How a British businessman named James McCormick made millions selling fake bomb-detectors to the Iraqi government: “When Dale Murray arrived in Denver a few weeks later, he knew he’d seen the Mole before. It was identical in every way to the Quadro Tracker—down to the patterns of stippling on the plastic handle. ‘It looked like […]
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Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
The Innovation That Helped 'El Chapo' Create a Multi-Billion-Dollar Drug Trafficking Empire
But Chapo’s greatest contribution to the evolving tradecraft of drug trafficking was one of those innovations that seem so logical in hindsight it’s a wonder nobody thought of it before: a tunnel. In the late 1980s, Chapo hired an architect to design an underground passageway from Mexico to the United States. What appeared to be […]
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“‘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,’ […]
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The Anatomy of a Tweet
“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 […]
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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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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. […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
Longreads List: Guns in America
From The Daily Beast’s David Sessions, a collection of stories on gun violence and policy in the U.S., featuring The Atlantic, Washington Post, Bloomberg Businessweek and Mother Jones.
Posted inEditor's Pick
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,” […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
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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Don Draper's Revenge
Don Draper’s Revenge “All these little companies with fun names,” says David Lubars, “we’ve kicked their butts.” Lubars is chairman and chief creative officer of Omnicom’s BBDO North America, an 82-year-old Madison Avenue agency with more than 17,000 employees. On a recent Friday afternoon, Lubars was sitting in his Midtown Manhattan office. He gestured at […]
