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[Not single-page] Facebook staffers once told Mark Zuckerberg he needed to take “CEO lessons.” How Zuckerberg responded, and what it means for Facebook leading up to its IPO:

‘Basically, there are two ways to build an organization,’ a former Facebook employee explains. ‘You can be really, really good at hiring, or you can be really, really good at firing.’ Zuckerberg has been really good at firing. ‘We made some hires that weren’t the right ones. And we were pretty good at correcting that quickly. Mark deserves the credit for identifying and following through with that.’ In other cases, key personnel who were good fits simply got outgrown by the company. It can be even harder to jettison those kinds of employees, whose contributions have earned them the loyalty of business partners and colleagues. But here too Zuckerberg did not flinch.

“The Maturation of the Billionaire Boy-Man.” — Henry Blodget, New York magazine

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A new book explains how “social jet lag” is interfering with our internal clocks:

Modern human beings are not much like mimosas. It’s true that both have biological clocks, but only one of us has culture. And culture, delightful as it is, turns out to radically complicate—“fuck up” would not be an overstatement—our relationship to time.

Among species, we humans are to time what Polish villagers have long been to place: unhappy subjects of multiple competing regimes. The first regime is internal time: the schedule established by our bodies. The second is sun time: the schedule established by light and darkness. These two we share with houseplants and virtually every other living being. But we are also governed by a third regime: social time. That sounds benign enough, like afternoon tea with a friend. But don’t be fooled. Social time is the villain in this drama, out to turn you against health, happiness, nature, sanity, even your own inner self.

“Cuckoo.” — Kathryn Schulz, New York magazine

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American Airlines once sold a lifetime pass for unlimited first-class travel. They soon regretted it:

In September 2007, a pricing analyst reviewing international routes focused the airline’s attention on how much the AAirpass program was costing, company emails show.

‘We pay the taxes,’ a revenue management executive wrote in a subsequent email. ‘We award AAdvantage miles, and we lose the seat every time they fly.’

Cade was assigned to find out whether any AAirpass holders were violating the rules, starting with those who flew the most.

She pulled years of flight records for Rothstein and Vroom and calculated that each was costing American more than $1 million a year.

“The Frequent Fliers Who Flew Too Much.” — Ken Bensinger, Los Angeles Times

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[Fiction] A sisters’ weekend and an unexpected encounter bring back memories:

When Trisha comes to town we have to go out. She’s the bitterest soccer mom of all time and as part of her escape from home she wants to get drunk and complain about her workaholic husband and over-scheduled, ungrateful children. No one appreciates how much she does for them. All she does is give, give, give, without getting anything back, et cetera. I don’t really mind—I enjoy a good martini, and while Trisha rants I don’t have to worry about getting sloppy, given that she’s always sloppier—except that even her complaints are part boast. She has to mention her busy husband and the two hundred thousand he rakes in a year. Her children’s after-school activities for the gifted are just so freaking expensive and time-consuming. There’s a needle in every one of these remarks, pricking at my skin, saying See, Sherri? See?

“Casino.” — Alix Ohlin, Guernica

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Edward Conard is Mitt Romney’s former partner at Bain, and he’s not afraid to have an honest conversation about wealth: 

A central problem with the U.S. economy, he told me, is finding a way to get more people to look for solutions despite these terrible odds of success. Conard’s solution is simple. Society benefits if the successful risk takers get a lot of money. For proof, he looks to the market. At a nearby table we saw three young people with plaid shirts and floppy hair. For all we know, they may have been plotting the next generation’s Twitter, but Conard felt sure they were merely lounging on the sidelines. ‘What are they doing, sitting here, having a coffee at 2:30?’ he asked. ‘I’m sure those guys are college-educated.’

“The Purpose of Spectacular Wealth, According to a Spectacularly Wealthy Guy.” — Adam Davidson, New York Times

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Top 5 #Longreads of the Week: GQ, The New Yorker, Inc. Magazine, The Classical, New York Magazine, #fiction from Guernica, plus a guest pick from Largehearted Boy’s David Gutowski.

[Not single-page] Reliving the “Carrington Event,” a solar storm that disrupted the U.S. telegraph system and lit up the sky in late August 1859:

The night of Carrington’s discovery, the electrical hurricane that had swept the globe peaked. The Great Auroral Storm had actually begun several days earlier with a similar incident on August 28, but it was Carrington and another astronomer, Richard Hodgson, who identified one of the solar flares that enveloped the earth in a week-long magnetic maelstrom. Because of their work, the episode was dubbed the ‘Carrington Event,’ and it consumed the world’s attention for the week.

In New York City, San Francisco, Boston, and Chicago, thousands of sky gazers wandered about the midnight streets, astounded at what they could see. ‘Crowds of people gathered at the street corners, admiring and commenting upon the singular spectacle,’ observed the New Orleans Daily Picayune. When the September 1 aurora ‘was at its greatest brilliancy, the northern heavens were perfectly illuminated,’ wrote a reporter for The New York Times.

“1859’s ‘Great Auroral Storm’—The Week the Sun Touched the Earth.” — Matthew Lasar, Ars Technica

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On the 25th anniversary of “Licensed to Ill,” an oral history of the birth of the Beastie Boys.

Then we were like, ‘Oh, shit, we should get a D.J.! Like rap groups. They have a D.J.!’ Nick Cooper knew about this guy Rick Rubin who went to NYU and would throw parties and had turntables. And a bubble machine. We were like, ‘If we had a fucking D.J. and a fucking bubble machine, we’d be fucking killing it.’

“Rude Boys.” — Amos Barshad, New York magazine, April 24, 2011

The rapper from Odd Future, whose disappearance became a pop music mystery, speaks out on where he went: Coral Reef Academy, a therapeutic retreat for at-risk boys in Vaitele, outside of the Samoan capital of Apia:

As Odd Future became more popular, though, his absence was harder to ignore. While Ms. Harris remained largely silent, ‘Free Earl’ became a slogan, a hashtag, a mantra. Odd Future fans began to see her as an antagonist. At one point a threatening note was left on her door.

‘I could have never imagined in my wildest dreams that this decision to send him away to a school that had the kind of support for his emotional well-being that he needed would turn into a story about locking him away,’ she said. To explain her son’s absence, she added, ‘I would’ve had to have talked about his personal life in a way that I think would’ve been really unfair.’

“Earl Sweatshirt Is Back from the Wilderness.” — Jon Caramanica, New York Times

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Excerpt from Maraniss’s new biography of the president. A look at Obama’s early twenties in New York, from the perspective of his girlfriend at the time:

Genevieve was out of her mother’s Upper East Side apartment by then. Earlier that spring she had moved and was sharing the top floor of a brownstone at 640 Second Street in Park Slope. The routine with Barack was now back and forth, mostly his place, sometimes hers. When she told him that she loved him, his response was not ‘I love you, too’ but ‘thank you’—as though he appreciated that someone loved him. The relationship still existed in its own little private world. They spent time cooking. Barack loved to make a ginger beef dish that he had picked up from his friend Sohale Siddiqi. He was also big on tuna-fish sandwiches made the way his grandfather had taught him, with finely chopped dill pickles. For a present, Genevieve bought him an early edition of The Joy of Cooking. They read books together and talked about what they had read. For a time they concentrated on black literature, the writers Maya Angelou, Toni Morrison, Toni Cade Bambara, and Ntozake Shange.

“Young Barack Obama in Love.” — David Maraniss, Vanity Fair

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