Search Results for: profile

At 18, Tavi Gevinson Is a Fashion Veteran—and a Broadway Rookie

Longreads Pick

A profile of a teen icon, after graduation. “‘She likes to argue and so do I,’ says [Kenneth] Lonergan, ‘and she’s really smart and so am I, so you end up having these discussions about interesting and broad-ranging topics. But then I find it very charming that she’ll go from mentioning a talk she gave in Australia at 16 to complaining about ‘Why does my dad care if I go to bed late?’ Or how annoying it is that her best friend is in Costa Rica and she can’t text her.'”

Published: Aug 10, 2014
Length: 15 minutes (3,824 words)

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

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The Founder of Flickr and Slack on the Psychological Torture of Selling Too Early

Stewart readily admits he sold Flickr too early.

“If we had waited six months we would have made much more money. If we had waited a year we would have made 10 times more money,” he says. He regrets it now. But at the time, after the dotcom crash, the Nasdaq plummet, and September 11, deals just weren’t happening. All his advisers and investors told him to go for it. It was hard to know what to do.

In the wake of WhatsApp (a $19 billion sale to Facebook) and Beats ($3 billion to Apple) and even Instagram (a lousy $1 billion, Facebook again), $22 million now seems like the kind of money you dig out of your wallet to give a stranger at the bus stop. But for the team at Flickr, it was life-changing. Slack, on the other hand, is looking at something more like first class airfare.

Such temptations aren’t easy to resist. “We could sell it right now for a billion dollars,” Stewart says, and then shakes his head like he’s trying to wake up from a weird dream. “Which sounds fucking mental. But the thing is, those options aren’t going to go away.”

He admits that if the right offer comes along, the kind of offer that only three or four companies in the world could come up with, he would have to jump. But what is that? Five billion? Seven? Ten? It’s hard to know, because in Silicon Valley today, money has lost all meaning and value.

Mat Honan, in Wired, on Flickr cofounder Stewart Butterfield, whose newest startup, Slack, is taking off.

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Photo: kk, Flickr

Why So Many Bottled and Canned Coffee Drinks Taste So Bad

It took Blue Bottle a year and a half to get to the point where they could regularly produce iced coffee at this scale. The seed of the idea was a can of cold cappuccino that James Freeman had on a plane to New York in late 2011. “I got this canned cappucino for, like, six dollars or something. And I opened it and I was like, ‘This is so horrible. This is so horrible,’” he said. He started trying every ready-to-drink cold coffee on the market. “The range of tastes is somewhere between terrible and horrible.” (He makes two exceptions to this general rule: products from Portland’s Stumptown and Oakland’s Black Medicine.)

He tried to figure out how these beverages had gone so bad. “You think about the psychology. Nobody is like, OK, let’s have a meeting and let’s invest millions of dollars because we want to develop this horrible product. Nobody does that,” he said. “It’s always with the best intentions.”

So what was going on? Freeman found a source who had worked with big beverage companies, who could explain the problems. First, making a shelf-stable product is hard, and it is hard in ways that are particularly bad for coffees.

“It was sort of a spooky story around a campfire, like, ‘Gather around kids, I’m gonna tell you how a frappuccino is made. No, no! That’s too scary!” Freeman said. He learned about a machine called a retort, a supercharged, industrial-scale pressure cooker, into which bottled coffee is inserted, pressurized, and heated to 240 degrees.

“Basically what survives that…” Freeman’s voice trails off. “It’s the same way that canned chili is made, you know?”

— In the Atlantic, Alexis Madrigal profiles James Freeman, the CEO of Blue Bottle, an Oakland and Brooklyn-based specialty coffee roaster that is trying to mass-produce coffee drinks that even coffee snobs would buy. Writes Madrigal after sipping a Blue Bottle iced coffee drink from a carton: “This coffee was the real deal.”

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Photo: Voxfx

The Abortion Ministry of Dr. Willie Parker

Longreads Pick

A profile of Dr. Willie Parker, who tends to the needs of women at the one abortion clinic open in Mississippi. Last week a federal appeals panel voted to block a Mississippi law that would have shut down the clinic.

Source: Esquire
Published: Jul 30, 2014
Length: 33 minutes (8,280 words)

‘She’s Good, With a Capital G’: A Roxane Gay Reading List

A reading list could never do author Roxane Gay justice. For one thing, she’s incredibly prolific. She writes, edits, teaches and tweets. Within the past few months, she’s garnered acclaim for her intense novel, An Untamed State, and her collection of essays, Bad FeministThese are just the facts.

I don’t remember discovering Gay’s work. I remember requesting to follow her on Twitter and the elation I felt after receiving her approval. I remember reading her stark personal essays for The Rumpus. I remember reading one my favorite stories of hers out loud to an ex while he listened obligingly. He didn’t love it, but I did. I had never read anything like it in my life. I was obsessed. Her commentary on current events, her appreciation of pop culture, her honesty and nuance—she’s Good, with a capital G.

If you haven’t had the privilege of reading Gay before, let this be a primer. She has written dozens and dozens of essays and short stories, many of which she lists on her website. I’ve included two wonderful recent interviews, a smattering of short stories and more. Longreads recently featured an excerpt from Gay’s novel, An Untamed State. If that doesn’t hook you, nothing will.

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Period.

Longreads Pick

“‘I’ve always been interested in how people deal with loss,’ he says.” A profile of an obituary writer.

Published: Aug 2, 2014
Length: 10 minutes (2,556 words)

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

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

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When the Bough Breaks

Longreads Pick

“Nichols steeled herself for the work that lay ahead, reminding herself, as she had so many times before, You wanted this job.” A profile of Sergeant Brenda Nichols, a former head of the Dallas Police Department’s Child Abuse Squad. The story goes deep on one of the hundreds of child abuse cases Nichols has investigated.

Source: D Magazine
Published: Jul 30, 2014
Length: 38 minutes (9,657 words)

The Skies Belong to Us: How Hijackers Created an Airline Crisis in the 1970s

Brendan I. Koerner | The Skies Belong to Us | 2013 | 25 minutes (6,186 words)

 

‘There Is No Way to Tell a Hijacker by Looking At Him’

When the FAA’s antihijacking task force first convened in February 1969, its ten members knew they faced a daunting challenge—not only because of the severity of the crisis, but also due to the airlines’ intransigence. Having spent vast sums on Beltway lobbyists, the airlines had the political clout to nix any security measure that might inconvenience their customers. So whatever solutions the FAA proposed would have to be imperceptible to the vast majority of travelers. Read more…