I strongly suggest a trip to the newsstand for the August 28, 2006 New Yorker magazine. There is a short story by Richard Ford (won the Pulitzer for Independence Day (my review)). There is an article on the Russian mathematician Grigory Perelman. We knew that he worked on the Poincare conjecture. We didn’t know that, at age 40, he lives with his mom and attends the opera in the evenings. Everyone he knows has decamped for sunnier climates and better paying jobs, but he returned to and stays in St. Petersburg: “I realize that in Russia I work better”. Malcolm Gladwell, inspiration to so many business executives today, writes about looking at the ratio of workers to non-workers to predict economic success in countries and companies (bad news for GM and Ford, of course). James Surowiecki (not online) writes about how executives at public companies manage to make $billions by running their companies badly (or at least doing the accounting so it looks as though things are going badly), taking them private, fixing the accounting or operational issues, then taking them public again. This is an old story, but Surowiecki is always fun to read.
3 thoughts on “August 28, 2006 New Yorker magazine”
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Thanks for the heads-up. The Perelman article was really well written and researched. Apart from his intelligence, I was impressed in how he doesn’t allow pride/ego/material comforts to get in the way of what is really important to him.
Surowiecki is, in fact, online. His Financial Page is considered part of Talk of the Town, so you have to click into the Talk of the Town section first to get to it. Here’s the URL:
http://www.newyorker.com/talk/content/articles/060828ta_talk_surowiecki
This was a strong issue, but the New Yorker is consistently incredible. It is more enjoyable as a subscription if you let go of reading things you don’t like.
It is a very good issue. I naddition to the articles Philp cites, I found the article on stage fright was very iluminating as it makes sense of why I don’t like doign sales calls. Anthony Lane’s film reviews are always a fun & sometimes a viciously fun read.