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How Bloomberg Stayed Involved with His Company While Still Being Mayor

“Officially the company was Doctoroff’s to run. Mike agreed with a city ethics board that he’d have no involvement in Bloomberg’s day-to-day operations, limiting his input to major decisions that ‘significantly’ affect his ownership stake. ‘I’ve recused myself from anything to do with the company,’ Mike said at a press conference in November.

“In truth, Mike was considerably more involved than that statement would suggest. He monitored the business from his Bloomberg terminal at City Hall and, as noted, spoke to Doctoroff every week. On occasion—including twice in one week as New York grappled with a blizzard dubbed ‘snowpocalypse’ in February 2010—Mike turned up at Bloomberg headquarters after-hours for meetings. (One of those sessions, during the blizzard week, concerned a redesign of Bloomberg’s website.) In other cases, he was briefed down at City Hall. Mike stayed on top of what was happening at his company, but he didn’t want to act as the decider after he left. And so a series of internal struggles played out, with Bloomberg playing only an occasional, oblique role.”

Peter Elkind, in Fortune Magazine (subscription required), on the internal company battles over the future of Bloomberg News. Read more on Bloomberg.

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Photo: Wikimedia Commons

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Longreads Best of 2013: The Best Sentence I Read This Year

Catherine Cloutier is an online producer at The Boston Globe’s Boston.com.

“Life, Feinberg says, guarantees misfortune. The wolf is always at the door.”

James Oliphant’s profile of Ken Feinberg in the National Journal transformed the way I view our nation’s response to tragedy. The monetary value of a life lost to violence is rarely equal. In highly publicized events, such as the school shooting in Newtown, Conn., or the Boston Marathon bombings, private donations flood victims and their families, while victims of inner-city gang violence often do not receive enough compensation to pay for a funeral. Feinberg tries not to ponder this inequity when distributing victim compensation. He looks at the numbers, determines a method of distribution, and gets the checks out quickly. He has a job to do. It’s math, not emotion. For one week and much of the many that followed, my life and job revolved around the coverage of one of these tragedies. Reading this article, particularly lines like the one I featured, gave me perspective on that event in light of other tragedies in our country. Violence and death are constants; what’s not constant is the attention given to them.

How Much Is a Life Worth?)

James Oliphant | National Journal | August 2013 | 18 minutes (4,405 words)

Read more stories from Longreads Best of 2013

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Tupac Shakur and the Origins of Thug Life

“My mother was a woman, a black woman, a single mother raising two kids on her own. She was dark-skinned, had short hair, got no love from nobody except for a group called the Black Panthers.

“I don’t consider myself to be straight militant. I’m a thug, and my definition of thug comes from half of the street element and half of the Panther element, half of the independence movement. Saying we want self-determination. We want to do it by self-defense and by any means necessary. That came from my family and that’s what thug life is. It’s a mixture.”

Tupac Shakur, in a 1994 interview with Entertainment Weekly, resurfaced by Blank on Blank. Read more on Tupac.

Longreads Best of 2013: My Favorite Stories About Taxes (and Twist-Ties)

Photo: 59937401@N07, Flickr

Atossa Araxia Abrahamian is a writer and an editor.

Taxes aren’t boring—they’re just supremely difficult to write about in a compelling way. These three stories stand out because they illustrate the far-reaching consequences of different countries’ tax policies through a few very influential people:

1. “Marty Sullivan figured out how the world’s biggest companies avoided billions in taxes. Here’s how he wants to stop them” (Steven Pearlstein, Washington Post, 2013)

In his affectionate profile of tax expert Marty Sullivan, Steven Pearlstein breaks down everything that’s wrong about the US tax code in Sullivan’s nonpartisan, almost technocratic view—and goes on to explain why politics make it so hard to alter, let alone fix, the system. Not exactly action-movie material, but it’s handled so deftly that I couldn’t put it down.

2. “A Tale of Two Londons” (Nicholas Shaxson, Vanity Fair, 2013)

In Vanity Fair, longtime tax writer Nicholas Shaxson shows how the City of London became a hub for tax-free global capital through the story of One Hyde Park, the world’s most expensive residential building, its fabulously wealthy and faceless owners, and the offshore accounts they used to buy and register the properties anonymously.

3. “Man Making Ireland Tax Avoidance Hub Proves Local Hero” (Jesse Drucker, Bloomberg, 2013)

Finally, Bloomberg’s Jesse Drucker profiles Feargal O’Rourke, the man who helped transform Ireland into a “hub for tax avoidance” for multinationals like Apple and Facebook. Drucker withholds judgment (this is Bloomberg, headline and all) but O’Rourke’s mercenary wiles shine through a few well-chosen anecdotes. Choice quote, on Breaking Bad: “I don’t know what it says that we can be rooting for a guy on the dark side of the law.”

Bonus Pick: Most Fascinating Thing I Learned from a Story This Year

Twist-Ties vs. Plastic Clips: Tiny Titans Battle for the Bakery Aisle” (Paul Lukas, Bloomberg Businessweek, 2013)

My favorite business stories are the ones that reveal how much time, energy and thought goes into seemingly mundane consumer goods. This Businessweek article about the ‘bakery bag closure and reclosure market’ is a great example of that. Did you know bag closures generate about $10 million in sales per year? That studies have failed to resolve whether consumers prefer clips or twist-ties? And that there are people whose job it is to sell commercial bakeries on the virtues of these objects? All of this makes perfect sense, of course (hi, capitalism!) but it takes a story like this one to get you thinking.

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College Longreads Pick: 'A Canine in a Cummerbund,' Peter Kaplan (1977)

Every week, Syracuse University professor Aileen Gallagher helps Longreads highlight the best of college journalism. Here’s this week’s pick:

The New York media world grieves for editor Peter Kaplan, who died last week. Kaplan worked at several publications during his career, and he’s best known as the longtime editor of the New York Observer, but The Harvard Crimson’s archives also contain 29 of Kaplan’s student bylines, mostly reviews. One, about a 1977 Hasty Pudding production, has the seeds of the voice Kaplan would perfect at the Observer: “So much confidence in the sameness of the future do the Pudding participants have that, more interested in the project than the theater, they can put on this elaborate celebration of the way things are, were and will be.” Kaplan’s voice, bequeathed to a generation of writers, became the root editorial language of the Internet. His influence spread across platforms and mastheads across the city.

A Canine in a Cummerbund

Peter Kaplan | The Harvard Crimson | February 28, 1977 | 7 minutes (1,542 words)

Professors and students: Share your favorite stories by tagging them with #college #longreads on Twitter, or email links to aileen@longreads.com.


Photo: Wikimedia Commons

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Longreads Best of 2013: Favorite New Writer Discovery

Above: Thomas “TJ” Webster Jr.

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Ross Andersen is a Senior Editor at Aeon Magazine. He has written extensively about science and philosophy for several publications, including The Atlantic and The Economist.

“Flinder Boyd’s piece about an aspirational streetballer and his cross-country trip to New York’s legendary Rucker Park had me from the very first word. The story is about basketball, a minor obsession of mine, but it’s also about poverty and the kinds of dreams it nurtures. Boyd gives us an unflinching portrait of his subject, an underskilled, overconfident young ballplayer from Sacramento without ever stripping him of his dignity as a human being. I read it twice, straight through.”

20 Minutes At Rucker Park

Flinder Boyd | SB Nation | October 2013 | 31 minutes (7,805 words)

More stories from Boyd in the Longreads Archive

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How To Get Your Own False Confession

“If you decide the suspect is lying, you leave the room and wait for five minutes. Then you return with an official-looking folder. ‘I have in this folder the results of our investigation,’ you say. You remain standing to establish your dominance. ‘After reviewing our results, we have no doubt that you committed the crime. Now, let’s sit down and see what we can do to work this out.’”

“The next phase—Interrogation—involves prodding the suspect toward confession. Whereas before you listened, now you do all the talking. If the suspect denies the accusation, you bat it away. ‘There’s absolutely no doubt this happened,’ you say. ‘Now let’s move forward and see what we can do.’ If he asks to see the folder, you say no. ‘There’ll be time for that later. Now let’s focus on clearing this whole thing up.’

“‘Never allow them to give you denials,’ Senese told us. ‘The key is to shut them up.’”

Douglas Starr, in The New Yorker, on how police have traditionally used The Reid Technique to get confessions—some of which have later turned out to be false.

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Photo: boelaars, Flickr

Longreads Best of 2013: The Most Surprising Piece of Cultural Criticism of the Year

Elizabeth Hyde Stevens is author of the book Make Art Make Money: Lessons from Jim Henson on Fueling Your Creative Career.

“I was shocked that Todd VanDerWerff was able to write such a serious essay about the show DuckTales. As a kid, I saw every episode, and didn’t think much about why it was good, or who made it. This essay looks at why Frank Wells and Michael Eisner pumped so much money into the series, and why, sadly, such an expenditure would never happen today.

“Since my own work examines the behind-the-scenes money at play behind the Muppets and Sesame Street, reading this essay on AV Club was like discovering a kindred spirit. I think it takes a lot of courage to seriously exhume and explore the loves of your youth with the wary eyes of an adult. It seems to me like the most mature thing you could do with your time, but most people will dismiss it as kids stuff. But if you care about good art, I think it’s important to know how artists of the past funded their work and got it past the naysaying accountants, executives, and boardrooms. This kind of thing just fascinates me, so finding this article was such a delight!”

DuckTales Invented a New Animated Wonderland—That Quickly Disappeared

Todd VanDerWerff | The AV Club | February 2013 | 9 minutes (2,159 words)

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The Missing Stories of Slavery

“There are many more narratives to tell about slavery. It’s such a rich subject. It’s like the Civil War, it’s like the Second World War. … I’m happy that they want to [remake Roots] but I think there’s much more—we’ve heard that story already, we don’t have to rehash it. There’s not been a film about the Underground Railroad, I mean it’s amazing—the story, it’s amazing.”

Steve McQueen, director of 12 Years a Slave, on KCRW’s The Treatment on the still untold stories of slavery. Read more on slavery.

(h/t @contextual_life)

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A Question for Storytellers

“I want a good story, but I want it to be told for a reason. Is affirmation that the storyteller exists a good enough reason for the story to be told? Sometimes. Some stories aren’t told as often as others. I’m not saying there is a hierarchy of suitable topics for essays. Not everything should be about death or hunger or, you know, celebrity diets. But it’s really the frequent lack of quality in the story itself that bothers me, especially when it’s done for a price. Then I wonder what the fuck is going on. Then I ask myself why and what and why again, over and over. Then I feel like no one is asking why they are telling their stories. It seems like the only answer to that question is: so that I can be heard.”

Jen Vafidis, in a short post for Vol. 1 Brooklyn, on the question of why we tell stories. Read more on writing.

(h/t @legalnomads)

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Photo: catnipstudio, Flickr

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