The Wangs vs. the World
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Read between May 22 - July 20, 2018
3%
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a new generation of business talents who made their millions on mass customization, on glamorizing the role of the middleman, on merchandising someone else’s talent.
4%
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none of that (and she’d had all of it) was as romantic as a boyfriend who would notice that the lightbulb in her hallway had blown out and change it without even bothering to mention the favor.
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“How could it happen?” “It happened!” “But how did it?” “How, how, how! You never ask how it get good, how I make so much money, how I know what everybody want, only how now that it go away! No how!”
Justin Cardinal
This feels as relevant for an individual to ask themselves as it does for a partner.
27%
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In the intervening weeks, as they slowly began to poke their heads out of their own private failures, each would come to find that the curse was, in fact, not theirs alone. Instead, it was spread across the country: a club, a collective, a movement, a great populist uprising of failure in the face of years of shared national success.
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“Throughout history we have believed that markets determine worth and that bubbles are eternal, despite ample evidence to the contrary. In the midst of each bubble, we believe that this time it will last forever. We have all been complicit in our own deluding.”
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“It’s all bullcrap. There is no market. The market is people, and people are dolts. Even the smartest people are moronic. You’re all a little too young to remember that there were people—educated people, people with serious careers—who chased down ‘rare’ Beanie Babies. Who bought heart-shaped plastic-tag protectors. Who told themselves that their massive collections of plush toys would pay for their children’s college tuitions.
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Women, she realized, were scared to be assholes. And what is any artist, really, but someone who doesn’t mind being an asshole?
36%
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The things we agree to call art are the shamanic totems of our time. We value them beyond all reason because we can’t really understand them. They can mean everything or nothing, depending on what the people who look at them decide.
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In a way, finance was even better than art. It was nothing but an expression of potential, of power, of our present moment in time, and existed only because a group of people collectively agreed that it should exist. Out of nothing but a shared conviction was born a system that could run the world. It was beautiful and terrible.
36%
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an interviewee’s observation about collectors: “The act of spending that money on an object makes them feel like they are collaborating on the creation of the art history of their time.”
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Just looking at a dollar bill did nothing to the emotions—you have to make money or lose money for it to make you feel anything. You can earn it, win it, lose it, save it, spend it, find it, but you can’t sell it because you never really own it. On the other hand, you didn’t have to possess a song or a sculpture for it to make you feel something—you only had to experience it. So why did collectors want to collect? What feeling were they pursuing? Or was a portfolio just a portfolio no matter whether the investments it held were financial or artistic?
36%
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Pandering to your detractors was even worse than pandering to your collectors.
41%
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Wasn’t money supposed to beget money? So how did all of his mighty dollars shrink up and cross their legs and refuse to breed anymore?
42%
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America celebrated Christopher Columbus, a thief and a liar, a man who called himself a great sailor but couldn’t even navigate his way past an entire continent. A man who discovered nothing, who explored nothing, yet was made into a hero all the same. Charles was reasonably generous with holidays for his employees: Veterans Day, the day after Thanksgiving, New Year’s Day, his factories were shuttered. But Columbus Day would never be a day of rest for him, for any of the hundreds of employees he’d once had. There was nothing patriotic about honoring a man who made a mockery of true pioneers, a ...more
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An old cabaret star who had once had a top-ten disco album shook her sagging breasts at the audience, and they clapped and cheered with such genuine appreciation that Andrew started to think that maybe he had misunderstood what it meant to be hot.
56%
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Love was supposed to be a by-product of a life well lived, not the goal.
57%
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She had seen people change around her when they found out the selling price of her work or the contents of her bank account. She had seen Grayson change, and in her starry-eyed lust she had just decided that it was him, falling more in love with her. It felt like that sometimes—people would get brighter, louder, quicker to laugh, and more eager—as if the very existence of those dollars were an electric conduit.
61%
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it was a mental state that required some degree of material support. A new Hermès belt. A diamond-studded Cartier watch. These nonnegotiable luxuries were like armor that only retained its efficacy if it was repolished every season.
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Worrying, Saina realized, was a luxury in itself. The luxury of purpose.
69%
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Being homeless was really boring. That was probably why homeless people spent all the money they panhandled on cheap highs—how else would they get through the days? When you had a home, hours passed magically, spent on just being. Sitting on your couch. Straightening things on your coffee table. Stroking your luxurious piles of toilet paper like a basket of soft little kittens. Adrift like this, Andrew found himself vacillating between an unimportant A and a nonsensical B for useless swaths of time that felt like forever but turned out to be minutes: Walk to the St. Louis Cemetery so that he ...more
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it had never occurred to Saina that the photos of war she saw in the paper, the long rows of patients with bandaged stumps like the men before her, the dead bodies in ditches, that those were still censored for the coddled public who would—wouldn’t they?—rise up and demand peace forever if they saw what war really looked like.
92%
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What was wrong with that man? He’d stolen all of their land and then ridden out here on a wheelchair to say that she was pretty? Sometimes Grace hated being a girl.
93%
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The people of the world could be divided into two groups: those who used all of their chances, and those who stood still through opportunity after opportunity, waiting for a moment that would never be perfect.
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What if death was just a perpetual state of dying? A never-ending fall into a blank forever? The children. Saina, Andrew, Grace. His wife. Barbra. Their lives unfurled in all directions, skipping out from his hospital bed like pebbles across a lake, all magic and light, bouncing from water to air and back again as he sank under the cold, cold surface.