Roosevelt Island Residents In the News, Young Playwright Chloe Hayat and Hedge Fund Magnate Coach Denise Shull

Roosevelt Island residents Chloe Hayat and Denise Shull were in the news this week.

Image of Chloe Hayat From Young Playwrites Inc.

Ms. Hayat was a winner of the 2013 National Playwriting Competition of Young Playwriting Inc which was:

... founded by Stephen Sondheim in 1981, Young Playwrights Inc. has been the only professional theater in the United States dedicated to identifying, developing, and promoting playwrights ages 18 and under....

Ms. Hayat was interviewed about her play, Electric Blues, which explores a man's time on Death Role. In the interview with Nick Gandiello of Young Playwrites, Ms Hayat explains the inspiration for Electric Blues:

... I had read Dead Man Walking for school over the summer before senior year. Then I wrote my final – I can’t remember what it was called! – public policy paper for my exit project in high school on the death penalty. And it is such a moving topic for me. I feel very passionately, obviously, against the subject. I wanted to find a way that an artist could change something about it. I thought that putting a face (to it) and making this issue human could really bring more light to the topic than numbers and facts. So, Trigg, my main character, is my human face to such a horrible, controversial topic...

Click here for the entire interview with Ms. Hayat including information on how you can attend a reading of Electric Blues and other 2013 Young Playwrites winners in January 2014.

Ms. Shull was interviewed by the NY Times

Image of Ms. Shull From Michael Kirby Smith for The New York Times

for a story on:

... a whole new cottage industry has cropped up in which statisticians track performance data, and coaches and psychiatrists work to help hedge fund managers make smarter decisions by getting them to talk about their personal histories and biases....

According to the NY Times:

... “Our baggage affects how we perform,” Ms. Shull said. “If you become conscious of that, you can make a change.”

One of Ms. Shull’s recent clients runs the trading desk at a major overseas bank and sought help because he was frustrated that he could never bring himself to make bold trades. Together, they traced his lack of appetite for risk back to a conservative mother. Ms. Shull said that this revelation made her client feel more emboldened, at least initially, to make bigger bets....

Click here for the entire NY Times article.

More on Ms. Shull's theory of future regret and her book  Market Mind Games: A Radical New Psychology of Investing, Trading and Risk from previous post.

Another Roosevelt Island resident in the news recently is Carl Weisbrod. He was appointed last week as  Co-Chair of Mayor Elect DeBlasio's Transition Team.