Word: playing
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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This explanation for Goldman's success hasn't been getting a lot of media play lately. Fox News talker Bill O'Reilly instead refers to the firm as an assemblage of "swine." Rolling Stone writer Matt Taibbi, showing more creativity if not sympathy, calls the firm a "great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money...
...this particular juncture in Russian history, it is Lebedev's self-assigned role to play, simultaneously, the oligarch and the anti-oligarch - to be the big, brash banking magnate whose estimated wealth prior to the financial crisis was around $3.7 billion and to decry the system that produces people like him, to live among the powerful while lambasting those who lord it over others. Before the global downturn, which Lebedev says has cost him $1 billion, he was a predictable, if persistent, critic of former President and current Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, routinely calling for an independent legislature, a free...
...took power in 2000, Putin immediately set out to rein in the oligarchs, offering them a straightforward deal: Keep your money, but stay out of politics. Khodorkovsky, now confined in a prison five time zones east of Moscow, is testament to what happens to oligarchs who don't play by the rules. The former head of Yukos was on the verge of forming a partnership with Exxon-Mobil, and had called for a more open and democratic nation - both big no-nos in Putin's Russia - before he was arrested...
...Lebedev the reformer he sees himself as, or does he play another role? "There's a belief - and this existed in Soviet times - that allowing a pressure valve of dissent and allowing certain voices out there is important for legitimacy," says Robert Amsterdam, a Canadian attorney in London who has represented Khodorkovsky and frequently blogs about Russia. "In a strange way, and whether or not Lebedev is part of this, he may well be seen as a demonstration of the regime's legitimacy." As long as he doesn't "cross any of these invisible lines, Lebedev may actually shield...
...year, he provided one answer in Tribulations of Saint Anthony, a pandemonium crammed with the kind of scribble-scrawl images the world would not see again until Cy Twombly came along more than six decades later. Around this time, Ensor also started bringing his masks and skeletons out to play on a regular basis. From then on, personal and social relations in his work would be a dark comedy, performed in disguise and in party colors, with the Grim Reaper making regular entrances to rattle his bones in your face. It's a spook show too tawdry to be frightening...