IT WAS THE TICS that made Sam Bankman-Fried compelling. The fidgets, the eyes f lickering around during TV interviews, the nasally nerd voice. Then there was that garden of dark, curly hair around his chubby face. Crypto was odd drug-dealer money until this Silicon Valley Paddington Bear came along, talking about how he was going to give away his fortune, save the world from pandemics and nuclear war, maybe one day buy Goldman Sachs. And it worked. By the end of 2021, his net worth was somewhere around $26.5 billion; a year before, he hadn’t even made the Forbes billionaires list. What made his success palatable, what gave it a veneer of legitimacy, were these strange little habits of his, each of which signaled eccentricity, brilliance, a childlike innocence.
On November 2, a federal jury in Manhattan found this seemingly harmless creature guilty of seven counts of fraud and conspiracy. It took the jurors less than five hours—an astonishingly swift deliberation considering the overwhelming amount of evidence they had to consider. This included 10 million pages of documents and testimony from three co-conspirators, his company’s former lawyer, friends, and experts who singled him out as the mastermind of the $9 billion fraud that led to the collapse of his crypto exchange, FTX, and his hedge fund, Alameda Research.
Diese Geschichte stammt aus der November 06 - 19, 2023-Ausgabe von New York magazine.
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Diese Geschichte stammt aus der November 06 - 19, 2023-Ausgabe von New York magazine.
Starten Sie Ihre 7-tägige kostenlose Testversion von Magzter GOLD, um auf Tausende kuratierte Premium-Storys sowie über 8.000 Zeitschriften und Zeitungen zuzugreifen.
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THE BEST ART SHOWS OF THE YEAR
IN NOVEMBER, Sotheby's made history when it sold for a million bucks a painting made by artificial intelligence. Ai-Da, \"the first humanoid robot artist to have an artwork auctioned by a major auction house,\" created a portrait of Alan Turing that resembles nothing more than a bad Francis Bacon rip-off. Still, the auction house described the sale as \"a new frontier in the global art market.\"
THE BIGGEST PODCAST MOMENTS OF THE YEAR
A STRANGE THING happened with podcasts in 2024: The industry was repeatedly thrust into the spotlight owing to a preponderance of head-turning events and a presidential-election cycle that radically foregrounded the medium's consequential nature. To reflect this, we've carved out a list of ten big moments from the year as refracted through podcasting.
THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR
THE YEAR IN CULTURE - BEST BOOKS
THE BEST THEATER OF THE YEAR
IT'S BEEN a year of successful straight plays, even measured by a metric at which they usually do poorly: ticket sales. Partially that's owed to Hollywood stars: Jeremy Strong, Jim Parsons, Rachel Zegler, Rachel McAdams (to my mind, the most compelling).
THE BEST ALBUMS OF THE YEAR
2024 WAS one big stress test that presented artists with a choice: Face uncomfortable realities or serve distractions to the audience. Pop music turned inward while hip-hop weathered court cases and incalculable losses. Country struggled to reconcile conservative interests with a much wider base of artists. But the year's best music offered a reprieve.
THE BEST TELEVISION OF THE YEAR
IT WAS SURPRISING how much 2024 felt like an uneventful wake for the Peak TV era. There was still great television, but there was much more mid or meh television and far fewer moments when a critical mass of viewers seemed equally excited about the same series.
THE BEST COMEDY SPECIALS OF THE YEAR
THE YEAR IN CULTURE - COMEDY SPECIALS
THE BEST MOVIES OF THE YEAR
PEOPLE LOVED Megalopolis, hated it, puzzled over it, clipped it into memes, and tried to astroturf it into a camp classic, but, most important, they cared about it even though it featured none of the qualities you'd expect of a breakthrough work in these noisy times.
A Truly Great Time
This was the year our city's new restaurants loosened up.
The Art of the Well-Stuffed Stocking
THE CHRISTMAS ENTHUSIASTS on the Strategist team gathered to discuss the oversize socks they drape on their couches and what they put inside them.
