Search Results for: This Magazine

Olga Kotelko, the 91-Year-Old Track Star

Olga Kotelko, the 91-Year-Old Track Star

I said, ‘What’s your — pardon me — your fucking plan, then, if you don’t like this?’” “‘We don’t like—’ I said, ‘Don’t tell me what you don’t like! Tell me how you’re going to stop the North Korean nuclear program.’ ‘But we wouldn’t do it this way—’ ‘Stop! What are you going to do?’ I could never get a goddamn answer. What I got was ‘We wouldn’t negotiate.’” I pointed out that the North Koreans had cheated on the 1994 agreement. “Excuse me,” Gallucci said, “the Soviets cheated on virtually every deal we ever made with them, but we were still better off with the deal than without it.

Anyone who has lived through the global bubble and bust of the last few years may wonder what’s so great about a consumer society. In the United States, the idea that we have reoriented our economy toward consumption and don’t make things anymore has become a standard lament, not a sign of progress. But China is a long way from consuming too much. Saying that China does not have a big-enough consumer economy is really another way of saying that not enough of its resources reach the broad mass of its people. If they had more resources, they would surely spend more. This is why the recent labor strikes, and the pay increases that followed, were so important. They were a sign that Chinese households might start to enjoy more of the fruits of the long boom.

A song called “A Freak Like Me Needs Company,” for the eight-stilettoed Arachne and her Furies to sing near the end of the show, was apparently less right. “I thought, and still do, that it would be a hit,” says Bono. “A percussive eighties Paradise Garage dance piece with a fantastic hook. Julie was like, ‘No … ’ And I said, ‘Julie, isn’t this what you call a ten o’clock number?’ And she goes, ‘Who cares what time it is?’ 

Hugh Hefner Has Been Good for Us

Longreads Pick

Hefner and Playboy have been around so long that not everyone remembers what America used to be like. It was sexually repressed and socially restrictive. Many people joined in the fight against that unhealthy society. Hefner was one of them, and a case can can be made that Playboy had a greater influence on our society in its first half-century than any other magazine.

Published: Oct 27, 2010
Length: 9 minutes (2,415 words)

The Savior of Conde Nast

Longreads Pick

Someday, when they tell the story of how digital magazines saved Conde Nast, it will begin in San Francisco’s Caffé Centro sometime in May 2009. It was there that Wired creative director Scott Dadich asked Wired editor Chris Anderson to meet him to discuss the creation of a prototype for a new digital tablet. Mr. Dadich knew the iPhone screen was far too small to re-create the magazine experience, but it got him thinking about a Minority Report-like touchscreen that could work. Mr. Dadich took out a cocktail napkin and drew an illustration of what Wired could look like on a 13-inch tablet screen.

Published: Aug 3, 2010
Length: 5 minutes (1,463 words)

Who’s Afraid of Steve Jobs?

Longreads Pick

Not Consumer Reports. Over the past year the 74-year-old magazine has carved up Apple and made Toyota roll over. Pretty good for a lab in Yonkers

Source: Businessweek
Published: Jul 22, 2010
Length: 7 minutes (1,969 words)

Henry Luce, the Editor in Chief

Longreads Pick

The life of Henry Luce, creator of Time and Life, who used his magazines to push political favorites and promote U.S. intervention in the world.

Published: Apr 25, 2010
Length: 9 minutes (2,359 words)

I Am Sorry to Inform You

Longreads Pick

In 2008 Joyce Carol Oates lost the husband—Raymond Smith—to whom she’d been married for 48 years. Her recollections of those harrowing early days of widowhood provide a glimpse of Oates as a teacher of writers and as caretaker of the literary magazine she and her husband kept in print for so long.

Source: The Atlantic
Published: Apr 26, 2010
Length: 18 minutes (4,638 words)

My First New York

Longreads Pick

In a cover feature last spring, New York Magazine invited 30 notable New Yorkers to share their memories (mostly fond, some harrowing) of arriving to town. Next week, Ecco/HarperCollins will publish “My First New York,” a greatly expanded collection. Here, from the book, are a few new entries—the early adventures of three writers — plus an actress, an editor, and a famous former call girl — in the big city.

Published: Mar 21, 2010
Length: 20 minutes (5,031 words)