Search Results for: Apple

How Bloomberg Stayed Involved with His Company While Still Being Mayor

“Officially the company was Doctoroff’s to run. Mike agreed with a city ethics board that he’d have no involvement in Bloomberg’s day-to-day operations, limiting his input to major decisions that ‘significantly’ affect his ownership stake. ‘I’ve recused myself from anything to do with the company,’ Mike said at a press conference in November.

“In truth, Mike was considerably more involved than that statement would suggest. He monitored the business from his Bloomberg terminal at City Hall and, as noted, spoke to Doctoroff every week. On occasion—including twice in one week as New York grappled with a blizzard dubbed ‘snowpocalypse’ in February 2010—Mike turned up at Bloomberg headquarters after-hours for meetings. (One of those sessions, during the blizzard week, concerned a redesign of Bloomberg’s website.) In other cases, he was briefed down at City Hall. Mike stayed on top of what was happening at his company, but he didn’t want to act as the decider after he left. And so a series of internal struggles played out, with Bloomberg playing only an occasional, oblique role.”

Peter Elkind, in Fortune Magazine (subscription required), on the internal company battles over the future of Bloomberg News. Read more on Bloomberg.

***

Photo: Wikimedia Commons

We need your help to get to 5,000 Longreads Members.

Join Longreads now and help us keep going.

Longreads Best of 2013: My Favorite Stories About Taxes (and Twist-Ties)

Photo: 59937401@N07, Flickr

Atossa Araxia Abrahamian is a writer and an editor.

Taxes aren’t boring—they’re just supremely difficult to write about in a compelling way. These three stories stand out because they illustrate the far-reaching consequences of different countries’ tax policies through a few very influential people:

1. “Marty Sullivan figured out how the world’s biggest companies avoided billions in taxes. Here’s how he wants to stop them” (Steven Pearlstein, Washington Post, 2013)

In his affectionate profile of tax expert Marty Sullivan, Steven Pearlstein breaks down everything that’s wrong about the US tax code in Sullivan’s nonpartisan, almost technocratic view—and goes on to explain why politics make it so hard to alter, let alone fix, the system. Not exactly action-movie material, but it’s handled so deftly that I couldn’t put it down.

2. “A Tale of Two Londons” (Nicholas Shaxson, Vanity Fair, 2013)

In Vanity Fair, longtime tax writer Nicholas Shaxson shows how the City of London became a hub for tax-free global capital through the story of One Hyde Park, the world’s most expensive residential building, its fabulously wealthy and faceless owners, and the offshore accounts they used to buy and register the properties anonymously.

3. “Man Making Ireland Tax Avoidance Hub Proves Local Hero” (Jesse Drucker, Bloomberg, 2013)

Finally, Bloomberg’s Jesse Drucker profiles Feargal O’Rourke, the man who helped transform Ireland into a “hub for tax avoidance” for multinationals like Apple and Facebook. Drucker withholds judgment (this is Bloomberg, headline and all) but O’Rourke’s mercenary wiles shine through a few well-chosen anecdotes. Choice quote, on Breaking Bad: “I don’t know what it says that we can be rooting for a guy on the dark side of the law.”

Bonus Pick: Most Fascinating Thing I Learned from a Story This Year

Twist-Ties vs. Plastic Clips: Tiny Titans Battle for the Bakery Aisle” (Paul Lukas, Bloomberg Businessweek, 2013)

My favorite business stories are the ones that reveal how much time, energy and thought goes into seemingly mundane consumer goods. This Businessweek article about the ‘bakery bag closure and reclosure market’ is a great example of that. Did you know bag closures generate about $10 million in sales per year? That studies have failed to resolve whether consumers prefer clips or twist-ties? And that there are people whose job it is to sell commercial bakeries on the virtues of these objects? All of this makes perfect sense, of course (hi, capitalism!) but it takes a story like this one to get you thinking.

***

Longreads Best of 2013: Here Are All 49 of Our No. 1 Story Picks From This Year

Every week, Longreads sends out an email with our Top 5 story picks—so here it is, every single story that was chosen as No. 1 this year. If you like these, you can sign up to receive our free Top 5 email every Friday.

Happy holidays! Read more…

Gretchen Molannen’s Legacy: Suffering, Suicide And A Journalist’s Responsibility

Longreads Pick

A reporter grapples with the suicide of a source:

The reporter-source relationship is a complicated one that defies easy description. It borrows a little from the salesman-buyer relationship, the therapist-patient relationship, the police officer-witness relationship, sometimes even the growing intimacy of a friendship. We work hard to gain access and trust, and generally we avoid doing anything that stops a source from talking once she gets started.

“How are you now?” I asked at the time.

“I’m suffering horribly . . . but I’m not suicidal,” she said. “It’s a soothing thing. I don’t really want to do it. But it helps me calm down, it helps me sleep to think about the possibilities to end the suffering.”

If I had possessed some sort of device that could peer inside her brain and pick up some biological trace amongst the billions of nerve cells and circuits that would indicate she was likely to commit suicide, would I have stopped the interview?

Source: Tampa Bay Times
Published: Nov 27, 2013
Length: 21 minutes (5,430 words)

'Am I a Vulture?' Katherine Boo on Reporting and Poverty

image

“We take stories and purvey them to people with money. And in the conventions of my profession, which I try to adhere to, we can’t pay people for stories. Anyone with a conscience who does this work grapples with that reality, and if they don’t, I’d worry. I lie awake at night, and I think, ‘Am I exploiting them? Am I a vulture?’ All of the terrible names anyone could call me, I’ve called myself worse.

“But if writing about people who are not yourself is illegitimate, then the only legitimate work is autobiography; and as a reader and a citizen, I don’t want to live in that world.”

-Katherine Boo, author of Behind the Beautiful Forevers, on journalism and reporting on poverty, in Guernica.

Read the story

More Guernica in the Longreads Archive

How Google Used a ‘Double Irish’ and ‘Dutch Sandwich’ to Shave $2.2 Billion from Its Tax Bill

Longreads Pick

The story of how Ireland became a global hub for tax avoidance, with companies including Google, Apple, Intel and others all taking advantage. Feargal O’Rourke is credited with helping create an environment where companies can come to Ireland to avoid taxes they’d face in their home countries:

“Under no circumstances is Ireland a tax haven,” O’Rourke said recently at his corner office on the River Liffey in Dublin, a ritual stop for many tech companies in their Irish quest. “I’m a player in this game and we play by the rules.”

Source: Bloomberg
Published: Oct 28, 2013
Length: 12 minutes (3,021 words)

‘Quebrado’: The Life and Death of a Young Activist

Illustration by Kjell Reigstad

Jeff Sharlet | Sweet Heaven When I Die, W. W. Norton & Company | Aug 2011 | 37 minutes (9,133 words)

 

Our latest Longreads Member Pick is “Quebrado,” by Jeff Sharlet, a professor at Dartmouth, contributing editor for Rolling Stone and bestselling author. The story was first published in Rolling Stone in 2008 and is featured in Sharlet’s book Sweet Heaven When I Die. Thanks to Sharlet for sharing it with the Longreads community. Read more…

Reading List: Misunderstood

image

Emily Perper is a word-writing human working at a small publishing company. She blogs about her favorite longreads at Diet Coker.

Feeling misunderstood has been the bane of teen angst for millennia, fodder for pop-punk anthems, and the basis of existential crises. Here, four people delve into the facets of their lives that don’t jibe with the expectations of others—some with disturbing consequences.

1. “I Was A Suspected School Shooter.” (Gina Tron, Vice, January 2013)

In a a small town post-Columbine, Tron’s nonconformity makes her a target. She begins to embody what she is suspected to be.

2. “Why I Stay Closeted in Asia.” (Connor Ke Muo, Buzzfeed, October 2013)

Traveling home for the first time in years, Muo grapples with his parents’ extreme homophobia, cultural stigma, and his father’s reluctance to embrace him — literally.

3. “Hot Girl #2.” (Melissa Stetten, Aeon Magazine, October 2013)

“I like it when people ask if I’m a model, but I hate it when they ask: ‘What do you do?’ and I have to say: ‘I’m a model.’ That makes sense, right?”

4. “Daniel Radcliffe’s Next Trick is to Make Harry Potter Disappear.” (Susan Dominus, October 2013, New York Times)

Radcliffe claims one of the most iconic roles in recent film history, but being Harry Potter isn’t without its cost. Here, the reporter delves into Radcliffe’s upcoming roles (Allen Ginsberg!), his struggle with alcohol and his nuanced relationships with family, friends and fans.

•••

Get the Top 5 Longreads free every week

Photo via Vice

The Andrew Wylie Rules

Longreads Pick

The renowned literary agent on his hatred of Amazon, commercial fiction, and the future of book publishing:

"I didn’t think that [in 2010] the publishing community had properly assessed—particularly in regard to its obligations to writers—what an equitable arrangement would look like.

"And I felt that publishers had made a huge mistake, because they were pressured by Apple and Amazon to make concessions that they shouldn’t have made.

“These distribution issues come and go. It wasn’t so long ago that Barnes and Noble was this monster publishing leatherette classics, threatening to put backlists out of print. Amazon will go, and Apple will go, and it’ll all go.”

Published: Oct 8, 2013
Length: 9 minutes (2,336 words)

And Then Steve Said, ‘Let There Be an iPhone’

Longreads Pick

An excerpt from Vogelstein’s new book Dogfight, inside the making of the iPhone—a story of clashing egos, technical risks, secrecy and a big bet by Steve Jobs and Apple about where the company’s future would lie:

“Grignon and his team could only ensure a good signal, and then pray. They had AT&T, the iPhone’s wireless carrier, bring in a portable cell tower, so they knew reception would be strong. Then, with Jobs’s approval, they preprogrammed the phone’s display to always show five bars of signal strength regardless of its true strength. The chances of the radio’s crashing during the few minutes that Jobs would use it to make a call were small, but the chances of its crashing at some point during the 90-minute presentation were high. ‘If the radio crashed and restarted, as we suspected it might, we didn’t want people in the audience to see that,’ Grignon says. ‘So we just hard-coded it to always show five bars.'”

Published: Oct 5, 2013
Length: 24 minutes (6,009 words)