Search Results for: The New Yorker

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

Making the Magazine: A Reading List

Longreads Pick

Magazine nerds, here we go: A starter collection of 27 behind-the-scenes stories from some of your most beloved magazines, including The New Yorker, Time, Entertainment Weekly, Cosmopolitan, Vanity Fair and the New York Review of Books, plus now-defunct publications like Might, George, Sassy and Wigwag.

Author: Editors
Source: Longreads
Published: Jun 16, 2014

Making the Magazine: A Reading List

Magazine nerds, here we go: A starter collection of behind-the-scenes stories from some of your most beloved magazines, including The New Yorker, Time, Entertainment Weekly, Cosmopolitan, Vanity Fair and the New York Review of Books, plus now-defunct publications like Might, George, Sassy and Wigwag. Share your favorite behind-the-magazine stories with us on Twitter or Facebook: #longreads. Read more…

The Science of Suppressing Traumatic Memories

I had come to his house, in this sunny spot between Ben Gurion Airport and the Mediterranean coast, for an unlikely reason: not long ago, after decades of unwavering silence, Sigmund Schiller spoke about his Holocaust experience.

“People talk about ‘Sophie’s Choice’ as if it were a rare event,” he said. “It wasn’t. Everybody had to make Sophie’s choice—all of us. My mother left behind a four-year-old with the maid. You don’t think I was beaten and shot at? There are no violins in my story. It is the most common thing that happened.”

Nobody moved in the Schillers’ living room while the film continued. At times, Daniela hid her eyes with her hands, and so did her father. For the most part, they were immobile. On camera, she asked him if he had consciously suppressed this information.

“Yes,” he said. “You must suppress. Without suppression I wouldn’t live.”

Michael Specter, in The New Yorker, on the neuroscience of our own memories.

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More Specter in the Longreads Archive

The Problem with Journalism and the Internet, in One Quote

Jonah Peretti: I think there’s an interesting tension between what’s good for the user and what’s good for the industry. That was really created by Google. Say The New Yorker writes a really long 12,000 word piece on Scientology. That takes lots of reporting and lots of investment. That’s important work that our industry should embrace and should find ways of supporting economically.

The average person who hears about that story doesn’t want to read the whole story. They’re at work, most likely. They do a Google search because they’ve heard about this Scientology scoop or long form piece. Their first result is the HuffPost link, not a New Yorker link. They look at it. It summarizes what the article is about. It says, “Here’s what was in it, here’s what was notable about it.” Has a few tweets from people. This is how people are reacting to it, and if you want to read it, here’s a link and you can go read the article.

The problem with that example is that from the perspective of the user, it’s a better experience to land on the summary, to see a little bit of the reactions, and have the option of reading it, because that’s as much as most people want. From the perspective of the industry, it would make much more sense for people to go to The New Yorker article so that they get the traffic, as modest as that ad revenue would be, they get the traffic and they get the people onto their site. There is some conflict between Google saying, “Well we want to serve the consumer,” and sending people to the article that the consumer likes the best. Or is Google supposed to send people to the article that costs the most to produce and supports the industry the most? Does that make sense? There is a little bit of a conflict, or a little bit of a tension.

BuzzFeed founder Jonah Peretti, in a long interview with Felix Salmon, on the past, present and future of media.

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Photo: techcrunch, flickr

The Self-Driving Revolution

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…

Yes, All Women: A Reading List of Stories Written By Women

This week, a lot happened. A misogynist went on a violent rampage. #YesAllWomen took off on Twitter. Dr. Maya Angelou, feminist author and all-around genius (and don’t get me started on her doctor honorary), died at 86 years old. This week, I present a long list of essays, articles and interviews written by women. Many are about women, too. Some are lighthearted; others reflect on the events of the past week. I included a variety of subjects to honor those who might be triggered by the deadly violence of last week’s shooting, because women do not only write in the wake of tragedy—we write, we exist, for all time. So in this list there is reflection and humor; there are books and music and religion; there are all kinds of stories, fiction and non. Read what you need. Engage or escape.

1. “Summer in the City.” (Emma Aylor, May 2014)

Aylor, author of Twos, uses #YesAllWomen to write about about the sexual harassment she experienced as she researched her dissertation on the work of Wallace Stevens.

2. “In Relief of Silence and Burden.” (Roxane Gay, May 2014)

The author of An Untamed State and critically acclaimed badass gives her “testimony … so we can relieve ourselves of silence and burden” in the vein of #YesAllWomen, sharing stories of harassment, abuse and more.

3. “Not All Women: A Reflection on Being a Musician and Female.” (Allison Crutchfield, Impose Magazine, May 2014)

A wide range of female musicians react to a depressingly misogynistic article in Noisey about how to tour in a dude-dominated band. They share what they’ve learned on the road, emphasizing self-care, communication with bandmates, and doing what you need to do to feel safe and be your best self.

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The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Photo: Sara Naomi Lewkowicz for Al Jazeera America

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Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle users, you can also get them as a Readlist.

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You’re Probably Using the Wrong Dictionary

Longreads Pick

What John McPhee and a good dictionary can teach us about writing:

John McPhee — one the great American writers of nonfiction, almost peerless as a prose stylist — once wrote an essay for the New Yorker about his process called “Draft #4.” He explains that for him, draft #4 is the draft after the painstaking labor of creation is done, when all that’s left is to punch up the language, to replace shopworn words and phrases with stuff that sings.

The way you do it, he says, is “you draw a box not only around any word that does not seem quite right but also around words that fulfill their assignment but seem to present an opportunity.” You go looking for le mot juste.

Source: jsomers.net
Published: May 23, 2014
Length: 12 minutes (3,198 words)

The Fault in Our Canon: A Reading List About Problems in the Literary Canon

This brief list is but a glimpse of the complex, crucial and ongoing discussion about the importance of inclusivity and the problems with privilege in the literary canon. Please share your recommendations: essays and articles in this vein, books you wish the canon could accept, etc.

1. “On ‘The John Green Effect,’ Contemporary Realism, and Form as a Political Act.” (Anne Ursu, Terrible Trivium, May 2014)

Realism’s literary privilege in America, the diminishment of other genres, the erasure of minority voices and the weird fact that everyone seems to have forgotten that fantastic YA fiction was around for a long time before John Green took pen to paper.

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