Lucrative placements within coveted search ranks on Amazon’s Marketplace are incentivizing sellers to do whatever it takes to undercut each other — not by competing on price or quality, but by creatively sabotaging the listing above theirs. Bad actors plant obviously fraudulent five-star reviews on popular listings to trigger penalties, or set rivals’ products on fire to frame them […]
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Posted inStory
The Man Who’s Going to Save Your Neighborhood Grocery Store
American food supplies are increasingly channeled through a handful of big companies: Amazon, Walmart, FreshDirect, Blue Apron. What do we lose when local supermarkets go under? A lot — and Kevin Kelley wants to stop that.
Posted inBusiness & Tech, Highlight, Nonfiction, Quotes
Long Live the Oddly Charming Poetry of the Mail-Order Catalog
Hammacher Schlemmer, which publishes America’s longest-running catalog, still takes its product descriptions seriously.
Posted inEditor's Pick
The World’s Most Peculiar Company
How does Hammacher Schlemmer, which publishes the longest-running mail-order catalog in American history, survive in the age of Amazon?
Posted inStory
The Migrant in the Mirror
In recent novels, Ocean Vuong and Nicole Dennis-Benn tell stories in which young queer characters affected by migration and displacement are worthy of seeing themselves reflected in others.
Posted inBlog Post, Books, Business, Commentary
How the Self-Publishing Industry Changed, Between My First and Second Novels
In the last few years, self-publishing and marketing your own books has become increasingly more difficult.
Posted inBooks, Essays & Criticism, Nonfiction, Science & Nature, Story
A Green New Jail
What does environmental justice look like in a landscape overrun by prisons? Where the incarcerated suffer from unusually polluted surroundings, and prisons are a toxin in their own right?
Posted inNonfiction
A Once and Future Beef
Beef is a major culprit of the climate crisis, but if you want to consider beef’s future, then look to its past. The industry’s tactics have not changed as much as you might think.
Posted inArts & Culture, Books, Essays & Criticism, Story
Bully for You
Women with power have the capacity to silence women with less — and they wield it. Why can’t they see that?
Posted inBooks, Commentary
This Month In Books: ‘How Thick Was the Cane?’ and Other Questions About Things
This month’s books newsletter is all about things. As in stuff, objects. Because, as Heike Geissler says, “It’s because of all the things that are here… that you’re here in the first place.”
