Among the cadre of journalists writing about the opaque and often bizarre world of the world’s richest people – both legitimate and illegitimate – the writer Atossa Araxia Abrahamian has one of the most unique voices. Her book Cosmopolites: The Coming of the Global Citizen explores the hardly understood business of
As the corruption trials of five U.S. Navy officers get underway in a federal court in San Diego this week, we’re excited. But we're also angry.
Excited because our hit podcast “Fat Leonard” has become a central part of the trials. And angry? Well, angry because
Welcome to the inaugural column of Yacht Watch (Tagline: "We're going to need a bigger boat") from Whale Hunting Contributor Alex Finley, a novelist and former CIA officer with the insight to explore who runs the world through the prism of super yachts. This will be
At Project Brazen, we love books that take you inside a world, profiling the players who hold unusual power. Sometimes you've heard of these people. But often they're surprisingly unknown. So we've compiled five books that pull back the curtain on centers of influence,
Kim Ghattas is an incredible journalist. Her body of work shows a huge range, from intellectual synthesis and scoops of insight to emotive stories from the frontlines of conflicts. She got her start in her hometown of Beirut before joining the BBC, Financial Times and the Dutch daily de Volkskrant
This week, Whale Hunting talks to Daniel Levin, who spends his days negotiating behind the scenes to free hostages or engaging quietly with Middle Eastern governments to seek political settlements (what's known as track 3 diplomacy). In this interview, I probed Daniel about the skills he's
In Bangkok these days anger over the Thai king’s use of state wealth for personal reasons is at boiling point. In a country where criticism of King Maha Vajiralongkorn can get you locked up, people refer to him as “Super V” in whispered conversations to avoid problems.
There’s
What will become of the letters of Napoleon Bonaparte?
In 2012, then-Prime Minister Karim Massimov reportedly spent nearly €100,000 on original letters written by Napoleon. The Kazakh "Renaissance Man" was also a collector of antiquarian books, such as a 1907 edition of Chinese Diaries and the 1886
At Project Brazen, we’ve been drawing up our rankings of the world’s richest people who don’t appear on the Forbes list, or who are on it, but with a vastly understated level of wealth. The world’s richest people have many reasons to hide their true holdings,
