Search Results for: Business

A New Front

Longreads Pick

Can the Pentagon do business with Silicon Valley? E.B. Boyd looks at what happens when the military meets the tech world.

Author: E.B. Boyd
Published: Sep 17, 2015
Length: 16 minutes (4,003 words)

The Radical Pessimism of Dashiell Hammett

The Thin Man

David Lehman | The American Scholar | Fall 2015 | 19 minutes (4,696 words)

 

Our latest Longreads Exclusive comes from the new issue of The American Scholar. Our thanks to them for sharing this essay with us.

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The Jeopardy category is Opening Lines, and the literary answer is “Two Bars, 52nd Street.” You need to ask what works begin in such venues. One comes to mind quickly enough, but if you have only an out-of-towner’s awareness of New York City and you have not paid close enough attention to W. H. Auden’s “September 1, 1939,” you may misread yourself 10 blocks down past Times Square. Read more…

A Very Brief History of Americans Playing Softball with Their Co-Workers

Americans have been playing softball with their co-workers since the game grew out of several variants of baseball in the late 19th century. In 1895, Louis Rober, a lieutenant in the Minneapolis fire department, organized games of “kittenball” to entertain firefighters between runs. Blue-collar company teams proliferated over the next half-century. Office workers joined in later, in the 1970s and ’80s.

Ira Boudway writing for Bloomberg Businessweek about how the High Times Bonghitters (yes, that is the team’s official name) became “the Yankees of New York media softball.”

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Reality TV and the Rise of Celebrity-CEOs

Sometimes it seems like everyone’s selling something. They’re selling their jewelry. They’re selling their book, selling their snack line, their natural cosmetics, their Etsy shop and blog and, ultimately, themselves. In The New Yorker‘s 2015 Style Issue, Lizzie Widdicombe writes about Bethenny Frankel, who turned her slot on The Real Housewives of New York City into an opportunity to sell her cocktail brand for $120 million dollars. Widdicombe examines Frankel and other “celebreneurs” who leverage visibility and idolatry to build their own commercial empire.

Frankel’s twin vocations are, in some sense, the same. “I’m a marketer,” she told me, explaining her role in business and in television. “I know how to communicate to people, and I think that’s what marketing really is.” It’s also an apt definition of celebrity. In 1944, the German sociologist Leo Löwenthal coined the phrase “idols of consumption” to describe the burgeoning celebrity culture. With their clear skin and fabulous wardrobes, stars give us something to aspire to─and an excuse to buy stuff we don’t really need.

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Making More Magazines: A Reading List

Photo: Sharon Terry

Last year, Longreads published a list with behind-the-scenes stories about magazines. Last week, Anne Helen Petersen published an article about the state of Tiger Beat for BuzzFeed News. Inspired, I decided to create an addendum to Making the Magazine. This reading list includes bigger names, like an archived examination of Ms. and Petersen’s update regarding Tiger Beat; a feminist-food magazine; a defunct magazine for sex workers and their supporters; and a lesbian/queer magazine for denizens of D.C. and beyond. Read more…

Savoring the Quintessential New York Hot Dog Experience

A much better example came on Central Park West in the lower Sixties, where a second Mohammad operated a stand. He told me that he’s from Alexandria and has been in New York for four years. (“Some people are good. Others, not so much,” he said of his customers.) Every winter, when the hot-dog business is sluggish and the park is more amenable to sledding than to lolling and ruminating, Mohammad goes back to Egypt to see his family. I asked him for a hot dog with ketchup and mustard and called my father. It was good—he lives in Europe, and we don’t often get to see each other. The hot dog was good, too—smooth and snappy, the mustard sweet. The key, Mohammad told me, is to ask for the hot dog to be thrown on the grill.

After my filial phone call was finished, I pushed onward and upward along Central Park West. Outside the American Museum of Natural History, I approached a larger stand, where I heard the vendor tell a couple that their order had come to forty-nine dollars. At first, I thought that I’d soon be seeing an overzealous NBC New York camera crew rush up to expose the vendor’s racket. But moments later a flurry of food came through the window: chicken fingers, four cheeseburgers, fries, and some hot dogs for good measure. The couple brought their grub to a bench, where their eagerly awaiting children sat. I bought a single hot dog from the same cart and sat down on an adjacent bench to marvel at a museum poster featuring a tardigrade—a tiny creature that looks like an inflated vacuum bag. After seven hot dogs, I knew how he felt.

Colin Stokes writing in The New Yorker about eating a hot dog from many of the thirty or so licensed venders around Central Park, in search of variations in New York City’s frankfurter formula.

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My Work, My Choice: ‘I Am a Prostitute’

As she prepares to transition out of sex work and into writing full-time, Charlotte Shane reflects on the politics of identity—specifically, her decision to call herself a prostitute:

I’ve called myself a prostitute for about as long as I’ve been one. I can’t remember exactly when I adopted the name but I know it felt like the most accurate term given the service I provide, and I like the solidarity of it, the refusal to kowtow to class-related stigma or what is sometimes called the “whorearchy” inside the sex industry…

Crowding what I do into the larger umbrella of “sex work,” without its own name, makes it seem as if I’m supposed to experience what I do as shameful. That my specific work can’t have a name; and that I’m supposed to accept the stigma that surrounds prostitution more intensely than any other form of sexual labor by using vague language to try to elide that stigma. It feels too much like an implication that there really is something bad and wrong about charging money to engage directly with someone else’s genitals, so I must never describe it as it is. I’m not OK with that. To make it verboten in public discourse puts us in agreement with those who think it’s a shameful life for shameful people.

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Dispatch from the Floor of the Model Minority Factory

Lawrence-Minh Bùi Davis, the founding director of the Asian American Literary Review and a lecturer in the Asian American Studies Program at the University of Maryland, worked for years at Straight A Learning Center, where he taught SAT prep classes and helped build a college advising service. At The Offing, he describes the opportunity to give back to his community and offer support to Asian American students like him — and how it went all wrong:

But there was a deeper problem too that I began to notice: in Helena, that furious striving, and in me, a compulsion to fan it in troubling ways. To not only convince her she could get accepted to top schools, and show her how to get accepted, but to set a dollar value on that acceptance. We were coding high-end acceptance as fulfillment, coding fulfillment as an investment. Which was also, not coincidentally, at the heart of our essay coaching — value. Application writing at all levels works this way. Why should you select me, hire me, give me that scholarship, that fellowship, that grant, that money. It’s the ultimate in capitalist logic: the most fundamentally important skill is being able to articulate your own value. I was not simply teaching this skill to individual students, I was pitching the idea to their parents, threading its logic into the fabric of our communities, creating a market for our business out of thin air. This was not teaching, not learning, not education; it was sales. It was recoding everything as commodity and transaction. It meant asking our prospective clients, the parents, to re-understand themselves and everyone around them, most especially their children, in terms of success narrowly understood in terms of education narrowly understood in terms of value. I was on the floor of the model minority factory, imagining the assembly line into being.

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On the Other Hand

Jon Irwin | Kill Screen | September 2015 | 22 minutes (5,439 words)

 

We’re excited to present a new Longreads Exclusive from Kill Screen—writer Jon Irwin goes inside the life of a man who helped keep the Muppets alive after Jim Henson’s death. For more from Kill Screen, subscribe. Read more…

Yonkers, Housing Desegregation and the Youngest Mayor in America

Lisa Belkin | Show Me a Hero, Little, Brown and Company | 1999 | 25 minutes (6,235 words)

 

Below is the first chapter of Lisa Belkin’s 1999 nonfiction book Show Me a Hero, which was recently adapted by David Simon into a six-part HBO miniseries of the same title. Belkin’s book (and the miniseries) depict the fight to desegregate housing in Yonkers, New York during the late 1980s and early ’90s, and the story of a young politician named Nick Wasicsko.  Read more…