The N.B.A.’s Oligarch and His Power Games

Chip Browns Profile of Mikhail Prokhorov and the inevitable challenge of revamping the New Jersey(Brooklyn) Nets

Inside he began rummaging through closets and drawers. Here was a four-inch nail a strongman friend of the family had bent in half; a boomerang from Australia; a Sharp double tape deck for the whole family that Prokhorov eventually “privatized.” A hall shelf was filled with books on physics, finance, and bound leather editions of classic writers like Balzac, Chekhov and Dickens. In his boyhood room were VCR tapes of Rambo (“I love Rambo — every five or seven years I watch it again”) and hockey photo books and chess manuals. Prokhorov was a gifted chess player, trouncing all the grown-ups on the beach during a family vacation to the Baltic Sea when he was 6, but he gave the game up, preferring hockey and soccer and sports where he could “feel the pulse of the opponent.” His bedroom wasn’t much bigger than a shoebox, with barely enough space for the extra long bed. His father was in charge of ordering supersize beds for the basketball athletes competing in the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow and added one for his son. When Mikhail was older and wanted a girlfriend to stay over, he had to set up a cot.

 

The Desk

Multi Level marketing never looked so good, here yet this short film i found really interesing in its questions about our relationship to the desk.

 

The question is whether we want to buy a Lexas or not.

 

Being Glenn Beck

MARK LEIBOVICH Glen Beck Profile is an investment of time, but fully worthwhile.

Beck’s Anchorage show started late — around 9 p.m. — and Beck was still speaking as 11 o’clock approached. He kept going, and going, and delivered a stem-winding ending about how George Washington became terrified at the end of his life about doing something that would dishonor himself and his country. I looked around the crowd of about 4,000, and it seemed no one had left. The room was perfectly silent after two hours plus — late on a Saturday night — to hear a self-described “recovering dirtbag” with not a single college credit to his name teach them history.

How To Start a Hedge Fund

“If you’ve spent the last 5, 10, or 20 years enjoying the fruits of a blissfully unregulated financial system that created wealth for its adepts but nothing for the American people, then surely you’re steamed at the big regulatory overhaul that passed in Congress this summer. But there’s still something you can do: move over from the stringently monitored world of banking to the somewhat less monitored world of hedge funds. We spoke to an actual big-shot hedge-fund manager to pick up tips on how you too can start the rogue finance shop of your dreams.”

 

Wikitized History

This particular book—or rather, set of books—is every edit made to a single Wikipedia article, The Iraq War, during the five years between the article’s inception in December 2004 and November 2009, a total of 12,000 changes and almost 7,000 pages.

It amounts to twelve volumes: the size of a single old-style encyclopaedia. It contains arguments over numbers, differences of opinion on relevance and political standpoints, and frequent moments when someone erases the whole thing and just writes “Saddam Hussein was a dickhead”.

The Most Isolated Man

The Most Isolated Man on the PlanetHe’s alone in the Brazilian Amazon, but for how long?

“The most isolated man on the planet will spend tonight inside a leafy palm-thatch hut in the Brazilian Amazon. As always, insects will darn the air. Spider monkeys will patrol the treetops. Wild pigs will root in the undergrowth. And the man will remain a quietly anonymous fixture of the landscape, camouflaged to the point of near invisibility.”

IPhones gone Wild

“Technology Leads More Park Visitors Into Trouble”
Ny times Sunday 22, August

In an era when most people experience the wild mostly through television shows that may push the boundaries of appropriateness for entertainment, rangers say people can wildly miscalculate the risks of their antics.

In an extreme instance in April, two young men from Las Vegas were killed in Zion National Park in Utah while trying to float a hand-built log raft down the Virgin River. A park investigation found that the men “did not have whitewater rafting experience, and had limited camping experience, little food and no overnight gear.”

“They told their father that they intended to record their entire trip on video camera as an entry into the ‘Man vs. Wild’competition” on television, investigators wrote.

Diploma Journey

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Here is a slideshow of my Diploma and I across America, there is a lot of places i stopped and forgot to take a picture, I tried. I left it in that Joshua Tree