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Reviews

Book Review: Putin’s Sledgehammer: The Wagner Group and Russia’s Collapse into Mercenary Chaos

My review for the Washington Independent Review of Books

An engrossing look at Yevgeny Prighozin’s soldiers-for-hire.

Putin’s Sledgehammer: The Wagner Group and Russia’s Collapse into Mercenary Chaos is a gripping, research-tome-sized account of the origins and ascent of Russia’s infamous private-military company, easily one of the world’s most notorious mercenary outfits (after Blackwater, of course). Aptly titled, the book makes the cogent argument that such “private” companies can be (and are) wielded by the state, as long as that collusion remains veiled in plausible deniability.

Author Candace Rondeaux, an award-winning journalist, public-policy scholar, and director of Future Frontlines at the New America Foundation, gives us in Putin’s Sledgehammer an expansive chronicle, making connections few have traced, some gained by analyzing 130,000 leaked files from the many shell companies of Yevgeny Prighozin, Wagner’s former head, who died in a suspicious 2023 plane crash. The detailed analysis reads more like a breathless spy thriller than an academic exploration, owing not only to Rondeaux’s brilliance but also to her personal connection to the material: She was a student in St. Petersburg around the time Prighozin first met Putin, then mayor of the city.

The narrative begins in 1991, after the collapse of Russia’s Communist Party-led government. The planned economy of the post-Soviet state is in freefall, and a new and violent market logic (aka neoliberalism) is wreaking financial havoc. Mafia rules the streets, and oligarchs form behemoth, Frankenstein-esque companies in the chaos of widespread privatization.

Following the Soviet Union’s withdrawal from Afghanistan in 1991, the Kremlin cut its military roughly in half. Soldiers returning home found almost no services to help them transition back to civilian life. “The downsizing created a huge pool of disillusioned and unemployed men trained to kill,” explains Rondeaux. Many of Russia’s future mercenaries met in informal, non-state-created veterans unions. Some became security for oligarchs, some worked for the mafia, and some ended up in prison — all spaces which would become important vectors for Russia’s nascent mercenary industry. The intricate jockeying for power at the state and private level birthed the Wagner Group.

Putin’s Sledgehammer really stands apart from other books on Wagner in its thorough, nuanced take on Prighozin. The public perception of him comes in disparate, singular labels: a former small-time criminal; a wildly successful hotdog salesman; a restaurateur-turned-government-caterer fondly referred to as “Putin’s Chef”; an internet-disinformation maverick; and, finally, leader of a formidable global mercenary group that eventually marched to Moscow, posing a first-of-its-kind threat to Putin’s rule.

And, indeed, Prighozin was all those things, but Rondeaux truly fleshes out this complicated, mercurial character. We ultimately come to see Prighozin as a marketing and entrepreneurial master (a doggedly hardworking one, at that), an image that belies the brash, uniformed strongman seen most recently before his death.

For example, Prighozin’s culinary acumen is often overlooked, his success as “Putin’s Chef” chalked up to favoritism. But the book tells a different story. In writing about the now-famous Russian state dinner at the Peterhof Palace on May 31, 2003, that hosted George W. Bush and other G8 leaders, Rondeaux paints the scene in mouth-watering detail:

“Sumptuous blinis stuffed with caviar and cream were served. Prighozin had spent nearly two years planning the menus and training the waitstaff on the intricacies of silver-service catering for heads of state. It was all part of the artful diplomatic ballet that Putin and the Kremlin had choreographed as part of Russia’s bid to return to the center of the world stage.”

But that return came to a halt after Russia’s takeover of Crimea and the Donbas in 2014. Putin’s Sledgehammer’s argues that although this was a turning point in lifting the veil on the state’s global backstage-military maneuvers, Putin had begun to see Russia as pitted in a Cold War 2.0 against the U.S., and private military companies were the most expedient means of waging it.

“There is always a [mercenary-for-hire] middleman [like Wagner] in the US-Russia conflict,” Rondeaux writes. “The central tension had always been over who in Russia would reap the greatest share of profits and political rewards from Prigozhin’s successes and who would pay the price for his failures.”

In 2016, U.S. and E.U. sanctions began to bite at the Russian economy. Putin had long been fixated on the idea that oil and gas were his country’s pathway back to wealth and to a commanding place in the world order. As Rondeaux narrates in the cleverly titled chapter “Guns, Gas, and Oil” (a satirical nod to Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel, a 1997 book challenging notions of Eurasian superiority), the Wagner Group emerged as the perfect solution for evading sanctions. By embedding itself in Syria, Libya, the Central African Republic, and Mali, Wagner enabled the Russian oil-and-gas industry to expand outward. Similarly, Russia is a prime exporter of arms in the world, second only to America. Wagner, with its plausible-deniability cover of not being a state actor, made sure Russia had arms clients in the Middle East and Africa, sanctions be damned.

And once again, Prighozin, ever the diligent employee (and employer), ensured that natural resources kept flowing freely. When the group took over the Hayan gas plant in Syria, says Rondeaux, “Wagner didn’t just deploy fighters: they also flew in geologists, engineers, and fire control experts.” Prighozin also hired anthropologists and other “academic types” when he launched the now-infamous Internet Research Agency, the entity behind the 2016 U.S. election interference and a worldwide-disinformation campaigner of unrivaled sophistication and influence. To dismiss the IRA as a “troll farm” would be a gross mischaracterization; the book tells of Prighozin’s recruitment of bright young polyglots from Russia’s top schools, who had a keen understanding of the issues du jour and knew how to amplify prejudices.

With the war in Ukraine, Prighozin would become even more important: The Wagner Group was an expedient solution to Russia’s manpower problem. “For Putin to call for a full mobilization would have been tantamount to admitting failure, that the war was a war, not a special military operation, and that victory would not come as swiftly or cheaply as he had promised,” Rondeaux explains. Until its downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 over eastern Ukraine in 2014 — which left 298 civilians dead — Wagner had been mostly a (fearsome) battlefield rumor. Soon after, it sledgehammered its way into notoriety, helped by Prighozin’s ability to deliver pithy, fiery speeches on social media.

Putin’s Sledgehammer is a seminal work of incisive insight not only about the Wagner Group and its late charismatic leader but also about modern mercenaryism and why we should care about it. Rondeaux draws parallels few others have, the kind that could only come from a Russophile like herself. The famous quote of sociologist Charles Tilly that “war made the state, and the state made war” is borne out in her riveting story of the murky, byzantine ties between the state and its mercenaries (or, perhaps, the mercenaries and their state).

 

Reporting

America’s Unaddressed Feminist Issues

My article for the School of International Service

Editor’s Note: Ahead of the 2024 US presidential election, SIS professor Antoaneta Tileva authored this piece reflecting on several of the feminist issues she feels are currently going unaddressed in America. At SIS, Tileva teaches courses on identity, gender, class, and culture. 

In her beautifully succinct yet expansive definition, bell hooks writes that feminism is “a movement to end sexism, sexist exploitation, and oppression.” Her seminal book, Feminism is for Everybody (2000), establishes feminism as a movement for everybody and every body. Patriarchy—or institutionalized sexism—affects people of all genders. Feminist issues are not just “women’s issues.” Feminism today is concerned with intersectionality–looking at the intersections of class, gender, race, religion, and the way they shape people’s experiences.

Let’s look at abortion rights through this intersectional lens. While abortion access has been labeled the feminist issue of this election, with most Americans favoring abortion rights, a conversation centered strictly on bodily autonomy misses the wider impacts.

Increasingly restrictive laws majorly affect maternal and women’s healthcare outcomes. Maternity care “deserts”—defined as areas where access to maternity health care services is limited or absent—limit access to birthing services but also pose challenges in securing early and continuous prenatal and postnatal care.

A shortage in OB-GYNs means that mothers have to travel greater and greater distances to get treatment, but it also means that women can’t get preventative, routine healthcare and that infants can’t get postnatal care. States with more restrictive abortion policies have higher total maternal mortality, measured as death during pregnancy or within one year following the end of a pregnancy. This is within the wider context of the US maternal mortality rates which remain consistently higher than those of other wealthy countries.

For the second straight year, fewer students in MD-granting US medical schools are applying for OB-GYN residencies in abortion-restricted states. According to the Association of American Medical Colleges, applicant numbers in those states decreased by more than 10 percent. The explanation for this is that residents know they will simply not be trained on how to offer comprehensive maternal care, which includes performing abortions in cases such as high-risk patients for whom pregnancy may be life-threatening, or patients who experience ectopic pregnancy or incomplete miscarriage.

Furthermore, maternal healthcare is not the same across class and racial lines—Black women are more than three times more likely to die from pregnancy-related causes than their white counterparts.

Some other feminist issues of this election include affordable/universal childcare, the wage gap, and, yes, also the war in Gaza.

The US stands out among advanced economies for its lack of universal childcare. This has not always been the case. During World War II, the government successfully established Lanham Centers to provide childcare for working women. On December 9, 1971, President Nixon vetoed the Comprehensive Child Development Act (CDA), which would have created federally-funded public childcare centers across the US Influenced by Pat Buchanan’s trip to the Soviet Union and his resultant panic over childcare centers representing a communist turn, Nixon essentially stymied any progress on this issue. Funnily (or perhaps not so), even in his old age, Buchanan doubled down, stating, “Mothers should be home with ‘cake and pie’ at 3 p.m.”

The 2024 State of Parenting survey found that only approximately 40 percent of participants feel supported by their employer. A lack of affordable childcare costs the US economy $122 billion annually.

The wage gap remains, with women, on average, earning 84 cents on the dollar to what a man makes. For Latine, Native, and Black women, the gap is more like a chasm than a gap.

The war in Gaza is also a feminist issue. According to recent estimates, since October 7, 70 percent of civilians killed in Gaza have been women and children and nearly a million women and girls have been displaced.

Ultimately, these “feminist” issues are everybody’s issues. Feminism is not about representation alone—it is not enough to have people of certain identities in leadership roles.

Reviews

Book Review: You Just Need to Lose Weight by Aubrey Gordon

My book review for the Washington Independent Review of Books

Co-host of the “Maintenance Phase” podcast and Self magazine’s “Your Fat Friend” columnist, “You Just Need to Lose Weight”: And 19 Other Myths about Fat People is an urgent, well-sourced fatifesto ready to be nailed to the door of our collective fridge. In 20 pithy chapters, Gordon offers historical background, current research, reflection questions, and “opportunities for action,” leading the reader toward meaningful allyship and advocacy.

Fatness is so feared in our culture that a Yale University study found 46 percent of 4,283 respondents would rather give up a year of life than be fat; 15 percent would prefer to be severely depressed. “You Just Need to Lose Weight” unflinchingly pushes back against those attitudes and dispels popular myths, laying bare the speciousness of “body and health” weight-loss arguments. Cloaked as prescriptive and factual, these arguments hide a dark underbelly: fat bias, one of the last socially accepted prejudices.

In her incisive, robustly sourced treatise, Gordon takes on everything from the influential “calories in, calories out” paradigm (based on a 1959 study), to the notion that losing weight is a choice, to the accusation that fat acceptance glorifies obesity. She rejects outright the idea that being fat is a failure of willpower. “According to the NIH,” she writes, “very fat women — like me — have a 0.8 percent chance of becoming thin in our lifetimes.”

The book takes a decisively intersectionalist stance. In tracing fat activism’s roots in the work of fat Black women during the civil- and welfare-rights movements, Gordon encourages the reader to connect fat discrimination with all the many isms: racism, classism, healthism, and ableism. She offers, too, an outstanding overview of the kinds of protest actions people have taken, including the first Fat-In (organized in 1967 by radio host Steve Post).

“You Just Need to Lose Weight” also deftly interrogates how body positivity essentially defanged the more “radical” fat-justice movement. The personal accounts in the book are especially poignant. Gordon shares a story of being called a “fat lady” by a kid whose mom gets furious when Gordon tells the kid that she is, in fact, a fat lady. Gordon eloquently explains how avoiding the word “fat” continues to “stigmatize my body and insist that describing my skin must be an insult.” She elaborates:

“For me, and for many, many fat people, reclaiming the word fat is about reclaiming our very bodies, starting with the right to name them. Fat isn’t a negative aspect of one’s body any more than tall or short is. It can, and should, be a neutral descriptor.”

Similarly, the oft-heard laments “I feel so fat” or “This dress makes me look fat” create the impression that fat is a feeling. Gordon has a helpful solution: Ask yourself for consent before engaging in negative body talk. Notice how you describe other people’s bodies and whether their size is relevant to your discussion of them. Stop treating thinness like an accomplishment and fatness like a failure. (The example of congratulating ill people on the “bright side” of now being thin is a glaring example of this sickening fixation.) And try to see food for what it is: a comfort, a celebration, a pleasure, or simply fuel.

Ultimately, “You Just Need to Lose Weight” lays bare Western society’s treatment of fatness as a moral failing. Gordon’s manifesto is essential reading in the intersectional conversation around fat acceptance and provides an excellent roadmap toward fat activism.

 

Reporting

Book Review: The Pornography Wars: The Past, Present, and Future of America’s Obscene Obsession by Kelsy Burke

My review for the Washington Independent Review of Books.

Pulling back the curtain on our nation’s dirty little secret.

If you don’t consume pornography, why should you concern yourself with the debates surrounding it? Sociologist Kelsy Burke’s comprehensive The Pornography Wars: The Past, Present, and Future of America’s Obscene Obsession makes a persuasive case that sex matters far beyond the private sphere and that pornography is ultimately about how we relate to one another. Based on five years of research and more than 90 interviews with people on both sides of the debate, the book is nuanced in its treatment of the topic and compelling in the way it situates the subject within broader society.

Burke is convincing in her argument that the crux of the matter is not simply or only pornography but “how to live an authentic and fulfilling life, which includes sexuality, in a modern world.” Porn’s ubiquity and accessibility in the internet age render it a topic that has to be addressed, and not just by feminists or sex-worker advocates.

The book begins with a history of pornography and obscenity laws. It then launches into an incredibly thorough section on the effects of porn-indexing sites. Started by the “geek king of smut,” Fabian Thylmann, who has since sold his share in the company for €73 million (yes, you read that correctly), MindGeek, by some estimates, owns 90 percent of all internet porn. Pornhub, one of its sites, draws a staggering 120 million visitors daily, placing it above Amazon and Netflix in online-traffic rankings. Generating revenue through banner ads, this behemoth is responsible for the prevailing and pernicious idea that porn should be free. But more on this later.

Burke then explores the passing of FOSTA-SESTA, the Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act and the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act, in 2018. For anti-pornography activists, porn and sex trafficking are too intricately linked to be considered separate entities. Pro-porn activists challenge this conflation but nevertheless have to recognize that the sex-work industry poses some very real threats to its purveyors.

Sex workers, for their part, have sought to overturn such laws because they actually place them in greater peril by not allowing these workers to share information about dangerous clients or to form networks of cooperation online. Another unintended consequence of the laws meant to help sex-trafficking victims is that they strengthen the penal system and push sex work further underground, making it much more dangerous. These laws also make a life outside of sex work harder to achieve as banks refuse to open accounts for sex workers and employers can fire employees who do outside, part-time sex work.

The Pornography Wars explores the feminist take on pornography, too, especially the so-called Porn Wars in 1984, spearheaded by legal scholar Catharine MacKinnon and writer/activist Andrea Dworkin. Women Against Pornography, founded by the pair, believed that porn exploits women and is fundamentally damaging and misogynistic. The very term “sex work” is abhorrent because it elides the exploitation and coercion anti-porn advocates claim is inherent in the system.

Burke’s interviews with people struggling with pornography addiction, as well as with people in the industry, are especially insightful. As adult-film performer and author Stoya says, “My politics and I are feminist…my job is not.” There is a particularly jarring interview with a BDSM performer who has a sobering realization in therapy that the violent content she’s participating in is being watched by people so that “they don’t have to make their own memories.” This line may leave readers shaken.

The book goes on to explore whether feminist (or ethical) porn can exist and what it looks like, as well as how our society perceives “genuine pleasure” and whether we can — or should — concern ourselves with distinguishing between the real and the fake.

Burke allows the contradictions and complexities on both sides of the debate to shine. “People experience pornography differently based on their sexual identity, experiences, and beliefs about sex,” she writes. Sex workers, too, she acknowledges, have inconsistent feelings about its harm or harmlessness.

The Pornography Wars concludes that, polarizing rhetoric and the way in which both sides have defined themselves vis-à-vis a distinction from the other aside, the overlap between porn-positive and anti-porn factions is larger than we might think. Because pornography is connected to broader social systems — including capitalism, the criminal justice system, and the media — any analysis of it without considering those connections is incomplete.

Finally, Burke outlines three points both sides agree on. First, that it’s a bad idea to keep porn habits hidden. Second, that talking to kids about sex and porn is necessary, considering its ubiquity. And finally, that nobody should be watching free porn. The two factions also share concerns about safety and consent, the risk of violence, and sexual health for sex workers.

The Pornography Wars is truly one of most cogent and sophisticated deep dives into our collective dirty secret that I’ve ever read. Do yourself a favor and pick it up.

Reporting

Housing Markets and the Broader Economy

My article for the Kogod School of Business

While the question of whether we will face a recession in 2023 and how bad it may be (terms like “soft landing” and “recalibration” dominate the discourse) has been daunting, economists’ discussion about the housing market and how it is affected by the current monetary policy has not been quite as prominent. Professor Jeff Harris, Kogod’s Gary D. Cohn Goldman Sachs Chair in Finance, recently spoke with WJLA News on the topic.

The housing market, which accounts for nearly 18 percent of the US economy, has recently shown some signs of cooling, with home sales sinking and prices beginning to soften. Yet, this is hardly enough to bring purchase and sale prices to anything even closely approximating the pre-pandemic days, when the market became (artificially, perhaps) red hot, when home prices soared 45 percent from December 2019 to June 2022.

The Fed is attempting to slow inflation via a process that economists call “demand destruction.” By raising interest rates, the central bank makes it more expensive to borrow and spend. As the most interest-sensitive sector of the economy, housing is greatly affected.

Professor Harris was closely involved in the bank bailouts in 2008 as chief economist at the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission–his knowledge of the mortgage markets is vast and practical. “In 2008, and very much similarly now, it was hard to get a handle on how many mortgages are out there. There is not one database that tracks that. Yes, banks have records of when they issue mortgages, but data on prepayment is lacking—for example, this is for people who pay off their mortgage earlier. This is why then and now, it is hard for the central bank to get a clear view of what is happening in that sector of the economy and how the interest rate hikes are affecting it.”

Data from January 5 shows that mortgage rates rose to the highest level since the week that ended December 1, resuming from a slight decrease in December–the average rate on the 30-year fixed rate mortgage was 6.48 percent. It was 6.42 percent as of January 6, 2023, and 3.22 percent a year ago. Freddie Mac estimated that 15 million potential homebuyers have been priced out of the housing market because, for the first time in US history, the average 30-year fixed-rate mortgage rate has more than doubled in a year’s time.

The monthly costs for some home buyers are essentially double what they would have been a year ago. Combine that with the already high prices, and this will keep a lot of people out of the market.”

But another segment that should be discussed is buyers with variable-rate mortgages. “Because there is about a four to five-month period before buyers with variable rate mortgages begin paying the prevailing market interest, we might not have seen the largest impact of the rate hikes on those mortgages until now. These buyers will struggle with contending with these punishing new payments.” And because buyers who take variable interest rate loans are already not as financially stable as those who purchase on a fixed rate, this could be very worrying.

Buyers may not find significant relief anytime soon. Mortgage rates are expected to edge lower this year but remain at about 5 or 6 percent. While demand may have dampened, the supply of homes remains low. “The housing markets vary widely across the country, with some places experiencing mild downturns and some continuing to see price hikes,” says Harris.

You will see some softening in prices for homes that have been sitting on the market for two to three months, but prices are unlikely to return to pre-pandemic levels.”

Harris believes that, in many ways, the worst is over, so to speak–even if the Federal Reserve continues with rate increases, mortgage rates will likely decrease from current levels. Yet, housing affordability is likely to remain low.

Reviews

Book Review: Body Work: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative by Melissa Febos

My review for the Washington Independent Review of Books

Melissa Febos’ latest essay collection, Body Work, is “not a craft book in the traditional sense,” she states. Nor is it a flowery ode to the writer’s life. Instead, it’s a practical, clear-eyed take on the intimate (and intricate) connection between our bodies and our bodies of work. Throughout, Febos beautifully narrates the ways in which writing is “integrated into the fundamental movements of life,” asking readers to go beyond writing about their lives to writing their lives.The author, whose previous works include Whip Smart, Abandon Me, and Girlhood, is a keen social critic, and she makes a cogent argument as to why women’s writing about trauma has been dismissed as unartistic, trite, and self-indulgent:

“Resistance to memoirs about trauma is always in part a resistance to movements of social justice.”

Indeed, while male navel-gazing has been valorized as the kindling for many a Great American Novel, when the introspection comes from women, it is scorned as so much whining no one wants to hear about yet again. (No wonder the words “histrionics” and “hysteria” sound so similar.) Febos makes an impassioned defense of self-reflection as a subversive act that personifies the notion “the personal is political.” Further, the freedom it creates benefits not just the writer but society. From it, we all wrest a bit more license to be honest about our truths.

Her essays are well researched, and much of the excitement here comes from the way in which she curates writing from Native and other non-mainstream voices. In “In Praise of Navel Gazing,” Febos discusses the work of social psychologist James Pennebaker, who found that writing about trauma is healing. She also examines how her “own internalized sexism” shaped her view of what a “real” writer does — craft fiction in the traditional American sense. This essay made me think about similar criticisms leveled against actors for “playing themselves” and thus “not acting.”

As you might guess, her chapter on how to write about sex is less about the mechanics and more about refusing to be shamed into silence. Her inclusion of an Audre Lorde essay on what sex actually is — and it’s not just sex — is especially well developed. When someone in an audience asks Febos if she feels any shame writing about the act, she responds, “I am shameless.” But shameless is not the same as vulgar or vacuous. Rather, writing about sex “might free me from shame and replace the onus of change onto the society in which we live.”

Even though Body Work is not meant to be a manual on memoir writing, it offers a useful, nuanced take on many issues that come up when tackling any sort of nonfiction. The third essay, “A Big Shitty Party,” explores writing about other people — a thorny subject faced by journalists and anthropologists alike. “It is profoundly unfair,” asserts Febos, “that a writer gets to author the public version of a story.” It is moments like this where her vulnerability and thoughtfulness are truly illuminating.

Febos also discusses ways in which writers can strengthen a story by taking a “casualties be damned, this is my artistic vision” approach or, conversely, by declining to add something “when a detail felt cruel.” She is never reckless in her own story-making; this is not slash-and-burn truth-telling. Rather, she explores how one can stay true to their recounting of an event while maintaining care for those woven into it.

The must-read Body Work is a captivating, eloquent paean to the power of working through a “pain that has been given value by the alchemy of creative attention.” In its pages, Melissa Febos posits self-appraisal as a brave act that is both intensely personal and also communal. “The only way to make room is to drag all our stories into that room,” she writes. “That’s how it gets bigger.”

 

Reporting, Reviews

Show Me the Money: Representation of Women + Capital in Media

My article for District Fray Magazine

Shakira sang about she wolves in the closet, which (albeit not) might as well have been a reference to the absence of popular media portrayal of the She Wolves of Wall Street. Kept pent up for far too long, women’s roars are finally falling on some eager ears. 

In reality and on screen, Wall Street has been a boy’s club. Not only are women less represented, but they are also less remunerated. Citi — one of the world’s largest banks– reported in 2019 that its female employees earn 29 percent less than its male employees globally.

But women are wresting the wads away from the dominant grasp in some surprising ways, including starting their own investing clubs and creating new enterprises during the pandemic.

In celebration of Women’s History Month, here are some bankable portrayals of women and money:

  1. Equity–is a corporate thriller that follows Naomi Bishop, an investment banker working on the IPO launch of a Silicon Valley company. While taut and engaging (and thrilling), it is also a very sophisticated exploration of the power dynamics on Wall Street between and among genders. One of the most memorable lines from the movie is Naomi’s deadpan, “I like money.” Taking a Wall Street opening bell hammer to the groan-inducing gold-digger trope, director Meera Mennon, portrays women as enjoying the competition, the chaos, the hard work of their careers but the perks, too (hello, enviable power wardrobe). And while Naomi’s character has been a caretaker for those around her, she reminds us that “Don’t let money be a dirty word. We can like that, too.”
  2. Drug Short on Netflix’ “Dirty Money”–Dubbed the “femme fatale of short trading,” Fahmi Quadir, a brilliant short seller who left a Ph.D. program in algebraic mathematics for a career on Wall Street, takes on drug behemoth Valeant…and wins.The recent Gamestop kerfuffle and techbro Elon Musk’s relentless Twitter beef has shorted short sellers, portraying them as predatory. Fahmi is a testament to a different kind of a short seller–one who looks to identify corporate malfeasance and (yes) reap the rewards. When she says, “I do my work in the shadows,” she is referring to the fact that short selling is sleuthing and hours of poring over quarterly earnings reports. In other words, you won’t find the kind of information Quadir unearths readily available and even less so revealed by the companies themselves. Short selling is especially male-dominated, so this documentary on a world understood by very few is illuminating: “All short sellers are outsiders. And women are especially outsiders in this world,” says Quadir.
  3. Capital in the 21st Century–”We have a mythology that what’s good for Wall Street is good for Main Street, but that’s really never been true,” says Rana Foroohar, financial journalist associate editor of the Financial Times, in this documentary take on Thomas Piketty’s tome of a book. Foroohar’s commentary features prominently in the film. And her recently-released book “Don’t Be Evil: The Case Against Big Tech” is a searing indictment of the extent to which tech behemoths are monetizing our data.
  4. Bethany McLean’s podcast “Making a Killing” Known for her book “Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room,” journalist and contributing editor to Vanity Fair magazine, McLean takes issues you may think you understand and complicates them, featuring clever titles like “Keynes was wrong. Gen Z will have it worse.” Her more recent 2018 book “Saudi America: The Truth About Fracking and How It’s Changing the World” is also thoroughly engrossing and a must-read for the energy heads out there.

While portrayals of women in finance have been scarce, the tide is certainly turning, as is the cash flow, with more women asserting their seat at the table at this former boys’ bastion.

Reporting

What Are the Odds? A computational neuroscientist and Kogod adjunct scores a career as a data scientist with the NBA.

So much of our everyday life involves making predictions—from picking the best route for our morning commute to bringing an umbrella to choosing a partner. “We predict all the time, so the process is natural,” says Grant Fiddyment, adjunct professor of predictive analytics at Kogod and data scientist for the NBA’s Philadelphia 76ers. “In a lot of ways, it’s the same way we interact with technology and the world. For instance, how can I phrase my web search so that the site will match what I’m looking for? How can I pronounce a word so that a virtual assistant will understand what I’m saying? Without knowing the technical details, we implicitly learn how these technologies work.”

What is predictive analytics, and how does it offer us a glimpse into the future?

At its most fundamental level, the discipline calculates the likelihood of future events by simply (although many would cry foul at this characterization) counting the possible outcomes. Its foundations were laid in a 1654 letter exchange between French mathematicians Pierre de Fermat and Blaise Pascal discussing how the winnings of a coin-flipping gambling game should be split. And while we all know that the house always wins in Vegas, few would know to credit Jacob Bernoulli’s Law of Large Numbers from 1713 as the reason why.

Despite predictive analytics’ old roots, it is responsible for many facets of modern-day life we give little thought to—things like credit card fraud detection, virtual chess partners, and, of most interest to Fiddyment, creating professional sports super teams.

Grant Fiddyment's headshot.

As a data scientist on the research and development team for the 76ers, Fiddyment helps frame and analyze the predictive questions that arise in sports—for example, how will signing a new player impact a team’s title odds, or how well will a tall lineup play against a smaller, quicker one?

Predictive analytics has long been used in sports, going back to the analog days of yore. Baseball has historically led the movement. One of the most famous success stories is told in the movie Moneyball, which follows 2002 Oakland Athletics general manager Billy Beane as he uses predictive analytics to hire under-valued players and send his team on a crowd-wowing 20-game winning streak. But the methods developed in Oakland have application across all sports.

“Most teams were asking, ‘How often does a batter get a hit when they go to bat?’ Instead, the A’s asked, ‘How many bases does a player get when they go to bat?’ Looking at total bases turns out to be more predictive of how many runs a team will score,” explains Fiddyment. “Similarly, in the NBA, teams used to ask how often a player will make a shot. But this overlooks the fact that all shots are not equal. So now teams are asking, ‘How many points will a player get when they take a shot?’”

In the past decade the number of three-point shots in the NBA has increased. Is the rise just due to random luck or is it part of a well-crafted strategy? Fiddyment and other fellow data scientists employed full-time by sports teams work to answer new questions like these. He credits the invention of video tracking as the proverbial game changer. “Chip or camera-based systems will follow players as they actively play a sport, and the data we get is much more nuanced than a single-number summary,” says Fiddyment. “For example, we can answer how many pick-and-rolls the team ran last game or how open were the shots they generated. We can analyze the individual and team as a whole.”

At the moment, this kind of data collection is limited to professional teams, making it difficult to spot up-and-coming superstars. “College and international teams typically don’t have the same camera systems, so projecting which players will become successful remains a very challenging problem,” Fiddyment says.

Despite rapid advancements in technology, however, not all data is created equal—or, perhaps, equally useful. The limitations of data translate to limitations in predictive accuracy (as meteorologists can confirm). “We need to be aware of computers’ strengths and weaknesses,” Fiddyment advises. “Computers can process vast amounts of data much more quickly than humans ever could. But they are restricted to the data they have and operate very literally, so we should never expect them to behave exactly like a human, even if they can match our performance at a given task.”

From the glitz of Vegas to the life-saving powers of storm forecasts to the way opinion polls affect voters, predictive analytics is ever-present in our lives. Advances in machine learning and big data models are improving our ability to look into the future, but they are also raising some thorny issues, one of the most notable being the boundaries of data privacy. For now, however, Fiddyment has scored a slam dunk for the NBA.