Shkreli, Running, Jazz, Bathing, Skyscrapers
Biopharma Investing
Martin Shkreli | 12th August 2018
Martin Shkreli may have done some bad things in his life, but right now, in jail, he is writing some good things on his blog. This post includes suggested interview questions for a person seeking a job in the pharmaceutical industry; a review of “The Acquirer’s Multiple” by Tobias Carlisle; and notes on a recent academic paper about asthma. “The number of people who tell me they have statistical experience or chemistry experience only to swing and miss a softball technical question is large. If you can fluster someone with a softball, they’re probably not a good fit” (2,100 words)
Bret, Unbroken
Steve Friedman | Runner's World | 1st June 2013
His brain and body shattered in a horrible accident as a young boy, Bret Dunlap thought just being able to hold down a job, keep an apartment, and survive on his own added up to a good enough life. Then he discovered running, which gave his life an upside. “You don’t like to talk about your brain injury, or recovery, or what was, or what might have been. But you want people — especially people who are going through what you went through — to know that things can get better, that if things are getting a little better for you, they might get a little better for them” (9,500 words)
John Coltrane And The End of Jazz
Dominic Green | Weekly Standard | 26th August 2018
“Coltrane’s late style emerged in his 1960s quartets. The further he went, the more ambitious and less accessible the music became, until it was incomprehensible to almost all of his audience and even to some of his closest collaborators. Jazz didn’t exactly die with Coltrane, but he certainly helped to kill it. No one, apart from Miles Davis, read its inner logic so clearly. No one did more to pulverize show tunes and the blues into stardust. After Coltrane, there was nothing left to say on the saxophone. But Kenny G said it anyway” (4,511 words)
Last Days Of A Beijing Bath House
Robert Foyle Hunwick | China Channel | 24th August 2018
“The Shuangxingtang bath house in the far south Beijing suburb of Fengtaihas survived a republic, various warlords, a full-scale occupation and a bitter civil war, followed by everything the Communist Party could throw at it. Not much seems to have changed since the Cultural Revolution. There are still framed black and white photographs of Mao Zedong and Lin Biao hanging in the changing room, although they’re kept well apart — at opposite ends, in fact, with Mao on the left and Lin on the right. Politically correct even in death” (2,430 words)
The Needles And The Damage Done
Aaron Timms | Baffler | 24th August 2018
Manhattan’s newest skyscrapers are insanely tall, amazingly thin, and impossibly expensive. “Gentrification is not quite the right word for what’s happening here. What’s emerging is a secessionist city. The techno-libertarians of Silicon Valley have long dreamed of an exit from regular society, through colonization of the seas and the stars. In the form of the supertall, they may have found, for themselves and others like them, an elegant solution: one that gives them a society apart, a realm of perfect exclusion and perfect control” (3,200 words)
Video of the day Up In Hudson
What to expect:
Car-park liaison begins badly but works out well. By Daren Rabinovitch, for Dirty Projectors
Thought for the day
Classify enough things and you will eventually discover something significant
Bran Emrys
Podcast World Building | The Ezra Klein Show
Hugo Award winner Nora Jemisin walks Ezra Klein through the process of building a fantasy world
(1h 25m 49s)