Search Results for: Fast Company

Longreads Best of 2014: Business Writing

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 writing.

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Max Chafkin
Writer focusing on business and technology.

Schooled (Dale Russakoff, New Yorker)

This piece explores the failed attempt by Mark Zuckerberg and Corey Booker, among others, to fix Newark’s schools—and in doing so makes clear just how hard education reform is. Most shockingly, it exposes the huge sums of money spent by the city and its supporters on education consultants who managed to extract huge fees without, apparently, doing a whole lot. It’s pretty hard to make a dense story about education reform read well, but Russakoff amazingly manages it, while managing to be fair and incisive. Read more…

Roy Choi and the Taco Truck That Spawned an Empire

Kogi didn’t take off overnight. After Choi’s friend and Kogi partner (eight people run the company) Mark Manguera came up with the idea of mashing up Korean BBQ and Mexican tacos, the Kogi truck began heaving through the streets of L.A. It was slow going at first, more a curiosity than anything else. But then one night in December of 2008, the truck pulled up outside the UCLA dorms during finals.

“We were out on the streets,” Choi says. “Alice (Shin) was in Brooklyn doing her thing. She’s a member of Kogi. She did our blogs. She was running our Twitter at the time. She still is. The rest of us were out here. We only had one smartphone at the time, so we were sharing that. And we were just driving from spot to spot. We didn’t know anyone was listening to us out there; we were just posting stuff on Twitter. We were going to K-Town, Hollywood. We were going to the clubs, going to the colleges. Slowly, little by little, things started to build.

“Then in December, it all just burst after UCLA. We went up to the dorms, and all the kids came out. That’s when Twitter was just becoming popular. It was at night. They were studying. We went to the co-op housing where they were all studying, it was finals. Everyone was around. Word got out, I think there were fliers all over campus about this mysterious taco truck that served Korean barbecue for $2 and it’s coming here. There were a thousand kids out there. It kind of created this kind of urban myth and groundswell. Then we started going out to Rosemead and Venice. That was the turning point.”

Nicole LaPorte, writing about chef Roy Choi for Fast Company. Choi’s LA-based food empire now includes restaurants (Chego, A-Frame), a cookbook/memoir (L.A. Son) and a hotel (The Line).

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Publishing Startup at a Crossroads: ‘Maybe It’s Time to Embrace Something Old-Fashioned’

The iOS app, pending improvements, still might catch on, but if it doesn’t, we’ll have to figure out how to try to keep those subscribers as we fold them back into the original distribution system. We’re also in talks with an established indie publishing house, trying to figure out whether doing a handful of print and e-book Emily Books originals in collaboration could make financial sense for both us and them; I’m hopeful, but when I look at the profit and loss statements they’ve given us for reference, I get less so. The idea that print availability is the only difference between selling a few hundred and a few thousand books seems like a stretch. Then again, we have a built-in base. “Two hundred people who love you are more important than 2 million people who like you,” some startup guy or other once said. Startup guys say a lot of stuff, though.

When night fell on our retreat, we put away our laptops and curled up on the couch in front of the TV. The Devil Wears Prada was showing on Lifetime, as it always is, and we were delighted to sit down and rewatch it. Outsized caricature that it is, this monumentally great chick flick does seem in some ways to encapsulate my own journey from principled young striver to glamour-chasing young sellout and back again. As we watched Andi toss the cell phone that had tethered her to her dream-nightmare job into the fountain and put her terrible corduroys back on to work at some kind of scrubby newspaper, I wondered if the movie wasn’t an omen. Maybe it’s time to embrace something old-fashioned instead of something glitzy and new and untried. Maybe our future–and publishing’s future–isn’t to be found in technological advancements that change the way we read, but in advancements that change the way books reach their audience.

Emily Gould, in Fast Company, with an honest reflection on her own publishing startup, and questions about what to do next.

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Photo: nataliaromay, Flickr

What Keeps Anthony Bourdain Excited About Making His Show

Bourdain’s shows have grown more visually complex and cinematic over the years, using intricate editing and atmospheric slo-mo shots to add mystery and gravitas. Episodes are often directly inspired by Bourdain’s film passions. A season 2 trip into Tokyo’s nightlife underbelly–complete with segments on bondage and S&M–was informed by the work of Tokyo Fist director Shinya Tsukamoto, while the Shanghai episode currently unspooling on-screen tapped Hong Kong’s Wong Kar-wai as its key reference point. Bourdain usually picks the influences, but it’s up to the team to execute that vision. “Before we go out on a shoot, Tony will give us a homework assignment, which is about a dozen esoteric films,” says Brigden. “We become obsessed with those filmmakers. We live and breathe them.”

Bourdain is more than just Parts Unknown’s host, head writer, and executive producer; he is its creative engine, picking locations, teasing out themes, obsessing over narrative structure, and guiding its overall artistic vision. At one point while watching a meditative, beautifully shot Shanghai montage, he’s distracted by some incongruously funky background music. “I wish there was no bass,” he says to Brigden and Andrukanis. “It shouldn’t be danceable. It should be wistful.” It’s a small detail in a short segment from a single show, but it’s easy to see how that one tweak will transform the mood of the scene–and maybe even the whole episode.

That quest for excellence is a big part of what’s kept Bourdain excited about making a show with the same basic format for the past 14 years. He can be intense, but he constantly pushes the crew to reach toward the new. “We literally sit down and try to figure out, ‘What’s the most fucked-up thing we can do?’ ” he says, taking a swig from his industrial-size cup of light-and-sweet deli coffee. “ ’What haven’t we done that we can try?’ ”

— Anthony Bourdain, profiled this week in Fast Company. Says a producer who has worked with Bourdain for a long time: “He is fun, funny, smart, sardonic, and a pain in the fucking ass sometimes. But it’s a very collaborative process. He is challenging in all the best ways. He can outtalk, outwit, outhumor anybody who’s trying to argue with him, and sometimes that gets your ire up. But ultimately you take that ire and channel it into the show.”

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Photo: YouTube

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle users, you can also get them as a Readlist.

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The Daytime Dance Party As Harbinger Of Gentrification

The hundreds of people who show up each week to party at Mister Sunday are out for a good time. What the carefree fun-seekers likely do not realize is that they are also a part of a powerful real-estate developer’s plan to remake Industry City—and the Sunset Park community in which it sits—into the Next Hot Property (with rents, of course, to match).

In New York City, parties like Mister Sunday, along with upscale flea markets, artisanal food events like Smorgasburg, and art events have long signaled the coming wave of gentrification to once-crumbling industrial backwaters like Williamsburg, Bushwick, Long Island City, Gowanus, and now, Sunset Park. A hip, young set willing to push the boundaries into once-unloved neighborhoods in search of bigger spaces, creative freedom, and ultimately cheaper rent is always part of the equation of gentrification. But so are the savvy real-estate developers who follow their every move, ready to pour accelerant on the process.

Jamestown, the developer that owns a 50 percent stake in Industry City along with Belvedere Capital and Angelo Gordon, aims to create a new home base for the borough’s pickle and ice cream companies, custom denim purveyors, and other makers and modern manufacturers. And what better way to raise awareness among the very types of people it’s trying to attract than to throw a bangin’ party each week deep inside Industry City’s space, in collaboration with Industry City tenant Mister Sunday?

Erica Berger, writing for Fast Company about gentrification and Brooklyn real-estate developer Jamestown.

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Photo: A Mister Sunday party at its former location in Gowanus (Casey Holford, Flickr)

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The 2014 National Magazine Award Winners: A Reading List

The American Society of Magazine Editors handed out its 2014 National Magazine Awards Thursday night, with Fast CompanyNew York magazine, Inc., Poetry magazine and Modern Farmer all taking home trophies. Boston Magazine’s stirring cover image (above) following the Boston Marathon bombings was named ASME’s Cover of the Year.

Below is a reading list featuring some of the stories honored Thursday night. Read more…

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle and Readmill 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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The Secret Behind Pixar's Storytelling Process

Fast Company has an excerpt from Creativity, Inc., the book by Pixar co-founder Ed Catmull (with Amy Wallace), which goes inside the creative process at the studio. Catmull attributes much of their creative success to their internal process for continually refining stories. It includes meetings with the Braintrust, a group of executives, directors and other storytellers who are assigned to objectively critique the work—but only as suggestions for the director to accept or dismiss on her own:

To understand why the Braintrust is so central to Pixar, you have to start with a basic truth: People who take on complicated creative projects become lost at some point in the process. It is the nature of things–in order to create, you must internalize and almost become the project for a while, and that near-fusing with the project is an essential part of its emergence. But it is also confusing. Where once a movie’s writer/director had perspective, he or she loses it. Where once he or she could see a forest, now there are only trees.

How do you get a director to address a problem he or she cannot see? The answer depends, of course, on the situation. The director may be right about the potential impact of his central idea, but maybe he simply hasn’t set it up well enough for the Braintrust. Maybe he doesn’t realize that much of what he thinks is visible on-screen is only visible in his own head. Or maybe the ideas presented in the reels he shows the Braintrust won’t ever work, and the only path forward is to blow something up or start over. No matter what, the process of coming to clarity takes patience and candor.

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