The billionaire oilman had the perfect plan to help his alma mater Oklahoma State University raise money—by taking out $10 million life insurance policies on him and 27 other people: Unfortunately for Oklahoma State, Pickens, and the other men and women who thought their demise would benefit their favorite university, Gift of a Lifetime has […]
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“The Post-Apocalypse Survival Machine Nerd Farm.” — Ashlee Vance, Bloomberg Businessweek More by Vance
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The Top 5 Longreads of the Week—featuring Rolling Stone, Los Angeles Magazine, The Atlantic, The Kenyon Review, Bloomberg Businessweek, fiction from Electric Literature, plus a guest pick from Moses Hawk.
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Member Exclusive: The Miracle Man
Our latest Member Exclusive (sign up here to join) comes from Andrew Rice, a contributing editor to New York magazine whose work has also appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The New Republic and Bloomberg Businessweek. He’s been featured on Longreads many times in the past, and we’re excited to feature “The Miracle Man,” […]
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We’re Getting Wildly Differing Assessments
A minute-by-minute account of the Supreme Court’s ruling on the American Care Act, and how some news organizations got it initially wrong: “Into his conference call, the CNN producer says (correctly) that the Court has held that the individual mandate cannot be sustained under the Commerce Clause, and (incorrectly) that it therefore ‘looks like’ the […]
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Koch Brothers Flout Law with Secret Iran Sales
A Bloomberg Markets investigation has found that Koch Industries — in addition to being involved in improper payments to win business in Africa, India and the Middle East — has sold millions of dollars of petrochemical equipment to Iran, a country the U.S. identifies as a sponsor of global terrorism. Internal company documents show that […]
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Homelessness in the Age of Bloomberg
We had four options: join Ready Willing and Able’s program, which prepared men to become street sweepers and janitors; sign up for a Bloomberg administration program which presents participants with a one-way ticket out of town, so long as the applicants could provide a contact person in the destination city who would agree to host […]
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Byron Reese & Demand Media’s Planet of the Algorithms
Every week, Reese would come up with an idea for something new to peddle. They would draft a business plan, launch a website, and measure consumers’ subsequent interest in a product. Efforts to sell coins and watches failed. At one point, Reese tried manufacturing family portraiture using inexpensive subcontractor artists in places such as Russia. […]
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Mike Bloomberg Will Save Us from Ourselves If Only We Let Him
Mike Bloomberg has become important because he represents a great American dream, not the one about owning a home or becoming more successful than your father but the one beneath all of those, the foundational American dream — the dream of freedom from politics. Bloomberg is the ultimate independent, the calm modern technocrat rooted in […]
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The Malaise-Proofing of Michael Bloomberg
Dispensing with any elaborate pretense about being in a competitive re-election contest, Mr. Bloomberg’s handlers have begun to use the mayor’s public appearances to address what happens after 2009. Their political task: to figure out a way of avoiding the historic curse of the complacent, unfocused and regrettable third term.
