Category Archives: Uncategorized

Selfishness, finance, and the ‘greatest trade ever’

I just finished reading Gregory Zuckerman’s new book The Greatest Trade Ever: The behind the scenes story of how John Paulson defied Wall Street and made financial history. The story is about how JP, a relatively staid merger expert, became intensely bearish on the housing market in 2004. He took a $2 billion in assets …

November 23, 2009 – 12:52 am | By Peter | Posted in Financial Crisis, Uncategorized | Tagged | Comments (5)

brand timeline

I sometimes imagine doing an exercise where students would write down in a journal all the advertisements they see in a 24hr time-span. Every single one, including logos, brands, commercials, street signs. Anything bigger than an identifying mark for a store or object, anything that aims towards informing you about the company behind the object …

May 23, 2008 – 10:34 am | By Peter | Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged | Comments (0)

Museums as value-chargers

I have not worked out the distinctions between value and values, or the separate spheres arguments of Zelizer as it fits more generally into economic sociology – efforts to bend her work to my frameworks don’t generally work, and it’s a failure of my frameworking. Still, this excerpt from Kopytoff seems incredibly insightful to me: …

May 23, 2008 – 8:01 am | By Peter | Posted in Art, Culture, Markets, Uncategorized | Comments (0)

The problem with Hulu…

October 29, 2007 – 10:47 am | By Peter | Posted in Uncategorized | Comments (0)