Author
Search Results for: Felix Gillette
Nintendo Can Keep a Secret
Posted by 
Catherine Cusick
Catherine Cusick 
A gamer plays 'The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild' on a Nintendo Switch. (Photo by Chesnot/Getty Images)
It is a truth universally acknowledged, or at least that one time by Howie Day and Kevin Griffin, that even the best fall down sometimes. What businesspeople are still trying to wrap their heads around is how a perennial blockbuster like Nintendo can fall down regularly for more than a century, innovate continuously from that prone position, and rise up, as if on cue, to master the art of fairytale comebacks.
In Bloomberg Businessweek, Felix Gillette tries to crack the code behind the gaming giant’s success, which remains as mysterious and unlikely as lucking into a banana bunch in the depths of an abandoned mineshaft.
Kimishima took a sip of tea. Next year, Nintendo will turn 130 years old. Once again, the outside world is wondering how a company periodically left for dead keeps revitalizing itself. But seesawing is nothing new for Nintendo. It has long alternated between fallow periods, in which the media churns out reports of pending doom, and boom times, during which Nintendo Mania is cast as an unstoppable force. What remains constant is the company’s understated and zealously guarded culture—the system at the root of its unusual ability to recalibrate, with some regularity, to humanity’s ever-evolving sense of play.
Miyamoto has offered some clues. He’s often told a story about how, when he was young, he discovered a cave in a bamboo forest outside his village of Sonobe, northwest of Kyoto. Initially afraid, he pushed deeper into the subterranean world, marveling at the feelings of mystery and soulfulness that washed over him. That sense of astonishment and animism persisted, helping to inspire hit games such as Donkey Kong, Super Mario Bros., and The Legend of Zelda. Miyamoto’s cave tale is to Nintendo acolytes as Plato’s cave allegory is to students of Greek philosophy: a way of framing the inherent challenge of perceiving reality. How to create a naturalistic gaming environment that opens a player’s mind to the transcendent elements within?
When it was Furukawa’s turn to speak, he noted that Nintendo makes “playthings, not necessities” and that if consumers stop finding its products compelling, the company could be swiftly forgotten. “It is a high-risk business,” he added. “So there will be times when business is good and times when business is bad. But I want to manage the company in a way that keeps us from shifting between joy and despair.”
If Nintendo, as a company, has long benefited from its artistic temperament, it suffers, too, from an artist’s restless insecurity. No matter how many times outsiders marvel at its work, its game designers must wake up each day, bike into the ivory cocoon of the R&D building, face the blank screen, and make something for the world.
The Legend of Nintendo
Longreads Pick
How can a perennial blockbuster like Nintendo fall down for more than a century, innovate continuously from that prone position, and rise up, as if on cue, to master the art of fairytale comebacks time and time again? Felix Gillette tries to crack the code behind the gaming giant’s success, which remains as mysterious and unlikely as lucking into a banana bunch in the depths of an abandoned mineshaft.
Author:
Source:
Bloomberg Businessweek
Published: Jun 21, 2018
Length: 13 minutes (3,349 words)
We’re Living in the Golden Age of the Corporate Takedown
Posted by 
Erin Blakemore
Erin Blakemore Elizabeth Holmes. Photo: AP Images
Miki Agrawal, co-founder and “She-EO” of menstrual underwear phenom Thinx, raised eyebrows when she stepped down from her role in the company in early March. Agrawal had long been infamous for her company’s boundary-pushing ads and her well-publicized hesitance to use the word “feminist.” Within days of Agrawal’s announcement, Racked published a gripping article examining corporate dysfunction and alleged sexism at Thinx, and Agrawal struck back with a lengthy post on Medium that detailed her “incredible ride” with the company. “I didn’t put HR practices in place because I was on the road speaking, doing press, brand partnerships, editing all of the creative and shouting from the rooftops about Thinx,” she wrote. Less than a week later, Agrawal was accused of sexual harassment by a former employee.
Such is the power of the corporate hit piece: Fueled by eyewitness accounts, scorned ex-employees, and juicy tidbits about a CEO’s bad behavior, a corporate identity that took years to build can unravel in days. These piquant stories might smack of a slow-motion trainwreck, but they satisfy more than our inner gossips and gawkers. Today, the myth of a CEO is often of their own making—once minted by years of climbing the corporate ladder, now CEOs are made in weeks or months. CEO, we are told, is less a work status than a state of mind.
Pivoting Away from Lung Cancer
Posted by 
Michelle Weber
Michelle Weber (Photo by Shiho Fukada for The Washington Post via Getty Images)
Felix Gillette, Jennifer Kaplan, and Sam Chambers report in Bloomberg Businessweek on Big Tobacco’s adaptation of the Silicon Valley playbook: sleek design, disruption, open-floor plan “innovation zones” with Eero Saarinen chairs, you name it. Welcome to the world of alternative nicotine platforms.
In between heatsticks, you holster the cyberpipe in a mobile charger, a smooth, palm-size contraption that calls to mind a cigarette pack mated with a smartphone and designed by Apple’s Jony Ive. “I was a smoker before,” Calantzopoulos said as he handled a charger. “I switched to this completely, and I cannot smoke cigarettes anymore.” Somewhere in flavor country the Marlboro Man is turning over in his grave.
How Billionaires Do Burning Man
Posted by 
Julia Wick
Julia Wick Photo by Duncan Rawlinson, Flickr
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.
See Also:
1. “The Old Man at Burning Man” (GQ, Feb. 2013)
Wells Tower’s legendary 2013 GQ account of attending the aforementioned festival with his father.
2. “Why the Rich Love Burning Man” (Jacobin, Aug. 2015)
An essay by Keith A. Spencer about why business leaders, particularly in Silicon Valley, are so enamored with Burning Man:
→
Posted by 
Longreads
Longreads What it’s like for an actor to become a TV commercial megastar—forever associated with a brand, for better and worse:
On the day of the audition, roughly 30 actors showed up. When it was Olcott’s turn, he flashed his big, ecstatic smile. The director loved it, and Olcott got the job. In February, on a bare-bones budget of roughly $100,000, a first commercial was shot touting the herbal product Enzyte. It boiled down to 30 seconds of campy innuendo. Olcott was shown breezing through life flashing his blissed-out smile at breakfast, at work, and while waving happily to his neighbor, a guy holding a sagging hose. ‘This is Bob,’ went the voice-over. ‘Bob is doing well. Very well indeed. That’s because not long ago, with just a quick phone call, Bob realized that he could have something better in his life. And what did he get? Why, a big boost of confidence, a little more self-esteem, and a very happy Mrs. at home.’ Toward the end of the commercial, viewers were given a telephone number for Enzyte.
A couple months later, Olcott got a phone call from the advertising team in Los Angeles. The commercial was a huge hit in the U.S. The phones at Berkeley Premium Nutraceuticals, the Cincinnati-based maker of Enzyte, were ringing like crazy. They wanted more ads, more Bob, more smiles. Spear rushed back to Vancouver. By the time they stopped shooting in 2005, Olcott had starred as Smiling Bob in 18 different Enzyte commercials. Ultimately, Berkeley Premium Nutraceuticals spent more than $125 million on airtime, the company’s founder would later tell GQ. Smiling Bob was famous.
“Branded for Life.” — Felix Gillette, Bloomberg Businessweek
→
Posted by Longreads
Longreads Coming Monday, May 14th:
Bloomberg Businessweek and Longreads present “Behind the Tech Longreads”: A night of storytelling featuring Felix Gillette, Sheelah Kolhatkar, Brad Stone, Ashlee Vance and editor Josh Tyrangiel.
Housing Works Bookstore Cafe, Manhattan, 7 p.m., Free admission
→
Posted by Longreads
Longreads Inside the social media factory created by former Huffington Post cofounder Jonah Peretti—how they’ve cracked viral content, invested in original content, and made money:
At around 5 p.m., Stopera published ‘48 Pictures That Perfectly Capture the ’90s’ on BuzzFeed. ‘These pictures are all that and a bag of chips!’ he wrote at the top of the list. A BuzzFeed visitor with an appetite for ’90s nostalgia could scroll down, gawk at the 48 retro images, read the deadpan captions, recall Bob Saget, Tipper Gore, and Scottie Pippen, laugh at the crazy fashion, and resurface to the present day in a matter of minutes. It racked up 1.2 million page views.
“BuzzFeed, the Ad Model for the Facebook Era?” — Felix Gillette, Bloomberg Businessweek
Writer Andrew Rice: My Top Longreads of 2011
Posted by Longreads
Longreads
Andrew Rice is a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine and the author of The Teeth May Smile but the Heart Does Not Forget: Murder and Memory in Uganda. (See recent longreads by Rice.)
***
Selected according to a complicated (read: entirely arbitrary) judgment of their degree of difficulty and technical execution, and listed in no particular order. Full disclosure: I’ve written for several of the publications cited on this list, but I’ve excluded from consideration any writer with whom I’m personally acquainted.
***
“The Romney Economy,” Benjamin Wallace-Wells, New York, 10/23/11
When it comes to degree of difficulty, delivering an interesting Mitt Romney profile is like nailing a reverse four-and-a-half somersault. But this story succeeded—not the least of which due to its brilliant packaging, which included a now-infamous cover photo of Romney with cash coming out of his suit pockets and the accompanying headline: “Mitt Romney and the 1% Economy.” Written without the (perhaps dubious) benefit of an interview with Romney, the story nonetheless managed to summon up the Republican candidate’s history of creative destruction, and tied that to the big story of the moment, the Occupy Wall Street protests. If Romney ends up becoming the Republican nominee, as still seems likely, the themes of Wallace-Wells’ profile will likely define the coming political year.
“How to be Good,” Larissa MacFarquhar, The New Yorker, 9/5/11 (sub. req.)
Oxford philosopher Derek Parfit argues, MacFarquhar writes, that “personal identity is not what matters.” But a profile is, by definition, an evocation of a person’s identity. How do you fulfill the requirements of the form on Parfit’s own, rather forbidding, terms? MacFarquhar didn’t make use of any scenes, or quotes of the traditional “he said” variety, conveying Parfit as a sort of disembodied intelligence. By all rights, this experiment should have been about as interesting to read as, well, a philosophy textbook. But the power of Parfit’s ideas about the nature of consciousness and ethics—and MacFarquhar’s skill at conveying them colloquially—made the piece sing to me.
“The God Clause,” Brendan Greeley, Bloomberg Businessweek, 9/1/11
Are you interested in reading about a shadowy industry that attempts to predict and profit from gigantic, multibillion-dollar disasters? Great—me too. Now that I’ve got you interested, I will disclose that this article is actually about the reinsurance industry. This is the bait-and-switch trick that Greeley pulls off admirably in this piece. This was the cover story for Businessweek’s 9-11 anniversary issue, and aided by some very good cover art—something the magazine has been justly praised for lately—the piece managed to tell its readers a story that touched on the past while telling them something new.
“Where’s Earl?” Kelefa Sanneh, The New Yorker, 5/23/11 (sub. req.)
A detective story masquerading as a celebrity profile—or maybe it’s the other way around?—this was in an issue that kind of hung around on my endtable for a few months before I got around to sticking it into my bag for a long plane flight. Then it completely sucked me into its world. I won’t even pretend that I’m young enough to care about the rap collective Odd Future, or the fate of its missing member Earl Sweatshirt, but the outcome of this story, which I won’t spoil, offered an (ahem) oddly plaintive reminder that so many of our musical idols are, after all, just kids.
“Watching the Murder of an Innocent Man,” Barry Bearak, New York Times Magazine, 6/2/11
This was my absolute favorite story of the year. Journalism from Africa often conveys the continent in broadly collective terms: tribes rival with one another, rebels fight the government, the downtrodden suffer or rise up. Bearak, who used to be stationed in the Times’ Johannesburg bureau, took one of those distressing mass phenomena that fill the inside pages of every day’s newspaper—an outbreak of xenophobic violence in South Africa’s township slums—and gave the story a terrible specificity. I particularly admired the way Bearak dissected the chance intersections and misunderstandings that led to a lynching, and dispassionately explained the cosmological worldview of the victim’s family about his death. In the end, Bearak resists the natural tendency to isolate a single villain and hold that person up to condemnation, despite the murky evidence, because that’s what the mob did, albeit in an incomparably more brutal fashion.
Bonus: Longreads Logrolling List
I’m lucky enough to be friends with a bunch of really talented writers, and it seems a shame to exclude them simply on the grounds of our acquaintance. So, here’s a list of really great articles written this year by people that I happen to know and like. You can take these endorsements with a grain of salt, of course, but I urge you to click and judge for yourself.
“Getting Bin Laden,” Nicholas Schmidle, The New Yorker, 8/8/11
The best account, so far, of the most stunning news event of this year.
“The Neverending Nightmare of Amanda Knox,” Nathaniel Rich, Rolling Stone, 6/24/11
I was fascinated by this lurid miscarriage of justice. This story went way beyond the tabloid narrative of the persecuted innocent abroad.
“The Idealist,” Jason Zengerle, The New Republic, 1/13/11
A rising Democratic star finds his life derailed when he gets enmeshed in a bizarre political dirty tricks plot.
“Cheating, Incorporated,” Sheelah Kolhatkar, Bloomberg Businessweek, 2/10/11
The real, profitable and Canadian (!) company behind those lubricious Ashley Madison TV ads.
“The King of All Vegas Real Estate Scams”, Felix Gillette, Bloomberg Businessweek, 12/8/11; “The Casino Next Door”, Felix Gillette, Bloomberg Businessweek, 4/21/11
These two stories made me ache with jealousy.
“The Gulf War,” Raffi Khatchadourian, The New Yorker, 3/14/11
The Gulf oil spill turned out to be less overwhelmingly catastrophic than some doomsayers predicted, but it still left behind some troubling lessons. This is the story of a disaster that happened beneath the surface, and in conveying that narrative with great depth and nuance, the story pulls off a truly difficult feat.
***
See more lists from our Top 5 Longreads of 2011 >
Share your own Top 5 Longreads of 2011, all through December. Just tag it #longreads on Twitter, Tumblr or Facebook.
You must be logged in to post a comment.