The Smartest Man Who Ever Lived | Inside the Taylor Swift Effect: How Small Businesses Are Keeping Up With Swifties' Need to Shimmer | These are the U.S. states where homeowners pay the most in property taxes—California isn't in the top 5 | Julia Fox Didn’t Want to Be Famous, but She Knew She Would Be

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The Smartest Man Who Ever Lived - The Atlantic

If the most dangerous invention to emerge from World War II was the atomic bomb, the computer now seems to be running a close second, thanks to recent developments in artificial intelligence. Neither the bomb nor the computer can be credited to, or blamed on, any single scientist. But if you trace the stories of these two inventions back far enough, they turn out to intersect in the figure of John von Neumann, the Hungarian-born polymath sometimes described as the smartest man who ever lived. Though he is less famous today than some of his contemporaries—Albert Einstein, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Richard Feynman—many of them regarded him as the most impressive of all. Hans Bethe, who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1967, remarked: “I have sometimes wondered whether a brain like von Neumann’s does not indicate a species superior to that of man.”

Born in Budapest in 1903, von Neumann came to the U.S. in 1930, and in 1933 he joined the Institute for Advanced Study, in Princeton, New Jersey. Like many émigré physicists, he consulted on the Manhattan Project, helping develop the implosion method used to detonate the first atomic bombs. Just weeks before Hiroshima, he also published a paper laying out a model for a programmable digital computer. When Los Alamos National Laboratory got its first computer, in 1952, it was built on the design principles known as “von Neumann architecture.” The machine was jokingly christened MANIAC, and the full name followed, devised to fit the acronym: Mathematical Analyzer, Numerical Integrator, and Computer.

And that’s not all. Von Neumann also established the mathematical framework for quantum mechanics, described the mechanism of genetic self-replication before the discovery of DNA, and founded the field of game theory, which became central to both economics and Cold War geostrategy. By the time he died of cancer, in 1957, possibly due to radiation exposure at Los Alamos, he was one of the American government’s most valued advisers on nuclear weapons and strategy. His hospital bed at Walter Reed Army Medical Center was guarded by a security detail, to make sure he didn’t reveal any secrets in his delirium.

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Inside the Taylor Swift Effect: How Small Businesses Are Keeping Up With Swifties' Need to Shimmer - Inc.com

When Taylor Swift announced her Eras Tour in November 2022, some apparel businesses were ready to make the whole place shimmer. Others had to get ready--fast.

The tour, which kicked off in March and is currently slated to run through November 2024, is expected to generate $5 billion in consumer spending in the United States alone, according to a June survey from QuestionPro, with the average concertgoer spending about $1,300. And that's not just on concert tickets, which infamously sold out in a Ticketmaster pre-sale. Attendees are also shelling out for concert outfits, much to the delight of small fashion brands.

Business owners anticipated the demand for concert-appropriate attire--namely, all things sparkly and sequined--but still, demand surpassed what many of them had anticipated. The ones that came out on top were those that were nimble enough to take advantage of the opportunity. Here's how a few did just that.

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These are the U.S. states where homeowners pay the most in property taxes—California isn't in the top 5 - CNBC

The amount Americans pay in annual property taxes varies by thousands of dollars depending on where they live, a Tax Foundation analysis reveals.

In New Jersey, residents pay a median of $8,797 â the highest of all U.S. states â based on data provided to CNBC Make It. In Alabama, the median property tax bill is only $646.

The varying totals were calculated based on five years of Census data as of 2021, the most recent available.

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Julia Fox Didn’t Want to Be Famous, but She Knew She Would Be - The New Yorker

Julia Fox, an iconoclast in a generation notably lacking them, is most famous for what might be the least interesting thing about herâher brief, ultra-publicized relationship (of sorts) with Kanye West, in 2022. She's also an actress (the role that she played in "Uncut Gems" took inspiration from her) and a downtown It-Girl-of-all-trades: she designed a fashion line, self-published photography books, and once put on an art show with canvasses painted in her own blood. She's now a podcast host, a single mother to a toddler, and a staple of the New York paparazzi diet, regularly appearing in outfits that sound as though they were generated by pervy A.I. ("Julia Fox Wore a See-Through Outfit Made Entirely of Condoms"âInStyle.) With her new memoir, "Down the Drain," Fox has become a writer, telling her story with a kind of dissociated, deadpan sweetness born of having experienced several lifetimes' worth of adventure and disaster by the age of thirty-three.

Fox mainly remembers her life in the registers of beauty and violence. Born in Italy, she spends early childhood with her grandfather, who makes zabaglione with eggs and sugar; she loves the emergency room and "the warm, calming sensation of knowing that I'm going to be taken care of." When she visits New York, she sleeps in squats and in houses under renovation by her father, a contractor, but when she moves there, at age six, she has her own room with clouds painted on the ceiling. Physical abuse is unremarkable; she develops a habit of turning on the hair dryer to drown out the noise in her apartment and in her head. She runs around unsupervised, stealing cash, clothes, candy. She's in love with every girlfriend that she meets.

In middle school, Fox gets her tongue pierced, protests the Iraq War at a sit-in in D.C., and discovers that she loves the attention of boys talking about her butt at school. She hides, in a top bunk at home, from a twenty-six-year-old who's just been kissing her and telling her she looks at least sixteen. (Fox remembers worrying about going any further, in part because she hadn't shaved.) She gains an acute understanding of her simultaneous proximity to and distance from wealth and luxury. Private-school girls "just seem so clean," she thinks. "They would never cut their own hair like I have to." Soon enough, she finds that guys will buy her the things she's intoâgold earrings, Yves Saint Laurent perfume.

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