The Longreads Blog

One Question for Microsoft's Next CEO

OM: The challenge for Microsoft comes down to: you’ve got developers, you’ve got cloud, you’ve got the legacy, the enterprise relationships, those things you got right. You’ve got old legacy products which people like to use however there is a little bit of challenge when it comes to the new world. Look at the world where people are spending money on applications, devices, other way of thinking. We don’t have a Microsoft product in our company now, which is unimaginable five years ago and I think that’s the challenge you have.

SN: I thought you had an Xbox in your lounge?

Om Malik, in a conversation with Microsoft’s Satya Nadella, who’s now the reported frontrunner to become CEO. Read more on Microsoft in the Longreads Archive.

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Photo: Flickr

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The Truth About What Goes On at the 'SNL' After-Party

“If you had a good show you’re on cloud nine,” said Jon Lovitz, who had a lot of them in the mid–1980s. On the other hand, Mr. Lovitz recalled the forlorn night when he had appeared in only one sketch, and was sitting at the party with Phil Hartman, Dana Carvey and Mike Myers.

“It feels like your career’s over,” Mr. Lovitz said. “Honestly, they call it the after-party. In my mind, I only know one time when it actually felt like a party.” (That was in 1990, he said, when Technotronic played their hit “Pump Up the Jam” there.)

Paul Brownfield, in The New York Times, investigating Saturday Night Live’s legendary after-party—and whether it’s actually fun. Read more on SNL in the Longreads Archive, or check out the Live from New York oral history.

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Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle and Readmill users, you can also get them as a Readlist.

Sign up to receive this list free every Friday in your inbox.

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The Business of Merchandising Pop Music

Brian Epstein was the manager of a family-owned business called North End Music Stores in Liverpool, England. He began hearing a lot about a new group called The Beatles, who were playing at the Cavern Club. So he went to hear them, and one day, proposed a management contract.

The four lads, which included drummer Pete Best at the time, eventually agreed, and a five-year deal was signed in 1962. With that, Epstein created a company called NEMS to manage The Beatles. As the band became popular in England, NEMS began to be overwhelmed with product licensing offers.

But once the band hit America, NEMS became besieged with merchandising requests, so Epstein reluctantly set up a subsidiary called Seltaeb to deal with the offers. Seltaeb was Beatles spelled backwards.

As Epstein saw it, the merchandising was just a PR abstraction at best, so he asked a friend to take the management of Seltaeb off his hands. That friend, Nicky Byrne, suggested a 90/10 split, which, by the way, was 90% for Byrne, 10% for The Beatles.

Epstein agreed immediately, thinking that 10% of incidental merchandising was better than nothing. And in the stroke of the pen, lost untold millions for The Beatles.

CBC Radio’s Under the Influence podcast, on the marketing of rock ‘n’ roll. See more podcast picks.

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Photo: moonierocks, Flickr

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A Think Piece About Think Pieces

Always pick sides! Team Aniston!! The internet demands it, even if it’s only half-thoughts it wants, thoughts like, “This, just this” or “This is everything.” “This” is not a sentence. Nor is “Best. Thing. Ever.” Nor “!!!!” But worse than inchoate enthusiasm is the “think piece” at the other end of the spectrum, a form of recreational sophistry usually in the service of some bullshit. Was Proust a Urologist? Girls, Not Bloomberg, Evicted Zuccotti Park. Does Breathing Make You Smarter? What Breaking Bad  Teaches Us About Building Brands. What Breaking Bad Teaches Us About the War on Drugs. What Breaking Bad Teaches Us About Toxic Relationships. (Those last three are real.) It makes you appreciate the listicle’s honest hypoambition; it’s the true slacker of internet forms. “13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” is a good listicle. It announces up front how little of your time it will waste.

We assert our right to not care about stuff, to not say anything, to opt out of debate over things that are silly and also things that are serious—because why pretend to have a strong opinion when we do not? Why are we being asked to participate in some imaginary game of Risk where we have to take a side? We welcome the re-emergence of politics in the wake of the financial crash, the restoration of sincerity as a legitimate adult posture. But already we see this new political sincerity morphing into a set of consumer values, up for easy exploitation. We are all cosmopolitans online, attentive to everything; but the internet is not one big General Assembly, and the controversies planted in establishment newspapers aren’t always the sort of problems that require the patient attention of a working group. Some opinions deserve radical stack (like #solidarityisforwhitewomen), but the glorified publicity stunts that dress up in opinion’s clothes to get viral distribution in the form of “debate” (Open Letters to Miley Cyrus) do not. We ought to be selective about who deserves our good faith. Some people duke it out to solve problems. Others pick fights for the spectacle, knowing we’ll stick around to watch. In the meantime they’ll sell us refreshments, as we loiter on the sideline, waiting to see which troll will out-troll his troll.

The Editors of n+1 on Internet rage, American rage, and Constitutional rights. Read more from n+1.

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What It’s Like to Grow Up Gay in Russia

Edited by Masha Gessen and Joseph Huff-Hannon | OR Books | February 2014 | 11 minutes (2,575 words)

 

Download as a .mobi ebook (Kindle)

Download as an .epub ebook (iBooks)

 

This week we are proud to feature a chapter from Gay Propaganda, a collection of original stories, interviews and testimonials from LGBT Russians both living there and in exile. The book was edited by Masha Gessen and Joseph Huff-Hannon, and will be published by OR Books in February. We’d like to thank them for sharing this chapter with Longreads Members. 

 

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TATIANA ERMAKOVA

“I had a career in Russia, a nice apartment, friends, family. 

I sacrificed all that to be with Ana.”

I was born and grew up in Saratov, Russia. It’s a provincial town, built on a mix of old-fashioned Orthodox Christian values (which condemned homosexuality as a sin) and Soviet beliefs (when most people thought that homosexuality didn’t exist in the Soviet Society at all).

Both of my parents worked, and I was on my own a lot. I was a good kid, though. I did my homework, stayed home, and didn’t get into trouble. I was also shy and sometimes had a hard time socializing. My father was a history professor at the university, and my mom worked for a non-profit organization. Read more…

Facebook's Real Names Problem

One thing about some of the new apps that will come as a shock to anyone familiar with Facebook: Users will be able to log in anonymously. That’s a big change for Zuckerberg, who once told David Kirkpatrick, author of The Facebook Effect, that “having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity.”

At the time of Facebook’s founding, there was no such thing as real identity online. Facebook became the first place where people met one another as themselves, and the company was stubborn about asking users to sign in and share material with their own names. A Facebook account became a sort of passport to the rest of the Web, and with its success came new problems. No teenager wants to share insane party pics with a group of friends that may include his or her parents and teachers. And dissidents in parts of the world where speaking freely can be incriminating avoided the service in favor of alternatives such as Twitter, where real names are optional.

Former Facebook employees say identity and anonymity have always been topics of heated debate in the company. Now Zuckerberg seems eager to relax his old orthodoxies. “I don’t know if the balance has swung too far, but I definitely think we’re at the point where we don’t need to keep on only doing real identity things,” he says. “If you’re always under the pressure of real identity, I think that is somewhat of a burden.” Paper will still require a Facebook login, but Zuckerberg says the new apps might be like Instagram, which doesn’t require users to log in with Facebook credentials or share pictures with friends on the social network. “It’s definitely, I think, a little bit more balanced now 10 years later,” he says. “I think that’s good.”

Brad Stone and Sarah Frier, in Bloomberg Businessweek, on the challenges for Facebook on its 10th anniversary. Read more about Facebook in the Longreads Archive.

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Five Stories About Sports for People Who Hate Sports

OK, “hate” is too strong a word. But I fundamentally do not get sports. Playing them, yes, fine. But knowing players’ names, arguing that this one guy is better than that other guy, keeping a little Excel sheet of strikes and yards and rebounds in my head? Baffling.

But that doesn’t mean, as it turns out, that stories about sports can’t be fascinating. The economics! The moral gray areas! The egos! It’s like a reality show in there.

I’m not going to start watching sports anytime soon, but thanks to these stories, I’m starting to see why other people do.

Does Football Have A Future? The N.F.L. and The Concussion Crisis

Ben McGrath | The New Yorker | Jan. 31, 2011

This story has moved on quite a bit since 2011—there is now a book, a movie and something called The Concussion Blog—but McGrath’s story is a good primer on the issue of football players suffering severe mental damage in old age, and foreshadows both the huge pressure on the NFL and its head-in-the-sand response.

Read more…

The Death of the FCC Indecency Complaint

As society has reached a consensus that there’s no way to control everything children see, the number of indecency complaints has decreased significantly. When Miley Cyrus twerked at the Video Music Awards last summer, the FCC received only 161 complaints (of course, as a cable channel, MTV doesn’t answer to the commission anyway). The moment became fodder for celebrity bloggers and morning show chatterboxes but was never treated as a problem that needed to be legislated away. The PTC dutifully issued a statement denouncing MTV for “sexually exploiting young women,” but no national outcry resulted. Perhaps not coincidentally, CBS never actually paid a fine in connection with Nipplegate—an appeals court ruled in 2008 and again in 2011 that CBS could not be held liable for the actions of contracted performing artists and that the FCC had acted arbitrarily in enforcing indecency policies. The Supreme Court declined to hear the case in 2012.

So for [former Chairman of the FCC Michael] Powell, the halftime show represents “the last great moment” of a TV broadcast becoming a national controversy—the last primal scream of a public marching inexorably toward a new digital existence: “It might have been essentially the last gasp. Maybe that was why there was so much energy around it. The Internet was coming into being, it was intensifying. People wanted one last stand at the wall. It was going to break anyway. I think it broke.

“Is that all good? Probably not, but it’s not changeable either. We live in a new world, and that’s the way it is.

“They said the same thing when books became printed, right? They said it was the end of the world.

“But it wasn’t.”

Marin Cogan in ESPN Magazine (2014) on how the halftime show of Super Bowl XXXVIII changed live television and American audiences.

Read the story

A Brief History of Class and Waste in India

Rose George | The Big Necessity, Metropolitan Books | 2008 | 28 minutes (6,900 words)

Below is a full chapter from The Big Necessity, Rose George’s acclaimed 2008 book exploring the world of human waste. The book will be reissued later this year with a new afterword. George’s 2013 book 90 Percent of Everything was featured previously on Longreads, and we’re thrilled to spotlight her work again.  Read more…