protests in South Korea, though, media stopped being just a source of information and became a locus of coordination as well.

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The fifteenth-century model of media production didn’t allow for that kind of sharing, because its inherent cost and risk meant professionals were required at every step. Now they’re not. THE SHOCK OF INCLUSION I teach in the Interactive Telecommunications Program, an interdisciplinary graduate program at NYU. In the decade I’ve been there, the average age of my students has stayed roughly the same, while my average age has grown at the alarming rate of one year per year; my students are now fifteen or twenty years younger than I am. Because I try to convey an understanding of the changing media landscape, I now have to teach the times of my own youth as ancient history.

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Creating something personal, even of moderate quality, has a different kind of appeal than consuming something made by others, even something of high quality. I was wrong about Geocities because I bet that amateurs would never want to do anything other than consume. (That was the last time I ever made that mistake.) MEMBERSHIP AND GENEROSITY Yochai Benkler, a legal scholar at Harvard, and Helen Nissenbaum, a philosopher at NYU, wrote a paper in 2006 with a mouthful of a title: “Commons-Based Peer Production and Virtue.” Commons-based peer production is Benkler’s term for systems that rely on voluntary contributions to operate—systems that rely on cognitive surplus. In their piece, they describe the positive characteristics that such participation both relies on and encourages.

Doctored: The Disillusionment of an American Physician by Sandeep Jauhar

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, delayed gratification, illegal immigration, income inequality, independent contractor, Induced demand, medical malpractice, moral hazard, obamacare, PalmPilot, profit motive, randomized controlled trial, source of truth, stem cell, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Yogi Berra

Rajiv had the kind of gregarious and easygoing personality that I had always desired but somehow never could develop. The only time we had worked together professionally was during my internship at New York Hospital in Manhattan, where as a star senior cardiology fellow he unwittingly reminded me of my incompetence again and again. Toward the end of my own cardiology fellowship at NYU, he had invited me to apply to LIJ and had used his considerable influence to get me a job. Now he was in a position to guide me through another, perhaps more challenging apprenticeship. At Long Island Jewish I would work as a cardiologist with a specialization in congestive heart failure. This was no small task: heart failure is the common final pathway for a host of cardiac diseases, including heart attacks, acute valve disorders, viral infections of the cardiac muscle, etc.

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The little boy in the elevator, the homeless guy on Seventy-seventh Street, and Clement, the Rastafarian, had all gotten it right. But not the chief of maternal-fetal medicine at the world-famous Cleveland Clinic with the aid of ultrasound! We became addicted to monitoring our baby. Just for kicks, we’d sneak into the echo lab at NYU, where Sonia would lie on an exam table and I, a senior cardiology fellow, would gently press the cardiac ultrasound probe to her belly. Her eyes would twinkle, and I would smile, too, quietly overjoyed at the melding of my personal and professional lives. We spent hours watching a video I made of our baby throwing up his arms, startled.

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If postmodernism teaches that there are many truths, or perhaps no truth, postmodern medicine teaches the opposite: that an objective truth is sure to explain a patient’s symptoms if only we look for it with the right tools. Under a flashing art deco coffee cup, I told Tom a story that an old-timer cardiologist at NYU had once told me. A group of residents had presented to him a case of atrial fibrillation, an abnormal heart rhythm, replete with results of echocardiograms, angiograms, and stress tests. He went to see the patient and immediately noticed that the whites of her eyes had black discoloration, a sign of a potentially serious metabolic derangement.

Artificial Whiteness by Yarden Katz

affirmative action, AI winter, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, autonomous vehicles, benefit corporation, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, Californian Ideology, Cambridge Analytica, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, colonial rule, computer vision, conceptual framework, Danny Hillis, data science, David Graeber, deep learning, DeepMind, desegregation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, general purpose technology, gentrification, Hans Moravec, housing crisis, income inequality, information retrieval, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, pattern recognition, phenotype, Philip Mirowski, RAND corporation, recommendation engine, rent control, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Seymour Hersh, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, speech recognition, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, surveillance capitalism, talking drums, telemarketer, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, W. E. B. Du Bois, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks

A variety of initiatives that imbibe this model have emerged at elite universities, including Harvard, MIT, Stanford, New York University, and Carnegie Mellon.39 These centers publish prolifically on AI’s consequences for numerous social and political arenas.40 A prominent institute in this space is AI Now, founded in 2017 at NYU and backed by Microsoft, which describes its focus as “social and cultural issues arising from data-centric technological development.” At first glance AI Now seems to offer a different discourse on AI compared with that of computing practitioners and entrepreneurs. The institute’s leaders speak of racism and sexism and even labor issues; not typical emphases within Silicon Valley’s corporate sphere.

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But while AI Now presents itself as an “independent” counter to major platform companies, it is nourished by those very corporations. Several of the institute’s core members are either current or former employees of Google or Microsoft, and Google employees serve on the advisory board.41 Other institutes in this space have similar corporate ties.42 AI Now was founded by former members of the Data & Society Center (also at NYU and backed by Microsoft), which had focused on social issues concerning “big data.” In AI Now’s founding event, academic social scientists appeared alongside representatives of Google, Facebook, and Intel, as well as White House representatives. In such ceremonies, each sector plays a part: academics make the endeavor look critical; major corporations give it money, power, technical bona fides; and the state lends an air of policy cachet.

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How Artificial Intelligence Is Reprogramming Fashion,” Guardian, September 15, 2018.     5.   Max Tegmark, Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence (New York: Knopf, 2017); New York University, “New Artificial Intelligence Research Institute Launches,” November 20, 2017, https://engineering.nyu.edu/news/new-artificial-intelligence-research-institute-launches; Ahmed Alkhateeb, “Can Scientific Discovery Be Automated?,” Atlantic, April 25, 2017; Arun Vishwanath, “When a Robot Writes Your News, What Happens to Democracy?,” CNN, February 27, 2018.     6.   Ian Sample, “AI Will Create ‘Useless Class’ of Human, Predicts Bestselling Historian,” Guardian, May 20, 2016; Vikram Barhat, “China Is Determined to Steal A.I.

Ayn Rand and the World She Made by Anne C. Heller

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, American ideology, anti-communist, Apollo 11, Bolshevik threat, Charles Lindbergh, conceptual framework, Future Shock, gentleman farmer, greed is good, laissez-faire capitalism, Lewis Mumford, Milgram experiment, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, Neil Armstrong, New Journalism, open borders, price stability, profit motive, public intellectual, rent control, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, the scientific method, theory of mind, Thorstein Veblen, transcontinental railway, upwardly mobile, wage slave, War on Poverty, Works Progress Administration, young professional

Blumenthal’s future wife), NYU graduate art student Joan Mitchell. Joan, in turn, brought along a friend, Mary Ann Sures, and the future chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, Alan Greenspan. (In 1953, Joan and Greenspan were briefly married. They remained on excellent terms after dissolving their marriage in 1954. Joan married Allan Blumenthal in 1957.) Barbara also enlisted her bright, bespectacled seventeen-year-old first cousin Leonard Peikoff, young for his age, who shortly after meeting Rand dropped out of a Canadian pre-med program and, to his parents’ horror, enrolled at NYU to study philosophy.

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In 1987, when he was fifty-four years old and living in California, his second wife, Cynthia Pastor, wrote a poignant letter to Sidney Hook, her husband’s former academic adviser at NYU, pleading for help in finding her husband a post in which to exercise “his talent and passion for teaching.” Peikoff had applied to three hundred colleges and universities, she wrote. He had been granted three interviews and had been “explicitly rejected because of his views.” Hook replied, not unkindly, that before recommending his former student for another teaching job, he would have to be satisfied that Peikoff would not inject, where inappropriate, Randian dogma into classroom instruction. “I made that a condition before giving him a couple of classes to teach at NYU many years ago,” Hook wrote.

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As the years went by, this particular confidence would not always serve her well. Then, suddenly, Barbara and Nathaniel were leaving. The philosophy major earned her bachelor’s degree in the spring of 1951 and enrolled in the master’s degree program at New York University. Nathaniel, about to be a college junior, decided to go with her and study psychology at NYU. In later years, he could hardly reconstruct his reasoning, so astonished was he at his readiness to leave the most significant relationship of his life. But with Rand’s encouragement, Barbara and he had become lovers again and were committed to making it work. In late June, the two stood in the O’Connors’ driveway and told their older friends good-bye.

The Tyranny of Experts: Economists, Dictators, and the Forgotten Rights of the Poor by William Easterly

air freight, Andrei Shleifer, battle of ideas, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business process, business process outsourcing, Carmen Reinhart, classic study, clean water, colonial rule, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, discovery of the americas, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, Ford Model T, Francisco Pizarro, fundamental attribution error, gentrification, germ theory of disease, greed is good, Gunnar Myrdal, income per capita, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, John Snow's cholera map, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, low interest rates, M-Pesa, microcredit, Monroe Doctrine, oil shock, place-making, Ponzi scheme, public intellectual, risk/return, road to serfdom, Robert Solow, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, tacit knowledge, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, urban planning, urban renewal, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, World Values Survey, young professional

Laura Freschi, the Managing Director of DRI, contributed to this book (sometimes also in symbiosis with the Templeton proposal and research) in many intangible and tangible ways, including supervising the student workers, doing her own research and fact-checking, co-authoring the work on the history of Greene Street, and heroic problem-solving whenever there was a crisis close to a deadline. The support of NYU for the Development Research Institute (DRI) was also critically important to being able to do this book. I want to thank in particular the co-director of DRI, Yaw Nyarko, the Provost of NYU, David McLaughlin, the Economics Department Chairman Alessandro Lizzeri, my Economics faculty colleagues Hunt Allcott, Jess Benhabib, Raquel Fernandez, and Boyan Jovanovic, Professor Kevin Davis from the NYU Law School and Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, Adam Przeworski, and Shanker Satyanath from NYU Politics. Steven Pennings played a crucial and remarkably helpful role as my Research Assistant on my own work, as co-author on the Greene Street history, and as co-author of work on “benevolent autocrats” and economic growth.

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I could not keep my job at NYU, a few blocks away in what is now a foreign country, unless the US government authorized the immigration and employment of a foreign national. To judge by the experiences of my foreign friends with the Immigration and Naturalization Service, my paperwork would get lost several times, the rules would be incomprehensible, and I would strain to find the right kind of visa that permits my work. I don’t know that I would even qualify for the category that the INS calls “alien of extraordinary ability.” Some anti-immigrant forces would criticize NYU for outsourcing to a foreign nation.

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“Half-free” meant that the slaves themselves were now free, but their children would return to slavery.1 The Dutch gave a half-free slave named Gratia d’Angola a 10-acre farm in the 1640s, centered around what is today one block of Greene Street between Prince Street and Houston Street, in the SoHo neighborhood of Manhattan.2 My NYU colleagues Laura Freschi, Steven Pennings, and I have researched the history of this Greene Street block between Houston and Prince from the 1600s up to the present using archival records and maps.3 Aiming to consider a view of development based on individual rights, we wanted to examine the story of the individuals who would come and go on this block during the 400 years of American economic development.

Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia by Anthony M. Townsend

1960s counterculture, 4chan, A Pattern Language, Adam Curtis, air gap, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, anti-communist, Apple II, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Big Tech, bike sharing, Boeing 747, Burning Man, business process, call centre, carbon footprint, charter city, chief data officer, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, company town, computer age, congestion charging, congestion pricing, connected car, crack epidemic, crowdsourcing, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data acquisition, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, digital map, Donald Davies, East Village, Edward Glaeser, Evgeny Morozov, food desert, game design, garden city movement, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, George Gilder, ghettoisation, global supply chain, Grace Hopper, Haight Ashbury, Hedy Lamarr / George Antheil, Herman Kahn, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, interchangeable parts, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jacquard loom, Jane Jacobs, Jevons paradox, jitney, John Snow's cholera map, Joi Ito, Khan Academy, Kibera, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Lewis Mumford, load shedding, lolcat, M-Pesa, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, megaproject, messenger bag, mobile money, mutually assured destruction, new economy, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, Occupy movement, off grid, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), openstreetmap, packet switching, PalmPilot, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parag Khanna, patent troll, Pearl River Delta, place-making, planetary scale, popular electronics, power law, RFC: Request For Comment, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, scientific management, self-driving car, sharing economy, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, SimCity, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, social graph, social software, social web, SpaceShipOne, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stuxnet, supply-chain management, technoutopianism, Ted Kaczynski, telepresence, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, too big to fail, trade route, Twitter Arab Spring, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, undersea cable, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, Vannevar Bush, working poor, working-age population, X Prize, Y2K, zero day, Zipcar

Citizens could shape the technology, and the business and regulatory context into which it would be applied, to meet their own needs. Cable was only a shadow of the media and communications revolution in store for the 1980s. Sensing what was coming, in 1975 Burns and others at NYU began planning a graduate program that would carry on the work of the Alternate Media Center, training the next generation of media and technology activists. With seed funding from the Markle Foundation, the Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP) opened its doors at NYU in 1979 with teleconferencing expert Martin Elton at the helm. Urban scholar Mitchell Moss (my own mentor during my master’s degree studies in urban planning) stepped in from 1981–1983 and rapidly expanded the program before Burns returned in 1983 to lead it for nearly twenty years.10 ITP’s ambition was to challenge top-down thinking about technology.

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., retrieved from Internet Archive, http://web.archive.org/web/20120103181806/http://www.ncta.com/About/About/ HistoryofCableTelevision.aspx?source=Resources. 5“History of Cable Television.” 6Jason Huff, “Technology is Not Enough: The Story of NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program,” Rhizome, December 15, 2011, http://rhizome.org/editorial/2011/dec/15/technology-not-enough-story-nyus-interactive-telec/. 7Red Burns, original manuscript, “Beyond Statistics,” Alternate Media Center, School of the Arts, New York University, n.d., 7. Also published in Martin C. J. Elton et. al., eds., Evaluating New Telecommunications Services (New York: Plenum Publishing, 1978). 8Burns, “Cultural Identity and Integration in the New Media World,” 6–7. 9Red Burns, interview by author, New York, October 24, 2011. 10Martin Elton, martin.elton@nyu.edu, “Through the Looking Glass: The Rhizome article on ITP,” private e-mail reposted by Gilad Rosner, itp-alumni@lists.nyu.edu, December 21, 2011. 11Red Burns, “Technology is not enough,” paper presented at the American Council on Education, Washington, DC, October 16, 1981. 12Burns, interview, October 24, 2011. 13William Gibson, “Rocket Radio,” Rolling Stone, June 15, 1989. 14Burns, “Cultural Identity and Integration in the New Media World,” 7. 15Dennis Crowley, interview by author, May 13, 2011. 16Dodgeball.com, November 9, 2000, http://web.archive.org/web/200011092025/http://www.dodgeball.com/city/. 17Crowley, interview, May 13, 2011. 18Crowley, interview, May 13, 2011. 19Crowley, interview, May 13, 2011. 20Five years later, when a half-decade’s worth of archived check-ins were migrated to the Foursquare database, Crowley e-mailed with the discovery that on November 17, 2003, during a test, I had tapped out a terse message, hit send, and became the first person (other the Crowley and Rainert) to check in on the third version of Dodgeball. 21Crowley, interview, May 13, 2011. 22Laura Barnett, “If It Wasn’t For Hedy Lamarr, We Wouldn’t Have Wi-Fi,” The Guardian, last modified December 4, 2011, http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian/shortcuts/2011/dec/04/hedy-lamarr-wifi. 23“A Brief History of Wi-Fi,” The Economist, June 10, 2004, http://www.economist.com/node/2724397. 24Alvin F.

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., Evaluating New Telecommunications Services (New York: Plenum Publishing, 1978). 8Burns, “Cultural Identity and Integration in the New Media World,” 6–7. 9Red Burns, interview by author, New York, October 24, 2011. 10Martin Elton, martin.elton@nyu.edu, “Through the Looking Glass: The Rhizome article on ITP,” private e-mail reposted by Gilad Rosner, itp-alumni@lists.nyu.edu, December 21, 2011. 11Red Burns, “Technology is not enough,” paper presented at the American Council on Education, Washington, DC, October 16, 1981. 12Burns, interview, October 24, 2011. 13William Gibson, “Rocket Radio,” Rolling Stone, June 15, 1989. 14Burns, “Cultural Identity and Integration in the New Media World,” 7. 15Dennis Crowley, interview by author, May 13, 2011. 16Dodgeball.com, November 9, 2000, http://web.archive.org/web/200011092025/http://www.dodgeball.com/city/. 17Crowley, interview, May 13, 2011. 18Crowley, interview, May 13, 2011. 19Crowley, interview, May 13, 2011. 20Five years later, when a half-decade’s worth of archived check-ins were migrated to the Foursquare database, Crowley e-mailed with the discovery that on November 17, 2003, during a test, I had tapped out a terse message, hit send, and became the first person (other the Crowley and Rainert) to check in on the third version of Dodgeball. 21Crowley, interview, May 13, 2011. 22Laura Barnett, “If It Wasn’t For Hedy Lamarr, We Wouldn’t Have Wi-Fi,” The Guardian, last modified December 4, 2011, http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian/shortcuts/2011/dec/04/hedy-lamarr-wifi. 23“A Brief History of Wi-Fi,” The Economist, June 10, 2004, http://www.economist.com/node/2724397. 24Alvin F.

The Rough Guide to New York City by Martin Dunford

Anton Chekhov, Berlin Wall, Bonfire of the Vanities, Buckminster Fuller, buttonwood tree, car-free, Charles Lindbergh, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean water, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, congestion pricing, Cornelius Vanderbilt, David Sedaris, desegregation, Donald Trump, East Village, Edward Thorp, Elisha Otis, Exxon Valdez, Frank Gehry, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, glass ceiling, haute cuisine, illegal immigration, Jane Jacobs, Lewis Mumford, machine readable, market bubble, Michael Milken, Multics, Norman Mailer, paper trading, post-work, rent stabilization, retail therapy, Saturday Night Live, subprime mortgage crisis, sustainable-tourism, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, transcontinental railway, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, white flight, Yogi Berra, young professional

The fire led to legislation requiring improved safety standards, and helped spur the growth of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union. The site is now known as the Brown Building and forms part of NYU, with flowers left in front of the plaque commemorating the disaster on March 25 each year. | Washington Square Park and around 11am–6pm,Wed 11am–8pm, Sat 11am–5pm; suggested donation $3; T 212/9986780, W www.nyu.edu/greyart/).The space hosts top-notch traveling exhibitions, which rotate every three months and feature a wide range of media, including sculpture, painting, photography, and provocative video shows.

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You can also cruise the harbor in style aboard Options for walking tours of Manhattan or the outer boroughs are many and varied. You’ll find fliers for some of them at the various visitor centers; for what’s happening in the current week, check the weekly print edition of Time Out New York, or the weekly Village Voice (Wwww.villagevoice.com). Columbia and NYU run very frequent tours of their campuses, free of charge. Not all tour operators are open year-round, with the more esoteric running only a few outings annually. Phone ahead or check websites for the full schedules. Tour companies Art Entrée T 718/391-0011, W www.artentree .com. Runs a range of art tours throughout the city, focusing on different art scenes, museums, galleries, neighborhoods, and genres like glass art and portraits.

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The last fifteen years have seen it become downright mainstream – you’re likely to walk by a pretty standard crosssection of boutiques, thrift stores, and record shops patronized by more tourists, students, and uptowners than authentic bohemians. The area’s high standard of living and panoply of restaurants and bars, never mind its proximity to NYU, ensure that rents here are almost – although not quite – as insane as those in the neighboring West Village. Nevertheless, despite the vaudevillian circuses of St Mark’s Place and Cooper Square, and creeping invasion of Starbucks (note THE E AST V I L L AGE The East Village The East Village’s cultural heritage Over the years, the East Village has been home to its share of famous artists, politicos, and literati.

Ignition by John D. Clark

George Santayana, RAND corporation, uranium enrichment

, Standard Oil of Indiana, Phillips Petroleum, and the Chemical Engineering Department of New York University (NYU). And for the next two or three years there was a continuous ignition delay project going on. Each laboratory, as it came up with a new hypergolic additive, would ship samples to all the others, who would mix it with standard nonhypergolic fuels and then measure the ignition delay of the mixtures. The standard nonhypergols were generally toluene and n-heptane, although NYU, presumably to assert its academic independence, used benzene and n-hexane. (JP wasn’t much use as a reference fuel, since no two lots of it were alike.)

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(Ethylene oxide, C2H4O, whose major decomposition products are methane and carbon monoxide, was considered for the same sort of cycle.) So the acetylenics looked good for the ram rocket. And finally, the acetylenics are rather easy to produce from petroleum feed-stock, by cracking and partial oxidation. The approaches of NYU and of Shell to the acetylenic problem were completely dissimilar. NYU tried dozens of compounds of the family, while Shell concentrated on just two, and then went hunting for additives which would make them into useful fuels. One of the two was 1,6-heptadiyne, with the skeletal structure C≡C—C—C—C—C≡C. And the other was 2-methyl-1-buten-3-yne, otherwise known as “isopropenyl acetylene” or “methyl vinyl acetylene,” whose skeleton is .

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(JP wasn’t much use as a reference fuel, since no two lots of it were alike.) As for the fuels and/or additives that they synthesized, Shell and NYU concentrated on acetylenic compounds, and Phillips put their major effort into amines. As for Standard of Indiana, that organization went off on a wild tangent. Apparently jealous of their sister company of California and determined to do them one better, they went beyond mere sulfur compounds, and came down hard on phosphorous derivatives. They investigated assorted substituted phosphines, from the timethyl phosphine, through butyl and octyl phosphines, on to monochloro (dimethylamino) phosphine, and then they settled happily on the alkyl trithiophosphites, with the general formula (RS)3P, where R could be methyl, ethyl, or whatever.

No One Succeeds Alone by Robert Reffkin

Albert Einstein, coronavirus, COVID-19, financial independence, George Floyd, global pandemic, hiring and firing, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Marc Benioff, market design, pattern recognition, Salesforce, Steve Jobs, young professional

When my grandfather found out that my mom and her long-term college boyfriend had slept together, he forced her to live at home and eat her meals alone at different times than the rest of the family. He refused to speak to her for months. When my mother married Gene Reffkin, a young man she’d met at NYU who’d been playing club gigs as a drummer since he was fourteen, her father made them marry out of state so he didn’t have to invite his friends and relatives to a ceremony that he flat-out did not support. When Gene declined my grandfather’s misguided offer to set him up with an accounting job, my grandfather was so offended and outraged that the two men almost never spoke again.

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Even though only 25 percent of the students graduated from that school, and most graduates didn’t even consider college, she was focused on getting good grades so she could get into the best college possible. Benís earned her place as one of the top students in her class while also working nights and weekends at the local country club to help ends meet at home. When she was admitted into NYU, the people she served as a waitress were amazed because all that many of them could see in her was another service worker with brown skin. But no one who’d gone to school with her was surprised at all. How my wife lost herself and then found herself again The first year of our second daughter’s life and the importance of home When we decided to have a second child, Benís told me that she thought we needed a larger apartment with another bedroom.

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In college, she didn’t realize that her well-off classmates were doing summer internships and making connections that would likely have a much bigger impact on their professional lives than any class she took or high grade she received. She didn’t have time to socialize or do extracurriculars because by age fifteen she was working at a country club, a job she kept until she graduated from NYU seven years later. Across the country in Berkeley, California, I had a mother who had immigrated to America from Israel as a child and therefore had been lucky enough to learn English at a young age, get a college education, and develop a clear understanding of how the game was played. As a single mother without a family to lean on, my mom had to declare bankruptcy at one point in my youth.

Wordslut: A Feminist Guide to Taking Back the English Language by Amanda Montell

Bernie Sanders, complexity theory, crowdsourcing, David Sedaris, Donald Trump, emotional labour, fake news, feminist movement, Mahatma Gandhi, pink-collar, pre–internet, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, seminal paper, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, white picket fence

Then I got to college and signed up for Linguistics 101, and you can imagine my delight when suddenly there was a whole room of people just like me, all desperately curious to know why we talk the way we do. Out of everything I studied, I was most bewitched by a course called Sex, Gender, and Language. It had actually never occurred to me before spotting the class on NYU’s registration system in 2011 that gender had anything to do with how we speak. Sure, when I was in preschool I was irrevocably labeled “bossy” after expressing that I should be the director of the class play instead of little Danny Altman. (I ended up winning, and the play was a smash—though it earned me the nickname “Demand-a Montell,” which I put up with until middle school.)

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Here is a story of one of those experiences—a time when just a little dash of linguistics expertise helped me convince someone from a very different background from mine, someone with their own steadfast beliefs about how women should talk, to consider a new idea. I was nineteen, working between classes at NYU as a babysitter for a professor’s daughter, who attended a prep school on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. The kid was in the same grade as another girl with a mother who wore tweed skirt suits, had hair the color of a daffodil, and grew up in a family that valued proper elocution and manners above all else—principles she was intent on passing down to her own daughter.

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Because female subjects are mostly absent from medical textbooks and papers, many doctors simply don’t know how to recognize or treat heart disease in women, whose symptoms usually show up differently than men’s (like nausea and neck discomfort as opposed to chest pain). So Jespersen’s book was very much like that, but for language. Louise O. Vasvári, language professor at NYU, has less-than-favorable thoughts about his “The Woman” chapter. “He had no chapter called ‘men’ or even ‘young men’ or ‘old men’ or any kind of minority men,” she laments. “Because Language was man’s language, of course, and then you have this one chapter, saying, oh, how interesting, how strange, these women and their language.”

We Are Data: Algorithms and the Making of Our Digital Selves by John Cheney-Lippold

algorithmic bias, bioinformatics, business logic, Cass Sunstein, centre right, computer vision, critical race theory, dark matter, data science, digital capitalism, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Evgeny Morozov, Filter Bubble, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Hans Moravec, Ian Bogost, informal economy, iterative process, James Bridle, Jaron Lanier, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, late capitalism, Laura Poitras, lifelogging, Lyft, machine readable, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, mass incarceration, Mercator projection, meta-analysis, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, offshore financial centre, pattern recognition, price discrimination, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rosa Parks, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, software studies, statistical model, Steven Levy, technological singularity, technoutopianism, the scientific method, Thomas Bayes, Toyota Production System, Turing machine, uber lyft, web application, WikiLeaks, Zimmermann PGP

Alondra Nelson, The Social Life of DNA: Race, Reparations, and Reconciliation after the Genome (Boston: Beacon, 2016); Kim Tallbear, Native American DNA: Tribal Belonging and the False Promise of Genetic Science (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013); Clara E. Rodriguez, Changing Race: Latinos, the Census, and the History of Ethnicity in the United States (New York: NYU Press, 2000). 31. Mae Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014). 32. Edlie L. Wong, Racial Reconstruction: Black Inclusion, Chinese Exclusion, and the Fictions of Citizenship (New York: NYU Press, 2015). 33. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1980). 34.

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Quite obviously, it wasn’t me who made those searches. In reality, I wasn’t even using my web browser. I was writing the preceding paragraph. Instead, those ten phrases were scraped from the RSS feeds of the top news stories at NYTimes.com, CNN.com, MSNBC.com, and TheRegister.co.uk. The program that did it was an NYU-based research project led by Helen Nissenbaum called TrackMeNot. TrackMeNot is a browser plug-in that sits like a daemon under your browser and automatically throws random search queries at each of the aforementioned four search engines every six seconds. These capricious queries make your data gibberish but now through a different rouse.

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And to my community at Michigan and beyond, I want to sincerely thank Carolina Aguerre, Evelyn Alsultany, Patricia Aufderheide, Finn Brunton, Amy Sara Carroll, Iván Chaar-López, Maria Cotera, Greg Dowd, Larry La Fountain-Stokes, Mary Frieman, Parisa Ghaderi, Judy Gray, Colin Gunckel, Zehra Hashmi, June Howard, Dara Leto, Peggy McCracken, Richard Meisler, Stephen Molldrem, Marlene Moore, Anthony Mora, JP Obley, Christian Sandvig, Sidonie Smith, Alexandra Minna Stern, Ted Striphas, Wendy Sung, and Tammy Zill. I also want to thank Lisha Nadkarni and NYU Press for their help, and accommodation, in producing this book. And abundant credit goes to Kim Greenwell and her laser-like ability to parse text, argument, and puerility. Lastly, to my sister Emily, my brother Matt, and especially my mother, Karen: while our family might be unique in its formation, it remains loving in its future.

The Bedwetter: Stories of Courage, Redemption, and Pee by Sarah Silverman

haute couture, index card, Nelson Mandela, Saturday Night Live, Skype

Kevin was tall with dark brown hair and a white-and-red blotchy Irish face. He wore a long army green trench coat and carried a briefcase, which, at nineteen, I found very impressive. And he was thirty--a grown man. He stood outside the club smoking a Merit Light. I went outside and bummed one. KEVIN: So, you go to school? ME: Yeah. NYU. KEVIN: What--are you a freshman? ME: Mm-hm. KEVIN: What--are you, like, in a sorority? ME: Yeah, but you can only be in it if you're really cool. KEVIN: Yeah? Who else is in it? ME: Just me. He laughs. Let me take a moment to describe myself here: big curly perm, black polyester shirt with long shear sleeves, black miniskirt, and Doc Martens with thick black socks.

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In New Hampshire, I'd always felt like a goat living among sheep; until I got to New York it had never occurred to me that there could be a place filled with other goats. It was the best New Year's I'd had yet. It probably still is. At seventeen I took a train from New Hampshire to New York City to go to an open call for Gypsy. In the fall of 1989 my mom came with me to New York City to help move me into my freshman dorm at NYU. We arrived in the city the night before and stayed at the Washington Square Hotel, putting the bulk of my luggage in their storage room. The next morning, we were given the storage key and went to gather my things. We opened the door, and there, lying on top of a mountain of luggage--including my trunk--was a maintenance man with his pants down around his ankles.

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Passersby pulled him off me almost instantly--what is that Tennessee Williams line about depending on the kindness of strangers?--and though I was shaken, not ten minutes later I was back to my barking duties. I shared the corner with another flyer-hander-outer--the mascot from Pluck-U Chicken, a nearby fast-food establishment. You might scoff that puns don't whet the appetite, but that place was insanely popular with NYU students. The mascot was an Asian kid my age in a giant chicken suit. To do that job shows tremendous ambition. Not because it leads anywhere, but because it means he was faced with the questions: What is it worth to you to go to college? What are you willing to do to afford the best education possible?

Palaces for the People: How Social Infrastructure Can Help Fight Inequality, Polarization, and the Decline of Civic Life by Eric Klinenberg

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, assortative mating, basic income, Big Tech, big-box store, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, Broken windows theory, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, classic study, clean water, deindustrialization, desegregation, digital divide, Donald Trump, East Village, fake news, Filter Bubble, food desert, gentrification, ghettoisation, helicopter parent, income inequality, informal economy, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, John Snow's cholera map, late fees, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, megaproject, Menlo Park, New Urbanism, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Peter Thiel, public intellectual, Ray Oldenburg, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, smart grid, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Great Good Place, the High Line, universal basic income, urban planning, young professional

In some nations, dealing with global warming remains a low priority, but in Bangladesh it’s already a matter of grave national significance, part of every major policy debate. In Bangladesh, as in most of the world’s poor nations, international development agencies tend to dictate the terms of new infrastructure investments. Malcolm Araos, an NYU graduate student and one of my research assistants, did fieldwork in Dhaka to examine how adaptation projects unfold on the ground. He found, predictably, that hard infrastructure like embankments, sluice gates, and drainage systems were often placed around command centers where the nation’s elites clustered rather than in the crowded, low-income neighborhoods where residents are most at risk.

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For years I took for granted all the things I learned in this special community center. Now I understand how much it shaped me. If the ideas for this book come from Chicago, they developed in New York City, and particularly at New York University. Since 2012, I’ve had the great privilege of directing NYU’s Institute for Public Knowledge, which is as real a community as any I’ve known in the academy, and a rare place where scholars are rewarded for engaging in civic life. I thank Craig Calhoun, IPK’s founding director, for creating such a special environment and entrusting me with its future; Katy Fleming, the provost, and Cybele Raver, the senior vice provost, for supporting it; and Jessica Coffey, Siera Dissmore, and Gordon Douglas for sustaining it.

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Thanks to Gabriel Abend, Sasha Abramsky, Hillary Angelo, Aziz Ansari, Eric Bates, Craig Calhoun, Daniel Aldana Cohen, Andrew Deener, Shamus Khan, Andrew Lakoff, Margaret Levi, Sharon Marcus, Harvey Molotch, Eyal Press, Patrick Sharkey, Rona Talcott, Iddo Tavory, Fred Turner, and Matt Wray. I owe a special debt to my research assistants from NYU, especially Delaram Takyar, who collaborated on all aspects of this project, and Matt Wolfe, who helped with the sections on social isolation and opioid addiction. After I finished writing, Delaram, who’s now studying law and social science, and Matt, who’s a sociologist as well as a journalist, teamed up to fact-check the entire document.

Ours to Hack and to Own: The Rise of Platform Cooperativism, a New Vision for the Future of Work and a Fairer Internet by Trebor Scholz, Nathan Schneider

1960s counterculture, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anthropocene, barriers to entry, basic income, benefit corporation, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Build a better mousetrap, Burning Man, business logic, capital controls, circular economy, citizen journalism, collaborative economy, collaborative editing, collective bargaining, commoditize, commons-based peer production, conceptual framework, content marketing, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, Debian, decentralized internet, deskilling, disintermediation, distributed ledger, driverless car, emotional labour, end-to-end encryption, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, food desert, future of work, gig economy, Google bus, hiring and firing, holacracy, income inequality, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Internet of things, Jacob Appelbaum, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, lake wobegon effect, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, minimum viable product, moral hazard, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, openstreetmap, peer-to-peer, planned obsolescence, post-work, profit maximization, race to the bottom, radical decentralization, remunicipalization, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rochdale Principles, SETI@home, shareholder value, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart contracts, Snapchat, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, Uber for X, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, Vitalik Buterin, W. E. B. Du Bois, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, workplace surveillance , Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

Seda Gürses is a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Center for Information Technology at Princeton University, and an FWO fellow at the Computer Security and Industrial Cryptography (COSIC) research group at the University of Leuven in Belgium. She works on privacy and requirements engineering, privacy enhancing technologies, and surveillance. Previously, she was a postdoctoral fellow at the Media, Culture and Communications Department at the NYU Steinhardt School and at the Information Law Institute at NYU Law School. She is also a member of the feminist art collective Constant VZW in Brussels. Steven Hill is a senior fellow at the New America Foundation and the Holtzbrinck fellow at the American Academy in Berlin. His latest book is Raw Deal: How the “Uber Economy” and Runaway Capitalism Are Screwing American Workers (St.

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He is also helping build seed.coop, a platform for co-ops everywhere to grow their membership. Say hi on Twitter @daspitzberg. Arun Sundararajan is Professor and the Robert L. and Dale Atkins Rosen Faculty Fellow at New York University’s Leonard N. Stern School of Business. He is also an affiliated faculty member at NYU’s Center for Urban Science+Progress, and at NYU’s Center for Data Science. Astra Taylor is a documentary filmmaker, writer, and political organizer. She is the director of the films Zizek! and Examined Life, and the author of The People’s Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age (Picador, 2015), winner of a 2015 American Book Award.

Elsewhere, U.S.A: How We Got From the Company Man, Family Dinners, and the Affluent Society to the Home Office, BlackBerry Moms,and Economic Anxiety by Dalton Conley

Alan Greenspan, assortative mating, call centre, clean water, commoditize, company town, dematerialisation, demographic transition, Edward Glaeser, extreme commuting, feminist movement, financial independence, Firefox, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, Home mortgage interest deduction, income inequality, informal economy, insecure affluence, It's morning again in America, Jane Jacobs, Joan Didion, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, late capitalism, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, McMansion, Michael Shellenberger, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, off grid, oil shock, PageRank, Paradox of Choice, Ponzi scheme, positional goods, post-industrial society, post-materialism, principal–agent problem, recommendation engine, Richard Florida, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skype, statistical model, Ted Nordhaus, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Great Moderation, the long tail, the strength of weak ties, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, women in the workforce, Yom Kippur War

And as long as I am thanking institutions, I have to express my appreciation to New York University for providing a fertile environment for this kind of more public work and for valuing it, perhaps in a way that other universities might not. In this vein, particular thanks go out to Richard Foley, the dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences; to George Downs, the dean of Social Science; to David McLaughlin, NYU’s provost; and to NYU President John Sexton. For administrative support with this project I also have to thank Alana Barraj and Dom Bagnato here at NYU, and at Pantheon Books, Dan Frank’s assistant, Fran Bigman. And for always asking why and keeping me guessing, I have to thank my kids, E and Yo Jeremijenko-Conley Notes INTRODUCTION 1. Suzanne M. Bianchi, John P.

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Nor could he have known about employee stock and pension plans that effectively gave workers a stake—albeit a much slimmer slice than major shareholders—in the profits of their company. ABOUT THE AUTHOR Dalton Conley is University Professor of the Social Sciences and Acting Dean for the Social Sciences at New York University. He also holds appointments at NYU’s Wagner School of Public Service, as an Adjunct Professor of Community Medicine at Mount Sinai School of Medicine, and as a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. His essays have appeared in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and Salon, among other publications. His previous books include Honky; Being Black, Living in the Red: Race, Wealth, and Social Policy in America; and The Pecking Order: Which Siblings Succeed and Why.

Panderer to Power by Frederick Sheehan

Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, book value, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, buy and hold, California energy crisis, call centre, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, deindustrialization, diversification, financial deregulation, financial innovation, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, Greenspan put, guns versus butter model, inflation targeting, interest rate swap, inventory management, Isaac Newton, John Meriwether, junk bonds, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, Mary Meeker, McMansion, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, money market fund, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Norman Mailer, Northern Rock, oil shock, Paul Samuelson, place-making, Ponzi scheme, price stability, reserve currency, rising living standards, Robert Solow, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South Sea Bubble, stock buybacks, stocks for the long run, supply-chain management, supply-chain management software, The Great Moderation, too big to fail, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, VA Linux, Y2K, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

Not intimidated by the anonymity of such an assembly line of students, he played clarinet in the orchestra, sang in the glee club, was chosen as president of the Symphonic Society, and was president of the Economics Society.12 Greenspan graduated summa cum laude in 1948 with a bachelor of science degree in economics. In 1950, Greenspan earned his master’s degree in economics from NYU. Acquaintances thought Greenspan was introverted. Did he view his extracurricular activities as a way to boost his career? Whether or not that was his intention, his friendships paid dividends. Robert Kavesh was probably his best friend at NYU, and they remained close. Kavesh worked on Wall Street in the 1950s before returning to NYU to teach economics. Professor Kavesh aided Greenspan when Alan sought (and received) his doctorate in the 1970s. To stake his future in the field was a gamble.

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He did so under the tutelage of his former classmate, Bob Kavesh, who was now a professor at NYU. Greenspan’s dissertation was peculiar. According to Jeff Madrick, writing in the New York Review of Books: “[H]e did not complete a conventional dissertation. Instead, he submitted published articles and other writings, some of them for publications such as Business Economics, which would not have met the scholarly standards for most economic 1John H. Allan, “Thrift Adrift: Why Nobody Saves,” New York Times, February 17, 1980, p. 4. 59 departments.”2 Traditionally, scholarship is available to the public; however, NYU has not released Greenspan’s work.3 The Ph.D. might or might not have aided his consulting business, but Greenspan knew it would be an asset if he were to be considered for a senior government position—such as Federal Reserve chairman.

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., New York 1960, p. 61. 5Figures from end of years he entered and left office. “Beginning of office” is December 31, 1987, from Federal Reserve Flow of Funds Account; “end of office” is December 31, 2005. After graduating from New York University in 1948, Greenspan took a job at the Conference Board. He received a master’s degree from NYU in 1950; then studied economics under Arthur Burns at Columbia University. The two became lifelong friends. Arthur Burns served as chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under President Dwight Eisenhower. He would become Federal Reserve chairman under President Richard Nixon. Greenspan headed President Gerald Ford’s Council of Economic Advisers (CEA) when Arthur Burns was Federal Reserve chairman.

Aerotropolis by John D. Kasarda, Greg Lindsay

3D printing, air freight, airline deregulation, airport security, Akira Okazaki, Alvin Toffler, An Inconvenient Truth, Asian financial crisis, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, big-box store, blood diamond, Boeing 747, book value, borderless world, Boris Johnson, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, carbon footprint, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, Charles Lindbergh, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, company town, conceptual framework, credit crunch, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, digital map, disruptive innovation, Dr. Strangelove, Dutch auction, Easter island, edge city, Edward Glaeser, Eyjafjallajökull, failed state, financial engineering, flag carrier, flying shuttle, food miles, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frank Gehry, fudge factor, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, Future Shock, General Motors Futurama, gentleman farmer, gentrification, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, George Gilder, global supply chain, global village, gravity well, Great Leap Forward, Haber-Bosch Process, Hernando de Soto, high-speed rail, hive mind, if you build it, they will come, illegal immigration, inflight wifi, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), intermodal, invention of the telephone, inventory management, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jevons paradox, Joan Didion, Kangaroo Route, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, kremlinology, land bank, Lewis Mumford, low cost airline, Marchetti’s constant, Marshall McLuhan, Masdar, mass immigration, McMansion, megacity, megaproject, Menlo Park, microcredit, military-industrial complex, Network effects, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), peak oil, Pearl River Delta, Peter Calthorpe, Peter Thiel, pets.com, pink-collar, planned obsolescence, pre–internet, RFID, Richard Florida, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, savings glut, Seaside, Florida, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spice trade, spinning jenny, starchitect, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Suez canal 1869, sunk-cost fallacy, supply-chain management, sustainable-tourism, tech worker, telepresence, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, thinkpad, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, Tony Hsieh, trade route, transcontinental railway, transit-oriented development, traveling salesman, trickle-down economics, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, walkable city, warehouse robotics, white flight, white picket fence, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

Its stable of blue-chip brands includes branches of both the Sorbonne and London’s Imperial College to go along with a complete New York University campus on Saadiyat Island—the first time a major U.S. research institution has cloned its entire curriculum offshore. NYU Abu Dhabi’s students are admitted under the same standards and handed the same diplomas as their American peers. NYU’s wish is to open “the world’s first global university in the world’s first truly global city,” according to its president. And while you might think NYU already fits that description in Manhattan, it’s not true. Not anymore. Before 9/11, more than half a million students from developing nations applied for visas every year to study in the United States.

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Human Rights Watch investigated the treatment of the UAE’s “guest workers” in “Building Towers, Cheating Workers: Exploitation of Migrant Construction Workers in the United Arab Emirates,” published in November 2006. In addition to his history of Dubai up until the crash, Christopher Davidson has written a comprehensive book about its older brother, Abu Dhabi. The Guggenheim’s Thomas Krens was interviewed by Rem Koolhaas in Al Manakh. The emirate’s plan to clone NYU was detailed in “The Emir of NYU” (New York, April 13, 2008), from which NYU president John Sexton’s quotes are taken. My road trip to the site of Dubai World Central occurred in June 2007. Kasarda’s ill-fated audience with its various executives occurred a year earlier. His subsequent meetings to plan a “Dubai Aerotropolis” took place between March 2009 and April 2010.

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The inaugural class attracted more than five hundred early-decision applicants, accepting students from China, Ethiopia, Hungary, India, Indonesia, Jordan, Morocco, Russia, and Taiwan. “Everyone introduced themselves, in English and whatever language they wanted,” recalled the NYU vice pro-vost in charge of admissions. “From French to Russian to Arabic to Hungarian, they’d say things like ‘I traveled 30 hours to get here,’ or ‘I’ve never been on a plane before.’ It was kind of a goose-bump moment.” What NYU gains from this arrangement besides money is harder to put a finger on. University president John Sexton is frank about his desire to see a host of “glocal” offshoots worldwide, framing expansion and confrontation in the context of 9/11.

The Alignment Problem: Machine Learning and Human Values by Brian Christian

Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, butterfly effect, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Donald Knuth, Douglas Hofstadter, effective altruism, Elaine Herzberg, Elon Musk, Frances Oldham Kelsey, game design, gamification, Geoffrey Hinton, Goodhart's law, Google Chrome, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, hedonic treadmill, ImageNet competition, industrial robot, Internet Archive, John von Neumann, Joi Ito, Kenneth Arrow, language acquisition, longitudinal study, machine translation, mandatory minimum, mass incarceration, multi-armed bandit, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, OpenAI, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pattern recognition, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, precautionary principle, premature optimization, RAND corporation, recommendation engine, Richard Feynman, Rodney Brooks, Saturday Night Live, selection bias, self-driving car, seminal paper, side project, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, sparse data, speech recognition, Stanislav Petrov, statistical model, Steve Jobs, strong AI, the map is not the territory, theory of mind, Tim Cook: Apple, W. E. B. Du Bois, Wayback Machine, zero-sum game

The models have tens of millions, not dozens, of parameters, and those parameters represent fairly ineffable things: summed thresholds of earlier layers, which are themselves summed thresholds of earlier layers, all the way back to the millions of raw pixels. This is not the raw grist from which intelligible explanations are made. So what to do? At NYU, PhD student Matthew Zeiler and his advisor, Rob Fergus, were fixated on this question. The success of these enormous, bewildering models, they argue, is undeniable. “However,” they write, “there is no clear understanding of why they perform so well, or how they might be improved. . . . From a scientific standpoint, this is deeply unsatisfactory.”63 In other words, the results are impressive, but as Zeiler puts it, “With all these nice results, it’s not clear what these models are learning.”64 People knew that the bottommost layer of a convolutional network represented basic things: vertical edges, horizontal edges, diagonal edges, a strong single color, or a simple gradient.

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Zeiler hypothesized that they weren’t correctly sized for the types of patterns they were trying to match. As astoundingly successful as AlexNet had been, it was carrying some dead weight. It could be improved—and the visualization showed where. In the fall of 2013, within a matter of frantic months, Zeiler finished his PhD, left NYU, started his own company—Clarifai—and entered that year’s ImageNet competition. He won.66 Other groups, subsequently and in parallel, have explored further ways of directly visualizing a neural network. In 2015, Google engineers Alexander Mordvintsev, Christopher Olah, and Mike Tyka experimented with a method of starting from an image of random static, and then tweaking its pixels to maximize the probability that the network assigns it a particular label—say, “banana” or “fork.”67 This deceptively simple method has proven to be remarkably powerful.

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In time, studies began to establish that the areas of the brain in which this electrical stimulation was most compelling were those areas involving neurons that produced a neurotransmitter called 3,4-dihydroxyphenethylamine—better known by its abbreviated nickname: dopamine.34 These cells were rare—much less than 1% of 1% of the brain—and they clustered in very specific areas.35 A single one of these dopamine cells could be wired in some cases to millions of other neurons, across a wide area of the brain.36 In fact, they were almost uniquely broadly connected, with the most highly connected cells each having nearly fifteen feet of axonal wiring within the brain.37 At the same time, however, they were fairly limited in the range and complexity of their output. As NYU neuroscientist Paul Glimcher puts it, this means that “they cannot say much to the rest of the brain, but what they say must be widely heard.”38 It sounded a lot, in other words, like a “reward scalar”—in essence, like points on the brain’s scoreboard—dead simple, but widely broadcast and all-important.

Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World by Clive Thompson

"Margaret Hamilton" Apollo, "Susan Fowler" uber, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 4chan, 8-hour work day, Aaron Swartz, Ada Lovelace, AI winter, air gap, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, Asperger Syndrome, augmented reality, Ayatollah Khomeini, backpropagation, barriers to entry, basic income, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, blue-collar work, Brewster Kahle, Brian Krebs, Broken windows theory, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Chelsea Manning, Citizen Lab, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, computer vision, Conway's Game of Life, crisis actor, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Danny Hillis, data science, David Heinemeier Hansson, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, disinformation, don't be evil, don't repeat yourself, Donald Trump, driverless car, dumpster diving, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ernest Rutherford, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fake news, false flag, Firefox, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Free Software Foundation, Gabriella Coleman, game design, Geoffrey Hinton, glass ceiling, Golden Gate Park, Google Hangouts, Google X / Alphabet X, Grace Hopper, growth hacking, Guido van Rossum, Hacker Ethic, hockey-stick growth, HyperCard, Ian Bogost, illegal immigration, ImageNet competition, information security, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Julian Assange, Ken Thompson, Kickstarter, Larry Wall, lone genius, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Shuttleworth, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, meritocracy, microdosing, microservices, Minecraft, move 37, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, Network effects, neurotypical, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, no silver bullet, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, OpenAI, operational security, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, PageRank, PalmPilot, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pink-collar, planetary scale, profit motive, ransomware, recommendation engine, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rubik’s Cube, Ruby on Rails, Sam Altman, Satoshi Nakamoto, Saturday Night Live, scientific management, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, single-payer health, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, social software, software is eating the world, sorting algorithm, South of Market, San Francisco, speech recognition, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, tech worker, techlash, TED Talk, the High Line, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, urban planning, Wall-E, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WeWork, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, Zimmermann PGP, éminence grise

Whatever was going on? At first, they noticed that a large number of complaints came from students who were logging into NYU’s portal while using computers at the Kinko’s copy center around the corner. Maybe Kinko’s was somehow to blame? But then Whitney saw reports of the same login bug from computers located on-campus. It became clear that the culprit was the university’s login system itself. Unfortunately, that login code had been written years earlier by a staff programmer who no longer worked for NYU. Since Whitney couldn’t ask him to help debug his code, she sat down to scrutinize it line by line with the help of another expert programmer.

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The problem began the moment someone connected to NYU’s network. When students logged in, the system gave them a random temporary ID number for that session. To generate the random ID number, the program would “seed” its random-number generator using the timestamp, the exact instant that the student logged in. But what if two students just coincidentally logged in at precisely the same second? They’d be issued the same quasi-random number; oops! To prevent this, the programmer added another “seed” number, the IP address of the computer that the student was using. NYU had tons of IP addresses, so the programmer figured there was no chance any two students logging in would have precisely the same timestamp and precisely the same IP address.

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NYU had tons of IP addresses, so the programmer figured there was no chance any two students logging in would have precisely the same timestamp and precisely the same IP address. Right? Nope. Years later, NYU and Kinko’s switched over to a new technology that funneled lots of computers through just one or two IP addresses. They did this to handle the explosive growth of internet use on campus, but nobody realized it might interfere with the old login system, written so many years previously. But it did. Suddenly it became possible for two people to log in at the same time and have the same IP address. The two users would be assigned the exact same session ID, and presto: One of them would be logged into the other person’s account, able to see the other person’s email and notes.

Data Science for Business: What You Need to Know About Data Mining and Data-Analytic Thinking by Foster Provost, Tom Fawcett

Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Apollo 13, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, bioinformatics, business process, call centre, chief data officer, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer vision, conceptual framework, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, data science, David Brooks, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Gini coefficient, Helicobacter pylori, independent contractor, information retrieval, intangible asset, iterative process, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Louis Pasteur, Menlo Park, Nate Silver, Netflix Prize, new economy, p-value, pattern recognition, placebo effect, price discrimination, recommendation engine, Ronald Coase, selection bias, Silicon Valley, Skype, SoftBank, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, systems thinking, Teledyne, text mining, the long tail, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, Thomas Bayes, transaction costs, WikiLeaks

Historically, the book arose from the development of Foster’s multidisciplinary Data Science classes at the Stern School at NYU, starting in the fall of 2005.[1] The original class was nominally for MBA students and MSIS students, but drew students from schools across the university. The most interesting aspect of the class was not that it appealed to MBA and MSIS students, for whom it was designed. More interesting, it also was found to be very valuable by students with strong backgrounds in machine learning and other technical disciplines. Part of the reason seemed to be that the focus on fundamental principles and other issues besides algorithms was missing from their curricula. At NYU we now use the book in support of a variety of data science–related programs: the original MBA and MSIS programs, undergraduate business analytics, NYU/Stern’s new MS in Business Analytics program, and as the Introduction to Data Science for NYU’s new MS in Data Science.

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At NYU we now use the book in support of a variety of data science–related programs: the original MBA and MSIS programs, undergraduate business analytics, NYU/Stern’s new MS in Business Analytics program, and as the Introduction to Data Science for NYU’s new MS in Data Science. In addition, (prior to publication) the book has been adopted by more than a dozen other universities for programs in seven countries (and counting), in business schools, in computer science programs, and for more general introductions to data science. Stay tuned to the books’ websites (see below) for information on how to obtain helpful instructional material, including lecture slides, sample homework questions and problems, example project instructions based on the frameworks from the book, exam questions, and more to come.

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However, much more often the well-known big data technologies are used for data processing in support of the data mining techniques and other data science activities, as represented in Figure 1-1. Previously, we discussed Brynjolfsson’s study demonstrating the benefits of data-driven decision-making. A separate study, conducted by economist Prasanna Tambe of NYU’s Stern School, examined the extent to which big data technologies seem to help firms (Tambe, 2012). He finds that, after controlling for various possible confounding factors, using big data technologies is associated with significant additional productivity growth. Specifically, one standard deviation higher utilization of big data technologies is associated with 1%–3% higher productivity than the average firm; one standard deviation lower in terms of big data utilization is associated with 1%–3% lower productivity.

The Man Who Knew: The Life and Times of Alan Greenspan by Sebastian Mallaby

airline deregulation, airport security, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, Andrei Shleifer, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, balance sheet recession, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, bond market vigilante , book value, Bretton Woods, business cycle, central bank independence, centralized clearinghouse, classic study, collateralized debt obligation, conceptual framework, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency peg, Dr. Strangelove, energy security, equity premium, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Flash crash, forward guidance, full employment, Future Shock, Glass-Steagall Act, Greenspan put, Hyman Minsky, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, inventory management, invisible hand, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, Kitchen Debate, laissez-faire capitalism, Lewis Mumford, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low skilled workers, market bubble, market clearing, Martin Wolf, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Northern Rock, paper trading, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, plutocrats, popular capitalism, price stability, RAND corporation, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, rent-seeking, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, secular stagnation, short selling, stock buybacks, subprime mortgage crisis, The Great Moderation, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tipper Gore, too big to fail, trade liberalization, unorthodox policies, upwardly mobile, We are all Keynesians now, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Y2K, yield curve, zero-sum game

“No longer is modern man able to believe ‘that government governs best which governs least,’” Samuelson declared confidently in his textbook; and his writing’s profound influence on students just a few years younger than Greenspan can be gauged from the vehemence with which conservatives denounced it.12 In God and Man at Yale, published in 1951, William F. Buckley Jr. lamented that fully one third of the Yale class had been exposed to Samuelson’s writings, and that “the net influence of Yale economics” was “thoroughly collectivistic.”13 But when Greenspan began at NYU, Samuelson’s textbook was as yet unpublished. Instead, Greenspan enrolled in courses taught by Walter Spahr, the head of the NYU economics faculty, whose view of the New Deal was ferociously critical. In a typical speech to the Economic Club of Detroit in 1949, Spahr decried “the March into the Death Valley of Socialism,” exclaiming that “‘Liberalism’ means practically nothing but Socialism or Communism or being liberal with other people’s money.”

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Over the next quarter century, researchers at the National Bureau assembled the statistics necessary to document the business cycle and formulate the national accounts from which the gross domestic product is calculated. At the onset of the Depression, the Hoover and Roosevelt administrations had confronted a collapse in output without the benefit of knowing what that output was. By the time Greenspan graduated from NYU, armies of Wesley Mitchell acolytes were tracking every facet of Americans’ productive existence. In his junior year at NYU, Greenspan got a taste of this measurement project. He took statistics classes from Geoffrey Moore, a School of Commerce professor who doubled as a researcher at the National Bureau. Moore went on to become commissioner of labor statistics under Richard Nixon, and made a lasting mark on the profession by developing leading and lagging indicators of the business cycle.

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Statist faith was at its peak; laissez-faire ideas were in abeyance. “In 1945 no articulate, coordinated, self-consciously conservative intellectual force existed in the United States,” declared George Nash, the great historian of the conservative movement. “There were, at most, scattered voices of protest.”8 • • • Arriving on the NYU campus as a shy nineteen-year-old, Greenspan could hardly fail to sense these intellectual currents. Since quitting the Henry Jerome band, he had spent the summer shuttling between the public library and his mother’s apartment, diligently reading the textbooks he would encounter in his first year of economics.

NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity by Steve Silberman

Albert Einstein, animal electricity, Apollo 11, Asperger Syndrome, assortative mating, autism spectrum disorder, Bletchley Park, crowdsourcing, Douglas Engelbart, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, experimental subject, Golden Gate Park, Haight Ashbury, hydroponic farming, hypertext link, IBM and the Holocaust, index card, Isaac Newton, John Markoff, Kickstarter, language acquisition, Larry Wall, megacity, meta-analysis, Mother of all demos, Neil Armstrong, neurotypical, New Journalism, pattern recognition, placebo effect, scientific mainstream, side project, Silicon Valley, Simon Singh, Skype, slashdot, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, sugar pill, the scientific method, twin studies, Tyler Cowen, union organizing, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, Yom Kippur War

appearances by Hillary Clinton and CBS Evening News anchor Katie Couric: “NYU Child Study Center Raises $9 Million and Celebrates 10th Anniversary.” Press release, NYU Child Study Center, Dec. 5, 2007. ASAN blasted out an action alert: “An Urgent Call to Action: Tell NYU Child Study Center to Abandon Stereotypes against People with Disabilities.” Press release, ASAN, Dec. 8, 2007. “This is a ‘public awareness’ campaign”: “Rescue Me: The NYU Child Study Center’s Ransom Notes Ad Campaign,” Kristina Chew. Blisstree. Dec. 11, 2007. http://www.blisstree.com/2007/12/11/mental-health-well-being/rescue-me-the-nyu-child-study-centers-ransom-notes-ad-campaign/#ixzz3AgpNrbMn In 2014, when Obama issued an executive order: “Obama’s Wage Hike For Federal Contractors Won’t Apply to Disabled Workers,” Mike Elk.

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The group’s chances of success seemed slim. NYU was powerful, and BBDO’s campaign represented hundreds of thousands of dollars in pro bono work. By contrast, ASAN hadn’t yet rented an office or opened a bank account. To persuade other disability advocacy groups to sign a letter of protest, Ne’eman cold-called Bob Kafka, the national director of ADAPT, one of the leading disability rights organizations in the country, with chapters in thirty states. Kafka agreed to sign the letter immediately, and thirteen other organizations quickly added their names to the list. Since Ne’eman had not yet gotten a response from NYU, an ASAN representative hand-delivered it to the receptionist at the Child Study Center, who looked haggard as phones rang in the background.

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The ads—produced on a pro bono basis by BBDO, the PR powerhouse that inspired Mad Men—were no more histrionic or stigmatizing than the messages that fund-raising organizations like Autism Speaks had been pumping out for years, comparing autism to cancer, cystic fibrosis, and other potentially fatal diseases. (Indeed, BBDO had done similar work for Autism Speaks.) In this case, however, the ads’ sponsor was NYU’s prestigious Child Study Center, launching a new campaign to alert the public to the “silent public health epidemic” of childhood mental illness. In the words of the center’s press release, twelve million children in America were being “held hostage by a psychiatric disorder.” “It’s like with AIDS,” the center’s director, Harold Koplewicz, told the New York Times.

Artificial Unintelligence: How Computers Misunderstand the World by Meredith Broussard

"Susan Fowler" uber, 1960s counterculture, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Ada Lovelace, AI winter, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Amazon Web Services, autonomous vehicles, availability heuristic, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Buckminster Fuller, Charles Babbage, Chris Urmson, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, cognitive bias, complexity theory, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data science, deep learning, Dennis Ritchie, digital map, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, easy for humans, difficult for computers, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, fake news, Firefox, gamification, gig economy, global supply chain, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Greyball, Hacker Ethic, independent contractor, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Joi Ito, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, life extension, Lyft, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, Minecraft, minimum viable product, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, PageRank, Paradox of Choice, payday loans, paypal mafia, performance metric, Peter Thiel, price discrimination, Ray Kurzweil, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ross Ulbricht, Saturday Night Live, school choice, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, TechCrunch disrupt, Tesla Model S, the High Line, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, theory of mind, traumatic brain injury, Travis Kalanick, trolley problem, Turing test, Uber for X, uber lyft, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, work culture , yottabyte

Data Privacy Lab, “Mission Statement”; Sweeney, “Foundations of Privacy Protection from a Computer Science Perspective.” 7. Pilhofer, “A Note to Users of DocumentCloud.” Acknowledgments Thank you to all the people who helped to bring this book to reality. I am grateful to my colleagues at New York University’s (NYU’s) Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute, my colleagues at the Moore-Sloan Data Science Environment at NYU’s Center for Data Science, the faculty and staff at the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia Journalism School, and my former colleagues at Temple University and the University of Pennsylvania. For reading, consulting on, or otherwise midwifing this manuscript, I am eternally indebted to Elena Lahr-Vivaz, Rosalie Siegel, Jordan Ellenberg, Cathy O’Neil, Miriam Peskowitz, Samira Baird, Lori Tharps, Kira Baker-Doyle, Jane Dmochowski, Josephine Wolff, Solon Barocas, Hanna Wallach, Katy Boss, Janet Alteveer, Leslie Hunt, Elizabeth Hunt, Kay Kinsey, Karen Masse, Stevie Santangelo, Jay Kirk, Claire Wardle, Gita Manaktala, Melinda Rankin, Kathleen Caruso, Kyle Gipson, my writers’ group, and the talented team at the MIT Press.

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Thus far, their efforts in self-governance have left much to be desired. We can learn from the past, but first we need to pay attention to it. A few projects in journalism and academia suggest that a new, more balanced view of AI is on the horizon. One such project is the AI Now Institute, a policy group at NYU founded in 2017 by Kate Crawford of Microsoft Research and Meredith Whittaker of Google. Funded by Silicon Valley, the group began as a joint project of President Obama’s White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and the National Economic Council. AI Now’s first report focused on the near-term social and economic issues that arise from artificial intelligence technology in four fundamental areas: healthcare, labor, inequality, and ethics.

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“Men (on the Internet) Don’t Believe Sexism Is a Problem in Science, Even When They See Evidence,” January 8, 2015. Fischhoff, Baruch, and John Kadvany. Risk: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Fletcher, Laurence, and Gregory Zuckerman. “Hedge Funds Battle Losses,” 2016. http://ezproxy.library.nyu.edu:2048/login?url=http://search.proquest.com/docview/1811735200?accountid=12768. Flew, Terry, Christina Spurgeon, Anna Daniel, and Adam Swift. “The Promise of Computational Journalism.” Journalism Practice 6, no. 2 (April 2012): 157–171. doi:10.1080/17512786.2011.616655. Fowler, Susan J. “Reflecting on One Very, Very Strange Year at Uber.”

The Hostage's Daughter by Sulome Anderson

Ayatollah Khomeini, different worldview, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, failed state, false flag, Kickstarter, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, sensible shoes, Skype

“Okay, well, you’ll have to tell me who he is,” she said, but I could see the doubt cross her face. A glimmer of hope. Was it possible I’d be able to bullshit my way out of this? I unleashed the tears. “This can’t be happening!” I wailed. “I’m graduating in three months! I was just trying to help a friend! Please don’t tell the dean, please . . . I’m supposed to go . . . to NYU . . .” I dissolved in sobs. The dorm master put a hand on my shoulder. “Sorry, Sulome,” she told me, sounding honestly regretful. “I have to tell the dean, otherwise my job is on the line.” She shook her head. “It’s a shame, though, it really is. You’re such a smart girl. Why do you have to do this stuff?”

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My boyfriend at boarding school had broken up with me hours after I was expelled and I found myself in a place I hated, with barely any friends. The empty place in me grew canyon wide. I needed something to fill it and was soon dabbling in harder substances; cocaine became my favorite way to erase my misery. Luckily, NYU didn’t withdraw my acceptance, so I was still off to New York in the fall, which was a light at the end of the tunnel. But I would often find myself doing lines off the toilet lid in the school restroom or running around town with some guy, rolling on Ecstasy. My parents seemed to just give up and let me do what I wanted, which was both painful and exhilarating.

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“If he ever comes to Lebanon again, tell him he’s welcome in my house. Say to him that the Shia are not monsters.” It’s an odd feeling, hearing this from a terrorist. But it’s even stranger that I find myself seeing a terrorist as a human being. THEN October 2003 I OD’d for the first time not long after I started at NYU. It wasn’t serious enough to get me sent to the hospital. I just remember being in the middle of one of those meaningless, teeth-grinding coke conversations and coming to on the floor of my dorm room, with my boyfriend yelling and shaking me. Apparently, I had gone into convulsions. I got up, drank some water, waited a half hour, and did another line.

Terms of Service: Social Media and the Price of Constant Connection by Jacob Silverman

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Aaron Swartz, Airbnb, airport security, Amazon Mechanical Turk, augmented reality, basic income, Big Tech, Brian Krebs, California gold rush, Californian Ideology, call centre, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, company town, context collapse, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, data science, deep learning, digital capitalism, disinformation, don't be evil, driverless car, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Evgeny Morozov, fake it until you make it, feminist movement, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Flash crash, game design, global village, Google Chrome, Google Glasses, Higgs boson, hive mind, Ian Bogost, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, information retrieval, Internet of things, Jacob Silverman, Jaron Lanier, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, late capitalism, Laura Poitras, license plate recognition, life extension, lifelogging, lock screen, Lyft, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Rover, Marshall McLuhan, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, Minecraft, move fast and break things, national security letter, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, optical character recognition, payday loans, Peter Thiel, planned obsolescence, postindustrial economy, prediction markets, pre–internet, price discrimination, price stability, profit motive, quantitative hedge fund, race to the bottom, Ray Kurzweil, real-name policy, recommendation engine, rent control, rent stabilization, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Snapchat, social bookmarking, social graph, social intelligence, social web, sorting algorithm, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, telemarketer, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Turing test, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, unpaid internship, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, yottabyte, you are the product, Zipcar

At the same time, the trials of poverty and urban crime are turned into yet another spectacle, in line with a popular culture that has made sport of satirizing the folkways of the poor, minorities, rednecks, and assorted eccentrics on reality TV and in tabloid media. Commenting on the “Bed Intruder Song,” an NYU music professor told NPR: “There’s a way in which the aesthetics of black poverty—the way they talk and they speak and they look—sort of becomes this fodder for humor without any interest in the context of the conditions in which people actually live.” But at least Honey Boo Boo and her family get paid, are shown in something approaching the fullness of their lives, and are willing participants in their own degradation.

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It wasn’t New York, and it was difficult leaving her grandparents and other family behind in India, but for all of them, it was the start of an exciting new American life—one which, her parents hoped, would lead to better opportunities, particularly for higher education. By the time that Nandini was a high school senior, she knew that Texas wasn’t for her, so she arranged to visit the city she had fallen in love with a decade earlier. She toured NYU, an experience that culminated with a trip to the top floor of the Kimmel Center, one of the university’s lavishly appointed, modern buildings off of Washington Square Park. From that vantage, she could take in an inspiring view of lower Manhattan. The message, she would later recall, was that “this could be yours”—this city, this life, all the fabled magic of being a young person on the make in New York.

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The message, she would later recall, was that “this could be yours”—this city, this life, all the fabled magic of being a young person on the make in New York. The next fall, she happily matriculated into the school of her dreams. More than five years later, the dream has curdled. The economy crashed before Nandini even finished high school, and its tepid recovery has done little to improve her prospects. After finishing her film degree at NYU, Nandini and a roommate moved uptown to a rent-stabilized, fourth-floor walkup. Despite a fine résumé that includes a number of internships in her field of interest, she’s been unable to find any work. If not for her relatively favorable lease arrangement, she’d have difficulty surviving at all in New York and might be forced to make the lonely trek back to Texas.

Creative Intelligence: Harnessing the Power to Create, Connect, and Inspire by Bruce Nussbaum

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, Black Swan, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, declining real wages, demographic dividend, disruptive innovation, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, fail fast, Fall of the Berlin Wall, follow your passion, game design, gamification, gentrification, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, industrial robot, invisible hand, James Dyson, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Gruber, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, lone genius, longitudinal study, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, Max Levchin, Minsky moment, new economy, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, QR code, race to the bottom, reality distortion field, reshoring, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, six sigma, Skype, SoftBank, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, supply-chain management, Tesla Model S, The Chicago School, The Design of Experiments, the High Line, The Myth of the Rational Market, thinkpad, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, We are the 99%, Y Combinator, young professional, Zipcar

_nkw=Old+German&_sacat=717&_ odkw=german&_osacat=717, accessed September 8, 2012. 163 Amy and Joe began: “Little Alouette: Wood for Wee Ones.” 163 Kids “require so little”: “Little Alouette Has Big Plans for Baby Toys,” post by Walker, Columbus Underground, October 19, 2009, September 8, 2012, http://www.columbusunderground.com/ little-alouette-has-big-plans-for-baby-toys. 163 And for every purchase: http://www.etsy.com/listing/48850576/ little-alouette-wee-wood-moustache, accessed September 8, 2012. 163 In 2007, the Sharps opened: http://www.etsy.com/shop/littleal ouette, accessed September 8, 2012. 163 Rattles and teethers: http://www.littlealouette.com/blocks/ safari-free-play-block-set, accessed September 8, 2012. 164 Sharp is an Etsy mom: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mompre neur, accessed September 8, 2012; http://www.wisegeek.com/ what-is-a-mompreneur.htm, accessed September 8, 2012. 164 They set up shop, literally: “Little Alouette Has Big Plans for Baby Toys.” 164 millions who shop there: http://mywifequitherjob.com/etsystores/, accessed September 8, 2012. 164 Rob Kalin dropped out: Teri Evans, “Creating Etsy’s Handmade Marketplace,” Wall Street Journal, March 30, 2010, accessed September 8, 2012, http://online.wsj.com/article/ SB1000142405270230437030 4575152133860888958.html?mod=WSJ_hp_edi torsPicks; http://www.nyu.edu/about/university-initiatives/ entrepreneurship/nyu-ventures/ success-stories/etsy.html, accessed September 8, 2012. 164 His real passion: Evans, “Creating Etsy’s Handmade Marketplace.” 164 In 2005, he got two: http://www.nyu.edu/about/universityinitiatives/ entrepreneurship/nyu-ventures/success-stories/etsy.html, accessed September 8, 2012. 164 Headquarters were set up: http://www.etsy.com/help/article/486/, accessed September 8, 2012. 164 Etsy has 875,000 sellers: I am indebted to Larry Keeley of Doblin, part of the Monitor Group of consultants, for first showing me the importance of platforms and platform innovation.

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Like so many shops on the site, Etsy was founded by an artisan seeking a direct connection to customers. Rob Kalin dropped out of high school for a time before attending NYU in New York City. His real passion was making furniture, which he did out of his apartment in Brooklyn. But selling furniture proved to be more difficult. Kalin wanted to get directly in front of his customers, but there was no marketplace for his work. So he decided to build one. In 2005, he got two of his NYU friends to set up servers for a new e-commerce service that would allow producers to share their experiences and challenges with each other. A community of crafters, in other words.

…

But for other illnesses and treatments, the existing framework of health care is ill-suited, unnecessary, and expensive. For regular chemotherapy appointments, that’s especially true. In 2010, Irish Maliq, the Project Manager of Strategic Planning and Innovation at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, decided to do something about it: Maliq gathered students from NYU, Carnegie Mellon University, IIT Institute of Design, and Parsons The New School for Design to reframe the chemo experience. The first thing the team did was observe the patients getting chemo treatments and ask them how they felt about it. It became obvious that people took cars or subways long distances to get to the hospital and then had to return home just as they began to feel sick.

Custodians of the Internet: Platforms, Content Moderation, and the Hidden Decisions That Shape Social Media by Tarleton Gillespie

4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, affirmative action, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, AltaVista, Amazon Mechanical Turk, borderless world, Burning Man, complexity theory, conceptual framework, crowdsourcing, deep learning, do what you love, Donald Trump, drone strike, easy for humans, difficult for computers, Edward Snowden, eternal september, fake news, Filter Bubble, Gabriella Coleman, game design, gig economy, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, hiring and firing, Ian Bogost, independent contractor, Internet Archive, Jean Tirole, John Gruber, Kickstarter, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, Menlo Park, Minecraft, moral panic, multi-sided market, Netflix Prize, Network effects, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, power law, real-name policy, recommendation engine, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, Snapchat, social graph, social web, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, TED Talk, Telecommunications Act of 1996, two-sided market, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

JARRETT, KYLIE. 2014. “The Relevance of ‘Women’s Work’: Social Reproduction and Immaterial Labor in Digital Media.” Television and New Media 15 (1): 14–29. JENKINS, HENRY. 2006. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: NYU Press. JENKINS, HENRY, SAM FORD, AND JOSHUA GREEN. 2013. Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture. New York: NYU Press. JEONG, SARAH. 2015. The Internet of Garbage. Forbes Media. http://www.forbes.com/ebooks/the-internet-of-garbage/. JISC (JOINT INFORMATION SYSTEMS COMMITTEE). 2007. “Hosting Liability.” https://www.jisc.ac.uk/guides/hosting-liability.

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“The Legislative History of Senator Exon’s Communications Decency Act: Regulating Barbarians on the Information Superhighway.” Federal Communications Law Journal 49: 51. CHANDER, ANUPAM. 2014. “How Law Made Silicon Valley.” Emory Law Journal 63: 639–94. CHENEY-LIPPOLD, JOHN. 2017. We Are Data: Algorithms and the Making of Our Digital Selves. New York: NYU Press. CHENG, JUSTIN, CRISTIAN DANESCU-NICULESCU-MIZIL, AND JURE LESKOVEC. 2015. “Antisocial Behavior in Online Discussion Communities.” arXiv. http://arxiv.org/abs/1504.00680. CHESS, SHIRA, AND ADRIENNE SHAW. 2015. “A Conspiracy of Fishes, or, How We Learned to Stop Worrying about #GamerGate and Embrace Hegemonic Masculinity.”

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Cyber Rights: Defending Free Speech in the Digital Age. Rev. ed. Cambridge: MIT Press. GOLDSMITH, JACK, AND TIM WU. 2008. Who Controls the Internet? Illusions of a Borderless World. New York: Oxford University Press. GRAY, MARY L. 2009. Out in the Country: Youth, Media, and Queer Visibility in Rural America. New York: NYU Press. GRIMMELMANN, JAMES. 2014. “Speech Engines.” Minnesota Law Review 98 (3): 868–952. ———. 2015. “The Virtues of Moderation: Online Communities as Semicommons.” Yale Journal of Law and Technology 17 (42). GRIMMELMANN, JAMES, AND PAUL OHM. 2010. “Dr. Generative, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the iPhone.”

How Markets Fail: The Logic of Economic Calamities by John Cassidy

Abraham Wald, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, Andrei Shleifer, anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, asset allocation, asset-backed security, availability heuristic, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black-Scholes formula, Blythe Masters, book value, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, capital asset pricing model, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, centralized clearinghouse, collateralized debt obligation, Columbine, conceptual framework, Corn Laws, corporate raider, correlation coefficient, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, debt deflation, different worldview, diversification, Elliott wave, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, full employment, Garrett Hardin, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Gunnar Myrdal, Haight Ashbury, hiring and firing, Hyman Minsky, income per capita, incomplete markets, index fund, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, Landlord’s Game, liquidity trap, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, market bubble, market clearing, mental accounting, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Minsky moment, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, Naomi Klein, negative equity, Network effects, Nick Leeson, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Northern Rock, paradox of thrift, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, Ponzi scheme, precautionary principle, price discrimination, price stability, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, proprietary trading, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, random walk, Renaissance Technologies, rent control, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, statistical model, subprime mortgage crisis, tail risk, Tax Reform Act of 1986, technology bubble, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The Market for Lemons, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Two Sigma, unorthodox policies, value at risk, Vanguard fund, Vilfredo Pareto, wealth creators, zero-sum game

, March 3, 2009. 342 “a hedge fund, basically . . .”: Ibid. 343 “The goal is not . . .”: Viral V. Acharya and Matthew Richardson, “Repairing a Failed System: An Introduction,” White Paper, from the series “Restoring Financial Stability: Policy Recommendations from NYU Stern,” 2008, available at http://whitepapers.stern.nyu.edu/summaries/intro.html. 345 “[T]he typical graduate . . .”: Willem Buiter, “The Unfortunate Uselessness of Most ‘State of the Art’ Academic Monetary Economics,” Financial Times, March 3, 2009, available at www.ft.com/maverecon. 346 “Despite the enormity . . .”: N.

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Friedman and Arnold Harberger—the same Arnold Harberger who would later accompany Friedman to Pinochet’s Chile—backed him up. (According to one of Harberger’s studies, the economy-wide efficiency losses from monopoly amount to just one-tenth of 1 percent of GDP.) Later on, even some moderate economists, such as NYU’s William Baumol, argued that monopolies didn’t need to be exposed to actual competition in order to curb their predatory behavior: the mere threat of competition would do the job. During the administration of George W. Bush, antitrust policy was relaxed to favor big companies. In 2008, the Justice Department published guidelines making it much harder to sue big companies for predatory or anticompetitve behavior.

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On the basis of experiments such as these, it is tempting to view the participants in speculative bubbles as lemmings headed for a cliff. But even lemmings aren’t as stupid as they appear. (Recent research suggests that they don’t commit suicide en masse, as was once commonly believed.) In 1953, two psychologists from NYU, Morton Deutsch and Harold Gerard, repeated Asch’s vision test but with a slightly different setup. This time the subjects didn’t meet the other members of their group, and they didn’t have to answer publicly: they just pushed a button. However, before they gave their responses, the instructors told them the (often mistaken) answers that other people in the group had given.

Naked City: The Death and Life of Authentic Urban Places by Sharon Zukin

1960s counterculture, big-box store, blue-collar work, classic study, corporate social responsibility, crack epidemic, creative destruction, David Brooks, East Village, en.wikipedia.org, Frank Gehry, gentrification, Guggenheim Bilbao, Haight Ashbury, Jane Jacobs, late capitalism, mass immigration, messenger bag, new economy, New Urbanism, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, rent control, rent stabilization, Richard Florida, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, subprime mortgage crisis, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, W. E. B. Du Bois, white flight, working poor, Works Progress Administration, young professional

“Blight,” which urban planning officials in the 1950s sneeringly said was the problem with old neighborhoods like ours, has yielded to chic.9 Redevelopment began in the 1950s, to the south of Washington Square Park, when Robert Moses used federal government funds for urban renewal to demolish manufacturing lofts and replace them with faculty housing for NYU. Since then NYU has expanded northward and eastward block by block. Tompkins Square Park has been cleaned up and pacified by the Parks Department and the police. Bars have overtaken ethnic grocery stores; rising rents have pushed old tenants out. Real estate markets have been supported by the actions of government agencies: policing by the NYPD, rezoning by the City Planning Commission, liquor licensing by the State Liquor Authority.

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In an apartment where maybe a husband and wife [had lived], now there might be three or four students living … so [there was] more of a concentration of people, and a younger population. Then slowly … a big thing [happened]. A lot more people [were] in the neighborhood during the day.” Joe focuses on two big changes in the East Village at that time: the aging of the working-class residents and the arrival of artists and yuppies. Lana talks about how NYU started to expand into the area from its campus on Washington Square. Joe mentions the East Village art galleries. Like the artist who recalls hanging out in the galleries all day, they also remember young people, students, and artists practically taking up residence in the area’s growing number of cafés.

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This style of life usually appeals to men and women who have more cultural than financial capital and can’t afford to pay high rents. But they can pay more than longtime residents. By connecting in some way to the growing sectors of the mainstream economy—working as a free-lancer, getting a teaching job at NYU, or consulting for an investment bank—they are willing and able to pay more for the consumption of history that the East Village represents. For a long time the neighborhood offered a visible image of the jagged edges of the city’s uneven development, with its tenements and storefronts and dangerous, derelict streets.

Free as in Freedom by Sam Williams

Asperger Syndrome, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, Compatible Time-Sharing System, Debian, Douglas Engelbart, East Village, Eben Moglen, Free Software Foundation, Guido van Rossum, Hacker Ethic, informal economy, Isaac Newton, John Conway, John Gilmore, John Markoff, Ken Thompson, Larry Wall, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Maui Hawaii, Multics, Murray Gell-Mann, PalmPilot, profit motive, Project Xanadu, Richard Stallman, Silicon Valley, slashdot, software patent, Steven Levy, Ted Nelson, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, urban renewal, VA Linux, Y2K

Taken as a whole, the signs offer a reminder: even in the relatively tranquil confines of pre-September 11, 2001, New York, one can never be too careful or too suspicious. The signs offer an interesting thematic counterpoint to the growing number of visitors gathering in the hall's interior atrium. A few look like NYU students. Most look like shaggy-aired concert-goers milling outside a music hall in anticipation of the main act. For one brief morning, the masses have taken over Warren Weaver Hall, leaving the nearby security attendant with nothing better to do but watch Ricki Lake on TV and shrug her shoulders toward the nearby auditorium whenever visitors ask about "the speech."

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As announced over a host of hacker-related web sites, including the GNU Project's own http://www.gnu.org site, Stallman is in Manhattan, his former hometown, 15 to deliver a much anticipated speech in rebuttal to the Microsoft Corporation's recent campaign against the GNU General Public License. The subject of Stallman's speech is the history and future of the free software movement. The location is significant. Less than a month before, Microsoft senior vice president Craig Mundie appeared at the nearby NYU Stern School of Business, delivering a speech blasting the General Public License, or GPL, a legal device originally conceived by Stallman 16 years before. Built to counteract the growing wave of software secrecy overtaking the computer industry-a wave first noticed by Stallman during his 1980 troubles with the Xerox laser printer-the GPL has evolved into a central tool of the free software community.

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Added Mundie: It also fundamentally undermines the independent commercial software sector because it effectively makes it impossible to distribute software on a basis where recipients pay for the product rather than just the cost of distributionSee Craig Mundie, "The Commercial Software Model," senior vice president, Microsoft Corp. Excerpted from an online transcript of Mundie's May 3,speech to the New York University Stern School of Business. The mutual success of GNU/ LinuxThe acronym GNU stands for "GNU's not Unix." In another portion of the May 29, 2001, NYU speech, Stallman summed up the acronym's origin: We hackers always look for a funny or naughty name for a program, because naming a program is half the fun of writing the program. We also had a tradition of recursive acronyms, to say that the program that you're writing is similar to some 18 existing program … I looked for a recursive acronym for Something Is Not UNIX.

I Live in the Future & Here's How It Works: Why Your World, Work, and Brain Are Being Creatively Disrupted by Nick Bilton

3D printing, 4chan, Albert Einstein, augmented reality, barriers to entry, Cass Sunstein, death of newspapers, en.wikipedia.org, Internet of things, Joan Didion, John Gruber, John Markoff, Marshall McLuhan, Nicholas Carr, QR code, recommendation engine, RFID, Saturday Night Live, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, TED Talk, The future is already here

Time, May 5, 2009, http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1895737,00.html. 6 Walter Lippmann and John Dewey: The debate played out largely in the pages of The New Republic, in a series of articles dating from 1922 to 1927. Also: In-person interview, Jay Rosen, NYU School of Journalism, 2009 and in-person interview with Mitchel Stephens, author of A History of News and The Rise of the Image, the Fall of the Word, NYU School of Journalism, 2009. 7 Cyborgs: Gordon Bell and Steve Mann: Clive Thompson, “A Head for Detail,” Fast Company 110, November 1, 2006, http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/110/head-for-detail.html. Also: Personal discussion with Gordon Bell, Toronto, 2008, and personal discussion with Steve Mann, Toronto, 2008.

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But I don’t question the authenticity of our friendship just because our encounters are digital; instead, I appreciate the camaraderie as well as the interesting, though geeky, technology and media stories we exchange online. Jason is a whiz at finding fun and interesting design news. Though we met only once at a conference, he lives in San Francisco, and I might not be able to pull him out of a police lineup, I trust his design-news judgment more than that of some of my colleagues at the Times and NYU. I don’t see any lines between real-life friendships that involve talking or looking someone in the eye and virtual ones in which the communication is through e-mail or text messages. Any of those relationships can be good friendships. We may not drink beer or coffee together or exchange birthday and anniversary cards.

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That’s the case because the press made books available in the common languages of the men and women of Europe—English, French, and Spanish—instead of Latin. After that, books in a common language became a vehicle for helping a community define its shared ambitions, and the modern nations we know today developed. In addition, the concept of imagined communities goes way beyond geography: I am middle class, a meat eater, a rock climber, an NYU instructor, a reader of a certain genre of books, a drinker of a specific brand of coffee, and a devotee of the New York Times. These all represent different, but important, imagined communities for me. Some are connected and overlap, but most don’t, and they are all dynamic, subject to influence by other communities in my life.

Gaming the Vote: Why Elections Aren't Fair (And What We Can Do About It) by William Poundstone

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, book value, business cycle, Debian, democratizing finance, desegregation, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, Everything should be made as simple as possible, global village, guest worker program, guns versus butter model, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, invisible hand, jimmy wales, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, manufacturing employment, Nash equilibrium, Paul Samuelson, Pierre-Simon Laplace, prisoner's dilemma, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, slashdot, the map is not the territory, Thomas Bayes, Tragedy of the Commons, transcontinental railway, Unsafe at Any Speed, Y2K

172 Story about Robert Lincoln, Equinox House: Ward 1992. 173 A score (twenty-three) cities used S1V: Cabrera 2006. 174 "I consider PR [proportional representation] the most un-American": www.nyu.edu/ gsas/deptlhistory/public~historyIPR. 174 Figures for city council seal" Ibid. 174 "complicated, trying the voters' patience '. Ibid. 174 "there is among the PR groups"; lhid, 175 Staller biography; wwwrotten.comllibrary/bio/entertaineruactors/ciccioJinal, 175 "'Stalin Frankenstein' Project": www.nyu.edu/gsasfdeptlhistorylpublic_historyfPR. 175 "By [960 there was only Cambridge"; Richie, interview, Tacoma Park, Md., Oct. 9, 2006. 176 "I am quite prepared to be told"; Black 1958, 230. 177 "Suppose A to be the candidate"; Ibid., 232. 177 'This prindple of voting": Ibid., 233. 177 Decision to use Gingrich in 1V arlo Morris 1997, 184. 178 Falwell On Clinton and Lucifer: Potter 2006. 178 Riker biography, Bueno De Mesquita and Shepsle 2001. 179 Riker interpreted Powell amendment as Condorcet cycle: Riker 1958 and 1965. 180 "has been seized upon": Riker 1982,154, 180 "The main thrust of Arrow's theorem": Ibid., 136. 181 "consigns democratic outcomes-and hence the democratic method", Ibid" 119.

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"Rejoinder to Saari and Van Newenhizen," Public Choke 59, 149. Brarns, SlevenJ., ~nd P~ul Hager (2002). "Why the Academy Awards May Fail to Pick the 'Best Picture' Again." www.cs-indiana.edu!-hagerp/ampas_nyu.htm. Btams, Steven J., and Samuel Merrill III (1994). "Would Ross Perot Have Won the 1992 Presidential Election Under Approval Voting?" PS, Po!itiml Science and Polirics 27: 39--44. Brams, Steven j., and M, Remzi Sanver (2006). "Voting Systems That Combine Approval and Preference." www.nyu.eduigsasideptipoliticslfacultylbramslapprovaLpreference,pdf. '1' Sources Bmun, Stephen, and Ralph Vartabedian (2005), "Levees Weakened as New Orleans Board, Federal Engineers Feuded."

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He could not believe how high the salaries of the other economics professors were, and how low his own salary was in comparison. For someone with Morgenstern's self-esteem (and belief in market valuations), this finding was impossible to accept. He did not accept it. In 1970 he severed ties with Princeton and took a professorship at New York University. Once again, Morgenstern was more or less cast adrift by fate. At NYU he met a young political scientist named Steven Srams. Srams revered Morgenstern as a living legend, and Bcams's wife, who happened to be Austrian, charmed the elderly economist. The couple socialized with Morgenstern-until he became too ill to socialize with anyone. Srams visited Morgenstern on his deathbed.

The Big Nine: How the Tech Titans and Their Thinking Machines Could Warp Humanity by Amy Webb

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Ada Lovelace, AI winter, air gap, Airbnb, airport security, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Andy Rubin, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Bayesian statistics, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bioinformatics, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Bretton Woods, business intelligence, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, cognitive bias, complexity theory, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, CRISPR, cross-border payments, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, distributed ledger, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fail fast, fake news, Filter Bubble, Flynn Effect, Geoffrey Hinton, gig economy, Google Glasses, Grace Hopper, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Herman Kahn, high-speed rail, Inbox Zero, Internet of things, Jacques de Vaucanson, Jeff Bezos, Joan Didion, job automation, John von Neumann, knowledge worker, Lyft, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, move fast and break things, Mustafa Suleyman, natural language processing, New Urbanism, Nick Bostrom, one-China policy, optical character recognition, packet switching, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, personalized medicine, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, seminal paper, SETI@home, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Skype, smart cities, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, strong AI, superintelligent machines, surveillance capitalism, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, the long tail, theory of mind, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, Turing machine, Turing test, uber lyft, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, zero day

Focusing on beating humans in direct competition has led to neglecting other ways of measuring and advancing AI. The Winograd schema was intended as a more multidimensional test because passing it requires more than a broad data set. Ernest Davis, Leora Morgenstern, and Charles Ortiz, three computer scientists at NYU, proposed the Winograd Schema Challenge, which is run once a year. They offer a terrific example on their faculty website (last accessed September 5, 2018, https://cs.nyu.edu/faculty/davise/papers/WinogradSchemas/WS.html): The city councilmen refused the demonstrators a permit because they [feared/advocated] violence. If the word is “feared,” then “they” refers to the city council; if it is “advocated,” then “they” presumably refers to the demonstrators.

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My sincerest thanks to Nicholas Burns, Condoleezza Rice, Joseph Nye, and Jonathon Price for the invitation and to Carla Anne Robbins, Richard Danzig, James Baker, Wendy Sherman, Christian Brose, Eric Rosenbach, Susan Schwab, Ann-Marie Slaughter, Bob Zoellick, Philip Zelikow, Dov Zakheim, Laura Rosenberger, and Mike Green for all of their valuable feedback. A lot of my thinking happened on the campus of NYU’s Stern School of Business, which has been a tremendously supportive professional home for my research. I’m grateful to Professor Sam Craig for bringing me into the MBA program and for advising me the past few years. I cannot say enough about the incredibly bright, creative MBA students who have taken my classes.

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Three recent Stern graduates in particular—Kriffy Perez, Elena Giralt, and Roy Levkovitz—were wonderful sounding boards as I modeled the futures of AI. I’m lucky to have in my life a group of sages who offer counsel and advice. All of the work I do is better because of them. Danny Stern changed my life a few years ago when he asked me to meet him one day on the NYU campus. He taught me how to think more exponentially and showed me how to make my research connect with much wider audiences. His partner at Stern Strategy Group, Mel Blake, has spent hundreds of hours mentoring me, shaping my ideas, and helping me to see the world around me differently. They are a continual source of inspiration, motivation, and (as they know) perspiration.

Dream Hoarders: How the American Upper Middle Class Is Leaving Everyone Else in the Dust, Why That Is a Problem, and What to Do About It by Richard V. Reeves

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, An Inconvenient Truth, assortative mating, Bernie Sanders, Branko Milanovic, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, circulation of elites, cognitive dissonance, desegregation, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, full employment, ghettoisation, glass ceiling, helicopter parent, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, income inequality, knowledge economy, land value tax, longitudinal study, meritocracy, mortgage tax deduction, obamacare, Occupy movement, plutocrats, positional goods, precautionary principle, race to the bottom, randomized controlled trial, restrictive zoning, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, working-age population, zero-sum game

The second degree is a “positional good,” valued precisely because not everybody can have one. Entry to the upper middle class now requires not one framed certificate, but two. A postgraduate degree has in fact become the most important means for transmitting status to the next generation, according to NYU economist Florencia Torche. “Intergenerational reproduction declines among college graduates,” she reports, “but reemerges among advanced degree holders, questioning the meritocratic character of labor markets for skilled workers.”43 (Well, Professor Torche, that depends on how you define “merit.” But I’ll get to that soon.)

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They are just as “stuck” at the top of the income ladder as the poor kids are at the bottom. Chetty’s data is not unusual: every scholar working in this field with any dataset finds that there is at least as much stickiness at the top as at the bottom of the distribution, and many find that there is more. NYU’s Florencia Torche found stronger intergenerational income persistence at the top than at the bottom. “Children of wealthy parents,” she says, “are more homogeneously wealthy than children of poor parents are homogeneously poor.”5 Stanford’s Pablo Mitnik and David Grusky used another measure of mobility—intergenerational elasticity (IGE)—and also found more stickiness at the top than at the bottom.6 Whatever measure is chosen, the pattern is the same.

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As with legacy preferences, policy changes will need to be accompanied with if not preceded by a shift in attitudes. Right now, Americans are literally shameless about the way they hand out and take up internships. But this could change. Social norms and social institutions evolve. “Behavior that is seen in one social setting as an admirable expression of parental concern,” NYU philosopher Samuel Scheffler points out, “may be seen in another as an intolerable form of favoritism or nepotism.”59 A comparison between the United Kingdom and the United States makes the point. In the United Kingdom, the handing out of internships to your own children, de Blasio style, would be political suicide.

All the Money in the World by Peter W. Bernstein

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, book value, call centre, Carl Icahn, Charles Lindbergh, clean tech, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, currency peg, David Brooks, Donald Trump, estate planning, Fairchild Semiconductor, family office, financial engineering, financial innovation, George Gilder, high net worth, invisible hand, Irwin Jacobs: Qualcomm, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job-hopping, John Markoff, junk bonds, Larry Ellison, Long Term Capital Management, Marc Andreessen, Martin Wolf, Maui Hawaii, means of production, mega-rich, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, new economy, Norman Mailer, PageRank, Peter Singer: altruism, pez dispenser, popular electronics, Quicken Loans, Renaissance Technologies, Rod Stewart played at Stephen Schwarzman birthday party, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, school vouchers, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, shareholder value, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, SoftBank, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, tech baron, tech billionaire, Teledyne, the new new thing, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, traveling salesman, urban planning, wealth creators, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce

Yet BP Capital Management has made him richer than ever. In 2006 Forbes estimated his net worth at $2.7 billion. For many others, failure ends in a slide that takes them off the 400 list, never to return. But there is an upside to even the worst bankruptcies—if not for the individual, then for the larger society, argues George Smith of NYU’s Stern School of Business. Smith says it is fortunate that entrepreneurs are willing to stick their necks out, because for every one hundred people who take a risk there is a chance that one will succeed. The United States, he points out, has made it relatively easy for people to fail because of a legal system and bankruptcy laws and protections that give failed entrepreneurs a “soft landing.”

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Larry Page #13 They’ve also invested in the Tesla roadster, a sports car with an electronic engine, which sells for $100,000 and has a range of 200 miles on the highway and 270 miles in stop-and-go city driving without a recharge. Steven Ballmer #15 1998 Lincoln Continental He grew up in Motor City, USA, which may explain his preference for a maroon Continental. * * * It goes without saying that art isn’t just a status symbol or an expensive hobby; it can also be a great investment. A study by NYU’s Jianping Mei and Michael Moses78 showed that between 1996 and 2006 postwar and contemporary art performed better than the S&P 500 Total Return Index. Art can also have tax benefits. Banking tycoon Andrew Mellon saved on his enormous estate tax bill by donating his art collection to the nation just before his death; it would become the National Gallery in Washington, D.C.

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But Vilar misjudged the depth of the high-tech market crash; as the NASDAQ plunged in 2001, Amerindo began to pay a hefty price. Still, his declining fortunes apparently didn’t rein in his urge to give. He pledged to donate more than $100 million that year to the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., Columbia University’s medical school, NYU, and, of course, opera houses. “Asking Alberto for money34 was like offering an alcoholic a drink,” a friend of Vilar’s told New Yorker writer James B. Stewart. Not surprisingly, Vilar was finding it tough to follow through on his pledges. He began to miss payment due dates. For the first time since he had joined the Met’s board in 1996, Vilar skipped a meeting in spring 2003.

Your Computer Is on Fire by Thomas S. Mullaney, Benjamin Peters, Mar Hicks, Kavita Philip

"Susan Fowler" uber, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, affirmative action, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, AltaVista, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, An Inconvenient Truth, Asilomar, autonomous vehicles, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boeing 737 MAX, book value, British Empire, business cycle, business process, Californian Ideology, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, collective bargaining, computer age, computer vision, connected car, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, dark matter, data science, Dennis Ritchie, deskilling, digital divide, digital map, don't be evil, Donald Davies, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, fake news, financial innovation, Ford Model T, fulfillment center, game design, gentrification, George Floyd, glass ceiling, global pandemic, global supply chain, Grace Hopper, hiring and firing, IBM and the Holocaust, industrial robot, informal economy, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Ken Thompson, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Landlord’s Game, Lewis Mumford, low-wage service sector, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, mobile money, moral panic, move fast and break things, Multics, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, new economy, Norbert Wiener, off-the-grid, old-boy network, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), packet switching, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, pink-collar, pneumatic tube, postindustrial economy, profit motive, public intellectual, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Kurzweil, Reflections on Trusting Trust, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, Salesforce, sentiment analysis, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, smart cities, Snapchat, speech recognition, SQL injection, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, tacit knowledge, tech worker, techlash, technoutopianism, telepresence, the built environment, the map is not the territory, Thomas L Friedman, TikTok, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, undersea cable, union organizing, vertical integration, warehouse robotics, WikiLeaks, wikimedia commons, women in the workforce, Y2K

Ford, Think Black: A Memoir (New York: Amistad, 2019). 11. Simone Browne, Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness (Durham, NC: Duke, 2015). See also Ruha Benjamin, Race after Technology (New York: Polity, 2019). 12. Clyde W. Ford, Think Black: A Memoir (New York: Amistad, 2019). 13. Safiya Noble, Algorithms of Oppression (New York: NYU Press, 2018). 14. David Golumbia, “Do You Oppose Bad Technology, or Democracy?,” Medium (April 24, 2019), https://medium.com/@davidgolumbia/do-you-oppose-bad-technology-or-democracy-c8bab5e53b32. 15. Nick Statt, “Google Dissolves AI Ethics Board Just One Week after Forming It: Not a Great Sign,” The Verge (April 4, 2019), https://www.theverge.com/2019/4/4/18296113/google-ai-ethics-board-ends-controversy-kay-coles-james-heritage-foundation. 16.

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Ali Winston and Ingrid Burrington, “A Pioneer in Predictive Policing Is Starting a Troubling New Project,” The Verge (April 26, 2018), https://www.theverge.com/2018/4/26/17285058/predictive-policing-predpol-pentagon-ai-racial-bias. 42. “How CEP’s EGLYPH Technology Works,” Counter Extremism Project (December 8, 2016), https://www.counterextremism.com/video/how-ceps-eglyph-technology-works. 43. Safiya Umoja Noble, Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism (New York: NYU Press, 2018). 44. Siva Vaidhyanathan, Antisocial Media: How Facebook Disconnects Us and Undermines Democracy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018); Virginia Eubanks, Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2018). 45. “ACM FAT*,” accessed August 1, 2018, https://fatconference.org/. 46.

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Janet Abbate, Inventing the Internet (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999); Paul N. Edwards, The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996); Finn Burton, Spam: A Shadow History of the Internet (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013); Thomas Streeter, The Net Effect: Romanticism, Capitalism, and the Internet (New York: NYU Press, 2011). See also Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon, Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins of the Internet (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996) and Walter Isaacson, The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014). 6. Peters, How Not to Network a Nation, 1–13.

Introduction to Tornado by Michael Dory, Adam Parrish, Brendan Berg

don't repeat yourself, Firefox, social web, web application, WebSocket

Mike would like to express his eternal gratitude to his family and friends for their constant support and encouragement, especially to Jean and John Dory, who understood that a love of blinky lights and black coffee might turn into something useful after all. A big thanks is due to the NYU ITP alumni, faculty, and staff that serve as a constant feed of guidance, support, and ever-evolving inspiration. And most importantly, to his wife Rita, whose encouragement, advice, and understanding made this and everything else possible. Adam is indebted to his students at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program, for whom much of the material in early chapters of the book was originally prepared. Their enthusiasm for the material proved that a book like this one would have an audience, and their helpful feedback made the book better.

The Cheating Culture: Why More Americans Are Doing Wrong to Get Ahead by David Callahan

1960s counterculture, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, business cycle, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, David Brooks, deindustrialization, East Village, eat what you kill, fixed income, forensic accounting, full employment, game design, greed is good, high batting average, housing crisis, illegal immigration, income inequality, job satisfaction, junk bonds, mandatory minimum, market fundamentalism, Mary Meeker, McMansion, Michael Milken, microcredit, moral hazard, multilevel marketing, new economy, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, oil shock, old-boy network, PalmPilot, plutocrats, postindustrial economy, profit maximization, profit motive, RAND corporation, Ray Oldenburg, rent stabilization, Robert Bork, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Chicago School, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, War on Poverty, winner-take-all economy, World Values Survey, young professional, zero-sum game

The Neurontin scandal is only one of many prescription drug scandals that have recently rocked the medical world. ♦ A reporter is writing an article on Ronald Zarrella, the CEO of Bausch & Lomb. Checking Zarrella's background, the reporter discovers that NYU's School of Business Administration has no record of the M.B.A. that Zarrella says he earned there. Confronted with this information, Zarrella confirms that, in fact, he did not get an M.B.A. from NYU as he had long contended. This revelation is just the latest in a spate of résumé-faking cases, including ones involving high-profile people like George O'Leary, the former Notre Dame football coach; Kenneth Lonchar, the former chief financial officer of Veritas software; and Sandra Baldwin, the former president of the U.S.

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The lie cost him over $1 million—a pittance, given that his fake credentials had helped him make many millions of dollars before he was unmasked.34 A year earlier, George O'Leary was hired as Notre Dame's football coach in a seven-figure deal—and fired shortly afterward when it was learned that he had lied about having a master's degree from NYU. (What is it about NYU?) O'Leary's brother Tom offered a spirited defense of him to a Sports Illustrated reporter: "Is anyone trying to tell me that résumés are truthful? In the America we live in, the willingness to lie on a résumé is an indication of how much you want the job."35 Olympic head Sandra Baldwin is another high-profile figure recently ousted from a lucrative job after the truth caught up with her.

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As the prizes for the winners have increased, people have become more willing to do whatever it takes to be a winner. A CEO will inflate earnings reports to please Wall Street—and increase the value of his stock options by $50 million. An A student will cheat to get the A+ that she believes, correctly, could make the difference between Harvard and a lifetime of big opportunities—or NYU and fewer opportunities. A steady .325 hitter will take steroids to build the muscles needed to be a slugger—and make $12 million a year instead of a mere $3 million. A journalist will fabricate sources in his quest to write as many hit pieces as possible—so that the day arrives sooner rather than later when he can command six-figure book deals and get lucrative lecture gigs.

Ayn Rand Cult by Jeff Walker

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, buy and hold, credit crunch, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Doomsday Book, Elliott wave, gentleman farmer, George Gilder, Herbert Marcuse, Jane Jacobs, laissez-faire capitalism, Lewis Mumford, market fundamentalism, Michael Milken, Money creation, Mont Pelerin Society, price stability, Ralph Waldo Emerson, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Savings and loan crisis, school vouchers, Tipper Gore, Torches of Freedom

Despite having no Ph.D. in economics and little esteem in academia, Greenspan was sworn in as, in a sense, the nation’s leading economist. And there in the front row at the White House ceremony sat Ayn Rand. Two days before she had told a reporter, “Alan is my disciple.” Greenspan did eventually get his Ph.D. from NYU in 1977, but it was apparently for articles he had written that NYU then conveniently lost, notes Lewis, making it the most suspect doctorate since Nathaniel Branden’s California Graduate Institute diploma. Comments neo-Objectivist Victor Niederhoffer, author of The Education of a Speculator, “As far as I know, no one has ever seen or read Greenspan’s dissertation.”

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Murray Rothbard and his Cercle Bastiat briefly intersect with Rand’s inner circle. 1960–1962 John Hospers has many philosophical discussions with Rand. 1962 The Objectivist Newsletter begins publication. 1962 John Hospers is excommunicated by Rand. Who Is Ayn Rand? by Nathaniel and Barbara Branden published. 1964 April, Rand pushes Nathan to resume their affair, she at age 59, he at 34. The Virtue of Selfishness published. Leonard Peikoff obtains his Ph.D. in philosophy from NYU. 1966 Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal published. 1966–1971 The Objectivist journal published. 1967 NBI moves to offices in the Empire State Building, signing 15-year $500,000 lease. 1968 Edith Efron is excommunicated by Rand. The Break: The Brandens and all who will not shun them are excommunicated by Rand.

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Many former cultists say that early college classes destabilized their worldview and bewildered them, preparing them for the certainty offered by the cult. Rand criticized professors for disorienting students, while in effect capitalizing upon the disorientation. Kay Nolte Smith recalls that a friend took her in 1957 to an NYU lecture by Rand who said that everyone has a philosophy of life, the only choice being whether one is going to know it consciously or not. For Smith this was “a blinding epiphany. I thought ‘my God, she’s right’—everybody’s actions are governed by some kind of thoughts,” so it’s incumbent on us to know consciously what those are.

Efficiently Inefficient: How Smart Money Invests and Market Prices Are Determined by Lasse Heje Pedersen

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, Andrei Shleifer, asset allocation, backtesting, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Black-Scholes formula, book value, Brownian motion, business cycle, buy and hold, buy low sell high, buy the rumour, sell the news, capital asset pricing model, commodity trading advisor, conceptual framework, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, currency peg, currency risk, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, discounted cash flows, diversification, diversified portfolio, Emanuel Derman, equity premium, equity risk premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial engineering, fixed income, Flash crash, floating exchange rates, frictionless, frictionless market, global macro, Gordon Gekko, implied volatility, index arbitrage, index fund, interest rate swap, junk bonds, late capitalism, law of one price, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, managed futures, margin call, market clearing, market design, market friction, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, merger arbitrage, money market fund, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, New Journalism, paper trading, passive investing, Phillips curve, price discovery process, price stability, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, Robert Shiller, selection bias, shareholder value, Sharpe ratio, short selling, short squeeze, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, stocks for the long run, stocks for the long term, survivorship bias, systematic trading, tail risk, technology bubble, time dilation, time value of money, total factor productivity, transaction costs, two and twenty, value at risk, Vanguard fund, yield curve, zero-coupon bond

Before forming his investment management firm, he was a general partner of Gruss Partners and a managing director in mergers and acquisitions at Bear Stearns. LHP: How did you originally get interested in event-driven investment? JAP: I first learned about risk arbitrage when I was a student at NYU and I signed up for a seminar-type course taught by Gustave Levy. He was the Chairman of Goldman Sachs and a graduate of NYU, and he had previously run the risk arb desk at Goldman Sachs. Unfortunately, right before the course started, Gustave Levy passed away. John Whitehead was made the Chairman, and John Whitehead stepped into Gustave’s shoes and took over the class.

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I became an insider in the asset management world and finally had access to people who knew how securities are traded, how leverage is financed, and how trading strategies are executed, both my colleagues at AQR and, through them, the rest of Wall Street. Most excitingly, my own research was being put into practice. After a year, AQR convinced me to take a leave of absence from NYU to join them full time starting on July 1, 2007. Moving from Greenwich Village to Greenwich, CT, the first big shock was how dark and quiet it was at night compared to the constant buzz of Manhattan, but a bigger shock was around the corner. My job was to develop new systematic trading strategies as a member of the Global Asset Allocation team, focusing on global equity indices, bonds, commodities, and currencies, and I also had opportunities to contribute to the research going on in the Global Stock Selection and arbitrage teams.

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Here was a real-life liquidity spiral, all too similar to that in my theoretical model. It is difficult to explain the emotional reaction to seeing many millions being lost, but it hurts. It hurt even though the strategies that I had worked on were actually unaffected and even though I had a tenured lifetime appointment at NYU to return to. It has been said that you cannot explain what it is like to be in a war unless you experience bullets flying over your head, and I think something similar holds for being in the midst of a trading crisis. I understand why most of the successful managers whom I interviewed for this book emphasize the importance of self-discipline.

In Pursuit of Privilege: A History of New York City's Upper Class and the Making of a Metropolis by Clifton Hood

affirmative action, British Empire, Carl Icahn, coherent worldview, Cornelius Vanderbilt, David Brooks, death of newspapers, deindustrialization, family office, gentrification, Golden Gate Park, Google Earth, jitney, mass immigration, new economy, New Urbanism, P = NP, plutocrats, Ray Oldenburg, ride hailing / ride sharing, Scientific racism, selection bias, Steven Levy, streetcar suburb, The Great Good Place, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, tontine, trade route, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, urban planning, We are the 99%, white flight

In 1965 Columbia’s twenty-four-person board embodied clubby Old New York, an all-male and mostly WASP bastion that had only three Jews and two Catholics. The NYU board of trustees was significantly more varied. In 1965 it had three women: Brooke Astor, the principal heir to the Astor family fortune; Mary W. Lasker, a philanthropist in the field of medical research; and Ruth L. Farkas, the wife of the owner of Alexander’s department stores. Nearly a third of the thirty-nine NYU trustees were Jews, including the heads of the Lehman Brothers; Kuhn, Loeb; Lazard Frères; and Loeb, Rhoades investment banks. Aware that Jewish leaders were grossly underrepresented on the boards of almost every other major New York City nonprofit, NYU administrators seem to have tapped upper-class Jewish networks as a growth strategy that aided its subsequent resurgence.86 Because the two universities had civic missions and because their boards were a key part of their public faces, both boards augmented their social diversity.

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Aware that Jewish leaders were grossly underrepresented on the boards of almost every other major New York City nonprofit, NYU administrators seem to have tapped upper-class Jewish networks as a growth strategy that aided its subsequent resurgence.86 Because the two universities had civic missions and because their boards were a key part of their public faces, both boards augmented their social diversity. By 1980 half of NYU’s trustees were Jewish. In 1980 Columbia’s twenty-three-person board contained two women and at least seven Jews and six Catholics, a marked improvement over 1965. Each board included a single African American in 1980. The numbers of women and particularly African Americans remained small, but some members of the newly included groups were blue-chip businesspeople (and major donors) who were in a position to make their presence felt rather than simply be symbols.

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MMA Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, N.Y. MO Metropolitan Opera Archives, New York, N.Y. N-YHS Library, New-York Historical Society, New York, N.Y. NYPL Manuscripts and Archives Division, New York Public Library, New York, N.Y. NYSEA New York Stock Exchange Archives, New York, N.Y. NYU New York University Archives, Bobst Library, New York University, New York, N.Y. PU Seeley G. Mudd Manuscript Library, Princeton University, Princeton, N.J. RAC Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow, N.Y. NOTES INTRODUCTION 1. L. P. Hartley, The Go-Between (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1953; repr., New York: New York Review of Books, 2002), 17. 2.

The Last Girlfriend on Earth: And Other Love Stories by Simon Rich

British Empire, place-making, pre–internet, Saturday Night Live

That night, I poke my head out of wallet and look around pocket. It is dark, but I can see we have new neighbor. He says his name is Cigarettes Gauloises. He is very polite, but I get “weird vibe” from him. It is about this time that I meet strip of notebook paper. On him is written rachelfeingold@nyu.edu. Now we’re getting somewhere, MetroCard says. I have never been more frightened in my life. IV. That Saturday, five crisp Twenties show up. I assume they will stay long time, like most Twenties. But two hours later, they are gone, replaced by receipt La Cucina. MetroCard looks at receipt La Cucina and laughs.

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I do not really want to move in with them, but what can I do? I figure this is “end of the line” for me. Suddenly, though, Jordan carries me away—to other side of room. I am placed inside shoe box under his bed. At first, I am afraid, because it is dark, but as vision adjusts I see I am not alone. There is strip of notebook paper rachelfeingold@nyu.edu. There is receipt La Cucina, on which is now written, “first date.” I spend long, long time in shoe box. When I arrive, I am “new guy.” But as time passes, I become veteran. I welcome many new friends: Birthday card Rachel. Happy Valentine’s Day Rachel. And many, many Post-it Notes Rachel. I love you, Jordi.

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One way or another. By its fifth week, the movement had gone national, with sympathy protests springing up on campuses across the country. Some of the demonstrations had turned violent. At the University of Mississippi, six students were teargassed. (The incident was blamed on “poor officer training.”) At NYU, kids were skipping lectures in protest of Jen. Few professors complained; some even joined their students on the streets. The most dramatic moment came six weeks into the movement. Jen had been avoiding the front entrance to her dormitory for some time. But one day, the back entrance was closed for construction and she had no choice but to cross the picket line.

Infinite Powers: How Calculus Reveals the Secrets of the Universe by Steven Strogatz

Albert Einstein, Asperger Syndrome, Astronomia nova, Bernie Sanders, clockwork universe, complexity theory, cosmological principle, Dava Sobel, deep learning, DeepMind, double helix, Edmond Halley, Eratosthenes, four colour theorem, fudge factor, Henri Poincaré, invention of the telescope, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, Johannes Kepler, John Harrison: Longitude, Khan Academy, Laplace demon, lone genius, music of the spheres, pattern recognition, Paul Erdős, Pierre-Simon Laplace, precision agriculture, retrograde motion, Richard Feynman, Socratic dialogue, Steve Jobs, the rule of 72, the scientific method

27 Plutarch: The Plutarch quotes are from John Dryden’s translation of Plutarch’s Marcellus, available online at http://classics.mit.edu/Plutarch/marcellu.html. The specific passages about Archimedes and the siege of Syracuse are also available at https://www.math.nyu.edu/~crorres/Archimedes/Siege/Plutarch.html. 27 “made him forget his food”: http://classics.mit.edu/Plutarch/marcellu.html. 27 “carried by absolute violence to bathe”: Ibid. 27 Vitruvius: The Eureka story, as first told by Vitruvius, is available in Latin and English at https://www.math.nyu.edu/~crorres/Archimedes/Crown/Vitruvius.html. That site also includes a children’s version of the story by the acclaimed writer James Baldwin, taken from Thirty More Famous Stories Retold (New York: American Book Company, 1905).

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That site also includes a children’s version of the story by the acclaimed writer James Baldwin, taken from Thirty More Famous Stories Retold (New York: American Book Company, 1905). Unfortunately, Baldwin and Vitruvius oversimplify Archimedes’s solution to the problem of the king’s golden crown. Rorres offers a more plausible account at https://www.math.nyu.edu/~crorres/Archimedes/Crown/CrownIntro.html, along with Galileo’s guess regarding how Archimedes might have solved it (https://www.math.nyu.edu/~crorres/Archimedes/Crown/bilancetta.html). 28 “A ship was frequently lifted up”: http://classics.mit.edu/Plutarch/marcellu.html. 29 estimate pi: Stein, Archimedes, chapter 11, shows in detail how Archimedes did it. Be prepared for some hairy arithmetic. 33 existence of irrational numbers: No one really knows who first proved that the square root of 2 is irrational or, equivalently, that the diagonal of a square is incommensurable with its side.

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For philosophy, see S. Weinstein and D. Rickles, “Quantum Gravity,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/quantum-gravity/. 2. The Man Who Harnessed Infinity 27 Archimedes: For his life, see Netz and Noel, The Archimedes Codex, and C. Rorres, “Archimedes,” https://www.math.nyu.edu/~crorres/Archimedes/contents.html. For a scholarly biography, see M. Clagett, “Archimedes,” in Gillispie, Complete Dictionary, vol. 1, with amendments by F. Acerbi in vol. 19. For Archimedes’s mathematics, Stein, Archimedes, and Edwards, The Historical Development, chapter 2, are both outstanding, but see also Katz, History of Mathematics, sections 3.1–3.3, and Burton, History of Mathematics, section 4.5.

The Death of Cancer: After Fifty Years on the Front Lines of Medicine, a Pioneering Oncologist Reveals Why the War on Cancer Is Winnable--And How We Can Get There by Vincent T. Devita, Jr., M. D., Elizabeth Devita-Raeburn

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, double helix, Frances Oldham Kelsey, mouse model, personalized medicine, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, Ronald Reagan, stem cell, three-martini lunch

.; National Cancer Act and; war on cancer and Nobel Prize non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma (NHL) Northwestern University Norton, Larry Norton-Simon effect NSAIDS Nuremberg Code nurses NYU cancer center Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Office of Medical Research Oliverio, Vince oncogenes Oncologic Drugs Advisory Committee (ODAC) oncology Oncovin optimism Osler, Sir William ovarian cancer ovaries Oxford University oxidative phosphorylation Paget, Stephen pancreatic cancer papilloma virus paralysis pathologists patient history Pazdur, Richard PD-1 PDQ Pel-Ebstein fever penicillin perimenopause Perlmutter Cancer Center, NYU Perry, Sy Peters, Vera pharmaceutical industry; FDA and; NCI and; new drug development; profits; see also specific companies and drugs pharmacology phase I trials phase II trials phosgene physical exam placebo placenta plasma cells platelets; transfusions platinum analogs PLX4032 pneumococcal meningitis pneumonia polymyxin B POMP potassium prednisone pregnancy President’s Cancer Panel prevention procarbazine prostate cancer; chemotherapy and radiation; of DeVita; diagnosis; hormone deprivation therapy; median survival; mortality rates; recurrence prostatectomy prostate gland; enlarged; removal of prostatitis Provenge PSA; elevated; prostate cancer and PSA test pseudomonas meningitis pseudomonas rectal infections Public Health Service pulmonary edema Quinn, Luke radiation; adjuvant chemotherapy; breast cancer and; chemotherapy vs.; dosage; dosimetry and; history of; for Hodgkin’s disease; improved technology; at Memorial Sloan Kettering; MOPP vs.; for prostate cancer; risk of future cancers from; side effects; survival rates; at Yale Cancer Center radical mastectomy radium Rall, Dave Rand Corporation randomized controlled trials RARA Rauscher, Frank Rauscher leukemia virus Reagan, Ronald rectal cancer recurrence; “critical period” and; prostate cancer red blood cells Reed, Dorothy Reed, John Reed-Sternberg cell Reid, Featherstone Reinhardt, Paul Relman, Bud remission; complete; Hodgkin’s disease Republican Party research, cancer; angiostatins; beginning of war on cancer; childhood leukemia studies; CMF period; common cancers; extramural; FDA approval of drugs and; funding; future of; Hodgkin’s disease studies; immunotherapy; intramural; Mary Lasker and; Memorial Sloan Kettering; MOMP; MOPP; National Cancer Act and; NCI cancer drug program; of 1970s; of 1980s; RO1 grants; turf battles; university cancer center model; VAMP; war on cancer; wartime embargo; Yale Cancer Center; see also specific doctors, hospitals, methods, and organizations resistance, drug retroperitoneal space rheumatoid arthritis Rhoads, Cornelius “Dusty” Rivers, Joan RNA Robbins, Guy Robinson, James D.

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In both cases, senators had intervened on their behalf and told the NCI, in no uncertain terms, that it had to fund them. But even without government intervention, the NCI has leeway in extending center grants under special circumstances, to allow a center to try to get its act together. Many centers, including Yale, Herbert Irving at Columbia, NYU, and the Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center at the University of Miami, have had their grants extended via political favor to avoid the embarrassment of losing NCI designation. Nonetheless, these centers also went on to be outstanding. Twice, I got Yale’s core grant approved by finessing the truth.

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This presentation took place in a small room with only a few people in attendance. The president of the hospital didn’t bother to show up. I tell you this story not to pillory Yale particularly, though it behaved badly with regard to its obligations to the war on cancer and to its patients, just as Mary Lasker had feared. The cancer centers at NYU, Columbia, Albert Einstein, Jefferson Medical College, University of Chicago, University of California, San Diego, UCLA, University of Miami, University of Colorado, Georgetown University, Duke, University of Alabama, University of Virginia, Wake Forest University, Emory, University of Hawaii, and Northwestern University, just to name a few more typical of the genre, had virtually the same problems.

The Airbnb Story: How Three Ordinary Guys Disrupted an Industry, Made Billions...and Created Plenty of Controversy by Leigh Gallagher

Abraham Maslow, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Bernie Sanders, Blitzscaling, cloud computing, crowdsourcing, data science, don't be evil, Donald Trump, East Village, Elon Musk, fixed-gear, gentrification, geopolitical risk, growth hacking, Hacker News, hockey-stick growth, housing crisis, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Jony Ive, Justin.tv, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, medical residency, Menlo Park, Network effects, Paul Buchheit, Paul Graham, performance metric, Peter Thiel, RFID, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South of Market, San Francisco, Startup school, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, the payments system, Tony Hsieh, traumatic brain injury, Travis Kalanick, uber lyft, Y Combinator, yield management

I liked everything about “Jen’s” place, from her book collection, which mirrored mine, to the towels she’d fluffed and folded, to the handwritten card she left for me. (It helped that Jen and I had the same aesthetic taste, but then that’s precisely why I picked her listing.) “When you stay in an Airbnb, even if the host isn’t there, it’s personal,” says NYU’s Arun Sundararajan. “It’s intimate. There’s this connection that you have with this person, with their art, with their choice of linens, with their wedding pictures. And that evokes in us a sense of something that we have lost.” Whatever the press thought of the rebrand, Airbnb’s users seemed to “get” it—over the next few months, more than eighty thousand people went online and designed their own versions of the logo, a rate of consumer-brand engagement that would be considered off the charts by larger brands.

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The scale of the Airbnb platform has grown so large that the fact that more things haven’t gone wrong may show that perhaps that trust is deserved. Some say we may also be heading toward a new paradigm of adjusted expectations for the brave new world of the sharing economy. “Fundamentally, this model of business isn’t going to have the same kind of protection that the hotels or the car-rental companies or the taxi commission provide,” says NYU’s Arun Sundararajan. “We always make a trade-off, and we’ll start to make different trade-offs with the sharing economy.” Some of the people who were victims of some of the worst incidents of breached trust seem to support this argument: Mark King of Calgary, whose home was trashed and had to be rebuilt, called the Kings’ experience “one in several million” and said, “It didn’t turn me off to the idea of Airbnb.”

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But it’s also why so many people who were initially drawn to Airbnb, both on the host side and on the guest side, weren’t customers of another vacation-rental site who switched; they were an entirely different kind of customer. After dismissing it for so long, the hotel industry slowly started to confront its Airbnb Problem. Executives started talking openly about it at industry events. At the 2016 NYU International Hospitality Industry Investment Conference, a series of CEOs took the stage and, referring to the “second phase” of Airbnb, pointed out why it wouldn’t compete and cited the hotel industry’s strengths—that hotels were people- and service-focused, that there would always be a customer for hotels, and that the hotel industry just needed to double down on its strengths.

What Patients Say, What Doctors Hear by Danielle Ofri

big-box store, Columbine, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, medical residency, meta-analysis, Nelson Mandela, placebo effect, randomized controlled trial, stem cell, sugar pill

“Patients are so varied as to what motivates and what challenges them,” Hamilton told me. “They have so many issues in their lives that make diabetes hard to manage, but these issues don’t come up in the regular doctor-patient encounter.” Research into adherence with blood pressure treatment by some of my colleagues at NYU reveals comparable findings.3 When doctors dominate the conversation and focus on the strictly medical issues of the visit—as opposed to the psychosocial aspects—the risk of nonadherence to medications is three-fold higher. When patients are experiencing particularly stressful life situations such as inadequate housing or unemployment, doctors’ avoidance of these issues is associated with a six-fold higher risk of nonadherence to medication.

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When I was a medical student, there wasn’t any explicit listening training—we were simply tossed into the clinical waters. I wouldn’t necessarily advocate that now, though there’s certainly something to be said for jumping right in. As a beginning medical student with not a single clinical skill to offer, listening is all you have so listening is all you do. One of my first clinical encounters was at NYU’s cranio-facial clinic, where young children with severe birth abnormalities undergo dozens of intricate reconstructive surgeries. I remember just listening and listening as parents recounted their harrowing journeys (and also listening to the surgeons, who displayed a sensitivity and perceptiveness I’ve never seen surpassed).

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And as the cranio-facial surgeons taught me by example when I was a beginning medical student, these skills are equally important for procedure-based doctors. But are all these training courses effective? A group of British researchers developed an intensive three-day training course for oncologists,2 based on a model created by Mack Lipkin, one of my colleagues from NYU. The doctors practiced extensively with actors who simulated patients, then received wide-ranging feedback from both the actors and an experienced facilitator. They also spent time critically reviewing videos of themselves in action. Compared with doctors who did not undergo the training, these participants demonstrated significantly more effective communication skills.

Emergence by Steven Johnson

A Pattern Language, agricultural Revolution, AOL-Time Warner, Brewster Kahle, British Empire, Claude Shannon: information theory, complexity theory, Danny Hillis, Douglas Hofstadter, edge city, epigenetics, game design, garden city movement, Gödel, Escher, Bach, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, hypertext link, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Kevin Kelly, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, Menlo Park, mirror neurons, Mitch Kapor, Murano, Venice glass, Naomi Klein, new economy, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, pez dispenser, phenotype, Potemkin village, power law, price mechanism, profit motive, Ray Kurzweil, SimCity, slashdot, social intelligence, Socratic dialogue, stakhanovite, Steven Pinker, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, traveling salesman, trickle-down economics, Turing machine, Turing test, urban planning, urban renewal, Vannevar Bush

By this standard, Eric Zimmerman is the Lou Reed of the new gaming culture. A stocky thirty-year-old, with short, club-kid hair and oversize Buddy Holly glasses, Zimmerman has carved out a career for himself that would have been unthinkable even a decade ago: bouncing between academia (he teaches at NYU’s influential Interactive Telecommunications Program), the international art scene (he’s done installations for museums in Geneva, Amsterdam, and New York), and the video-game world. Unlike John Maeda and or Jodi.org, Zimmerman doesn’t “reference” the iconography of gaming in his work—he openly embraces that tradition, to the extent that you have to think of Zimmerman’s projects as games first and art second.

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Unlike John Maeda and or Jodi.org, Zimmerman doesn’t “reference” the iconography of gaming in his work—he openly embraces that tradition, to the extent that you have to think of Zimmerman’s projects as games first and art second. They can be fiendishly fun to play and usually involve spirited competition between players. But they are also self-consciously designed as emergent systems. “One of the pleasures of what I do,” Zimmerman tells me, over coffee near the NYU campus, “is that you get to see a player take what you’ve designed and use it in completely unexpected ways.” The designer, in other words, controls the micromotives of the player’s actions. But the way those micromotives are exploited—and the macrobehavior that they generate—are out of the designer’s control.

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I recall more than a few casual conversations that also had an impact, primarily ones that involved David Shenk, Ruthie Rogers, Roo Rogers, Mitch Kapor, Kevin Kelly, Annie Keating, Nicholas Butterworth, Kim Hawkins, Rory Kennedy, Mark Bailey, Frank Rich, Denise Caruso, Liz Garbus, Dan Cogan, Penny Lewis, John Brockman, Rufus Griscom, Jay Haynes, Betsey Schmidt, Stephen Green, Esther Dyson, and my students at NYU’s ITP program, where Red Burns generously invited me to teach a graduate seminar on emergent software. My family, as always, was a constant source of ideas and encouragement—particularly my two direct connections to the world of medicine, my mother and my sister Sallie. For most of the writing of this book, Andrew Shroeder played an invaluable role as research assistant, tracking down obscure essays and reading alongside me.

Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations by Clay Shirky

Andrew Keen, Andy Carvin, Berlin Wall, bike sharing, bioinformatics, Brewster Kahle, c2.com, Charles Lindbergh, commons-based peer production, crowdsourcing, digital rights, en.wikipedia.org, Free Software Foundation, Garrett Hardin, hiring and firing, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, Internet Archive, invention of agriculture, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invention of the telegraph, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, Joi Ito, Kuiper Belt, liberation theology, Mahatma Gandhi, means of production, Merlin Mann, Metcalfe’s law, Nash equilibrium, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, Picturephone, place-making, Pluto: dwarf planet, power law, prediction markets, price mechanism, prisoner's dilemma, profit motive, Richard Stallman, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Coase, Silicon Valley, slashdot, social software, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, ultimatum game, Vilfredo Pareto, Wayback Machine, Yochai Benkler, Yogi Berra

A perceptive appraisal of the contemporary technology-society interface.” —Booklist ABOUT THE AUTHOR Clay Shirky writes, teaches, and consults on the social and economic effects of the internet, and especially on those places where our social and technological networks overlap. He is on the faculty of NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program, and has consulted for Nokia, Procter and Gamble, News Corp., the BBC, the United States Navy, and Lego. Over the years, his writings have appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Harvard Business Review, Wired, and IEEE Computer, and he is a regular keynote speaker at tech conferences.

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It’s obvious why they would find Meetup valuable. Less obvious but as least as remarkable is how that particular group came to be in the first place. Every Meetup group navigates the tension between specificity and size. A Meetup group perfectly fit to an individual (bald fathers of two in Brooklyn who teach at NYU and like bagpipe music) would have exactly one member, while a Meetup that included huge numbers of potential members (parents, or TV watchers, or residents of Atlanta) would provide little in the way of commonality or conversational fodder: “So, you watch TV too, huh?” The ideal group exists in some equipoise between specific and generic.

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As everyone from working biologists to angry air passengers starts to adopt those tools, it is leading to an epochal change. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS No one knows better than I that a book is the work of a group, and that the thanks I can offer will be both incomplete and inadequate to the debt. First, I must thank Red Burns for recruiting me to the Interactive Telecommunications Program at NYU; she has created not just a wonderful environment for teaching but for thinking. Dan O’Sullivan, the associate director, and my colleagues Tom Igoe and Nancy Hechinger offered vital comments and support. I must also thank many of my former students, who have always asked sharp questions and pushed for clear answers.

I Want My MTV: The Uncensored Story of the Music Video Revolution by Craig Marks, Rob Tannenbaum

Adam Curtis, AOL-Time Warner, Bernie Sanders, Bob Geldof, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, crack epidemic, crowdsourcing, financial engineering, haute couture, Live Aid, Neil Armstrong, Parents Music Resource Center, pre–internet, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, sensible shoes, Skype, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Tipper Gore, upwardly mobile

We started madly dialing her house—we thought maybe she’d been in a car accident. We got her husband on the phone and he said, “Well”—long pause—“Meg has decided this is not for her.” MEG GRIFFIN: Maybe they thought I was being unprofessional. You know what? I didn’t give a shit. MARTHA QUINN, MTV VJ: I had graduated from NYU, where I’d worked at the radio station, WNYU. My radio name was Tiffany and I played urban music, like Shalamar and the Whispers. MEG GRIFFIN: It was clearly typecast, because look who they hired when I turned it down! Martha Quinn was a duplicate of me. People used to call her “Little Meg,” which irked her.

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Mark Goodman almost got into a fist fight with them because they were rude to his wife. ADAM HOROVITZ: “Fight for Your Right (to Party)” started as a joke. The goal was “Let’s write a stupid frat song. That’ll be funny.” Then people liked it. So Rick said we had to make a video. RIC MENELLO, director: I was a desk clerk at the NYU dorm from midnight to 8 A.M. I knew a lot about movies. Rick Rubin used to come by. Russell Simmons used to come to the dorm. The Beastie Boys would come by, especially Adam Horovitz, because his dad was a play wright and a screenwriter. You pop by Menello at the front desk, bullshit a little, then split.

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Now, Menello is a great character. He’s ten years older than me, and he knows more about film than anybody you know. He’s like an idiot savant of film, and he would preside behind the desk of Weinstein dorm. He would tell you about Orson Welles for four hours, and imitate him as he’s doing it. I’d graduated NYU film school in May of ’86, and I’d produced and directed my own student films, so Menello brought me in. He hit on the look and the feel of the video by saying, “It’s going to be like the party scene in Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” which is really just a long series of gags. In fact, we stole some of the gags from director Blake Edwards, particularly having a guy with an eye patch.

A People's History of Poverty in America by Stephen Pimpare

affirmative action, British Empire, car-free, clean water, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, dumpster diving, East Village, Frederick Winslow Taylor, George Gilder, green new deal, hedonic treadmill, hiring and firing, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, impulse control, income inequality, index card, it's over 9,000, Jane Jacobs, low skilled workers, Mahatma Gandhi, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, moral panic, Naomi Klein, New Urbanism, payday loans, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, subprime mortgage crisis, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, union organizing, urban renewal, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, white flight, working poor, Works Progress Administration

., Managing Welfare Reform in New York City (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005), 359. 11 Premilla Nadasen, Welfare Warriors: The Welfare Rights Movement in the United States (New York: Routledge, 2005), 50. 12 Gwendolyn Mink and Rickie Solinger, eds., Welfare: A Documentary History of U.S. Policy and Politics (New York: NYU Press, 2003), chap. 70. 13 Ibid., chap. 98. 14 John Kenneth Galbraith, The Affluent Society (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1958), 330. 15 Stephen E. Lankenau, “Stronger than Dirt: Public Humiliation and Status Enhancement Among Panhandlers,” Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 28, no. 3 (June 1999): 288–318. 16 Dwight Macdonald, “Our Invisible Poor,” New Yorker, January 19, 1963. 17 I adopt the use of “constants” here from Stephen T.

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Roosevelt: Letters from Children of the Great Depression (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 92. 71 Terkel, Hard Times, 47. 72 David Caplovitz, The Poor Pay More (New York: Free Press, 1963 [1967]). 73 Proceedings of the National Conference on Charities and Corrections (1912), 119. 74 Gwendolyn Mink and Rickie Solinger, eds., Welfare: A Documentary History of U.S. Policy and Politics (New York: NYU Press, 2003), chap. 63. 75 Gold, Jews Without Money, 255. 76 Noah Sawyer and Kenneth Temkin, “Analysis of Alternative Financial Service Providers,” Fannie Mae Foundation and the Urban Institute, February 19, 2004, www.urban.org/url.cfm?ID=410935; John P. Caskey, “Fringe Banking and the Rise of Payday Lending,” chap. 2 in Credit Markets for the Poor, ed.

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Houck, Katalin Szanto, Mary Amanda Dew, Stephen E. Gilman, and Charles F. Reynolds III, “Social Inequalities in Response to Antidepressant Treatment in Older Adults,” Archives of General Psychiatry 63 (January 2006): 50–56. 17 Gwendolyn Mink and Rickie Solinger, eds., Welfare: A Documentary History of U.S. Policy and Politics (New York: NYU Press, 2003), chap. 61. We’ll set aside how it is that “lazy loafers” manage to muster the significant energy required to riot. 18 Vivyan C. Adair, “Disciplined and Punished,” in Reclaiming Class: Women, Poverty, and the Promise of Higher Education in America, ed. Vivyan C. Adair and Sandra L. Dahlberg (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2003), 32–33.

The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure by Greg Lukianoff, Jonathan Haidt

AltaVista, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, Cambridge Analytica, cognitive dissonance, correlation does not imply causation, demographic transition, Donald Trump, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, helicopter parent, Herbert Marcuse, hygiene hypothesis, income inequality, Internet Archive, Isaac Newton, low skilled workers, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, mass incarceration, means of production, microaggression, moral panic, Nelson Mandela, Ralph Nader, risk tolerance, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, traumatic brain injury, Unsafe at Any Speed, Wayback Machine

The signs outline for members of the NYU community how to report one another anonymously if they experience “bias, discrimination, or harassment,” including by calling a “Bias Response Line.”37 NYU is not an outlier; a 2017 report by FIRE found that, of the 471 institutions cataloged in FIRE’s Spotlight on Speech Codes database, 38.4% (181) maintain some form of bias reporting system.38 Of course, there should be an easy way to report cases of true harassment and employment discrimination; such actions are immoral and unlawful. But bias alone is not harassment or discrimination. The term is not defined on the NYU Bias Response website, but psychological experiments have consistently shown that to be human is to have biases.

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The webpage listed on the signs explains: “The New York University Bias Response Line provides a mechanism through which members of our community can share or report experiences and concerns of bias, discrimination, or harassing behavior that may occur within our community.” NYU Bias Response Line. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://www.nyu.edu/about/policies-guidelines-compliance/equal-opportunity/bias-response.html 38. FIRE. (2017). 2017 Report on Bias Reporting Systems. [Blog post]. Retrieved from https://www.thefire.org/first-amendment-library/special-collections/fire-guides/report-on-bias-reporting-systems-2017 39.

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., 60–62, 75, 76, 98 Kipnis, Laura, 208–10 Krupenkin, Masha, 130–32 Ku Klux Klan, 12, 90, 91, 207 Kuran, Timur, 267 labeling, 38, 39, 50, 89, 145, 150, 277 LaFreniere, Peter, 181 Lagarde, Christine, 48 language development, 182 Lareau, Annette, 173–75, 179, 235 Las Vegas shooting, 12 law education, 205 Leahy, Robert, 37, 241–42 LEAP (Learning Early About Peanut Allergy), 20–21 learned helplessness, 158 Let Grow, 164, 238–39 Licence, 238–39 Levitsky, Steven, 131 Lexington High School, 190 Lilla, Mark, 74–75 Limbaugh, Rush, 132 locus of control, 46, 70, 158 Louisiana State University (LSU), 199 Lythcott-Haims, Julie, 165, 169–70, 190 Macaulay, Thomas Babington, 265 Mac Donald, Heather, 88–89, 126 Maher, Bill, 48 Mandela, Nelson, 81, 98 Manning, Jason, 209, 210 Mao Zedong, 100–101 Marano, Hara Estroff, 170 Marcus Aurelius, 95 Marcuse, Herbert, 64–71 marriage equality, 61–62 Martínez Valdivia, Lucía, 93 Marx, Karl, 64, 254 Marxism, 64, 65 matrix, matrices, 9–10 May Day, 201 McChrystal, Stanley, 251 McElroy, Wendy, 26–28 McGinn, Lata, 37 McLaughlin and Associates, 86 McNally, Richard, 29 McNeese State University, 203 McWhorter, John, 86 media, 130–32, 137 Meng Tzu (Mencius), 19 mental health, 26, 140, 143–61, 266 of college students, 156–59 in girls versus boys, 149–51, 154–56, 160, 161 self-harming and, 151, 195–96 and social media and phones, 146–47, 152–56, 159–61, 265 see also anxiety; depression #MeToo Movement, 12, 27 microaggressions, 40–46, 51, 71, 77, 145, 205, 210, 260 Middlebury College, 12, 87–88, 90, 103, 127 Mill, John Stuart, 248 Millennials, 30, 31, 156, 160, 175, 178, 184–85, 188, 213 Milton, John, 34 mindfulness, 242 mind reading, 38, 41, 212, 277 Misoponos, 1–4, 14, 34, 50 moral dependency, 209–12 moral judgments, intent versus impact in, 43–44, 46 moral matrices, 9, 10, 58 moral values, 61–62 Morgan, Kathryn Pauly, 68–69 Murray, Charles, 87–88, 103, 127 Murray, Pauli, 61, 62, 75–76, 260 Nader, Ralph, 24 National Association of Social Workers, 220 National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, 166, 168 Nazis and neo-Nazis, 12, 63, 64, 90–92, 133, 139, 140 negative filtering, 38, 177, 277 negative partisanship, 131–32, 140 Neuromancer (Gibson), 9–10 New Jersey Transit, 203–4 New Jim Crow, The: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (Alexander), 74 New Left, 65, 67 New Republic, 6 Newsome, Hawk, 75–76 Newton, Isaac, 125 New York, 106 New Yorker, 205 New York Sun, 163 New York Times, 6, 26, 88, 92, 95, 127, 133, 190, 226 New York University (NYU), 204–5 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 2, 22 1960s, 213–14, 216, 230 No Child Left Behind, 188 Noonday Demon, The: An Atlas of Depression (Solomon), 143 Northern Michigan University, 200, 211 Northwestern University, 208 Notre Dame vs. the Klan: How the Fighting Irish Defeated the Ku Klux Klan (Tucker), 207 NW Anxiety Institute, 163 Oakton Community College, 201 Obama, Barack, 11, 96, 140, 214 Obama, Malia, 250 Oberlin College, 24–25 Occupy Wall Street, 129 Oliver, Kelly, 106–7 Olivia (Claremont student), 53–55, 175 Once and Future Liberal, The: After Identity Politics (Lilla), 74–75 On Liberty (Mill), 248 oppression, 6, 44, 46, 57, 64, 65, 68–71 Orlando nightclub shooting, 12 Ostrom, Elinor, 191 Ostrom, Vincent, 191, 192 Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis (Putnam), 173–76 overgeneralizing, 38, 39, 50, 277 overprotection, 13 in parenting, 126, 148, 164, 165, 167–72, 183, 201–2, 235, 236, 266 see also fragility; parenting; safetyism overreaction, 201, 203 overregulation, 201–3 parenting, 125, 126, 163–79, 192 and actual versus imagined risk, 167–68 and arrest for neglect, 171–72, 266 and assuming capability in children, 237 and child’s walking to places alone, 169–70, 237–39 cognitive distortions and, 177–78 concerted cultivation style of, 173, 174, 176, 179, 235–36 free-range, 164, 211, 238, 266, 268 Let Grow License and, 238–39 natural growth style of, 174, 179 overprotective (helicopter), 126, 148, 164, 165, 167–72, 183, 201–2, 235, 236, 266 prepare the child for the road, not the road for the child, 23, 237–40 risk taking and, 238 school policies and, 245–49 social class and, 173–76, 179 societal pressures and, 171 suggestions for, 235–51 Parker, Sean, 147 Paros, Mike, 118 Patz, Etan, 165, 166 Paxson, Christina, 27 “Paying the Price for Breakdown of the Country’s Bourgeois Culture” (Wax and Alexander), 107–8, 121 peanut allergies, 19–21, 23–24, 30, 164, 236, 237 Peck, Don, 10 personalizing, 277 Pew Research Center, 128 phones, 30, 146, 147, 152–54, 159–61, 194, 214 and limiting device time, 249–50 school and, 247 see also social media Pinker, Steven, 264, 265 play, 125, 126, 178, 181–94 brain and, 181–84, 193 free, 183–86, 188, 189, 191, 193–94, 235–37, 245–46, 266 importance of, 181–83, 193–94 outdoor, 184, 186, 266 playgrounds, 183, 238 risk and, 183–85, 236, 238, 246 polarization, 121, 125–41, 251, 265 affective, 129, 131–32, 141 outrage and, 133–38, 261 police, attitudes toward, 219–20 political correctness, 46, 94–95, 202 Political Tribes: Group Instinct and the Fate of Nations (Chua), 267 politics, 213–14 alt-right, 81, 84, 118, 139, 266 bipartisanship in, 131 birth year and, 213–14 filter bubble and, 130–31 left-wing, 5, 110–13, 126–27, 132–38, 141, 199 negative partisanship in, 131–32 from 1940s to 1980, 130 right-wing, 5, 63, 110–13, 118, 126, 127, 132–38, 141 universities and, 110–13, 121, 126–27, 132–38, 141, 199, 258 see also polarization Pomona College, 89–90 positives, discounting, 38, 177, 277 post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), 25, 28–29 power, 53, 66 intersectionality and, 68 prejudice, 25, 40–44, 46 see also racism Princeton Review, 189 principle of charity, 42, 51, 55, 243–44, 260 privilege, 68–71 problems of progress, 13–14, 170, 264 procedural justice, 217, 219–22, 227, 230, 231 professors: political perspectives of, 110–13, 121, 258 retraction demands and, 103–4, 107–8, 121 social media and, 137, 141, 201 trust between students and, 205–6, 212 viewpoint solidarity and diversity among, 108–13, 121, 258 proportionality, 217–19, 224, 227 proportional-procedural social justice, 220–23, 231 Putnam, Robert, 173–76, 236 racism, 6, 42, 44–45, 64, 71, 140 civil rights movement and, 60–61 Halloween costumes and, 56, 102, 165 intimidation and threats, 138–40 Jim Crow laws, 221 white supremacists, 12, 86, 87, 89–91, 94 Rage, The: The Vicious Circle of Islamist and Far Right Extremism (Ebner), 266–67 rape culture, 26–28 rape law, teaching of, 205 Rational Optimist, The (Ridley), 264–65 Rauch, Jonathan, 59, 267 Rawls, John, 213 Redelsheimer, Katrina, 82 Reed College, 93, 127 regret orientation, 278 religion: American civil, 60–61 rituals in, 100 Renaissance, 136 “Repressive Tolerance” (Marcuse), 65–67 Republicans, 129–31, 213, 216 see also politics rider-and-elephant metaphor, 35, 36, 51, 62 Ridley, Matt, 264–65 Righteous Mind, The: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion (Haidt), 9 Right on Crime, 74 Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America’s Police Forces (Balko), 74 risk, 185, 237 actual versus imagined, 167–68 play and, 183–85, 236, 238, 246 see also safety rituals, 100 Roberts, John, 192–93 Roman statues, 136–37 Roof, Dylann, 139 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 74 Sacks, Jonathan, 53, 64 safety, 6–7, 9, 14, 24–25, 29–30, 96, 148 and actual versus imagined risk, 167–68 crime and, 167, 186, 238, 266 improvements in child safety, 168–69 meaning of, and concept creep, 24–25, 27, 246–47, 259 threats and, 138–40, 260–61 safetyism, 29–30, 85, 104, 121, 125, 164, 165, 194, 203, 246–47 on campus, 12, 24–26, 96–97, 125, 145–46, 148, 195–212, 268 cognitive distortions and, 177–78 dangers of, 168–71 exclusion and, 246–47 iGen and, 30–31, 156, 158, 161 overprotective parenting, 126, 148, 164, 165, 167–72 rise of, 24–26, 121 safe spaces, 26–31, 96, 145, 210, 259 school and, 236 trigger warnings, 6–7, 24, 28, 29, 31, 145, 210 Salem witch hunts, 99–100 San Bernardino attack, 12 Sanders, Bernie, 213 Savio, Mario, 84 schemas, 36–38, 57, 150, 177 Schill, Michael, 92 school (K–12), 59, 185–89, 194 college admissions and, 189–91, 194, 235, 236, 257–58, 268 debate teaching in, 248 discussions on coursework in, 248 first-grade readiness checklists, 186–87, 238 grades in, 190 homework, 185–86, 245 ideas for elementary schools, 245–47 ideas for middle schools and high schools, 247–49 identity politics and, 244 influencing policies at, 245–49 kindergarten, 185, 187–88 phones at, 247 recess at, 245–47 safetyism and, 236 year of service or work between high school and college, 250–51, 257 Schulz, Kathryn, 244 “see something, say something,” 203–4 Seligman, Martin, 158 September 11, 2001, attacks, 200, 203 Service Year Alliance, 251 sexism, 6, 44, 71 sexual misconduct and assault, 27 law education and, 205 #MeToo Movement and, 12, 27 Shakespeare, William, 34 Shapiro, Ben, 83 Sheskin, Mark, 218 shoulds, 277 Shuchman, Daniel, 238 Shulevitz, Judith, 26–28 Silverglate, Harvey, 74 Simmons, Ruth, 259 Singal, Jesse, 106 Skenazy, Lenore, 163–65, 169, 171, 172, 177, 185, 211, 238 sleep, 250 smartphones, see phones Smith College, 72 snowballs, and danger, 236 social class: parenting and, 173–76, 179 universities and, 174, 176 social justice, 111, 125, 126, 213–32 and correlation as causation, 227–29, 231–32 definition and use of term, 217, 220–21, 223 equal-outcomes, 223–27, 230, 231 major news stories related to, 214–16 proportional-procedural, 220–23, 231 social media, 5, 10, 30, 130, 133, 139, 145, 194, 203, 259 call-out culture and, 71–73 curation and comparisons in, 154–55, 161 Facebook, 49, 55, 105, 107, 130, 146–47, 207, 265 impact on girls, 154–56 and limiting device time, 249–50 mental health and, 146–47, 152–56, 159–61, 265 positive trends in, 265–66 professors and, 137, 141, 201 Twitter, 81, 130, 135–37, 147, 265 virtue signaling and, 73 Socrates, 49, 50 Solomon, Andrew, 143 Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr, ix, 243 Soviet Union, 130, 243 Spellman, Mary, 54–55, 57, 71, 102–3, 105–6, 134 Spencer, Richard, 139 Spock, Benjamin, 174 sports, 152, 189, 225–26 Title IX and, 224–25 spurious correlations, 152, 228 Stalin, Joseph, 243 Stanger, Allison, 87–88, 103, 127, 140 Starmans, Christina, 218 statues, Greco-Roman, 136–37 “sticks and stones” saying, 210 Stoicism, 95–96, 98 Stone, Geoffrey, 255, 279 Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, 84 Sue, Derald Wing, 40–42 suicide, 5, 24, 30, 143–44, 152 academic competition and, 190 rates of, 150–51, 160, 183, 190 sharing thoughts of, 195–96 Suk Gersen, Jeannie, 205 summer camps, 240 Supreme Court, 61 Tajfel, Henri, 57–58, 76 Taleb, Nassim Nicholas, 22–23, 28, 164, 170 Tannen, Deborah, 154 Taylor, Keeanga-Yamahtta, 135–36 Tea Party, 129 telos, 253–55 Tenbrink, Tyler, 139 terrorism, 11–12, 204 September 11, 2001, attacks, 200, 203 Tetlock, Phil, 229 Texas State University, 63–64, 67 Theodoric, 34 Theory of Justice, A (Rawls), 213 Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don’t Have All the Facts (Duke), 248–49 threats, 138–40, 260–61 Three Felonies a Day: How the Feds Target the Innocent (Silverglate), 74 Thucydides, 108–9 Title IX, 206–8, 223–25 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 191, 195 tolerance, 65–66 transgenderism, 104–5, 205–6 transracialism, 104 trauma, 25–26, 28–29, 31–32, 33 PTSD, 25, 28–29 Treatment Plans and Interventions for Depression and Anxiety Disorders (Leahy, Holland, and McGinn), 37 tribalism, 57–59, 76, 130, 131, 153, 267 see also groups trigger warnings, 6–7, 24, 28, 29, 31, 145, 210 Trump, Donald, 12, 82–83, 87, 96, 112, 114, 127, 135, 139, 140 Charlottesville and, 91, 94 supporters of, 75–76, 81, 83 truth, 253–55, 268 Tucker Carlson Tonight, 118, 133, 134 Turning Point USA (TPUSA), 138 Tuvel, Rebecca, 104–7, 121, 127 Twenge, Jean, 30–31, 146–49, 152–54, 159, 160, 164, 185 Twitter, 81, 130, 135–37, 147, 265 Tyler, Tom, 219–20 Tyranny of the Majority, The (Guinier), 222 UCLA, 92 Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race, and Family Life (Lareau), 173–75 unfair comparisons, 278 universities, 5, 8, 10, 11, 59, 125–26, 214 admissions to, 189–91, 194, 235, 236, 257–58, 268 amenities at, 199, 211 bureaucracy at, 125, 126, 192, 194, 195–212 canon wars at, 7 Chicago Statement and, 255–56, 268, 279–81 consumerist mentality at, 198–200, 211 corporatization of, 197–98, 211 cross-partisan events at, 261 distorted thinking modeled by administrators at, 200–203 diversity among professors in, 108–13, 121, 258 diversity among students in, 43, 258, 260 expansion of, 197–98 freedom of inquiry at, 255–57 free speech at, 5–6, 31, 65, 84, 200–203 heckler’s veto and, 257 iGen and, 31, 145, 148, 156–59, 174–75, 185 intellectual virtues and, 258 intimidation and violence at, 81–98 mental health and, 156–59 as multiversities, 197, 253 political orientation and, 110–13, 121, 126–27, 132–38, 141, 199, 258 preparation for life following, 8–9 productive disagreement in, 258–60 regulations at, 192, 200–203, 211–12 and responding to pressure campaigns and outrage, 256–57 retraction demands at, 103–4, 107–8, 121 safe spaces and, 26–31, 96, 145, 210, 259 safetyism at, 12, 24–26, 96–97, 125, 145–46, 148, 195–212, 268; see also safetyism school spirit at, 260 social class and, 174, 176 speakers at, 6, 27, 47–51, 87, 199 suggestions for, 253–62 trigger warnings and, 6–7, 24, 28, 29, 31, 145, 210 trust between professors and students at, 205–6, 212 truth and, 253–55, 268 wisdom and, 253–62 University of California, 197 Berkeley, 12, 81–87, 90, 94, 120 Los Angeles, 92 University of Central Florida, 207 University of Chicago, 119, 251, 253, 268 Chicago Statement on Principles of Free Expression, 255–56, 268, 279–81 University of Cincinnati, 203 University of Connecticut, 202 University of Iowa, 136–37 University of Michigan, 184, 207 University of Missouri, 11 University of Northern Colorado, 205–6 University of Oregon, 92 University of Pennsylvania, 107, 108 University of Virginia, 12, 188, 223–27 University of West Alabama, 202 Unsafe at Any Speed (Nader), 24 us versus them; good people versus evil, 3–4, 14, 53–77, 85, 90, 92, 119–20, 132, 177, 206, 243–44, 247, 259–60 see also groups vaccination, 21 Valenti, Jessica, 26–27 Venker, Suzanne, 49 victimhood culture, 209–10 victimization, 41–42, 46, 57, 126 viewpoint diversity, 11, 109, 112–13, 121, 248, 258 vindictive protectiveness, 10, 235 violence, 81–98 definition of, 85–86 words as, 84–86, 89, 94–98, 145, 158 Virginia Rowing Association, 223 virtue signaling, 73 vulnerability, culture of, 209, 210 see also fragility Wall Street Journal, 222 Walsh, Adam, 165–66 Walsh, John, 166 Ward, Douglas Turner, 114 War on Cops, The (Mac Donald), 88 Washington Post, 93, 199 Wax, Amy, 107–8, 121, 126 Weinstein, Bret, 114–19, 127, 133 “what if” questions, 278 Where You Go Is Not Who You Will Be: An Antidote to the College Admissions Mania (Bruni), 190 white genocide, 135, 136 white nationalists and white supremacists, 12, 86, 87, 89–91, 94, 135, 136, 139, 140, 266 Will, George, 48 William & Mary, 92 Williams College, 49–50 Wilson, E.

Open for Business Harnessing the Power of Platform Ecosystems by Lauren Turner Claire, Laure Claire Reillier, Benoit Reillier

Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, benefit corporation, Blitzscaling, blockchain, carbon footprint, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, commoditize, crowdsourcing, data science, deep learning, Diane Coyle, Didi Chuxing, disintermediation, distributed ledger, driverless car, fake news, fulfillment center, future of work, George Akerlof, independent contractor, intangible asset, Internet of things, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Lean Startup, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, Metcalfe’s law, minimum viable product, multi-sided market, Network effects, Paradox of Choice, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer lending, performance metric, Peter Thiel, platform as a service, price discrimination, price elasticity of demand, profit motive, ride hailing / ride sharing, Sam Altman, search costs, self-driving car, seminal paper, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, software as a service, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, TaskRabbit, the long tail, The Market for Lemons, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, Y Combinator

As expected (see Figure 12.1), close friends and family are the most trusted (4.7/5), while online strangers are the least trusted (1/5). What is fascinating is the extent to which adding a picture and having a validated identity, as well as positive reviews on a platform, can make a total stranger almost as trusted as a family member (4.2/5). BlaBlaCar and NYU Stern Professor Arun Sundararajan also carried out an extensive study in 2016 over 18,000 BlaBlaCar members in 11 European countries. It validated earlier survey results across all countries, showing the universality of new online trust tools.3 The ability to create a trusted online profile is a very recent phenomenon that is partly linked to the ubiquitous availability of social networks and the unique ability for platforms to collect and display relevant data that increase trust between participants.4 Establishing trust between participants is therefore one of the foundational pillars of platforms and critical to their successful scaling.

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Notes 1 For an accessible summary of the argument and its implications for platforms, see R. Fisman and T. Sullivan, The Inner Lives of Markets: How People Shape Them – and They Shape Us, London: Public Affairs/John Murray Learning, 2016. 2 Betrustman Report, Chronos & BlaBlaCar, December 2012. 3 See BlaBlaCar, NYU Stern, Entering the Trust Age, 2016. In this study, respondents were asked to rank on a scale from 0 to 5 the level of trust they gave to different types of relationships, from a social network contact through to friends or family. A BlaBlaCar member with a full online profile was then included in the mix.

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This percentage is largely above the percentage of people who highly trust their colleagues (58%) or neighbors (42%), and close to the percentage of people who highly trust their friends (92%), revealing that trust built by online platforms can supersede offline relationships. 4 Arun Sundararajan, The Sharing Economy, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016, p. 61. 5 Rachel Bostman, the Trust Stack, www.rachelbotsman.com. 6 D. H. Maister, R. Galford and C. Green, The Trusted Advisor, London: Simon & Schuster, 2 January 2002. Trust, governance and brand 171 7 BlaBlaCar, NYU Stern, Entering the Trust Age, 2016. 8 This feedback profile example is from StuffUSell, the UK’s leading trading assistant. This popular merchant helps people who don’t have the time or don’t have enough positive feedback to efficiently sell on eBay. 9 H. Hagiu and S. Rothman, ‘Network Effects Aren’t Enough’, Harvard Business Review, 94(4), 2016, https://hbr.org/2016/04/network-effects-arent-enough. 10 Survey from BlaBlaCar showed that 75% of participants believed in the importance of the platform in regulating the community.

Competition Overdose: How Free Market Mythology Transformed Us From Citizen Kings to Market Servants by Maurice E. Stucke, Ariel Ezrachi

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", affirmative action, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Andrei Shleifer, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Boeing 737 MAX, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, cloud computing, commoditize, corporate governance, Corrections Corporation of America, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, delayed gratification, disinformation, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, Garrett Hardin, George Akerlof, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Google Chrome, greed is good, hedonic treadmill, incognito mode, income inequality, income per capita, independent contractor, information asymmetry, invisible hand, job satisfaction, labor-force participation, late fees, loss aversion, low skilled workers, Lyft, mandatory minimum, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, military-industrial complex, mortgage debt, Network effects, out of africa, Paradox of Choice, payday loans, Ponzi scheme, precariat, price anchoring, price discrimination, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, search costs, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Stanford prison experiment, Stephen Hawking, sunk-cost fallacy, surveillance capitalism, techlash, The Chicago School, The Market for Lemons, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Davenport, Thorstein Veblen, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, ultimatum game, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, winner-take-all economy, Yochai Benkler

But in fact the unpopular, exploitive practice did not stop. Resort fees on the Strip, and throughout the United States, continued to increase, and more competitors kept adding them. A trend analysis report written by a professor at NYU concluded that such “fees and surcharges are highly profitable; many have incremental profitability of 80 to 90 percent or more of the amounts collected, so they represent significant contributors to industry profits.”48 Source of data: 2017 NYU School of Professional Studies: Trend Analysis Report49 So a powerful casino chain takes a stand against an unpopular, exploitive practice. And not only does it fail, but by 2013, Caesars gives up on its quest to warn consumers of these resort fees and joins the race to exploit.

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., “Economics at the FTC: Drug and Pbm Mergers and Drip Pricing,” Review of Industrial Organization 41, no. 4 (2012): 303–319, https://doi.org/10.1007/s11151-012-9360-x (discussing Laibson’s testimony); see also Xavier Gabaix and David Laibson, “Shrouded Attributes, Consumer Myopia, and Information Suppression in Competitive Markets,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 121, no. 2 (2006): 505, 506, http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:4554333. 41.Sullivan, Economic Issues. 42.Federal Trade Commission Warning Letters. 43.Bjorn Hanson, “U.S. Lodging Industry Fees and Surcharges Continue Upward Trend in 2011 to New Record—$1.8 Billion,” NYU School of Professional Studies: Trend Analysis Report, September 20, 2011, http://lb1.scps.nyu.edu/content/scps/about/newsroom/news/2011/u_s_lodging_industry.html. 44.“Showgirls Take to Las Vegas Boulevard for Rally,” Las Vegas Blog, July 21, 2011, http://blog.caesars.com/las-vegas/las-vegas-hotels/ballys-las-vegas/showgirls-take-to-las-vegas-boulevard-for-rally/. 45.Ron Sylvester, “Caesars to Start Charging Resort Fees, Says Guests Demanding Them,” Las Vegas Sun, February 21, 2013, https://lasvegassun.com/news/2013/feb/21/caesars-hotels-will-start-charging-resort-fees/. 46.Benston, “Harrah’s Sees $$.” 47.Sylvester, “Caesars to Start Charging Resort Fees.” 48.Hanson, “U.S.

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News Ranking Overall Average % of Students Matriculating Brown 14 3.17% Columbia 5 3.23% Cornell 14 3.0% Dartmouth 11 2.2% Harvard 2 4.48% Penn 8 3.16% Princeton 1 2.28% Yale 3 3.28% Ivy League Subtotal 24.8% Other Top 30 2018 U.S. News Ranking Overall Average % of Students Matriculating Cal Tech 10 0.25% Carnegie Mellon 25 1.1% Chicago 3 3.47% Duke 9 1.37% Emory 21 1.06% Georgetown 20 2.18% Johns Hopkins 11 0.93% MIT 5 1.04% NYU 30 3.02% Northwestern 11 1.96% Notre Dame 18 0.42% Rice 14 0.19% Stanford 5 2.26% USC 21 1.97% Vanderbilt 14 0.84% Wake Forest 27 0.42% Washington University in St Louis 18 2.31% Other Top 30 Subtotal 24.79% Little Ivies 2018 U.S. News Ranking Overall Average % of Students Matriculating Amherst 2 1.14% Bates 23 0.62% Bowdoin 3 1.13% Colby 12 0.75% Connecticut College 46 0.38% Hamilton 18 1.03% Middlebury 6 1.08% Trinity 44 0.53% Tufts 28 (National) 1.89% Wesleyan 21 1.18% Williams 1 1.21% Little Ivies Subtotal 10.94% Other Top 30 Liberal Arts 2018 U.S.

USA's Best Trips by Sara Benson

Albert Einstein, California gold rush, car-free, carbon footprint, cotton gin, Day of the Dead, desegregation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Donner party, East Village, Frank Gehry, gentrification, glass ceiling, Golden Gate Park, Haight Ashbury, haute couture, haute cuisine, if you build it, they will come, indoor plumbing, Kickstarter, lateral thinking, McMansion, mega-rich, New Urbanism, off-the-grid, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, side project, Silicon Valley, the High Line, transcontinental railway, trickle-down economics, urban renewal, urban sprawl, white flight, white picket fence, Works Progress Administration

Downtown in Greenwich Village, you can find the urban campus of New York University. It has no defined quad, but is centered on Washington Square Park, with its famous arch that you’ve seen in every rerun of Friends. Founded later than the other universities, in 1831, NYU is known for its art, business and law schools. NYU (masquerading as UNY) is also where Keri Russell as “Felicity” matriculated. Walk down West 4th St and admire the brick NYU School of Law where JFK Jr got his degree. Further east on 4th St is Bobst Library, a severe orangey-red brutalist cube of a building, designed by Phillip Johnson, which houses one of New York’s largest libraries

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The decor is subdued, the music quiet enough to carry on a conversation. Come for the kuzu stew and stay for the New York tofu cheesecake and homemade soy ice cream!” Liz Ureneck, NYU, New York * * * If you’re near NYU, unpack your bag at the basic but comfortable Washington Square Hotel. From here you’ll easily be able to go carousing up and down Bleecker St with the NYUers into the wee hours. And if the next morning’s hangover isn’t enough to convince you to hightail it home, then drop by the NYU Office of Admissions right down the street – surely they’d be happy to hand you an application. Got your transcripts ready? David Ozanich * * * TRIP INFORMATION GETTING THERE Williamsburg is 50 miles east of Richmond via the I-64.

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A couple of hour’s drive north, there’s a place called New York and it has enough universities to rival Boston for the college-town crown. But the roost is ruled by two dueling divas, one from uptown and the other downtown: Columbia University and New York University. Only one of them is Ivy League (Columbia, if you didn’t know) and that forever rains on NYU’s parades. To its constant chagrin, no matter how many Olsen twins enroll, NYU will never have the same golden luster as fancy-schmancy Columbia. But both are pretty cool schools, all things considered. Columbia is another of the colonial colleges (founded in 1754 as King’s College) and counts both presidents Roosevelt among its alumni.

The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President by Bandy X. Lee

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Anthropocene, Carl Icahn, cuban missile crisis, dark triade / dark tetrad, David Brooks, declining real wages, delayed gratification, demand response, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, facts on the ground, fake news, false flag, fear of failure, illegal immigration, impulse control, meta-analysis, national security letter, Neil Armstrong, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, Skype, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, The Chicago School

Born in the post-Holocaust displacement in the Ural Mountains, she has lived and received her education in the Soviet Union, Poland, Italy, and the United States. That journey included essential lessons in history, geography, culture, art, and politics. Postgraduate training and faculty appointments followed, in psychiatry at Hillside Hospital on Long Island, and in psychoanalysis at NYU Psychoanalytic Institute (now the Institute for Psychoanalytic Education, affiliated with NYU Medical School). She is editor of Issues in Education for The American Psychoanalyst of the American Psychoanalytic Association. TRUMP’S DADDY ISSUES: A Toxic Mix for America STEVE WRUBLE, M.D. As a psychiatrist, I am interested in why people are the way they are.

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Gilligan is a psychiatrist and author who has studied the motivations behind violent behavior over his twenty-five years of work in the American prison systems. “If we psychiatrists who have experience in assessing dangerousness, if we give passive permission to our president to proceed in his delusions, we are shirking our responsibility,” Gilligan said. Today a senior clinical professor of psychiatry at NYU School of Medicine, Gilligan told Dr. Lee’s town hall attendees, “I don’t say Trump is Hitler or Mussolini, but he’s no more normal than Hitler.” We don’t have to rely on psychiatrists to see that this president is not consistent in his thinking or reliably attached to reality. We have had vastly more exposure to Donald Trump’s observable behavior, his writing and speaking, than any psychiatrist would have after listening to him for years.

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It is a privilege we still enjoy in the United States, and it will be the skill we need to prevent us from careening toward crisis, as it seems Donald Trump would have us do. Betty P. Teng, M.F.A., L.M.S.W., is a trauma therapist in the Office of Victims Services of a major hospital in Lower Manhattan. A graduate of Yale College; UCLA’s School of Theater, Film, and Television; and NYU’s Silver School of Social Work, Ms. Teng is in psychoanalytic training and practices at the Institute for Contemporary Psychotherapy. She is also an award-winning screenwriter and editor whose credits include films by Ang Lee, Robert Altman, and Mike Nichols. References Chun, Wendy. 2016. Updating to Remain the Same: Habitual New Media.

Greed and Glory on Wall Street: The Fall of the House of Lehman by Ken Auletta

Bear Stearns, book value, business climate, classic study, corporate governance, financial independence, fixed income, floating exchange rates, Herman Kahn, interest rate swap, junk bonds, New Journalism, profit motive, proprietary trading, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, scientific management, traveling salesman, zero-coupon bond

With a liberal arts and accounting degree, in 1947 Glucksman migrated to Wall Street, where he first went to work as a credit reporter with Dun & Bradstreet. He then held a series of other unsatisfactory jobs. Restless, he enrolled nights at New York University’s Business School, receiving an M.B.A. in finance in 1951. He credits the years at N.Y.U. with opening his “intellectual horizons”; his gratitude is evident through his service as an N.Y.U. trustee and his sponsorship of the L. Glucksman Institute for Research in Securities Markets at the N.Y.U. Graduate School of Business Administration. In 1952, Glucksman became a securities analyst at A. G. Becker, a Wall Street investment bank. He left to become an arbitrageur—purchasing securities, commodities or currency in one market and selling them at a better price in another market—for L.

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This desire led to discussions with Laurence and Robert Tisch of the Loews Corporation. Glucksman felt comfortable with Larry and Bob Tisch. They were all alumni of New York University and had undertaken to raise funds for the university. Each man sat on N.Y.U.’s board. Larry Tisch liked Lew Glucksman, and fondly remembered the dinner they once shared at N.Y.U. when these two millionaires mourned the death of the five-cent hotdog, and Glucksman told him that he still did his own laundry rather than send it out and pay “ridiculous” prices. They talked about Loews putting up between $150 and $200 million to purchase a 50 percent interest in Lehman’s stock.

The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth by Jonathan Rauch

2021 United States Capitol attack, 4chan, active measures, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Ayatollah Khomeini, Black Lives Matter, centre right, classic study, Climategate, company town, coronavirus, COVID-19, critical race theory, deplatforming, disinformation, disintermediation, Donald Trump, experimental subject, facts on the ground, fake news, Filter Bubble, framing effect, hive mind, illegal immigration, information asymmetry, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, jimmy wales, Jon Ronson, Louis Pasteur, market bubble, meta-analysis, microaggression, mirror neurons, Peace of Westphalia, peer-to-peer, post-truth, profit motive, QAnon, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, Russian election interference, social software, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Tragedy of the Commons, yellow journalism, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game

In a lecture at Case Western Reserve University in 2018, Haidt, the psychologist, said: “I don’t take any chances at NYU. I don’t say anything controversial. I can be controversial with you, because you can’t report me. You can’t do anything to me if I say something that offends you. But if I’m at NYU, there’s a sign in every bathroom telling students what number to call or what email to send to report me or anyone else who says something that they think is offensive. So I just don’t take chances at NYU.” All downside. Ironically, although canceling chilled dissent on the center and left, it was a godsend to trolls on the right.

…

It is only after we appreciate the miracle of knowledge production (the “constitution” of knowledge) that we can understand the tragedy befalling us now, as key institutions and practices decay. This book is a magnificent integration of psychology, epistemology, and history. It is a joy to read—deep insight after deep insight, embedded in playful writing, about one of the most important problems of the 2020s.” —JONATHAN HAIDT, Thomas Cooley Professor of Ethical Leadership, NYU-Stern School of Business; author of The Righteous Mind; co-author of The Coddling of the American Mind “The digital age was supposed to bring about the blessings of unlimited knowledge fueled by radically egalitarian free speech allowing everyone to access, share, and learn from freely available information to the benefit and progress of all.

…

., 178–80; digital model compared to, 135–38; disinformation awareness of, 186–88; public trust in, 174, 188; Rushdie and, 190; Trump and, 5, 6, 171, 180–81, 235; viewpoint diversity in, 240–41. See also conservative media; journalism Newton, Isaac, 65–66 New York Times: Cotton’s op-ed essay in, 199–200, 206–07; liberal readers of, 177; subscription base for, 137; on traditional news viewership trends, 188; on Trump, 169–70 New York University (NYU), 14 nihilism and trolling, 158–60 Nimmo, Ben, 187 Niven, Nephi, 256–57 no bullshitting, 107–08, 143, 245 Noelle-Neumann, Elisabeth, 195 NPR (Nation Public Radio), 177 Nupedia, 138–39 Nygaard, William, 190 Nyhan, Brendan, 30, 177, 185 Obama, Barack, 9, 40–41, 170, 209 objectivity: academic doctrines vs., 261; from diversity, 193–94; government agencies and, 241; journalism and, 240; of reality, 9, 86–87; reality-based communities and, 100–103, 108; Wikipedia and, 141, 147 O’Connor, Cailin: The Misinformation Age (with Weatherall), 36, 121–22, 196 Olson, Mancur, 229 ONE (magazine), 253 optimism bias, 26 Orbán, Viktor, 157 orchestration in cancel culture, 219 Oreskes, Naomi: Why Trust Science?

WikiLeaks and the Age of Transparency by Micah L. Sifry

1960s counterculture, Amazon Web Services, Andy Carvin, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Buckminster Fuller, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, Climategate, crowdsourcing, digital divide, digital rights, Evgeny Morozov, Gabriella Coleman, Google Earth, Howard Rheingold, Internet Archive, Jacob Appelbaum, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Network effects, RAND corporation, school vouchers, Skype, social web, source of truth, Stewart Brand, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, web application, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

By seeing everyone’s comments and joining in the give-andtake, I could even play a role in the public conversation we were all having. It didn’t matter who I was or whether I had been credentialed by the “authorities” running the event as an expert. All that mattered was whether what I had to say had any credibility. I was now a full-fledged member of the group that NYU scholar Jay Rosen has dubbed “the people formerly known as the audience.”4 Being connected in real-time also meant that we, the ex-audience, had a new ability to talk back to the powers that be, or as digital visionary Howard Rheingold likes to say, to be “crap-detectors” and “call bullshit” when we see it.5 Nothing illustrates that better than a moment at the first Personal Democracy Forum in May 2004.

…

As Malamud recounted at a keynote address at the 2009 Government 2.0 Summit in Washington, “What we found when we placed these so-called products on the Internet—for free—was that these reports were not just fodder for a few well-heeled financial professionals, a commodity used to make the Wall Street money machine function, but instead that these public reports of public corporations were of tremendous interest to journalists, students, senior citizen investment clubs, employees of the companies reporting and employees 66 MICAH L. SIFRY of their competitors, in short a raft of new uses that had been impossible before.”3 By late 1994, other partners were joining in Malamud’s quirky venture. MIT, NYU, Sun Microsystems, MCI Communications, R. R. Donnelly & Sons, and Time Inc. announced they were working to expand the databases provided to include patents, trademarks, and all current SEC filings. As Vint Cerf, one of the creators of the Internet (who was then at MCI and now works for Google as its senior Internet evangelist), said at the time, “I think the rest of the world is listening to how valuable it is for a government to provide information to its citizens.”4 By the summer of 1995, Malamud was providing SEC records on a same-day basis, thanks to donations from two private companies.

…

In 2007, in a first for courtroom transparency, a rotating team of six bloggers from FireDogLake.com live-blogged the Scooter Libby trial, providing real-time coverage that the rest of the media didn’t see as a priority, but came to rely on. (Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, was convicted for obstructing justice and perjury in the Valerie Plame affair, which ironically enough was about the unauthorized leaking of classified information. President Bush commuted his prison sentence.) At the time, NYU press critic Jay Rosen marveled: That an online community could, of its own free will, scare up support for six correspondents at a big trial; that the correspondents would work as hard as they did informing a live public; that they did it for expenses (no pay) and the joy of informing people who depend on you, this is a small, but remarkable part of the Libby case to reflect on, if we’re still aftermathing it.

I Want to Be Where the Normal People Are by Rachel Bloom

4chan, call centre, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, COVID-19, gentrification, imposter syndrome, Snapchat, telemarketer

Chocolate Seller Max Brenner Union Square November 2008–January 2009 Worked over the holidays at this popular chocolate shop and restaurant. One time in the storeroom, a co-worker said that if he couldn’t make a woman cum with “just his dick” he didn’t feel like a man. Have no idea how the conversation segued from chocolate to that. Fundraising Caller NYU Phonathon January 2007–December 2007 The main fundraising program for NYU. I called alumni to ask them to give the school money with the justification that the “Princeton Review rates schools partially based on alumni satisfaction and the way that’s recorded is through donations from alumni like you!” I took a long, hard look at myself in the mirror when one caller said, “Sweetie, you and I are both smart women and you know that’s not true.”

…

(key change) TOLERATED! The Bullies circle Rachel with giant feathers. ADOLESCENT RACHEL BLOOM THEY LIKE ME NOW AND WITH THIS I FEEL A REBIRTH. THEY LIKE ME NOW WHICH GOES TO SHOW MY TALENT IS SYNONYMOUS WITH MY SELF-WORTH! She gets an acceptance letter. ADOLESCENT RACHEL BLOOM Wow, I got into NYU, Tisch School of the Arts! This confirms my trajectory! COLLEGE RACHEL BLOOM walks in. Her boobs are even bigger. COLLEGE RACHEL BLOOM Tagging you out, adolescent me! We’re in college now and the freshman fifteen has made us a C cup! Adolescent Rachel Bloom leaves; College Rachel picks up the song.

The Alpha Masters: Unlocking the Genius of the World's Top Hedge Funds by Maneet Ahuja, Myron Scholes, Mohamed El-Erian

"World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, asset-backed security, backtesting, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, book value, Bretton Woods, business process, call centre, Carl Icahn, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, computerized trading, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, diversification, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, family office, financial engineering, fixed income, global macro, high net worth, high-speed rail, impact investing, interest rate derivative, Isaac Newton, Jim Simons, junk bonds, Long Term Capital Management, managed futures, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, merger arbitrage, Michael Milken, Myron Scholes, NetJets, oil shock, pattern recognition, Pershing Square Capital Management, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Renaissance Technologies, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, rolodex, Savings and loan crisis, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, statistical model, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, systematic bias, systematic trading, tail risk, two and twenty, zero-sum game

That was my strategy.” He tactfully executed just that. When the dean of NYU suggested he apply to Harvard Business School, Paulson leapt at the opportunity, and John Whitehead, who was a member of the Harvard Board of Trustees, offered to write his recommendation. After gaining admission, he received the prestigious Sidney J. Weinberg/Goldman Sachs scholarship, an endowment started in 1950 for exceptional students. He was elated. It was at Harvard that Paulson really hit his stride. After graduating summa cum laude from NYU business school as valedictorian of his class, he felt that he had really earned his spot with the rest of the world’s brightest business-minded students.

…

He’d been in the business for over 15 years focusing on event-driven transactions, and the financial crisis of 2008 happened to be the biggest event-driven trade since the Great Depression. Paulson began his testimony with a synopsis of his background— graduating summa cum laude from New York University (NYU) in 1978, attending Harvard Business School as a Baker Scholar in 1980, and working as a managing director of mergers and acquisitions at Bear Stearns. He opened his hedge fund in 1994, and by 2008, it was the fourth-largest such fund in the world. He then explained how it happened that his firm managed to pull off a $15 billion trade.

…

He liked being successful, being independent, making money, and having employees, and this exposure gave him his first taste of what it would be like to run his own firm. Gradually, however, he realized that if he wanted to succeed in business, he would have to go back and finish college. He entered NYU. Two years behind his classmates, Paulson felt a certain pressure. This time, though, he was keenly focused on business and pushed himself to excel, getting straight A’s. As a senior, Paulson took a course that changed his life forever. It was called The Distinguished Adjunct Professor Seminar in Investment Banking, a semester-long course that was led by John Whitehead, who, at the time, was chairman of investment banking at Goldman Sachs.

Automate This: How Algorithms Came to Rule Our World by Christopher Steiner

23andMe, Ada Lovelace, airport security, Al Roth, algorithmic trading, Apollo 13, backtesting, Bear Stearns, big-box store, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black-Scholes formula, call centre, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, delta neutral, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, dumpster diving, financial engineering, Flash crash, G4S, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hacker News, High speed trading, Howard Rheingold, index fund, Isaac Newton, Jim Simons, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, knowledge economy, late fees, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Max Levchin, medical residency, money market fund, Myron Scholes, Narrative Science, PageRank, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Pierre-Simon Laplace, prediction markets, proprietary trading, quantitative hedge fund, Renaissance Technologies, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Mercer, Sergey Aleynikov, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, speech recognition, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, transaction costs, upwardly mobile, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Y Combinator

In spite of the protests, the AMEX agreed to allow Peterffy’s traders to bring small tablet computers into the pits. Peterffy now had a new problem: he had no tablet computer of any kind. Nor did anybody else, thirty years before the advent of the iPad. The devices would have to be built from scratch. With a vague idea of what he wanted, Peterffy brought in physics PhD candidates from NYU who helped him construct small rectangular boxes out of Mylar, a black plastic. The boxes measured roughly eight inches by twelve and were two inches deep. Inside were packed transistors and circuit boards that gave way to a top panel that included a series of gold wires. The wires detected when users pressed them with a finger, creating a touchscreen.

…

Andrew Montalenti didn’t need to be shoved out the door of Morgan Stanley. He just left in March of 2009 after spending three years as a hacker on Wall Street and thinking, “I never got the idea I was solving real problems.” Montalenti accepted a job at Morgan in 2006 halfway through his senior year at NYU, where he majored in computer science. The investment bank gave him a $10,000 signing bonus and a September start date, which Montalenti says made taking the job that much easier. All of the new recruits fall in love with the idea of spending the summer traveling through Europe or South America on Morgan’s money, without a care in the world.

…

“Everybody knew that Wall Street needed quantitative people—they recruited the math department at Harvard heavily,” he explains. Hammerbacher wasn’t keen on becoming some quant analyzing derivatives and writing the next great trading algorithm. So when he joined his girlfriend in the city that summer, he had plans to start a math PhD at NYU in the fall. To kill time and make some money, he took an internship at Bear Stearns for the summer. As happens so often on Wall Street, one little gold piece led to the promise of more, and Hammerbacher dropped his doctorate plans and signed on full-time with Bear. He found himself inside the churning heart of Bear’s quantitative mortgage machine that worked tirelessly on algorithms and data crunching to support their myriad positions in the housing market.

The Confidence Game: The Psychology of the Con and Why We Fall for It Every Time by Maria Konnikova

Abraham Maslow, attribution theory, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Bluma Zeigarnik, British Empire, Cass Sunstein, cognitive dissonance, cognitive load, coherent worldview, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark triade / dark tetrad, endowment effect, epigenetics, Higgs boson, higher-order functions, hindsight bias, lake wobegon effect, lateral thinking, libertarian paternalism, Milgram experiment, placebo effect, Ponzi scheme, post-work, publish or perish, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, seminal paper, side project, Skype, Steven Pinker, sunk-cost fallacy, the scientific method, tulip mania, Walter Mischel

And so they make financial woes (or windfalls) front and center of their put-up—much as Sylvia Mitchell did with her victims, bringing up financial considerations right away: they had too great an attachment to money; they were in an emotional predicament because they had an unhealthy relationship with material possessions; and so on. While they were busy thinking through the implications, she was busy reading them. * * * Lee Choong was a businesswoman from Singapore who had earned a master’s degree in business from NYU. Her life, however, wasn’t going quite as planned. Professionally, her job seemed at a standstill. It was 2007. She was working between eighty and a hundred hours a week at a high-profile investment bank. It was a good job. It paid well. So many others were out of work; she should have been happy. But her countless hours seemed wasted somehow.

…

In his seminal 1950 paper “Self-Actualizing People: A Study of Psychological Health,” Abraham Maslow, a founder of the humanist school of psychology and famous for his eponymous hierarchy of needs, argued that the fully realized, or “self-actualized,” human being must perceive reality “efficiently” and accept herself, with all her quirks and ways, no matter how much that reality might deviate from her ideal vision of herself. Only then will she reach her fullest potential as a person. Eight years later, Marie Jahoda, one of the earliest pioneers of positive psychology and empirical research into the foundations of mental health—she was a founding director of NYU’s Research Center for Human Relations—defined the healthy psyche as one that could perceive the self as it is in reality, without skewing it to fit a particular image or desire. Accurate perception of reality was one of the six criteria she put forward for full mental health. And in 1967, Harold Kelley, a psychologist who was one of the originators of attribution theory, or the theory of how we ascribe causes to different events, agued that humans were like naïve scientists, striving for truth through unbiased, systematic research.

…

A Jew born in Vienna in the winter of 1907, she found herself in prison in 1936—not yet for her Jewishness (Austria was yet to be annexed by Hitler) but for her political views as a social democrat. She managed to escape and make her way to London. Her first book, however, which had expounded on her research to date, was rounded up and most of its copies summarily burned. This time, because its author was Jewish. When she made it to the United States and was teaching at NYU, she focused not only on mental health but also on social prejudice. And there she came to a very different conclusion from her earlier view that an accurate perception of reality was a prerequisite of solid mental health. “People with prejudices seldom like to admit it,” she wrote in one study of opinion researchers who had themselves used biased questions to detect bias in others.

Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America: A Recent History by Kurt Andersen

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, airline deregulation, airport security, Alan Greenspan, always be closing, American ideology, American Legislative Exchange Council, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-communist, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, blue-collar work, Bonfire of the Vanities, bonus culture, Burning Man, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, centre right, computer age, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate raider, cotton gin, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, Elon Musk, ending welfare as we know it, Erik Brynjolfsson, feminist movement, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, Future Shock, game design, General Motors Futurama, George Floyd, George Gilder, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, High speed trading, hive mind, income inequality, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jitney, Joan Didion, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kevin Roose, knowledge worker, lockdown, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, mass immigration, mass incarceration, Menlo Park, Naomi Klein, new economy, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, obamacare, Overton Window, Peter Thiel, Picturephone, plutocrats, post-industrial society, Powell Memorandum, pre–internet, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, Right to Buy, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Seaside, Florida, Second Machine Age, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, strikebreaker, tech billionaire, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, urban planning, urban renewal, very high income, wage slave, Wall-E, War on Poverty, We are all Keynesians now, Whole Earth Catalog, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, working poor, young professional, éminence grise

Charles Koch funded two libertarian nonprofits, a think tank that became the Mercatus Center and an academic networking outfit called the Institute for Humane Studies, and transplanted them to George Mason. They’ve both been influential, Mercatus particularly aggressive and effective in working to hold back federal environmental regulation. The founder of Mercatus was a libertarian economics Ph.D. student at NYU who first pitched himself to Charles Koch in the late 1970s. His actual name is Rich Fink. In 1980 Rich Fink was installed on the economics faculty of George Mason, and for most of the next four decades, he served as Koch’s chief ideological officer, helping to build and oversee his far-flung and constantly expanding propaganda and political enterprises, as well as managing Koch Industries’ Washington lobbying operation.

…

How much do executives, each being paid with stock and options worth millions and sometimes hundreds of millions, use buybacks simply to enrich themselves? The new SEC rule in 1982 didn’t define what might constitute unacceptable deception or fraud when it came to buybacks, so in the thirty-eight years since, no company has been prosecuted for abusing the practice. In 2018 an SEC commissioner who happens to be an NYU law professor specializing in this area did a study of this problem, and he makes a compelling case for systematic abuse. Right after a buyback becomes public, the average executive sells five times as many of his or her shares as usual. “When executives unload significant amounts of stock upon announcing a buyback, they often benefit from short-term price pops at the expense of long-term investors.”

…

But having built that permanent fiefdom inside an established institution, which is now Virginia’s largest public university, the Koch operation leveled up and went national. It endows and otherwise subsidizes libertarian economic and legal programs and classes and one-off conferences and a thousand professors at more than three hundred public and private colleges and universities, including every member of the Ivy League and MIT, NYU, Wesleyan, Amherst, Wellesley, Georgetown, Northwestern, Stanford, and most of the University of California system. In the early 2000s, the Kochs’ spending on U.S. academia increased to around $30 million a year, and since 2017 it has been $100 million a year. Most of the right-wing counter-Establishment that was dreamed up and built in the 1970s and ’80s is now simply the Establishment, none of its pieces more remarkably or importantly so than those in the law.

Navel Gazing: True Tales of Bodies, Mostly Mine (But Also My Mom's, Which I Know Sounds Weird) by Michael Ian Black

Bernie Madoff, David Sedaris, double helix, false flag, Minecraft, planned obsolescence, pre–internet, TED Talk

Once I factored in the possibility that a carload of football players might see me, panting along the road in short shorts, I became dissuaded. After all, a herd of zebras is majestic. A solitary zebra is prey. No, running would have to wait. Perhaps forever. Forever lasted until my freshman year of college at NYU, when my new roommate Dan suggested we take a run together. Dan was an amiable kid from upstate New York who had been on his high school track team, and who dreamed of becoming a foot doctor, which struck me as a bizarre career aspiration. What eighteen-year-old wants to be a podiatrist? Didn’t he know that feet are disgusting?

…

I like her. And, of course, I worry about losing her. Chapter Fourteen Fine, I will save a stupid human life! I tried to save somebody’s life once. I didn’t know her personally, and if I ever knew her name, I have long since forgotten it. All I knew was that, like me, she was a student at NYU but, unlike me, she needed a bone marrow transplant. The girl had a rare bone marrow type, and they needed to cast as wide a net as possible to find her a match. Volunteers had fanned out across the campus, taping flyers to dormitory bulletin boards, begging students to register with the bone marrow people.

…

There is no feeling quite so delicious as that of being virtuous without having had to do anything. So it was with some alarm that I found myself, a couple of weeks later, in my dorm room speaking on the phone with the bone marrow people about the opportunity to save a life. As suspected, I was not a match for the NYU girl. But it turned out I was a potential match for a sickly, middle-aged man somewhere else in the country. Would I like to come in for further testing? What kind of bullshit bait and switch was this? I’d signed on to save a fellow student, not some random dude. I had no idea that when I enrolled, the bone marrow people would then check my blood for all potential matches.

Futureproof: 9 Rules for Humans in the Age of Automation by Kevin Roose

"World Economic Forum" Davos, adjacent possible, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Web Services, Atul Gawande, augmented reality, automated trading system, basic income, Bayesian statistics, Big Tech, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, business process, call centre, choice architecture, coronavirus, COVID-19, data science, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, disinformation, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, factory automation, fake news, fault tolerance, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Freestyle chess, future of work, Future Shock, Geoffrey Hinton, George Floyd, gig economy, Google Hangouts, GPT-3, hiring and firing, hustle culture, hype cycle, income inequality, industrial robot, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, Kevin Roose, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, labor-force participation, lockdown, Lyft, mandatory minimum, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Narrative Science, new economy, Norbert Wiener, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, off-the-grid, OpenAI, pattern recognition, planetary scale, plutocrats, Productivity paradox, QAnon, recommendation engine, remote working, risk tolerance, robotic process automation, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social distancing, Steve Jobs, Stuart Kauffman, surveillance capitalism, tech worker, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TikTok, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, work culture

Some schools are also experimenting with educating students about the value of resting themselves. At Harvard, incoming freshmen are now required to take an online course known as “Sleep 101,” adapted from a popular seminar taught by the leading sleep researcher Charles Czeisler, before ever setting foot on campus. Brown, Stanford, and NYU also offer their own, optional courses in sleep studies. But these kinds of courses can’t be reserved for elite college students. In the automated future, as more of our contributions come from big breakthroughs, inspired ideas, and emotional aptitude, being well-rested is going to become even more critical.

…

And Roots of Empathy, a program developed by the Canadian educator Mary Gordon to help students develop empathy and emotional literacy, is being used by schools in fourteen countries, including the United States, South Korea, and Germany. Older students, too, are experimenting with revisiting analog ethics. At Stanford, for example, students can take a seminar called “Becoming Kinder,” which teaches them about the psychology of altruistic behavior. At NYU, an undergraduate course called “The Real World” is teaching students a critical skill of the future—the ability to cope with change—by conducting simulated problem-solving drills. At Duke, Pittsburgh, and other top medical schools, oncology fellows can sign up for “Oncotalk,” a specialized communications course that teaches them how to have difficult conversations with their cancer patients.

…

Here are a few of the books that most informed my thinking on the subjects of AI, automation, and the contours of the future. If you’re looking to start your own robot-themed bookshelf, I’d recommend starting here. Artificial Unintelligence by Meredith Broussard (2018). Broussard, an experienced data journalist and NYU professor, is a savvy guide to the foibles and limitations of AI, and her book is a forceful argument against what she calls “technochauvinism.” The Second Machine Age by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee (2014). This book by two MIT professors was years ahead of its time. I find myself going back to it frequently.

Duped: Double Lives, False Identities, and the Con Man I Almost Married by Abby Ellin

Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Burning Man, business intelligence, Charles Lindbergh, cognitive dissonance, cognitive load, content marketing, dark triade / dark tetrad, Donald Trump, double helix, dumpster diving, East Village, fake news, feminist movement, forensic accounting, fudge factor, hiring and firing, Internet Archive, John Darwin disappearance case, longitudinal study, Lyft, mandatory minimum, meta-analysis, pink-collar, Ponzi scheme, post-truth, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, TED Talk, telemarketer, theory of mind, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions

14 Short wants a universal law stating that “nonconsensual sex is sexual assault,” and that “consent is freely given, knowledgeable, and informed agreement.” This is personal for her. Short was in her twenties and a Wall Street bond trader when she met Brian, a thirty-two-year-old divorced Jewish man with an accounting degree from New York University (NYU). A Vietnam vet, he had been born in South America and had two sons, both of whom lived with their mother, Roxanne, in Brazil, who was dying of cancer. Short fell in love and they soon became inseparable. A year and a half into their relationship they began talking marriage and she became pregnant.

…

“A betrayal response, along with a moral code of commitment to a loved one, can confuse and deter the victim from simply walking away.” The truth finally unfolded courtesy of Roxanne. Brian was a Catholic, draft-dodging high school dropout, eight years younger than what he’d told Short. There had been no degree from NYU. There was no Jewish family. He hadn’t been to Vietnam. It was like someone took a sledgehammer to Short’s head. “I couldn’t wrap my head around the concept that he was a total stranger to me and the man I loved really didn’t exist,” she said. “He had been an actor. I was not his audience; he was his own audience.

…

She had just completed a master’s degree in religious education at Fordham University, and was teaching religion at a Catholic high school on the Upper East Side. She loved it, but what she enjoyed most was the counseling part, spending time with kids and talking to them. So she went back to school for another master’s, this one in counseling psychology at NYU. At the time, she was grappling with her sexual identity. It was a different world then—lots of shame and internalized homophobia. She “sort of” knew she was a lesbian, but she didn’t know how to deal with it. Diane met another female teacher and they became lovers. Her girlfriend exposed her to a world of female academics with doctoral degrees—professional, smart, fun women.

Floating City: A Rogue Sociologist Lost and Found in New York's Underground Economy by Sudhir Venkatesh

creative destruction, East Village, gentrification, illegal immigration, public intellectual, side project, Silicon Valley, the scientific method, urban renewal, working poor

But that night in my apartment, the more she cried, the less I felt I had any standard to judge. I ventured a technical question. “What kind of investment?” “He said he needed to get some work done on some new projects.” This was J.B.’s weakness. He took pride in discovering new talent. He would find directors fresh out of NYU and tell them he’d finance their genius movie idea. They’d spend weeks drawing up elaborate plans for cast and crew and platform media releases. Alas, his trust fund never quite matched his needs. When his parents refused to offset the difference, J.B. concocted a scheme with his parents’ chauffeur to fake an injury and collect on the payment.

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The university had a reputation for treating young faculty poorly. Rarely did they grant tenure, and when they did, junior professors were still thought of as expendable labor. Most of my friends and advisers urged me not to take the job. But I turned down the other offers that came my way—including one from the downtown competitor, NYU—because I was hungry and I felt I needed the stature and challenge of an Ivy League badge. The pressure cooker of the University of Chicago taught me that I needed a high-stakes environment to motivate me. The department was going through a period of transition. In a bitter struggle between two competing visions of sociology, Herbert Gans represented the discipline’s original aim.

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“I’m not sure there is a good Chianti,” I answered. Betsy looked puzzled. “So you know each other?” We confessed that we did. Like a good host, she soon found an excuse to disappear and let us catch up on old times. “So how are you?” Analise asked. “Good, real good. I’m teaching here now.” “NYU?” “Columbia.” She congratulated me, and I asked what she was doing. “A bunch of different pointless jobs,” she said. “You know, trying to find my thing.” I told her I was thinking about going to France. I mentioned that my marriage wasn’t doing so well. Something about her seemed to invite those kinds of confessions.

The End of College: Creating the Future of Learning and the University of Everywhere by Kevin Carey

Albert Einstein, barriers to entry, Bayesian statistics, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Blue Ocean Strategy, business cycle, business intelligence, carbon-based life, classic study, Claude Shannon: information theory, complexity theory, data science, David Heinemeier Hansson, declining real wages, deliberate practice, discrete time, disruptive innovation, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Downton Abbey, Drosophila, Fairchild Semiconductor, Firefox, Frank Gehry, Google X / Alphabet X, Gregor Mendel, informal economy, invention of the printing press, inventory management, John Markoff, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, low skilled workers, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, natural language processing, Network effects, open borders, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, pez dispenser, Recombinant DNA, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Ruby on Rails, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social web, South of Market, San Francisco, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, technoutopianism, transcontinental railway, uber lyft, Vannevar Bush

New York City, with a population of more than eight million, contains only two first-tier research universities, Columbia and NYU. That’s the same number as the state of Iowa, population three million. Given that New York City is a global capital of finance and culture with an enviably low crime rate, it could easily house ten times the numbers of organizations that support high-level scholarship. The city is also a huge potential market for new educational organizations built from the ground up to serve undergraduates. Universities like NYU and George Washington shoved their way into the top tier of contemporary prestige by selling, first and foremost, their locations.

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A luxury apartment building that opened near campus in 2011 quickly filled with students whose parents paid $3,900 a month in rent. On weekends they gathered in nearby nightclubs to pay $1,000 for reserved tables and bottles of premium vodka and champagne. GW was hardly alone in this. The empire builders prospered in reviving urban centers. In New York, John Sexton turned NYU into a global higher-education player by selling the dream of downtown living to students raised on Sex and the City. In Boston, Northeastern followed BU up the ladder, while Silber’s legacy continued to expand along the Charles. In Los Angeles, Steven Sample turned USC from the “University of Spoiled Children” into a U.S.

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., 53, 123 Nebraska, University of, 26 Nelson, Ben, 133–35, 139, 181 Netflix, 131, 145 Netscape, 115, 126, 128, 129, 204–5 Newell, Albert, 79, 105 New Jersey, College of, 23 Newman, John Henry, 27–29, 47, 49, 244 Newman Report (1971), 56 Newton, Isaac, 190 New York, State University of, Binghamton, 183–84 New York City public schools, 1, 44 New York Times, 9, 44, 56–57, 107–8, 149, 170 New York University (NYU), 9, 64, 96, 250 Ng, Andrew, 153, 158 Nicomachean Ethics (Aristotle), 17 Nimitz, Admiral Chester W., 90 NLS/Augment, 125 Nobel Prize, 3, 45, 59, 78, 80, 176 Northeastern University, 64 Northern Arizona University, 229–30 Health and Learning Center, 230 Northern Iowa, University of, 55 Norvig, Peter, 149, 170, 227–28, 232 Notre Dame (Paris), cathedral school at, 18 Nurkiewicz, Tomasz, 218 Obama, Barack, 2 Oberlin College, 46 O’Brien, Conan, 166 Oklahoma, University of, 90 Omdurman Islamic University, 88 oNLine system, 125–26 Open Badges, 207 Open source materials and software, 177, 205–6, 215, 223, 232 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, 9, 224 Overeducated American, The (Freeman), 56 Oxford University, 19, 21, 23, 24, 92, 135 Packard, David, 123 Parkinson’s disease, 70 Paris, University of, 18–19, 21, 137 Pauli, Wolfgang, 176 Pauling, Linus, 70 Pausch, Randy, 71–72 Peace Corps, 125 Pellar, Ronald (“Doctor Dante”), 208 Pell Grant Program, 56 Penguin Random House, 146 Pennsylvania, University of, 23, 24, 31 Wharton Business School, 155 Pennsylvania State University, 53 People magazine, 57 Pez dispensers, 146 Phaedrus (Socrates), 20, 98 PhDs, 7, 55, 117, 141, 193, 237, 250, 254 adjunct faculty replacing, 252 college rankings based on number of scholars with, 59 regional universities and community colleges and, 60, 64, 253 as requirement for teaching in hybrid universities, 31–33, 35, 50, 60, 224 Silicon Valley attitude toward, 66 Philadelphia, College of, 23 Philip of Macedon, 92 Phoenix, University of, 114 Piaget, Jean, 84, 227 Piazza, 132 Pittsburgh, University of, 73–76 Pixar, 146 Planck, Max, 45 Plato, 16, 17, 21, 31, 44, 250–51 Portman, Natalie, 165 Powell, Walter, 50, 117 Princeton University, 1–2, 23, 112, 134, 161, 245 Principia (Newton), 190 Protestantism, 24 Public universities, 7, 55, 177, 224, 253 Purdue University, 96, 208 Puritans, 22–24 Queens College, 23 Quizlet, 133 Rafter, 131–32 Raphael, 16, 17 Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature, 87 Reagan, Ronald, 56 Regional universities, 55, 60, 64 Reid, Harry, 42 Renaissance, 19 Rhode Island, College of, 23 Rhodes Scholarships, 2 Rice University, 204 RNA, 3 Rockstar Games, 230 Roksa, Josipa, 9, 36, 85, 244 Romans, ancient, 16 Roosevelt, Theodore, 165 Ruby on Rails Web development framework, 144 Rutgers University, 23 Sample, Steven, 64 Samsung, 146 San Jose State University, 177 Sandel, Michael, 177 SAT scores, 63, 136–37, 171, 195, 213 Saylor, Michael, 186–93, 199, 201 Saylor.org, 191, 223, 231 Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph, 45 School of Athens, The (Raphael), 16 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 45 Science: The Endless Frontier (Bush), 51 Scientific American, 92, 155 Scientific Research and Development, U.S.

Late Bloomers: The Power of Patience in a World Obsessed With Early Achievement by Rich Karlgaard

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Amazon Web Services, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Bob Noyce, book value, Brownian motion, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Sedaris, deliberate practice, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, experimental economics, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, financial independence, follow your passion, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Goodhart's law, hiring and firing, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, Larry Ellison, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, move fast and break things, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, power law, reality distortion field, Sand Hill Road, science of happiness, scientific management, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, sunk-cost fallacy, tech worker, TED Talk, theory of mind, Tim Cook: Apple, Toyota Production System, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, women in the workforce, working poor

He wanted to be an actor. But since he struggled with English diction, he turned his attention to directing, where he showed a spark of promise. After the University of Illinois, he followed his future wife, who was doing postdoc graduate work in molecular biology, to New York University. There he enrolled at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. His film directing talents began to be recognized, and he won awards for two of his short films, Shades of the Lake and Fine Line. Then the William Morris Agency signed him. The new film director seemed to be on his way. And then…nothing. Hollywood, it seemed, was not interested in the man from Taiwan, who was not young anymore.

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But insight is more than a novel perception, arrived at in a moment of genius. In fact, our insights are the result of us drawing on our full mental library of experience, patterns, and context, yielding an idea of extraordinary value. For a fuller explanation, let’s turn to seventy-two-year-old Elkhonon Goldberg, the NYU neuroscientist and neuropsychologist. In his 2018 book Creativity, Goldberg debunked the popular notion that creativity resides in the brain’s right hemisphere (while the left hemisphere is a repository for reasoning). The real story is more complicated and interwoven. The right hemisphere matures in childhood; the development of the left is consistent with the development of the prefrontal cortex, which is not fully mature until the mid-twenties, by the estimates of some scientists, and “early to mid-thirties” in Goldberg’s experience.

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It stands to reason that the more information we have stored in our brains, the more easily we can detect familiar patterns. Contrary to popular ideas about aging and creativity, many older adults discern patterns faster, determining what’s important and what’s trivial, then jumping to the logical solution. Elkhonon Goldberg, the NYU neuroscientist, has said that “cognitive templates” develop in older brains based on pattern recognition and form the basis for wise behavior and better decisions. As he observed in The Wisdom Paradox, Goldberg began to realize that as he aged, he was increasingly adept at a kind of “mental magic.”

You're Not Doing It Right: Tales of Marriage, Sex, Death, and Other Humiliations by Michael Ian Black

Albert Einstein, fear of failure, life extension, placebo effect, rent control, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), sugar pill, upwardly mobile

My brother is at Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh, where he is studying to be an actuary, a career he chose after reading a survey in USA Today ranking it the best profession due to its high income and stability. Reading a chart in a newspaper seems like a random way to pick your career, but no more so than choosing one because a girl said she wanted to blow you when you were nine. (Or, for that matter, by taking an online personality test.) I apply to NYU early decision, and the day I am accepted is the happiest I have ever had. I am going to New York. And college doesn’t disappoint. I study acting and try to have sex with girls in my theater class. When we pick partners for scene study, I pair myself with an attractive classmate. Then we meet at her dorm room or mine to practice the scene.

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Don’t go! I am screaming in my head. But she’s gone. I am such an idiot. Why didn’t I get her number? Why didn’t I ask her out? This is exactly why I can’t have nice things! When I get back home I call Ben and ask him if he knows the roommate she was talking about. He thinks so. She’s a freshman at NYU. A freshman? Which would mean the girl I met is only eighteen or nineteen years old. I’m not sure how I feel about that. Actually I am sure, but I am pretending not to be because it would be unseemly to admit how much the words “barely legal” turn me on. Can he call her and get the roommate’s name?

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Not a huge age difference, but I have already been living a fully adult life for those four years. This girl just seems so young to me. Too young? Too innocent? Too boring? Ordinarily I would say yes except for one simple, yet important fact: She is so hot. After our meal, we wander back to her place and she invites me up. Her “place” is a dorm at NYU, the concrete warehouse where they store freshmen. I feel stupid signing in to a dorm. Does the security guard know that my interest in this girl is only prurient? That I am only interested in sullying this doe-eyed young creature? If so, he does not say anything. But I feel bad. I feel bad getting into the elevator and I feel bad listening to her chatter on about the wonders of Indiana.

The Invention of Air: A Story of Science, Faith, Revolution, and the Birth of America by Steven Johnson

Albert Einstein, conceptual framework, Copley Medal, Danny Hillis, discovery of DNA, Edmond Halley, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Kevin Kelly, planetary scale, seminal paper, side project, South Sea Bubble, stem cell, Stewart Brand, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, zero-sum game

How can such a dramatically expanded vista not make us think that the world is still ripe for radical change, for new ways of sharing ideas or organizing human life? And how could it not also be cause for hope? ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I’m grateful to several institutions for their willingness to let me work through the major themes of this book in public. First, NYU’s School of Journalism, for letting me teach a graduate seminar on Cultural Ecosystems, and my students there who contributed so many helpful ideas (and who, I’m thankful to report, shot down more than a few of my less helpful ones). My friends at the Long Now Foundation—Stewart Brand, Kevin Kelly, Brian Eno, Danny Hillis, and Alexander Rose—were kind enough to invite me to discuss the “long zoom” approach to cultural history at one of their seminars in long-term thinking in 2007.

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My research assistant, Jared Ranere, responded with aplomb to the most bizarre of my requests—“Giant dragonflies!”—and was an invaluable sounding board from start to finish. I’m grateful for the institutions that supported the research for this book: the University of Chicago Library; the New York Public Library; the NYU Library; the Jefferson Library at Monticello; the Papers of Benjamin Franklin, maintained by the American Philosophical Society and Yale; the Avalon Project at Yale Law Library; the Royal Society; the British Library; the Priestley collection at the University of Pennsylvania. I also greatly benefited from the many public-domain works by Priestley and his peers that are now available as full-text documents from Google Books.

Marx at the Arcade: Consoles, Controllers, and Class Struggle by Jamie Woodcock

4chan, Alexey Pajitnov wrote Tetris, anti-work, antiwork, augmented reality, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, Boris Johnson, Build a better mousetrap, butterfly effect, call centre, capitalist realism, collective bargaining, Columbine, conceptual framework, cuban missile crisis, David Graeber, deindustrialization, deskilling, Donald Trump, emotional labour, game design, gamification, gentrification, gig economy, glass ceiling, global supply chain, global value chain, Hacker Ethic, Howard Zinn, Ian Bogost, independent contractor, Jeremy Corbyn, John Conway, Kickstarter, Landlord’s Game, late capitalism, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, microaggression, military-industrial complex, Minecraft, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, Oculus Rift, pink-collar, planned obsolescence, scientific management, sexual politics, Silicon Valley, SimCity, Steve Bannon, systems thinking, tech worker, union organizing, unpaid internship, V2 rocket, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War

Payne, Joystick Soldiers: The Politics of Play in Military Video Games (London: Routledge, 2010); Gerald Voorhees, Joshua Call, and Katie Whitlock, Guns, Grenades, and Grunts: First-Person Shooter Games (New York: Bloomsbury, 2012); Corey Mead, War Play: Video Games and the Future of Armed Conflict (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2013). 62Nick Hopkins, “Ministry of Defence Forced to Update Its War Games for Xbox Generation,” Guardian, December 28, 2011, www.theguardian.com/uk/2011/dec/28/ministry-defence-war-games-xbox. 63Hopkins, “Ministry of Defence Forced.” 64Stephen Kline, Nick Dyer-Witheford, and Greig de Peuter, Digital Play: The Interaction of Technology, Culture, and Marketing (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2003), 99. 65Michael Brooks, “If You Can Play a Video Game, You Can Fly a Drone,” New Statesman, June 13, 2012, www.newstatesman.com/sci-tech/sci-tech/2012/06/play-video-game-fly-drone. 66Matthew T. Payne, Playing War: Military Video Games after 9/11 (New York: NYU Press, 2016), 6. 67Kline, Dyer-Witheford, and de Peuter, Digital Play, 244. 68Roger Stahl, Militainment, Inc.: War, Media, and Popular Culture (London: Routledge, 2010), 6. 69Payne, Playing War, 6. 70Quoted in Keith Stuart, “Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare: ‘We Worked with a Pentagon Adviser,’” Guardian, August 28, 2014, www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/aug/28/call-of-duty-advanced-warfare-pentagon-adviser. 71Stuart, “Call of Duty.” 72Strike Fighter Consulting, “About,” Strike Fighter Consulting, 2011, http://strikefighterconsultinginc.com/about/. 73Dabney B., “Did the DoD Forever Change the FPS Video Game Industry?

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Johnson and Jamie Woodcock, “Fighting Games and Go: Exploring the Aesthetics of Play in Professional Gaming,” Thesis Eleven 138, no. 1 (2017): 32. 8Konnikova, “Why Gamers Can’t Stop Playing First-Person Shooters.” 9Michael Hitchens, “B.J.’s Family: A Survey of First Person Shooters and Their Avatars,” in Proceedings of the Sixth Australasian Conference on Interactive Entertainment, ACM, 2009, p. 4. 10Rune Klevjer, “Gladiator, Worker, Operative: The Hero of the First Person Shooter Adventure” (presentation, Level Up: Digital Games Research Conference, Utrecht University, Netherlands, 2003). 11Hitchens, “B.J.’s Family.” 12Edge Staff, “The Making Of…Medal of Honor,” GamesRadar, March 30, 2015, www.gamesradar.com/making-medal-honor/. 13Edge Staff, “The Making Of…Medal of Honour.” 14James Orry, “Battlefield 1’s Anthology Format Single Player Campaign Looks Amazing in First Trailer,” VideoGamer, September 28, 2016, www.videogamer.com/news/battlefield-1s-anthology-format-single-player-campaign-looks-amazing-in-first-trailer. 15Julie Muncy, “A First-Person Shooter Set in WWI Is Maaaybe Not the Best Idea,” Wired, May 10, 2016, www.wired.com/2016/05/battlefield-1-wwi. 16Wilfred Owen, The Poems of Wilfred Owen (Ware, UK: Wordsworth Editions, 1994), 60. 17Adam Chapman, “It’s Hard to Play in the Trenches: World War I, Collective Memory and Videogames,” Game Studies 16, no. 2 (2016). 18Quoted in “Call of Duty Q&A,” GameSpot, May 1, 2003, www.gamespot.com/articles/call-of-duty-qanda/1100-6026083. 19Owen Good, “Black Ops II Chooses Someone Who Failed the Call of Duty,” Kotaku, May 4, 2012, http://kotaku.com/5907854/black-ops-2-chooses-someone-who-failed-the-call-of-duty. 20Marianne Hirsch, The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture after the Holocaust (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008). 21Adam Chapman, Digital Games as History: How Videogames Represent the Past and Offer Access to Historical Practice (New York: Routledge, 2016). 22Kevin O’Neill and Bill Feenstra, “‘Honestly, I Would Stick with the Books”: Young Adults’ Ideas about a Videogame as a Source of Historical Knowledge,” Game Studies 16, no. 2 (2016). 23“Exclusive: Inside the Making of Call of Duty 4,” Gamasutra, March 11, 2008, www.gamasutra.com/view/news/108762/Exclusive_Inside_The_Making_Of_Call_Of_Duty_4.php. 24Steven Burns, “Death From Above: How COD4 Is the Most Realistic War Game Ever Made,” VideoGamer, January 18, 2014, www.videogamer.com/features/death-from-above-how-cod4-is-the-most-realistic-war-game-ever-made. 25Simon Parkin, “Call of Duty: Gaming’s Role in the Military-Entertainment Complex,” Guardian, October 22, 2014, www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/oct/22/call-of-duty-gaming-role-military-entertainment-complex. 26Good, “Black Ops II Chooses Someone Who Failed.” 27Stephen Totilo, “Call of Duty Creators Say Oliver North Helped Make Their Game More Authentic,” Kotaku, May 24, 2012, http://kotaku.com/5913092/call-of-duty-makers-say-controversial-oliver-north-helped-make-their-game-more-authentic. 28Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (London: Verso, 1983). 29Matthew T. Payne, Playing War: Military Video Games after 9/11 (New York: NYU Press, 2016), 7–8. 30Payne, Playing War, 5. 31Tom Bissell, “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Shooter,” Grantland, July 12, 2012, http://grantland.com/features/line-explores-reasons-why-play-shooter-games. 32Kristine Jørgensen, “The Positive Discomfort of Spec Ops: The Line,” Game Studies 16, no. 2 (2016). 33Jørgensen, “The Positive Discomfort of Spec Ops.” 34Jørgensen, “The Positive Discomfort of Spec Ops.” 35Daniel Joseph, “A Line in a Cyclone,” First Person Scholar, December 21, 2016, www.firstpersonscholar.com/a-line-in-a-cyclone. 36Bissell, “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Shooter.”

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Political Videogames 1Woodcock, Working the Phones. 2Patricia Hernandez, “There’s No Such Thing as a Game without Politics or an Agenda,” Kotaku, August 30, 2012, https://kotaku.com/5939367/theres-no-such-thing-as-a-game-without-politics-or-an-agenda. 3Quoted in Chris Baraniuk, “Video Games Become Political as US Election Looms,” New Scientist, October 28, 2016, www.newscientist.com/article/2110736-video-games-become-political-as-us-election-looms. 4Bertell Ollman, “Ballbuster? True Confessions of a Marxist Businessman,” in Dialectical Marxism: The Writings of Bertell Ollman, www.nyu.edu/projects/ollman/docs/bb_ch01.php. 5Ollman, “Ballbuster?” 6Ollman, “Ballbuster?” 7Quoted in Ollman, “Ballbuster?” 8Quoted in Ollman, “Ballbuster?” 9Caillois, Man, Play and Games, 13. 10Ollman, “Ballbuster?” 11Keith Plocek, “Most Popular Marxist Board Game,” Mental Floss, August 12, 2014, http://mentalfloss.com/article/58318/story-class-struggle-americas-most-popular-marxist-board-game. 12Quoted in Plocek, “Most Popular Marxist Board Game.” 13Molleindustria, “Phone Story,” Phone Story, 2011, www.phonestory.org. 14Stuart Dredge, “Apple Bans Satirical iPhone Game Phone Story from Its App Store,” Guardian, September 14, 2011, www.theguardian.com/technology/appsblog/2011/sep/14/apple-phone-story-rejection. 15Molleindustria, “Phone Story.” 16Dredge, “Apple Bans Satirical iPhone Game.” 17Molleindustria, “To Build a Better Mousetrap,” 2014, http://www.molleindustria.org/to-build-a-better-mousetrap. 18Joseph Bernstein, “The New Marxism Comes to Computer Games,” BuzzFeed, May 5, 2014, www.buzzfeed.com/josephbernstein/the-new-marxism-comes-to-computer-games. 19David Leblanc, “Working at Play: Alienation, Refusal, and Every Day the Same Dream,” First Person Scholar, December 14, 2016, www.firstpersonscholar.com/working-at-play. 20Quoted in Leblanc, “Working at Play.” 21Leblanc, “Working at Play.” 22John Walker, “Wot I Think: Papers, Please,” Rock Paper Shotgun, August 12, 2013, www.rockpapershotgun.com/2013/08/12/wot-i-think-papers-please. 23Walker, “Wot I Think: Papers, Please.” 24Keith Stuart, “War Games – Developers Find New Ways to Explore Military Conflict,” Guardian, July 15, 2014, www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jul/15/war-games-developers-military-conflict. 25Marijam Didžgalvytė, “The Uber Game Shows the Latent Power of Political Video Games,” Kotaku, February 8, 2018, www.kotaku.co.uk/2018/02/08/the-uber-game-shows-the-latent-power-of-political-video-games. 26Didžgalvytė, “The Uber Game Shows the Latent Power.” 27Marijam Didžgalvytė, “‘Corbyn Run’ Highlights the Stakes of This Week’s British Election,” Waypoint, June 6, 2017, https://waypoint.vice.com/en_us/article/a3zvpp/corbyn-run-highlights-the-stakes-of-this-weeks-british-election. 28Quoted in Didžgalvytė, “‘Corbyn Run’ Highlights the Stakes.” 29Didžgalvytė, “‘Corbyn Run’ Highlights the Stakes.” 30Didžgalvytė, “The Uber Game Shows the Latent Power.” 31The Supergamers, directed by Chris Boulding, London: BBC, 2016. 32Mark R.

Age of Greed: The Triumph of Finance and the Decline of America, 1970 to the Present by Jeff Madrick

Abraham Maslow, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, bank run, Bear Stearns, book value, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, Carl Icahn, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency risk, desegregation, disintermediation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, financial deregulation, fixed income, floating exchange rates, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, Greenspan put, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, index fund, inflation targeting, inventory management, invisible hand, John Bogle, John Meriwether, junk bonds, Kitchen Debate, laissez-faire capitalism, locking in a profit, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, Mary Meeker, Michael Milken, minimum wage unemployment, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Money creation, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, oil shock, Paul Samuelson, Philip Mirowski, Phillips curve, price stability, quantitative easing, Ralph Nader, rent control, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, scientific management, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, tail risk, Tax Reform Act of 1986, technology bubble, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, too big to fail, union organizing, V2 rocket, value at risk, Vanguard fund, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, Y2K, Yom Kippur War

In 1997, he married NBC News correspondent Andrea Mitchell. He also finally got his Ph.D. from NYU. He had completed his course work years earlier, but did not write a thesis. Possibly because he was not comfortable with theory, nor is there any evidence he was conversant with new complex statistical techniques, Greenspan submitted as a thesis business analyses he had completed for clients or published mostly in business journals, and NYU accepted them as adequate. It is unlikely another established economics department would have done so, or that NYU would do so today. The Ph.D. was granted in 1977. In the 1980s, as he developed his business further, he gave informal advice to the Reagan administration on a variety of issues, and spoke regularly to Democratic politicians as well when asked.

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He quit the demanding program, coming to grips with his limits as a musician, according to biographer Justin Martin, and joined a professional jazz band as saxophonist and clarinetist. He was exempted from service during the war for medical reasons. In 1945, he entered New York University at the age of twenty, graduating summa cum laude in 1948. After NYU, Greenspan attended Columbia in graduate economics, where he studied with Arthur Burns. The Columbia department, and especially Burns, was statistically oriented, which appealed to Greenspan. Moreover, Burns, one of the faculty’s political conservatives, was the first authoritative economist Greenspan met who was a critic of John Maynard Keynes.

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Richard Fuld, the CEO, was also even more aloof than Cayne and showed little capacity to understand fully the crisis that threatened the firm’s survival. The son of a wealthy manufacturer, his father got him a job with a friend at Lehman in 1966 while he was at the University of Colorado. He later earned his MBA from NYU at night. Lehman was an investment banking legend and one of the largest firms on the Street. Fuld, a natural battler who had a couple of fistfights as an adult, became a commercial paper trader, and an intimate of the gruff man who eventually ran the firm, Lewis Glucksman. Glucksman won a power struggle against the investment banker Pete Peterson for control of the firm in the early 1980s and sold it (see Chapter 16) to Sandy Weill’s former protégé at American Express, Peter Cohen, who merged it with Shearson, Weill’s old firm.

America's Bitter Pill: Money, Politics, Backroom Deals, and the Fight to Fix Our Broken Healthcare System by Steven Brill

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, asset light, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, business process, call centre, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, compensation consultant, crony capitalism, desegregation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, employer provided health coverage, medical malpractice, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Nate Silver, obamacare, Potemkin village, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, side project, Silicon Valley, the payments system, young professional

Didn’t all that also drive their ability to negotiate hard with UnitedHealthcare? “Of course,” Corwin acknowledged. “But,” he reiterated, “that allows us to have the resources to continue to do more research and expand care.” “The other hospitals do it, too,” Kelly, the president and chief operating officer, added, noting that “we just lost the billboard to NYU”—the NYU Langone Medical Center. NYU, along with hospitals and clinics run by Mount Sinai Hospital and the North Shore–LIJ Health System, were three fast-growing hospital conglomerates that were Corwin and Kelly’s main competitors. In each case, they gave bigger discounts to insurers, because New York–Presbyterian was perceived to be the more indispensable brand.

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If Corwin and his integrated system charged too much or didn’t do a good job, my employer or I (if I was in the individual market) could switch to another competitive New York brand like Mount Sinai or NYU Langone. And all of that competition would be fortified by advances in data transparency that would make each competitor’s quality ratings for various types of care readily available. Corwin’s high price for my open-heart surgery would truly be tested in the market, because he would be competing with other high-quality health systems, like Mount Sinai or NYU Langone, to capture all of my business or my employer’s business. He and his network of hospitals, clinics, and doctors would be insuring me not only against heart surgery, but for routine treatment and x-rays if I twist my ankle or get the flu.

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Yet it is done in combination with private sector competition and innovation, as exemplified by these doctor-leaders. Let them act on their ambitions. Let them compete with other legitimate players in their markets, or even with one another if they want to expand. That kind of competition is already happening, as the fight over the billboard between New York–Presbyterian and NYU Langone illustrates. Only it is blurred by the insurance companies in the middle, which makes it competition by proxy, at best. As things stand now, an employer who wants to get healthcare for his workers, or an individual who is shopping on the Obamacare exchanges, has to figure out which insurance company has which hospitals and doctors in its network and what discounts it has negotiated.

The Hype Machine: How Social Media Disrupts Our Elections, Our Economy, and Our Health--And How We Must Adapt by Sinan Aral

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, AOL-Time Warner, augmented reality, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, computer vision, contact tracing, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, death of newspapers, deep learning, deepfake, digital divide, digital nomad, disinformation, disintermediation, Donald Trump, Drosophila, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, Erik Brynjolfsson, experimental subject, facts on the ground, fake news, Filter Bubble, George Floyd, global pandemic, hive mind, illegal immigration, income inequality, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, lockdown, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Metcalfe’s law, mobile money, move fast and break things, multi-sided market, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, performance metric, phenotype, recommendation engine, Robert Bork, Robert Shiller, Russian election interference, Second Machine Age, seminal paper, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, skunkworks, Snapchat, social contagion, social distancing, social graph, social intelligence, social software, social web, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Chicago School, the strength of weak ties, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, WikiLeaks, work culture , Yogi Berra

—SETH GODIN, author of This Is Marketing “Brilliant! Aral’s masterful integration of science, business, law, and policy presents a powerful, accessible explanation of how social media affects all of us. Whether you simply want to understand the how and why, or need to make business or policy decisions, this is a must-read!” —FOSTER PROVOST, NYU Stern School of Business, author of Data Science for Business “Sinan Aral is a scientist and entrepreneur, and his unique perspective makes him the perfect guide to the world we live in today. From ads to fake news, The Hype Machine is the best critical foundation for understanding the connected world and how we might navigate through it to a better future.”

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How we choose to consume and act on the information and recommendations the machine makes determines what the machine will recommend next. When the Sense and Suggest Loop encounters healthy communication, it responds in kind, creating a virtuous rather than a vicious Hype Loop. So when should we follow the Hype Machine’s recommendations, and when should we push back? My friend and former NYU colleague Vasant Dhar has asked that very question. Which decisions should we outsource to machine intelligence and which should we keep to ourselves? While his framework applies to the broader AI economy, I believe the insights it offers can help us understand how to design better Hype Machine code and suggest when we, as users, should follow or ignore its suggestions.

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On MySpace, they could connect with, well, strangers. Facebook launched at Harvard in February 2004, then opened its doors to one college after another: Columbia, Yale, Dartmouth, Cornell. Within two months, seventy thousand students had joined from twenty major U.S. colleges, including Stanford, MIT, NYU, and Northeastern. Facebook wasn’t open to anyone outside these campuses. By May 2005 it had expanded to eight hundred college networks. In September of that year, it added high school networks. In October it expanded to international school networks. In May 2006 it added workplace networks. Each of these networks was a tight-knit group in which many people already knew each other, had friends in common, or could relate to each other’s experiences of having the same school or work culture.

The Digital Divide: Arguments for and Against Facebook, Google, Texting, and the Age of Social Netwo Rking by Mark Bauerlein

Alvin Toffler, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andrew Keen, business cycle, centre right, citizen journalism, collaborative editing, computer age, computer vision, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, digital divide, disintermediation, folksonomy, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Future Shock, Hacker News, Herbert Marcuse, Howard Rheingold, invention of movable type, invention of the steam engine, invention of the telephone, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, late fees, Lewis Mumford, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, meta-analysis, moral panic, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, PageRank, PalmPilot, peer-to-peer, pets.com, radical decentralization, Results Only Work Environment, Saturday Night Live, scientific management, search engine result page, semantic web, Silicon Valley, slashdot, social graph, social web, software as a service, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, technology bubble, Ted Nelson, the long tail, the strength of weak ties, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thorstein Veblen, web application, Yochai Benkler

But Thoreau understood that securing one’s self-possession was worth a few wounded feelings. He may have put his neighbors off, but at least he was sure of himself. Those who would find solitude must not be afraid to stand alone. < Clay Shirky> means Excerpted from Cognitive Surplus (pp. 42–64). CLAY SHIRKY is an adjunct professor in NYU’s graduate Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP). Prior to his appointment at NYU, Shirky was a partner at the investment firm The Accelerator Group in 1999–2001. He has had regular columns in Business 2.0 and FEED, and his writings have appeared in the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Harvard Business Review, Wired, Release 1.0, Computerworld, and IEEE Computer.

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This shift to post-Gutenberg economics, with its interchangeably perfect versions and conversational capabilities, with its symmetrical production and low costs, provides the means for much of the generous, social, and creative behavior we’re seeing.... >>> the shock of inclusion I teach in the Interactive Telecommunications Program, an interdisciplinary graduate program at NYU. In the decade I’ve been there, the average age of my students has stayed roughly the same, while my average age has grown at the alarming rate of one year per year; my students are now fifteen or twenty years younger than I am. Because I try to convey an understanding of the changing media landscape, I now have to teach the times of my own youth as ancient history.

The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class by Joel Kotkin

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", "World Economic Forum" Davos, Admiral Zheng, Alvin Toffler, Andy Kessler, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bread and circuses, Brexit referendum, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon credits, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, clean water, company town, content marketing, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, data science, deindustrialization, demographic transition, deplatforming, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, edge city, Elon Musk, European colonialism, Evgeny Morozov, financial independence, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Future Shock, gentrification, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Google bus, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, guest worker program, Hans Rosling, Herbert Marcuse, housing crisis, income inequality, informal economy, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, job polarisation, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, land reform, liberal capitalism, life extension, low skilled workers, Lyft, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, megacity, Michael Shellenberger, Nate Silver, new economy, New Urbanism, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, Occupy movement, Parag Khanna, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post-industrial society, post-work, postindustrial economy, postnationalism / post nation state, precariat, profit motive, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, rent control, Richard Florida, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Salesforce, Sam Altman, San Francisco homelessness, Satyajit Das, sharing economy, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, smart cities, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, superstar cities, technological determinism, Ted Nordhaus, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, trade route, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, Virgin Galactic, We are the 99%, Wolfgang Streeck, women in the workforce, work culture , working-age population, Y Combinator

Dobson, “The East Is Crimson,” Slate, May 23, 2012, http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/foreigners/2012/05/harvard_and_the_chinese_communist_party_top_chinese_officials_are_studying_at_elite_u_s_universities_in_large_numbers_.html; Jennifer Levitz, Steve Eder, and Jeremy Page, “Bo Xilai’s Son Appears to Have Left Home Near Harvard,” Wall Street Journal, April 16, 2012, https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702304818404577345680438913376. 4 Ben Wildavsky, The Great Brain Race: How Global Universities Are Reshaping the World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), 169. 5 “NYU president on global universities, ‘idea capitals’ and ‘talent snowballs’,” Times Higher Education, May 22, 2013, https://www.timeshighereducation.com/comment/opinion/nyu-president-on-global-universities-idea-capitals-and-talent-snowballs/2004033.article. 6 Claudia Goldin and Lawrence F. Katz, “The Shaping of Higher Education: The Formative Years in the United States, 1890 to 1940,” National Bureau of Economic Research, April 1998, https://www.nber.org/papers/w6537.pdf. 7 Daniel Bell, The Coming of Post-Industrial Society (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 217–22; Erin Duffin, “U.S. college enrollment statistics for public and private colleges from 1965 to 2016 and projections up to 2028,” Statista, August 9, 2019, https://www.statista.com/statistics/183995/us-college-enrollment-and-projections-in-public-and-private-institutions/. 8 Robert Gordon, The Rise and Fall of American Growth (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016), 513, 521. 9 Max Roser and Esteban Ortiz-Ospina, “Tertiary Education,” Our World in Data, 2019, https://ourworldindata.org/tertiary-education; Angel Calderon, “The higher education landscape is changing fast,” University World News, June 22, 2018, http://www.universityworldnews.com/article.php?

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Renn, “Population Transformation in Pittsburgh and Chicago,” New Geography, April 13, 2018, http://www.newgeography.com/content/005937-population-transformation-pittsburgh-and-chicago. 45 UCL Urban Laboratory, “How Ruth Glass shaped the way we approach our cities,” University College London, January 13, 2015, http://www.ucl.ac.uk/urbanlab/news/ruth-glass-seminar. 46 Karen J. Gibson, “Bleeding Albina: A History of Community Disinvestment,” Transforming Anthropology, vol. 15:1, (2007), 3–25, http://kingneighborhood.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/BLEEDING-ALBINA_-A-HISTORY-OF-COMMUNITY-DISINVESTMENT-1940%E2%80%932000.pdf; NYU Furman Center, “Focus on Gentrification” June 9, 2016, http://furmancenter.org/files/sotc/Part_1_Gentrification_SOCin2015_9JUNE2016.pdf; Jonathan Wynn and Andrew Deener, “Gentrification? Bring It,” The Conversation, October 11, 2017, https://theconversation.com/gentrification-bring-it-82107. 47 Kevin Baker, “The Death of a Once Great City,” Harper’s, July 2018, https://harpers.org/archive/2018/07/the-death-of-new-york-city-gentrification/; Theodore Dalrymple, “The Architect as Totalitarian,” City Journal, Autumn 2009, https://www.city-journal.org/html/architect-totalitarian-13246.html; Claire Berlinski, “The Architectural Sacking of Paris,” City Journal, Winter 2018, https://www.city-journal.org/html/architectural-sacking-paris-15655.html. 48 James Heartfield, “London’s Social Cleansing,” New Geography, May 13, 2012, http://www.newgeography.com/content/002824-london%E2%80%99s-social-cleansing. 49 Ibid.; Sara Malm, “Is buying a house just a pipe dream?

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Civil Service College Singapore and Chapman University, 2012, https://www.chapman.edu/wilkinson/_files/the-rise-of-post-familialism.pdf; Ali Modarres and Joel Kotkin, “The Childless City,” City Journal, Summer 2013, https://www.city-journal.org/html/childless-city-13577.html. 18 Joel Kotkin and Wendell Cox, “America’s Future Depends on the Bedroom, Not the Border,” New Geography, April 22, 2019, http://www.newgeography.com/content/006282-america-s-future-depends-bedroom-not-border. 19 Derek Thompson, “The Future of the City Is Childless,” Atlantic, July 18, 2019, https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/07/where-have-all-the-children-gone/594133/. 20 NYU Furman Center, “Report Analyzes New York City’s Gentrifying Neighborhoods and Finds Dramatic Demographic Shifts,” The Stoop, May 9, 2016,. http://furmancenter.org/thestoop/entry/new-report-analyzes-new-york-citys-gentrifying-neighborhoods-and-finds-dram; Joel Kotkin, “America’s Future Cities: Where the Youth Population Is Booming,” New Geography, February 6, 2014, http://www.newgeography.com/content/004169-americas-future-cities-where-the-youth-population-is-booming. 21 Steve LeVine, “1 Big Thing: the great family exodus,” Axios, January 25, 2019, https://www.axios.com/newsletters/axios-future-ddfc78e8-78ec-4285-87ab-f10565b42249.html. 22 Elizabeth Cheung, “Financial burdens, cramped living quarters and less sex: are these the reasons so many Hong Kong women are undecided about having children?”

I See You Made an Effort: Compliments, Indignities, and Survival Stories From the Edge of 50 by Annabelle Gurwitch

Alan Greenspan, Large Hadron Collider, McMansion, multilevel marketing, Saturday Night Live, Steve Jobs, urban planning, zero-sum game

It was also unfathomable to me that anyone would have been content to live with sect leaders “Do” and “Ti” on a 3.4-acre property with a pool and tennis courts but be housed in dormitory-style rooms with bunk beds. Ridiculous! But snagging a seat on a spaceship? I was on board with that idea. How I ended up in a UFO cult is directly related to my moving to New York in the fall of 1980. I had fair to middling SAT scores and a grade point average good enough to make me a decent candidate for NYU acceptance, but I had other advantages working in my favor: desperation and good timing. I remain convinced I was accepted because I cried and begged to be admitted during my interview. I hear this doesn’t work anymore in the college application process, but as luck would have it, I had specifically requested placement in their Experimental Theatre Wing, a fledgling program that was actively soliciting students for enrollment.* The night before my audition I had attended a student production.

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I never asked critical questions, like why our artsy band was chosen to usher in the new age and not the legions of religious adherents who have dedicated their entire lives to achieving enlightenment. On the face of it, there wasn’t much to recommend me, in particular, as a representative of our planet. I didn’t have any scientific knowledge that could be useful on a long journey across the universe. In fact, I had enrolled in an astronomy class at NYU so I could gain more understanding of my future voyage but never made it to more than a handful of the classes. The seminars had a narcoleptic effect on me—these were the dark ages before really good coffee could be found on every corner of the city, and I attended these lectures on nothing more potent than watery coffee-shop drip.

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*In UFO lingo, a close encounter of the first kind is seeing the UFO, the second kind involves some sort of interaction, the third kind is getting on the ship/pod mode of transport. It’s beam-me-up-Scotty territory. *I had the opportunity to interview an admissions officer on NPR about current standards at NYU. She assured me that with my grades, scores, and crying I would have absolutely no chance whatsoever of being admitted to the school today. *That performer, the multitalented Gayle Tufts, is now a prominent chanteuse in Germany. *My immediate goal became to get listed in the New York phone book.

Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy by Jonathan Taplin

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "there is no alternative" (TINA), 1960s counterculture, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, American Legislative Exchange Council, AOL-Time Warner, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, basic income, battle of ideas, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Big Tech, bitcoin, Brewster Kahle, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, Clayton Christensen, Cody Wilson, commoditize, content marketing, creative destruction, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, data science, David Brooks, David Graeber, decentralized internet, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, equal pay for equal work, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, future of journalism, future of work, George Akerlof, George Gilder, Golden age of television, Google bus, Hacker Ethic, Herbert Marcuse, Howard Rheingold, income inequality, informal economy, information asymmetry, information retrieval, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jacob Silverman, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, labor-force participation, Larry Ellison, life extension, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, military-industrial complex, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, offshore financial centre, packet switching, PalmPilot, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, pre–internet, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, recommendation engine, rent-seeking, revision control, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Ross Ulbricht, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, secular stagnation, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skinner box, smart grid, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, software is eating the world, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, tech billionaire, techno-determinism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Chicago School, the long tail, The Market for Lemons, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transfer pricing, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, unpaid internship, vertical integration, We are as Gods, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, web application, Whole Earth Catalog, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, you are the product

Released in early 1969, Easy Rider completely changed the industry. The film grossed more than $60 million, so the return on investment was extraordinary. Almost instantly, every broke studio began looking for first-time directors who could make films for less than $1 million. The obvious place to look was the film schools—NYU, USC, and UCLA. But the young men (and they were almost all men) who were training in these schools had a very different view of the role of the director from that of the old moguls who still ran the studios. The kids had been schooled on European New Wave directors such as François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Federico Fellini, and Ingmar Bergman.

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Just because some techno-optimists continue to insist that old jobs will be replaced by new jobs we can’t imagine yet does not mean it is true. Google’s AlphaGo artificial intelligence system may have bested the world’s greatest Go player, but I’m not worried that it’s going to replace our greatest musicians, filmmakers, and authors, even though an NYU artificial intelligence laboratory has programmed a robot named Benjamin to be a screenwriter. And even if you believe that robots will be able to fill most jobs, MIT’s Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson have pointed out that “understanding and addressing the societal challenges brought on by rapid technological progress remain tasks that no machine can do for us.”

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John Seabrook, The Song Machine: Inside the Hit Factory (New York: W. W. Norton, 2016). This is a wonderful book on the modern pop-music business. Frans de Waal, “How Bad Biology is Killing the Economy,” Evonomics, March 2016, evonomics.com/how-bad-biology-is-killing-the-economy/. Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (New York: NYU Press, 2006). Jenkins and I don’t always agree, but he has been a constant source of inspiration and guidance for me at the Annenberg Innovation Lab. Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death (New York: Penguin, 1985). This was a pre-Internet look at the role of popular culture in pacifying the American public.

Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World by Cal Newport

Black Lives Matter, Burning Man, Cal Newport, data science, Donald Trump, Dunbar number, financial independence, game design, Hacker News, index fund, Jaron Lanier, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, lifelogging, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, Mr. Money Mustache, Pepto Bismol, pre–internet, price discrimination, race to the bottom, ride hailing / ride sharing, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, TED Talk

If we want to thwart their worst effects, however, we need to better understand how they’re so easily able to subvert our best intentions for our lives. Fortunately, when it comes to this goal, we have a good guide. As it turns out, during the same years when Harris was wrestling with the ethical impact of addictive technology, a young marketing professor at NYU turned his prodigious focus to figuring out how exactly this techno-addiction works. * * * ■ ■ ■ Before 2013, Adam Alter had little interest in technology as a research subject. A business professor with a PhD from Princeton in social psychology, Alter studied the broad question of how features in the world around us influence our thoughts and behavior.

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He discovered that putting on NPR in the background while working on manual tasks kept him sufficiently up to speed and saved him from many of the worst features of internet news. Ramel also embraced an older technology: instead of checking social media feeds to stay up to date, he now has a newspaper delivered to his NYU dorm. Perhaps predictably, many of the participants in my mass declutter experiment ended up abandoning the social media services that used to take up so much of their time. These services have a way of entering your life through cultural pressure and vague value propositions, so they tend not to hold up well when subjected to the rigor of the screen described above.

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* * * ■ ■ ■ Part of what complicates discussions of waning solitude in the smartphone age is that it’s easy to underestimate the severity of this phenomenon. While many people admit that they use their phones more than they probably should, they often don’t realize the full magnitude of this technology’s impact. The NYU professor Adam Alter, whom I introduced earlier in this book, details a typical story of such underestimation in Irresistible. While researching his book, Alter decided to measure his own smartphone use. To do so, he downloaded an app called Moment, which tracks how often and how long you look at your screen each day.

The Last Black Unicorn by Tiffany Haddish

El Camino Real, Skype

I did that all through high school, till I was like eighteen. And then, I had to quit. I had to quit comedy, because I was homeless, and I was supposed to go to NYU, and I had no idea what to do. I know, it’s confusing. Here’s how it went: Once I turned eighteen, my grandma sat me down. Grandma: “Since I ain’t getting paid for you now, you need to go to school. You grown. Go on, get out there. You got friends. You’ll make it.” I had gotten accepted into NYU, but they weren’t paying my way. I didn’t have no money, and my grandma was still taking care of my brothers and sisters. I was like, What if something happens to her?

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Even though I bombed, getting to the second round helped my career. I did some stand-up on a couple of late night TV shows, and then I ended up doing HBO’s Def Comedy Jam, and then Def Comedy Jam started getting me other shows. Then I got a movie with Mike Epps, and that started getting me to colleges. It’s kind of full circle, ’cause NYU wanted to charge me $30,000 a semester to attend, and now, I’m going to all these different colleges, and they’re paying me $2000 to tell jokes for like forty-five minutes. I felt like the dopest person in the world. I was getting paid to go to school. I wasn’t really learning anything, but still. Once I got divorced, it was like the floodgates opened.

Kill Chain: The Rise of the High-Tech Assassins by Andrew Cockburn

airport security, anti-communist, Bletchley Park, drone strike, Edward Snowden, friendly fire, Google Earth, license plate recognition, military-industrial complex, no-fly zone, RAND corporation, risk/return, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, Suez crisis 1956, TED Talk, Teledyne, too big to fail, vertical integration, WikiLeaks

After all, it was an established point of drone-strike doctrine: Jo Becker and Scott Shane, “Secret ‘Kill List’ Proves a Test of Obama’s Principles and Will,” New York Times, May 29, 2012. Finally, sometime after 10:00 a.m.: International Human Rights and Conflict Resolution Clinic at Stanford Law School and Global Justice Clinic at NYU School of Law, “Living Under Drones; Death, Injury and Trauma to Civilians from U.S. Drone Practices in Pakistan” (2012), p. 59. http://livingunderdrones.org/report/. “The smell was awful.”: Ben Emmerson, UNSRCT Drone Inquiry, “Interview with witness #3,” Case Study #1: Datta Khel, March 14, 2014. http://vimeo.com/79102292.

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“in a manner consistent…”: Sebastian Abbott, “New Light on Drone War’s Death Toll,” AP Impact, February 26, 2012. “These guys were terrorists”: Tom Wright and Rehmat Mehsud, “Pakistan Slams U.S. Drone Strike,” Wall Street Journal, March 18, 2011. A separate probe by the Associated Press: Abbott, op. cit. Although the positions held by the dead men were now of course vacant: Stanford and NYU Law Schools, op. cit., p. 60. When presented with the tool of a Hellfire-armed Predator: Steve Simon and Dan Benjamin, Age of Sacred Terror (New York: Random House, 2002), p. 345. Soon, visiting dignitaries: Mazzetti, op. cit., p. 6. In 2004, when the CIA sought Pakistani permission to launch drone strikes: Mazzetti, op. cit., p. 103ff.

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“We did nothing”: Columbia School of Law, Human Rights Clinic and Center for Civilians in Conflict, The Civilian Impact of Drones—Unexamined Costs, Unanswered Questions, p. 21. Afterward, when Hayden and Kappes explained the concept of a signature strike: Daniel Klaidman, “Drones: The Silent Killers,” Newsweek, May 28, 2012. According to a rare outside observer: David Rhode, “The Drone War,” Reuters magazine, January 26, 2012. “We do not come out of our villages”: NYU and Stanford Schools of Law, op. cit., p. 96. The sole survivor of Obama’s first strike: Ibid., p. 74ff. “We got played all the time”: Interview with former CIA official, Washington, DC, April 16, 2014. Naturally, the Pakistani government was happy: Ahmed, op. cit., p. 73. As related in Joby Warrick’s gripping account: Joby Warrick, The Triple Agent: The al-Qaeda Mole Who Infiltrated the CIA (New York: Doubleday, 2011).

13 Bankers: The Wall Street Takeover and the Next Financial Meltdown by Simon Johnson, James Kwak

Alan Greenspan, American ideology, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Bonfire of the Vanities, bonus culture, book value, break the buck, business cycle, business logic, buy and hold, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, Charles Lindbergh, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, corporate governance, corporate raider, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, currency risk, Edward Glaeser, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, financial repression, fixed income, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Greenspan put, Home mortgage interest deduction, Hyman Minsky, income per capita, information asymmetry, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, laissez-faire capitalism, late fees, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, Michael Milken, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage tax deduction, Myron Scholes, Paul Samuelson, Ponzi scheme, price stability, profit maximization, proprietary trading, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, Robert Bork, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Satyajit Das, Savings and loan crisis, sovereign wealth fund, Tax Reform Act of 1986, The Myth of the Rational Market, too big to fail, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, value at risk, yield curve