In 1973 the ever-reclusive Alfred Hitchcock was interviewed for an episode of Tom Snyder’s Tomorrow Show. Whatever the explanation—misplaced, forgotten, destroyed—the recording was lost to posterity sometime after Memorial Day in 1980, when it was rerun as part of a retrospective episode (ostensibly as an observance of Hitchcock’s demise the previous month).

Recently, a perfectly preserved VHS recording of the 1980 rerun was discovered, digitally transferred and uploaded to Youtube in six parts:

Part I / Part II / Part III / Part IV / Part V / Part VI

That, according to a seriously shaky Wolfram|Alpha calculation, is how much land that each person would get were the Earth (minus Antarctica and the Sahara Desert) split 6.67 billion equal ways.¹

Here’s the equation:

For comparison, 4.659 acres is about the size of 2.6 FIFA-sanctioned international match soccer fields.

If you’re thinking, Gee, that actually kind of sounds like a lot, bear this in mind: the actual Earth is not a flat grid of equally habitable cells—inevitably, many millions of people would get stuck with parcels on mountainsides or in toxic waste dumps, swamps, deserts and Siberia. The above figure is clearly on the generous side.²

That said, I’m on the borderline of horror with this one. It either makes the world seem very small or makes mankind seem very stifling.

Either way, this much is certain: the fact that Wolfram|Alpha can help be indulge in such childish things is undeniably cool.

1. A side note: one of mankind’s greatest inventions is the technique of building vertically. But, for the sake of this hypothetical, I’m talking straight-up land ownership. [↑]
2. And no, there’s no easy way to further refine the equation, short of making an exhaustive (and totally subjective!) List of All Terrestrial Hellholes Known to Man and plugging each item in one after another. [↑]

When Theresa Duncan, 40, took her own life on July 10, followed a week later by her boyfriend, Jeremy Blake, 35, their friends were stunned and the press was fascinated: what had destroyed this glamorous couple, stars of New York’s multi-media art world, still madly in love after 12 years?

“Multi-media art world” and the clueless artiness that it seems to imply is just the first indication that the following is about some sad-sack Gen-Xers.

And you’d be right. But there’s a heck of a story in there—I read it during my lunch break yesterday and haven’t been able to get it out of my mind ever since.

It’s old—from the January 2008 issue of Vanity Fair—and has been widely read (Gus Van Sant and Bret Easton Ellis are reportedly working on the screenplay). But hey, just in case.

I’ve made an iPhone¹ version of the site:

A couple things. I’m going to be making some changes to the way that full posts are displayed, like ditching the speech bubble icons used to display how many comments a post has—they just tend to get in the way. I also need to take a serious look at the navigation bar on top, which I’ll do as soon as I get the chance.

Aside for noting that I’ll need to rework the comments section of each permalink page, I haven’t really taken a look at how this condensed layout affects other pages. So if anything looks stupid, bear with me. Or, better yet, let me know!

There’s no special url – just visit the site from a mobile device.

1. Works on any mobile device, though – it’s designed to be viewed on displays that are 320 pixels wide. Because I’ve only got an iPod Touch to work with, I don’t know how that looks on, say, a Blackberry. For the sake of making sure this looks good on as many devices as possible, I’m going to make the assumption that 320 is pretty standard by now. [↑]

The sun-drenched apartment, perched high in a Midtown Manhattan building looking down on the famed restaurant Le Cirque, is as luxurious as one would expect for space that cost $10.4 million. Lined with floor-to-ceiling glass, the living room features low divans wrapped in rich golden fabric. On the vast outdoor deck, as big as many apartments, the views stretch north and east, all the way across Long Island Sound toward Connecticut.

Yet even a casual visitor would notice that something is amiss. Dozens of bare hooks line the white walls; all the paintings are gone. Boxes of paperwork litter the floors. In the kitchen, the knives are missing. Bags of trash overflow. The dining-room table is strewn with containers of half-eaten Chinese food. In an adjacent nook, an older man slumps on a sofa watching CNN on a wall-mounted flat-screen television. Unpaid bills are piling up. As nice as this apartment once was, it now feels like a $10 million dorm room.

That’s because it’s a jail. Sort of. On the orders of a federal judge, its owner is living here under house arrest. That man watching CNN? He’s a retired F.B.I. agent, one of several who rotate through all week long. One morning I arrive after 11. The owner, the man the security guards are watching, is just getting out of bed.

His name is Marc Dreier, he is 59 years old, and his life is over. A smallish, tightly wound man with red, stubbled cheeks and a silvery pompadour, Dreier was once a hotshot New York litigator with multi-millionaire clients. Then he stole $380 million from a bunch of hedge funds, got caught, and was arrested in Toronto under bizarre circumstances, having attempted to impersonate a Canadian pension-fund lawyer as part of a scheme to sell bogus securities to the big American hedge fund Fortress Investment Group. Now, as he wanders into the living room rubbing sleep from his eyes, Dreier is waiting for the judge to tell him just how many years he will spend in prison.

As part of a collaboration with 60 Minutes, Vanity Fair‘s Bryan Burroughs recently sat down to talk with Marc Dreier—the guy behind a four-year, $380 million Ponzi scheme discovered at the end of 2008. Dreier was fortunate (??) enough to get caught just days before Bernie Madoff’s infinitely more extensive heist was brought to light. Needless to say, everybody but the justice department forgot who Dreier was overnight.

Which is a shame. Because not only is Dreier an extremely guilty man, but he’s a vastly compelling character—the sort of guy who admits that the main impetus behind his thieving nature is his constant yearnings for a newer beach house.

Oh yeah. And there’s the really interesting part, as detailed in the first paragraph of the blockquote above: Dreier was arrested in Toronto after trying (and failing spectacularly) to impersonate a Canadian lawyer at a meeting with the head of American hedge fund Fortress Investment Group.

Got an hour to kill?

Alternate Title: Wake Me in January: The Chad Pennington's Throwing Shoulder Benefit Mixtape

Fueled by nothing but reheated dinner, autumnal ennui and prevailing financial paranoia, I have compiled the Playlist to fit this exact moment in football history.

Listen closely and soon you too may find yourself bouncing a bald tennis ball against the wall and singing softly to yourself. Or drinking irresponsibly while you stare out the kitchen window at your fenced-in apartment-complex yard and the looming city with a punctured sort of feeling. Somehow, through it all, absently massaging your own right shoulder, imagining what it must feel like to have it ripped apart by some fat young brute from San Diego. Hoping, beyond all reason, that next Sunday just simply fails to materialize.

Moping.

I invite you, dear reader, to come away with me on an emotional journey. All links lead to corresponding YouTube videos.

1. Van Morrison – Sweet Thing from the album Astral Weeks
2. N.E.R.D. – Sooner or Later from the album Seeing Sounds
3 Elliott Smith – Oh Well, Okay from the album XO

Had to establish a rule early on: only one Elliott Smith song allowed. A guy like that could monopolize a list like this.

4. Roy Orbison – It’s Over
5. Eric Clapton – Tears in Heaven from the album Unplugged
6. Jeff Buckley – Last Goodbye from the album Grace
7. Belle & Sebastian – Get Me Away From Here, I’m Dying from the album If You’re Feeling Sinister
8. Nick Drake – Pink Moon from the album Pink Moon

I saw it written and I saw it say / Pink moon is on its way / And none of you stand so tall / Pink moon gonna get you all

9. Gnarls Barkley – Whatever from the album The Odd Couple
10. The Notorious B.I.G. – Suicidal Thoughts from the album Ready to Die
11. Tom Waits – November from the album The Black Rider
12. Elliott Smith – A Fond Farewell from the album From a Basement on the Hill

It’s OK to cry. I am.

In an article posted Sept. 22, Clusterstock’s John Carney tries to make the argument that Paul Krugman is wrong about Wall Street bonuses. I say ‘tries’ because his argument, as you read through it with a feeling of mounting incredulity, is pretty flaccid.

On October 13, a year will have elapsed since New York Times columnist (and Princeton professor) Paul Krugman won the Nobel Prize in Economic Science. Krugman has been something of a guiding light throughout our financial blowup. He has the enviable ability to simplify extraordinarily eggheaded economic principles and to shape them into compelling calls to action. He is unashamedly in the Keynesian mold, a true believer in the importance of strong government involvement in times such as these—times in which the moral invincibility of free market principles feels increasingly discredited.

Krugman’s line throughout the crisis has remained steady: everything is rooted in the actions of deeply irresponsible bankers who knowingly took on too much risk because they were rewarded with big short-term profits.

Carney has dubbed this the “banker pay myth”—so you pretty much know right away where he stands. He cites a post on Causes of the Crisis, a blog set up by a bunch of wonks from the Critical Review. Here’s the relevant passage:

For one thing, bankers were often compensated in stock as well as with bonuses, and the value of this stock was wiped out because of the investments in question. Richard Fuld of Lehman Brothers lost $1 billion this way; Sanford Weill of Citigroup lost half that amount. A study by Rüdiger Fahlenbrach and René Stulz [3] showed that banks with CEOs who held a lot of stock in the bank did worse than banks with CEOs who held less stock, suggesting that the bankers were simply ignorant of the risks their institutions were taking. Journalists’ and insiders’ books about individual banks[4] bear out this hypothesis: At Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers, for example, the decision makers did not recognize the risks until it was too late, despite their personal investments in the banks’ stock.

Perhaps the most powerful evidence against the executive-compensation thesis, however, is that 81 percent of the mortgage-backed tranches purchased by banks were rated AAA[5], and thus produced lower returns than the double-A and lower-rated tranches of the same mortgage-backed securities that were available. Bankers who were indifferent to risk because they were seeking higher return, hence higher bonuses, should have bought the lower-rated tranches universally, but they did so only 19 percent of the time. And most of those purchases were of double-A rather than A, BBB, or lower-rated, more-lucrative tranches.

Nope. Your eyes do not deceive you. Yup, the Review‘s case for executive exoneration is the fact that any high-stakes crook worth his salt would have made a blindingly obvious cash-grab and gotten out. He would have made it so nakedly obvious that this debate we’re having right now wouldn’t be a debate at all—it would be two fairly reasonable human beings agreeing on an observed fact. Right?¹

Right?

That which the Review and, by proxy, Carney fail to account for is perhaps the oldest trick in the book as far as fraud is concerned: an imperfect money-sucking machine draws less attention and—this is the important part—hides behind an inscrutable veil of doubt. Mathematics and economics, alas, have a tough time accounting for simple deceit.

For an alternative example, look to the recent beef that Nate Silver started with Strategic Vision over some cooked poll numbers. Even the dumbest pollster knows the danger of releasing badly lopsided poll numbers (when compared to the aggregate of other similar polls). Slightly smarter dumb pollsters at least make it look competitive—their favored choice wins reliably, but never by an unrealistic margin (see: the 2009 Iranian election)

Obviously, that’s all a metaphor. Polling is not subject to the same rules as financial raiding, but it’s certainly subject to the same strategy: cook it but make it look, at the very least, believable. There’s simply no evidence against a scenario in which the execs picked tranches with lesser value so that they could keep plausible deniability on their side.

It’s telling that Carney should offer up a couple of goats like [Lehman Bros CEO] Richard Fuld and [Citigroup CEO] Sanford Weill—two guys who steered their respective firms to the bottom of a crater. More relevant examples would be dudes like [Goldman Sachs CEO] Lloyd Blankfein or [JPMorgan Chase CEO] James Dimon. How have they fared?

Don’t bother—I can answer that. See, it’s no secret that in July, Goldman reported its largest quarterly profit in its history as a public company. JPMorgan was no slouch, either.

So instead of giving us two examples of jugheads who probably were legitimately blindsided by the whole thing, why not talk about the guys who cleaned up?

Because, of course, that would be devastating to Carney’s case. That’s why. Carney’s logical paradigm seems to favor an all-or-nothing scenario—either they were all in on it or they were all doofuses. He either does not understand or is unwilling to admit that the plights of two clueless firms are not representative of all firms.

But I’m not going to hold that against him because it actually is a pretty effective illustration of an important yet little-understood distinction: all of the major Wall Street firms caused this mess, but some had the foresight to realize it beforehand. The rest were hapless pretenders who fucked up, made things worse and then imploded.

All evidence—literally, all of it—points to Goldman having set up the market like a bowling pin. Hank Paulson, who was CEO of Goldman before Bush tapped him for Treasury Secretary in 2006, had an outrageously suspect relationship with his old firm.²

In citing the examples of only the most hapless executives (Fuld and Weill et al.), Carney has demonstrated that he’s either a hopeless naïf or that he’s the sort of guy you can really count on to keep your secrets from the cops.

1. If you didn’t read it earlier, read it now: The Myth of the Atomic Bomb [↑]
2. Yeah. That’s a link to an actual substantive scoop by the New York Post. What of it? [↑]

Yesterday, I read the NYT Magazine article about Carl Jung’s mythical Red Book. Better grab a coffee—reading the article could take all morning.

The condensed version, for those of you who don’t have time: 38-year old Swiss psychologist Carl Jung has a sort of psychotic existential breakdown sometime in 1914 and, consequently, begins cataloguing and exploring the debilitating hallucinations he experiences. What results over the next 16 years is 205 pages of meticulous illustration and writing, which is all eventually bound together in a gigantic eponymous red leather tome.

The magazine article describes it thusly:

The book tells the story of Jung trying to face down his own demons as they emerged from the shadows. The results are humiliating, sometimes unsavory. In it, Jung travels the land of the dead, falls in love with a woman he later realizes is his sister, gets squeezed by a giant serpent and, in one terrifying moment, eats the liver of a little child. (“I swallow with desperate efforts — it is impossible — once again and once again — I almost faint — it is done.”) At one point, even the devil criticizes Jung as hateful.

Jung dies in 1961, before he can complete his book. His son, who inherits the estate, decides to leave this book of disjointed writings and mindbending mandalas where it lies, locked in a cupboard. Twenty years later the family has it transferred to the Union Bank of Switzerland’s vault—where it’s been ever since, existing in a sort of ethereal, self-mythologizing state.

At most, just two dozen people have ever gotten a substantial look inside. But those long odds haven’t deterred many of Jung’s followers, who have apparently spent the 48 years since Jung’s death trying to get through to Jung’s family – the book’s stalwart protectors. Every inquiry, even the ones delivered from the family’s literal doorstep, has been turned down – sometimes viciously.

Until now. Someone – somewhere, somehow – must have been successful, because The Red Book comes out October 7.¹

With an apparent list price of $195², but Amazon’s selling it for $105.30. Barnes and Noble is doing the same. Borders, predictably, is not.

That’s just a little blue for my blood. This sort of thing practically begs to be read during a long afternoon spent in a chair at Barnes and Noble.

1. Note: link to Amazon [↑]
2. Hope you didn’t just spit that coffee all over your computer screen – I know how those repair bills can be [↑]

According to Politico this morning, President Obama’s request earlier this week that New York Gov. Paterson abstain from running for reelection in 2010 came at the urging of several U.S. senators and concerned state legislators.

Who? I can’t help but wonder.

Since he took over last year, Paterson’s had a tough time. The extreme highs of being the guy who replaced Eliot Spitzer gave way to the lowest approval ratings in state history as problems piled up.

Like the recession. Because Wall Street has taken some serious hits, so has their taxable revenue. New York is uniquely dependent on a booming Wall Street. The wonderful things that we New Yorkers enjoy – like a large, accessible public university system – are unsustainable in times like these.

And, of course, there’s the Great Senate Stalemate of ’09, in which Democrats briefly lost their tenuous majority because of a couple of unashamed opportunists.¹ The ensuing weeks were as close to a breakdown of American government as we have ever seen.

By any metric, Paterson has had a trying term. But, given the circumstances, it’s unclear just what – if anything – that Paterson could have done avoid it. His heart is generally in the right place, as far as Democrats go. He supports gay marriage and wants to institute ‘fat taxes’ on soft drinks. He’s unwilling to raise tax rates on the extraordinarily wealthy.

This latest news just reiterates the fact that Paterson can’t even count on that eternal fallback of any mainstream politician: the support of his own party.

update: Andrew Cuomo? I’m just sayin. It’s not like he needs to resort to underhanded shit to beat Paterson next year, but maybe he feels better with a little insurance.

1. To be fair, it’s tough to tell whether that all happened because Paterson was too weak or whether it happened because Sen. Hiram Monserrate and Sen. Pedro Espada, Jr. are extremely easily bribed – Monserrate, after all, was rewarded for his defection with the post of president pro tem. [↑]

A friend sent me a link the other day to a post on a blog. The gist, as I understand it, is pretty well encapsulated in one particular section:

Out of curiosity I went to check out how much apple was asking for Jay-Z’s Blueprint 3.

$16.99, $16.99 to get me to pay for some mp4 files, a few music videos and the liner notes of an album. Apple you are making a mistake, if you want people to buy albums and not singles, charge the same $9.99 price tag. But no instead your going to ask people to spend $20 on some shit they can’t even take off of the computer.

Which, though it does it in a particularly shrill way, at least makes a decent point – The Deluxe Version of Jay-Z’s new album, The Blueprint 3, is going for $16.99 on the iTunes Store.¹ The $6 difference between deluxe and standard, then, must be accounted for by the iTunes LP extras.

Which are as follows: (1) two music videos and (2) the LP package – the contents of which I am not privy to. Assuming that it’s fairly boilerplate, it probably just includes some photos, lyrics, a custom visualizer and some more videos. Admittedly, that’s not worth six bucks to me either.

But there are some things.

Most importantly, the music files are 256kbps AAC files and arenot DRM-protected – meaning they’re actually iTunes Plus files.² Which, of course, have always been more expensive. One would expect that some dude who claims to be a vinyl fiend would appreciate the higher bitrate. Or at least notice it.

Second – and this one probably doesn’t interest the blog’s author all that much – the whole thing is entirely presented with HTML and CSS, all wrapped up in a Webkit package. The bottom line: no fucking flash.³ This last one isn’t really much of a selling point – it’s not like added value in the consumer’s pocket – but it’s a great move, as far as pushing the standards envelope is concerned.

On the topic of the price-gouging: $16.99 is, all said and done, not a terribly high price to pay for a “deluxe” album.⁴ Which is, in part, what’s making Chap foam at the mouth. In his estimation, nothing has changed:

All apple is doing is taking the old model of making 2000% profit on cds that collapsed, adding a few bells and whistles and telling me that $17-$20 for an “iTunes LP” is fair. So instead of getting an overpriced CD your getting some files on your computer. Guess what. I’m not gonna buy into it.

To that, I can only say that Apple has never, as a company, tried to push a bargain-basement image. They are and always have been unashamed price-gougers. We pay for the convenience and intuitiveness – the Apple Tax. To expect Apple to push prices down is to display a complete ignorance of Apple’s business ethic.

I’ll grant Chap this, though: despite Apple’s claim, iTunes LP is a pale replacement for a thoughtfully-packaged physical record. Further, it’s changed literally nothing about the record industry’s favored practice of tacking crap on top of a record and charging a few more bucks – other than the fact that there’s a little more art to the presentation and that the whole thing is digital. And, of course, there’s the bitrate bump. And, again no DRM.

But then again, Apple doesn’t really change things these days – they didn’t invent the mp3 player, the mp3 store or the smartphone. Apple helps existing things reach their potential. This is probably just as far as the Deluxe Album could possibly go. The main thrust of Chap’s argument concerns Apple’s failure to take the reins and really just change everything. Which is not really a great criticism – not unless you can give examples of how it could be better. Chap, like any consumer, just wants more for less.

Or, to frame it from a different angle, he believes that his ten bucks entitles him to a lot more than he’s getting. And maybe he’s right.

But he’ll never get it from Apple – a company that probably has no desire to destroy the music industry and uproot all those money trees. Now he knows.

1. The regular version of the disc – with no bells or whistles – costs $10.99. Amazon’s got it for $9.99 – discounted from an apparent list price of $19.98. [↑]
2. One note: now that Apple decided to bake Webkit into iTunes, it seems that we’ve lost the ability to see bitrates and metadata by right-clicking and choosing Get Info. Which I consider to be a pretty grievous loss in itself. I guess you’ve got to buy it before you see the nuts and bolts of what you’re getting. [↑]
3. Really, I applaud this latest nail in Flash’s coffin. [↑]
4. And anyway, it’s not like $16.99 is some standard price point. Muse’s new album, The Resistance (warning: iTunes link), is priced at 11.99. [↑]