Former Time Warner Book Group CEO Larry Kirshbaum jumps from the traditional publishing world to “the dark side,” heading up Amazon Publishing. Meanwhile, the Big Six watch closely: Amazon could be an unstoppable competitor to big publishing houses. If history is any guide, Jeff Bezos, who declined to comment for this story, doesn’t care whether […]
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Capital New York covers last night’s “Behind the Longreads” event with New York magazine, and tells writer Dan P. Lee’s story about how he reported his “Travis the Menace” story: Lee, in a striped grey-and-black hoodie and a mop of dirty blonde hair that matched his five o’clock shadow, was participating in a panel discussion […]
The harsh working conditions inside factories that make products for Apple: “We’ve known about labor abuses in some factories for four years, and they’re still going on,” said one former Apple executive who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity because of confidentiality agreements. “Why? Because the system works for us. Suppliers would change […]
The emotional and financial challenges in providing assisted living for parents, who are now living longer: Since then, Daddy’s long goodbye has drained his retirement income and life savings of more than $300,000. Where’s that money gone? Assisted living, mostly. Of course, that amount doesn’t account for his medical bills, most of which have been […]
Our growing prison population, and whether there’s a link to the dropping crime rate: The accelerating rate of incarceration over the past few decades is just as startling as the number of people jailed: in 1980, there were about two hundred and twenty people incarcerated for every hundred thousand Americans; by 2010, the number had […]
Nieman Storyboard’s “Why’s This So Good” explores what makes classic narrative nonfiction stories worth reading. This week, Bruce Gillespie takes a look at Andrea Curtis’s “Small Mercies,” which was originally published in Toronto Life: A compelling narrative and a richly detailed behind-the-scenes look at a NICU would, on its own, be enough to hook any […]
Self-driving car technology is advancing rapidly. But how comfortable can we get with the idea? Beyond bureaucracy, there are deeper legal questions. Ryan Calo, director for privacy and robotics at Stanford Law School’s Center for Internet and Society, which is studying the legal framework for quasi-autonomous vehicles, notes how active the liability landscape already is […]
[Not single-page] The Google engineer who became a symbol of the Egyptian revolution grapples with what’s next for the country: “A little more than two weeks ago, Ghonim settled into his regular three-hour flight from Dubai to Cairo. His seatmate, an older Egyptian executive type, recognized him immediately and started right in. ‘Isn’t enough enough?’ […]
The making of the album, on its 40th anniversary: This is not a blues city. L.A. is about the concealment of appearance, but the blues is about its unraveling. The blues is the opposite of bullshit. And the psychic unrest of L.A. Woman is prominently placed on the album cover, which drops in April ‘71. […]
A look at hundreds of pages of internal White House documents, and what they reveal about the president’s decision-making process: One Cabinet official made it clear that she did not share the President’s growing commitment to coupon-clipping: Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. She rejected the White House’s budget for her department, and wrote the President […]
U.S. soldiers returning home face a culture that doesn’t understand them: The 1 percent tends to be concentrated in the southern states and among the working and lower-middle classes. With a few notable exceptions—such as vice-president Joe Biden’s son Beau—the children of the elite have not served in these wars. It’s a sharp change from […]
The country’s huge challenges following the U.S. withdrawal, including corruption, new waves of violence and crippled infrastructure: The end of the U.S. military’s long, bloody adventure in Iraq signals the start of a new, highly uncertain chapter in the country’s development. In the scenario conjured by optimistic U.S. and Iraqi officials, an Iraq free of […]
[Not single-page] A trip to a mysterious, reclusive community in New York that’s been derided by neighboring residents for decades: For most of its history, the residents of surrounding areas quietly judged the Oniontowners but left them alone up on the mountain. ‘Most locals know there’s no point in going up there,’ a state police […]
How sexual freedom began to spread in the west, and how we moved away from a society that once executed adulterers and prostitutes: Since the dawn of history, every civilisation had punished sexual immorality. The law codes of the Anglo-Saxon kings of England treated women as chattels, but they also forbade married men to fornicate […]
[Fiction] A marriage and its outside interferences: When she told her husband that David Cannon had arranged for her a series of recitals in South America, she looked to him for swift response. She was confident that anything touching on her professional life would kindle his eye and warm his voice. It was, in fact, […]
The long road to reform the government’s Minerals Management Service, three years after its “sex, drugs and oil” scandal: One thing that the agency hasn’t done is put to rest the skepticism of its whistleblowers. They claim that schemes similar to the royalty-avoidance techniques at issue in the False Claim Act lawsuits are still being […]
Reminder: This is next Wednesday! “Behind the Longreads” at Housing Works in NYC with New York magazine’s Dan P. Lee, Jessica Pressler, Wesley Yang and Editor-in-Chief Adam Moss. It’s a free event, and you can now RSVP on the Longreads Facebook page. Because this night is going to be about the stories themselves, we’ve prepared […]
A trip to John Madden’s man cave, and whether sports video games can ever be described as “art”: Clearly, the way sports games are played, and the way Madden in particular is played, is ripe for some massive paradigm shift. Why doesn’t the quarterback position feel as visceral and pinpointy as firing a rifle in […]
[Not single-page] The case of the “Waffle House terrorists,” which included 73-year-old Fred Thomas and three other 60-something men charged with plotting to commit acts of terror—and an FBI informant previously arrested on charges of molestation: It is the central mystery of the case, one even more perplexing than the mystery of whether the old […]
Thirty-two-year-old Luis Mijangos hacked into his victims’ computers, accessing their hard drives and even turning on their webcams: Mijangos was an unlikely candidate for the world’s creepiest hacker. He lived at home with his mother, half brother, two sisters—one a schoolgirl, the other a housekeeper—and a perky gray poodle named Petra. It was a lively […]
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