2025 - Long Reads

[shri]

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/28/m...smid=url-share

Some of the comments in that article hint at what I suspect is happening .. crime is up, but underreported or prosecuted.

[huja]

Some of the comments in that article hint at what I suspect is happening .. crime is up, but underreported or prosecuted.

I don't think it's hinted at . . . I think it's explicitly spelled out. However, the point is that letting the small stuff slide (i.e. not sending the kids to confinement, prison, camps, or whatever you call it) avoids turning small time criminals into hardcore offenders. It's often been said that prison is hopeless at reform but it's like a top university for producing more efficient, more violent criminals.

[huja]

Usually don't spend too much time on sports stories.. this one had mentioned hooked.

https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/607...-finell-white/

Great read. Sad story. Often times the "What-could-have-beens" tales are far more interesting than the stories of the ones who "made it." I think about Houston McTear, Marcus Dupree, etc.

[Cheeky Kiwi]

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2...tificial-blood

[Cheeky Kiwi]

https://thewalrus.ca/immigration-consultants/

[Cheeky Kiwi]

https://www.theguardian.com/technolo...ersary-feature

[shri]

A crypto scam... with a nod to some rando in "Hong Kong" (and a rando in Australia if it matters..)

Hanes promised that he could recover the money — a total of $47.1 million. All he needed was the board’s approval to borrow another $18 million.

With the help of some business contacts, he said, he would use those funds to recoup the many millions he had already lost. His banking career was probably finished, he acknowledged.

But the deal came with a sweetener that would allow him to start over. “The people I’m working with have built in money for me,” Hanes explained.

But then Hanes was telling the board that someone in Hong Kong had frozen millions in crypto holdings that he had acquired while working with a couple of internet acquaintances — a banker named Rob who had good relationships in Washington and a woman named Bella with family in Australia.

But a problem arose after Hanes and his partners moved the funds to a Hong Kong trading platform that charged lower fees, he told Mitchell. The money had somehow gotten stuck, and the only way to unfreeze it was to send more.

As he sat in Hanes’s glass-walled office, Mitchell wondered what his friend had gotten himself into. Mitchell was not interested in sending $12 million to a mysterious crypto operation in Hong Kong. “Go there, hire an interpreter and get a cashier’s check,” he told Hanes. “If you think you’ve got $40 million in an account, go get it.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/19/m...land-bank.html

(The story does have a slightly happy ending... read it)

https://archive.is/jherm

[SirNotAppearing]

I always read the title of this section as "Lou Reed" so here's a Lou Reed long read.

https://faroutmagazine.co.uk/everyth...know-lou-reed/

[huja]

Makes me think about the book, "When Breathe Becomes Air," which sat on my shelf for years before I was ready to tackle it. This is a gifted article so everyone should be able to read it.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/26/u...smid=url-share