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Een mooie aanwinst voor het Rijksmuseum, De bocht van de Herengracht (1671-1672) van Gerrit Adriaensz. Berckheyde.

Umberto Eco: ‘We Like Lists Because We Don’t Want to Die’. Waarvan akte. Gespeeld en genoten in 2009:
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Andrew Ross Sorkin in Vanity Fair, Wall Street’s Near-Death Experience.

“With the implosion of Lehman Brothers, in September 2008, the realization dawned: Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs could be next. In an excerpt from his new book, the author reveals the incredible scramble that took place—desperate phone calls, seat-of-the-pants merger proposals, flaring tempers—as Washington got tough and Wall Street titans Lloyd Blankfein and John Mack fought for survival.”

Felix Salmon: The unwilling risk-takers:

“Comment of the day comes from Chris:

The person most willing to take on risk is the one unaware he is doing so. He charges no risk premium…

The resulting market equilibrium is that the guy who is unaware of the risk ends up loaded with it. Then the music stops.”

Financial Times, The Iraqi who saved Norway from oil:

“When he boarded his flight from London to Oslo, Farouk al-Kasim, a young Iraqi geologist, knew his life would never again be the same. Norway was a country about as different as it was possible to imagine from his home, the Iraqi port city of Basra. He had no job to go to, and no idea of how he would make a living in the far north. It was May 1968 and al-Kasim had just resigned from his post at the Iraq Petroleum Company. To do so, he had had to come to the UK, where the consortium of western companies that still controlled most of his country’s oil production had its headquarters.”

De Pers, Als Nederland een dorp was. Van 16,5 miljoen naar 100 inwoners:

“Van die 100 inwoners zijn er 10 buiten het dorp geboren. In totaal wonen er 20 allochtonen, onder wie 11 niet-westerse allochtonen. In het dorp wonen 2 Marokkanen, 2 Turken en 2 Surinamers. Er zijn 5 moslims, van wie er 4 aan de ramadan doen.

In Nederland wonen geen joden.”

Kottke: “The September Issue is the much-anticipated documentary that follows Anna Wintour and her staff at Vogue through the process of creating the magazine’s September issue, AKA the world’s thickest magazine issue.” (YouTube)

‘A commuter poses with D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover in 1960, the day it went on sale after a 32-year ban was lifted.’

James Wolcott in Vanity Fair, What’s a Culture Snob to Do?:

“Pity the culture snob, as Kindles, iPods, and flash drives swallow up the visible markers of superior taste and intelligence. With the digitization of books, music, and movies, how will the highbrow distinguish him- or herself from the masses?”

‘Both test cricket and psychoanalysis are out of tune with a world that demands quick results. That’s our loss, argues former England cricket captain Mike Brearley, now Britain’s leading psychoanalyst’

Prospect Magazine, Freud in the slips:

“(…) It is an interesting change of career, but perhaps not an altogether surprising one. Cricket, particularly in its five-day form, requires intelligence, astuteness and an ability to withstand long periods where nothing much happens while keeping alert for the moment when action erupts—not unlike psychoanalysis itself.”

Jonathan Power in Prospect Magazine, In search of the Swedish soul:

“An examination of the Swedish soul must begin, I’m afraid, with sex. Not Volvo, not IKEA, not Alfa Laval nor H&M. Not Strindberg nor Dagerman nor even Astrid Lindgren and Pippi Longstocking. Not the welfare state, not income equality nor criminal justice. Not the Lutheran Church nor collective bargaining. Not the Vikings nor 200 years without war. It’s that three letter word—and the half-myth about Swedish promiscuity—that is our starting point.”

Nieuws uit Amsterdam, Drieëntwintig liquidaties tijdens bezetting:

“Tijdens de Duitse bezetting heeft het Amsterdamse verzet 23 mensen geliquideerd en nog eens 4 personen gedood tijdens schietpartijen, zo blijkt uit een recent onderzoek. Als vergelding hebben de Duitsers tientallen mensen gefusilleerd. Het verzet was in Amsterdam overigens minder gewelddadig dan in Rotterdam. “

Charlie Brooker’s Newswipe S1E3P3 – Includes a short film by Adam Curtis about the rise of ‘Ohdearism’.

Michael Osinski, My Manhattan Project. How I helped build the bomb that blew up Wall Street:

“I never would have thought, in my most extreme paranoid fantasies, that my software, and the others like it, would have enabled Wall Street to decimate the investments of everyone in my family. Not even the most jaded observer saw that coming. I can’t deny that it allowed a privileged few to exploit the unsuspecting many. But catastrophe, depression, busted banks, forced auctions of entire tracts of houses? The fact that my software, over which I would labor for a decade, facilitated these events is numbing. Is capitalism inherently corrupt? I don’t think the free flow of goods in and of itself is the culprit. No, it’s the complexity masked by thousands of unseen whirring widgets that beguiles people into a sense of power, a feeling of dominion over the future.”

Clay Shirky, Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable:

“When someone demands to be told how we can replace newspapers, they are really demanding to be told that we are not living through a revolution. They are demanding to be told that old systems won’t break before new systems are in place. They are demanding to be told that ancient social bargains aren’t in peril, that core institutions will be spared, that new methods of spreading information will improve previous practice rather than upending it. They are demanding to be lied to.”

AT5: De strijd om de straatnaambordjes:

“Er zijn lange, korte, oude of beplakte en soms met grote of juist kleine letters. In zijn jarenlange eenzame strijd pleit vormgever Carel Kuitenbrouwer daarom voor de invoering van één type bordje, om zo de versnippering die door de stadsdelen is ontstaan tegen te gaan. Zijn korte film moet nu dan eindelijk zorgen voor een goed naambord in elke straat van de stad.”

Korte film: Opkomst en ondergang van een Goede Letter.
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“An elevator opening onto the mysterious 17th floor of the Lipstick Building, in Manhattan, where a small staff helped to manage Bernard Madoff’s exclusive investment fund.”

Mark Seal in Vanity Fair, Madoff’s World:

“Shortly after Madoff’s arrest, Rabbi Moshe Scheiner advised his congregation at the Palm Beach Synagogue to look beyond money, beyond financial losses, to matters of deeper importance. In New York, Rabbi Marc Gellman wrote in an open letter to Madoff in Newsweek about the pain he had inflicted on the Jewish community: “There must be some new word invented to describe the way you have redefined betrayal.” Rabbi Mark Borovitz, a reformed scamster and alcoholic himself, whose Los Angeles foundation lost between $200,000 and $300,000 to Madoff, called Madoff’s crooked style “affinity theft,” in which the con man preys on the idea that you can trust your own people. “Whether it’s Latino or black or Jewish or Christian, everybody wants to trust their own. Bernie Madoff took our trust and raped it,” said Borovitz. “He took advantage of every vulnerability, because he knew our vulnerable spots.”

When asked to describe Madoff’s personality, most of the people I interviewed in Palm Beach could come up with very little. “Pleasant, charming, but reclusive,” said one. “I go out nine nights out of seven, and I never saw him out once,” said another. “We’d never heard of him before December 11,” said Jeff Ostrowski, of The Palm Beach Post. Madoff’s barber, who had cut his hair and given him manicures and pedicures at least once a month for 17 years, couldn’t recall Madoff saying anything other than greetings and small talk.”

“Demonstrators in front of Iceland’s parliament building, in Reykjavík’s Austurvollur Square, on January 31.”

Michael Lewis in Vanity Fair, Wall Street on the Tundra:

““Yes,” he says with a smile, “there’s been a lot of Range Rovers catching fire lately.” Then he explains. For the past few years, some large number of Icelanders engaged in the same disastrous speculation. With local interest rates at 15.5 percent and the krona rising, they decided the smart thing to do, when they wanted to buy something they couldn’t afford, was to borrow not kronur but yen and Swiss francs. They paid 3 percent interest on the yen and in the bargain made a bundle on the currency trade, as the krona kept rising. “The fishing guys pretty much discovered the trade and made it huge,” says Magnus. “But they made so much money on it that the financial stuff eventually overwhelmed the fish.” They made so much money on it that the trade spread from the fishing guys to their friends. It must have seemed like a no-brainer: buy these ever more valuable houses and cars with money you are, in effect, paid to borrow. But, in October, after the krona collapsed, the yen and Swiss francs they must repay are many times more expensive. Now many Icelanders—especially young Icelanders—own $500,000 houses with $1.5 million mortgages, and $35,000 Range Rovers with $100,000 in loans against them. To the Range Rover problem there are two immediate solutions. One is to put it on a boat, ship it to Europe, and try to sell it for a currency that still has value. The other is set it on fire and collect the insurance: Boom!”

‘An Operation Migration pilot guiding whooping cranes to their winter nesting grounds. The group is one of several trying to bring the birds back to eastern North America.’

IHT, Orchestrating the comeback of the whooping crane:

“For the past eight years, Operation Migration has been one of several organizations collectively trying to bring whooping cranes back to the eastern part of the North American continent. The whooping crane is reclusive and headstrong – it demands a square mile, or two and a half square kilometers, around its nest to itself – and consequently was one of the first birds to suffer as humans crowded into their space.

Re-establishing the species presents a challenge: How can humans intervene to breed and teach the birds what they will need to survive without also wearing away those birds’ natural apprehension of people? One way is to do it in disguise.”

Website: Whooping Crane Reintroduction – Operation Migration