Inside the boardroom battles that led to the hiring (and firing) of CEO Léo Apotheker, formerly of SAP. Meg Whitman is now in charge of finding ways to fix the legendary tech company: A few months after she took over as the CEO of Hewlett-Packard last September, Meg Whitman held one in a series of […]
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Nearly one year after taking over for Steve Jobs, a report card for the new CEO. The company has never been more efficient, or fun, but some are wondering about the future of the products: The ultimate ‘tell’ of tectonic changes at Apple will be the quality of its products. Those looking for deficiencies have […]
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Why was New York Times CEO Janet Robinson fired? A look inside the political battles and financial troubles that led Arthur Sulzberger to let Robinson go (with a $24 million exit package): Interviews with more than 30 people who are intimately familiar with different aspects of the Times’ business (none but a spokesperson would speak […]
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Nora Ephron on her uncle Hal, an inheritance, and working on a famous screenplay: My husband and I had recently bought a house in East Hampton, and the renovation had cost much more than we’d ever dreamed. There was nothing left for landscaping. I went outside and walked around the house. I mentally planted several […]
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In investigation into how the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) became accused of intentionally allowing American firearms to get into the hands of Mexican drug cartels: Voth grew deeply frustrated. In August 2010, after the ATF in Texas confiscated 80 guns—63 of them purchased in Arizona by the Fast and Furious […]
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Top 5 #Longreads of the Week: D Magazine, Fortune Magazine, New England Review, The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, #fiction, plus a guest pick from James daSilva.
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A writer digs through his personal library of quitting-smoking books as he attempts to quit smoking: Step 3: Go to the Strand. Buy a book you already own—Richard Klein’s Cigarettes Are Sublime. (Your old copy—a gift from one of the girls next door senior year, the same ‘friend’ who another time gave you a carton […]
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How Lisette Lee, a privileged young woman with ties to the Samsung fortune, turned to drug trafficking: Lee would go on to tell federal authorities a lot of things about herself: that she was a famous Korean pop star as well as the heiress to the Samsung electronics fortune; she was so emphatic on this […]
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Our Top 5 Longreads of the Week—featuring stories from Orion Magazine, Harper’s, Atlanta Magazine, Fortune Magazine and The Rumpus, plus fiction from Electric Literature and a guest pick from N.V. Binder.
Posted inBooks, First Chapters, Member Pick, Nonfiction, Story
‘Like Being in Prison with a Salary’: The Secret World of the Shipping Industry
Rose George | Metropolitan Books | August 2013 | 17 minutes (4,213 words) The following is the opening chapter of Rose George’s new book, Ninety Percent of Everything. Our thanks to the author for sharing it with the Longreads community. * * * Friday. No sensible sailor goes to sea on the day of the Crucifixion or the […]
