Longreads Best of 2015: Business & Tech

We asked a few writers and editors to choose some of their favorite stories of the year in specific categories. Here, the best in business and tech.
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We asked a few writers and editors to choose some of their favorite stories of the year in specific categories. Here, the best in business and tech.
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All through December, we’ll be featuring Longreads’ Best of 2015. To get you ready, here’s a list of every story that was chosen as No. 1 in our weekly Top 5 email.
If you like these, you can sign up to receive our free weekly email every Friday. Read more…

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.”

Like all people who hate Burning Man, I enjoy nothing more than reading articles about Burning Man. In February, Felix Gillette chronicled the semi-clad class warfare at last year’s Burning Man for Bloomberg Businessweek. Despite being a festival based on radical self-reliance, Black Rock City is seemingly overrun with tech billionaires setting up their own exclusive festivals-within-a-festival; ultra-luxe camps that are fully built and staffed by paid “sherpas.” In his piece, Gillette described plans for an over-the-top camp hosted by Jim Tananbaum, a former member of Burning Man’s governing board:
In the spring [Tananbaum] and his team sent out a detailed invitation, enticing potential guests with an early vision of the camp, named Caravancicle. Anyone concerned about living in a hot, unforgiving wilderness could rest assured. There would be no roughing it at Caravancicle. Accommodations would consist of a series of cubical tents with carbon fiber skeletons. Each cube would have 9-foot ceilings, comfortable bedding, and air conditioning. The surrounding camp, enclosed by high walls, would be safe and private. Amenities would include a central lounge housed in a geodesic dome, private showers and toilets, solar panels, wireless Internet, and a 24-hour bar. Guests could count on a “full-service” staff, who would among other things help create “handcrafted, artisanal popsicles” to offer passers-by. To help blend in with the Burning Man regulars, who tend to parade around the commons in wild, racy outfits (if anything at all), the camp would include an entire shipping container full of costumes.
Wells Tower’s legendary 2013 GQ account of attending the aforementioned festival with his father.
An essay by Keith A. Spencer about why business leaders, particularly in Silicon Valley, are so enamored with Burning Man:

Quietly, steadily, the Buffett family is funding the biggest shift in birth control in a generation. “For Warren, it’s economic. He thinks that unless women can control their fertility—and that it’s basically their right to control their fertility—that you are sort of wasting more than half of the brainpower in the United States,” DeSarno said about Buffett’s funding of reproductive health in the 2008 interview. “Well, not just the United States. Worldwide.”
—Karen Weise writing in Bloomberg Businessweek about Warren Buffett’s financial support of contraceptive research and access. Over the last decade, the Buffett Foundation has quietly funded a birth control revolution, becoming the most influential supporter of research on IUDs and expanding access to the contraceptive.

The paint-and-sip industry is a little more than a decade old. People show up to drink while an instructor slowly guides them, step-by-step, through the creation of a prechosen design. The idea was pioneered by Painting With a Twist, which two women in New Orleans started while looking for a reason to gather after Hurricane Katrina; it now has 200-plus locations, more than a third of which opened last year. Based on growth, it was rated the No. 1 franchise in Entrepreneur magazine’s Franchise 500 list.
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A typical Paint Nite teacher is a young, full-time artist or an older art teacher. Many, like Boston’s Callie Hastings, who is now on staff at the company, once taught preschool. She says teaching 4-year-olds how to paint isn’t all that different from teaching drunk people: “They have short attention spans. So you have to talk in short sentences.” She was surprised to find that people didn’t choose classes based on date or location, but on the painting itself. They will drive an extra 45 minutes, past two other Paint Nite locations, to execute the pastoral landscape that will go perfectly in their dining room. To avoid copyright issues, all the paintings have been created by Paint Nite artists, and there’s a huge selection. One of Paint Nite’s first crises came when artists got mad that other people were using their works in classes. Now instructors give $10 per session to the creator of the work.
Choosing the painting that brings in a crowd is an art in itself: The work can’t look so challenging that you’d have trouble reproducing it drunk; it should involve nature and have enough contrast to look good on social media; and, if possible, it should knock off a famous impressionist. Most artists learn this the hard way, despite the advice in Paint Nite’s starter kit. “A lot of them pick paintings based on what they like,” McGrail says. “One artist, Raisin—that was his first and last name—had a giraffe coming out of an elephant penis. Not surprisingly, it didn’t sell that well.” After years of pushing artists to hire a nude male model—Hermann and McGrail wanted to call it Asstastic night—without anyone taking them up on it, they recently got an instructor to do it in Boston in June. Demand was so high they had to rent out a theater.
—Joel Stein, in Bloomberg Businessweek, profiles a franchise with a $39 million valuation called Paint Nite, which arranges painting classes led by artists at bars. Participants pledge not to use the words “mine sucks.”

Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle users, you can also get them as a Readlist.
Sign up to receive this list free every Friday in your inbox.
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Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle users, you can also get them as a Readlist.
Sign up to receive this list free every Friday in your inbox.
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Paul Ford and Bloomberg Businessweek collaborate on a 38,000-word essay meant to answer the big and small questions of what it means to be a coder: how programming works, why it matters, and whether you should start learning yourself.

Below is a guest reading list by Eva Holland, a writer and editor based in Canada’s Yukon Territory, whose work we’ve featured on Longreads many times in the past.
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Canada’s magazine industry recently threw its biggest party of the year: the National Magazine Awards. The Canadian event differs from the American Ellies, with more categories and more nominees per category: this year’s awards were up for grabs among 326 nominees from 80 publications, spread across 43 categories. “Gold” and “silver” winners get awards, and the balance of the nominees receive honorable mentions. That spawns the occasional joke about how in Canadian magazines, everyone gets a medal for participation, but—go ahead, call me biased (I was a nominee/honorable mention in the “society” category, for “The Forgotten Internment”)—I like the way our format lets us celebrate many different sorts of work, not just the “biggest,” most ambitious features.
Here are a few of my favorites from among this year’s winners: Read more…
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