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The Buried Lede in Christie Smythe’s Romantic Connection with Martin Shkreli
There’s a story of intimacy amid American social undercurrents and business culture, and how they pertain to the way we discuss women’s life choices.
There was a time on the Internet when you couldn’t escape hearing about “pharma bro” Martin Shkreli, most infamous for hiking the price of AIDS drug Daraprim to an obscene level. A rich young edgelord who was prime fodder for hate-tweets and thinkpieces, he became a cautionary tale in the hubris of wealth upon receiving a prison sentence for scamming investors in a hedge fund he ran, after such antics as buying a Wu-Tang Clan album no one else could listen to and trying to buy access to Bernie Sanders’ 2016 campaign (which then donated his contribution to a charity for people with AIDS). But the real lesson Shkreli served up was that unchecked avarice only yields consequences if you screw over other rich people, and Bernie Madoff already proved that a decade prior.
A ceaseless parade of Trumpian dumpster fires dominating the media in the ensuing years began, as did a parallel procession of “main characters” on Twitter who you never want to be. Once Shkreli’s trial concluded and his sentence commenced, denizens of the Internet pretty much moved…