Sheelah Kolhatkar

The Republican Presidential candidate and biotech founder mocks corporate virtue-signalling on climate change and racial justice. His positions have made him a right-wing star, Sheelah Kolhatkar writes.

The gutting of federal regulations is partially to blame for the bank’s crisis. But so is a belief, prevalent in the finance and tech worlds, that profits will come forever, and that there is little need to plan for a rainy day.

The case, centering on Google’s dominance in the search-engine industry, will have implications that ripple throughout the tech world, and beyond.

At Stanford Law School, Joseph Bankman and Barbara Fried specialized in ethics and social fairness. Now that their son stands accused of one of the largest financial frauds in U.S. history, they’re scrambling for legal escape routes.

Khan’s argument against the dominance of the consumer-welfare standard rested on an analysis of the business practices of Amazon—which she called “the titan of twenty-first century commerce,” and which now, according to some estimates, controls about half of the U.S.’s online-shopping market. Despite the fact that Amazon offered low prices, she wrote, its dominance was still detrimental to the economy. Amazon would sell products near or below cost in order to gain market share, making it more di…

A little less than a year ago, Bankman-Fried had been ascendant. Thanks to the successful cryptocurrency businesses he founded, he was estimated to be worth billions of dollars; he mused about one day buying Goldman Sachs. At the same time, as a vocal adherent of effective altruism, the quasi-utilitarian philanthropic movement, he pledged to give most of that money away. Speaking from a lectern before the packed courtroom, Rehn, a decorated debater, evoked Bankman-Fried’s grandiosity and tried t…

Merchant feels that the original Luddites, early-nineteenth-century cloth­-makers who raided British factories and destroyed the new machines that were replacing them, have been getting a bad rap lately. Modern people tend to see them as fools who didn’t appreciate the benefits of technology. In Merchant’s view, the Luddites saw the future all too clearly: new machinery meant that the work they had previously done in their own homes would now be done in factories, as mass production, destroying…

Stenger shows an ability to cling to optimism even when the facts don’t warrant it. He didn’t panic at first. “For all I knew, they were coming to take a tour of the place,” he told me. He drove down to the cluster of trailers that served as the resort’s administrative hub and noticed five or six black S.U.V.s in the parking lot. Inside the office, his staff was standing around awkwardly. A lawyer named Jeffrey Schneider told Stenger that the Securities and Exchange Commission was seizing the re…

A collection of articles about 05 from The New Yorker, including news, in-depth reporting, commentary, and analysis.

“Nobody’s perfect,” Varoufakis said, laughing. “I’m Greek.” Varoufakis, who is tall and bald, with a rakish demeanor, wore boots and a black trenchcoat, like a character from “The Matrix.” In 2015, amid one of the worst financial crises in Greece’s history, he was appointed by the country’s new left-wing government to try to save the financial system and to fend off punishing austerity measures that the country’s creditors had proposed in exchange for a bailout. (During the negotiations, the Fin…