IF YOU GO to Crystal Springs Uplands School, it’s both difficult to truly succeed (as in exceeding expectations) and difficult to fail. You know the kind of place. The floor is so high, the net is so secure. You’re born with a feeling your intelligence is a gift to society, a confidence that you can do no wrong. Everyone’s parent is either a Stanford professor or a tech mogul or Steve Jobs, whose son attended the school at the same time as Sam BankmanFried, who graduated in 2010.
“There was one kid who was like the youngest global chess champion ever when he was, like, 11 years old,” one SBF-era alumnus of Crystal Springs Uplands School told me. (This was Daniel Naroditsky, class of ’14.) “Another girl from the school just made it into Forbes. She’s like 28 years old. She raised millions of dollars for a start-up.” (Ellen Rudolph, class of ’12.) Starting here, how could you rise so high that you ever impressed anybody? How could you fall with enough force to crash through the goldmesh safety net?
And yet, even here, SBF was special. These were the days of grand tech optimism. Facebook introduced the like button in SBF’s junior year. Google still used its motto “Don’t be evil.” By age 14, SBF was reading up on utilitarian philosophy—the idea that one could use data and rationality to deduce right action, defined as producing the most good for the most people. (The means of getting there don’t matter.)
Denne historien er fra November 21 - December 4, 2022-utgaven av New York magazine.
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Denne historien er fra November 21 - December 4, 2022-utgaven av New York magazine.
Start din 7-dagers gratis prøveperiode på Magzter GOLD for å få tilgang til tusenvis av utvalgte premiumhistorier og 9000+ magasiner og aviser.
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Early and Often: David Freedlander - Momentum vs. Machine The Trump and Harris campaigns battle it out for every last vote.
WIth two weeks left to go, the contours of the 2024 presidential election are clear: Both campaigns need voters who usually don’t vote, and Kamala Harris needs to bring the Democratic coalition, including its Trump-curious members, back home.While the Republican side plans to spend the remaining days of the contest trying to lure low-propensity voters to the polls, the Harris team will attempt to persuade voters of color to return to its side and will try to increase numbers among white voters in previously red suburbs.
Drowning in Slop - A thriving underground economy is clogging the internet with AI garbage-and it's only going to get worse.
SLOP started seeping into Neil Clarke's life in late 2022. Something strange was happening at Clarkesworld, the magazine. Clarke had founded in 2006 and built into a pillar of the world of speculative fiction. Submissions were increasing rapidly, but “there was something off about them,” he told me recently. He summarized a typical example: “Usually, it begins with the phrase ‘In the year 2250-something’ and then it goes on to say the Earth’s environment is in collapse and there are only three scientists who can save us. Then it describes them in great detail, each one with its own paragraph. And then—they’ve solved it! You know, it skips a major plot element, and the final scene is a celebration out of the ending of Star Wars.” Clarke said he had received “dozens of this story in various incarnations.”
The City Politic- The Other Eric Adams Scandal The NYPD shot a fare evader, a cop, and two bystanders. He defends it.
On Sunday, September 15, Derell Mickles hopped a turnstile, got asked to leave by cops, then entered the subway again ten minutes later through an emergency exit. This was at the Sutter Avenue L station, out by his mother's house, five stops from the end of the line. Police said they noticed he was holding a folded knife. They followed him up the stairs to the elevated train, asking him 38 times to drop the weapon.
Can the Media Survive?
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A Matter of Perspective
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Creator, Destroyer
A retrospective reveals an architect's vision, optimism, and supreme arrogance.
In Praise of Bad Readers
In a time of war, there is a danger in surveying the world as if it were a novel.
Trust the Kieran Culkin Process
First, he nearly dropped out of Oscar hopeful A Real Pain. Then he convinced Jesse Eisenberg to change the way he directs.
The Funniest Vampires on TV
What We Do in the Shadows is coming to an end. Its idiosyncratic brand of comedy may be too.
