Search Results for: Nature

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 Disruption Machine

Longreads Pick

Jill Lepore’s critical look at the language of innovation in tech:

Clay Christensen has compared the theory of disruptive innovation to a theory of nature: the theory of evolution. But among the many differences between disruption and evolution is that the advocates of disruption have an affinity for circular arguments. If an established company doesn’t disrupt, it will fail, and if it fails it must be because it didn’t disrupt. When a startup fails, that’s a success, since epidemic failure is a hallmark of disruptive innovation. (“Stop being afraid of failure and start embracing it,” the organizers of FailCon, an annual conference, implore, suggesting that, in the era of disruption, innovators face unprecedented challenges. For instance: maybe you made the wrong hires?) When an established company succeeds, that’s only because it hasn’t yet failed. And, when any of these things happen, all of them are only further evidence of disruption.

Source: The New Yorker
Published: Jun 18, 2014
Length: 24 minutes (6,015 words)

Which Kind of Failure Are You?

Clay Christensen has compared the theory of disruptive innovation to a theory of nature: the theory of evolution. But among the many differences between disruption and evolution is that the advocates of disruption have an affinity for circular arguments. If an established company doesn’t disrupt, it will fail, and if it fails it must be because it didn’t disrupt. When a startup fails, that’s a success, since epidemic failure is a hallmark of disruptive innovation. (“Stop being afraid of failure and start embracing it,” the organizers of FailCon, an annual conference, implore, suggesting that, in the era of disruption, innovators face unprecedented challenges. For instance: maybe you made the wrong hires?) When an established company succeeds, that’s only because it hasn’t yet failed. And, when any of these things happen, all of them are only further evidence of disruption.

-From Jill Lepore’s 2014 critical look at the language of disruption and innovation, in The New Yorker.

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More on innovation in the Longreads Archive

Photo: chefcooke, flickr

The House of Mondavi: How an American Wine Empire Was Born

Julia Flynn Siler | The House of Mondavi | 2007 | 14 minutes (3,328 words)

 
For our latest Longreads Member Pick, we’re excited to feature an excerpt from The House of Mondavi, Julia Flynn Siler’s book about a family that turned a Napa Valley winery into a billion-dollar fortune. Thanks to Siler and Gotham Books for sharing it with the Longreads community.

Download .mobi (Kindle) Download .epub (iBooks)

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We Are More Dangerous to Sharks Than They Are to Us

In the Toronto Star, Sandro Contenta travels to the Bahamas to attend “SharkSchool” where a man named Erich Ritter teaches a one-week course on how to swim safely with sharks. Over the course of his reporting, Contenta learns that 63 people have been killed by sharks in the past decade, while scientists have estimated that 97 million sharks have been killed by humans during fishing-related activities in 2010 alone:

The scientists concluded that dozens of species of sharks were being killed at unsustainable rates. “The consequences of these unsustainable catch and mortality rates for marine ecosystems could be substantial,” they wrote. “Global total shark mortality, therefore, needs to be reduced drastically in order to rebuild depleted populations and restore marine ecosystems with functional top predators.”

Scientists warn of a “trophic cascade.” That’s when the disappearance of a top predator causes a cascading and dramatic impact on organisms at lower levels of the food chain until an entire ecosystem is transformed. The loss of sharks, for example, contributes to the death of coral reefs, because coral-eating fish that were part of a shark’s diet suddenly boom in numbers.

Worm and his colleagues echoed concerns by the International Union for Conservation of Nature, published in a landmark analysis by 23 leading scientists including B.C.’s Nick Dulvy, who co-chairs the union’s shark specialist group. Released in January, the 34-page report is based on the work of more than 300 scientists. It is the first systematic analysis of the global population status of more than 1,000 species of sharks, rays and chimaeras.
It found that one in four of these fish are threatened with extinction due to overfishing, either targeted or unintended, what the fishing industry calls bycatch. That amounted to 107 species of rays and 74 species of sharks, including angel and thresher sharks.

“There isn’t a part of the ice-free ocean surface that doesn’t contain a threatened shark,” Dulvy says. “That’s a lot of real estate with threatened biodiversity.”

As for what you should do if you ever found yourself being attacked by a shark? The answer is obvious: Fight for your life:

“In sharks you want to fight and fight like hell because they respect power,” Burgess says. “If you pop them in the nose, they veer off almost always, and then will come back around.

“I equate it to the neighbourhood bully: if you pop them in the nose first, more often than not they’ll back off because they weren’t expecting it. After the initial surprise wears off he’ll probably come back and beat the hell out of you, and you’d be smart to get out of the water while you’ve got your opening.

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Photo: Jeff

The Pagan Rituals of Modern Winemaking

I had come back to AmByth to help hasten the vines’ resurrection by taking part in a ritual. I’d been invited the month before, while dining with Philip Hart and his wife, Mary. We’d talked for several hours that night, around their fireplace, wine glasses in hand. They asked me why I was so interested in biodynamic wine. I told them it was the relationship between wine and mysticism that really interested me. The conversation drifted to religion, and Mary told me she was a Christian, and considered herself born again. Philip didn’t come out and say what he believed, but it was clear he took Rudolf Steiner’s metaphysics quite seriously. A disagreement between them broke out at one point: Mary said, ‘as a Christian’, she was turned off by the pagan elements of biodynamics.

Philip mentioned they would be dispersing a preparation called ‘three kings’ shortly after the turning of the New Year. The ‘three kings’ preparation was devised decades after Steiner’s death, by Hugo Erbe, a disciple of his who also claimed to be in touch with nature’s ‘elemental beings’. Erbe said he’d seen these beings take flight from his farm after the atomic levelling of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In order to rescue them, and heal the Earth’s wounds, he developed a preparation made from the gifts given to the infant Christ by the three wise men: gold, frankincense, and myrrh. The preparation is dispersed once a year, on 6 January, the date the wise men showed up in Bethlehem. ‘You’re welcome to join us, if you’re in town,’ Philip said to me.

Ross Andersen, in Aeon magazine, on the mystical roots of biodynamic wine.

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Photo: peterburge

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Love and Loss on the Seine

Longreads Pick

The river is a lure for romantics, tourists, sunbathers, anglers, psychiatric patients—le tout Paris.

Most every morning at nine, the emergency responders assigned to the Seine pull on their wet suits and swim around the Île de la Cité. In the course of their circuit around this teardrop-shaped island in the middle of the river in the middle of Paris, the firemen-divers scour the bottom, retrieving bikes, cutlery (which they clean and use in the nearby houseboat where they live), cell phones, old coins, crucifixes, guns, and once, a museum-grade Roman clasp.

By the Pont des Arts, where lovers affix brass locks inscribed with their names (“Steve + Linda Pour la Vie”), they retrieve keys tossed in the water by couples hoping to affirm the eternal nature of their padlocked love. One bridge upriver, at the Pont Neuf, near the Palace of Justice law courts where divorces are decreed, they find wedding bands, discarded when eternal love turns out to be ephemeral.

Published: May 1, 2014
Length: 16 minutes (4,000 words)

The Perfect Essay, Kafka’s Abyss, and My Mother

The relationship between writer and teacher is no simple thing. For John Kaag, a former professor of expository writing at Harvard, the most vital component of this relationship is intimacy. Despite the persistent image of the writer as solitary figure, Kang sees companionship–specifically critical companionship–as essential. For many writers, the search for a truly compatible teacher–the Gordon Lish to their Raymond Carver–can be a lifelong journey. But for Kaag, the tutelage began at home, under the watchful eyes of his mother, a high school English teacher. From the Opinionator:

The intimate nature of genuine criticism implies something about who is able to give it, namely, someone who knows you well enough to show you how your psychic life is getting in the way of good writing. Conveniently, they’re also the people who care enough to see you through the traumatic aftermath of this realization. For me the aftermath took the form of my first, and I hope only, encounter with writer’s block.

Franz Kafka once said: “Writing is utter solitude, the descent into the cold abyss of oneself.” My mother’s criticism had shown me that Kafka is right about the cold abyss, and when you make the introspective descent that writing requires you’re not always pleased by what you find. But, in the years that followed, her sustained tutelage suggested that Kafka might be wrong about the solitude. I was lucky enough to find a critic and teacher who was willing to make the journey of writing with me. “It’s a thing of no great difficulty,” according to Plutarch, “to raise objections against another man’s oration, it is a very easy matter; but to produce a better in its place is a work extremely troublesome.” I’m sure I wrote essays in the later years of high school without my mother’s guidance, but I can’t recall them. What I remember, however, is how she took up the “extremely troublesome” work of ongoing criticism.

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Photo: Smithsonian, Flickr

An Untamed State: The Opening Chapters from Roxane Gay's New Novel

Roxane Gay | An Untamed State | May 2014 | 11 minutes (2,742 words)

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Roxane Gay’s new novel, An Untamed State, is out this week, and we’re excited to present the opening chapters with the Longreads community. Our thanks to Gay and Grove Atlantic for sharing it here.

For more, read our Roxane Gay picks from the Longreads Archive. Read more…