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.
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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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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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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.

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.
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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:

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.
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…

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.
* * *

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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-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.
Photo: sokwanele, Flickr

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