For New York Magazine’s August 15th - August 28th, 2022 issue, features writer Jen Wieczner takes readers through the rise and fall of Singapore-based cryptocurrency fund Three Arrows Capital.
The collapse of Three Arrows is a strange and winding tale of how Su Zhu and Kyle Davies, two Ivy League–educated and Wall Street–trained investors, convinced the world that they were financial geniuses, then blew up their own multibillion-dollar firm. In the process, they took down a big part of the crypto industry, propelling lenders worldwide into bankruptcy and precipitating mass layoffs.
“The Three Arrows Capital saga fascinated me from the beginning, because it’s a stranger-than-fiction story that only can be fully understood when you look at it holistically,” says Wieczner. “The tale of Three Arrows Capital is instructive as, at its core, it’s not so much a crypto failure as a human failure. Bitcoin was essentially created to obviate the need for trust, yet Three Arrows Capital shows the pitfalls of an industry that has taken on many of the trappings of Wall Street but still operates largely outside of its regulations.”
Elsewhere in the issue is a sweeping package on the thriving New York drill scene, a Chicago-born rap subgenre pushed to the mainstream by artists like Chief Keef and spread as far as London and, later, Brooklyn and the Bronx, where it has become the sound and voice of New York City. Introduced by senior editor Dee Lockett, the package includes “The Tragedy of Jayquan McKenley,” by features writer Simon van Zuylen-Wood; contributor Wayne Marshall on the sound of drill; and extensive interviews with many drill artists.
“You’ll hear from several members of this new generation coming out of the city and the stories of pride and pain they’ve been fighting for their lives to tell for so long as the city passes the mic to them,” says Lockett.
The substantial portfolio of images at the heart of the project is by photographer Ashley Peña. “An elegant portraitist, Peña captured intimate photographs stripped of the familiar performative armor, instead surfacing their very human spirit,” says photography director Jody Quon.