On Top of the World
Today marks the celebration of the 110th birthday of Tenzing Norgay, the Nepali-Indian mountaineer who on May 29, 1953, became the first person (along with Edmund Hillary) to set foot on the summit of Mount Everest. The legendary mountain—known as “Goddess Mother of the World” in Tibetan and “Peak of Heaven” in Sanskrit—boasts the world’s highest peak, at 29,032 feet (8,849 meters), and had claimed at least 14 lives in the years before Norgay and Hillary reached the top.
The History of Explorations on Mount Everest
© Arsgera—iStock/Getty Images
Cheating Death on Mount Everest
Pemba Dorje Sherpa—AFP/STR/Getty Images
The Life of Legendary Climber Tenzing Norgay
UPI/Bettmann Archive
Test Your Knowledge
Hello, Kitty!
Shares of GameStop surged this week after investor Keith Gill, known as Roaring Kitty on X (formerly Twitter), resurfaced after nearly three years to post a sketch of a game player leaning forward—a meme used by gamers to suggest things are getting serious. The post reignited interest in GameStop, driving shares up 74% on Monday.
Upending short selling
Back in 2021, GameStop was fighting for survival when Gill began posting favorable opinions of the video game retailer on Twitter and Reddit, driving the price higher and creating a phenomenon known as meme stocks. Gill and his followers also bought thousands of shares of the company. The price surged, but big Wall Street hedge funds were betting against GameStop, shorting the stock—selling borrowed shares with the expectation of buying them later at a lower price—assuming that it would continue downward.
The big squeeze
Gill’s efforts, which some likened to a fight between David (small investors) and Goliath (big hedge funds), helped push shares of the beleaguered retailer up more than 1,000% and drove up prices on other meme stocks, such as movie theater operator AMC Entertainment and smartphone maker BlackBerry. The upward push in stock values put the big hedge funds in an awkward position. With shares rising rapidly, hedge funds had to rush to buy shares to offset further losses—a predicament known as a short squeeze.
Defining meme stocks
In contrast to fundamental analysis (evaluating a stock’s value based on financial and economic factors that show investors what’s driving a company’s long-term profitability), meme stocks are driven by chatter on social media sites such as X, Instagram, and Facebook. And just as memes are often driven by nothing more than the musings of a social media influencer, so are jumps in the prices of meme stocks. In other words, there’s no “there” there—only volatility.
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The political history of the term “Asian American”
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