The Longreads Blog

It takes self-regard to name your company the Herminator Experience.

It takes self-regard to go to a fancy dinner in Amsterdam with a group of colleagues from the National Restaurant Association and — well, let Biff Naylor, who was an N.R.A. officer at the time, explain: “We walk in, and the piano player is getting up to take a break. Herman turns to the owner and says, ‘Do you mind if I play the piano and sing some songs?’ And we’re all looking sideways at Herman. What is he doing? So he takes the piano and starts singing some Sinatra or whatever and just lights the place up.”

It takes self-regard to write down speaking tips and sign your name, as a keepsake, on every page.

Of course, that self-regard could also let you assume your attentions are welcomed and cause colleagues to file sexual-harassment complaints. That’s the drawback.

But most of the time it works in your favor.

It has been a weirdly useful self-regard.

“On the Ropes with Herman Cain.” — T.A. Frank, The New York Times Magazine

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Featured Longreader: Caleb Hannan, managing editor of the Seattle Weekly. See his story picks from The Miami New Times, SB Nation, and more on his #longreads page.

Featured Longreader: Caleb Hannan, managing editor of the Seattle Weekly. See his story picks from The Miami New Times, SB Nation, and more on his #longreads page.

Indeed, the greatest confidence man of the last few years, at least going by Suskind’s definition, was not Larry Summers or Timothy Geithner, but Barack Obama. Being a confidence man is almost in the job description of the insurgent presidential candidate. Having not been president before, you must, by definition, ask the American people for a trust you have not earned.

“Obama’s Flunking Economy: The Real Cause.” — Ezra Klein, The New York Review of Books

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Indeed, the greatest confidence man of the last few years, at least going by Suskind’s definition, was not Larry Summers or Timothy Geithner, but Barack Obama. Being a confidence man is almost in the job description of the insurgent presidential candidate. Having not been president before, you must, by definition, ask the American people for a trust you have not earned.

“Obama’s Flunking Economy: The Real Cause.” — Ezra Klein, The New York Review of Books

See more #longreads from The New York Review of Books

Was Steve Jobs a Samuel Crompton or was he a Richard Roberts? In the eulogies that followed Jobs’s death, last month, he was repeatedly referred to as a large-scale visionary and inventor. But Isaacson’s biography suggests that he was much more of a tweaker. He borrowed the characteristic features of the Macintosh—the mouse and the icons on the screen—from the engineers at Xerox PARC, after his famous visit there, in 1979. The first portable digital music players came out in 1996. Apple introduced the iPod, in 2001, because Jobs looked at the existing music players on the market and concluded that they “truly sucked.”

“The Tweaker.” — Malcolm Gladwell, The New Yorker

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Was Steve Jobs a Samuel Crompton or was he a Richard Roberts? In the eulogies that followed Jobs’s death, last month, he was repeatedly referred to as a large-scale visionary and inventor. But Isaacson’s biography suggests that he was much more of a tweaker. He borrowed the characteristic features of the Macintosh—the mouse and the icons on the screen—from the engineers at Xerox PARC, after his famous visit there, in 1979. The first portable digital music players came out in 1996. Apple introduced the iPod, in 2001, because Jobs looked at the existing music players on the market and concluded that they “truly sucked.”

“The Tweaker.” — Malcolm Gladwell, The New Yorker

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You made it now, Lex remembers Jay-Z saying. You got Beyoncé bopping to your beats.

Lex didn’t know whether to hug her or shake her hand. He went with the hug.

It happens about once a year in hip-hop production: someone invents or perfects a sound, someone figures out how to get a weird noise out of some piece of technology not designed to make that noise, someone figures out a way to make a drum machine say the same old thing with a different accent and the whole rap world tilts on its axis. If you manage to change the beat — if your sound drifts upstream from mix tapes to pop radio, if it becomes the only thing anybody wants to hear — you can change hip-hop.

“Lex Luger Can Write a Hit Rap Song in the Time It Takes to Read This.” — Alex Pappademas, The New York Times Magazine

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You made it now, Lex remembers Jay-Z saying. You got Beyoncé bopping to your beats.

Lex didn’t know whether to hug her or shake her hand. He went with the hug.

It happens about once a year in hip-hop production: someone invents or perfects a sound, someone figures out how to get a weird noise out of some piece of technology not designed to make that noise, someone figures out a way to make a drum machine say the same old thing with a different accent and the whole rap world tilts on its axis. If you manage to change the beat — if your sound drifts upstream from mix tapes to pop radio, if it becomes the only thing anybody wants to hear — you can change hip-hop.

“Lex Luger Can Write a Hit Rap Song in the Time It Takes to Read This.” — Alex Pappademas, The New York Times Magazine

See more #longreads from Alex Pappademas

Doyle approached him and said, “Do you know there’s a retired number in Williams football?”

“Williams doesn’t retire numbers,” Quinn replied.

“Apparently it does,” Doyle said.

On the Monday after that game Quinn called Boyer and asked, “Williams has a retired football number?”

“I don’t know about retired,” Boyer said, “but there’s this box down here.

“The Forgotten Hero.” — Tim Layden, Sports Illustrated

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