Chicago -
Plus: Wild Child Winston Churchill
Second in a series about this year’s Society of Midland Authors award winners, honoring the best books by Midwest authors published in 2013. The annual awards dinner will take place on May 13 at the Cliff Dwellers Club.
BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR
WINNER: James Tobin, The Man He Became: How FDR Defied Polio to Win the Presidency, Simon & Schuster. (Author lives in Ann Arbor, Mich.)
Posted on April 11, 2014
World War II, The Fountain Of Youth & Railroads
First in a series about this year’s Society of Midland Authors award winners, honoring the best books by Midwest authors published in 2013. The annual awards dinner will take place on May 13 at the Cliff Dwellers Club.
ADULT NONFICTION
WINNER: Rick Atkinson, The Guns at Last Light: The War in Western Europe, 1944-1945, Henry Holt and Co. (Author is a former reporter for the Pittsburg (Kan.) Morning Sun and the Kansas City Times.)
Posted on April 10, 2014
She Likes Books
This is Maggie Needham applying for an internship with Open Books.
Posted on April 8, 2014
Before arriving there as part of the big push, Katsuyama had never laid eyes on Wall Street or New York City. It was his first immersive course in the American way of life, and he was instantly struck by how different it was from the Canadian version. “Everything was to excess,” he says. “I met more offensive people in a year than I had in my entire life. People lived beyond their means, and the way they did it was by going into debt. That’s what shocked me the most. Debt was a foreign concept in Canada. Debt was evil.”
For his first few years on Wall Street, Katsuyama traded U.S. energy stocks and then tech stocks. Eventually he was promoted to run one of RBC’s equity-trading groups, consisting of 20 or so traders. The RBC trading floor had a no-jerk rule (though the staff had a more colorful term for it): If someone came in the door looking for a job and sounding like a typical Wall Street jerk, he wouldn’t be hired, no matter how much money he said he could make the firm. There was even an expression used to describe the culture: “RBC nice.” Although Katsuyama found the expression embarrassingly Canadian, he, too, was RBC nice. The best way to manage people, he thought, was to persuade them that you were good for their careers. He further believed that the only way to get people to believe that you were good for their careers was actually to be good for their careers.
–
The online broker TD Ameritrade, for example, was paid hundreds of millions of dollars each year to send its orders to a hedge fund called Citadel, which executed the orders on behalf of TD Ameritrade. Why was Citadel willing to pay so much to see the flow? No one could say with certainty what Citadel’s advantage was.
–
“There are still some human beings working on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange and the various Chicago exchanges, but they no longer preside over any financial market or have a privileged view inside those markets. The U.S. stock market now trades inside black boxes, in heavily guarded buildings in New Jersey and Chicago. What goes on inside those black boxes is hard to say – the ticker tape that runs across the bottom of cable TV screens captures only the tiniest fraction of what occurs in the stock markets. The public reporters of wht happens inside the black boxes are fuzzy and unreliable – even an expert cannot say what exactly happens inside them, or when it happens, or why. The average investor has no way of knowing, of course, even the little he needs to know. He logs onto his TD Ameritrade or E*Trade or Schwab account, enters a ticker symbol of some stock, and clicks an icon that says “Buy”: Then what? He may think he knows what happens after he presses the key on his computer keyboard, but, trust me, he does not. If he did, he’d think twice before he pressed it.”
*
“The line was just a one-and-a-half-inch-wide hard black plastic tube designed to shelter four hundred hair-thin strands of glass, but it already had the feeling of a living creature, a subterranean reptile, with its peculiar needs and wants. It needed its burrow to be straight, maybe the most insistently straight path ever dug into the earth. It needed to connect a data center on the South Side of Chicago* to a stock exchange in northern New Jersey. Above all, apparently, it needed to be a secret.”
* The principal data center was later moved to Aurora.
*
“After some unsatisfying years working as a stockbroker in Jackson [Mississippi], [Dan Spivey] quit, as he put it, ‘to do something more sporting.’ That turned out to be renting a seat on the Chicago Board Options Exchange and making markets for his own account. Like every other trader on the Chicago exchanges, he saw how much money could be made trading futures in Chicago against present prices of the individual stocks trading in New York and New Jersey. Every day there were thousands of moments when the prices were out of whack – when, for instance, you could sell the futures contract for more than the price of the stocks that comprised it. To capture the profits, you had to be fast to both markets at once. What was meant by ‘fast’ was changing rapidly. In the old days – before, say, 2007 – the speed with which a trader could execute had human limits. Human beings worked on the floors of the exchanges, and if you wanted to buy or sell anything you had to pass through them. The exchanges, by 2007, were simply stacks of computers in data centers. The speed with which trades occurred on them was no longer constrained by people. The only constraint was how fast an electronic signal could travel between Chicago and New York – or, more precisely, between the data center in Chicago that housed the Chicago Mercantile Exchange and a data center beside the Nasdaq’s stock exchange in Carteret, New Jersey.
MORE SPIVEY
*
phil rosenthal
Posted on April 6, 2014
Plus: Roosevelt Aluma In Northwestern Author’s Movie
1. Embracing Forbidden Voices: Exiled Authors in Chicago.
“The Guild Literary Complex’s commitment to spotlighting divergent voices extends beyond the borders of Chicago in Voices of Protest,” the GLC has announced.
“On April 25 and 26, the Guild brings Manal Al-Sheikh (Iraq) and Mazen Maarouf (Palestine) – two authors exiled from their home countries and now living in Scandinavia – to participate in conversations, film screenings, and readings with a focus on human rights, freedom of speech, and the ways literature celebrates life and inspires social change.
Posted on April 4, 2014
By The Electronic Frontier Foundation
On April 4th, EFF is partnering with the Center for Civic Media at MIT and the National Coalition Against Censorship to bring attention to the longstanding problem of Internet censorship in public libraries and schools for 404 Day.
Join us on Friday, April 4th from 12 p.m. – 1 p.m. PST for a digital teach-in with some of the top researchers and librarians working to analyze and push back against the use of Internet filters on library computers.
Posted on April 2, 2014
By The Literacy Volunteers of Illinois
Whether you’re new at volunteer tutoring or have been tutoring for years, whether you tutor teens or adults, there is always something for everyone at the annual On The Road to Literacy Conference.
This year’s event will be held on Saturday, April 12th, beginning at 9 a.m. at the University of Illinois-Chicago. Co-sponsors are the Literacy Volunteers of Illinois and the UIC Center for Literacy.
This year’s daylong session will feature 24 workshops whose speakers will be presenting strategies, techniques, materials and games to use to help tutors build their student’s vocabulary, pronunciation, conversation, comprehension, reading, writing, computer and computational skill.
Posted on March 27, 2014
Nelson George Does The Deed
“In a publishing marketplace where 700 pages of text are not enough to encompass a movie star’s life or a presidential administration, The Hippest Trip in America manages, semi-miraculously, to compress more than 30 years of rapier-keen social history and street-savvy cultural criticism within 230-odd pages,” Gene Seymour writes for USA Today.
“The ‘trip’ chronicled in those pages by journalist-filmmaker Nelson George is the 1,117-episode run of Soul Train, the syndicated TV dance-and-music series. Its nationwide premiere in 1971 was perhaps the most auspicious signpost of a decade in which African-American culture, freed during the previous decade from the social and legal constraints of racial segregation, leapt to the forefront of mainstream pop as never before and, some might argue, never since.
“Soul Train, which ascended from humble beginnings as a local after-school program in Chicago to a phenomenon of national, if not global proportions, was in retrospect the cornerstone of this transformative era, setting the decade’s agenda for music, dance and fashion.”
Posted on March 25, 2014
The Most Eloquent Voices In The City
Louder Than A Bomb wrapped up its annual month-long festival this weekend. Here are some of the highlights.
1. Chicago Social Movements.
Posted on March 19, 2014
Plus: Home Remedies & Modern Masters
“The prostitution debate will get nowhere as long as women who sell sex are seen as victims to be ‘rescued’, their views ignored, argues a former sex worker in this extract from her new book,” the Guardian says.
Here’s the Chicago part (links added):
“Awareness-raising about prostitution is not a value-neutral activity. Sex workers see a straight line between foundation dollars earmarked for advertisements such as those that appeared on Chicago buses – Get Rich. Work In Prostitution. Pimps Keep The Profits, And Prostituted Women Often Pay With Their Lives – and the allocation of resources to the Chicago police to arrest pimps in order to save women whom they call ‘prostituted.’
“Inevitably, all of these women face arrest, no matter what they call them, a demonstration of the harm produced by awareness raising despite any good intentions.
“‘On paper, sex workers are still not as likely to face felony charges as their patrons,’ according to the Chicago Reporter, ‘who can be charged with a felony on their first offense under the Illinois Safe Children’s Act, which was enacted in 2010.’
“But when the paper examined felony arrest statistics they found, [the] data shows that prostitution-related felonies are being levied almost exclusively against sex workers. During the past four years, they made up 97% of the 1,266 prostitution-related felony convictions in Cook County. And the number only grew: felony convictions among sex workers increased by 68% between 2008 and 2011.
Posted on March 17, 2014
