The New Yorker – May 13, 2019

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Buttigieg

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THESTREET


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aggie Siff walked onto the floor
of the New York Stock Exchange
eight minutes before the opening bell
one recent morning. The actress, who
is forty-four and has long, coffee-col-
ored hair and bangs, had a day off from
shooting the Showtime series “Billions,”
on which she plays Wendy Rhoades,
one of the show’s few female charac-
ters. Wendy is a corporate psychother-
apist for a hedge fund—kind of like a
life coach for capitalism—and she slinks
around the office in austere sheath
dresses. Siff had taken a cab to Wall
Street from Brooklyn, where she lives,
and she wore the uniform of a hip outer-
borough mom: black pants, ruffled
blouse, and slouchy black blazer. She
grew up in Riverdale, but this was her
first trip to the Stock Exchange.
A press representative for the ex-
change greeted her with the news that
Citigroup was celebrating International
Women’s Day by having one of its man-
aging directors ring the closing bell.
“Happy International Women’s Day,”
Siff said, as she was led through the
throng of traders awaiting the nine-
thirty opening bell. She asked how many
women were on the trading floor.
“Um, that’s a good question,” the
rep said, giggling nervously. “Between
the traders, the Stock Exchange per-
sonnel, the media, and the guests, there
can be scores of them.”
“But how many traders?” Siff pressed.
“I don’t know, exactly,” he said. “We’ve
had a few in and out.” He pushed on,
pointing up at the bell podium, where
Stacey Cunningham, the first woman
president of the N.Y.S.E., stood, in a
chestnut dress, leather jacket, and leop-
ard pumps.
“Did Stacey ever work on the floor?”
Siff asked. Before she got the answer,
the bell clanged, a few traders approached
her for selfies, and the crowd dispersed
to start making money. Cunningham
descended and held out her hand to
Siff. “I’m a big fan of the show—love

it, love it!” Cunningham said, in a husky
voice. “So, are you ready to start trad-
ing stocks?”
“Um...” Siff said.
“There were not that many women
on the floor when I started, in the late
nineties,” Cunningham told her. “But it
cuts both ways. You have a much higher
profile as a woman on the trading floor,
because you get some extra points for
wanting to be there.” She added, “But
there are still very few women on the
floor.” (Last year, there were two.)
A dark-haired woman in a red blazer
and a double strand of pearls with a
diamond Chanel clasp walked up. It
was Tracey Brophy Warson, from Citi-
group. She was the one who would be
ringing the day’s closing bell. “We are
the pioneers,” she said to Cunningham.

“You’ve been in finance for years,”
Cunningham said.
“It’s lonely,” Warson responded.
“Being in financial services, we have a
ways to go.”
Siff told them that she had been fol-
lowing the story of “Fearless Girl,” the
statue of a defiant young woman with
her hands on her hips, which State Street
Global Advisors had installed facing
Arturo Di Modica’s “Charging Bull”
sculpture at Bowling Green, to draw at-
tention to the dearth of women on cor-
porate boards. Di Modica had protested,
arguing that “Fearless Girl” changed the
context of his original work, and the
new statue was relocated, to just out-
side the Stock Exchange. Cunningham
lobbied to get it there. “I love it—she’s

at Oxford. “We had this sunroom with-
out heat that we called ‘the cold room,’”
Mutter, now a professor of geriatrics at
U.V.A., said, “where we ate and talked—
state of the world, state of politics, how
we could be agents of change.” Mutter
and another roommate tended to cook,
while Buttigieg was, in Mutter’s recol-
lection, “a key cleaner-upper.”
“There was a book on the shared toi-
let,” Farris, who is now the general coun-
sel at New Mexico’s Department of Fi-
nance & Administration, said, “called
‘Teach Yourself Norwegian.’” One day,
as the flatmates were walking along the
Thames, a young man wearing a soldier’s
coat with a Norwegian flag appeared.
“Peter stopped him,” Farris said, “and
they had a conversation while we politely
waited. I realized that Peter had taught
himself Norwegian on the toilet.”
On a trip to Malta, Buttigieg told
Farris a Maltese parable about a grand-
mother who’d spent her life in a small
village in Gozo, and, in her final years,
visited a church on the other end of the
island—five miles away. Farris recalled,
“She stares up at the rotunda, marvel-
ling, ‘Kemm hi kbira id-dinja,’” or “How
vast the world is.” He went on, “In Malta,
it’s a barbed joke at Gozo’s provincial-
ism. As a parable, it suggests that vast-
ness is relative, prioritizing wonder. As
a motto, it perfectly accords with Peter’s
intellectual openness and vast talent.”
When it came time to conclude his
studies, Buttigieg chose what Farris calls
his “North Sea-cargo-ship exam prepa-
ration.” Wilkinson said, “It’s one of those
mythic Oxford tales that’s actually true.
Pete boarded a cargo ship—shipping
goods across the ocean—to isolate him-
self before the multiple days of tests. I
just remember thinking, like, What? Who
does that?” Soon after, Buttigieg earned
a “first,” the highest grade. Then it was
on to a job at McKinsey.
In Spy, Sullivan predicted that a
Rhodie would never become President,
“because,” he wrote, “if you were presi-
dent, you could never hope to put any-
thing better on your résumé, and be-
cause that, to a Rhodes scholar, is tan-
tamount to death.” Five years later, a
notebook-carrying Rhodie from Arkan-
sas was sworn in. With Booker and But-
tigieg in the running, might Sullivan be
proven wrong once more?
—Charles Bethea

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Maggie Siff and Stacey Cunningham

Talk 05_13_19.L [Print]_9508479.indd 15 5/3/19 8:26 PM
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