I'm going to cut back on my entries to Pragmatism Refreshed. Why? Because I've begun a new blog, here, www.proxypartisans.blogspot.com -- and I'm splitting my constant quantum of blogging energy into two.
Proxy partisans is what it sounds like -- a blog with a tighter focus on the battles for control in corporate America, as waged through the proxy machinery required by the laws of the state of Delaware (usually) with some impositions on the federal level.
Meanwhile, Pragmatism Refreshed will continue as it is -- a receptacle for whatever is passing through my head on a particular day -- the ultimate vent.
The distribution of efforts should be 50/50, so I hope those of you who've been checking in on a daily basis will keep up that habit, or modify it only slightly and check in once every couple of days to see what's new.
By the way, the new issue of Conde Nast's Portfolio is on newsstands. I bought one in an airport on my way across the country Thursday. It's their best issue yet (though that isn't a really high bar for them to clear, either). They may be beginning to find a distinctive voice. The articles on the chocolate industry and the pertinent FDA regulations was a fun read, from the pen of Alexandra Wolfe, the daughter of Thomas Wolfe.
Her father didn't really do the magazine any favors in its inaugural issue, as I believe I've mentioned on this blog. His contribution, which started with a failed effort at onomatopoeia -- in this case, an effort to represent the sound of fists banging on a door -- was just silly, on a lot of levels.
But Alexandra has done Portfolio, and the family name, proud.
Showing posts with label Conde Nast. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Conde Nast. Show all posts
27 October 2007
12 July 2007
Kurt Eichenwald
People in the public eye these days -- people notable enough to have a wikipedia entry at all -- seem unable to resist the temptation to tweak it.
I suppose if somebody had started a "Christopher Faille" entry (unlikely, but let it pass) and either the initiator or some subsequent editor had told a blatant lie there, I'd be tempted to remove it myself too, rather than trusting in the 'process' to do so sooner or later. Still, too much concern with what one's biography says passes a fine line, and is like too much time spent in front of a mirror.
The latest prominent person alleged, with at least some show of evidence, to have danced to or across that line is ... Kurt Eichenwald.
I discussed Mr. Eichenwald in this blog in March. http://cfaille.blogspot.com/2007/03/reporting-on-slime-and-slipping.html He's the former New York Times reporter who now is under contract with Portfolio, the glossy financial-news quarterly.
Eichenwald has surely had a distinguished career. He's twice been nominated for Pulitzers, and his book about a price-fixing scandal at ADM, The Informant, is the basis for a movie set to appear in theatres next year, starring Matt Damon no less. But it isn't clear that the folks at Portfolio know what to do with him. He had no story in the inaugural issue of the quarterly magazine, and accordingly to Gawker he's furious that his piece on money laundering, intended for the second issue, has been spiked.
So maybe if they aren't using him at Portfolio he has time to go on wikipedia a lot? There's somebody named Milo73 who's done a lot of work recently on the Eichenwald bio article. Gawker (again) has given its reasons for believing this might be Eichenwald himself.
http://www.gawker.com/news/internet-mysteries/is-kurt-eichenwald-writing-his-own-wikipedia-page-275394.php
I hope they're wrong, and Milo is an admirer. Here's why.
Before Milo noticed it, that entry had a section called "Education and Career" that ran thus:
"He graduated from St. Mark's School of Texas in Dallas and Swarthmore College, where he was a founder of the a cappella octet Sixteen Feet.
"In 1984 and 1985, Eichenwald was a writer-researcher for CBS News in the Election and Survey Unit. He joined ''The Times'' in 1985 as a news clerk for Hedrick Smith, who was chief Washington correspondent. When Mr. Smith began writing his book ''The Power Game'', Eichenwald became his research assistant, leaving in 1986 to become associate editor at ''The National Journal'' in Washington. Eichenwald returned to ''The Times'' later in 1986 and was a news clerk for the national desk in New York before becoming a financial reporter in 1988.
"He began reporting for the ''Times''' business section in 1988, covering Wall Street, corporate takeovers and the insider trading scandals. In 1992, he began writing the "Market Place" column and covering the unfolding scandals at Prudential Financial. In February 1995, Eichenwald began covering a range of investigative projects for the business section. He is author to several bestsellers of the same context, Business Ethics, the latest of which is Conspiracy of Fools, about the Enron debacle."
Milo73 decided to divide the section into two, one part called "Education and Early Life," a second part called "Early Career." The first part is almost entirely new, and personal in character. It discusses Eichenwald's concussion, which produced epilepsy, which requierd medication, and the bad side-effects of the first medication regimen, side-effects that aped the symptoms of leukemia. Then the article quotes a magazine profile of Eichenwald written twenty years ago by Dean Rotbart, who said:
''While Kurt has never since hidden his epilepsy, he also didn’t make it a centerpiece of his life. After writing his story, Kurt’s mission was clear and it was not to become a poster boy for the illness. "My whole life from the time I got sick was focused on making sure that I was a student, a journalist, a husband and a father," Kurt tells me. "Not that I was someone with this condition." Well he succeeded quite spectacularly.''
It would be sad to learn that a distinguished journalist not only inserted a long discussion of his struggle with epilepsy into a wikipedia biography, but used it to resuscitate a 20 year old magazine article that praised him for refusing to focus on that condition.
I suppose if somebody had started a "Christopher Faille" entry (unlikely, but let it pass) and either the initiator or some subsequent editor had told a blatant lie there, I'd be tempted to remove it myself too, rather than trusting in the 'process' to do so sooner or later. Still, too much concern with what one's biography says passes a fine line, and is like too much time spent in front of a mirror.
The latest prominent person alleged, with at least some show of evidence, to have danced to or across that line is ... Kurt Eichenwald.
I discussed Mr. Eichenwald in this blog in March. http://cfaille.blogspot.com/2007/03/reporting-on-slime-and-slipping.html He's the former New York Times reporter who now is under contract with Portfolio, the glossy financial-news quarterly.
Eichenwald has surely had a distinguished career. He's twice been nominated for Pulitzers, and his book about a price-fixing scandal at ADM, The Informant, is the basis for a movie set to appear in theatres next year, starring Matt Damon no less. But it isn't clear that the folks at Portfolio know what to do with him. He had no story in the inaugural issue of the quarterly magazine, and accordingly to Gawker he's furious that his piece on money laundering, intended for the second issue, has been spiked.
So maybe if they aren't using him at Portfolio he has time to go on wikipedia a lot? There's somebody named Milo73 who's done a lot of work recently on the Eichenwald bio article. Gawker (again) has given its reasons for believing this might be Eichenwald himself.
http://www.gawker.com/news/internet-mysteries/is-kurt-eichenwald-writing-his-own-wikipedia-page-275394.php
I hope they're wrong, and Milo is an admirer. Here's why.
Before Milo noticed it, that entry had a section called "Education and Career" that ran thus:
"He graduated from St. Mark's School of Texas in Dallas and Swarthmore College, where he was a founder of the a cappella octet Sixteen Feet.
"In 1984 and 1985, Eichenwald was a writer-researcher for CBS News in the Election and Survey Unit. He joined ''The Times'' in 1985 as a news clerk for Hedrick Smith, who was chief Washington correspondent. When Mr. Smith began writing his book ''The Power Game'', Eichenwald became his research assistant, leaving in 1986 to become associate editor at ''The National Journal'' in Washington. Eichenwald returned to ''The Times'' later in 1986 and was a news clerk for the national desk in New York before becoming a financial reporter in 1988.
"He began reporting for the ''Times''' business section in 1988, covering Wall Street, corporate takeovers and the insider trading scandals. In 1992, he began writing the "Market Place" column and covering the unfolding scandals at Prudential Financial. In February 1995, Eichenwald began covering a range of investigative projects for the business section. He is author to several bestsellers of the same context, Business Ethics, the latest of which is Conspiracy of Fools, about the Enron debacle."
Milo73 decided to divide the section into two, one part called "Education and Early Life," a second part called "Early Career." The first part is almost entirely new, and personal in character. It discusses Eichenwald's concussion, which produced epilepsy, which requierd medication, and the bad side-effects of the first medication regimen, side-effects that aped the symptoms of leukemia. Then the article quotes a magazine profile of Eichenwald written twenty years ago by Dean Rotbart, who said:
''While Kurt has never since hidden his epilepsy, he also didn’t make it a centerpiece of his life. After writing his story, Kurt’s mission was clear and it was not to become a poster boy for the illness. "My whole life from the time I got sick was focused on making sure that I was a student, a journalist, a husband and a father," Kurt tells me. "Not that I was someone with this condition." Well he succeeded quite spectacularly.''
It would be sad to learn that a distinguished journalist not only inserted a long discussion of his struggle with epilepsy into a wikipedia biography, but used it to resuscitate a 20 year old magazine article that praised him for refusing to focus on that condition.
21 April 2007
Tom Wolfe: On Hedge Funds
Tom Wolfe's novel, "Bonfire of the Vanities" (1987), chronicles the troubles of a "Master of the Universe." That's the self-describing phrase Wolfe puts into the head of his protagonist in that novel, Sherman McCoy, a successful bond salesman. McCoy takes a wrong turn one day, ends up in a traffic accident, and becomes what Wolfe says is every urban prosecutor's dream, the Great White Defendant.
That was then. This is now. Bond salesmen are still around, and of course many are still quite successful. But they aren't the ones that Wolfe targets as examples of hubris twenty years on.
Last year, Conde Nast announced plans to add a new business/financial glossy to its line up of periodicals (Conde Nast publishes Vogue, Architectural Digest, Glamour, GQ, etc.). CN went out of its way to lure talented and well-known writers to the new magazine, which it dubbed Portfolio. Indeed, Kurt Eichenwald left the New York Times for Portfolio, as I've mentioned before on this blog.
CN didn't ask me to write for Portfolio but, heck, they've never yet asked me to pose for GQ either. I've survived.
Their really big "get," though, was Tom Wolfe. And now that the first issue is out, there he is. The Wolfe story isn't Bonfire. To begin with, it's non-fiction. But this, too, one has to qualify immediately. It's non-fiction peppered with the use of novelistic techniques, the sort of thing he did for test pilots and the early astronauts in The Right Stuff.
Who is the new protagonist? Who has the right (or self-righteous) stuff in the financial world as Wolfe sees it? who has the hubris of a Sherman McCoy? Hedge fund managers do.
I find this fact intriguing, because when I began covering hedge funds regularly nobody in the literary world of Wolfe's stature would write about them. They were still happily obscure. Obviously, they are obscure no more. I think it's good that folks like yours truly, toiling in the day-to-day vinyard of hedge fund news, have gradually dragged these important pieces of the financial world out into the sunlight so that they've come to the attention of the lions of the forest, the Tom Wolfes. You're welcome, Tom.
My opinion of the story? Frankly, it stinks. Judge for yourself though.
http://www.portfolio.com/executives/features/2007/04/16/The-Pirate-Pose
That was then. This is now. Bond salesmen are still around, and of course many are still quite successful. But they aren't the ones that Wolfe targets as examples of hubris twenty years on.
Last year, Conde Nast announced plans to add a new business/financial glossy to its line up of periodicals (Conde Nast publishes Vogue, Architectural Digest, Glamour, GQ, etc.). CN went out of its way to lure talented and well-known writers to the new magazine, which it dubbed Portfolio. Indeed, Kurt Eichenwald left the New York Times for Portfolio, as I've mentioned before on this blog.
CN didn't ask me to write for Portfolio but, heck, they've never yet asked me to pose for GQ either. I've survived.
Their really big "get," though, was Tom Wolfe. And now that the first issue is out, there he is. The Wolfe story isn't Bonfire. To begin with, it's non-fiction. But this, too, one has to qualify immediately. It's non-fiction peppered with the use of novelistic techniques, the sort of thing he did for test pilots and the early astronauts in The Right Stuff.
Who is the new protagonist? Who has the right (or self-righteous) stuff in the financial world as Wolfe sees it? who has the hubris of a Sherman McCoy? Hedge fund managers do.
I find this fact intriguing, because when I began covering hedge funds regularly nobody in the literary world of Wolfe's stature would write about them. They were still happily obscure. Obviously, they are obscure no more. I think it's good that folks like yours truly, toiling in the day-to-day vinyard of hedge fund news, have gradually dragged these important pieces of the financial world out into the sunlight so that they've come to the attention of the lions of the forest, the Tom Wolfes. You're welcome, Tom.
My opinion of the story? Frankly, it stinks. Judge for yourself though.
http://www.portfolio.com/executives/features/2007/04/16/The-Pirate-Pose
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