Tracey Emin, she of dirty sheets, cheap vodka, shagging, tents, bad teeth, bad behaviour, struts into the lobby of the £500-a-night Hotel Costes in Paris, aka Fashion Central, in a divinely slinky caramel Yves Saint Laurent satin skirt and towering chocolate-brown Prada sandals. She has the best legs in the lobby, which, as anyone who has been to the Costes will tell you, is saying something. Her camisole, which is the palest café-au-lait silk, reveals a glimpse of her mint- green Agent Provocateur bra and acres of nut-brown skin. She looks amazing. "Wotcha. Miaow. How long is it going to take to get a fucking drink today?"

Mollified with a flute of rosé champagne, she settles herself into an overstuffed armchair. "You look good," she greets one of her entourage, looking slightly huffy. Then she glances in a mirror, and brightens. "Unfortunately, however, not as fucking good as me."

Emin, who accompanied the Guardian to this week's couture shows, is a couture natural. She has pure front-row diva attitude in spades. For a start, she is the only person I have ever met who can out-attitude the staff at the Hotel Costes. You may be rude and beautiful, Emin tells them in no uncertain terms, but I'm more rude, more beautiful, and what's more, I'm paying, so jump to it, sharpish.

She is here to deliver an artist's judgment on haute couture. Haute couture, the uppermost echelon of fashion, which deals in handmade dresses for £20,000 and up, is in crisis - hardly surprising, when you consider that you can buy decent knock-offs in Zara. When Donatella Versace pulls out, as she did this week, saying the event is over the top and unnecessary, you know you're in trouble. With the numbers not adding up, haute couture can only claim any raison d'etre on the basis of artistic merit.

Emin has a unique viewpoint on this, being, in her words, "one of the only artists who know anything about fashion - there's just me and Sam [Taylor-Wood]". Plus she has real experience in fashion: she began her art school training, aged 18, with a diploma in fashion craft, and has just designed a range of bags for Longchamp, with her trademark ransom-note lettering spelling out sentiments such as "international lover"and "you said you love me". And she can sympathise with couturiers who are passionate about an art that most of the public see as a joke - as they do fashion and, as evidenced by the reaction to the Momart fire in east London, much modern art.

It is Tuesday and Dior is our first stop. The catwalk is lit with strips of pink neon, so Emin feels immediately at home. She gets the hang of the never-too-much couture aesthetic remarkably quickly: by the time the lights go down, she is whispering to me that what would be good now would be some white Persian cats on the catwalk.

The models are as elongated and fragile as porcelain figurines, but there is always something odd, something dark, going on, and Emin loves it. The huge duvet coats remind her of a performance by Leigh Bowery where he started out looking even bigger than usual, and then appeared to "give birth" to his wife from under his clothes. She loves the white ballgown with lapping petals of silk blossoming from the "mound of Venus" (Emin's phrase) - very Georgia O'Keeffe. She doesn't like the fur, however (she is missing her cat, Docket, already). "Maybe it's secondhand, though," she suggests, rather sweetly. I haven't the heart to point out that since Galliano has a €3m (£2m) budget at his disposal this seems unlikely.

After the show she is pumped full of energy, even more livewire than usual. "It makes you feel like you dress really lazily, doesn't it? It's made me want to go to my studio and create something. That's a big compliment." But isn't it all a bit over the top? "You have to go to an extreme because that's the way to find something new." So is it art? Yes, she says, because you can tell that Galliano is an artist. "Being an artist is as much about what you can see in the world around you as what you create. I look outside now [we are driving through Paris in dappled sunlight] and I can see how truly beautiful the light is. That's what makes me an artist."

That evening at Valentino is a different ballgame, ultra-feminine, ultra-glamorous. Emin loves the stage set: the models emerge through a tall silver-bead curtain and the whole scene is reflected in a giant mirror so that, if you watch the reflection, the models seem to be walking upwards towards the bright-lit heaven of the photographers' flashbulbs. She admires a jade-green skirt suit, but thinks the fur jackets look like orang-utans, and she doesn't like lace, which is a problem at Valentino. She is clearly desperately trying to think of nice things to say, because she met Valentino once and thought he was lovely. He always makes bottoms look good, she says. Afterwards she says, "I think I'm too young to wear Valentino." We go backstage so she can kiss him anyway. Very fashion.

Emin is in her element at couture. She loves the craziness of it, the fact that it makes no financial sense and yet everyone behaves as if it is fabulously important. And she has the temperament to appreciate the idea of couture, of so much time and effort going into making one woman look beautiful - she is, after all (and she said this, not me), very narcissistic.

It will come as a surprise to those who think of her as snaggle-toothed Margate Emin that she is absolutely at home in the fashion social scene. At Dior, she turns out to be on matey terms with the entire front row. Liz Hurley greets her like an old friend (they met through Elton John) and invites her to her party at the Ritz that night. Val Kilmer reminisces with her about drunken escapades in hotel rooms (they met through Ronnie Wood, after all.) This, I suddenly remember, is a girl who spent her first proper pay cheque on a platter of oysters.

Later that night, I leave her on the dancefloor at Hurley's party (there were male models wearing thongs with lace-up shoes and socks. Thongs with brogues is a fashion faux pas too far for me at the end of a long day's work.) "Write that you left me dancing on the dancefloors of Paris," she says. In the morning, I ask her what she meant and she tells me a story. When serving in France, her uncle Alan sent his mother a postcard which said, "Next time you see me I'll be dancing on the dancefloors of Paris." The next time she heard from him was the notification of his death. "So I was saying that for my uncle," she explains. I tell her it sounds like something from a Tracey Emin piece. The Next Time You See Me ...

Emin's storytelling gene comes through in the way she dresses. She describes her current style as "very Mediterranean, Sophia Loren in the 1970s, Jean-Luc Godard on holiday in Italy, Jackie Onassis if she only would have relaxed a bit". And consider, if you will, her scent: she wears Agent Provocateur perfume ("because they are my friends"), Dior Eau Svelte and the lemony, masculine Eau Savage by Christian Dior. Svelte, Savage and Provocateur: it is an unmistakably Emin combination, even without smelling it.

And then there's her jewellery. Around her neck she wears two gold necklaces, both from her brother. One, which he gave her when she graduated with a first-class degree, is strung with two gold rings - her nan's 1916 wedding ring and another, which Emin hopes will one day be her daughter's ring. The other, her brother and his wife gave her when she won the Turner prize. On her wrist she wears black sea pearls ("the orphan pearls that get left behind," as she puts it) and two gold bangles. She bought these in Istanbul to replace two bangles that Matt, her ex-boyfriend, had given her, after they broke up. Because, as she explains to me, complete with an enthusiastic mime, "It wouldn't be right to be giving someone a handjob wearing bangles another man had given you." In her own way, Emin is a true romantic.

Whatever she wears, I put it to her, trying to be polite, there is a bra thing going on. "There's a breast thing going on, you mean," she corrects me. She loves underwear: no outfit is complete without a sensational shot of chartreuse lace or pink satin. And she is proud of her body, which is very slim and very busty. "I like being thin. To the point where I'd be anorexic to be thin if I had to be."

She is known for wearing a lot of Vivienne Westwood's clothes: the two met when Mario Testino took their portraits for Vogue, and Westwood has been making clothes for Emin ever since. (The clothes are made to fit, giving her a rare insight into the life of a couture client.) She wears Westwood because it suits her figure, she says, but clearly also adores the designer, referring to her constantly throughout the week. She never wears high-street clothes. She loves Diane von Furstenberg dresses, and Helmut Lang jeans, and Yves Saint Laurent tailoring. But she can't wear Jean Paul Gaultier, she explains as we are waiting on Thursday for his show to start, because "I'm too sexy. It's too much, with my body. I've got it already."

Soon, Gaultier is over. We head backstage with Liz, who pronounces the show "absolutely glorious", sounding exactly like a Roedean head girl who is jolly pleased that the weather has turned out well for sports day. Emin, on the other hand, seems slightly underwhelmed by her fellow enfant terrible. "I'd wear the capes and tunics if I was pregnant," she says, which one might think was a back-handed compliment, except that Emin doesn't do back-handed anything. "And I love the music, and the girl with the red hair, who looked like Puss in Boots." She shrugs. "It was good, yeah. I just wish there was more champagne."

Summary: Astronomical prices, plummeting numbers of customers and increasingly disillusioned designers - haute couture, it seems, is dying. But is it entirely without value? Tracey Emin, who visited the Paris shows this week for the Guardian, tells Jess Cartner-Morley why preposterous frocks still make great art.


In person, Taryn Simon seems like an unlikely contender for the title of most important photographer of her generation. Dressed in brown woolly tights and a matching check dress that looks thrift shop but is probably designer-Amish, she appears to have stepped out of a Sofia Coppola adaptation of an Edith Wharton novel.

She is charming and personable but becomes palpably nervous when talking about her work, which is characterised by its complexity and ambition. "I do seem to try to make things harder and harder for myself," she says, laughing. "In some perverse way, obstacles interest me and I'm drawn to projects that end up being incredibly laborious."

This week, an exhibition of new work entitled A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters opens at Tate Modern, a rare accolade for a photographer who is just 36 years old. It is an investigation into the nature of genealogy and its consequences and is her most complex, ambitious and laborious project yet. It comprises a series of 18 family bloodlines, each with a strange or arresting individual story at its heart: an Iraqi man who was apparently employed as Saddam Hussein's son's body double; a member of the Druze religious sect in Lebanon who believes in reincarnation and re-enacts remembered scenes from previous lives; a living Indian man who gives the project its title, having been declared dead in official records.

"It is a complex and multilayered exhibition, but also direct and engaging," says Simon Baker, Tate Modern's curator of photography. "There are a small number of photographers who combine the visual and the textual so powerfully, and whose work is sophisticated in terms of contemporary art practice but also hard-wired to the real world. Taryn is certainly one of them. In one way, walking into the exhibition is like entering an incredible book."

Simon is currently one of the hottest properties on the international art photography market. Her prints fetch stellar prices at auction and have been acquired by leading institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney in New York, the Getty Museum in Los Angeles and the Pompidou Centre in Paris, as well as the Victoria and Albert Museum and Tate Modern in London. She is represented by Larry Gagosian, the gallery owner and art dealer who also represents Damien Hirst in New York and oversees the estate of Andy Warhol. A Living Man Declared Dead is on loan to Tate Modern from Jane and Michael Wilson, a couple who are perhaps the most important collectors of photography in Britain. (Michael Wilson, who made his fortune co-producing James Bond films with his sister, Barbara Broccoli, was recently described in the FT as "a one-man Photography Council".)

Socially, too, Simon is well connected. She lives in downtown Manhattan with her husband, Jake Paltrow, a film-maker who recently directed his older sister, Gwyneth, in his debut feature, The Good Night. In an article about their purchase of a $2m apartment in the Village, the New York Observer dubbed them "a dandy 30-ish power couple". When I mentioned her to a New York-based photographer last week, he said, with a perhaps understandable mixture of bemusement and envy, "How many photographers have Steven Spielberg come to an opening?"

For all that, Simon is undoubtedly a serious and committed artist whose work is unapologetically cerebral. She is meticulous, perhaps even obsessive, in her preparation and research. A Living Man Declared Dead took four years to come to fruition, but only about two months of that time was spent photographing the subjects.

"The majority of my work is about preparation," she says during a break from overseeing the installation of her show at Tate Modern. "The act of taking photographs is actually a very small part of the process. I work with a small team, just my sister (Shannon Simon) and one assistant (Douglas Emery). We deal with translators, fixers, fact checkers and the logistics of setting up shoots in places where people do not have the internet or access to telephones. Then there was the actual bloodlines which had to be constructed and verified." She sighs and shakes her head. "It is easily the most difficult and demanding project I have done thus far."

She made her name with An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar, published in 2007, a book that delves deep into a secret America in images that are often both detached and ominous: a nuclear waste storage facility in Washington State; a cryopreservation unit where bodies are frozen just after death; a bio-containment laboratory where deadly animal diseases are studied; a death row outdoor recreational cage; a cave where a sleeping black bear and its cubs are monitored by biologists studying hibernation.

Like an Annie Leibovitz of the conceptual world, Simon seems to possess considerable clout when it comes to both access and control. Her mixture of tenacity and charm seems to have worked wonders on organisations not known for their openness: the Church of Scientology, the Ku Klux Klan and the Prisoner of War Interrogation Resistance Programme run by Team Delta, a private body run by former US military personnel. (Ironically, one of the few organisations that denied her access was Disney, whose spokesperson sent her a fax that read: "Especially during these violent times, I personally believe that the magical spell cast on guests that visit our theme parks is particularly important to protect, and helps to provide them with an important fantasy they can escape to." It was, she told Interview Magazine, "better that any photograph I could have ever produced".)

An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar is one of those rare photography books that struck a chord with both photography buffs and the wider public. In his introduction, Salman Rushdie pinpointed why: "In a historical period in which many people are making such great efforts to conceal the truth from the mass of the people, an artist like Taryn Simon is an invaluable counter-force. Democracy needs visibility, accountability, light… Somehow, Simon has persuaded a good few denizens of hidden worlds not to scurry for shelter when the light is switched on, as cockroaches and vampires do, but to pose proudly for her invading lens…"

Simon grew up in New York and started taking pictures as a child. "Both my father and grandfather were avid photographers. I was introduced to the larger world and photographic production through their slideshows. I would often go on little expeditions with them, taking photographs in a very loose form."

Her father worked for the government, often travelling "to dangerous and distant places and returning with an enormous number of photographs". Her grandfather lived in Connecticut, where he ground glass for telescopes and, as she put it, "was more interested in the macro – stars, insects, and plant and animal life". He also built telescopes, which may help explain the scientific undertow in her current work: the interest in genetic mapping and patterning, the portraits that are presented in systematic grids, complete with footnotes and ancillary information.

Photography, then, is in her blood, though she studied environmental science at college, obtaining a BA at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. "I just kept on taking photographs throughout my time there, and afterwards I worked as an assistant for photographers involved in various approaches – anything from a journalist to a toy catalogue photographer. Anything, really, just to learn about lighting and composition and the whole technical side of photography."

After starting out on her own, she did some editorial work for the New York Times magazine before successfully applying for a Guggenheim grant for a tentative work-in-progress that eventually became her first book, The Innocents. Published to considerable acclaim in 2003, it set the tone in both its scope and ambition for much of what was to follow. In large format portraits and extended texts, The Innocents documents American victims of miscarriages of justice, various men – and just one woman – who have served time for violent crimes they did not commit.

Its subtext is photography's role, even complicity, in the wrongful convictions, most of which were often obtained through the police's use of photographs, Polaroids and mugshots of the accused in witness corroboration. "The Innocents is very much about the use and misuse of photography, " says Simon. "I would often take the subjects back to the scene of the crime, a scene that they had never before been to, but were forever linked to. The place that had changed their lives forever. Like some of the chapters in A Living Man Declared Dead, The Innocents is about people suddenly caught up in a narrative that is not their own."

Until she undertook A Living Man Declared Dead, Simon's work was, as she puts it, "about issues of power, mainly American power, at a historical moment when governance and power structures are destabilising and changing due to unpredictable forces like the global economy, environmental changes and asymmetrical warfare". For all that, though, she rejects the label "political artist" and its connotations.

"The work eludes that kind of categorisation intentionally, though, of course, it may activate something political in the viewer or resonate with them in a political way. But I don't have an agenda. I guess a lot of what I do is underpinned by anxiety. But I am also anxious about photography and its role. I try to keep a clear distance from the subject. I never want to say that I understand or somehow know the subject. In fact, it's more that I don't know."

Last year, Simon published Contraband, a book of relatively humble ambition, for which she spent four days without sleep at the US Customs and Border Protection site and the US Postal Service international mail facility at JFK airport in New York. The book is another visual inventory, this time of 1,075 seized items, some bizarre (deer penis, cow dung toothpaste, a dead bird), some mundane (sausages, spices, pumpkins).

"People imagine customs officers seizing familiar threats – drugs or weapons – but most of the seized items were, of themselves, incredibly mundane. I was fascinated by the idea that a banal thing like a banana or an apple could suddenly assume a threatening identity because it is in the contraband room."

In both her creative ambition and conceptual reach, Simon is at the vanguard of a relatively new kind of photography that evades easy categorisation and often blurs the boundaries between reportage, conceptualism and portraiture. Alongside the likes of Jim Goldberg, winner of this year's Deutsche Börse prize, and Paul Graham, whose work is currently on show at the Whitechapel Gallery, she makes work that straddles the worlds of documentary photography and fine art.

"A Living Man Declared Dead is a really important work because it draws on various often exclusive traditions," says Simon Baker. "It has the tenacity we associate with photojournalism and the practices and presentation of art photography. In a way, it's bringing the real world – politics in the broadest sense – into galleries and museums. That is not an easy thing to do, but photography can do it very well and this particular show is an amazing example of a complex and ambitious project that contains within its presentation all the things you need to understand about it."

That may well be so, but I also suspect that, for the casual or curious viewer, it may prove a demanding, even frustrating, experience, not least because the ambition and complexity of the idea almost overwhelms the actual work on the walls – a dilemma that is at the heart of much high-end conceptual art. In one way, too, Simon's work also refutes the long held notion that a great photograph should speak for itself, much of its impact resting on the interrelation of image and text, the latter giving the former much of its power and resonance.

With A Living Man Declared Dead, she has arrived at a place where, visually, all extraneous style and embellishment, even context, has been discarded. The portraits that make up each individual bloodline are arranged in grids and are unadorned and undramatic. They have a certain cumulative power but certainly do not possess the intrigue or the mystery of the images in An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar. This, it turns out, is intentional.

"I think I've just gotten tired of photography in a way," she says, revealingly, at one point, "and am trying to use it as a simple recorder allowing the construction of collections and associations that disturb the value of the single image and underscore issues of translation. Certainly the progression of my work has very much been a shedding of style and embellishment. The neutral background of the non-place behind many of my subjects corresponds to this erasure."

The neutral portraits of individual bloodlines, arranged in scientific grids against white backgrounds, and hung in a huge gallery space where, at Simon's insistence, the walls are ultra-white and the lighting ultra-bright, are punctuated by blank spaces that represent the missing, the dead or those who refused to have their photograph taken. This is a project, then, as these absences attest, about the limits of photography – a strange place for a young photographer to end up. It will be interesting to see where she goes next.

A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters is at Tate Modern, London, 25 May to 6 September. An accompanying book of the work is published by MACK , at £80

Summary: Taryn Simon is currently the hottest property in art photography, with her work sought after by major museums across the world. On the eve of her latest show at Tate Modern, she talks to Sean O'Hagan about her complex and challenging images and the painstaking creative processes involved


ingredients that are part of so many friday nice for teenagers across this country, partying and alcohol. Tonight, an hour every parent wants to see. Every parent these stories, thinking not my child....

ingredients that are part of so many friday nice for teenagers across this country, partying and alcohol. Tonight, an hour every parent wants to see. Every parent these stories, thinking not my child. With all of that alcohol, he was uniquing into the wrong house and what happened next, only two people will ever know for sure. And one of them is dead. Here's abc's deborah roberts. Reporter: It was a late saturday night last spring. 16-year-old caleb gordley had a secret plan, to sneak out of his house to go party with some friends. A popular, three-sport athlete at parkview high school in virginia, caleb was also an aspiring rapper seeing himself as the next jay-z. ♪ ♪ time moves slow ♪ he was a self-proclaimed rapper, going by the name of "prince george." The core was his music, was his lyrics, was his -- poetry. I have 85 songs that I've collected. Reporter: A good kid? Great kid. He was very respectful, very polite. Reporter: Partier? No. He did not drink. And that's what makes that night even more peculiar, even more odd. Reporter: And out of character for caleb. He's not much of a drinker, but, I guess, he wanted to try for that night. Reporter: Yet, the one-time caleb decided to let loose. He would wind up dead in a stranger's home. It all began with a typical teen punishment. He had been grounded because he went to the park on a sunday afternoon after I told him to clean his room. I said, "one week, you cannot go anywhere. You go to school. You go to practice, whatever. You're coming straight home. And he accepted it. He doesn't get up in my face. He said, "all right, dad." Reporter: By the end of the week, caleb is itching to get out of the house. ♪ Reporter: Tweeting throughout the day, "honestly, who's throwing a party tonight. I'm trying to have fun tonight, no lie." Caleb and sister eden are living with their dad, their parents shawn and jennea are divorced. Their first born was a natural ham, caleb, here at 6, busting a move to 'n sync's song "girlfriend." ♪ he just had that energy that really attracted lot of people to him. Because he was so fun and good-hearted. Reporter: To give their kids a better life, the gordleys left behind the tough, crime-ridden streets of dayton, ohio, for the tranquil suburbs of sterling, virginia, where shawn is a corporate i.T. Manager. I was happy with the area, i was happy with the school. The community seemed to be very active and social and kind of close-knit. Reporter: After the split, jennae moved back to ohio to go to school, but never missed a beat with her kids. How much did you monitor his social media accounts? A lot. And that was the one time i didn't in that particular day. I would have saw the signs if i would have just looked that day. About the parties and talking to friends about it. He was looking for someplace to go that night. Reporter: So, at the stroke of midnight, caleb slips out the window of his two-story home. He would never return. Caleb's first mistake would happen just after arriving at a buddy's house a few blocks away. Some of the boys begin tossing back vodka shots. By 2:00 a.M., A woozy caleb decides it's time to go home before his dad notices he's gone. Good friend kory carico was with caleb. I took him back to my house and I was going to make him stay there, but he knew he had to get home. I knew that for sure. He kept bothering us about it, Reporter: Staggering now, caleb needs his sober friend to walk him the few blocks home to his quiet cul-de-sac where many of the houses in the development look nearly identical. We crossed this fence because all the houses are similar, and once we crossed we came up to this window over here. You thought this was the window? Yes. We thought this was the window, I've never come in the back way before. It looks different from the back. I always come from the front when I come pick him up in the morning, so I figured it was his house because he thought it was his house, too. Reporter: Did you just sort of like shove caleb in? No, he went in himself. The alarm went off and then i saw the light come on and then i heard yelling, which I thought was his dad, so then I ran because I thought I was going to get in trouble. Reporter: Turns out it's not caleb's dad, in fact it's not even caleb's house. It's the neighbor's home two doors down. The startled homeowner grabs his 40-caliber pistol that he kept next to his bed thinking a burglar has broken in at 2:30 in the morning. In the chilling moments that follow -- gunshots. How many times was caleb actually physically shot? Once. Out of four shots, he was hit once. A developing story now out of sterling. Responded to burglary. Reporter: The next morning news of a shooting quickly spreads through the neighborhood. At caleb's home, there is panic. His sister eden realizes her brother isn't in his bed. Many friend's mother called her and told her that someone two doors away from us had gotten shot. She said somebody was trying to break in. I told my dad and then maybe like an hour later, he was like, "i woke up this morning and caleb's not home. I don't know where he is." I ran over to the neighbors' house, knocked on the door and didn't find out any information. Reporter: What's going through your mind at this point? I know my son's dead. I know he's dead. Cory dropped caleb off at my house at 2:30 in the morning, and there was a shooting in my neighborhood at 2:30 and I can't find my son. I knew it instantly. Reporter: His 16-year-old son shot dead. I could barely talk. And I was so lost. I couldn't fathom surviving this. I just -- no. I was like, "what -- there's no -- no -- there's no going beyond this." Reporter: Eden and shawn break the unbearable news to jennea in ohio. Overcome with grief, she heads to virginia. I wept in the airport, I wept on the plane in front of strangers, and it didn't even matter. Reporter: You lost your son. Did you understand at all what had happened? I did. I understood that, you know, he made a mistake. And it cost him his life. Yeah, my handsome man. Reporter: A life even caleb realized was fragile. This is a new microphone. Trust me, I'm going to have six songs I'm going to put out today. Sfwlr and one of those songs he wrote just months before dying is oddly prophetic. ♪ Reporter: Called "wreckless," the sound of gunshots in the background, caleb. ♪ Your life can be done like that like that, like that ♪ Reporter: His own life cut heartbreakingly short in what seemed a classic case of self-defense. This person going up the stairs, I guess he felt in fear for their lives. I mean, I put all on me at first. I thought it was all my fault, because I took him to the wrong house. Reporter: But then you realized it was a tragic mistake. Yeah. Reporter: Both shawn and jennea believed it an awful accident, until they got the police report. What it revealed would change everything for caleb's parents. Once I got the details, I was absolutely outraged. Reporter: Was it self-defense or something else? Murder. Reporter: Stay with us.

This transcript has been automatically generated and may not be 100% accurate.

Summary: Act 1: Caleb Gordley was shot and killed after a night of drinking when he entered the wrong home.


Comic books are the center of a huge industry — from toys and games to blockbuster movies — and there are plenty of apps to help you enjoy them.

Free for iOS, Android, Windows 8,and Kindle Fire devices

An impressive start is comiXology’s Comics app. It is free for iOS, Android, Windows 8, and Kindle Fire devices, although you have to sign up for an account with the company.

It works as you might expect. Part of the interface is dedicated to helping users find, buy, and download comic books from a digital store, and part is a clever comic book e-reader.

The discovery section is well organized: It lets you search for comics, offers different story categories to browse through, and lists popular and free options.

A handy section called “New to comics? Start here” has a list of titles that may pique your interest.

Free comics are available as samplers, and an issue typically costs around $2. A huge range of publishers offer content, including big names like DC and Marvel, as well as smaller publishing houses.

The neat part of Comics is its reader. Unlike a traditional e-reader, which simply lets you flip through and read the pages of a digital book, Comics allows interactivity with each story’s panels.

Tapping on the edge of the screen or swiping across it to “turn the page” makes the display sweep from one panel to the next with an attractive set of animations. This draws attention to every panel in the comic, because it zooms to fill the screen.

I’ve long liked this effect, called Guided View, because it makes reading a digital comic dramatic. But some users may prefer using the standard swipe and pinch-to-zoom gestures to read the comic as if it were a simple image of a comic book page.

There’s little to dislike about this app, although it doesn’t cover every comic publisher.

Free on Android and iOS

Dark Horse Comics, for example, is home to famous titles like “Star Wars.”

The company has its own app, similar in design to Comics: It combines a comic book store and e-reader.

I prefer the design of Dark Horse Comics’ store, because it’s more straightforward to scan through and easier on the eye.

Like comiXology’s app, this also animates the process of reading the story panels. But its zooming effect can be a little jerky, and it sometimes seems as if the illustration quality drops during the zoom.

It’s a small annoyance but noticeable. Of course, you can skip the animations and zoom into the panels yourself to read the story, too.

Dark Horse’s app is free for Android and iOS, but digital comics inside its store can cost you a few dollars each.

Free on iOS and Android

I couldn’t write about comics without mentioning Japanese manga, and there are many apps out there for this genre.

Manga Rock, free on iOS and Android, beats the competition. It has a list of more than 50,000 comics available, and although its reading system isn’t as sophisticated as the one in Comics, it is still smooth to use. It’s free, but to get access to all the comics you have to pay $4 for the full edition through an in-app upgrade. Manga Reader — also free on Android — may be a good alternative to Manga Rock. Manga Storm, free on iOS, is also worth checking out.

Many comic anthologies are available as traditional e-books, and Amazon’s Kindle app (free on iOS, Android, and Windows) is one of the best and best known for reading this sort of publication. But you don’t get the dynamic reading effect.


Modernist and poet … from 'Chicago - A Camera Exploration', Fortune, February 1947. Photograph: Walker Evans/Metropolitan Museum of Art

On 5 July, 1963, Life magazine published a nine-page photo essay by Walker Evans titled America's Heritage of Great Architecture is Doomed … It Must be Saved. It showed images of beautiful, historically important buildings threatened with demolition as a brutal wave of urban regeneration swept through the US. Chief among them was Pennsylvania station, Manhattan, a beaux-arts masterpiece from 1910that was scheduled to make way for a more functional, but faceless construction.

The demolition of Penn station went ahead, but Evans's photographic essay made its mark, prompting a protest outside the terminus by 150 architects and critics – and leading to a slew of similar photo-essays on endangered buildings in other US periodicals. "Evans's photographs were being seen in the nation's most widely read magazine," writes David Campany in an exhaustive essay for Walker Evans: the Magazine Work. "For the first and last time, he was in tune with popular feeling."

Evans was 59 when the series was published. Two years later, he stopped working for magazines to teach graphic design at Yale University. Since then, he's become one of the towering figures of photography. A master of self-reinvention, Evans photographed depression-era America for the Farm Security Administration. In 1938, Walker Evans: American Photographs was held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the first time the institution had hosted an exhibition of a single photographer's work. In 1941, he published his first book, the great Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, in which his quietly powerful images were set alongside emotive prose by journalist James Agee.

The book of the same name remains one of the cornerstones of documentary photography in the 20th century. Evans is acclaimed, too, as a pioneering photographer of the America vernacular landscape – street signs, highways, shop fronts, civic buildings and crossroads.

Evans has been lauded for every part of his creative career except for his magazine work. From the mid-1920s to the early 1960s, Evans worked on assignment for Harper's Bazaar, Vogue, Vanity Fair, Life and Fortune magazine, for which he worked regularly for 20 years.

Evans had unique artistic authority over his output. "In small avant-garde publications and mainstream titles," Campany writes, "he produced innovative and independent journalism – often setting his own assignments, editing, writing and designing his pages." Thanks to this degree of control, not to mention the quiet power of his photographs, Walker Evans: the Magazine Years is an illuminating book, both for photography buffs and anyone interested in the history of magazine design.

A photo-series such as Along the Right-of-Way, published in the September 1950 issue of Fortune, is pure Evans: urban landscapes – factories, shacks, municipal buildings, houses – taken from passing trains as they trundled across New Jersey and Connecticut, in Chicago, Pittsburgh and on "through the citadels of steel production" of Pennsylvania. Evans also wrote the captions and accompanying essay, revealing his first love: writing. In 1955, he created Beauties of the Common Tool, in which single-page images of everyday tools – pliers, tin-snips, a crate opener, a trowel and a spanner – are shot in stark black and white. Occasionally, his artistic assignments for magazines are previewed in edited form. A small section of his haunting and clandestine subway portraits of commuters, collected in the 1966 book Many Are Called, were first featured alongside Agee's text in the Cambridge Review in the winter of 1956. .

Evans chose magazine stories that often had elegiac qualities: The American Warehouse (Architecture Forum, April 1962) pictures those vast buildings in decline, while The Auto-Junkyard (Fortune, April 1962) shows the scrapyards where outdated American cars went to die. The muted tones of his colour photographs add to the sense of transience, the feeling of things lost. In this, too, the magazine pictures echo his other, more well-known work. Walker Evans was a modernist and a poet of the United States' ever-changing, yet somehow secure, sense of itself. His work for magazines adds another layer of understanding in terms of how an already great artist saw the world. It also attests to the tenacity of his vision and the artistic control he fought hard for in his years as a magazine photographer. What he was fighting for, as Campany notes, was his "commitment to the ideal of an intelligent and reflective pop culture". Though Evans won his own battle, that commitment remains a struggle worth fighting for.

• Walker Evans: the Magazine Work is published by Steidl

Summary: His stunning Life magazine series of buildings-at-risk had such sway it started a picket line, but he's still best known for his Depression-era portraits – until now. A new book shows the master at work, and in control of, magazine photoessays on everything from Chicago street life to common tools, writes Sean O'Hagan


Kim Kardashian, 33, and Kanye West, 36, got married at Fort di Belvedere in Florence, Italy, on Saturday after almost a week-long celebration in Paris, PEOPLE reports.

Rich Wilkerson Jr., a pastor from North Miami, performed at the wedding, which counted many of the Kardashian family members and their celebrity friends as guests.

According to one guest PEOPLE spoke to, West “was the typical nervous groom, swigging obsessively from a bottle of water and shifting his weight from one foot to the other.”

“It was funny how nervous he was,” the source said. “He clearly knew the gravity of what he was about to do. This morning he was all smiles, but as it got closer, you could see that the nerves were kicking in.”

As rumors suggested, pop siren Lana Del Rey performed three songs at the lavish pre-wedding festivities in Paris, E! reports. But the couple chose to have the special ceremony take place in Florence because their daughter, North West, was conceived there.

Summary: You can all go home now: The #worldsmosttalkedaboutwedding is complete


The New York Times Co. will sell its 16 regional newspapers and related businesses to Halifax Media Holdings LLC for $143 million, the company said yesterday.

The sale is part of a broader strategy to become a more digitally focused media outlet. The transaction is expected to close in a few weeks and net proceeds, including a tax benefit, are expected to be $150 million. The Boston Globe and the Telegram & Gazette of Worcester were not part of the sale.

Founded in 2010, Halifax owns the Daytona Beach News-Journal and is headquartered in that Florida city. The purchase will give it ownership of several other Florida newspapers as well as others across the South and in California. Included in the transaction are the Sarasota Herald-Tribune in Sarasota, Fla.; the Star-News in Wilmington, N.C.; and the Press Democrat in Santa Rosa, Calif.

Ken Doctor, a media analyst at Outsell Inc., said the sales would allow the Times Co. to focus on its flagship brand, The New York Times, and decide what it wants to do with The Boston Globe.

Doctor called the sale price “incredibly low.’’

“That’s saying basically each title is worth about $10 million,’’ on average, he said, “which is just breathtaking when you consider what kinds of profit machines these newspapers used to be.’’

Under the Times Co., papers in the regional group won three Pulitzer Prizes, including the 2011 prize for investigative reporting, for the Sarasota paper’s series on difficulties residents had with Florida’s property insurance system.

“These news organizations have served as trusted institutions in their communities, delivering news and information that matter most to their readers,’’ said Arthur Sulzberger Jr., Times Co. chairman. “The sale of our Regional Media Group will enable The New York Times Company to continue our transformation to a digitally focused, multiplatform media company.’’

Halifax’s chief executive, Michael Redding, said in a statement that the company sees the papers as a good investment because of their strong local coverage. “We have been impressed with the newspapers’ reputations as well as the markets they serve,’’ he said. “When you have the opportunity to purchase solid news products located in great markets, it is very compelling.’’

Summary: The New York Times Co. will sell its 16 regional newspapers and related businesses to Halifax Media Holdings LLC for $143 million in cash, the company announced today. The sale is part of a broader strategy to transition to a more digitally-focused media outlet at its core properties, including the Times, The Boston Globe and The International Herald Tribune. The transaction is expected to close in a few weeks and after-tax net proceeds are expected to be $150 million, the company said today.


Meftah Bouzid, a prominent Libyan journalist and vocal critic of the country’s jihadists, was shot dead on Monday in the Islamist stronghold of Benghazi, generating a wave of condemnation from domestic and international rights organizations.

Bouzid had previously been the subject of death threats for his frequent condemnation of Islamic extremists, who since the 2011 revolution have carried out dozens of deadly attacks on prominent figures, officials, foreigners and the armed forces in Benghazi, AFP reports.

Hundreds of people attended the funeral of the slain editor of the weekly newspaper Burniq, as French-based media watchdog Reporters Without Borders (RSF) and the U.N. mission in Libya called for a prompt investigation into the shooting.

RSF urged “all civilian, military and political actors … to immediately end all attacks on civilians, including all journalists.”

Summary: Meftah Bouzid's slaying is the latest in a series of deadly attacks carried out by jihadists in the Islamist stronghold of Benghazi


TEMPE, Ariz. -- D.J. Foster expected to finish in the end zone each time he touched the ball in Arizona State's season-opening win over Weber State.

"That's just how I think," Foster said. "I expect a touchdown every time I touch the ball."

Foster scored on two of his first 15 touches against Weber State, reaching the end zone on short runs from a few yards out. But it was his 19th touch -- a career-best 57-yard touchdown run -- that showed what the junior offers the Sun Devils' offense.

"I was just being patient and I finally got a chance to make a move and I just tried to make something out of it," Foster explained.

As Foster takes on a role of featured back for the first time at ASU, his ability to change games on one play gives the high-powered offense a dynamic it lacked the past two seasons, and his versatility makes the ASU offense perhaps more dangerous than ever.

Not that Marion Grice, ASU's primary back the past two years, wasn't capable of big, game-changing plays. Foster just seems to have a different gear that distinguishes him from Grice.

"Just really different backs," coach Todd Graham said. "D.J. is a home run hitter. You saw the one (against Weber State). Any time he breaks, he gets past, he's going to go to the house."

Added offensive coordinator Mike Norvell: "Marion was a great back, but D.J. is different. I think you see the explosiveness he has. Any time he touches the ball he can go to the end zone."

Christian Petersen-Getty Images North America

ASU vs. NEW MEXICO When: 4 p.m. Saturday Where: University Stadium, Albuquerque, N.M. TV: CBS Sports Network (Carter Blackburn, Aaron Taylor) Radio: KTAR 92.3 FM (Tim Healey, Jeff Van Raaphorst)

There is no disagreement: Put the ball in Foster's hands and there's a good chance he'll get you six points. ASU's last four games to support the notion.

Foster stepped in as the No. 1 back for ASU's final three games last season after Grice was injured. From then to now, Foster has three games of at least 100 rushing yards and an average of 116.3 yards per game. He has seven rushing touchdowns and one receiving touchdown in that stretch.

In ASU's 45-14 win over Weber State, Foster rushed for a career-high 147 yards and three touchdowns.

"He's on a good streak right now," Norvell said. "He knows he's the guy. That's something where you see that confidence. When he's on the field, there's no big eyes. He's been there, he's done it, and he's had a lot of great success doing it."

Foster downplays the idea that knowing he's "the guy" makes him run more confidently. He insists his motivation is making the most of the time he has left at ASU and being part of a winning program.

But Foster surely knows the individual potential he possesses. It's what got him to this point. Interestingly, the path he has taken at ASU has mirrored the one he took at Scottsdale Saguaro High School.

In his first two years at Saguaro, Foster played receiver and quarterback as he gained size. Then when the starting running back got hurt, he stepped in.

"The rest was history from there," Foster said. "It's crazy how it's really the same story. I'm trying to just stay on the same path and keep working hard."

In his first two seasons at ASU, Foster was more of a receiver, typically starting in the slot. In the two seasons combined, he caught 101 passes for 1,186 yards and eight touchdowns while rushing 195 times for 994 yards and eight touchdowns.

Now 15-20 pounds heavier than when he arrived at ASU, Foster again takes on the role of lead back. He believes his style now is more physical than when he was a freshman, which sometimes makes Graham uneasy.

"He likes running over people instead of running around 'em," Graham said. "Sometimes I'd like him to just run around 'em. But I like his mindset. He's my kind of tailback. He is an intense competitor, and I like that about him."

Foster admits he likes running opponents over and sometimes lets his instincts take over in those moments but also says he's gotten smarter since taking on the No. 1 job, finding the right mix of physicality and finesse.

"When it's time to go and be physical, I know," Foster said. "When it's time to just kind of not take the unnecessary hits, I know. I understand now that being in that main position I've got to take care of my body as much as I can."

Foster's new role as the lead back doesn't mean, though, that he's done being a receiver. He had four catches against Weber State, and Norvell says the balance going forward will typically depend on what defenses show. He'll feel good about the offense if Foster is getting 20-30 touches per game regardless of how they're split.

And as much as ASU likes Foster as a running back, his ability as a receiver is too great to take away from the offense.

"As a receiver he's a real challenge to deal with out of the backfield," Graham said. "I think he's much harder to handle probably than what Marion was out of the backfield. Marion's strength was his counter running and his perimeter running. I think D.J. can do it all -- inside, outside."

Grice, too, made plenty of big plays as a receiver, but Norvell points again to Foster's explosiveness as the difference between the backs.

"He just has so much versatility in what he can do and just his explosiveness makes him so dangerous," Norvell said.

Graham has expressed belief that Foster could rush for more than 1,000 yards this season while also racking up 1,000 receiving yards. Foster says he doesn't think about specific statistical goals -- "I just really want to score every time I touch the ball," he says -- but enjoys those expectations.

Norvell doesn't set stat-based expectations for Foster either. He's plenty content to just watch his top playmaker take the ball and make something happen.

"I don't put any limitations on him and what he can do," Norvell said. "It's just making the most of every opportunity to get the ball in his hands and do what he does. I know those explosive plays are going to come.

"I don't have a set number in my mind of what I want him to do, but if he stays on track doing what he did the other night I think we'll be in good shape."

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Summary: D.J. Foster's big-play ability makes ASU offense more dangerous than ever.


The following correction was printed in the Guardian's Corrections and clarifications column, Saturday April 28 2007

Warrington is less than 20 miles from Manchester, rather than 50 as stated in the article below. This has been corrected.

Ten years after Pete Postlethwaite's film career took off, an incident in an airport persuaded him that it was time to come back down to earth. "I checked in believing myself to be in New York, but when I looked up at the boards I realised I was in LA," he says. "Then my phone rang, and it was my agent wanting to know why I wasn't in San Francisco."

Postlethwaite still makes the occasional film when he feels like it, but these days he prefers to play the role of a gentleman orchard farmer at his home in the Shropshire hills. And now he has returned to what he considers to be his natural environment, sitting in the bar of a repertory theatre with three pints of Guinness lined up in front of him, reflecting on a career that has turned full circle.

Postlethwaite has come to Manchester Royal Exchange, barely 20 miles from his birthplace in Warrington, to rehearse Prospero in The Tempest. It seems to have put him in a valedictory frame of mind. "It's all about endings, isn't it?" Postlethwaite reflects, lighting the first of many cigarettes. "I don't think Prospero is some kind of all-powerful magus. He's more of a tired old man aware of his mortality."

He can be forgiven for having slightly morbid thoughts. Last year, he was devastated when his brother died unexpectedly: "He was just a year older than me - worked all his life as a builder in Warrington, and had just begun to think about easing off a little. The week before he died, he complained about a twinge in his chest. I asked him if he was going to get it checked out, and he said, 'No - I'm not going to spend the rest of my life worrying about death.'"

Postlethwaite broke off filming Closing the Ring, a second-world-war drama being shot in Ireland by Richard Attenborough, to attend the funeral. He says that delivering the eulogy was the toughest performance of his life. "It was around this time that the offer of The Tempest came in. I put it off for months before I realised that I ought to do it as a tribute to my brother. He was a kind of Prospero himself - incredibly wise and charismatic with a hard-won perception of the world."

An elderly gentleman who has been listening in on the conversation shuffles up and nods at the mounting pile of stubs on the table. "It'll kill you, that," he says. "Why, how old do you think I am?" Postlethwaite responds. "Well, I'm in my 90s," the man replies, "and I reckon you're about 72."

"Bloody hell," says Postlethwaite, who is in fact 62. "To think I originally trained as a PE teacher." I ask if he still follows any kind of exercise routine. "Yes," he responds dryly. "Every morning, one eyelid goes up and the other immediately follows."

His lugubrious air and distinctive features - angular and chiselled, as if by a cubist sculptor - have always created the impression that he may be older than his years. Following a brief career teaching at a girls' school in Manchester, Postlethwaite enrolled as a student at the Bristol Old Vic at the relatively advanced age of 24. "I stood out like a sore thumb among all these fresh-faced teenagers," he says. "I've been playing old men since I was a kid." To pay his fees, Postlethwaite worked nightshifts pressing beer kegs in a sheet metal plant in Bristol, a curious turn of fate as his father had trained as a cooper. Despite his efforts, he still found himself a few hundred pounds short of completing the course. "The head of the school took me aside and said, 'Listen, I have a hunch you're going to do all right in this business, so I'm going to put down the outstanding amount as a debt and then, in a few years' time, I'll write it off as a bad debt.'" Postlethwaite was delighted that his tutor should have such confidence. "But then he had to take the shine off it by adding, 'Of course, when you've got a face like a fucking stone archway, you can't go wrong.'"

The teacher's prediction proved right: Postlethwaite's geological features and rugged-sounding surname became his selling point. "I was warned that I'd never get my name up in lights because there wouldn't be enough bulbs," he says, yet he proudly points out that in more than 40 years as an actor, he has never once had to sign on the dole.

One of his first jobs took him to the Everyman in Liverpool, where director Alan Dosser assembled a company that included Julie Walters, Bill Nighy and Antony Sher. Willy Russell and Alan Bleasdale were the house playwrights. "I couldn't believe my luck," says Postlethwaite. "The first drama I ever saw was at the Everyman: Look Back in Anger, directed by Terry Hands. Seeing someone do the ironing on stage and talking in a northern accent made me feel that, yes, I can do this."

Postlethwaite's early engagements took him to a sports centre in Billingham, a town more famed for its chemical industries than for classical drama. Timothy West had established a company there and even a powdered wig couldn't disguise Postlethwaite's unmistakable physiognomy. "We did Congreve for people from the chemical plant. Prunella Scales sent me a telegram saying I was the best Restoration truck-driver she'd ever worked with." He also returned to the Bristol Old Vic, where Adrian Noble had begun to establish a reputation as a promising young interpreter of the classics. Among these was a memorable Duchess of Malfi featuring Helen Mirren and Bob Hoskins. "Bob was great but I don't think he quite saw the point of iambic pentameter. He kept saying to Adrian Noble [adopts rough East-End accent], "Listen, Ade, you've got to cut the verbals, mate. No one's gonna have a clue what's going on, know what I'm saying?'"

Before Hollywood called, towards the end of the 1980s, Postlethwaite's career had hit Bottom - playing the ass in A Midsummer Night's Dream for the Royal Shakespeare Company was about as far as he expected to go. He had been acclaimed for his role as a drunken wife-beater in Terence Davies's movie Distant Voices, Still Lives, but Postlethwaite was almost 50 before he was "mugged by the movies" as he puts it. Yet his new-found celebrity also saved him from being mugged by a mugger: "I was walking alone in New York at night, and could hear heavy footsteps following behind. I turned, ready to surrender my wallet, and the guy says, 'Weren't you in In the Name of the Father? I hadn't spoken to my dad for 30 years - after I saw that film, I got straight on the phone.'"

The most manic spell of his career came in the mid-1990s, when he made two Steven Spielberg blockbusters, The Lost World and Amistad, plus the low-budget British hit Brassed Off in the same year. Spielberg was moved to say Postlethwaite was the best actor in the world, though Postlethwaite says: "I think what he actually said was that Pete thinks he's the best actor in the world."

The number - and quality - of Postlethwaite's films has tailed off in recent years: he made a solid contribution in The Constant Gardener, but also ran through the motions as Father Brennan in an uninspiring remake of The Omen, and was in the frame for a Razzle award for his part in the sci-fi fiasco Aeon Flux. But he is due to appear alongside Christopher Plummer and Shirley MacLaine in the Richard Attenborough venture, and is preparing to shoot a film about the signing of the Magna Carta, with a new British production company.

Despite Postlethwaite's decision to choose future projects with care, he has no immediate plans to retire. "Actors aren't judges or brain surgeons," he says. "We pose no risk to the public if we decide to keep going." His one unfulfilled ambition is to play King Lear, and discussions are underway for him to take on the role at Liverpool Everyman as part of the city's Capital of Culture celebrations in 2008.

"Nothing's fixed as yet - but it would be nice to go back to the place that inspired me to become an actor in the first place. It may not happen, but I'm determined to play Lear before I die."

In the meantime, there is Prospero to prepare for, a character who says that "every third thought shall be my grave". Postlethwaite drains the last of his Guinness. "Well, it doesn't do to become too morbid," he concludes. "I'm not going to spend the rest of my life worrying about death".

· The Tempest is at Manchester Royal Exchange from May 23 to July 7. Box office: 0161-833 9833. Distant Voices, Still Lives has just been rereleased.

Summary: Spielberg called him the world's best actor, but Pete Postlethwaite is going back to theatre. He tells Alfred Hickling why the death of his brother inspired him to play Prospero.


The UK’s Heathrow airport began screening passengers for Ebola Tuesday.

Arrivals from at-risk countries in West Africa will be subject to filling out a questionnaire and having their temperature taken before the process gets rolled out to other terminals within Heathrow and then other airports including Gatwick and Eurostar. Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt said that although the UK’s Ebola risk is low, he expects a “handful” of cases to enter the region, the BBC reports.

Health officials said anyone suspected to have Ebola will be taken to a hospital, while those who are asymptomatic but high-risk, having reported prior contact with patients, will receive daily follow-ups.

Journalist Sorious Samura, who traveled back from Monrovia, Liberia, through Brussels and into Heathrow, told The Guardian that he underwent the screening — but noted that it was optional.

“I could have just come throughout without any screening. That is how scary it is,” he said. “They asked for various details, about the symptoms, whether you experienced any of the symptoms, did you experience headaches, vomiting and things like that, and then they did my temperature using the normal equipment that you put in someone’s ear.”

“[The screening] appears not to be a scientific decision but a political one,” Dr. Ron Behrens from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine told The Telegraph, noting that it will benefit few but disrupt “large numbers of people.”

Health Secretary Hunt said that approximately 89% of people entering the UK from impacted regions would get checked, since some might take an indirect route in the airport that avoids the screening area. He added, “This government’s first priority is the safety of the British people.”

This article originally appeared on Time.com.

Summary: A health official says he expects a 'handful' of cases to enter the UK.


When Americans head to the polls next week, many will vote for congressional candidates who promise to fix the economy. In fact, the economy is “very important” to the majority of registered voters and outstrips any other issue, including health care and terrorism, according to a recent survey by the Pew Research Center.

The sad reality, however, is that these voters won’t get what they want, no matter who ultimately heads to Washington, namely because too many Americans have developed a nasty case of economic hypochondria. How can any politician fix what isn’t really broken?

It has been more than five years since America emerged from the Great Recession, and most economic indicators have improved ever since. GDP climbed by 4.6% last quarter, which is tied for the best mark since 2007. The national unemployment rate fell to 5.9% in September, which not only is its best mark since 2008 but is actually lower than it was for most of the 1980s. Even the number of long-term unemployed has been cut by more than a quarter over the past year. Gas prices are way down, and the stock markets, despite some recent volatility, are hanging around record highs.

All those factors have led 42% of Americans to say they’re in “excellent or good” financial shape, according to another Pew poll. The trouble is that only 21% of respondents in the same poll say the economy is in “good or excellent” condition. This disconnect is also reflected when 56% expect their personal finances to improve over the next year, but only 22% expect economic improvement over the same period.

And then there’s this stunner: According to a summer poll by the Public Religion Research Institute, 72% of Americans still think we’re in a recession, down just barely from 76% when the same question was asked in 2012.

A CASE OF THE BLAHS A poll by the Pew Research Center found that three-quarters of Americans believe the economy will be either the same or worse a year from now.Graphic Source: Pew Research Center

I’ve come up with three explanations for this massive disconnect, in ascending order of importance.

SHELL SHOCK. Most American adults had experienced economic downturns before 2008, but few had experienced anything quite as severe or wide ranging as the Great Recession. It’s the sort of thing that some people just can’t get over; many put up mental defenses to make sure they don’t get fooled again. It’s both totally understandable and thoroughly illogical.

Yours truly. We media folks also don’t like getting egg on our faces, and you could have cooked a lifetime of omelets on our foreheads in 2008. So we keep predicting that bubbles will burst. Plus, bad news sells better than good news. So we overplay the high unemployment figures and underplay the low ones. We explain that top-line figures like unemployment rates aren’t really reflective of the current environment, but we use the exact same measurements when nostalgically harking back to economic boom times.

Political calculus. In theory, both political parties should claim ownership of economic improvements. But rather than advocate for a continuation of current policy, each party has determined that the smarter electoral strategy is to claim that everything is awful and the other side’s fault. That is true of both incumbents and challengers. Rather than “Our policies helped you find a job,” we hear “You can’t get work because we aren’t able to implement our policies.” Even if a voter has a good job with gold-plated benefits, he remains immersed in political discourse about those who don’t.

You may think I’m waving pompoms past the economic graveyard. But I’m no cockeyed cheerleader. In fact, I’m downright pessimistic. The less we are willing to recognize the economy we have, the more likely we are to elect representatives who stoke economic fear because they have little else to offer. And if that happens, we will indeed end up with a lousy economy.

Subscribe to Dan Primack’s daily newsletter at GetTermSheet.com.

This story appears in the November 17, 2014 issue of Fortune.

Summary: Here's what's at play in voters' economic hypochondria.


‘White Bird in a Blizzard” develops engine trouble early on, right around the time it asks us to accept Eva Green as a desperate suburban housewife. The Paris-born actress (“Casino Royale,” “Dark Shadows”) is beautiful in that willowy French way, but she has shoulders that seem to stoop under the weight of depravity and eyes that could challenge Death himself to a chess match (Green would win, no contest). Offering her up as an oppressed all-American homemaker with a wimpy husband (Christopher Meloni) and a rebellious teenage daughter (Shailene Woodley) is like putting escargot on the menu at Applebee’s.

Green’s character, Eve Collins, goes missing in the first few scenes of Gregg Araki’s drama, and her absence nags at the daughter, Kat, like a toothache. Based on the novel by Laura Kasischke, “White Bird in a Blizzard” is told from the girl’s point of view as she explores her sexuality with the stoner kid next door (Shiloh Fernandez) and the ex-Marine police detective (Thomas Jane) tasked with solving the mother’s disappearance. Truth be told, it’s good to see Woodley (“The Fault in Our Stars,” “The Spectacular Now”) play something other than a sweetie-pie. Kat is not particularly nice and not terribly bright, but she knows what (and who) gets her pulse racing. It’s a neat portrait of a girl playing at being a tart before signing up for a life of bourgeois respectability.

After plowing a willful path of queer teen drama and self-conscious artificiality with 1995’s “The Doom Generation” and other early works, Araki has lost his way in recent years. “Mysterious Skin” (2004) was his best film, the 2007 stoner comedy “Smiley Face” his most conventional, and 2010’s “Kaboom” went straight to video on demand. “White Bird” seems like a halfhearted holding maneuver, a movie unsure of what it’s even about. The most interesting character, the mother, is the hole at the movie’s center, and in flashback sequences, Green gives a genuinely unsettling performance, with moments of madness, sanity, and outrageous sexuality. If Isabella Rossellini’s character in “Blue Velvet” had settled down and had kids, she might look something like this.

Oddly, “White Bird in a Blizzard” turns slowly into a mystery thriller, as Kat starts suspecting that her non-entity of a father may know more than he’s letting on. The intentional blandness of the writing keeps us from wanting to push further, though. Araki peppers the film with interesting faces — Gabourey Sidibe (“Precious”) as Kat’s high school party pal, Dale Dickey as the stoner’s blind mother, Angela Bassett as a therapist, Sheryl Lee (Laura Palmer herself!) as dad’s new girlfriend — but he gives them too little to do. Only Jane, as the cop who knows exactly what Mrs. Collins’s wayward daughter needs, has the sense of threat the movie is seeking. His and Woodley’s scenes together are dirty and alive.

They’re the only ones that feel that way. With “White Bird in a Blizzard,” Araki seems to be revisiting old haunts and trying to remember why they mattered to him. The film is set in the late 1980s and early 1990s if only to have this director’s beloved alt-rock from the period on the soundtrack: Cocteau Twins, New Order, The Jesus and Mary Chain, The Cure. It’s a great mix tape, but it can’t take him home again.

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Summary: “White Bird in a Blizzard” review:  Trouble in the late-’80s suburbs, as desperate housewife Eva Green goes missing and leaves her rebellious daughter (Shailene Woodley) holding the pieces.


FORTUNE — It was the “get” of a lifetime. In late 1986, Marc Rich –– America’s most-wanted white-collar fugitive –– agreed to spend an entire day with me in his sanctuary, the famously ritzy hamlet of Zug, Switzerland. No other U.S. journalist had ever spoken to the shy, secretive Rich. But smoking Cuban cigars and downing diet-Cokes in his office, his narrow face framed with black, bushy sideburns, the patrician, soft-spoken Rich was amazingly confessional and candid. “I’ve been portrayed in a horrible way,” he told me. “As a workaholic, a loner, a money machine. I’m a modest, quiet person who has never done anything illegal.” What followed that day was a kind of moveable investigative feast that started in the six-story blue-reflecting glass headquarters of his company, Marc Rich AG, and shifted to his chalet-style home overlooking the misty lake of Zug, where I viewed his collection of Miros and Giacomettis and listened to his songwriter wife Denise laud what she described as Marc’s mythic strength and generosity.

On June 26th, Marc Rich died at age 78, still living near Zug. In the years between, he’d seen the trading firm he built from a cramped apartment grow into Glencore Xstrata, the world’s biggest commodities trader, endured a bitter divorce from Denise that cost him a reported $365 million, and had striven unsuccessfully to settle the charges against him and restore his reputation. In a final twist to his mercurial saga, Rich deployed his fortune and dues from politicians to secure a full pardon from Bill Clinton on the former president’s final day in office in 2001, virtually the only time a fugitive has ever been exonerated, and a decision universally vilified by both the press and the prosecutors who worked on and followed Rich’s case.

Back in 1986, I was thrilled to secure that exclusive because Rich wasn’t just another tycoon on the lam, like Robert Vesco, then domiciled in Cuba. This brilliant trader was accomplishing one of the most extraordinary, unlikely feats in the annals of capitalism: Running a global commodities colossus trading everything from aluminum to zinc beyond the reach of prosecutors, who’d indicted him in the biggest tax fraud case in U.S. history on charges that carried a 325-year jail term. I’d actually written a story on Rich, “Secrets on Marc Rich,” three years earlier with my colleague Ford Worthy, without his cooperation. In reporting that story, I’d closely followed his extraordinary career and the highly publicized case that barely slowed his remarkable ascent.

In 1982, U.S. Attorney Rudy Giuliani convened a grand jury to investigate if Marc Rich AG had violated the price controls on newly-produced oil to generate $105 million in illegal profits, then shipped the money offshore to dodge $48 million in taxes. Rich unwisely refused to cooperate with the investigation, claiming that Marc Rich AG was a Swiss company and shielded from American laws, even though Rich had long been running the company from New York. Rich later argued that Swiss secrecy laws prevented him from releasing documents, a position that infuriated prosecutors.

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Fearing they’d be indicted, Rich and his partner Pincus Green fled to Switzerland, where their company had a big trading operation. Several months later, the grand jury issued a 65-count charge against Rich and Green that encompassed the oil price violations, tax fraud, and trading oil with Iran during the hostage crisis in 1980 and 1981. Had Rich and Green simply agreed to settle the case, they would probably have avoided any criminal action, and been lauded as extraordinary entrepreneurs instead of reviled as fugitives. The oil majors routinely abused the maddeningly complex, misguided oil price controls and escaped prosecution by paying fines.

Even as fugitives, Rich and Green skillfully used money and machinations to keep their business thriving. After Giuliani criminally indicted their U.S. subsidiary, Rich and Green paid $50,000 a day in fines for more than a year to maintain operations and finally settled all charges for $150 million (total cost: $171 million). That left even their U.S. arm as free to trade as any rival. The Swiss government refused American demands to extradite Rich and Green on the grounds that tax evasion isn’t a crime in Switzerland. Spain, where Rich had worked for 13 years for trading house Philipp Bros, granted Rich citizenship, and also refused to extradite him. Rich regularly vacationed at his seaside pleasure dome in Marbella, comprising three sleek houses shaded by Lebanese pines with room for forty guests, hosting an A-list of celebrities that included opera star Placido Domingo.

His money also won him great favor among the Swiss. The attorney general of the canton of Zug and other officials served on the boards of charities he established. Those officials didn’t relish answering questions about their benefactor. “You’re not going to squeeze me like a lemon,” remarked one person I was attempting to interview.

During my reporting on the first Rich story, I’d learned that his life story had been a primer in the art of survival. An only child, Rich was born in Antwerp, where his father was a prominent diamond dealer. The family fled the Nazis to Morocco, and spent nightmarish weeks confined to an interment camp. Rich arrived as a seven-year old refugee in, of all places, Kansas City, where his father opened a jewelry store. A few years later, the family moved to New York, and his father established a highly successful burlap bag exporting business. In 1963, Rich dropped out of NYU to work in the mailroom of commodities giant Philipp Bros. Over the next 21 years, Rich performed brilliantly in a series of foreign assignments, including that long stint in Spain, rising to become heir apparent to trading legend Ludwig Jesselson.

But Rich and Green clashed with Jesselson over their bonuses in 1973, then departed with half-a-dozen of Jesselson’s best traders to start their own operation, named for Marc Rich himself, that would eventually dwarf their alma mater.

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When I approached Rich in 1986 for an interview, he dispatched his attorney, Leonard Garment, to Paris to interview me first, as a kind of audition. Garment was the ultimate politically connected attorney, with a glittering resume that including a two year-stint as special counsel to President Nixon. Garment regaled me with stories of how he’d befriended Nixon when he joined Garment’s law firm while in the political wilderness in the early 1960s, and how, after a story appeared in which Garment confessed “I can be mean,” the President took him aside at a White House reception and lectured him, no humor intended, “Now, Len, don’t be mean!” Garment was also a former jazz musician who played saxophone in a New York-based band alongside section-mate Alan Greenspan.

Garment confided to me that Rich had summoned a group of his closest friends and advisors from far and wide to discuss whether he should grant the interview. Among the counselors was an octogenarian rabbi and hotel magnate from Spain who’d been a mentor to Rich. At one point, Garment related, the sage rabbi interrupted the discussion to ask, “This Tully, is he Jewish?” evoking gales of laughter from the assembled, and a rejoinder from Garment that Tully was most likely a nice Irish boy.

The highly personable and widely respected Garment recommended that Rich speak to me. The discussions began in his Zug headquarters appointed with salmon pink carpeting and elevators streaming soft jazz. I opened with questions about the business. Even though Rich couldn’t travel to most of the countries where he did business for fear of being arrested by Interpol, his company was already gigantic. Rich gave me numbers that no other reporter knew: Marc Rich AG generated $12 billion a year in trading volumes, earning around $100 million a year, figures that would multiply in the years to come. A swashbuckler, he swore, he was not. “We’re not sexy or speculative,” he said, “We buy commodities only after lining up a buyer first, and take a small markup or commission. Buying commodities any other way is incredibly risky.”

Rich exuded an air of dour, world-weary gentility. He spoke in extremely soft tones, with a slight European accent that was hard to place. His account of his rupture with Jesselson was typically understated: “Jesselson talked about handing over responsibility to me, but he really didn’t mean it. He still wanted to control the company.” Notoriety clearly disturbed him. “People point and gesture when I walk into a restaurant,” he complained. He confessed to being extremely shy, and even unforceful. “When I fire a person, sometimes they don’t notice right away,” he quipped. In the course of interviewing present and former colleagues, another highly impatient, demanding side emerged. Rich apparently hated long-winded conversations. His office featured an electrically operated door so that Rich could buzz in visitors without leaving his desk. When bored, he’d leave his desk without saying a word and buzz himself out, dispatching an underling to finish the meeting.

It was also clear from those conversations that Rich could evoke tremendous loyalty. His Swiss attorney and others said that Rich would write highly emotional, handwritten letters thanking them for a job well done, or congratulating them on a wedding or the birth of a child.

My overall impression: Rich was so colorless he was colorful. He did show flashes of humor. Asked where he could travel, he declined all specifics, except to note, “Not to the U.S., that would be a one-way trip!” To my amazement, we were joined by someone I never thought I’d meet, Rich’s partner, Pincus Green. The Brooklyn-bred Green had avoided extradition by becoming a Bolivian. I’d heard that Green was a great jokester with a style all his own –– he’d stand in line at airports to travel coach, explaining, “It’s the same airplane, why pay more?” An Orthodox Jew, Green drove around his neighborhood in nearby Zurich in a mud-spattered Oldsmobile.

Upon entering Marc’s office, the tall, crew-cut Green declared, “You came to see Marc, so here I am!” Known as the “Admiral,” Green was practically a walking database of shipping rates, especially for oil tankers. That elicited the query, Pinky, how’s the oil business? He quipped: “Isn’t that the stuff you pack sardines in?” I don’t know what inspired this question, but it was inspired: “Pinky, what do you think of women’s liberation?” Answer: “Never heard of it!”

MORE: The lifestyle of Rich, the infamous (Fortune, 1986)

At lunchtime, we drove to Rich’s hilltop home, named Himmelreich, which is German for paradise. Rich spoke Spanish with his three daughters, and even to “Macho,” his terrier. Denise Rich was the antithesis of her husband, a gregarious optimist who gushed, “I’m surrounded by positive energy!” She described how when they first met, Marc had invited her on a date on New Year’s Eve in 1965, and she agreed to go if he could find dates for her roommate and another friend. He complied, and when he heard her mother was in a New York hospital, the relentless trader tracked her down and sent her flowers. Denise also described how the family, avid skiers all, had taken an unmarked trail while on a vacation in Squaw Valley, and gotten hopelessly lost. It was her stalwart husband who kept them walking and praying, she said, until they were found, almost frozen to death, two days later.

Denise had just written a hit called “Frankie” for the group Sister Sledge, and issued an album for MCA, “Sweet Pain of Love.” She said she’d pondered writing a tune called “Marc Against the World.”

My story appeared under the title, “Lifestyle of Rich the Infamous,” a derivation on the TV show, “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous.” It’s hardly surprising that Rich liked neither the story nor the title, although I’d found him both frank and humble, and clearly a business genius. If ever two people less needed to cheat or scheme to make money –– if they did as prosecutors allege –– it was Marc Rich and Pincus Green. Despite the Clinton pardons, Green got one as well, this brilliant pair never redeemed their tarnished reputations. Seldom has so much wealth, so much success, even so much grudging respect from rivals, been overshadowed by so much tragedy –– tragedy they brought on themselves.

Summary: A Fortune senior editor-at-large recounts how he landed an exclusive interview with the elusive late financier.


U.S. retailers finally had a merry Christmas.

The National Retail Federation said on Wednesday that retail sales for November and December rose 4%, roughly in line with its initial forecast and the industry’s best showing in three years. The number is likely to come as a relief to retailers after a slow start to the season despite efforts to spur early spending with aggressive deals at the start of November.

The industry group characterized the growth as a turning point for retail after years of reticence on the part of shoppers to spend—and hold out for deals—as they grappled with slow job growth and the absence of meaningful wage gains.

“There is every reason to believe that we have moved well beyond the days of consumer pessimism and that the trajectory for retailers continues to point up,” said NRF President and CEO Matthew Shay. The NRF had forecast holiday sales, which excludes gas, would rise 4.1%.

With the U.S. economy creating 3 million jobs in 2014 and gas prices at multi-year lows giving consumers billions more to spend, holiday revelers picked up their spending in December and salvaged a season that initially looked worrisome after spending during the Thanksgiving/Black Weekend Friday plummeted 11%. Earlier deals simply brought spending sooner in November.

But the U.S. job creation machine kicked into high gear, especially later in the year—December was the 11th consecutive month of job gains above 200,000—the longest such stretch in 20 years, bringing the unemployment rate to 5.6%. And while wages didn’t rise much, people worked more hours, giving them more money to spend.

“This is the best the U.S. economy has looked since before the recession,” former Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke said earlier this week at NRF’s annual retail industry convention as he predicted more strength in 2015 and beyond.

A number of big retailers have reported their holiday numbers already, reflecting this renewed mood to spend. J.C. Penney JCP said last week comparable sales rose 3.7%, easily beating Wall Street forecasts, while at Macy’s M , there were up 2.1%. Department stores had been struggling in the fall as consumers cut back on spending on apparel to shift more of it to home repairs.

According to the NRF, stores selling furniture and electronics saw some of the biggest gains, while general merchandise retailers saw the lowest.

Yet there were some areas of retail that were surprisingly weak. MasterCard Advisors said luxury sales had declined in each of the last three months of the year, and Gap Inc GPS at its namesake and Banana Republic chains.

Summary: The National Retail Federation says holiday season sales rose 4% in their best showing since 2011 as shoppers finally emerged from their gloom.


In France, Vincent Bolloré counts as an activist investor. But not, apparently, activist enough for New York-based P. Schoenfeld Asset Management.

Bolloré is chairman of Paris-based Vivendi SA VIVEF , owner of Universal Music Group, the world’s biggest record label in terms of sales, and its biggest shareholder with 8.2% of the company.

He’s also the architect of the plan it announced earlier this year to give back over $6 billion to shareholders in dividends and buybacks over the next three years.

However, as far as Schoenfeld is concerned, that’s too slow. The Financial Times reported Monday that PSAM is planning to push a rebellion against Bolloré and his chief executive Arnaud de Puyfontaine at this year’s shareholder meeting, with a view to increasing and speeding up cash returns.

Specifically that means selling Universal, leaving it with just one significant asset, the French TV and movie business Canal+.

No way, says Vivendi. The company put out a riposte to the media Monday, defending the current plan and saying that the majority of shareholders support it.

“UMG is not for sale, and constitutes, along with Groupe Canal+, a strategic pillar of a great media and content group,” Vivendi said, adding that it would of course submit any new demands from PSAM to the board for discussion.

Bolloré’s team is currently two years into a plan to slim down by selling off all manner of non-core assets (ranging from 85% of Activision Blizzard and 13% of Beats Music through to the sale of its Brazilian mobile and broadband company GVT to Spain’s Telefonica).

After selling nearly $20 billion worth of assets in the last two yeas, it already has almost $5 billion in net cash and it’s due to get another $8 billion when the sale of GVT goes through in spring. But the company has so far said very little about how it intends to use what’s left of the cash to strengthen the “strategic pillars” that remain.

A spokesman for PSAM wasn’t immediately to comment on what action it wants to see at Vivendi. However, some media speculated that the last straw may have been its rumored refusal to listen to an approach for UMG from John Malone’s Liberty Media Corp. LMCB group. No-one at Liberty was immediately able to comment either.

UMG has the rights to moneyspinners as diverse as Taylor Swift’s “1989” and the soundtrack from Disney’s “Frozen” and the U.K.’s favorite crooner du jour, Sam Smith. But its revenue still fell 6.7% last year after adjusting for exchange rates, due to what it called the “rapid transformation of the recorded music industry.”

Summary: Hedge fund unhappy with slow return of funds to shareholders after massive slim-down under Bolloré.


Updated MAR 24, 2015 5:11p ET

TUCSON, Ariz. -- The shimmy is still there, and so is the determination. They'll be there Thursday when Arizona faces Xavier in the Sweet 16. But the smiles are fewer and farther between for Arizona's do-everything forward Rondae Hollis-Jefferson.

He's still affable, but all these NCAA games are part of a business trip for the full-throttle sophomore who has been asked to guard everyone and everything but the front door.

"People can tell I'm more on the aggressive side, more focused or straight forward," said Hollis-Jefferson, which is in contrast to the happy-go-lucky, free-spirited personality he's often showed in his two years in Tucson.

He's turned it up since the regular season ended, especially on the defensive end. He helped limit Ohio State's D'Angelo Russell to nine points on 3-of- 19 shooting on Saturday.

"I like this side," he said of his increased intensity. "I like the way I'm playing. It feels comfortable."

In the Pac-12 Tournament he admitted he was a bit peeved he was overlooked when it came to Defensive Player of the Year (which went to Oregon State's Gary Payton II), so he put the clamps down on his opponents. Over the first weekend of the NCAA tournament, that continued.

He calls it being in "attack" mode, and it's not about to change. Likewise for the shimmy at the free-throw stripe.

Sean Miller is used to it, but he'll have to face another coaching friend in Chris Mack, Xavier's head coach.

Before Miller left Xavier for UA in 2009, Mack was Miller's right -hand man for the Musketeers. When Xavier chose Mack as Miller's replacement then, Miller was quoted as saying, "Xavier doesn't make mistakes," when hiring coaches.

Mack is the latest on an Xavier coaching three that goes back through Miller, Thad Matta, the late Skip Prosser and Pete Gillen. Matta was on the opposing bench on Saturday when Arizona defeated Ohio State.

"Sean gave me a heck of an opportunity to come back to my alma mater,"Mack said after his team Georgia State to advance to the Sweet 16. "He put a lot of responsibility and trust in me. He ultimately really pushed for me to become the head coach, and for that I'm eternally grateful. It's hard to play against one of your best friends in the business. But it really won't matter to our guys, nor will it matter to Arizona, because they don't know me from a bucket of paint."

With former Arizona All-America point guard Damon Stoudamire and former Pittsburgh guard Miller on Arizona's coaching staff, T.J. McConnell said it's not hard to gain lots of insider knowledge about playing the point for the Wildcats.

McConnell was a guest on Jim Rome's radio show on Monday, and he was asked to compare his game to that of his coaches.

"Coach (Miller) has still got it," McConnell told Rome. "And Coach Stoudamire has still got it, too. (But) I'd have to say I'm the third best out of the three."

When pressed to be less politically correct, McConnell rephrased his answer.

"You know what? I have to change my mind. I have to be first on that list," he said. "I'm not sure about those two. They can duke it out. I certainly belong first on that list."

Kidding aside, McConnell said he was grateful for the coaching of Stoudamire and Miller.

"In the Xs and Os, he's taught me more than I ever thought I could learn," McConnell said of Miller. "He's been the father figure I haven't had because my parents aren't here (in Tucson)."

Just last week, McConnell moved into third place in Arizona's record book for assists in a season with 228, passing Stoudamire. He's three shy of Reggie Geary's 231 and 19 behind Russell Brown's 247 set in 1978-79.

"It's really an honor to be in the same conversation as Coach Stoudamire," he said. "There's a reason why this place is called 'Point Guard U.' He's a big reason it's called that."

He then joked, "I guess I do have some bragging rights against him. I'll tease him about that for sure."

McConnell then said he has to realize Stoudamire made more than $100 million in his playing career -- "and I will probably never make close to that."

Follow Steve Rivera on Twitter

VIDEO: The Sports Guys look back on last week's victories and ahead to this week's games in Los Angeles.

Summary: The smiles are fewer and farther between for Arizona's do-everything forward Rondae Hollis-Jefferson as the Wildcats advance deeper into the NCAA postseason.


Brad Griffith got the idea for his startup after missing part of a baseball game while struggling to buy last minute tickets online. As part of the ordeal, he ended up having to duck into the basement of a local bar to print the tickets.

Griffith realized that there should be a better way.

His solution was to create Gametime, a last-minute sports ticket marketplace. On Thursday, the company said it has raised $13 million in new funding to expand its business.

Inspired by Griffith’s experience, Gametime has focused on making tickets as easy as possible to buy and use with a smartphone. After transactions are complete, the company’s app displays the digital tickets and their barcodes for admission into the venue. Tickets can also be easily transferred to friends via text message and email.

But with an already crowded industry with several well-established companies like Ticketmaster and StubHub, the question is why sports fans should use Gametime.

For early investor Jeff Mallett, the answer building a product with the user in mind that comes with convenience. In a conversation with Fortune, Griffith added that focusing on mobile is also the company’s strategy to appeal to millennials — a buzzword for teens and young adults whose generation uses smartphones more than any other device.

But despite the obvious convenience of electronic tickets, some teams still require paper tickets, something Gametime can only help with by providing printable PDF versions. It’s still up the teams to open the gates of convenience.

Mallett, who is part owner of the San Francisco Giants and a former chief operating officer for Yahoo, also believes that Gametime will be in good shape as long as it continues to perfect its ticket search algorithm and to add to the number of ticket suppliers in its system. It currently pulls supply from other marketplaces, individual ticket brokers, and ticket broker networks. It takes a cut of up to 15%, depending on the seller.

While the company does work directly with some sports teams, Mallett doesn’t foresee Gametime as relying on such partnerships.

Griffith added that as a secondary marketplace, the company also doesn’t have to really worry about exclusivity deals — something primary ticket sellers have been fighting over for years. He also sees “the couch or the bar” as his company’s main competition because they’re the easier or cheaper alternatives to buying tickets, althoug that may be a bit of wishful thinking.

But as the company works to grow beyond the 35 cities it’s currently serves, attracting new customers and gaining recognition will be the real challenges, Mallett said. Gametime’s mostly benefitted from word-of-mouth so far, but it will need a lot more if it wants to aggressively expand its marketshare. While the company declined to share specifics, it said that it currently sells just over 5% of tickets at any given San Francisco Giants baseball game, which is not surprising since the city is its most established market. But competitors are raking in big bucks: Ticketmaster brought in $1.37 billion in 2012, and StubHub generated $2.8 billion in sales in 2013, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Gametime is also planing to expand beyond sports, into concerts and other shows in the next 12 months, something that will surely come with its own challenges.

Accel Partners led the Gametime’s funding latest round. Other investor included Philadelphia 76ers and New Jersey Devils co-owner David Blitzer, and Trunk Club founders Brian Spaly and John Tucker; and previous investors Mallett, Tibco founder and Sacramento Kings owner Vivek Ranadive, and Box founder Aaron Levie. The company previously raised a total of $5 million in funding.

For more about online sports, watch this Fortune video:

Summary: The company is hoping to challenge giants Ticketmaster and StubHub in sports tickets.


With 134 million people around the globe currently watching eSports, according to SuperData Research, it was only a matter of time before gambling and fantasy sports businesses sprouted around professional video gaming. Three startups—Vulcun, AlphaDraft, and Unikrn—have staked a claim on eSports fans wanting to further immerse themselves in the action.

Ali Moiz, founder of Vulcun, believes fantasy eSports could become a $250 million a year industry by 2020. And the good news for traditional fantasy sports is that Moiz has seen “mostly no overlap so far,” so these companies are tapping into a new audience.

Vulcun has raised over $13.4 million, which has helped the company pay out over $1.1 million in prizes to over 117,000 fans in its first three months. Gamers assemble their own fantasy teams and compete in daily competitions.

“Since fantasy sports is a game of skill, it allows sports fans that really get into it to consistently win over time,” Moiz says. “This is different from betting, where winning or losing is random over time. Fantasy sports engages fans with their favorite sport in a deeper, more engaged way. That is why leagues such as the NBA, MLB, and NHL have all gotten involved with daily fantasy leagues. Because it’s good for the sport, and good for the fans.”

Meanwhile, AlphaDraft just closed its $4.2 million seed round, based on convertible notes. Lead investors are Metaphorphic, WME, Upfront, IDG, KEC, MV, and Greycroft, including former NBA Commissioner David Stern. With the funding, AlphaDraft will pay out at least $5 million in cash and prizes in its first year, aiming to have over 1 million active users by the end of 2015.

Todd Peterson, CEO of AlphaDraft, says many fans started out playing video games before watching players and teams compete professionally. Fantasy eSports allows fans to take an active role competing for prizes and showing off in-depth knowledge of the matches and the players.

Taking a different approach to eSports gambling is Unikrn, which is offering traditional “safe and legal wagering” according to Rahul Sood, CEO and co-founder of Unikrn. Built on an online community of nearly 10 million gamers in over 100 countries, Unikrn has raised over $3 million, with over $5 million committed. The company has also signed an exclusive deal with Tabcorp, a $5 billion dollar Australian wagering company, which also became an investor in Unikrn.

Unikrn provides access to live viewing, live discussions, and competitive odds to gaming fans globally, including in the US. In legal sports betting jurisdictions, Unikrn users can bet on the outcome of matches and tournaments, with further bet types to follow.

“The average amount placed on bets has increased by 350% since we started, and we only see it growing,” Sood says. “Obviously there is a learning curve associated with betting on eSports, but as you’ll see with our future products we’ll be able to address this and make it accessible to anyone in a legal jurisdiction to participate.”

All three companies are currently focusing on the fan base of Riot Games’ League of Legends due to the game’s immense viewership, but AlphaDraft and Unikrn are planning to expand to other games.

“This is a very big space with much potential,” Peterson says. “If the video game industry currently rivals the size of traditional sports as a whole, and eSports is the size of any of the major individual sports, there’s a lot of room for friendly competition and further specialization, as the industry matures.”

Summary: Vulcun, AlphaDraft, and Unikrn give eSports fans the chance to play fantasy leagues and place bets on big eSports events.