Abhiroop Basu

My home away from home.

[abhiroopbasu]

Excerpt: "The lights shone more brightly than anything I’d ever seen. One million blinding watts strafed across the leaves of countless cannabis plants that peeled off in neat rows in every direction."

[abhiroopbasu]

Excerpt: "The great trick of online retail has been to get us to shop more and think less about how our purchases reach our homes. By A decade ago, the British department-store chain John Lewis built itself a long warehouse, painted in gradations of sky blue."

[abhiroopbasu]

Excerpt: "On any given day, thousands of packages from Walmarts, Targets, and stores around the country travel north along a two-lane road out of Billings, Montana — past the Tumbleweed Saloon, past cows grazing on empty rangeland, past the Busy Bee Cafe and stands of short pines — to the town of Roundup,"

[abhiroopbasu]

Excerpt: "Wall Street’s biggest houses hawked $702 million in junk bonds for WeWork. The junk pays 7.875 percent interest and is due in 7 years."

[abhiroopbasu]

Excerpt: "Some 18 months ago, a friend of mine was approached on LinkedIn by a WeWork executive. Coffee ensued. It took him a split second to realise he was being offered a job on the spot."

[abhiroopbasu]

Excerpt: "If the wealthy are so stressed out, whose fault is that? Seems like it’s getting tough at the top. The winners in America’s meritocracy are suffering."

[abhiroopbasu]

Excerpt: "I still remember the day six and a half years ago when I got the job offer from my current employer."

[abhiroopbasu]

Excerpt: "Some sellers offer gift cards or freebies to customers in exchange for five-star reviews. Amazon is recommending their products as “Amazon’s Choice.” But many Amazon’s Choice products sold by third-party sellers are not what they seem."

[abhiroopbasu]

Excerpt: "The first time I wrote about Uber was in June, 2014. The Wall Street Journal had posted a column entitled Uber’s $18.2B Valuation is a Head Scratcher, which led to an easy rejoinder: Why Uber is Worth $18.2 Billion. Given that Uber is today worth $53."

[abhiroopbasu]

Excerpt: "Our CFO, Barry McCarthy, slowed his BMW to a crawl as he made the turn into Santa Barbara Airport. In the distance, a faint glow on the horizon was teasing us that it was close to dawn, but in front of us, the road was almost invisible, dark and shaded by the overhanging oak trees."

[abhiroopbasu]

Excerpt: "“Argestes” brought the Roys to a conference reserved for the 0."

[abhiroopbasu]

Excerpt: "The next time you type the name of a website into your browser, pause for a second to think about what happens after you press “enter.”What happens is that your browser sends that name—technologyreview.com, say—to a network of computers called the Domain Name System."

[abhiroopbasu]

Excerpt: "SAN FRANCISCO — Silicon Valley told itself a good story, the best one, really: It was saving the world. For nearly a decade, this gave the modern tech worker purpose, optimism and self-confidence."

[abhiroopbasu]

Excerpt: "Is WeWork a Fraud? WeWork will never ever, in its short history, generate a profit, let alone the tens of billions in revenues necessary to generate anywhere near the $3 billion in earnings required to (even then generously) value the company at £47 billion."

[abhiroopbasu]

Excerpt: "Theater-subscription service MoviePass officially shut down on Saturday, September 14th, ending the platform’s controversial two-year run as a would-be disruptor of the moviegoing business."

[abhiroopbasu]

Excerpt: "‘Trump Force One,” a quarter-century-old Boeing 757, might not be the largest, or the fastest, or the most expensive private aircraft in the world, but it holds the undeniable virtue of being the most famous."

[abhiroopbasu]

Excerpt: "What the hell happened here? Seven floors above the iced-over Dallas North Tollway, Raghib (Rocket) Ismail is revisiting the question."