What the “protesters” had come up against was the Active Denial System, a weapon, we were told, that “could change the rules of war and save huge numbers of lives in Iraq.” Active denial works like a giant, open-air microwave oven, using a beam of electromagnetic radiation to heat the skin of its targets to […]
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Posted inBooks, Nonfiction, Quotes
‘The Rise of the Warrior Cop’
Sal Culosi is dead because he bet on a football game — but it wasn’t a bookie or a loan shark who killed him. His local government killed him, ostensibly to protect him from his gambling habit. Several months earlier at a local bar, Fairfax County, Virginia, detective David Baucum overheard the thirty-eight-year-old optometrist and […]
Posted inMember Pick, Nonfiction, Profiles & Interviews
The Believer Interview: Ice Cube
Linda Saetre | The Believer | 2004 | 26 minutes (6,574 words) The below interview is excerpted from The Believer’s new book, Confidence, or the Appearance of Confidence: The Best of the Believer Music Interviews. Thanks to The Believer for sharing this with the Longreads community. * * * ‘Music Is a Mirror of What […]
Posted inMember Pick, Nonfiction, Profiles & Interviews, Story
The Believer Interview: Ice Cube
Linda Saetre | The Believer | 2004 | 26 minutes (6,574 words) The below interview is excerpted from The Believer’s new book, Confidence, or the Appearance of Confidence: The Best of the Believer Music Interviews. Thanks to The Believer for sharing this with the Longreads community. * * * ‘Music Is a Mirror of What […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
Joyce Wadler’s Throwback Thursday
If you missed knowing me when I was 26, Throwback Thursday gives you the chance to see me in my physical prime, which I know is very important to you, particularly those 3,426 Facebook Friends who did not know me then. Or now, actually. What, another Throwback Thursday already? O.K., here is a picture of […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
The Founder of Flickr and Slack on the Psychological Torture of Selling Too Early
Stewart readily admits he sold Flickr too early. “If we had waited six months we would have made much more money. If we had waited a year we would have made 10 times more money,” he says. He regrets it now. But at the time, after the dotcom crash, the Nasdaq plummet, and September 11, […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
What It Was Like to Hear Nina Simone Live
Nina Simone’s explosiveness was well known. In concert, she was quick to call out anyone she noticed talking, to stop and glare or hurl a few insults or even leave the stage. Yet her performances, richly improvised, were also confidingly intimate—she needed the connection with her audience—and often riveting. Even in her best years, Simone […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
What Does ‘Shareholder Value’ Really Mean?
James Post and others argue that a well-run company can—and should—be managed in a way that benefits not just the investors who own its stock, but a wide range of constituents. As opposed to “shareholders,” they call these people “stakeholders”: a group that includes employees, customers, suppliers, and creditors, as well as the broader community […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
The Painful Business of Running a Franchise
It’s not just the workers who get a lousy deal. Over the years, Bob Baber, the Quiznos franchisee, became increasingly frustrated by the terms of his contract. One of the issues that galled him the most was that Quiznos was allowed to (and did) place additional sub shops in his franchise area, creating what he […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
‘The Artist’s Memory Is a Dangerous, Necessary Thing’
Memory is your greatest ally and your primary source material, because memory is your body as it was in the world and the world as it was and will be; memory is the people you have loved or wanted to love in the world, and what are we if not bodies filled with reminiscences about […]