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    E-Commerce and the Influencer Economy

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    How internet shopping became choked with junk. People are bombarded online each day with ads for newfangled products that promise dramatic life improvements. Modish tumblers. Sleek pans. Miraculous cleaning solutions. Overblown air purifiers. Just click this link and — voilà! Productivity. Happiness. Nirvana.Don’t buy it.Wirecutter, The Times’s product recommendation service, tests many of the wares that clog Americans’ social media feeds. And while our testers do like some, these products are often built on empty promises. In today’s newsletter, I’ll explain how e-commerce, a $6 trillion global industry, became choked with junk.Paid to sellOnline shopping can expose people to a greasy influencer economy. Influencers often join affiliate-revenue networks, such as Amazon’s. When an influencer’s follower clicks a link and buys something, the influencer makes money. That’s why people on your social media feed are crowing about their 10 favorite Amazon finds or talking about how an expensive gizmo has changed their life.Many influencers have another incentive: Brands pay them to hawk stuff. Some people with large followings make deals for tens of thousands of dollars per post. Then, when enough people like or share a post, TikTok, Instagram and YouTube algorithms push it to more people. The result is a blizzard of gadgets.Consider these spin scrubbers, pitched online as the solution to all of your cleaning woes. “In videos, these devices churn up rings of soap suds, implying they are lifting away all the filth beneath them,” writes Ellen Airhart, Wirecutter’s cleaning expert.In reality, they’re the worst cleaning tools we’ve ever tested. Ellen spent six hours trying to scour a soap-scum-covered shower and a toothpaste-crusted sink with two spin scrubbers popular on TikTok. They splattered water everywhere and often cost upward of $50. Instead, Ellen recommends a humble $1 sponge.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Teacher Secretly Sold His Students’ Art on Mugs and Shirts, Lawsuit Says

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      Parents of a dozen students at a school near Montreal accused an art teacher in a lawsuit of reproducing portraits from a class assignment and putting them on items that he offered for sale online.In January, students at a junior high school outside Montreal received an assignment to draw a classmate or a self-portrait in the style of Jean-Michel Basquiat.“The challenge is to make an original artwork in Basquiat’s style; not to copy one of his images,” the teacher, Mario Perron, wrote to his students on the junior campus at Westwood High School in St.-Lazare, Quebec. “I am very familiar with Basquiat’s work and will return copied work, because it is considered plagiarism.”The assignment was titled “Creepy Portrait.”Basquiat was a worthy subject: He was the influential Brooklyn-born artist of Haitian and Puerto Rican descent who was known for a brief career in which he innovated with graffiti and other types of improvisational pieces. He died at 27 in 1988.But parents of some students who completed the assignment were shocked to find that Mr. Perron had copied the portraits and was offering mugs, cushions, bags, apparel and other items for sale online bearing reproductions of the artwork, according to a class-action lawsuit filed last week in Quebec Superior Court.Joel DeBellefeuille, who learned what was happening from his 13-year-old son, Jax, accused Mr. Perron in an interview of perpetrating a “premeditated” scheme. A portrait of Jax by one of his classmates was among the student artwork being offered for sale, he said. “I freaked out,” Mr. DeBellefeuille said. “I was full of emotions. Still now, it’s really unbelievable.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Has the Luxury E-Commerce Bubble Burst?

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      After implosions by Farfetch and MatchesFashion — and with other blowouts possible — the future for online fashion retailers looks uncertain.Rosh Mahtani, the founder of the jewelry brand Alighieri, is celebrating the 10th anniversary of her company this year. Her handmade gold-plated pieces, inspired by Dante’s “Divine Comedy,” made her a winner of the Queen Elizabeth II Award for British Design and a mainstay of luxury e-commerce vendors.During Paris Fashion Week last month, buyers came to her showroom to select stock for the upcoming season, including MatchesFashion, a leading multibrand fashion retailer that is responsible for about half a million pounds, or $630,000, of Alighieri’s projected revenues. But there was a problem.“They had owed me 70,000 pounds [about $88,000] in unpaid invoices since October and had been asking for discounts on those bills,” Ms. Mahtani said last week. It made her uneasy, even if such bargaining was increasingly commonplace for independent brands like hers. Still, she said, she wasn’t quaking in her boots.“The team made a selection, and we talked about a capsule collection for the summer,” she said. “I don’t think any of us had a sense of what would come next.”Days later, MatchesFashion was put into administration (the British term for bankruptcy). Its owner, Frasers Group, which bought the company in December for about 52 million pounds, or $66 million, now said the operation was not commercially viable. Overnight, almost half of the staff was fired from a company that had been valued at $1 billion when it was sold to Apax Partners in 2017. Today, 200 brands are owed money and cannot access unsold inventory, and a furious customer base rages online about accessing orders or making returns.Rosh Mahtani, founder of cult jewelry label Alighieri, was owed substantial sums by MatchesFashion when the retailer was put into administration earlier this month.via Alighieri JewelryWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      RuPaul Is Sending a Rainbow Bus to Give Away Books Targeted by Bans

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      The star, whose show “RuPaul’s Drag Race” has an international following, is one of the founders of a new online bookstore promoting underrepresented authors. The giveaways are part of its outreach.At a time of book bans and efforts by state legislatures to ban drag shows, the performer and television producer who is arguably the country’s most famous drag star, RuPaul, is the co-founder of a new online bookstore that will be sending a rainbow school bus from the West Coast to the South to distribute the very books targeted by those bans.He announced on Monday that he was one of three business partners behind the bookstore, Allstora, which will promote underrepresented authors and provide writers with a greater share of profits than other online booksellers do.RuPaul said that this sort of book website would fill an important gap, especially in “these strange days, we’re living in,” to support the ideas of people “who are willing to push the conversation forward.”In recent years, there has been a sharp rise in efforts to restrict access to books at libraries in the United States, and most of the challenged books are by or about L.G.B.T.Q. people or people of color, according to library and free speech organizations. Some libraries have received bomb threats, and others have faced closure over efforts to remove books. At the same time, states have tried to ban drag shows and restrict access to health care for transgender people.RuPaul with Eric Cervini, left, co-founder and chief executive of Allstora, and Adam Powell, co-founder and director of the Rainbow Book Bus.AllstoraEnter RuPaul. Drag has been in popular culture for decades, but his reality competition show “RuPaul’s Drag Race,” which is airing its sixteenth season and has more than a dozen international editions, has brought the work of hundreds, if not thousands, of drag performers to home audiences.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      The Sunday Read: ‘The Great Freight-Train Heists of the 21st Century’

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      Adrienne Hurst and Sophia Lanman and Listen and follow The DailyApple Podcasts | SpotifyOf all the dozens of suspected thieves questioned by the detectives of the Train Burglary Task Force at the Los Angeles Police Department during the months they spent investigating the rise in theft from the city’s freight trains, one man stood out. What made him memorable wasn’t his criminality so much as his giddy enthusiasm for trespassing. That man, Victor Llamas, was a self-taught expert of the supply chain, a connoisseur of shipping containers. Even in custody, as the detectives interrogated him numerous times, after multiple arrests, in a windowless room in a police station in spring 2022, a kind of nostalgia would sweep over the man. “He said that was the best feeling he’d ever had, jumping on the train while it was moving,” Joe Chavez, who supervised the task force’s detectives, said. “It was euphoric for him.”Some 20 million containers move through the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach every year, including about 35 percent of all the imports into the United States from Asia. Once these steel boxes leave the relative security of a ship at port, they are loaded onto trains and trucks — and then things start disappearing. The Los Angeles basin is the country’s undisputed capital of cargo theft, the region with the most reported incidents of stuff stolen from trains and trucks and those interstitial spaces in the supply chain, like rail yards, warehouses, truck stops and parking lots.In the era of e-commerce, freight train robberies are going through a strange revival.There are a lot of ways to listen to ‘The Daily.’ Here’s how.We want to hear from you. Tune in, and tell us what you think. Email us at thedaily@nytimes.com. Follow Michael Barbaro on X: @mikiebarb. And if you’re interested in advertising with The Daily, write to us at thedaily-ads@nytimes.com.Additional production for The Sunday Read was contributed by Isabella Anderson, Anna Diamond, Sarah Diamond, Elena Hecht, Emma Kehlbeck, Tanya Pérez and Krish Seenivasan. More

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      in US Politics

      The trials of SBF and DJT: Trump isn’t clean on crypto but he did warn us about it

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      The New York fraud trial of Sam Bankman-Fried kicked off this week. The 31-year-old former crypto billionaire faces two substantive counts of wire fraud, for acts allegedly perpetrated against the customers of FTX, the crypto-futures exchange he founded, and five related counts of conspiracy. If convicted on all charges, he faces up to 110 years in prison.As fate would have it, his case is being heard a few buildings away from where one Donald J Trump sits on trial for fraud. Like the 45th president – DJT, if you will – SBF has a tough row to hoe.Even if Bankman-Fried is acquitted, he stares at another trial, slated for March 2024, on five more counts of fraud. The men’s paths remain entwined. At that same moment, Trump will be both deep into the Republican primary and likely standing trial in connection with January 6.Furthermore, filings show that as of early August, Trump held $2.8m in a cryptocurrency wallet, with as much as $500,000 in ethereum, a cryptocurrency. On top of that, his collection of non-fungible tokens generated $4.87m in licensing fees. The NFTs are a collection of virtual trading cards, featuring illustrations of Trump as superhero, cowboy or astronaut. Really.Not that Trump has always been in favour of crypto.“I am not a fan of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, which are not money, and whose value is highly volatile and based on thin air,” he tweeted in 2019.Sound familiar? Prosecutors say Bankman-Fried relied on smoke and mirrors to gain access to political power. According to his indictment, he used customers’ assets “to lobby Congress and regulatory agencies to support legislation and regulation he believed would make it easier for FTX to continue to accept customer deposits and grow”.He is also alleged to have “misappropriated customer money to help fund over $100m in political contributions in advance of the 2022 election”, while seeking to “conceal the source of the funds used for the contributions”.Trump and his party, however, were not the chief recipients of such largesse. Bankman-Fried tended to donate to Democrats. Conservatives were therefore annoyed. They sought to portray Bankman-Fried as a leftist, on top of being a crook. Once upon a time, though, he met Ron DeSantis for no apparent reason other than the fact Florida’s hard-right governor wanted to meet. Now, as a presidential candidate, DeSantis has emerged as a crypto advocate. His campaign continues to sink, however.We know more about such meetings now, thanks in large part to Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon, a new book by Michael Lewis, the author of Moneyball, The Big Short and other bestsellers about how capitalism works – and doesn’t.For instance, Jerry Jones, a Republican and owner of the Dallas Cowboys NFL team, showed up at a Beverly Hills party also attended by Hillary Clinton, a passel of Kardashians, Doug Emhoff, the husband of the vice-president, Kamala Harris – and Bankman-Fried.Bankman-Fried had allure. Exactly why continues to puzzle political players. His money doesn’t explain everything. But it does shed light on plenty.In summer 2022, Lewis writes, Bankman-Fried met Mitch McConnell, the Senate minority leader, with the goal of stopping Trump-aligned extremists snagging Republican nominations. It was a high-level meeting – high enough that for one evening, Bankman-Fried even swapped his beloved cargo shorts for a suit.“At that moment, Sam was planning to give $15m to $30m to McConnell to defeat the Trumpier candidates in the Senate races,” Lewis writes.Bankman-Fried also explored paying Trump $5bn not to run in 2024, Lewis writes. Nothing came of that.Now, as Bankman-Fried sits in court, McConnell, 81, remains in the minority, his health in public decline. But McConnell remains a reliable soldier, his hold on his caucus unchanged.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe crypto industry, meanwhile, scrambles to salvage its image from the damage done by Bankman-Fried.“The idea that one man and one company dictated an entire industry was frustrating for a lot of people,” Kara Calvert, head of US policy at Coinbase, recently told Politico. “At the end of the day, the industry is so broad-based. Nobody wants to let the whole future of technological development in the United States be dictated by a criminal.”Bankman-Fried has not been convicted of anything. But it does seem extraordinary that he rose so high so fast, and that so many political leaders were so eager to help.“From the beginning, I had thought that crypto was pretty dumb,” wrote Zeke Faux, an investigative reporter for Bloomberg and a fellow at New America, in Number Go Up, his unflattering take on crypto and Bankman-Fried. “And it turned out to be even dumber than I imagined.“There was no mass movement to actually use crypto in the real world … from El Salvador to Switzerland to the Philippines, all I saw were scams, fraud, and half-baked schemes.”In September 2021, El Salvador made bitcoin legal tender, the first country to do so. The rightwing Heritage Foundation ranks the country’s economy the 114th most free. Freedom House, more mainstream, rates El Salvador partly free. It’s not a flattering ad for crypto.In the US, major advocates include Eric Adams, the mayor of New York; Robert Kennedy Jr, a conspiracy theorist and likely third-party presidential candidate; and Cynthia Lummis, the Wyoming Republican senator who opposed certifying Joe Biden’s 2020 win just hours after the attack on Congress.Such names should tell us something – as should Trump’s crypto holdings mentioned above. But anyone who still believes might also care to recall Trump’s earlier words.“Unregulated crypto assets can facilitate unlawful behavior, including drug trade and other illegal activity,” he tweeted, more than four years ago. “We have only one real currency in the USA … it is by far the most dominant currency anywhere in the world, and it will always stay that way. It is called the United States Dollar!”Strange as it seems to say it, the man had a point. More

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      in US Politics

      Trump, Bankman-Fried and Musk are the monsters of American capitalism | Robert Reich

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      Trump, Bankman-Fried and Musk are the monsters of American capitalismRobert ReichFor them, and for everyone who still regards them as heroes, there is no morality in business or economics. The winnings go to the most ruthless If this past week presents any single lesson, it’s the social costs of greed. Capitalism is premised on greed but also on guardrails – laws and norms – that prevent greed from becoming so excessive that it threatens the system as a whole.Yet the guardrails can’t hold when avarice becomes the defining trait of an era, as it is now. Laws and norms are no match for the possibility of raking in billions if you’re sufficiently ruthless and unprincipled.Donald Trump’s tax returns, just made public, reveal that he took bogus deductions to reduce his tax liability all the way to zero in 2020. All told, he reported $60m in losses during his presidency while continuing to pull in big money.Every other president since Nixon has released his tax returns. Trump told America he couldn’t because he was in the middle of an IRS audit. But we now learn that the IRS never got around to auditing Trump during his first two years in office, despite being required to do so by a law dating back to Watergate, stating that “individual tax returns for the president and the vice-president are subject to mandatory review”.Of course, Trump is already synonymous with greed and the aggressive violation of laws and norms in pursuit of money and power. Worse yet, when a president of the United States exemplifies – even celebrates – these traits, they leach out into society like underground poison.Meanwhile, this past week the SEC accused Sam Bankman-Fried of illicitly using customer money from FTX from the beginning to fund his crypto empire.“From the start, contrary to what FTX investors and trading customers were told, Bankman-Fried, actively supported by Defendants, continually diverted FTX customer funds … and then used those funds to continue to grow his empire, using billions of dollars to make undisclosed private venture investments, political contributions, and real estate purchases.”If the charge sticks, it represents one of the largest frauds in American history. Until recently, Bankman-Fried was considered a capitalist hero whose philanthropy was a model for aspiring billionaires (he and his business partner also donated generously to politicians).But like the IRS and Trump, the SEC can’t possibly remedy the social costs that Bankman-Fried has unleashed – not just losses to customers and investors but a deepening distrust and cynicism about the system as a whole, the implicit assumption that this is just what billionaires do, that the way to make a fortune is to blatantly disregard norms and laws, and that only chumps are mindful of the common good.Which brings us to Elon Musk, whose slash-and-burn maneuvers at Twitter might cause even the most rabid capitalist to wince. They also raise questions about Musk’s other endeavor, Tesla. Shares in the electric vehicle maker dropped by almost 9% on Thursday as analysts grew increasingly concerned about its fate. Not only is Musk neglecting the carmaker but he’s appropriating executive talent from Tesla to help him at Twitter. (Tesla stock is down over 64% year-to-date.)Musk has never been overly concerned about laws and norms (you’ll recall that he kept Tesla’s factory in Fremont, California, going during the pandemic even when public health authorities refused him permission to do so, resulting in a surge of Covid infections among workers). For him, it’s all about imposing his gargantuan will on others.Trump, Bankman-Fried and Musk are the monsters of American capitalism – as much products of this public-be-damned era as they are contributors to it. For them, and for everyone who still regards them as heroes, there is no morality in business or economics. The winnings go to the most ruthless. Principles are for sissies.But absent any moral code, greed is a public danger. Its poison cannot be contained by laws or accepted norms. Everyone is forced to guard against the next con (or else pull an even bigger con). Laws are broken whenever the gains from breaking them exceed the penalties (multiplied by the odds of getting caught). Social trust erodes.Adam Smith, the so-called father of modern capitalism, never called himself an economist. He called himself a “moral philosopher,” engaged in discovering the characteristics of a good society. He thought his best book was not The Wealth of Nations, the bible of modern capitalist apologists, but the Theory of Moral Sentiments, where he argued that the ethical basis of society lies in compassion for other human beings.Presumably Adam Smith would have bemoaned the growing inequalities, corruption, and cynicism spawned by modern capitalism and three of its prime exemplars – Trump, Bankman-Fried, and Musk.TopicsUS newsOpinionUS politicsUS taxationDonald TrumpSam Bankman-FriedFTXUS economycommentReuse this content More

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      in US Politics

      FTX seeks to claw back donations to politicians and charities

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      FTX seeks to claw back donations to politicians and charitiesCollapsed cryptocurrency exchange had reputation for corporate philanthropy to tune of hundreds of millions of dollars FTX, the collapsed cryptocurrency exchange founded by Sam Bankman-Fried, has started trying to claw back payments made by its former management to politicians, celebrities and charities, as it continues to progress through bankruptcy proceedings in the US.FTX “intends to commence actions before the bankruptcy court to require the return of such payments, with interest accruing from the date any action is commenced”, the company said, sharing an email address – FTXrepay@ftx.us – that recipients could use to voluntarily return money.“Recipients are cautioned that making a payment or donation to a third party (including a charity) in the amount of any payment received from a FTX contributor does not prevent the FTX debtors from seeking recovery from the recipient or any subsequent transferee,” FTX added in a statement.Bankman-Fried, other members of FTX leadership and a number of members of the FTX group all developed reputations for corporate philanthropy to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars.FTX billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried funneled dark money to RepublicansRead moreHe was one of the largest political donors in the United States, giving directly to Democratic politicians and to Republican causes. Other members of the FTX inner circle were also high-profile donors, such as Ryan Salame, the co-chief executive of FTX’s Bahamian subsidiary.As well as political causes, Bankman-Fried donated large sums to charities, endowing the FTX Foundation and FTX Future Fund to promote his interests.The FTX Foundation had given away $140m (£115m), the organisation reported in October, of which $90m had gone to the Future Fund.In criminal charges filed in the state of New York, the Department of Justice has alleged that the donations were the result of criminal money laundering, since the money was effectively taken from customer accounts.The charges also allege campaign finance violations, arguing that Bankman-Fried “and others known and unknown” broke donation limits by making contributions in the names of other people.Clawing back payments made to politicians and charities is likely to be one of the easier parts of the bankruptcy process.Under US law, payments or transfers made within 90 days of bankruptcy are presumed to be preferential if they result in a creditor getting more than it would have been entitled to at the end of the bankruptcy process, and a “clawback” can attempt to recover the difference in the payments.With FTX, which lost more than $8bn from customer withdrawals in a day less than a week before it declared bankruptcy, there could be billions of dollars that the court decides were distributed unfairly.Retail depositors, however, will be hoping that they aren’t treated as typical creditors. In FTX’s terms of service, the company said depositors didn’t hand over ownership of their deposits, which has led some creditors to argue that the crypto they placed in the exchange should not be used to pay the company’s bills.In another crypto bankruptcy, for BlockFi, a shadow bank that went bust after FTX, the court is now ruling on that question.BlockFi filed a motion on Monday with the New Jersey bankruptcy court arguing: “The BlockFi Wallet terms of service are clear. They provide that ‘title to the cryptocurrency held in your BlockFi Wallet shall at all times remain with you and shall not transfer to BlockFi.’“The debtors have no legal or equitable interest in cryptocurrency that was present in the Wallet accounts as of platform pause, and clients should be able to withdraw such assets from the platform if they choose.”As such, normal retail depositors should be able to withdraw their assets, the shadow bank said.TopicsSam Bankman-FriedFTXCryptocurrenciesE-commerceUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

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      in Elections

      Trump Sells $99 NFT Trading Cards of Himself, Confusing Allies

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      Money from sales of the digital trading cards, which depict the former president as characters like a superhero and a “Top Gun”-style fighter pilot, will go directly to him instead of his 2024 campaign.Donald J. Trump’s political opponents have long criticized him as something of a cartoon character. On Thursday, the former president made himself into one — but with the aim of turning a profit.In his first significant public move since opening his 2024 presidential campaign last month, Mr. Trump announced an online store to sell $99 digital trading cards of himself as a superhero, an astronaut, an Old West sheriff and a series of other fantastical figures. He made his pitch in a brief, direct-to-camera video in which he audaciously declared that his four years in the White House were “better than Lincoln, better than Washington.”The sale of the trading cards, which Mr. Trump had promoted a day earlier as a “major announcement” on his social media website, Truth Social, perplexed some of his advisers and drew criticism from some fellow conservatives.“Whoever told Trump to do this should be fired,” Keith and Kevin Hodge, two Trump supporters and stand-up comedians, posted on Twitter.“Man, when all Patriots are looking for is hope for the future of our country and Trump hypes everybody up with a ‘BIG ANNOUNCEMENT’ then drops a low-quality NFT collection video as the ‘announcement,’ it just pushes people away,” they said in another post.What to Know About Donald Trump TodayCard 1 of 6Donald J. Trump is running for president again, being investigated by a special counsel again and he’s back on Twitter. Here’s what to know about some of the latest developments involving the former president:Documents investigation. More