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There’s more to Sony’s problems than acts of God and currency traders. The maker of the Walkman and the Trinitron hasn’t driven pop culture for years. Sony thrived in an era of stand-alone electronics. When the Internet arose and digital began to mean connected, iPods became the center of people’s entertainment lives, then smartphones and tablets—which Sony was late to produce. Even the quintessential Sony product—the TV set—has become a millstone. Sony has lost nearly $8.5 billion on TVs over eight years and expects to keep losing at least into 2013. Samsung, Vizio, and other upstarts have driven prices so low that one Sony executive says the company charges less for some TVs than it cost to ship them a few years ago.

“What Is Sony Now?” — Bryan Gruley and Cliff Edwards, Bloomberg Businessweek

Featured Longreader: Music blogger Damien Joyce. See his story picks from Bloomberg Businessweek, Nouriel Roubini, plus music stories on his #longreads page.

In the weeks since the immigration law took hold, several hundred Americans have answered farmers’ ads for tomato pickers. A field over from where Juan Castro and his friends muse about the sorry state of the U.S. workforce, 34-year-old Jesse Durr stands among the vines. An aspiring rapper from inner-city Birmingham, he wears big jeans and a do-rag to shield his head from the sun. He had lost his job prepping food at Applebee’s, and after spending a few months looking for work a friend told him about a Facebook posting for farm labor.

The money isn’t good—$2 per basket, plus $600 to clear the three acres when the vines were picked clean—but he figures it’s better than sitting around. Plus, the transportation is free, provided by Jerry Spencer, who runs a community-supported agriculture program in Birmingham. That helps, because the farm is an hour north of Birmingham and the gas money adds up.

Durr thinks of himself as fit—he’s all chiseled muscle—but he is surprised at how hard the work is. “Not everyone is used to this. I ain’t used to it,” he says while taking a break in front of his truck. “But I’m getting used to it.”

“Why Americans Won’t Do Dirty Jobs.” — Elizabeth Dwoskin, Bloomberg Businessweek

See more #longreads from Bloomberg Businessweek

Featured Longreader: Front-end developer Carlos Rodriguez. See his story picks from Bloomberg Businessweek, Yield Thought, Fortune Magazine and more on his #longreads page.

Graeber’s arguments place him squarely at odds with mainstream economic thought, and the discipline has, for the most part, ignored him. But his timing couldn’t be better to reach a popular audience. His writing provides an intellectual frame and a sort of genealogy for the movement he helped start. The inchoate anger of the Occupy Wall Street protesters tends to cluster around two things. One is the influence of money in politics. The other is debt: mortgages, credit-card debt, student loans, and the difference in how the debts of large financial companies and those of individual borrowers have been treated in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis.

“David Graeber, the Anti-Leader of Occupy Wall Street.” — Drake Bennett, Bloomberg Businessweek

See more #longreads about Occupy Wall Street

Featured Longreader: Gabrielle Gantz, arts & culture blogger/publicist at Viking & Penguin. See her story picks from The Christian Science Monitor, Bloomberg Businessweek and more on her #longreads page.

Featured Longreader: Bloomberg News writer Elizabeth Lopatto. See her story picks from The Atlantic, Cabinet Magazine and more on her #longreads page.

The Green Bay Packers are a historical, cultural, and geographical anomaly, a publicly traded corporation in a league that doesn’t allow them, an immensely profitable company whose shareholders are forbidden by the corporate bylaws to receive a penny of that profit, a franchise that has flourished despite being in the smallest market in the NFL—with a population of 102,000, it would be small for a Triple A baseball franchise. Of all the original NFL franchises—located in places like Muncie, Ind., Rochester, N.Y., Massillon and Canton, Ohio, and Rock Island, Ill.—Green Bay is the only small-town team still in existence. The Packers have managed not merely to survive but to become the NFL’s dominant organization, named by ESPN in 2011 as the best franchise in all of sports.

“The Green Bay Packers Have the Best Owners in Football.” — Karl Taro Greenfeld, Bloomberg Businessweek

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In many ways, Forstall is a mini-Steve. He’s a hard-driving manager who obsesses over every detail. He has Jobs’s knack for translating technical, feature-set jargon into plain English. He’s known to have a taste for the Mercedes-Benz SL55 AMG, in silver, the same car Jobs drove, and even has a signature on-stage costume: black shoes, jeans, and a black zippered sweater. (He favors Reyn Spooner Hawaiian shirts for normal days at the office.) Forstall is like Steve in one other important way: He can be, in what some of his co-workers might call an understatement, a polarizing figure.

“Scott Forstall, the Sorcerer’s Apprentice at Apple.” — Adam Satariano, Peter Burrows and Brad Stone, Bloomberg Businessweek

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“A Bloomberg Markets investigation has found that Koch Industries — in addition to being involved in improper payments to win business in Africa, India and the Middle East — has sold millions of dollars of petrochemical equipment to Iran, a country the U.S. identifies as a sponsor of global terrorism. Internal company documents show that the company made those sales through foreign subsidiaries, thwarting a U.S. trade ban. Koch Industries units have also rigged prices with competitors, lied to regulators and repeatedly run afoul of environmental regulations, resulting in five criminal convictions since 1999 in the U.S. and Canada.”

“Koch Brothers Flout Law with Secret Iran Sales.” — Asjylyn Loder and David Evans, Bloomberg News

More #longreads: “Covert Operations.” Jane Mayer, The New Yorker, Aug. 20, 2010, on the billionaire brothers waging a war against President Obama