Search Results for: business

The Shadowy Business of International Education

Longreads Pick
Source: The Walrus
Published: Aug 18, 2021
Length: 29 minutes (7,330 words)

The Business of Scenery

Longreads Pick

“In Zion National Park, crowding is such that one of the most popular trails had to be temporarily closed in 2017 to airlift eight tons of human excrement from public outhouses that a journalist described as an “open sewer.””

 

Published: Mar 30, 2021
Length: 13 minutes (3,271 words)

Longreads Best of 2020: Business Writing

All Best of Longreads illustrations by Kjell Reigstad.

Through December, we’re featuring Longreads’ Best of 2020. After revisiting hundreds of business stories picked by the team this year, we’ve narrowed down our favorites. Enjoy these nine reads, including coverage of the wildest startup collapses and in-depth explorations of pandemic insurance, TikTok content houses, 5G, and the state of the fossil fuel industry.

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Unlucky Charms: The Rise and Fall of Billion-Dollar Jewelry Empire Alex and Ani (Aaron Gell, Marker)

Carolyn Rafaelian spent 15 years building a jewelry empire, making her company, famous for its $30 expandable wire bracelets, one of the fastest-growing fashion brands ever. But what led to Alex and Ani’s fall? Aaron Gell’s piece has it all: an odd alliance between a spiritual “earth mother” founder and an Army major-turned-CEO, business decisions influenced by astrology and New Age practices, a $1.1 billion gender discrimination lawsuit against Bank of America, and even a spinoff into a “university”that was meant to share the company’s life lessons with the world.

Buzzwords aside, the curriculum mostly aimed to impart an essential truth behind Alex and Ani’s appeal: Its products were not just glittery trinkets but spiritual armor designed to protect, inspire, and ennoble the bearer as she made her way through the world. Retail employees at the company’s “bangle bars” were known internally as “bar tenders” for their patience and empathy. They’d draw out customers’ personal stories — what AAU president Dennis Rebelo called “story birthing” — prescribing just the right stones and talismans (the Eye of Horus for protection, light, and reason; the dragonfly for grace, change, and power) for each unique journey.

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The Power and Business of Hip-Hop: A Reading List on an American Art Form

De La Soul, Posdnuos, Torhout/Werchter Festival, Werchter, Belgium, 1990. Gie Knaeps/Getty Images

Ever since Black and Latino Americans created hip-hop at south Bronx block parties during the 1970s, this highly original, uniquely American music has continued to evolve, while simultaneously taking root in countless countries throughout the world.

As cultural critic Harry Allen once said: “hip hop is the new jazz.” But like jazz, hip-hop is more than music. It’s a culture. “’Hip-hop,’ once a noun,“ Kelefa Sanneh wrote in The New Yorker, “has become an adjective, constantly invoked, if rarely defined; people talk about hip-hop fashion and hip-hop novels, hip-hop movies and hip-hop basketball. Like rock and roll in the nineteen-sixties, hip-hop is both a movement and a marketing ploy, and the word is used to describe almost anything that’s supposed to appeal to young people.“ Beyond marketing and corporatization, hip-hop culture has always included dance, rap, fashion, design, stretching language, reclaiming public spaces, and its creative, genre-spanning approach has allowed artists to represent their lives in a world that often ignores or misrepresents them. In the San Francisco Gate in 2003, Adam Mansbach, author of Go the F**k To Sleep described hip-hop culture as “assembled from spare parts, ingeniously and in public. Paint cans refitted with oven-cleaner nozzles transformed subway trains into mobile art galleries. Playgrounds and parks became nightclubs; turntables and records became instruments. Scraps of linoleum and cardboard became dance floors. Verbal and manual dexterity turned kids into stars, and today’s artists grew up listening to the first strains of the musical form.” As Jeff Chang, author of Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop, put it, hip-hop culture is “naturally interdisciplinary” and composed of “mix signifiers, we break everything down to bits and bytes and rebuild something new.” I love the description.
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Abortion Clinics Are Getting Nickel-and-Dimed Out of Business

Longreads Pick
Source: Businessweek
Published: Feb 27, 2020
Length: 13 minutes (3,427 words)

Family Business

Longreads Pick

What do you do when all you ever really wanted was to be loved by your dad and all he wants is to use you to perpetrate crime? Vincent Moretti got wrapped up in his overbearing father’s penchant for organizing inside-job armoured car heists. When Archie Moretti refused to share the take fairly, Vincent decided he had had enough of the patriarchy.

Published: Jan 28, 2020
Length: 31 minutes (7,873 words)

Longreads Best of 2019: Business Writing

We asked writers and editors to choose some of their favorite stories of the year in various categories. Here is the best in business writing.

Whitney Joiner
Articles editorThe Washington Post Magazine

The State With the Highest Suicide Rate Desperately Needs Shrinks (Monte Reel, Bloomberg Businessweek)

This isn’t a traditional business piece — in the sense that it’s not a profile of a kooky founder or a growing industry, or an investigation into corporate wrongdoing, or a capitalist reckoning. It’s a wrenching read about what happens when a job market/industry (in this case, mental health) slowly folds in on itself while demand for that industry’s services and providers grows dramatically. Monte Reel’s profile of the one psychiatrist in eastern Montana (Joan “Mutt” Dickson, whose grit will stick with you) covers so many other pressing American problems: addiction, guns, depression, anxiety, burnout. Reel’s portrait of Dickson’s work — and his mastery of the background forces at play — is a grim-but-captivating look at what the dearth of mental health resources in the rural and mountain West means.

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The Often Perilous, Sometimes Lucrative, and Ever-Evolving Business of Being a YouTube Star in 2019

Longreads Pick

“Really, the digital creator class’s legitimacy is arising out of the passage of time. YouTube fame isn’t novel to Gen-Zers. It simply is.”

Source: Vanity Fair
Published: Oct 7, 2019
Length: 19 minutes (4,956 words)

The Unstable Business of Higher Education

AP Photo/Toby Talbot

When a college closes, its property gets sold off, employees get paid out, and, as Alia Wong writes at The Atlantic, “customers are told to move on.” But for many students and faculty, personal connections to their college makes losing their school different from losing other businesses. How do they deal with the loss? And how can small colleges avoid this fate? Through the story of 57-year old Newbury College in Massachusetts, which closed this May, Wong explores the threats facing many American liberal arts colleges.

Students I spoke with described a grieving process after hearing the news that went from shock to panic, curiosity to nostalgia, heartbreak to acceptance. Stefan, who’s from the Denver area and had finished her finals early last December, was on a cruise celebrating her 21st birthday when news of the closure broke, oblivious due to her lack of reception. Upon returning to shore, her phone lit up with texts from her friends and bosses. Stefan, who’d held a host of roles on campus during her three years at Newbury—an athlete on three sports teams, an RA, and a work-study employee in admissions, to name a few—started applying to other colleges as soon as she got home. She proceeded to spend her entire winter break obsessing—and often crying—over her next steps. “Every day I was like, Oh my Godwhat am I going to do?!” Stefan recalled. “Newbury was my home away from home.”

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