I am not the same Devon Pendleton who has apparently started some sort of war with Barstool Sports. So kindly quit with the angry comments. I’m sure the other Devon Pendleton has a blog you can spar with.
Gaming for Good and an Update
I recently had the pleasure of contributing a story to a very interesting, relatively new online mag, The Good Men Project Magazine. It’s a worthwhile site to bookmark if you enjoy thoughtful, sometimes provocative essays about society, sports, ethics…other manly topics. It was actually started by a small team (including founder Tom Matlack and NYT Magazine writer Benoit Denizet-Lewis) who were interested in creating a smarter alternative to the other men-oriented mag brands out there like Men’s Health, Maxim and others who traffic in endorsing a manly male personage that you might say doesn’t always appeal to the “sensitive guy.” Good Men (which donates a quarter of its profits to organizations that help at-risk boys) is less boobs, abs, UFC recaps, marinade recipes “guaranteed to close the deal,” and more about fatherhood, workplace quandries, sports and smart humor. Enlightened masculinity, if you will.
Anyways, my Good Men piece was about video games. I can’t believe it either, but it was fascinating to report and a lot of fun to write. I was one of those insufferable snobs who thinks there is little to zero redeeming value to playing video games. Spending hours in the dark, on the couch, eyes glazed, playing World of Warcraft seemed to be more of a symptom of social exile-dom than a worthy, productive pursuit in of itself. Not only is that wrong on many levels (and snotty of me) it’s also hypocritical in that I was a devout fan of action adventure games like Monkey Island (1, 2 and 3) and the LucasArts games like Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis growing up. Guess what…they’re online games, I loved ‘em and no doubt still would if I dared to download them today. The only thing stopping me- seriously- is the fear that I will become obsessed. Though if I decide to go ahead and take a stab at the Monkey Island screenplay (Zach Braff as Guybrush Threepwood…perfect right? My husband’s idea, I admit) it may the perfect excuse.
The story is called “Could the Next Warren Buffett be an Online Gamer?” and you can read it here.
Now for my update! Tomorrow I start a new gig as a television writer for Bloomberg TV. I’m tremendously excited- it’s a new medium at a new, very promising company that seems to have a lot of great people. A new challenge, and a new insanely crazy schedule. Updates to come- when relevant and interesting.
Filed under Uncategorized
Visualizing Visual.ly
I’ve noticed recently that there’s a pressing new “must-have” skill for reporters. No, not a deep comfort level with CMS (that’s a given). Not a fine eye for content curation (you’ve got that nailed). Not video-editing (what what Final Cut!), not regular editing (as in words? God no) not personal branding and not doing all five of those things while simultaneously scooping everybody.
It’s creating infographics- nifty, eye-catching charts, diagrams and other visual devices that help writers illustrate stats. Numbers can be dense and as for that old adage about pictures = 1,000 words, let’s be honest, it’s kind of true. A painful admission for anyone who’s paid by the word.
But designing these graphics ain’t easy. The New York Times is generally considered the gold standard for these types of work-ups and they enlist a fleet of design/coding/development brains.
Which is what makes this start-up, Visual.ly so intriguing. Watch-
Pretty cool. They’re reportedly already talking with media heavyweights like HuffPo and CNN to be their exclusive infographic provider. Do they offer anything for the little guy? Possibly not yet but their very existence will no doubt spawn competitors which should help keep prices in check. Maybe even a WordPress of infographics? An elegant, intuitive visual-builder for the amateurs among us. I’d invest.
Filed under Business, Digital Media
Back At It
So it’s been nearly a year. A year. A year in which this neglected blog has been left fallow- a fact both embarrassing and unacceptable to someone like myself, for whom consistency is right behind godliness and just ahead of cleanliness on the personal-values index.
To me, a year of non-posting smells like a year of of neglected trash. Looks like a year of collected dust, tastes like a year of stale Nescafe. But enough with the shame and remorse. To be fair, it’s been a pretty busy year.
I got married.
Before getting married, I participated in that frantic rite of passage Americans call “planning a wedding” which, despite my best of intentions, did end up consuming 42.5% of my brain (which seems bizarre and unfair now that I realize I can’t remember any of my hard-earned knowledge about peony varietals). You win, bridal-industrial complex.
I took a sumptuous Italian honeymoon.
I finally fixed the leak in my roof ($4k later it turned out to be nothing a hurricane sock couldn’t fix, but an emotional victory nonetheless) and we can enjoy the view with a little less angst.
Professionally, I tried something new. When I resigned from my full-time magazine job 18 months ago, part of my rationale was that there was a digital revolution going on in media and I had best go out and seek it on my own terms. I figured this could be a fun side hobby while I developed a rich and fulfilling career as a full-time freelance writer. The (hopelessly naive) adage “do you what you love and the money will follow” might be better phrased in this case “do you what you love only to realize no one pays for it anymore so do whatever you can with your skills which are growing more archaic by the day.” Which is how I found myself with a steady (paid!) contract gig with the New York Stock Exchange as a “digital strategy consultant,” a title which later evolved into more of a producer/editor role for a new network of NYSE Euronext-branded consumer-facing sites.
I’m considering it as tantamount to a year in business school with a new media concentration- partly because I learned a tremendous amount (more on that later) and partly because I have to somehow justify to myself a year of not writing much. I hate writing but I hate not writing more.
And yes- learning. I never thought I would understand the stark distinction between Project Managers and Product Managers. The philosophies behind Waterfall and Agile in the software development process. Why there is a critical dearth of Drupal developers in NYC and the argument against Ruby on Rails (“SO not scalable”). “Dev” does not mean me and “Prod” is not a request to shove over. And maybe most confounding of all, a “story” is not what you think. Not even close. But that’s another post entirely.
So yes, a lot was learned on the job in the past year and it’s all coming with me into Phase 2 of my freelance career. If Nov. 2009 to April 2010 was beta, then today we are launched.
And lest I forget to mention perhaps the very best part of this busy year: my new niece Gabriele Grae, born September 14, 2010.
Filed under Uncategorized
Harrod's Sale Crowns Mohamed Al-Fayed World's Craziest Billionaire
When feisty Egyptian retail mogul Mohamed Al-Fayed announced earlier this week that he sold his prized luxury store Harrods to the Qatari royal family for $2 billion, it marked his official entry to the who’s-who list of ten-digit fortunes.
Yes, the headline here is not that what al-Fayed did yesterday was crazy- in fact it may be the sanest thing he’s ever done- but that his reported $1.32 billion cut now makes him a certified billionaire. And given his colorful track record, rife with (alleged) bribery, vicious feuds and bizarre conspiracy theories he has a strong case for now being the world’s craziest.
And that’s a dense field. Hitherto May 10′s announcement, the distinction probably belonged to self-proclaimed “#1 King of All Fun” generic-drug kingpin Stewart Rahr, though even he had stiff competition from an increasingly-senile Sumner Redstone and the irrepressible Mark Cuban.
Why does Al Fayed trump them all? Many reasons, but these three loom largest:
1. His Faux-Paranoia
Most billionaires are a little cagey- and for very good reason. As any poor soul who’s had the misfortune of winning the lottery can tell you, public wealth is a big burden: an infringement on you and your family’s security, privacy and a source of unmanageable junk mail. But Al Fayed’s raging paranoia is legendary and also inauthentic. As recounted in Maureen Orth’s engrossing 1995 expose in Vanity Fair:
Fayed has a personal security staff of 38-two teams that alternate, one week on, one week off, at his residence at 60 Park Lane, at his country house in Oxted, where his family lives, and at his castle in Scotland. His “close-protection team” consists of 8 or 10. One assumes that the millions of dollars this security costs and the level of his apparent paranoia, which extends to wearing only clip-on ties so that he cannot be strangled, must mean that Fayed’s life is under constant threat. Not so, according to a half-dozen former guards I interviewed, who say that his security is mainly for show.
via Vanity Fair’s famous exposé of Mohamed ‘Al’ Fayed, by Maureen Orth.
2. His Genuine Paranoia
Not a charmingly-eccentric brand of neuroticism, mind you- but a rather repellant fear of anything “beneath” him. Again, as reported by Orth back in 1995:
Whenever Fayed suffers a spate of bad publicity, the press seems to be flooded with stories and pictures of him helping needy children. In fiscal 1994, Fayed had House of Fraser donate £800.000 ($1.2 million) to charity. Yet Fayed’s fear of germs is such, say ex-employees, that he can, barely stand to touch the children who get him so much positive press. He does not allow his own children to attend the annual Harrods Christmas party, they say, for fear of contamination, and he keeps Wet-wipes in his pockets so that after shaking every little hand he can wipe his own.
3. He’s completely delusional
Evidence? It’s almost too plentiful to list here but it includes a) a conviction that the British government conspired to kill Princess Diana and his son Dodi Fayed in the 1997 car crash, b) the fact that in order to convince the government that he had the cash to buy Harrods back in 1984, he drafted a completely-fabricated press release claiming (among other things) that he hailed from an “old, established Egyptian family” of industrialists and was educated in British schools. And c) his defamation lawsuit against Vanity Fair for their critical profile was summarily dismissed.
I will grant Al Fayed this- he does win “Best Appearance by a Billionaire on Da Ali G Show.” No small feat, especially for a man who is paranoid, delusional and (one would think) completely lacking a sense of humor:
[youtubevid id="9bYjGHRX9dE"]
Filed under Billionaires, Business, World
Obama's Entrepreneurship Summit: Propaganda or Progress?
In case you missed it, the “new beginning” to US-Muslim relations kicked off Monday. The difference is palpable, no?
Well, maybe no. Not yet- but the two-day Presidential Summit on Entrepreneurship which ended yesterday at the White House is evidence of a promise fulfilled. Back last June in his much-ballyhooed speech in Cairo, Obama vowed to host a conference of prominent business people and leaders from predominantly-Muslim countries to network, discuss the region’s pressing economic problems and identify ways the US can help.
In terms of participation, the summit seemed a sure success, with attendees including Muslim rockstars of commerce like Grameen Bank-founder and microfinance-Evangelist Mohammad Yunus, Arif Naqvi, head of Arab private equity giant Abraaj Capital and Sudanese billionaire Mohammed Ibrahim, founder of mobile group, CelTel International. And as a diplomatic maneuver, it’s a smart strategy: after all, what topic could be more unifying and less-controversial than economic empowerment (aka turning a buck)? Especially when- as it is at this summit- the emphasis is on social as well as financial returns. Steering the Muslim-American dialogue to something other than terrorism, profiling, war and oil is not only a welcome change from the same old discourse, it’s an important chance to focus on the dual crisis of surging population growth and high unemployment endemic to the Middle East.
But is a feel-good confab with roundtables on vague subjects like “Promoting Entrepreneurship and Enabling Business” and “Culture of Entrepreneurship” really going to get us anything beyond a modicum of goodwill from a few economically-progressive Muslim leaders? Is it a legitimate sign of progress? Not by the history-books standard:
“In some ways Cairo is not going to be fulfilled until you get grander solutions to some of the big geopolitical problems,” said Juan Zarate, an analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “The president is going to be judged by his ability to move those big issues much more so than whether or not he hosts a conference at the White House,” he said.
Via: NewsDaily: Obama fulfills Cairo pledge with entrepreneur summit.
And is the White House really the best host of an event espousing the merit of entrepreneurialism? Particularly at a time when the administration has been so publicly battling the “unchecked greed” of capitalism. As Tim Kane, a researcher at the Kauffman Foundation for Entrepreneurship noted:
To be fair and balanced, I’m not sure all of the White House folks get entrepreneurship and you get a sense some want to talk about social entrepreneurship instead. Believe me, the delegates from the Middle East noticed, and one would-be entrepereneur commented to me that, “We need help creating wealth before we start talking about giving it back.”
via Grading the Presidential summit on entrepreneurship – CSMonitor.com.
And how realistic is it, that these entrepreneurs will be able to launch or grow their businesses in a region that’s overwhelmingly under autocratic (real or virtual) rule? Andrew Albertson, director of the Project on Middle East Democracy, is not optimistic:
Washington does the region no favors by offering an entrepreneurship summit, one of its new initiatives, while avoiding the root problems hindering business such as political decay and corruption.
Yet despite the fluff, spin and potential futility surrounding the whole gathering, Obama should still be lauded for holding it, for these 3 reasons:
1. New businesses- and the jobs they create- are critical to the Middle East’s near-term future.
According to a recent report by the Brookings Institution, the region’s youth unemployment rate is nearly twice that of the world at large. This, despite the fact that its youth population also happens to be one of the world’s best-educated demographics. Millions of educated but jobless youths in a region where the education and health care system, infrastructure and natural resources are already strapped is a recipe for discontent. If these quasi- or outright- autocratic rulers care to keep their populace pleased, they’d be best to empower entrepreneurs.
2. Speaking of discontent…
While there is no hard-and-fast evidence that poverty breeds terrorists (or that there is any petri dish for terrorists, anywhere), there is loads of anecdotal evidence that there is a link between a country’s youth unemployment and its homegrown terrorists. Frustrated, disenfranchised young people with schooling but little opportunity to use it to better their lives is a common profile of terrorist offenders and exactly the population nonprofits like the Education for Employment Foundation try to reach. EFE’s mission is to provide supplemental vocational and technical education to young people in predominantly-Muslim countries- future entrepreneurs or their potential employees.
3. The Summit focuses on what unites us
Again with the money thing. But seriously, encouraging and enabling people all over the world to make a living, support their families and innovate is, in my opinion, a more concrete and sensible approach to pushing democracy than any “Winning hearts/mind” campaign strategy of the Bush administration. A world of billionaires would probably still not be entirely peaceful but a world where people have the agency to improve their lives might be one in which folks have one less thing to fight over.
Filed under Billionaires, Business, World
Goldman's Fraud: Ignorance, Meet Arrogance
In sifting through the reams of damning documents and news stories that have surfaced over the past three days, it is perversely comforting to rediscover the icky truth behind financial implosions in general and the subprime debacle in particular: no one- no one- knew what the hell they were doing.
I say “comforting” because every time I try to suss out the salient details of any issue having to do with credit-default swaps, collateralized loans or subprime derivatives, I get so confused and lost I wonder if I am perpetrating my own personal fraud- moron hack journalist. So the news frenzy set ablaze last Friday by the SEC’s civil fraud case against Goldman Sachs has granted us a new opportunity to gawk at the stunning hubris of some Wall Street traders and remember that common sense has not yet been rendered irrelevant by ad networks, quant models, the iPod or Wikipedia.
To get a handle on just how much the involved parties didn’t know, a little background is helpful:
1. What’s the SEC’s suit all about?
In short, the SEC is accusing Goldman Sachs, the lionized Harvard of investment banks, of lying to investors. In finance- as in relationships- not telling the whole truth is tantamount to lying. When Goldman hawked to investors a shiny new product- a synthetic collateralized debt obligation tied to the performance of subprime residential mortgage-backed securities (sounds sexy- surely someone smart put it together) back in early 2007, they didn’t bother to tell investors that the fund’s holdings were chosen with the help of an independent hedge fund (billionaire John Paulson’s Paulson & Co.) who wanted the fund to fail. While Goldman was marketing the fund on the premise that the housing market was sound, bear Paulson was betting housing would flop and, the SEC alleges, made the portfolio pics accordingly. Spoiler alert: he was right. Paulson made $3.5 billion shorting subprime in 2007. [For more background, check out the SEC's formal complaint- it's surprisingly readable].
2. So what was in this fund, exactly?
A big pile of dodgy debt. No kidding. Investment banks nationwide binged on subprime mortgage securities back in the heyday of the housing bubble. High-risk mortgages- the kind banks were normally loathe to give out because of the high likelihood of default- were suddenly hot on Wall Street. Investors developed complex statistical models to determine borrower behavior (defaults, prepayments, etc.) driving bond value. Fancy algorithms- portfolio analytics- developed by the super-genius “quant” traders at banks showed that distributing risk over a broad “basket” of loans could turn subprime loans into safe ones. So by bundling some very risky loans in along with a heap of not-so risky loans, you had an AAA-rated product. A rock-solid way to mint money. The same way that mixing some arsenic into a pie crust recipe will make for an overall perfectly-healthy treat. Make sense? No? You’re right- it doesn’t make sense. These two Brits articulate the nonsensical-ness of it all rather nicely:
[youtubevid id="mzJmTCYmo9g"]
Because Paulson had a gloomy view of the future of mortgage securities, he participated in the market largely through Credit Default Swaps, insurance contracts which paid out a premium if a loan defaulted. Paulson essentially, had a lot to gain if housing went bust and (the SEC alleges) his firm influenced the Goldman fund’s portfolio picks to emphasize the dodgiest of the debt.
3. Why is this Goldman’s fault? Seems like Paulson is the bad guy.
Paulson so far hasn’t been implicated in any shenanigans though there’s a case that he should be. Goldman made the critical mistake not to be disclose to prospective investors the involvement of Paulson & Co. and their bearish view. In their response, they say ACA an “independent and experienced portfolio selection agent” and the largest investor in the fund, selected the portfolio. But how independent were they if they were the largest investor? And selected from what- a list given to them by Paulson?
The moral takeaway- and the thing that is really going to tarnish Goldman (and the stock market) in the long run is how arrogant and clueless those involved come across. “Fabulous Fab,” the named orchestrator behind the particular fund, is a straight-to-screen character. His now-famous 2007 email says it all:
“More and more leverage in the system, The whole building is about to collapse anytime now…Only potential survivor, the fabulous Fab[rice Tourre]… standing in the middle of these complex, highly leveraged, exotic trades he created without necessarily understanding all of the implications of those monstruosities!!! (sic)” he wrote in an email to a friend in January 2007, according to the SEC.
via ‘Fabulous Fab’ emails revive broker conflicts – MarketWatch.
Surely politics has more than its share of ignorance and arrogance and the timing of the SEC probe could not be more politically-perfect for the Dems and Obama’s financial-reform agenda. But fraud is fraud and meddling in things you don’t fully understand is always a bad idea, be it home renovation or statistical derivatives models.
Filed under Billionaires, Business, Wall Street
