The Longreads Blog

1991 Jeffrey Katzenberg memo to Disney execs.

As we begin the new year, I strongly believe we are entering a period of great danger and even greater uncertainty. Events are unfolding within and without the movie industry that are extremely threatening to our studio.

Some of you might be surprised to read these words. After all, wasn’t Disney number one in 1990? Yes, but our number one status was far from a sign of robust health. Instead, it merely underscored the fact that our studio did the least badly in a year of steady decline for all of Hollywood… a year that was capped off by a disastrous Christmas for nearly everyone. Although we led at the box office in 1990, our bottom line profits in the movie business were the lowest in three years.

Now, added to that, the nation’s economy is acknowledged to be in a recession… a recession that I am convinced will be quite devastating to our industry.

“Some Thoughts on Our Business.” — Jeffrey Katzenberg, Letters of Note, Jan. 11, 1991

See also: “The Internet Tidal Wave.” Bill Gates, May 26, 1995

Bitcoin was drawing the kind of attention normally reserved for overhyped Silicon Valley IPOs and Apple product launches. On his Internet talk show, journo-entrepreneur Jason Calacanis called it “a fundamental shift” and “one of the most interesting things I’ve seen in 20 years in the technology business.” Prominent venture capitalist Fred Wilson heralded “societal upheaval” as the Next Big Thing on the Internet, and the four examples he gave were Wikileaks, PlayStation hacking, the Arab Spring, and bitcoin. Andresen, the coder, accepted an invitation from the CIA to come to Langley, Virginia, to speak about the currency. Rick Falkvinge, founder of the Swedish Pirate Party (whose central policy plank includes the abolition of the patent system), announced that he was putting his life savings into bitcoins. The future of bitcoin seemed to shimmer with possibility.

“The Rise and Fall of Bitcoin.” — Benjamin Wallace, Wired

See more #longreads from Benjamin Wallace

Kare’s first assignment was developing fonts for the Mac OS. At the time, digital typefaces were monospaced, meaning that both a narrow I and a broad M were wedged into the same bitmapped real estate — a vestigial legacy of the way that a typewriter platen advances, one space at a time. Jobs was determined to come up with something better for his sleek new machine, having been impressed by the grace of finely wrought letterforms in calligraphy classes he audited at Reed College, taught by the Trappist monk Robert Palladino, a disciple of master calligrapher Lloyd Reynolds. (The lasting impact of Reynolds’ instruction can also be seen in the playful cursive of the seminal West Coast Beat poets Gary Snyder and Philip Whalen, making Reynolds and Palladino the human hyperlinks between desktop publishing and Jack Kerouac’s Dharma Bums.)

For the Mac, Kare designed the first proportionally spaced digital font family that allowed text to breathe as naturally on the Mac’s white screen as it does in the pages of a book. The distinctive Jobs touch was upgrading the original monikers of these elegant typefaces from the names of train stations near Philadelphia — like Rosemont and Ardmore — to those of world-class cities like Geneva, Chicago, and New York.

“The Sketchbook of Susan Kare, the Artist Who Gave Computing a Face.” — Steve Silberman, NeuroTribes 

See more #longreads from Steve Silberman

Well into his forties he kept swinging between the poles of his double life as only a true Manichean can, a rock star buried in a pile of cocaine one minute and a sadhu renunciant fingering his beads the next. But by his fifties he had abandoned the pretensions of stardom altogether. He had married a formidable but endlessly forgiving woman. (“People sometimes say to me, ‘What’s the secret of a long marriage?’ ” Olivia says in the movie. “And I’m like, ‘You don’t get divorced!’ ”)

“George’s God.” — Andrew Ferguson, The Weekly Standard

See more #longreads from The Weekly Standard

Heyman found an apartment in Rio with a bunch of twentysomething international travelers and slipped easily into the singles beach and party scene. When we spoke by phone in mid-November, he confided that his old life at Infosurv seemed a distant memory. “Going back there is not Plan A,” he said. “It’s very possible that that part of my life is behind me.” His biggest frustration: Because he was spending so much time with non-Brazilians, he wasn’t picking up Portuguese as quickly as he would have liked. So he moved after a month or so. By December, he was on the island of Florianópolis, in southern Brazil. His days consisted of riding a rented motorcycle to the beach, practicing his kite surfing, and then working out—mainly yoga and a regimen called P90X. His Portuguese was improving, thanks to a widening circle of Brazilian friends. “I have the vocabulary of a 5-year-old, but I can get my point across,” Heyman said. “The biggest thing I’ve learned so far is that I have a gear I didn’t know existed. I look back on my life, and I’ve always been a very go-go person. I have been very achievement oriented all my life. And it is surprising to me that I can get into this gear where it is not about achievement. Maybe I was due for a break.”

“Inside the Mind of a Runaway CEO.” — Amy Barrett, Inc. Magazine

See more #longreads from Inc. Magazine

Featured Longreader: Writer Kevin Lincoln. See his story picks from Jim Romenesko, Ben Cohen, Poetry Magazine and more on his #longreads page.

Serpell told me that those handicaps can be easily masked by an outgoing, playful personality. “Bulldog breeders will insist that their dogs are happy and have a very good life,” Serpell said. “But a dog can love its owner and be happy at times, but that doesn’t mean his life isn’t needlessly compromised. In many ways, dogs are their own worst enemy. They don’t complain. They just kind of plod along, trying to make the best of things. That’s how I see many bulldogs. They are severely handicapped because of what we have done to them, but they still have these amazing personalities that shine through despite it all.”

“Can the Bulldog Be Saved?” — Benoit Denizet-Lewis, New York Times Magazine

See also: “Gary Francione: Animal Advocate.” The Believer, Feb. 2011

Depending where you fall on the spectrum between civil liberties absolutism and homeland security lockdown, Palantir’s technology is either creepy or heroic. Judging by the company’s growth, opinion in Washington and elsewhere has veered toward the latter. Palantir has built a customer list that includes the U.S. Defense Dept., CIA, FBI, Army, Marines, Air Force, the police departments of New York and Los Angeles, and a growing number of financial institutions trying to detect bank fraud. These deals have turned the company into one of the quietest success stories in Silicon Valley—it’s on track to hit $250 million in sales this year—and a candidate for an initial public offering. Palantir has been used to find suspects in a case involving the murder of a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement special agent, and to uncover bombing networks in Syria, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. “It’s like plugging into the Matrix,” says a Special Forces member stationed in Afghanistan who requested anonymity out of security concerns. “The first time I saw it, I was like, ‘Holy crap. Holy crap. Holy crap.’”

“Palantir, the War on Terror’s Secret Weapon.” — Ashlee Vance and Brad Stone, BusinessWeek

See more #longreads from BusinessWeek

India has a voracious market for asbestos, which is used to make a cement composite used in low-cost building products. Canada sent 69,575 tonnes of asbestos to India in 2010, according to the United Nations Commodity Trade Statistics Database, with a value of $39.1 million (U.S.). The leading supplier to the country, by far, is Russia. In 2010, Canada ranked third after that country and Brazil.

A small network of activists and aggrieved workers across India argue that there is no such thing as safe use in a country where there is no tradition or practice of occupational safety, no enforcement of regulations, no monitoring of workers’ health—and such severe poverty that Swami went on showing up for work for years, long after he was winded by a half-block walk and had been diagnosed with asbestosis. He knew full well his job was killing him. “In Canada you have all these safety measures,” he says. “In my country they’ve left us to carry it and die.”

“Canada’s Chronic Asbestos Problem.” — John Gray and Stephanie Nolen, The Globe and Mail

See more #longreads from The Globe and Mail

Musk makes no secret of the end goal: Create a new civilization on Mars. Speaking at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., in September, he outlined the business plan—if that’s the right term for something that looks decades into the future. “If you can reduce the cost of moving to Mars to around the cost of a middle class home in California—maybe to around half a million dollars—then I think enough people would buy a ticket and move to Mars,” he said. “You obviously have to have quite an appetite for risk and adventure. But there are seven billion people on Earth now, and there’ll be probably eight billion by the midpoint of the century. So even if one in a million people decided to do that, that’s still eight thousand people. And I think probably more than one in a million people will decide to do that.” Talking about a city on Mars by the middle of this century—even as SpaceX has yet to fly its first cargo mission to Earth orbit—is one of the reasons space professionals are skeptical about Musk’s claims.

“1 Visionary + 3 Launchers + 1,500 Employees = ?” — Andrew Chaikin, Air & Space magazine

See more #longreads about Mars