“Gary Rivlin is one of our nation’s most sharp-eyed cultural observers.”
“One of our finest journalists.”
“A masterful journalist.”
“Rivlin is a sharp observer and a dogged reporter.”
I go inside a slot machine factory for the New York Times Magazine. The diabolical brilliance of this modern-day marvel that generates the bulk of any casino’s profits.
Growing rich in the trailer park business.
George Gilder weighs the cost of his pie-eyed tech optimism.
Welcome to the lucrative, predatory world of subprime car loans.
Struggling to get by on $3 million a year: a part of the Times’s “Age of Riches” series.
A Long March from Mao to Microsoft: one American’s journey from communist party insider to BMW-driving capitalist.
An “On Money” column on the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
An article in Mother Jones about the fat profits the big tax prep chains make in lower-income neighborhoods.
It’s expensive being poor: calculating the “poverty tax” assessed by check cashers, payday lenders, and other merchants of misery feasting on those of little means and with lousy credit.
An excerpt of my book, Broke, USA, appearing in Bloomberg Business Week.
My first of a series of dispatches following a single business as it struggled to rebuild after Hurricane Katrina
I scoop even the New Orleans Times-Picayune in reporting that the city will allow residents to rebuild anywhere they like, no matter how vulnerable a neighborhood to future flooding.
The self-fulfilling prophecy that is the Lower Ninth Ward, 10 years Katrina.
A profile of super-geek Linus Torvalds for the cover of Wired magazine.
My first weeks covering Silicon Valley for the New York Times, I inadvertently delay an IPO.
a profile I wrote for the Sunday Business section of the Times.
The mayor dies suddenly and the city’s aldermen gather to choose one of their one as his successor.
Police and prosecutors went after the kid who pulled the trigger when the barrio’s most promising politician was killed at 31. Did they overlook the ones who pulled the strings?
The U.S. government under Ronald Reagan tried to deport Dennis Brutus, an outspoken anti-apartheid activist and poet who taught at Northwestern. My first article for the Reader.
Ignoring the 20th anniversary of the ’68 riots that indelibly changed the city’s west side, “confirming the suspicions of a great many Chicagoans about the mainstream white media’s lack of interest in the west side and in the black population in general.”
I inaugurated a City Hall column during my time at the Reader. This was probably the one having the greatest impact.