Follow Following. Ismailimail Join 73, other followers. Sign me up. Already have a WordPress. Log in now. Loading Comments Email Required Name Required Website. Post was not sent - check your email addresses! He'd been willing to tolerate this state of affairs; however, as it happened, he'd also been born to program computers. He hadn't laid hands on one until , when he was already 16, but the first thing he'd done was to write a program.
He'd instructed the computer to draw a picture of a sine wave. When the computer actually followed his instructions, he was hooked. What hooked him, he now says, was "its detailed orientation. The way it requires an ability to see the problem and tackle it from different angles. It's not just like chess, but like solving a particular problem in chess. The more challenging problem is not to play chess but to write the code that will play chess.
Even though it is technical, it is a work of art. You get this level of satisfaction. He applied to switch his major from mathematics to computer science, but the authorities forbade it. Two things shocked him about his new city: the diversity of the people on the streets and the fantastic range of foods in the grocery stores.
He took photographs of the rows and rows of sausages for sale and mailed them to his mother in Moscow. But once he'd marveled at the American cornucopia, he stepped back from it all and wondered just how necessary all of this food was. He read books about fasting and the effects of various highly restrictive diets. In the end he became a finicky vegetarian. He took a course at the 92nd Street Y on how to apply for a job.
I never do. From the medical center he landed a better job in the Rutgers computer-science department, where they gave him a scholarship to pursue a master's degree. After Rutgers he spent a few years working at Internet start-ups until, in , he received a job offer from a big New Jersey telecom company called IDT. For the next decade he designed computer systems and wrote the code to route millions of phone calls each day to the cheapest available phone lines.
When he joined the company it had employees; by it had 5,, and he was its star technologist. That year a headhunter called him and told him there was a booming demand for his particular skill—building software that parsed huge amounts of information at great speed—on Wall Street. Serge knew nothing about Wall Street. Serge felt flattered, and liked the headhunter, but he read the books and decided Wall Street wasn't for him.
He enjoyed the technical challenges at the giant telecom and didn't really feel the need to earn more money. A year later the headhunter called him again. By , IDT was in financial trouble.
His wife, Elina, was carrying their third child, and they would need to buy a bigger house. Serge agreed to interview with the Wall Street firm that especially wanted to meet him: Goldman Sachs. A t that moment, at least on the surface, he had the sort of life people are said to come to America for. He'd married a pretty fellow Russian immigrant, and started a family with her. They bought a twobedroom red-brick house in Clifton, New Jersey, then traded up to a three-bedroom Cape-style house in Little Falls.
They had a circle of Russians they called their friends. On the other hand, all Serge did was work, and his wife had no real clue what that work involved; they weren't actually all that close to each other.
He didn't encourage people to get to know him well, nor did he exhibit a great deal of interest in getting to know them. He was acquiring a lot of possessions in which he had very little interest. The lawn in Clifton was a fair example of the general problem. When he'd gone hunting for his first house he'd been enamored of the idea of having his very own lawn.
In Moscow such a thing was unheard of. But the moment he had one, he regretted it. He was not aware of things. He liked slender girls who loved to dance. He married a girl and manages to have three kids with her before he figures out he doesn't really know her. He was working his ass off, and she would spend the money he was making. He would come home, and she would cook him vegetarian dishes. He was serviced, basically. And then Wall Street called. Goldman Sachs put Serge through a series of telephone interviews, then brought him in for a long day of face-to-face interviews.
These he found extremely tense, even a bit weird. One after another, a dozen Goldman employees tried to stump him with brainteasers, computer puzzles, math problems, and even some light physics. It must have become clear to Goldman as it was to Serge that he knew more about most of the things he was being asked than did his interviewers.
At the end of the first day, Goldman invited him back for a second day. He went home and thought it over: he wasn't all that sure he wanted to work at Goldman Sachs. He'd been surprised to find that in at least one way he fit in: more than half the programmers at Goldman were Russians.
Russians had a reputation for being the best programmers on Wall Street, and Serge thought he knew why: they had been forced to learn programming without the luxury of endless computer time. Consequently we learned to write the code in a way that minimized the amount of debugging. And so you had to think about it a lot before you committed it to paper The ready availability of computer time creates this mode of working where you just have an idea and type it and maybe erase it 10 times.
Good Russian programmers, they tend to have had that one experience at some time in the past: the experience of limited access to computer time. He returned for another round of Goldman's grilling, which ended in the office of one of the high-frequency traders, another Russian, named Alexander Davidovich. A managing director, he had just two final questions for Serge, both designed to test his ability to solve problems.
Serge quickly saw there was something strange about 3, it was very close to 3, Not a prime number. The problem wasn't that difficult, but, as he put it, "it was harder to solve the problem when you are anticipated to solve it quickly. The second question the Goldman managing director asked him was more involved—and involving.
He described for Serge a room, a rectangular box, and gave him its three dimensions. There is also a fly on the ceiling, and he gives me its coordinates as well.
Then he asked the question: Calculate the shortest distance the spider can take to reach the fly. The shortest path between two points was a straight line, and so, Serge figured, it was a matter of unfolding the box, turning a three-dimensional object into a one-dimensional surface, then using the Pythagorean theorem to calculate the distances.
It took him several minutes to work it all out; when he was done, Davidovich offered him a job at Goldman Sachs. He'd joined Goldman at an interesting moment in the history of both the firm and Wall Street. By mid, Goldman's bond-trading department was aiding and abetting a global financial crisis, most infamously by helping the Greek government to rig its books and disguise its debt, and by designing subprime-mortgage securities to fail, so they might make money by betting against them.
At the same time, Goldman's equities department was adapting to radical changes in the U. There were now 10 public stock exchanges in New Jersey alone, all trading the same stocks. Within a few years there would be more than 40 "dark pools," or private exchanges, one of them owned by Goldman Sachs, also trading the same stocks. Why the world needed 50 places, most of them in New Jersey, in which to buy and sell shares in Apple Inc.
The fragmentation of the American stock market was fueled, in part, by a rule created in by the S. The rule, known inelegantly as Reg NMS, was designed to protect investors from their brokers. Instead it wound up creating, as such rules often do, new ways for brokers to abuse their clients.
Reg NMS requires stockbrokers to route their clients' orders to whichever exchange offers the best price. You might think that brokers might do this naturally to please their clients. Think again. For reasons not entirely obvious yet another question for another day , the new rule stimulated a huge amount of stockmarket trading. Much of the new volume was generated not by old-fashioned investors but by extremely fast computers controlled by high-frequency-trading firms, like Getco and Citadel and D.
Shaw and Renaissance Capital, and the high-frequencytrading divisions of big Wall Street firms, especially Goldman Sachs. Essentially, the more places there were to trade stocks, the greater the opportunity there was for highfrequency traders to interpose themselves between buyers on one exchange and sellers on another. This was perverse. The initial promise of computer technology was to remove the intermediary from the financial market, or at least reduce the amount he could scalp from that market.
As high-frequencytrading firms aren't required to disclose their profits with the exception of public firms, like Knight, which have disclosed profits in the past , and big banks like Goldman that engage in the practice are assumed to hide their own profits on their balance sheets, no one really knows just how much money is being made. The combination of new market rules and new technology was turning the stock market into, in effect, a war of robots.
The robots were absurdly fast: they could execute tens of thousands of stock-market transactions in the time it took a human trader to blink his eye. The games they played were often complicated, but one aspect of them was simple and clear: the faster the robot, the more likely it was to make money at the expense of the relative sloth of others in the market. There was easy money to be made, for instance, from being able to respond more quickly than the rest of the market to changes in the supply and demand for a given stock.
There was not-so-easy money to be made running crude strategies premised on the correlation between different securities. For example, assume the stock prices of Coke and Pepsi tend to move together; if you can see Coke's stock popping higher and Pepsi has not yet responded, your robot might buy Pepsi before anyone else has processed what's happened to Coke. At any rate, in , from the point of view of Goldman Sachs, the good news was that there were billions of new dollars to be made by stock-market intermediaries.
The bad news was that Goldman Sachs wasn't yet making much of it—or it was doing a very good job of disguising its profits. A headhunter who sat in the middle of the market, and saw what firms were paying for geek talent, says that "Goldman had started to figure it out, but they really hadn't figured it out.
They weren't Top The simple reason for this was that Goldman's robots were slow. A lot of the moneymaking strategies were of the winner-take-all variety.
When every player is trying to buy Pepsi after Coke's stock has popped, the player whose computers can take in data and spit out the obvious response to it first gets all the money. In the various races being run, Goldman was seldom first. That is why they had sought out Serge Aleynikov: to improve the speed of their system.
There were many problems with GoldX man's system, in Serge's view. It wasn't so much a system as an amalgamation. Goldman had bought the core of its system nine years earlier in the acquisition of one of the early electronictrading firms, called Hull Trading. The massive amounts of old software Serge guessed that the entire platform had as many as 60 million lines of code in it and nine years of fixes to it had created the computer equivalent of a giant rubber-band ball.
When one of the rubber bands popped, Serge was expected to find it and fix it. The building housed Goldman's dark pool.
When Serge arrived, 40, messages per second were flying back and forth between computers inside the two buildings. Proximity, he assumed, must offer Goldman Sachs some advantage—after all, why else buy the only building anywhere near the exchange?
But when he looked into it he found that, to cross the street from Goldman to NASDAQ, a signal took five milliseconds, or nearly as much time as it took a signal to travel on the fastest network from Chicago to New York. It could be caused by computer hardware. Not so w. Vanity Fair I'm maybe a hundred pages in and I'm savoring it.
It's deliciously wise and cyncial and knowing and filled with its own combustion engine, perpetual storytelling ie serialization, 'let's throw in a subplot so we can go out to eat for the next week' is a lost art.
One thing, an objection anticipated- Story being overtold? Legitimate grounds How much story does one really need? What is a story without the very thing which comprises it?
The protein in the beef, the fiber in the bread For me as a reader, it's all about language- the way things are said, not as much what's said. How many buildungsroman 'idealistic young man from the sticks hits the big city and gets more than he bargained for" stories does one need to read The Red And the Black, On The Road, Huck Finn, Great Gatsby, Portrait, whatever View all 10 comments.
Jun 27, Loretta rated it liked it Shelves: classic , myreading-challenge. This book really wasn't for me. Don't get me wrong, some parts were very enjoyable and humorous, while others, not so much. The Rebecca, Becky character, I just couldn't stand!
She was such a snob and just so full of herself! She just wanted to be one of the rich and famous! Three stars. However, William Makepeace Thackeray's portrait of human nature isn't limited to any time or place. The novel is made up of nothing but super-rigidly-defined cliques; complicated rules about who is allowed to talk to whom, when, where, and for how long; small levels of popularity subdivided into types; and a bunch of people who are constantly trying to reach the top of the heap and avoid becoming social pariahs.
But what's more important than the plot is the style of the novel: its bitter and caustic humor. And it really does have something for everyone to laugh at: snobby merchants, greedy social climbers, illiterate aristocrats, nosy servants, evil nobles, macho soldiers, bossy women, bumbling men, British people, German people, Belgian people, and every other kind of group of humans that can be crammed in. What sets this aside from the novels of its time is that it's not about very nice people.
These are people who make disliking them so easy -- which makes them, all the more, interesting. I sensed that Thackeray got into everything he ever witnessed or suspected about human motives.
It's a profoundly skeptical book. He pits worldliness against goodness with no illusions about which quality usually triumphs. Put it this way: In a Dickens novel, a small boy rescued from the torments of a bully will almost certainly grow up to be an exemplar of kindness and gentleness.
The same boy, in Thackeray, grows up to be a snob and a rotter, and hateful to the friend who saved him from the bully. Multiply those incidents into a panorama that stretches nearly the entire height of early 19th century English society, and you have an overwhelmingly coherent and devastating satiric vision. A poor orphan of low birth, Becky is a born hustler and almost sociopathic striver who manages to raise herself to the upper limits of high society and wealth -- only to see her achievements crumble under the weight of her bad deeds.
Evil temptress or misunderstood woman ahead of her time? You be the judge. But there's another way of looking at the story which doesn't preclude the feminist treatment, and which seems potentially richer: its inescapable revelation that in 19th century England, a woman had to be a genius to achieve success -- or even to fight life to a draw.
Her foil, Amelia Sedley, is also compelling. While Becky is self-reliant and action oriented, with a scheme or two always on the backburner, Amelia is dependent on the kindness of the next stranger to come around the corner. If you want to get fancy about it, she entirely lacks agency. In almost any other novel, she would be the heroine, and her sad-sack ways would be disguised a little better so that instead of coming across like a lump of nothing she would seem like a paragon of femininity.
You know the drill: dainty, small, semi-pathetic, and needing some white-knight rescue action. Here, though, we are shown exactly what happens when you take those supposed ideals of femininity to the extreme -- you get Jell-O in human form.
Thackery's narrator, who's telling a "true" story based on the accounts of the principal characters he has met, satirizes early 19th century British and European culture class, religion, education, business, war, tourism, etc. He is keenly honest about their failings, yet you don't get the feeling that he despises people for their weaknesses.
He tells the story almost as if he is a fond old uncle, slightly detached, amused at the foibles of, but still having affection for, his characters. Sentences are complex and very long, florid, and decorative.
There is a lightness in its tone, even when your emotions are being tugged a bit. Vanity Fair may be brilliant, but it is extremely bloated and uneven. For each page that features interesting characters and compelling dialogue, one must trudge through a greater measure of dull, relentless and misplaced description, aside and detail. Thackeray just goes on and on, spilling onto the page everything he can possibly think of, without any consideration for what is interesting and what is not.
The story seems not to be driving anywhere in particular, but it drives on regardless, an Vanity Fair may be brilliant, but it is extremely bloated and uneven.
The story seems not to be driving anywhere in particular, but it drives on regardless, and the driver enjoys nothing more than tediously pointing out each minute element of the scenery passed along the way. This is a novel built on comic wit and satire, which, I've come to realise, aren't really my thing, especially when coupled with Nineteenth Century concerns and sensibilities and packaged in bland realism.
Give me a metaphor now and then, or something! Of the mostly unappealing and forgettable cast of characters, Becky was the one I felt least indifferent too, and she represents almost all of what I enjoyed about this novel. I found myself frequently tuning out when she wasn't around, barely expending the effort to keep track of which Crawley was which, or who was married to whom, or in which park did each now happen to take their walks of an afternoon as compared to last week , and who enjoys a little claret with their meals now and then, and is tonight's veal to their liking?
I think to enjoy this novel you have to have some sort of affinity for its excesses, to be captivated by its time and place, its wit and voice and style, in order to follow, eagerly and attentively down each unremarkable cul-de-sac.
For my part, I followed, but reluctantly, and with very little enthusiasm. If Vanity Fair were about pages shorter I might have enjoyed it, but as it stands I'm just pleased to have gotten through it. View all 7 comments. Aug 31, Helga rated it liked it Shelves: british , historical-fiction , classics. A novel without a hero! A puppet show! The puppets are the flawed and unlikeable characters and the acts are hypocrisy, callousness, betrayal and artfulness.
Narrated by Thackeray himself who is unreliable and voluble, the story is about two opposites. The manipulative, cunning, scheming and pleasure-seeking Becky Sharp and the weak, naive and kindhearted in my opinion stupid and annoying Emmy Sedley.
Vanity Fair is the portrayal of human nature at its worst. It is about the vanity of human affairs and not an easy book to like. It took me more than 3 months to read it, whereas I finished Les Miserables and War and Peace respectively in 3 and 4 weeks and devoured Charles Dickens novels like they were chocolate dipped peanut butter crackers!
Oct 13, Perry rated it really liked it. Clever, charming, attractive, as well as artful, duplicitous, hyper-ambitious, a superself-centered woman who uses sex as one of her tools to manipulate men but only to serve her needs. She is the anti-heroine without a scruple in this subtitled "novel without a hero. Nonetheless, I was thoroughly impressed with and enjoyed reading this novel which is set in England around the time of Waterloo. View 2 comments. Maybe I've matured as a reader now but I think I haven't enjoyed any classic as much as I did this one.
It was thicker and longer than many a novel, but I enjoyed it the better for it. By the end, I understood why it was so long, the ending justified it.
I was so daunted by its iconic title to read it before, but it was easier to read than most classics. The experience was complete, there wasn't anything missing, it had everything and so so much more. Published in , Vanity Fair is a Victorian satire and covers the English era during and after the Napoleonic Wars.
The novel is about two women, totally opposite to each other, who after completing their education set out into the world. Thackeray talks about British Raj of those times and the Battle of Waterloo which changes the course of the lives of the protagonists. The writing is rich with historical, Biblical, and literary allusions and references. The omniscient narration is most endearing. The title of the novel, Vanity Fair, has been iconic to this day.
The author explains his title again and again in the novel bringing its significance to light. The author declares the heroine of the novel in the very beginning but subtitled his novel "A novel without a hero" which I don't agree with, by the way.
I recognized a hero in William Dobbin by the latter part of the novel. Thackeray's writing portrayed a realism unfound among the writers of his time. Thackeray discusses the human nature, explores the hypocrisy of society, and takes the curtain off the mysteries of life for a moment and lets us take a peek in.
The novel is about sticking to the idols we make, ourselves, of people we think we love but which are nothing like the reality, our need to believe in our ideals no matter how false they may be, the egotism and of course the vanity of the innocent and the cunning, the rich and the poor alike, the human infidelity, the brutal reality of being poor, human greed, of closing our eyes to what is right in front of us, the truth, the frailty of relations, of friendship and opportunism.
Thackeray shows us and believes that love triumphs in the end, but so does villainy, it doesn't get retribution enough, but I had the underlying sense that depravity is a punishment in itself. Ecclesiastes 1. Shelves: happyendings , groups-of-people. First things first: Don't get this edition!
I recently attended my college reunion. Whilst ambling idly around the green lawns of that hallowed institution, I had chance to encounter my most distinguished and beloved professor of English. Exalted that I happened to be dandling Thackeray's baby on my knee instead of the glossy monthly version of Vanity Fair , as is more common with me , with sparkling eyes and an enchanting smile I thrust my copy before his erudite and discerning nose.
That said, I managed to enjoy my pictureless experience of Vanity Fair immensely! This is the best novel I've ever read on the topic of money. It's also got maybe the most wonderful and fascinating narrator in English literature, which is no small feat considering there's some virile competition. Vanity Fair is supposed to be, as its title says, A Novel Without A Hero , and much fun is derived figuring out if this claim is true.
In Vanity Fair, characters tend to be ruled either by love or money; by ruthless self-interest or slavish sacrifice to unworthy others. Thackeray's narrator slyly presents these modes and their virtues alongside society's supposed and actual values, forcing the reader to ask herself who, in this Fair, could possibly be called a true hero? Of course, for this reader, the answer was clear: while there are some who may neither love nor delight in the antics of Becky Sharp, they're not in my social circle and would "cut" me rudely, should our open carriages happen to pass in the Park.
Despite some superficial similarities, Becky Sharp is no odious Undine Spragg, and I can't imagine not cheering for this anti-heroine. Like the narrator, Becky's got the number of every character in Vanity Fair, and she illusionlessly proceeds based on this sound intelligence. Unlike even the noble Wm. Dobbin, Becky has no blind spots or weaknesses in judging character, and so she is that rarest of creatures: a truly charming realist who loves to have a great time. As Thackeray takes pains to remind us, Becky's not a pure cynic: she appreciates goodness in people, and doesn't begrudge others the virtue that she lacks.
She is thoroughly lovable in her wickedness, as the best of us are. What a great novel! All its considerable dramatic tension comes directly from its incredible characters -- Which will taste Success?
Who shall be faced with Ruin? Will Becky triumph? Will Dobbin rally? Will Amelia ever grow a pair or will she, one wonders hopefully, please drown herself in the Thames? As I said above, it's a novel focused on the topic of money, and is the best of these of any that I've ever read. Obviously, it's a comic novel, and is very funny; but it's also great literature, so beyond being funny, it's true. O brother-wearers of motley!
Are there not moments where one grows sick of grinning and tumbling, and the jingling of cap and bells? This, dear friends and companions, is my amiable object -- to walk with you through the Fair, to examine the shops and shows there; and that we should all come home after the flare, and the noise, and the gaiety, and be perfectly miserable in private.
I cried three times while reading Vanity Fair! If you think that's pathetic, wait until you see how often the female characters in here fall to weeping. You might play a drinking game while reading Vanity Fair , and take a swig of brandy-and-water each time a character starts to cry; perhaps it might be a two-person game, in which one player drinks to the sincere and awful blubbering of dopey neurotic Amelia, while another takes a sip for each of "our little adventuress" Becky's crocodile tears.
Or maybe, following the book's milieu, it wouldn't be based around drinking but instead a highly risky and addictive game of chance. There was an unholy amount of gambling in Vanity Fair, and indeed this vice seems to have been to moneyed Regency? England what crack cocaine was to impoverished s American urban centers. Anyway, this book was great and I definitely do recommend it. I know I said that going forward I was going to make a greater effort to start quoting from the source, but I've got things to do, and anyway, it's all so choice that I hardly know where to start.
Just go read it yourself -- but remember! Get the one with the pictures! Nov 23, BAM Endlessly Booked rated it really liked it Shelves: before-death , catching-up-on-classics , gilmore , e-book , own , guardian-list , library , classic-literature , wc-democratic.
Quite unstimulating I obviously missed something. I chose audio book format because the book is so long, but I felt like it was just one long ramble, the narrator droning on and on about nothing.
I also own the paperback, so maybe down the road I'll give it another try. This is a classic for a reason. So i dont know why I had such a hard time finishing this book in the past. It was an accurate depiction of the 19th century.
Jan 27, Sara rated it liked it Shelves: catching-up-classics , classics , victorian , the-author-cards-list. This book might be unique in that it not only claims to have no hero, but in fact has no hero. What it does have is a cast of duplicitous, weak or inane characters, none of whom stir much in the way of either pity, empathy, or affinity.
It also has the bad girl to end all bad girls, Miss Rebecca Sharp. I doubt anyone would argue that Becky is not the most interesting character in the book, and while some might admire the good little Amelia, few could actually like her. Vanity Fair is quite a bit This book might be unique in that it not only claims to have no hero, but in fact has no hero.
Vanity Fair is quite a bit longer than it needs to be and some chapters meander aimlessly, but this, I believe, can be attributed to the method in which it was released. When a book is being presented to its audience in a serial form, it must go on for a prearranged period of time and acquire a certain length. Were it being edited for release as a novel today, I feel sure it would be shortened considerably.
Thackeray breaks the fourth wall constantly, talking to the reader and urging him to see the point he has just made, in a way that can become irritating at times. But, even this conceit works for me for the most part. Up to this point, I had accepted the narrator as an all-seeing sort of presence, not a literal acquaintance of the characters, so it was discombobulating to say the least.
Vanity Fair is a moral tale, or more correctly a tale about lack of morals. One wonders if this society actually had any or if everything that passed for morals was pretense. At one point, Thackery compares the behavior of these persons to a mermaid and her tail: Those who may peep down under waves that are pretty transparent and see it writhing and twirling, diabolically hideous and slimy, flapping amongst bones, or curling around corpses; but above the waterline, I ask, has not everything been proper, agreeable, and decorous, and has even the most squeamish immoralist in Vanity Fair a right to cry fie.
I believe he is trying to impress upon his reader that this is a world of pretense, a world that cares more for appearance than it ever could for virtue. Indeed, we watch Becky Sharp navigate this society in the most unscrupulous way possible, and we cannot help feeling that her flaws and shortcomings are more about survival than evil. And, there seems to be a particular emphasis on women and their relationships to one another: I am tempted to think that to be despised by her sex is a very great compliment to a woman.
It does indeed seem that it is the fairer sex, who are proposed to have the gentler hearts, the nurturing instincts and the sweeter dispositions, who wield the knife most cruelly. The men, while equally dissipated, seem somehow more gullible and unaware than hateful or manipulative.
I had a hard time deciding what rating to give this tome. I did enjoy it and found myself caught up in the story at times.
There were also moments when I might have laid it aside and never picked it up again without the slightest hesitation. It is not the best of Victorian literature to me Though we never talked about John Garraty—who I later learned was born in Brooklyn and served in World War II, and who in addition to his tenured faculty position at Columbia also acted as a consultant on Schoolhouse Rock! Dixon made her point.
Textbooks are written by people. History is written by people, and its writers change over time. The other phrase of Mrs.
It was aggravating to hear—all I wanted to know was whether my point was correct—but she was after something deeper, modeling an absorption of competing ideas, allowing for contradiction and nuance. Suggesting, perhaps, that when it comes to American history, none of us….
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