Year: 2013

On Reading, Forgetting, and Re-Reading

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Editor’s note: this post was originally published on Medium.

fleeting

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A couple of months ago, while I was in line waiting to get a Caffè Americano at my local coffee shop, the barista inquired about my reading habits. I noted my favorite science fiction novels:Slaughterhouse-Five and Brave New World. The barista then asked me about Fahrenheit 451, which I read early in my youth. “The ending was amazing, wasn’t it?” she inquired. At this point, a mild shock came over me, my cheeks reddened, and I muttered “Yeah, definitely.” The truth is: I’ve read the novel, but have forgotten almost the entire plot—ending included.

Ian Crouch, writing in a recent piece in The New Yorker, likened reading and forgetting with the following anecdote:

This forgetting has serious consequences—but it has superficial ones as well, mostly having to do with vanity. It has led, at times, to a discomfiting situation, call it the Cocktail Party Trap (though this suggests that I go to many cocktail parties, which is itself a fib). Someone mentions a book with some cachet that I’ve read—a lesser-known work of a celebrated writer, say Eliot’s “Daniel Deronda,” to take an example from my shelf—and I smile knowingly, and maybe add, “It’s wonderful,” or some such thing. Great so far, I’m part of the in-crowd—and not lying; I did read it. But then there’s a moment of terror: What if the person summons up a question or comment with any kind of specificity at all? Basically, what if she aims to do anything other than merely brag about having read “Daniel Deronda”?

My very brief encounter at the coffee shop still didn’t sway my mind on re-reading. Yes, I felt embarrassed about the episode, but the embarrassment did not deter my pride (re-reading is silly!). But about a month ago, things started to unravel. It began with my friend Steven’s suggestion to read John Steinbeck’s classic, East of Eden. I’ve long considered this novel to be in my top five books I’ve ever read: for the story, for the writing, for the allegory. I distinctly remember, how one summer before my junior year of high school, I spent four days, non-stop, engrossed in the novel (I’m a slow reader, I admit). But after Steven suggested reading the novel, I replied in the most glowing way possible: “A sublime selection. For anyone deliberating on whether to read this magnum opus: do it, and you will be better for it.”

And yet. I didn’t re-read East of Eden.

It was only during the discussion of the novel that someone by the name of Blake struck me as extremely profound. “Eugene, the first time you read East of Eden was in your teenage years. That was half a lifetime ago. Think about that.” And Blake is right. When put in that context, so much has transpired in my life over the past fifteen years, that I’ve had an epiphany: re-reading should be a pleasure in its own right. I shouldn’t feel guilt in re-reading; on the contrary, I should take comfort and joy in rediscovering a book which enlightened me so much in the past.

Ian Crouch notes:

If we are cursed to forget much of what we read, there are still charms in the moments of reading a particular book in a particular place. What I remember most about Malamud’s short-story collection “The Magic Barrel” is the warm sunlight in the coffee shop on the consecutive Friday mornings I read it before high school. That is missing the more important points, but it is something. Reading has many facets, one of which might be the rather indescribable, and naturally fleeting, mix of thought and emotion and sensory manipulations that happen in the moment and then fade.

I recollect not only when I read East of Eden, but how: in my room, in the downstairs basement curled up with a warm blanket, outside on the patio with butterflies floating in the distance. It is perhaps more wonderful to remember the sensory associations with reading than the plot.

And so, when 1984 was announced as the next book we were going to read in book club, I wasn’t going to make any excuses: I was going to re-read this novel. And I am glad I did. There were so many specifics from the novel which I didn’t remember that it felt like reading the novel for the first time.

My obstinate attitude on re-reading took more than ten years to come around. If you currently rationalize re-reading like I used to, I encourage you to consider re-reading not only as a remedy to forgetting, but as a profoundly new, joyous experience.

 

Brunete, Spain: A Lesson for Dog Owners Who Don’t Clean up After Their Pets

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This is a great story of how one town in Spain, just outside of Madrid, chose to deal with dog owners who don’t clean up after their dogs: send the poop to the guilty owner’s doorsteps in unmarked packages. The idea began with the mayor, who called it a “direct marketing” effort:

After nearly two years in office, he said, he had visited with some 220 citizens in their homes, and the subject of dog owners was the one constant complaint. As spring approached this year, when children started going to the parks again, he decided to try what many here are calling “direct marketing.”

The dog owners got their packages — white boxes bearing the seal of this town and labeled “lost and found” — within hours.

Signing for the curious parcels, they must have been intrigued, though surely unsuspecting.

So far, the boxes seem to be extremely effective compared with Brunete’s earlier campaign, which involved a remote control specimen (very lifelike) that was used around town to get people’s attention. It followed. It banged into shoes. And it generally drew laughs. There was some improvement in behavior. But it did not last long.

And as far as how effective the campaign has been?

Delivering 147 boxes of the real stuff seems to have produced a far more lasting effect in this town of about 10,000 residents. The mayor guesses a 70 percent improvement even now, several months after the two-week campaign.

The sting operation worked because dogs are registered in this city:

The sting operation worked like this: Volunteers were instructed to watch for negligent dog owners and then to approach their dogs to pet them. After a few flattering remarks about the beauty of said dog, they asked what breed it was. Then they asked the dog’s name.

Back at city hall, where more than 500 residents have their pets registered, that was enough information to get to an address.

So this is a case of private shaming, but it seems to have worked in this town. I wonder if it could work in a city like New York.

On Selling and Storytelling

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What is the one of the most important elements in selling a particular commodity? Sure, usefulness/practicality matters. But what’s even more important is the story behind the product. The emotional connection that people make to stories cannot be discounted. Ty Montague reminds us of this narrative in The Harvard Business Review:

Back in the summer of 2006, New York Times Magazine columnist Rob Walker was mulling the question of what makes one object more valuable than another. What makes one pair of shoes more valuable than another pair if they both deliver on the functional basics of comfort, durability, and protection? Why does one piece of art cost $8,000,000 and another, $100? What makes one toasterworth $20 and another worth nearly $400 if they both make toast? As Walker turned these questions over in his mind he concluded that it is not the objects themselves, but the context, the provenance of the objects, that generates value. In other words, the value isn’t contained in the objects themselves, but in the story or the meaning that the objects represent to the owner.

Walker decided to test this conclusion in a simple and direct way. With the help of a friend, he began buying random, worthless, or low-value objects at tag sales and thrift shops. The cost of the objects ranged from one to four dollars. An old wooden mallet. A lost hotel room key. A plastic banana. These were true castoffs with little or no intrinsic worth.

Next, Walker asked some unknown writers to each write a short story that contained one of the objects. The stories weren’t about the objects, per se; but they helped to place them in a human context, to give them new meaning.

When Walker put the objects, along with their accompanying stories, up for sale on eBay, the results were astonishing. On average, the value of the objects rose 2,700%. That’s not a typo: 2,700%. A miniature jar of mayonnaise he had purchased for less than a dollar sold for $51.00. A cracked ceramic horse head purchased for $1.29 sold for $46.00. The value of these formerly abandoned or forsaken objects suddenly and mysteriously skyrocketed when they were accompanied by a story.

You can see the results of that fascinating project here. It is time that we all learn to tell better stories.

How Much is the White House Worth?

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Zillow has published one of its Zestimates, claiming that the White House, a 16-bedroom, 35-bathroom single-family home located at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue would be worth about $319 million on the open market.

The White House isn’t for sale, but Matthew Yglesias did a bit of research and found the price at odds:

This turns out to be rather substantially at odds with the Washington, D.C., Office of Tax and Revenue’s take on the matter. Assessor Folu Addy’s take on the property is that it’s a commercial building worth almost $1 billion. The difference seems to largely come down a different assessment of the land involved. Washington views parcel 0187S 0800 as a quite expansive area whose land alone is worth $963,825,340. The physical structures are valued at a mere $31,174,660.

Hmm.

Jeff Bezos Purchases The Washington Post

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Wow. Talk about a changing market in journalism. The huge news today is that Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon.com, is plunking $250 million in cash to buy The Washington Post. Here is more:

Bezos, whose entrepreneurship has made him one of the world’s richest men, will pay $250 million in cash for The Post and affiliated publications to the Washington Post Co., which owns the newspaper and other businesses.

Seattle-based Amazon will have no role in the purchase; Bezos himself will buy the news organization and become its sole owner when the sale is completed, probably within 60 days. The Post Co. will change to a new, still-undecided name and continue as a publicly traded company without The Post thereafter.

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The sale to Bezos involves The Post and its website (washingtonpost.com), along with the Express newspaper, the Gazette Newspapers and Southern Maryland Newspapers in suburban Washington, the Fairfax County Times, the Spanish-language El Tiempo Latino newspaper, and the Robinson Terminal production plant in Springfield. Bezos will also purchase the Comprint printing operation in Gaithersburg, which publishes several military publications.

The deal does not include the company’s headquarters on 15th St. NW in Washington (the building has been for sale since February), or Foreign Policy magazine, Slate.com, the Root.com, the WaPo Labs digital-development operation or Post-owned land along the Potomac River in Alexandria.

Bezos’s purchase is a great addition to the history of The Washington Post:

The Post, founded in 1877, has been controlled since 1933 by the heirs of Eugene Meyer, a Wall Street financier and former Federal Reserve official. Meyer bought the paper for $825,000 at a bankruptcy auction during the depth of the Depression.

After years of financial struggle, Meyer and his successor as publisher of The Post, son-in-law Philip L. Graham, steered the paper into a leading position among Washington’s morning newspapers. They began enlarging the company, notably by acquiring TV stations and Newsweek magazine in 1963 (the company sold the magazine for a nominal fee to the late billionaire Sidney Harman in 2010 after years of losses). In later years, the company added cable TV systems and the Kaplan educational division, currently the company’s largest by revenue.

UPDATE (8/5/13):

Here is Jeff Bezos’s letter to The Washington Post employees, in which he alludes to the changing nature of journalism and what’s to come for the paper:

There will of course be change at The Post over the coming years. That’s essential and would have happened with or without new ownership. The Internet is transforming almost every element of the news business: shortening news cycles, eroding long-reliable revenue sources, and enabling new kinds of competition, some of which bear little or no news-gathering costs. There is no map, and charting a path ahead will not be easy. We will need to invent, which means we will need to experiment. Our touchstone will be readers, understanding what they care about – government, local leaders, restaurant openings, scout troops, businesses, charities, governors, sports – and working backwards from there. I’m excited and optimistic about the opportunity for invention.

Brief Thoughts on Punctuality

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I agree with Max Strom’s piece on punctuality; he argues that running late is not a time management issue, but rather a life span management and commitment integrity issue. Briefly,

Here are some of the common excuses and myths for running late:

  • I don’t want to interrupt the flow of what is going on, such as a great conversation.
  • I can’t stand arriving early and having nothing to do.
  • I don’t remember to plan out how much time it actually takes me to get somewhere.
  • People really don’t mind so much if I’m late. The only people who mind are people with control issues; so it’s their problem, not mine.
  • I am very spiritual and am concerned with higher things.

What you may be unaware of:

  • You have probably lost friends over this issue and are not aware of it because they did not tell you.
  • You have definitely lost business because of it.
  • Most people resent and are offended by being kept waiting. They feel like you do not respect or care about them. Or it makes them not trust you.
  • People feel that if you are unreliable in this way, you are unreliable in other ways.
  • If you cause your spouse to be late with you on a regular basis, your husband or wife will probably feel that you are not only disrespectful of him or her by running late but you are also embarrassing your spouse by causing him or her to be late as well. This syndrome can be a source of great irritation to an otherwise compatible relationship.
  • You may have a fear of success, and running late is a form of self-sabotage.

He explains:

In my case, my habit of running late was a form of self-sabotage as it caused me to suffer as well as inconvenience those waiting for me. But for some people the cause of this issue is different. I know someone, for example, who is chronically late, but it causes no stress in her whatsoever. Running late may be a passive-aggressive way of controlling those around you. But whatever the cause of your lateness, there is always damage done to others and to yourself. I have noticed that with only a few exceptions, it is the most successful and busiest business people I know who are almost always the first to arrive to my workshops. In other words, those with the busiest, most complex, and high-pressure careers, who have the best excuses for running late, understand the value of promptness and live by it.

It is a pet peeve of mine when people run late. What I try to do is covered by one of Max’s advice bullets: factor in all the time that won’t make you late and then add twenty to thirty minutes to get there earlier. Bring a book, laptop, or whatever else and arrive EARLY. This framework has worked for me for most of my life.

Highly recommend reading in its entirety.

Did Goldman Sachs Overstep in Criminally Charging Its Ex-Programmer?

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Michael Lewis’s latest piece for Vanity Fair is an 11,000 examination of how Goldman Sachs acted after finding that one of its ex-programmers, Sergey Aleynikov, allegedly stole computer code. There was a federal trial, and the 41-year-old father of three was sentenced to eight years in federal prison. Investigating Aleynikov’s case, Michael Lewis holds a second trial. The entire piece is worth reading, especially the interviews with Aleynikov in which he presents his views on life (quoted at the bottom in this post).

First, this was an interesting anecdote on why Russians are the best programmers on Wall Street:

He’d been surprised to find that in at least one way he fit in: more than half the programmers at Goldman were Russians. Russians had a reputation for being the best programmers on Wall Street, and Serge thought he knew why: they had been forced to learn programming without the luxury of endless computer time. “In Russia, time on the computer was measured in minutes,” he says. “When you write a program, you are given a tiny time slot to make it work. Consequently we learned to write the code in a way that minimized the amount of debugging. And so you had to think about it a lot before you committed it to paper. . . . The ready availability of computer time creates this mode of working where you just have an idea and type it and maybe erase it 10 times. Good Russian programmers, they tend to have had that one experience at some time in the past: the experience of limited access to computer time.”

A new rule created by the SEC in 2007 called Regulation NMS led to the proliferation of high frequency trading (HFTs):

For reasons not entirely obvious (yet another question for another day), the new rule stimulated a huge amount of stock-market trading. Much of the new volume was generated not by old-fashioned investors but by extremely fast computers controlled by high-frequency-trading firms, like Getco and Citadel and D. E. Shaw and Renaissance Capital, and the high-frequency-trading divisions of big Wall Street firms, especially Goldman Sachs. Essentially, the more places there were to trade stocks, the greater the opportunity there was for high-frequency traders to interpose themselves between buyers on one exchange and sellers on another. This was perverse. The initial promise of computer technology was to remove the intermediary from the financial market, or at least reduce the amount he could scalp from that market. The reality has turned out to be a boom in financial intermediation and an estimated take for Wall Street of somewhere between $10 and $20 billion a year, depending on whose estimates you wish to believe.

Goldman decided to hire Serge Aleynikov to beef up their algorithms to compete with the likes of big hedge funds like Citadel:

A lot of the moneymaking strategies were of the winner-take-all variety. When every player is trying to buy Pepsi after Coke’s stock has popped, the player whose computers can take in data and spit out the obvious response to it first gets all the money. In the various races being run, Goldman was seldom first. That is why they had sought out Serge Aleynikov: to improve the speed of their system.

The article explains how Goldman is a money-making machine, but the appearance of black swan events led many Wall Street firms to lose millions of dollars at the height of the financial crisis, Goldman included:

Day after volatile day in September 2008, Goldman’s supposedly brilliant traders were losing tens of millions of dollars. “All of the expectations didn’t work,” recalls Serge. “They thought they controlled the market, but it was an illusion. Everyone would come into work and were blown away by the fact that they couldn’t control anything at all. . . . Finance is a gambling game for people who enjoy gambling.”

This was probably the most damning paragraph in the piece about Goldman’s relationship with open source software:

But most of his time was spent simply patching the old code. To do this he and the other Goldman programmers resorted, every day, to open-source software, available free to anyone for any purpose. The tools and components they used were not specifically designed for financial markets, but they could be adapted to repair Goldman’s plumbing.

Serge quickly discovered, to his surprise, that Goldman had a one-way relationship with open source. They took huge amounts of free software off the Web, but they did not return it after he had modified it, even when his modifications were very slight and of general rather than financial use. “Once I took some open-source components, repackaged them to come up with a component that was not even used at Goldman Sachs,” he says. “It was basically a way to make two computers look like one, so if one went down the other could jump in and perform the task.” 

On the individualistic (selfish) nature of competition at Goldman, even when efforts were collaborative in nature:

It made no sense to him the way people were paid individually for achievements that were essentially collective. “It was quite competitive. Everyone’s trying to show how good their individual contribution to the team is. Because the team doesn’t get the bonus, the individual does.”

And then we get to the meat of the piece, where Michael Lewis invites people in the HFT industry to come up with their own verdict of whether Serge Aleynikov did something nefarious and/or illegal:

Our system of justice was a poor tool for digging out a rich truth. What was really needed, it seemed to me, was for Serge Aleynikov to be forced to explain what he had done, and why, to people able to understand the explanation and judge it. Goldman Sachs had never asked him to explain himself, and the F.B.I. had not sought help from someone who actually knew anything at all about computers or the high-frequency-trading business. And so over two nights, in a private room of a Wall Street restaurant, I convened a kind of second trial. To serve as both jury and prosecution, I invited half a dozen people intimately familiar with Goldman Sachs, high-frequency trading, and computer programming.

You have to read the piece for the conclusion. As one of the jurors assembled by Michael Lewis says: it was nauseating how Sergey was treated.

One last bit in the informal jury process that caught my attention was Serge’s demeanor and approach to life. Take things as they come; negativity is pointless:

At one point one of the people at the table stopped the conversation about computer code and asked, “Why aren’t you angry?” Serge just smiled back at him. “No, really,” said the other. “How do you stay so calm? I’d be fucking going crazy.” Serge smiled again. “But what does craziness give you?” he said. “What does negative demeanor give you as a person? It doesn’t give you anything. You know that something happened. Your life happened to go in that particular route. If you know that you’re innocent, know it. But at the same time, you know you are in trouble and this is how it’s going to be.” To which he added, “To some extent I’m glad this happened to me. I think it strengthened my understanding of what living is all about.”

What are your thoughts?

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There’s a very interesting addendum in Vanity Fair in which Michael Lewis is interviewed about his piece. Here, he shares his personal thoughts on Sergey’s time in prison:

Q: For the past 200, 250 years, prison has been an essential part of the Russian experience. Like Dostoyevsky and other Russian authors, and their heroes, Serge found some sense of purpose in his incarceration. Do you think an American could have come away from the experience with that same perspective?

[Michael Lewis]: In the 1950s, European filmmakers, when their films were going to be made for both a Russian and American audience, would change the ending. They would make a happy ending for the American audience and a tragic one for the Russian audience. There’s a photographer named Tacita Dean who has done a series of photographs called “Russian Endings” where she has played on this. I would say that in some ways, there’s something in the water in Russia that enables you to derive a kind of pleasure from a tragic experience. That is not in the water in America. A kind of richness from a tragic experience. And whatever chemical is in the water, Serge drank plenty of it. He is very persuasive on the subject that this was not an all-together bad experience for him. It woke him up to many aspects of life that he had previously been asleep to. I believe him. I don’t think it’s just superficial rationalizing.

When you’re with him, it’s shocking how without anger or bitterness he is. You would never guess, at the dinners I had, that he was one who spent time in jail. You would have picked every other person there.

Also worth highlighting is financial blogger Felix Salmon on his reaction to Lewis’s piece:

I’m increasingly coming to the conclusion that America’s system of jurisprudence simply isn’t up to the task of holding banks and bankers accountable for their actions. The only people who ever get prosecuted are small fry and insider traders, rather than the people who really caused the biggest damage. And the lesson of Sergei Aleynikov is that if and when the laws get beefed up, the banks will simply end up taking advantage of those laws for their own vindictive purposes, rather than becoming victims of them. Given the ease with which Goldman got the FBI to do its bidding, one has to assume that, most of the time, the government will be working on the same side as the big banks, rather than working against them. Do we really want to give those banks ever more powerful weapons?

A Way to Frame Questions

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Robin Hanson considers that if you want to probe someone’s intellectual endeavors/pursuits, you should frame a question you ask them a certain way:

I know many folks who consider themselves intellectuals. I guess they think that in part because if you asked them “What have you been up to lately?,” they’d tell you about books, articles, blogs, or twitter feeds that they’ve been reading. Or perhaps TED talks they’ve watched. This is why I prefer the question “What have you been thinking about lately?” And I’ll usually be a bit disappointed if the answer isn’t about a question they’ve been trying to answer.

Yes perhaps if they just mention a topic, that really stands for some questions about that topic. But often people thinking about a topic are mostly trying to find more supporting evidence for things they already believe. Less often are they taking what I consider the most productive intellectual strategy: focus on an important question where you don’t know the answer.

Indeed, “Once you start to think about a question, you’ll probably soon start to break it down into supporting sub-questions.”

So, what have you been thinking about lately?

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(hat tip: Ben Casnocha)

The South Korean Teacher Who Makes $4 Million Per Year

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The Wall Street Journal profiles Kim Ki-hoon, who earns $4 million a year in South Korea as a rock-star teacher. He has been teaching for over 20 years, all of them in the country’s private, after-school tutoring academies, known as hagwons. Unlike most teachers across the globe, he is paid according to the demand for his skills—and he is in very high demand:

Mr. Kim works about 60 hours a week teaching English, although he spends only three of those hours giving lectures. His classes are recorded on video, and the Internet has turned them into commodities, available for purchase online at the rate of $4 an hour. He spends most of his week responding to students’ online requests for help, developing lesson plans and writing accompanying textbooks and workbooks (some 200 to date).

A bit more on how Mr. Kim makes his income:

The bulk of Mr. Kim’s earnings come from the 150,000 kids who watch his lectures online each year. (Most are high-school students looking to boost their scores on South Korea’s version of the SAT.) He is a brand name, with all the overhead that such prominence in the market entails. He employs 30 people to help him manage his teaching empire and runs a publishing company to produce his books.

To call this mere tutoring is to understate its scale and sophistication. Megastudy, the online hagwon that Mr. Kim works for, is listed on the South Korean stock exchange. (A Megastudy official confirmed Mr. Kim’s annual earnings.) Nearly three of every four South Korean kids participate in the private market. In 2012, their parents spent more than $17 billion on these services. That is more than the $15 billion spent by Americans on videogames that year, according to the NPD Group, a research firm. The South Korean education market is so profitable that it attracts investments from firms like Goldman Sachs, the Carlyle Group and A.I.G.

Welcome to the new economy.

Advice for Staying in Moscow for Edward Snowden

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In Foreign Policy, Edward Snowden receives some amusing but useful advice for staying in Russia on his (at the moment) one year planned stay:

Get used to grumpiness. It’s a decent bet that a smiling Potemkin border guard reserved especially for arriving U.S. dissidents was detailed to stamp you into Russia for the first time, but for the rest of us, friendly officials are like unicorns. They don’t exist. Border guards here almost never say a word, even if you greet them with the chirpiest “zdravstvuite” (“hello”). Forget about that verging-on-annoying friendliness one gets from waiters, shop assistants, or random people in elevators in America. From here on in it will be angry glances and accusatory stares, suspicious neighbors and glum shop workers. The U.S. Justice Department might like to have a few words with you, but there’ll be punishment enough in Moscow. Show up at the grocery store without exact change to pay for your “doctor’s sausage” (don’t ask, Edward, just don’t ask) and you’ll get an earful of barking abuse.

The exception to this will be if you end up living in a building with a “concierge,” which in the Moscow incarnation is not a smartly dressed polite man in a suit and hat, but an inquisitive, squinting babushka who will use a combination of your comings and goings, the identity of any visitors you might have, and ceaseless interrogation to put together a complex psychological portrait of you and the other inhabitants of the building. Think of it as an offline, Soviet version of the PRISM program.

Moscow, of course, has spent the past two decades going through wave after wave of change, and if the angry stares get you down, you can always hire a bike and ride with the hipsters at Gorky Park, or party with the nouveau riche at Gypsy, where your newly acquired fame is sure to get you past the strict face control. Indeed, your lawyer Anatoly Kucherena has said that numerous young Russian damsels have already expressed an interest in providing you with shelter, and perhaps much, much more.

Also, I had no clue Anna Chapman proposed to Snowden. Read the rest here.