Sheelah Kolhatkar is features editor at Bloomberg Businessweek. *** Some of my favorite non-Businessweek features that were published this year: “Lost at Sea,” Jon Ronson, The Guardian This piece combines a genre I love—the gritty crime story—with the utter weirdness of the cruise ship industry. Apparently people disappear from cruise ships all the time, but […]
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Evan Kindley: My Top 5 Longreads of 2011
Evan Kindley is the managing editor of the Los Angeles Review of Books. ••• Ariel Levy, “Basta Bunga Bunga” (June 6, 2011) – The New Yorker A great piece about what proved to be the Last Days of Berlusconi’s Italy, with all the virtues of the typical artfully triangulated New Yorker profile (as recently codified by […]
Lessons from inventor Lenn Rockford Hann’s negotiations with companies over a carbon-fiber shoe he patented in 2004: When it came time to talk price with New Balance, Hann set his offer sky-high. He says he meant it as a starting point, but company executives closed discussions. Hartner remains a supporter of the shoe, but says […]
The country’s huge challenges following the U.S. withdrawal, including corruption, new waves of violence and crippled infrastructure: The end of the U.S. military’s long, bloody adventure in Iraq signals the start of a new, highly uncertain chapter in the country’s development. In the scenario conjured by optimistic U.S. and Iraqi officials, an Iraq free of […]
Former Time Warner Book Group CEO Larry Kirshbaum jumps from the traditional publishing world to “the dark side,” heading up Amazon Publishing. Meanwhile, the Big Six watch closely: Amazon could be an unstoppable competitor to big publishing houses. If history is any guide, Jeff Bezos, who declined to comment for this story, doesn’t care whether […]
An inside look at the operational challenges facing United and Continental as they merge—from the union negotiations to the choice of in-flight coffee: On July 1 the new United introduced its new coffee. Fliers on the ‘legacy United’ fleet, accustomed to Starbucks, let out a collective yowl of protest. Pineau-Boddison had expected some resistance—Starbucks, after […]
How one night at Rupert Murdoch’s London townhouse changed the course of the phone-hacking scandal: Red wine in hand, Rupert Murdoch chatted with guests at his London townhouse on what would be one of the most important nights to the future of his company. Gathered for cocktails were Rupert’s son James, heir apparent to the […]
Top 5 #Longreads of the Week: Salon, The Atlantic, Bloomberg Businessweek, Forbes, Nature, a fiction pick, plus a guest pick from Emily Keeler.
Ex-president and CEO Michael Woodford says he tried to blow the whistle on fraudulent accounting related to $1.6 billion in transactions. He was then fired: Woodford, 51, recounted how he had just returned from Hong Kong, having fled Tokyo after a board meeting in which Olympus Chairman Tsuyoshi Kikukawa had fired him. The cause for […]
The Bank of England’s Andrew Haldane on banking, risk and how to bring social and financial equity back into the system: Consider the effects of the too-big-to-fail problem on risk-taking incentives. If banks know they will be bailed out, those holding their debt will be less likely to price the risk of failure for themselves. […]
