Mark Armstrong 
A short reading list on the many lives of AOL, which will be acquired by Verizon for $4.4 billion. Fifteen years ago, AOL acquired Time Warner for $165 billion. Read more…
Julia Wick With Alfred, you no longer have to open the door for the Instacart delivery: A worker comes into your apartment and stocks food in your fridge. You don’t hand off your dirty undies to a Washio messenger; Alfred puts the laundered undies in the drawer. This all happens by paying your Alfred $99 a month, plus the goods and services at reduced cost through Alfred’s hookups. Alfred won first place in the TechCrunch Disrupt SF conference last year.
Shutting people out is an important part of being a shut-in: When signing up, customers can choose the option of not seeing their Alfred, who will come in when they’re at work. Alfred’s messaging is aimed at sweeping aside any middle-class shame.
“We’re trying to remove the taboo and the guilt that you should have to do it,” says Alfred’s CEO Marcela Sapone over the phone. “We’re empowering you to let others do it for you. You’re the manager of your life. It’s against the stigma of ‘People use this because they’re lazy.’ Absolutely not. They’re using this because they’re extremely busy.”
—Lauren Smiley, in an essay for Matter about the “sharing economy,” where anything and everything is now deliverable with a single click. Smiley sees the on-demand economy as less about sharing and more about serving, creating a world where one is either “pampered, isolated royalty,” or a “21st century servant.”
Aileen Gallagher After Rap Genius cofounder Mahbod Moghadam was forced out of the company for writing horrible Tweets about a spree killer’s manifesto, the public’s interest shifted to the next misuse of social media. Not so for Yale Herald writer Kohler Bruno, who wondered what Moghadam’s life was like sans free Whole Foods and away from Genius, now with a valuation just shy of $1 billion. Moghadam lives in LA and doesn’t care for New York, so many of the conversations between reporter and subject were conduced over the phone or via email or text. It is a 21st-century way to profile someone who lived life online. Throughout the story, Bruno seems as confused as anyone what to make of Moghadam, whose “jokes” are difficult to parse. The piece itself is annotated, a comment not only on Genius’s gimmick, but on the nature of the reporting itself.
Mark Armstrong Lately there has been some angst about the state of longform journalism on the Internet. So I thought I’d share some quick data on what we’ve seen within the Longreads community: Read more…
Mark Armstrong Here’s the first official edition of Longreads’ Best of WordPress! We’ve scoured 22% of the internet to create a reading list of great storytelling — from publishers you already know and love, to some that you may be discovering for the first time.
We’ll be doing more of these reading lists in the weeks and months to come. If you read or publish a story on WordPress that’s over 1,500 words, share it with us: just tag it #longreads on Twitter, or use the longreads tag on WordPress.com.
Photo: wallyg, Flickr
Mark Armstrong –BuzzFeed founder Jonah Peretti, in a long interview with Felix Salmon, on the past, present and future of media.
Mark Armstrong Let’s be honest: Humans never should have been allowed behind the wheel in the first place. There’s so much that can go wrong, so much room for negligence—it’s incredible to think that we managed human-controlled cars for as long as we did.
Here’s a reading list covering the past, present and future of transportation. Read more…
Mark Armstrong 
Longreads Last year, Jacob Bernstein wrote about his mother Nora Ephron’s last days for The New York Times Magazine. In the following excerpt, Bernstein writes about the moment he learned that his mother’s aggressive blood disorder had turned into leukemia and saw his mother in a rare state of vulnerability:
It terrified me to see her cry like that. She loved me, showered me with gifts, e-mailed or called every time I wrote something that made her proud. But even after all the weekly meals, the shared vacations, the conversations about movies and journalism and the debt ceiling and Edith Wharton, I still viewed her with a mix of awe and intimidation. It wasn’t often that I caught a glimpse of her vulnerability.
Now there she was, in her Chanel flats and her cream-colored pants and her black-and-white-striped blouse, looking so pretty and so fragile as she dabbed her eyes with a Kleenex; and I finally understood what she meant when she said she was a bird — that she wasn’t just talking about her looks but something inside as well.
Photo: TechCrunch
Sam Stecklow Wired senior editor Bill Wasik on the public’s changing relationship with both Silicon Valley and the technology it creates and promotes:
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