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The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Photo courtesy of Matthew Teague

Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle users, you can also get them as a Readlist.

Sign up to receive this list free every Friday in your inbox.

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The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Photo by Flickr

Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle users, you can also get them as a Readlist.

Sign up to receive this list free every Friday in your inbox.

* * *

Read more…

What It Was Like Working with the Junk Bond King

Michael Milken. Photo by Larry Weisenberg via Wikimedia Commons

Mark Attanasio: The day started at 5, not 5:01. …You got in between 4:30 and 5 and got yourself situated. … Often clients would show up early to man up and show Mike, “Hey, I’m here, too.”

G. Chris Andersen: We financed Ted Turner. We financed John Malone.

Mark Attanasio: Within a year I was in front of guys like Ron Perelman and Steve Ross at Warner Brothers.

Lorraine Spurge: And then, at some point, we met a gentleman named Steve Wynn.

Ken Moelis: Steve came to me in 1986. And he says, “Look, I got this idea. We’re going to build this casino for $800 million, and it’s going to have a volcano that goes off every 15 minutes.”

—from “Renegades of Junk: The Rise and Fall of the Drexel Empire”, an oral history by Bloomberg News reporters Max Abelson, Jason Kelly, and David Carey. Interviews trace the trajectory of former investment bank Drexel Burnham Lambert, where Michael Milken helped popularize junk bonds before the firm filed for bankruptcy 25 years ago.

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The 2015 Pulitzer Prize Winners

The Pulitzer Prizes winners have been announced: Bloomberg News’s Zachary R. Mider was awarded a prize for explanatory reporting on corporate tax dodgers. Carol D. Leonnig of The Washington Post was awarded a national reporting award for her coverage of security lapses in the Secret Service. The New York Times won an international reporting award for its coverage of the Ebola outbreak in West Africa. Lisa Falkenberg of the Houston Chronicle was given the award for commentary for her columns about grand jury abuses. Mary McNamara, a TV critic for the Los Angeles Times, was awarded a prize for criticism. A list of the all the winners and finalists can be found here. Below is a short list of other books and features that were honored.

Public Service: “Till Death Do Us Part” (The Post and Courier)

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Breaking News Reporting: “Snohomish County Landslide” (The Seattle Times)

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Feature Writing: “Scenes from California’s Dust Bowl” (Diana Marcum, Los Angeles Times)

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Investigative Reporting: “Courting Favor” (Eric Lipton, New York Times) and “Medicare Unmasked” (The Wall Street Journal)

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Local Reporting: “Centinela Valley Union High School District Investigation” (Daily Breeze)

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Fiction: All the Light We Cannot See, Anthony Doerr

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Nonfiction: The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History, Elizabeth Kolbert

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Biography: The Pope and Mussolini: The Secret History of Pius XI and the Rise of Fascism in Europe, David I. Kertzer

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History: Encounters at the Heart of the World: A History of the Mandan People, Elizabeth A. Fenn

The Inequality of Maternity Leave in the United States

Photo by vinothchandar

In Bloomberg Businessweek, Claire Suddath reports that there are only two countries in the world that don’t have some type of legally protected, partially paid leave for working women who just had a baby: Papua New Guinea and the U.S. The result is another big gap between the haves and have-nots:

The policies vary widely across industries and pay grades. A BLS survey of “business, management, and finance” workers—basically, those in white-collar jobs—found that 26 percent of them get paid leave. At many Silicon Valley companies, which compete for talent, new parents have it made. Facebook offers a little more than four months to everyone. Google offers five for mothers and three for fathers or new adoptive parents. The company developed its policy a few years ago when it noticed that many new mothers were quitting their jobs. After it added two more months and offering full pay, the number of new mothers who left the company dropped by half.

Some older companies also have generous policies. Goldman Sachs offers four paid months, and General Electric offers two months to moms and two weeks to dads or other parents. Waitresses and sales clerks are often out of luck; only 6 percent of service workers get anything at all. That means the ability to adjust to parenthood, learn to breast-feed, and manage a newborn becomes a luxury only certain people can afford. “We have these policies set up from the Mad Men era when dads worked and moms stayed at home. But that doesn’t reflect the American workforce anymore,” says Gillibrand, who as partner at the Manhattan law firm Boies, Schiller & Flexner wrote the firm’s maternity leave policy in 2002.

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Longreads Best of 2014: Business Writing

We asked a few writers and editors to choose some of their favorite stories of the year in specific categories. Here, the best in business writing.

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Max Chafkin
Writer focusing on business and technology.

Schooled (Dale Russakoff, New Yorker)

This piece explores the failed attempt by Mark Zuckerberg and Corey Booker, among others, to fix Newark’s schools—and in doing so makes clear just how hard education reform is. Most shockingly, it exposes the huge sums of money spent by the city and its supporters on education consultants who managed to extract huge fees without, apparently, doing a whole lot. It’s pretty hard to make a dense story about education reform read well, but Russakoff amazingly manages it, while managing to be fair and incisive. Read more…

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle users, you can also get them as a Readlist.

Sign up to receive this list free every Friday in your inbox.

* * *

Read more…

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle users, you can also get them as a Readlist.

Sign up to receive this list free every Friday in your inbox.

* * *

Read more…

A Brutal Dictator, and the Wall Street Hedge Fund That Gave Him $100 Million

Mugabe’s men were setting up command centers for torture and killing in areas that voted for the opposition, the man told McGee, and regional party leaders like him were told to draw up lists of people to target. The ambassador learned that Mugabe’s government had landed critical funding, totaling $100 million, only days after the vote. The regime even provided hundreds of trucks and other vehicles to ferry militias to regions that favored Tsvangirai.

Reports of violence across the country soon poured into McGee’s embassy as Mugabe’s militias sought to punish opposition activists, drive their supporters from their homes, and intimidate the rest into backing Mugabe in the next round of elections. …

McGee wouldn’t find out for years, but as the attacks were unfolding, and as he worked with Washington to financially isolate Mugabe, a Wall Street consortium provided the $100 million for the dictator’s government. These millions secured the rights to mine platinum, among the most valuable of minerals, from central Zimbabwe. Several firms were involved in the investment, including BlackRock (BLK), GLG Partners, and Credit Suisse (CS). The most vital player was Och-Ziff Capital Management (OZM), the largest publicly traded hedge fund on Wall Street. An Och-Ziff spokesman declined to comment for this article. Now some of its African investments are at the center of an investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice and the Securities and Exchange Commission.

-A new Bloomberg Businessweek investigation, by Cam Simpson and Jesse Westbrook, on the hedge fund that helped fund Robert Mugabe, the notorious president of Zimbabwe.

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Photo: sokwanele, Flickr

Taylor Swift Is a Music Business Genius: A Reading List

Taylor Swift has done it again, this time getting Apple to change its streaming deal with artists. Here’s a collection of stories on how the pop star runs the music industry. 

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1. The Future of Music Is a Love Story (Taylor Swift, Wall Street Journal)

In an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, Swift says the future of music will be saved by this—the ability of a star to make millions of real friendships:

There are always going to be those artists who break through on an emotional level and end up in people’s lives forever. The way I see it, fans view music the way they view their relationships. Some music is just for fun, a passing fling (the ones they dance to at clubs and parties for a month while the song is a huge radio hit, that they will soon forget they ever danced to). Some songs and albums represent seasons of our lives, like relationships that we hold dear in our memories but had their time and place in the past.

However, some artists will be like finding “the one.” We will cherish every album they put out until they retire and we will play their music for our children and grandchildren. As an artist, this is the dream bond we hope to establish with our fans. I think the future still holds the possibility for this kind of bond, the one my father has with the Beach Boys and the one my mother has with Carly Simon.

2. The Secret Genius of Taylor Swift (Zoe Chace, Planet Money, 2012)

It’s not just the emotional bonds that will matter—it’s also the ability to thrive in a fragmented world where streaming overtakes individual album sales. Planet Money reported in 2012 that Swift and her team still know the best ways to move albums:

As Paul Resnikoff, editor and founder of Digital Music News points out, she has chosen from the toolbox only the outlets that would give her the most money for every album sold: Outlets that pushed a full album purchase.

The first week her album came out, you could only get it in a few key places: iTunes, Walgreens, Wal-Mart, Target. You could order a Papa Johns pizza and receive the CD — at the sticker price of around 14 bucks.

But the tools Swift didn’t use are as important than the ones she did. By refusing to release her singles on Spotify, or any other streaming site, she pushed her fans to buy the album. Spotify pays the artist pennies on the dollar. Taylor Swift skipped it.

3. You Belong With Me (Lizzie Widdicombe, The New Yorker, 2011)

As the New Yorker’s Lizzie Widdicombe noted in 2011, there were early signs that Swift had a keen business sense:

Early on, Swift assumed that she would follow her parents into business. “I didn’t know what a stockbroker was when I was eight, but I would just tell everybody that’s what I was going to be,” she recalled, during an online Q. & A. with fans. “We’d be at, like, the first day of school and they’re, like, ‘So what do you guys want to be when you grow up?’ And everybody’s, like, ‘I want to be an astronaut!’ Or, like, ‘I want to be a ballerina!’ And I’m, like, ‘I’m gonna be a financial adviser!’ ” But she eventually had a country-music epiphany, inspired by listening to nineties crossover hits—Faith Hill, Shania Twain, the Dixie Chicks. The melodies were good, but she especially liked the storytelling. “It was just such a given—I want to do that!” she said.

4. Taylor Swift Is the Music Industry (Devin Leonard, Bloomberg Businessweek)

After selling 1.29 million copies of her new album 1989, then pulling her music from the streaming service Spotify, Devin Leonard goes to Nashville to meet Scott Borchetta, founder of Swift’s label Big Machine Records, to understand the economics of being a label in 2014:

For that reason, Borchetta and Swift chose to initially withhold 1989 from Spotify. They did the same thing with Red in its early weeks. “We’re not against anybody, but we’re not responsible for new business models,” Borchetta says. “If they work, fantastic, but it can’t be at the detriment of our own business. That’s what Spotify is.”

Photo: evarinaldiphotography, Flickr