Search Results for: Business

Using Technology to Fight the Power

In a new story for Wired, Bijan Stephen looks at how the Black Lives Matter movement uses social media to organize and fight for change. As Stephen writes, “any large social movement is shaped by the technology available to it,” tailoring their goals and tactics to the media of their time. For the nascent Black Lives Matter movement, that technology has been platforms like Twitter and Facebook. But civil rights organizers were using technology to mobilize long before the advent of social media. Here’s what that looked like in the Jim Crow South:

In the 1960s, if you were a civil rights worker stationed in the Deep South and you needed to get some urgent news out to the rest of the world—word of a beating or an activist’s arrest or some brewing state of danger—you would likely head straight for a telephone.

From an office or a phone booth in hostile territory, you would place a call to one of the major national civil rights organizations. But you wouldn’t do it by dialing a standard long-distance number. That would involve speaking first to a switchboard operator—who was bound to be white and who might block your call. Instead you’d dial the number for something called a Wide Area Telephone Service, or WATS, line.

Like an 800 line, you could dial a WATS number from anywhere in the region and the call would patch directly through to the business or organization that paid for the line—in this case, say, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.

On the other end of the line, another civil rights worker would be ready to take down your report and all the others pouring in from phones scattered across the South. The terse, action-packed write-ups would then be compiled into mimeographed “WATS reports” mailed out to organization leaders, the media, the Justice Department, lawyers, and other friends of the movement across the country.

In other words, it took a lot of infrastructure to live-tweet what was going on in the streets of the Jim Crow South.

Read the story

Postscript: A Secret Society Shuts Its Doors

What happened inside the Latitude Society? In September, we featured a Longreads Original by Rick Paulas, “‘We Value Experience,’” which told the story of artist/entrepreneur Jeff Hull and his group’s attempts to build a sustainable “secret society” in the Bay Area. Paulas has shared the following postscript on what happened after his story about the group went public.

* * *

Five days after my article went up at Longreads (“’We Value Experience’: Can A Secret Society Become a Business?”, 9/24/15), visitors to The Latitude’s website were met with the following prompt:

latitudeclose Read more…

I Would Rather Be Herod’s Pig: The History of a Taboo

One of Odysseus' men transforming into a pig. Via Wikimedia Commons.

Mark Essig | Lesser Beasts: A Snout-to-Tail History of the Humble Pig | Basic Books | May 2015 | 20 minutes (5,293 words)

Below is an excerpt from Lesser Beasts, by Mark Essig, as recommended by Longreads contributing editor Dana Snitzky

* * *

Built in about 2550 bc, the Great Pyramid of Giza stands 455 feet tall and comprises some 2.3 million blocks of stone weighing about 13 billion pounds in aggregate. Archaeologists still argue over whether those stones were moved into place using levers, sledges, or oil-slicked ramps. Whatever the technical method, building the pyramids involved a feat of social engineering just as impressive as the mechanical: Egyptian authorities had to feed a workforce of thousands of people for decades at a time. Read more…

The Impossibility of Building a Personal Brand

Creating a personal brand is exhausting, but potentially rewarding. It requires maintenance on all fronts, social media and IRL. Is it tenable for the average human being?

Branding yourself has become a professional goal for more than just journalists. Today, Fortune 500 companies hold seminars to train their employees in the art of personal branding, and an entire industry of coaches is flourishing to teach nonprofit managers and small-business owners how to get a leg up on the competition. By the year 2020, according to software company Intuit, 40 percent of the workforce will consist of freelancers and independent contractors. Whether you’re a financial planner or a fashion blogger, a personal brand has come to seem like a professional requirement—the key to success and fulfillment in an increasingly cutthroat and unstable economy. “Every person is a media company,” said Dan Schawbel, 32, a brand consultant in New York and one of the leading figures in the personal branding industry. “Anyone can have a platform now, whether you’re a janitor or a CEO.”

Ann Friedman investigates all of this at The New Republic, and decides to undergo her own rebranding. She consults with Karen Leland, president of Sterling Marketing Group.

We struck a deal: Leland, who is based in San Francisco, would walk me through a truncated version of her personal branding services—which she’s been offering for 20 years and normally cost between $25,000 and $75,000 for anywhere from three months to six months or longer…She started with some questions: What do you do? What are the qualities with which you do it? And what is the result or impact?

A personal brand, Leland cautioned me, is “something that you actively have to manage online, offline, in your organization, in your industry, and on social media.” Which means there are dozens of opportunities every day to question whether you’re doing it right. Is this crop top on-brand for a networking happy hour? Is this joke tweet-worthy or something I should merely text to a friend? Is this stupid assignment I accepted in order to make rent detracting from my reputation too much? Life is not always on-brand.

Read the story

The Politics of Poetry

David Orr | Beautiful & Pointless: A Guide to Modern Poetry | HarperCollins | 2011 | 18 minutes (4,527 words)

The essay below is excerpted from David Orr’s 2011 book Beautiful & Pointless: A Guide to Modern Poetry. Orr writes the On Poetry column for The New York Times, and an earlier version of this essay appeared in Poetry Magazine. Read more…

Relearning How to Talk in the Age of Smartphone Addiction

Photo: Peter Urban

Jessica Gross | Longreads | October 2015 | 17 minutes (4,263 words)

 

Sherry Turkle, a professor of the social studies of science and technology at MIT, has studied our relationship with technology for decades. While some of her earlier works highlighted the ways in which technology could help us construct self-identities, her more recent writing warns that we are overinvesting in our devices and underinvesting in ourselves and each other.

In Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other, published in 2011, Turkle explored the implications of replacing real intimacy with digital connection. Her new book, Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age, continues that thread. Turkle uses Thoreau’s three chairs—one for solitude, two for friendship, and three for society—as a framework, describing how our devices disrupt conversation and healthy development at every stage. When we turn to our phones constantly, we deny ourselves the capacity for solitude and identity development. This, in turn, blunts our ability to form healthy relationships. And vice versa: when we text instead of talk, or look at our devices instead of each other, we diminish our abilities to relate to other people as well as ourselves. Turkle ends the book with a discussion of what it means that we have begun to relate to machines as sentient beings when, in fact, they have no feelings, no experiences, no empathy, no idea what it means to be human.

Turkle—a psychoanalytically trained psychologist who founded and directs the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self—is no Luddite. But she argues for moderation, and for a deep look at how over-invested we’ve become in new technology. She is also optimistic that we are at just the right moment for this rceexamination, and for a return to conversation, reflection, and real intimacy. Turkle and I began our phone conversation by hailing that old thing, the landline.

Hi, this is Jessica Gross, calling from Longreads. Is this Sherry Turkle?

Yes, it is. I’ve been looking forward to hearing from you. But let me have you call back on a landline. I think the fidelity would be better and it’d just be easier. [Ring, ring.] Here I am. I love this old technology. I’m at a seaside cabin with this 1950 phone that works perfectly. [Laughter]

I got my own landline recently and it’s been really delightful.

I mean, there’s this thing where calls never get dropped, where you can hear in perfect fidelity! [Laughter] And it goes on even if the Wi-Fi is down! Read more…

How Women Are Taking the Legal Weed Industry into the Future

“On account of its federal status [as a Schedule I drug], most big law firms don’t want to touch weed,” [attorney Amanda] Connor explains. “Ethically, lawyers aren’t supposed to give advice about illegal activities. Major firms are afraid to lose clients.” Her boutique firm may be the only one in the country that takes marijuana providers through the entire byzantine process, from licensing to opening a shop.

Another renegade is Boulder, Colorado-based marijuana tax law attorney Rachel Gillette. She recently sued the IRS—and won—on behalf of a client who was denied an abatement of a 10 percent penalty for paying his taxes in cash. But cash was the only option: Because of federal law, marijuana enterprises deal only in cash, as banks shun them. “It’s a difficult situation for many marijuana businesses, with regard to banking,” says Gillette. “Most banks do not take marijuana business accounts, even in states where it is legal. They can’t afford the compliance cost. It’s too risky.” So far, Gillette has been the only marijuana attorney to beat the IRS on this issue.

Gogo Lidz, writing in Newsweek about how female medical personnel, scientists, strategists and investors are advancing America’s booming weed business and rapidly shifting it from a male dominated industry.

Read the story

The Hard Life and High Times of Independent Musicians

The band Dead Moon is a rock and roll institution and legend around their native Pacific Northwest. Formed in 1987 by husband and wife team Fred (guitarist) Cole and Toody (bassist) Cole, their do-it-yourself approach to making music and managing their affairs has influenced musicians around the world. This September, Fred collapsed on stage during their set at Seattle’s annual Bumbershoot festival and was taken to the hospital. He’s 67 years old. In February, 2014, Callie Danger spoke with bassist Toody in She Shreds magazine about making music for a living, keeping control of their art, and keeping motivated.

She Shreds: And what are the advantages of running everything independently?

Toody Cole: It’s that you’ve got free range to do what you want with it. That’s always been a big thing. That’s why we got into having our own business. Fred used to have to work for temp labor, putting his hair up in a hat just to get hired. You guys forget how difficult it used to be, just to be weird! You have the freedom as a musician to not have to go, “Gee, would it be okay if I take off next Friday?” Because you’d just get fired. At some point, we said, “We should just create our own thing.” We’re both control freaks, so just to have the control is number one. It’s also a cost-saving thing as well, to have your own label. To just be able to go direct to the source for the mastering and the pressing. To not have to go through somebody else who would charge you for the time and labor to do it for you. We’ve always been hands-on.

She Shreds: How long do you think it took to conjure up the commanding stage presence that you have today?

Toody Cole: There used to be a big thing on the West Coast called Garage Shock that Dave Crider from Estrus Records used to have every year in Bellingham, Washington. People used to come from all over the United States, all over the world. When we went up there, it might have been one of the first times Dead Moon played. There were a bunch of these other bands—naturally, all guy bands—sitting around. We were one of the headliners. And, of course, they hadn’t heard of us. At that point, nobody really had. When I walked by, one of these guys goes, “Oh, we’re so gonna blow these guys. They’ve got a girl in the band!” I don’t get mad that easily, but man, I was so fucking pissed. “Yeah, we’ll see, dudes. We’ll see who blows who off the stage, asshole.” It wound up being one of the best gigs we ever did! [laughs] It’s a great motivator, when people underestimate you.

Read the interview

My Unsentimental Education

Debra Monroe | My Unsentimental Education, The University of Georgia Press | Oct. 2015 | 14 minutes (3,487 words)

A misfit in Spooner, Wisconsin, with its farms, bars, and strip joints, Debra Monroe left to earn a degree, then another, and another, vaulting into academia but never completely leaving her past behind. Her memoir My Unsentimental Education was published today, and our thanks to the University of Georgia Press for allowing us to reprint the chapter below. Two previous excerpts from the book have been long-listed for The Best American Essays (2011 and 2015), and an early excerpt also appeared on Longreads in 2013.  

*** Read more…

Atomic Summer: An Essay by Joni Tevis

Operation Teapot, the Met Shot
Operation Teapot, the Met Shot, a tower burst weapons effects test April 15, 1955 at the Nevada Test Site. Photo via Wikimedia Commons

Joni Tevis | The World Is On Fire: Scrap, Treasure, and Songs of Apocalypse  | Milkweed Editions | May 2015 | 28 minutes (7,494 words)

 

Below is Joni Tevis’s essay “Damn Cold in February: Buddy Holly, View-Master, and the A-Bomb,” from her book The World Is On Fire, as recommended by Longreads contributing editor Dana Snitzky. This essay originally appeared in The Diagram. Read more…