Search Results for: competition

The Future of Restaurateuring in Portland

Photo by Carl, Flickr

This “safer bet” is where the second generation of Portland’s food industry intersects with the region’s commitment to density in the face of growth. Micro restaurants and food halls celebrate small spaces. Their inherent informality appeals to diners who treat dining out as an everyday form of entertainment. The small, turnkey spaces make it easier for established local food businesses to expand. “It took only three months to get all nine Letters of Intent at Pine Street signed,” says project developer Jean Pierre Veillet, principal of Siteworks design-build firm. “There’s a hankering for small space in the city’s core.”

Projects like Pine Street and Bethany are the logical evolution of food carts — a codifying and commodifying of the once gritty first-generation food entrepreneurship. Done right, they will ensure that Portland’s food cred will continue to grow, one meal at a time. The statewide food system that fuels these restaurants, and other food-based industries, is also evolving. That is: The first generation of food business would never have taken off without the quality and diversity from Oregon’s small, family-owned farms. Will those conditions persist for the second?

In Oregon Business, Amy Milshtein writes about the way a few new food hall projects signal the future of restaurateuring in Portland, Oregon, and how the city’s rising rents, increasing density and success as a food destination have pushed it into a new phase of greater polish, greater competition, higher financial stakes, and greater responsibility to create sustainable food systems.

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More on food from the Longreads Archive

Siri Hustvedt on Knausgaard’s ‘Feminine Text’ and the Gendering of Literature

A few years ago, novelist Siri Hustvedt interviewed fellow Norwegian writer Karl Ove Knausgaard in public. Toward the end, she asked why, in thousands of pages filled with hundreds of mentions of writers, he’d mentioned only one woman writer, Julia Kristeva. “No competition,” he said without much thought.

This stunning comment from a man whose six-volume autobiographical opus, My Struggle, treads in territory long considered the unserious domain of women writers–deeply emotional self-examination and domestic ennui–provoked Hustvedt’s curiosity about the gendering of literature. At Lithub, she presents a deep examination of gender bias among readers and writers alike, and asks what bearing an author’s sex has on the writing itself.

When I look back at the “no competition” remark, I suppose I should be offended or righteously indignant, but that is not at all how I feel. What I feel is compassion and pity for a person who made a remark, no doubt in earnest, which is nevertheless truly silly. Thousands of pages of self-examination apparently did not bring him to enlightenment about the “woman” in himself. “It’s still in me.” It is not enough to notice that a feminine text by a man and a feminine text by a woman are received differently or to call attention to numbers that represent sexual inequality in the world of letters. It is absolutely essential that men and women become fully conscious of what is at stake, that it is blazingly clear to every single one of us who cares about the novel that there is something at once pernicious and silly at work in our reading habits, that the fate of literary works cannot be decided by a no-competition clause appended to a spurious homo-social contract written under the aegis of fear, that such a clause is nothing short of “insane.”

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The Impossibility of Building a Personal Brand

Creating a personal brand is exhausting, but potentially rewarding. It requires maintenance on all fronts, social media and IRL. Is it tenable for the average human being?

Branding yourself has become a professional goal for more than just journalists. Today, Fortune 500 companies hold seminars to train their employees in the art of personal branding, and an entire industry of coaches is flourishing to teach nonprofit managers and small-business owners how to get a leg up on the competition. By the year 2020, according to software company Intuit, 40 percent of the workforce will consist of freelancers and independent contractors. Whether you’re a financial planner or a fashion blogger, a personal brand has come to seem like a professional requirement—the key to success and fulfillment in an increasingly cutthroat and unstable economy. “Every person is a media company,” said Dan Schawbel, 32, a brand consultant in New York and one of the leading figures in the personal branding industry. “Anyone can have a platform now, whether you’re a janitor or a CEO.”

Ann Friedman investigates all of this at The New Republic, and decides to undergo her own rebranding. She consults with Karen Leland, president of Sterling Marketing Group.

We struck a deal: Leland, who is based in San Francisco, would walk me through a truncated version of her personal branding services—which she’s been offering for 20 years and normally cost between $25,000 and $75,000 for anywhere from three months to six months or longer…She started with some questions: What do you do? What are the qualities with which you do it? And what is the result or impact?

A personal brand, Leland cautioned me, is “something that you actively have to manage online, offline, in your organization, in your industry, and on social media.” Which means there are dozens of opportunities every day to question whether you’re doing it right. Is this crop top on-brand for a networking happy hour? Is this joke tweet-worthy or something I should merely text to a friend? Is this stupid assignment I accepted in order to make rent detracting from my reputation too much? Life is not always on-brand.

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The Walkable Multiverse According to Charles Jencks

Alina Simone | Atlas Obscura | September 2015 | 23 minutes (5,747 words)

Atlas ObscuraOur latest Exclusive is a new story by Alina Simone, co-funded by Longreads Members and published by Atlas Obscura. Read more…

Trouble Between the Buns at Whataburger

Photo by Rick, Flickr

There’s nothing simple about selling simple burgers for a living. The decades-long relationship between Whataburger’s parent company and the Andrews family’s successful Whataburger franchises soured recently, when the Andrews’ company filed a lawsuit, claiming Whataburger violated an agreement. In Texas Monthly, Loren Steffy writes about the bad blood and changing corporate culture at Texas’ second-largest homegrown restaurant chain.

When most Whataburger customers walk into the restaurant, they have no idea if the place they are eating at is a franchise or a corporate-owned branch. And as long as they can still get their Green Chile Double Whataburgers or Honey Butter Chicken Biscuits, they probably don’t care. But the rift between the Andrews family and the burger chain they helped build represents a struggle between the past and the present, and between two families who have known each other for a long time. “It’s a little like a public divorce—neither side walks away looking good,” says Michelle Hartmann, a Dallas attorney who specializes in private-company litigation. “It hurts the brand ultimately.”

This is a terrible time to risk messing with the Whataburger brand. The Texas burger landscape is more competitive than ever, thanks to an influx of regional mini-chains such as Austin’s P. Terry’s, the Metroplex’s Twisted Root Burger Co., and Houston’s Becks Prime and smaller national chains such as Smashburger, Five Guys, and Shake Shack. Whataburger is bigger than all of those, and that may be the point. It isn’t a small business anymore, and to keep ahead of the competition, it may have to start acting its size. Its competition is McDonald’s and Wendy’s, not a boutique operation with three locations that offers grass-fed-bison burgers topped with arugula on a gluten-free bun.

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New York City’s Menu Wars

In the early 1990s, food delivery services on Manhattan’s Upper West Side sparked what New York Times writer Emily M. Bernstein called “the menu wars.” Everyone from dry cleaners to nail salons followed Chinese restaurants’ lucrative lead, placing paper take-out menus inside apartment buildings’ lobbies and mail rooms and under residents’ doors. Angry tenants demanded that businesses stop. Fistfights erupted. Local government got involved. In 1996, Jane H. Lii wrote in The New York Times about the hard-working delivery men at the center of the battle. Here’s an excerpt:

”At least with this job we can make enough to survive,” said Li W. Xiao. ”You can do twice the work and make half the money in a garment factory.”

Until a year ago, Mr. Li, who was smuggled into America just four years ago, thought he was on top of the world. Inspired by the American entrepreneurial spirit, he and his brother took a gamble and borrowed $20,000 from friends and relatives to open a garment factory in Brooklyn. But they did not realize how fierce the competition would be. After they opened, orders never came in enough volume for them to pay the bills. They shut down the factory six months ago. Now, in addition to his smuggling debt, Mr. Li owes $10,000 more.

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The History of Weak American Beer

In The Atlantic, Joe Pinsker writes about the historical conditions that shaped the flavor and body of America’s popular commercial brews. Like the cultural melting pot of America itself, various factors, including market forces, thirsty laborers, WWII rationing, religious movements and the idea of temperance all thinned our big brand beers into the light, offensively inoffensive yellow water they are today, and helped birth our current craft brewing renaissance in response:

But Americans didn’t develop a more unified taste in beer until the mid-1800s, when huge numbers of German immigrants—including David G. Yuengling, whose brewery still operates today, outside of Philadelphia—arrived and brought lager with them. Less intense in flavor than porters, stouts, and ales, lagers were a hit with America’s growing number of factory workers and miners, who ate at saloons near where they worked. “It was normal to get a beer with your meal, but not allowable to be tipsy on the job,” says [economics professor Ranjit] Dighe. “So if you wanted a beer, your safest option was a weak beer.” As more and more immigrants came to the U.S. and unemployment stayed high, the stiff competition for jobs made this pressure for sobriety even higher.

From this perspective, wateriness was not a bug, but feature. In the late 1800s, when Anheuser-Busch started selling a milder version of Budweiser made with rice, it cost a nickel more than its competitors—and it sold quite well.

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The Company That Controls Elite Cheerleading

Texas—despite being America’s Cheer Capital—is one of thirty or so states that don’t recognize cheerleading as an official sport (other non-recognizers include the NCAA and the National Federation of State High School Associations, both of whom also decline to classify cheerleading as a sport). The lack of official recognition created a regulation vacuum of sorts, with no single regulatory agency responsible for cheerleading safety. A for-profit Memphis-based company called Varsity Brands saw opportunity in the regulatory void and created an empire. In a recent feature for the Houston PressLeif Reigstad investigated Varsity Brands’s near total control of cheerleading:

Varsity runs all the major cheer competitions and camps. It publishes a cheerleading magazine and has its own online television network. It is the largest corporate sponsor of the National Federation of State High School Associations, which writes the rules for high school sports. It provides insurance for private competitive gyms and for college cheerleading teams in the NCAA. It controls cheerleading’s self-proclaimed governing bodies for safety and rules and international competition — seemingly independent nonprofits that lack transparency, do not enforce their own written safety rules and are financially bound to Varsity. And it is expanding worldwide.

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‘Dr. V’ Writer Caleb Hannan Speaks for the First Time About What Went Wrong

“It didn’t need to exist. And that was not something that occurred to me in the process of reporting.”

Out of everyone who read an early draft of “Dr. V’s Magical Putter,” only Caleb Hannan’s wife asked him the most critical question of all: Did this story even need to exist?

Hannan spoke publicly for the first time on Saturday at the Mayborn narrative journalism conference in Texas, in a panel called “Anatomy of an Error,” to dissect what went wrong with his 2014 story for Grantland, which ended with the suicide of a transgender woman. The story led to massive public criticism—as well as an internal investigation at ESPN and a letter of contrition from editor Bill Simmons—about how Hannan and his editors handled the story, and whether the reporting pushed a woman to take her own life. Hannan was joined on the panel by writers Hanna Rosin and Michael J. Mooney, and Boston Magazine editor (and one of Hannan’s early critics) S.I. Rosenbaum.

Speaking in a room filled with hundreds of journalists, Hannan was both extremely self-critical and at times emotional as he went through the chronology of reporting and editing for the piece.

Late in the process of vetting the story, Hannan said he was contacted by one of Grantland’s freelance fact-checkers, who raised concerns about the story—the first time anyone other than his wife had voiced those concerns. “Some of the first words out of her mouth were, ‘There’s a chance this woman is going to hurt herself,’ and I said, ‘I know and I’m scared shitless, and I don’t know what to do,’ and she said, ‘Okay I just want to make sure I said that.’ And that’s a conversation I immediately should have taken to my editor, but I didn’t.”

Why not, he was asked.

“I don’t know.”

Hannan reflected on the ideas that journalists should hold people accountable or seek out the truth at all cost. But it’s not that simple. “At every point in the reporting I could justify myself going forward … ‘I’m doing my job.’ But part of the job was to assess whether it was worth it. And there were two people who saw that. In talking with my wife, in talking with this fact-checker, I said, ‘What happened?’ And they said, ‘You were in denial.’

“There’s this idea that it’s not going to happen to me. There is a momentum to a story that’s hard to stop. … It would have been a blow to my ego to set aside something I knew was going to be talked about. But I should have.”

The Latest Human Rights Crackdown in Uncle Xi’s China

Chinese authorities have recently detained or questioned more than 150 human rights lawyers and activists in an unprecedented nationwide crackdown. Some detainees are missing, and a petition is calling on the U.S. to cancel the Chinese president’s upcoming state visit. In his April New Yorker story “Born Red,” Evan Osnos profiled Big Uncle Xi (the state news agency’s nickname for the president), “China’s most authoritarian leader since Mao”:

Before Xi took power, he was described, in China and abroad, as an unremarkable provincial administrator, a fan of American pop culture (“The Godfather,” “Saving Private Ryan”) who cared more about business than about politics, and was selected mainly because he had alienated fewer peers than his competitors. It was an incomplete portrait. He had spent more than three decades in public life, but Chinese politics had exposed him to limited scrutiny. At a press conference, a local reporter once asked Xi to rate his performance: “Would you give yourself a score of a hundred—or a score of ninety?” (Neither, Xi said; a high number would look “boastful,” and a low number would reflect “low self-esteem.”)

But, a quarter of the way through his ten-year term, he has emerged as the most authoritarian leader since Chairman Mao. In the name of protection and purity, he has investigated tens of thousands of his countrymen, on charges ranging from corruption to leaking state secrets and inciting the overthrow of the state. He has acquired or created ten titles for himself, including not only head of state and head of the military but also leader of the Party’s most powerful committees—on foreign policy, Taiwan, and the economy. He has installed himself as the head of new bodies overseeing the Internet, government restructuring, national security, and military reform, and he has effectively taken over the courts, the police, and the secret police. “He’s at the center of everything,” Gary Locke, the former American Ambassador to Beijing, told me.

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In Xi’s early months, supporters in the West speculated that he wanted to silence hard-line critics, and would open up later, perhaps in his second term, which begins in 2017. That view has largely disappeared. Henry Paulson, the former Treasury Secretary, whose upcoming book, “Dealing with China,” describes a decade of contact with Xi, told me, “He has been very forthright and candid—privately and publicly—about the fact that the Chinese are rejecting Western values and multiparty democracy.” He added, “To Westerners, it seems very incongruous to be, on the one hand, so committed to fostering more competition and market-driven flexibility in the economy and, on the other hand, to be seeking more control in the political sphere, the media, and the Internet. But that’s the key: he sees a strong Party as essential to stability, and the only institution that’s strong enough to help him accomplish his other goals.”

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