Longreads Pick
“It’s funny to say that because I’ll often get a lot of pushback and they’ll say, ‘No, no, no. There are all these people who are being empowered by all this stuff on the Internet that’s free’, and I’ll say, ‘Well, show me. Where’s all the wealth? Where’s the new middle class of people who are doing this?’ They don’t exist. They just aren’t there. We’re losing the middle class, and we should be saving it. We should be strengthening it.”
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Published: Aug 30, 2011
Length: 42 minutes (10,581 words)
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Longreads Pick
At the time I wrote Nickel and Dimed, I wasn’t sure how many people it directly applied to—only that the official definition of poverty was way off the mark, since it defined an individual earning $7 an hour, as I did on average, as well out of poverty. But three months after the book was published, the Economic Policy Institute in Washington, D.C., issued a report entitled “Hardships in America: The Real Story of Working Families,” which found an astounding 29% of American families living in what could be more reasonably defined as poverty, meaning that they earned less than a barebones budget covering housing, child care, health care, food, transportation, and taxes—though not, it should be noted, any entertainment, meals out, cable TV, Internet service, vacations, or holiday gifts. Twenty-nine percent is a minority, but not a reassuringly small one, and other studies in the early 2000s came up with similar figures.
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Published: Aug 9, 2011
Length: 15 minutes (3,933 words)
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Longreads Pick
Most people have already forgotten how dark and unsignposted the Internet once was. A user in 1996, when the Web comprised hundreds of thousands of “sites” with millions of “pages,” did not expect to be able to search for “Olympics” and automatically find the official site of the Atlanta games. That was too hard a problem. And what was a search supposed to produce for a word like “university”? AltaVista, then the leading search engine, offered up a seemingly unordered list of academic institutions, topped by the Oregon Center for Optics.
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Published: Aug 18, 2011
Length: 19 minutes (4,911 words)
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Longreads Pick
VC manifesto from the Founders Fund. “To understand why VC has done so poorly, it helps to approach the future through the lens of VC portfolios during the industry’s heyday, comparing past portfolios to portfolios as they exist today. In the 1960s, venture closely associated with the emerging semiconductor industry (Intel, e.g., was one of the first – and is still one of the greatest – VC investments). In the 1970s, computer hardware and software companies received funding; the 1980s brought the first waves of biotech, mobility, and networking companies; and the 1990s added the Internet in its various guises.”
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Published: Jul 25, 2011
Length: 19 minutes (4,870 words)
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Longreads Pick
When News Corp. officials gathered in the Hong Kong convention center in March to unveil their latest Chinese Internet investment, a tall woman in their midst handed out a business card that read simply, “News Corporation/Wendi Deng Murdoch.” Ms. Deng is not a News Corp. employee. Once a junior executive at the company’s Star TV unit in Hong Kong, the 31-year-old Ms. Deng quit her post before marrying News Corp. Chairman Rupert Murdoch last year. Since then, she has been portrayed—by Mr. Murdoch and the company—as a traditional housewife who attends to decorating, her husband’s diet and the like. But Ms. Deng is no homebody.
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Published: Jan 1, 2000
Length: 14 minutes (3,713 words)
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Longreads Pick
Muppet trailers are making the rounds of the Internet these days. There are a few spoofs: rom-com, superhero and heist parodies, and then the official trailer for the new movie, which promises “muppet domination” this Thanksgiving. Presumably, this domination will mean a return to the box-office and critical success of days of old. And I have to admit: it’s exciting. Anyone who remembers the Muppets remembers them fondly. If there’s an anti-Muppet faction out there, they’ve kept quiet.
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Published: Jul 13, 2011
Length: 20 minutes (5,096 words)
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Longreads Pick
Mr. PARKER: So let’s make it look like it was “Family Guy” and not us. So then that gave us the whole idea for the show, that we would put “Family Guy” in the show and only have Muhammad appear in the “Family Guy” part. So if they ever saw a still of it on the Internet, or they ever saw anything, they’d know it was “Family Guy” and not us. And then they would get bombed and not us.
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Published: May 28, 2010
Length: 36 minutes (9,159 words)
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Longreads Pick
While it was shut down with a Denial of Service attack by the German authorities in late 2002, the website for the Cannibal Café can still be viewed online thanks to the Wayback Machine. Nine years is an eternity when it comes to the Internet and, suspended there in history, the website is a time capsule of early website-design features and flourishes, down to a .gif of dripping blood and the flashing “WARNING” sign. Its forum messages also carry the whiff of a different era; written at a time when people, unaware and unafraid of consequences, were more open with their identities online.
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Published: Mar 16, 2011
Length: 13 minutes (3,437 words)
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USA Inc.: An Open Letter to Shareholders, by Mary Meeker
What you’ll see on the following pages is hard to misinterpret: We have big issues, but the U.S. is in sounder shape than Apple was in 1997, when it lost a billion dollars. That’s the year Steve Jobs returned as CEO and took extreme measures, including agreeing to make Internet Explorer the Mac’s default browser. Jobs also got Microsoft to buy $150 million in nonvoting Apple shares—a lifeline for a company that, according to Jobs himself, was 90 days from bankruptcy court. Apple is now the second most valuable company in the world.
By Mary Meeker, Businessweek
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Longreads Pick
What you’ll see on the following pages is hard to misinterpret: We have big issues, but the U.S. is in sounder shape than Apple was in 1997, when it lost a billion dollars. That’s the year Steve Jobs returned as CEO and took extreme measures, including agreeing to make Internet Explorer the Mac’s default browser. Jobs also got Microsoft to buy $150 million in nonvoting Apple shares—a lifeline for a company that, according to Jobs himself, was 90 days from bankruptcy court. Apple is now the second most valuable company in the world.
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Published: Feb 25, 2011
Length: 10 minutes (2,730 words)
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