Search Results for: Bloomberg

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…

Taking Care of Business: A Reading List

Longreads Pick

This week’s picks from Emily include stories from Orange Coast Magazine, The New York Times, Business Insider, and Bloomberg Businessweek.

Source: Longreads
Published: Feb 16, 2014

Taking Care of Business: A Reading List

Hackers! Gen Y CEOs! Multibillion dollar success stories! International expansion! Top-secret projects! Cute clothes! Hamburgers! Capitalism is so exciting, and so are these longreads about popular U.S. companies.

1. “In-N-Out’s Burger Queen.” (Patrick J. Kiger, Orange Coast, Jan. 2014)

31-year-old Lynsi Snyder presides over In-N-Out’s $1.1 billion industry, founded by her grandparents in the 1940s. What’s the company secret? Never change. Seem counterintuitive? Not if you’ve ever had an In-N-Out burger.

2. “You Can Explain eBay’s $50 Billion Turnaround With Just This One Crazy Story.” (Nicholas Carlson, Business Insider, Feb. 2014)

A group of six twenty-somethings fly to Sydney, Australia on a secret mission for eBay. Carlson brings the eBay executives and employees to life; I felt like I was watching “The Social Network.”

3. “A Sneaky Path Into Target Customers’ Wallets.” (Elizabeth A. Harris, Nicole Perlroth, Nathaniel Popper and Hilary Stout, Washington Post, Jan. 2014)

Merry Christmas, you’ve been hacked! In the midst of the 2013 holiday season, millions of Target customers received an ominous email; Cybercriminals targeted the store’s credit card machines, stole card numbers and PINs and endeavored to sell the information in the creepy corners of the internet.

4. “The J. Crew Invasion.” (Emma Rosenblum, Bloomberg Businessweek, Nov. 2013)

J. Crew executives hope the brand’s casual-chic niche will find a foothold in London.

***

Photo: Kevin Dooley

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

Join Longreads now and help us keep going.

Regulating the $1.5 Billion E-Cigarette Industry

businessweek-ecigs

Even without the combustion, nicotine is a vasoconstrictor that narrows blood vessels and drives up blood pressure. Doing that a dozen times a day is less bad than getting lung cancer, but it’s still not great. Besides, there is no study on what inhaling those “generally recognized as safe” compounds might do to your lungs if you inhale them daily for a few decades. It’s hard to imagine that the health effects could be worse than setting something on fire and deliberately breathing the smoke. But they’re probably not as good as quitting. “The antismokers think we’re going to win—that we can get to zero tobacco,” says Kleiman. If that’s what you believe, then you’re likely to endorse stiff restrictions on e-cigarettes. On the other hand, if you think U.S. tobacco consumption will stay stubbornly stuck between 10 percent and 20 percent of the population for the foreseeable future—which means tobacco deaths will remain in the hundreds of thousands annually—you’re more likely to be agitating for the federal government to take a light hand, even if it means opening the door to the possibility of a renewed national mania for nicotine.

Among the FDA’s most difficult decisions will be determining whether e-cigarettes will be a gateway product, encouraging young smokers to develop a nicotine habit that might lead to tobacco use. After all, many of the things that make e-cigarettes attractive to smokers make them even more attractive to minors. It’s actually pretty unpleasant to start smoking—it causes dizziness, it causes coughing, and it usually takes kids a while to learn to inhale—but anyone can inhale e-cigarette vapor on the first puff. And since e-cigarettes don’t have much odor, they’re harder for parents to detect. During the debate over New York’s policy, a September report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention showing e-cigarette use on the rise among teenagers was prominently discussed. Spokesmen for Altria Group (MO), Reynolds American (RAI), and Lorillard—the Big Three of tobacco—are in agreement that children should be prevented from buying e-cigarettes, just as they are prevented from buying the regular kind.

Megan McArdle, in Bloomberg Businessweek, on the regulatory and health questions arising from e-cigarettes. Read more from Bloomberg Businessweek.

***

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

Join Longreads now and help us keep going.

A Think Piece About Think Pieces

Always pick sides! Team Aniston!! The internet demands it, even if it’s only half-thoughts it wants, thoughts like, “This, just this” or “This is everything.” “This” is not a sentence. Nor is “Best. Thing. Ever.” Nor “!!!!” But worse than inchoate enthusiasm is the “think piece” at the other end of the spectrum, a form of recreational sophistry usually in the service of some bullshit. Was Proust a Urologist? Girls, Not Bloomberg, Evicted Zuccotti Park. Does Breathing Make You Smarter? What Breaking Bad  Teaches Us About Building Brands. What Breaking Bad Teaches Us About the War on Drugs. What Breaking Bad Teaches Us About Toxic Relationships. (Those last three are real.) It makes you appreciate the listicle’s honest hypoambition; it’s the true slacker of internet forms. “13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” is a good listicle. It announces up front how little of your time it will waste.

We assert our right to not care about stuff, to not say anything, to opt out of debate over things that are silly and also things that are serious—because why pretend to have a strong opinion when we do not? Why are we being asked to participate in some imaginary game of Risk where we have to take a side? We welcome the re-emergence of politics in the wake of the financial crash, the restoration of sincerity as a legitimate adult posture. But already we see this new political sincerity morphing into a set of consumer values, up for easy exploitation. We are all cosmopolitans online, attentive to everything; but the internet is not one big General Assembly, and the controversies planted in establishment newspapers aren’t always the sort of problems that require the patient attention of a working group. Some opinions deserve radical stack (like #solidarityisforwhitewomen), but the glorified publicity stunts that dress up in opinion’s clothes to get viral distribution in the form of “debate” (Open Letters to Miley Cyrus) do not. We ought to be selective about who deserves our good faith. Some people duke it out to solve problems. Others pick fights for the spectacle, knowing we’ll stick around to watch. In the meantime they’ll sell us refreshments, as we loiter on the sideline, waiting to see which troll will out-troll his troll.

The Editors of n+1 on Internet rage, American rage, and Constitutional rights. Read more from n+1.

***

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

Join Longreads now and help us keep going.

Facebook's Real Names Problem

One thing about some of the new apps that will come as a shock to anyone familiar with Facebook: Users will be able to log in anonymously. That’s a big change for Zuckerberg, who once told David Kirkpatrick, author of The Facebook Effect, that “having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity.”

At the time of Facebook’s founding, there was no such thing as real identity online. Facebook became the first place where people met one another as themselves, and the company was stubborn about asking users to sign in and share material with their own names. A Facebook account became a sort of passport to the rest of the Web, and with its success came new problems. No teenager wants to share insane party pics with a group of friends that may include his or her parents and teachers. And dissidents in parts of the world where speaking freely can be incriminating avoided the service in favor of alternatives such as Twitter, where real names are optional.

Former Facebook employees say identity and anonymity have always been topics of heated debate in the company. Now Zuckerberg seems eager to relax his old orthodoxies. “I don’t know if the balance has swung too far, but I definitely think we’re at the point where we don’t need to keep on only doing real identity things,” he says. “If you’re always under the pressure of real identity, I think that is somewhat of a burden.” Paper will still require a Facebook login, but Zuckerberg says the new apps might be like Instagram, which doesn’t require users to log in with Facebook credentials or share pictures with friends on the social network. “It’s definitely, I think, a little bit more balanced now 10 years later,” he says. “I think that’s good.”

Brad Stone and Sarah Frier, in Bloomberg Businessweek, on the challenges for Facebook on its 10th anniversary. Read more about Facebook in the Longreads Archive.

***

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.

***

The Anatomy of a Tweet

image

“For all the possibilities of APIs, there are also limits. Another tweet field, ‘withheld_copyright,’ if set to ‘true,’ lets you know that a tweet is in trouble—that its content has raised flags and hackles over copyright. The text of the tweet, in that case, may be suppressed. The ‘withheld_in_countries’ field can provide a list of the nations in which the tweet is banned. Another field has a telling name: ‘possibly_sensitive.’ It’s set to either true or false. The field indicates whether a tweet links to potentially offensive things such as ‘nudity, violence, or medical procedures.’ (If ever you wanted a snapshot of our world’s anxieties in three terms, there you have it.) As a user you can check a box on your profile so that the media you link to is automatically flagged this way. If you don’t, you risk having your pictures of your medical procedure marked as objectionable by an offended reader and thus put ‘in review,’ the Twitter version of limbo.”

Paul Ford, in Bloomberg Businessweek, on the metadata of a tweet and what makes Twitter work. Read more from Ford.

***

Cover via Richard Turley

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

Join Longreads now and help us keep going.

“‘We are going to be poised to benefit from the aging of America, the baby boomers,’ Foley said. Deaths in the U.S. are forecast to increase at an average annual rate of 1.1 percent over the next five years. At SCI, earnings per share rose 26 percent in the first half of 2013. ‘This growth,’ Foley said, ’was driven in large part due to the strong flu season’—i.e., a lot of old people got sick and died last winter.”

Meet the company that’s taking over the funeral industry. Then read more Longreads picks from Bloomberg Businessweek.

***

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

Join Longreads now and help us keep going.

Longreads Guest Pick: Matthew Zeitlin on Mina Kimes's story about Sears

Matthew is a business reporter at BuzzFeed.

My longread of the week is ‘At Sears, Eddie Lampert’s Warring Divisions Model Adds to the Troubles,’ by Mina Kimes in Bloomberg Businessweek. This is not a profile of Eddie Lampert, the hedge fund manager who masterminded Kmart’s acquisition of Sears and is now running the struggling retailer. The piece, based on interviews with former Sears executives and employees, is instead an examination of what happened to Sears after Lampert took over and implemented a strategy based on his Ayn Rand inflected worldview. Lampert’s big idea is that the 30-plus different segments of Sears operate more or less independently and compete for resources and attention. Kimes is never able to actually speak with Lampert in person or see him operate, and so she paints a portrait not of the man — which is where so much business magazine journalism starts and ends — but of something far more important: the results.

•••

Do you enjoy this service? You can support us by becoming a Longreads Member.