— What Private Equity Firms Are and How They Operate - Chris Morran and Daniel Petty, ProPublica, Aug. 3, 2022
“As the U.S. crawled out from the Great Recession, private equity firms took advantage of very low interest rates and the appetite of investors looking for seemingly stable places to stash their cash to venture into new fields like residential real estate. Amid a nationwide affordable housing crisis, private equity has quickly become a dominant player in the apartment rental business.”
— How a Corporate Law Firm Led a Political Revolution, David Enrich, The New York Times, Aug. 25, 2022
“The power of that revolution, which is spreading to courtrooms and statehouses around the country, is now on vivid display. Even with Democrats controlling the White House and Congress, the Supreme Court has been on a rightward tear. In its most recent term, Trump’s three appointees — the first two handpicked by McGahn and the third, Barrett, plucked by him out of academia for the federal bench — helped erase the constitutional right to abortion, erode the separation of church and state, undermine states’ power to control guns and constrain the authority of federal regulators. Jones Day had a hand in some of those cases, and the firm has telegraphed that it is eyeing additional legal challenges in line with its leaders’ ideology.”
— Chile’s Millennial President Is a New Kind of Leftist Leader, Ciara Nugent, TIME, Aug. 31, 2022
“But when he was 12 he came across a fantastical story that didn’t make sense to him. It was 1998, and Augusto Pinochet, the dictator who ruled Chile for 17 years, had just been arrested in London. Boric saw a group of women protesting on the news: they said Pinochet had made their relatives disappear. How could he make someone disappear, Boric wondered, if he wasn’t a magician?”
— Inside the Shadow Evacuation of Kabul - Michael Venutolo-Mantovani, WIRED, Aug. 30, 2022
“Meanwhile, Saboe started hearing from several veterans across the country who’d seen his Facebook post. They were all in their thirties, each trying to get a single contact to safety. By Saturday, August 14, the day before Kabul fell, Saboe decided to link all nine of them in a WhatsApp group, where they could share what they were hearing and relay it back to the people they were trying to help. They posted furtively snapped pictures of the ever-changing and growing number of Taliban checkpoints, sent to them by families and military contacts scattered around the city. Soon, they had a relatively reliable picture of what was happening in real time. Several members of the group had gone into tech after the military, and they started building a detailed map using annotated images from Google Maps and Google Earth, updating it nearly hourly to reflect the movements of the Taliban and the airport’s access points. To mitigate confusion between similar or identical last names, they also assigned each potential evacuee or family of evacuees a “chalk number”—a term dating to World War II, when Allied paratroopers had their flight numbers placed on their backs in chalk. The Hidais were Chalk-0001.”
Now reading: Shadow and Bone by Leigh Bardugo
Now listening: Ghost - Imminence