Today's Hours:
Battle for the Bird by
Now known as X, Twitter's messy history--including Elon Musk's takeover in 2022, its outsized cultural impact, and its significant role in shaping how the world gets its news--is thoroughly and entertainingly revealed in this "absolute triumph of reporting and storytelling" (Ashlee Vance, New York Times bestselling author). Bloomberg journalist Kurt Wagner takes you inside Twitter's everchanging headquarters, charting its rise from flippant 140-character posts to one of the world's most consequential tech companies. From Jack Dorsey's triumphant return as CEO in 2015 to the rise and fall of @RealDonaldTrump to the contentious $44 billion sale to Elon Musk, Battle for the Bird exposes the messy reality and relentless challenges that come with building a global social network. This is the "meticulous and riveting account" (Emily Chang, host of Bloomberg's The Circuit) of the fight over the world's most influential social media platform. Now, for the first time--through deeply sourced, exclusive interviews--you will discover how the visionary promises of one iconoclast gave way to the darker, yet-to-be-defined motives of another, upending the virtual status quo and impacting the flow of news and information to the masses.
She-Wolves by
First came the secretaries from Brooklyn and Queens--the "smart cookies" who saw that making money, lots of it, might be within their grasp. Then came the first female Harvard Business School graduates, who were in for a rude awakening because an equal degree did not mean equal opportunity. But by the 1980s, as the market went into turbodrive, women were being plucked from elite campuses to feed the belly of a rapidly expanding beast, playing for high stakes in Wall Street's bad-boy culture by day and clubbing by night. In She-Wolves, award-winning historian Paulina Bren tells the story of how women infiltrated Wall Street from the swinging sixties to 9/11--starting at a time when "No Ladies" signs hung across the doors of its luncheon clubs and (more discretely) inside its brokerage houses and investment banks. If the wolves of Wall Street made a show of their ferocity, the she-wolves did so with subtlety and finesse. Research analysts signed their reports with genderless initials. Muriel "Mickie" Siebert, the first woman to buy a seat on the NYSE, threatened she'd have port-a-potties delivered if the exchange didn't finally install a ladies' room near the dining room. The infamous 1996 Boom-Boom Room class action lawsuit, filed by women at Smith Barney, pulled back the curtain on a bawdy subculture where unapologetic sexism and racism were the norm. As engaging as it is enraging, She-Wolves is an illuminating deep dive into the collision of women, finance, and New York.
Dollars and Dominion by
"A history of the globalization of US banking in the early twentieth century"-- Provided by publisher.
"How the creation of a new banking infrastructure in the early twentieth century established the United States as a global financial powerThe dominance of US multinational businesses today can seem at first like an inevitable byproduct of the nation's superpower status. In Dollars and Dominion, Mary Bridges tells a different origin story. She explores the ramshackle beginnings of US financial power overseas, showing that US bankers in the early twentieth century depended on the US government, European know-how, and last-minute improvisation to sustain their work abroad. Bridges focuses on an underappreciated piece of the nation's financial infrastructure-the overseas branch bank-as brick-and-mortar foundations for expanding US commercial influence.Bridges explores how bankers sorted their new communities into "us"-potential clients-and "them"-local populations, who often existed on the periphery of the banking world. She argues that US bankers mapped their new communities by creating foreign credit information-and by using a financial asset newly enabled by the Federal Reserve System, the bankers' acceptance, in the process. Doing so, they constructed a new architecture of US trade finance that relied on longstanding inequalities and hierarchies of privilege. Thus racialized, class-based, and gendered ideas became baked into the financial infrastructure.Contrary to conventional wisdom, there was nothing inevitable or natural about the rise of US finance capitalism. Bridges shows that US foreign banking was a bootstrapped project that began as a side hustle of Gilded Age tycoons that sustained itself by relying on the power of the US state, copying the example of British foreign bankers, and building alliances with local elites. In this way, US bankers constructed a flexible and durable new infrastructure to support the nation's growing global power"-- Provided by publisher.