Search Results for: publishing

Get Rich U.

Longreads Pick

Stanford University, and its president John L. Hennessy, have a tight relationship with Silicon Valley, which has helped the university’s endowment grow to nearly $17 billion. A look at how those relationships are shaping what’s next:

“John Hennessy’s experience in Silicon Valley proves that digital disruption is normal, and even desirable. It is commonly believed that traditional companies and services get disrupted because they are inefficient and costly. The publishing industry has suffered in recent years, the argument goes, because reading on screens is more convenient. Why wait in line at a store when there’s Amazon? Why pay for a travel agent when there’s Expedia? The same argument can be applied to online education. An online syllabus could reach many more students, and reduce tuition charges and eliminate room and board. Students in an online university could take any course whenever they wanted, and wouldn’t have to waste time bicycling to class.”

Source: The New Yorker
Published: Apr 23, 2012
Length: 30 minutes (7,629 words)

Former Time Warner Book Group CEO Larry Kirshbaum jumps from the traditional publishing world to “the dark side,” heading up Amazon Publishing. Meanwhile, the Big Six watch closely:

Amazon could be an unstoppable competitor to big publishing houses. If history is any guide, Jeff Bezos, who declined to comment for this story, doesn’t care whether he loses money on books for the larger cause of stocking the Kindle with exclusive content unavailable in Barnes & Noble’s Nook or Apple’s iBookstores. He’s also got almost infinitely deep pockets for spending on advances to top authors. Even more awkwardly for publishers, Amazon is their largest retailer, so they are now in the position of having to compete against an important business partner. On the West Coast people cheerfully call this kind of arrangement coopetition. On the East Coast it’s usually referred to as getting stabbed in the back.

“Amazon’s Hit Man.” — Brad Stone, Bloomberg Businessweek

More from Stone: “The Omnivore.” — Bloomberg Businessweek, Sept. 28, 2011

Amazon’s Hit Man

Longreads Pick

Former Time Warner Book Group CEO Larry Kirshbaum jumps from the traditional publishing world to “the dark side,” heading up Amazon Publishing. Meanwhile, the Big Six watch closely:

“Amazon could be an unstoppable competitor to big publishing houses. If history is any guide, Jeff Bezos, who declined to comment for this story, doesn’t care whether he loses money on books for the larger cause of stocking the Kindle with exclusive content unavailable in Barnes & Noble’s Nook or Apple’s iBookstores. He’s also got almost infinitely deep pockets for spending on advances to top authors. Even more awkwardly for publishers, Amazon is their largest retailer, so they are now in the position of having to compete against an important business partner. On the West Coast people cheerfully call this kind of arrangement coopetition. On the East Coast it’s usually referred to as getting stabbed in the back.”

Author: Brad Stone
Source: Businessweek
Published: Jan 26, 2012
Length: 13 minutes (3,406 words)

Kevin Smokler's Top 5 Deep Interviews of 2011

Kevin Smokler is the author of the forthcoming essay collection Practical Classics: Rereading Your Favorite Books from High School (Prometheus Books, 2013) and curator of Deep Interviews here on Longreads. 

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Here on Longreads, I’m curating Deep Interviews (#deepinterviews)—lengthy interviews with interesting people—a format I’ve grown to love. It’s not quite original reporting but certainly more than transcription, a showcase for at least three of my favorite art forms—conversation, listening and set decoration. A great interview not only brings us inside the mind of an interesting person but inside the room where the conversation happened. And while many of the best presenters of interviews (The Paris Review, Playboy, Bomb) use an iterative process—the final interview emerging from several sessions like portrait painting—many others, equally loved, are on-the-spot reporting while all the action sits in hotel room club chairs. We the reader are invited in but are not the important person. We’re probably leaning uncomfortably against the bathroom door and trying to stay out everyone’s way. 

For this best-of list, I’ve chosen only interviews that you can read right now, no subscription required, from 5 different publications, at five different points in the trajectory of a culturally-known person. If the Deep Interview is a butterfly, below we’ve got pupae to pretty flying thing, though in no order biology would understand. 

2012 is looking to be a denser, dizzier time for the Deep Interview. More publications are opening their archives and the Charles Foster Kane basement of the genre (explained below). The hashtag #deepinterviews will keep you up to date on all these developments starting right now. 

I. William Gibson, The Paris Review Interview (Summer 2011 Issue)

Gibson knocks ‘em dead here—funny, smart, but plain and practical. A line like “We’re increasingly aware that our society is driven by these unpredictable uses we find for the products of our imagination,” which left me thinking for a solid 40 minutes, is tossed off without pause. There’s also plenty for those of us who know science fiction much more as cultural phenomenon than by the particulars of the author’s worlds. I’m also guessing that even the diehards will be pleased by Gibson calling Neuromancer, his most famous novel, “a soap box derby car.” 

II. Scott Shepherd and Richard Maxwell: Bomb Magazine (Summer 2011 Issue)

BOMB has featured artist-on-artist interviews as its signature offering since 1981. About 90% of the time I have no idea who the subjects are and that’s just the way I like it. I read BOMB to unearth areas of creativity. Their interviews are my miner’s helmet. 

Scott Shepherd is an actor with the New York theater company Elevator Repair Service. ERS was profiled last year in the New Yorker as they were putting up GATZ, a six-hour word-for-word retelling of The Great Gatbsy. Richard Maxwell is an experimental theater director. Of them, I know The Great Gatsby, the New Yorker and that’s it. These guys don’t have a bunch of old war stories but rather experience collected as the raw material of the future, of projects yet conceived and horizons yet crossed. I don’t understand a fair amount of the theorizing about theater that they do. But the conversation is open enough for curiosity and learning and in that way, is the creative process itself in miniature. 

III. tUnE-yArDs: Pitchfork Interviews (April 25, 2011)

I loved Merrill Garbus (TY is her project) after reading this interview. She’s funny, self-aware, thoughtful. She’s also exactly the kind of musician you want big sloppy success for, which is what makes this piece such a great example of a type: The interview that catches a star on the rise. 

Pitchfork catches Garbus right before a tour, when she’s “doing a lot of boring and wonderfully domestic things.” Read the rest and you’ll think “I don’t think Merrill Garbus will be doing her own laundry much longer unless she wants to.” Also the interviewer both acknowledges that TY does not fit a current musical trend yet nonetheless insists on asking if Garbus went through a “punk phase” (nothing in her afro-pop-inspired-vocal-heavy songs would indicate this. The interviewer seems to think that any musician not wearing glitter must have had a punk phase) and rushing past Garbus’s narration of her musical salad days in the uncool 1980s to get to her time spent in the more culturally approved 1990s. 

Garbus is having none of it. She is straight with the journalist but firm that her story not fit any convention but her own. 

I wish only great things for Merrill Garbus after reading this. And I hope she also files it away as capturing a moment before all those big things happened. 

IV. Giancarlo Esposito: The Onion AV Club Interview (Oct. 7, 2011)

Read enough interviews and you thank 18 different gods when someone with a criminally underrated career is given room to talk about themselves. Such is the case with Giancarlo Esposito, a character actor who makes everything he appears in better just with his presence. 

Esposito has been acting since the 1980s and I became aware of him from starring roles in Spike Lee’s early films. If you’re around my age (38) you probably remember him as Buggin’ Out in Do the Right Thing or as Cab Driver YoYo in Jim Jarmusch’s Night on Earth. The AV Club’s got him here for his role as Gustavo Fring, the newest addition to the acclaimed series Breaking Bad, unseen by me. But I still say “thank god” and “about time.” Fifty more like this with Mr. Esposito please and at least that many actors like him. 

V. Martin Luther King Jr: The Playboy Interview (January, 1965, republished Oct. 21, 2011)

I’ve got this one here as a representation of where the availability of Deep Interviews is going. Playboy has taken to republishing from its 50-year archive of interviews via reader requests on the magazines Facebook page. Martin Luther King Jr.’s is here by reader demand, a rebuke to the idea that no one reads Playboy for the articles. 

Beyond that, Playboy’s efforts are an indicator of reader demand for this kind of journalism. And with any luck, more availability, more openness, at whatever rate, is where we’re headed. BOMB and The Paris Review already have their complete interview archives available on line and free. I’d love to see more publications head that way. 

An even bigger interview drop is coming in the next two years. The Library of Congress is in the process of digitizing the entire collection of interviews by Studs Turkel, perhaps America’s greatest interviewer. The first of those nearly 7,000 conversations is due to be made publicly available sometime next year. 

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Time's Radhika Jones: My Top 5 Longreads of 2011

Radhika Jones is executive editor of Time.

I got to work on a number of great longreads at Time this year, among them Lev Grossman on fan fiction, Kate Pickert on the perils of cancer screening, and Kurt Andersen on the Year of the Protester. But these are a few of the pieces from other venues that have stuck with me.

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“And I Should Know,” by Roseanne Barr, New York

I didn’t follow the great Charlie Sheen meltdown of spring 2011. But I read every word of Roseanne Barr’s Sheen-inspired treatise on sitcom fame, in which she opens a window onto the warped and warping world of celebrity. It was a brilliant assignment, sharply executed and highly entertaining.

“It’s the Economy, Dummkopf!” by Michael Lewis, Vanity Fair

This is about the most exhilarating piece of business writing I have ever read, mostly thanks to Lewis’s summary of the trope of shit in German culture and its relation to the European financial crisis, which I found both hilarious and totally plausible. It was like stumbling into a graduate seminar on formalist readings of macroeconomics textbooks. I mean that in a really good way.

“Changing Times,” by Ken Auletta, The New Yorker

There’s nothing flashy or attention-seeking about Ken Auletta’s profile of Jill Abramson; it makes my top five because I found it fascinating to watch a picture of her emerge from the figure she cuts in the workplace. It emerges slowly—you have to wade through a lot of meetings—but Auletta was smart to go for inspirational at the outset: as a woman in publishing, I felt invested in Abramson’s rise and in the way she’s cultivated authority, intelligence and ambition.

“A Sister’s Eulogy for Steve Jobs,” by Mona Simpson, The New York Times

We all read a ton about Steve Jobs in the days after his death. Then Mona Simpson’s eulogy came along, reinvented the Jobs memoriam and blew the competition away. It was elegant, personal and lovingly attentive to detail—a tribute perfectly fitted to the man it honored. He was very lucky to have a writer for a sister.

“Cincinnati,” by James Pogue, n+1

I grew up in Cincinnati, back when WKRP was on the air and Jerry Springer was the mayor. It’s a city of in-betweens, and James Pogue’s rambling, evocative essay in n+1 captures its contradictions perfectly. I love the idea of a piece whose main goal is to take you somewhere else—in geography, in history and in memory.

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Businessweek's Sheelah Kolhatkar: My Top 5 Longreads of 2011

Sheelah Kolhatkar is features editor at Bloomberg Businessweek.

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Some of my favorite non-Businessweek features that were published this year:

“Lost at Sea,” Jon Ronson, The Guardian

This piece combines a genre I love—the gritty crime story—with the utter weirdness of the cruise ship industry. Apparently people disappear from cruise ships all the time, but you usually don’t hear about it because the cruise lines keep it quiet. Ronson goes deep into the bizarre cruise culture as he tries to figure out what happened to Rebecca Coriam, who vanished from the Disney Wonder last March.

“All The Angry People,” George Packer, The New Yorker

This story accomplished what seemed almost impossible, at least from an editor’s perspective: it made a compelling narrative out of the Occupy Wall Street encampment in lower Manhattan. Even though OWS was being covered to death, this story—along with Bloomberg Businessweek’s own fine contribution, Drake Bennett’s profile of David Graeber—found a new angle on it and made it fresh and compelling.

“The Girl from Trails End,” Kathy Dobie, GQ

This devastating story just really stayed with me.

“California and Bust,” Michael Lewis, Vanity Fair

His piece about Iceland (“Wall Street on the Tundra”) is my favorite one he’s done about the global financial crisis, but Michael Lewis’s breakdown of the fiscal disaster that is California was his best in 2011. It really makes you think about the scary place we might be headed as a country, and the scene with Arnold Schwarzenegger is priceless.

“Lady, Where’s My Magazine**?” Ann Friedman

This is a parody, and it isn’t terribly long, so I’m not sure that it qualifies. But it is hilarious, and perfectly illustrates much of what is wrong with the publishing business.

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Instafiction's Jeremy Bushnell: My Top Fiction Longreads of 2011

Jeremy P. Bushnell is the editor-in-chief of Instafiction.org, which links to a quality short story each weekday.  He stockpiles many other links at his blog, Raccoon.  He’s also on Twitter

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Backbone,” David Foster Wallace (The New Yorker)

During his lifetime, David Foster Wallace made massive contributions to the worlds of fiction and nonfiction alike, and I still miss his presence in the world acutely. The Pale King was a towering book of my summer, and although it didn’t quite yield the pleasures that a truly finished work might have, many of its fragments and episodes had the power of great short stories.  See, for instance, this chapter, published as a standalone piece in The New Yorker.

Zone One,” Colson Whitehead (excerpt, Esquire)

Whitehead’s Zone One is a great 2011 novel about government, bureaucracy, urban space, and human population.  Oh yeah, it has zombies in it, too.  Esquire gave us the first 20 pages—detailing a four-zombie attack on the book’s protagonist—right before Halloween, but it’s just as good a read now, at year’s end.

Female Explosion Syndrome” Jessica Forcier (New Delta Review)

Women all over the globe begin spontaneously combusting.  Men don’t.  Feminist?  Fabulist?  All of the above?  Either way, this one stuck with us.  Thanks to New Delta Reviewfor publishing it.

The Empty Room,” Jonathan Lethem (Paris Review)

Lethem hasn’t put out a short story collection since 2006’s How We Got Insipid, but he’s still writing short fiction, and this year he placed a memorable tale of domestic collapse with the Paris Review.  The setup: Upon moving his family into a sprawling farmhouse, a father makes a decision: one room will remain empty. “The empty room is like a living organ in our family’s house,” he claims, although in actuality it becomes the hollow core around which the family implodes.   

Becoming Deer,” Rachel Levy (PANK Magazine)

This fall, in the Chicago Reader, our Associate Editor Jamie Yates praised this story (from PANK Magazine) as a story that straddles the line between “the realistic and the mythical” and derives strength from each. You could also say it does the same with the line between the human and the animal. All this line-crossing makes the story into a kind of tangled skein, humming with tension. Taut, terse, and eerie: the best of a certain kind of experimental work. 

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We also featured tons of good stuff this year that didn’t make its first appearance in 2011, so if you’re looking for more good fiction from the past, check out our Instafiction “Editor’s Picks” tag.

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Lightning Rods is about a salesman named Joe who fails to sell a single Encyclopedia Britannica and sells exactly one Electrolux vacuum cleaner. He realizes the problem isn’t with him. The problem is with other people. He needs to sell “something people knew they needed anyway.” He sets up a business of contracted female administrative assistants—nicknamed Lightning Rods—that have anonymous sex with the male employees in an office through a glory hole in the bathroom. He says he can convince people that this is a substitute for ordinary sex, and a way of guarding against workplace sexual harassment. The idea sweeps the nation and changes everything. Ms. DeWitt gives the last word of her novel to George Washington: “In America anything is possible.”

“Novels From the Edge: For Helen DeWitt, the Publishing World Is a High-Stakes Game.” — Michael H. Miller, The New York Observer

See more #longreads about publishing

Writer David Dobbs: My Top Longreads of 2011

David Dobbs writes articles on science, sports, music, writing, reading, and other culture at Neuron Culture and for the New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, The Atavist, Nature, National Geographic, and other publications. He’s working on a book about the genetics of human strength and frailty. He also twitters and tries to play the violin.

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Truly we live, as Steve Silberman said, in a time of longform renaissance.  The reading year was notable not just for the rise of many long reads and Longreads, but for the debut of The Atavist and Byliner, two new venues for publishing pieces too long for magazines but too short for books. Both, like Longreads, brought me lots of good reading. And The Atavist, which was first off the blocks, let me publish a story, My Mother’s Lover, for which I had tried but failed to find the right length and form for almost a decade. Cheers to Longreads for helping spearhead this renaissance—and to you, Constant Reader, for doing the reading that in all but the most immediate sense makes the writing possible.

Here are my top 5 longreads of 2011, plus some extras. My filter: a combination of what I thought best and what continued to resonate with me. Writing is hard. I’m moved by the dedication to craft in these pieces.

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“Autistic and Seeking a Place in an Adult World,” by Amy Harmon, New York Times
Harmon pulls off something extraordinarily difficult here: she draws on little more than straight reportorial observation to show a young autistic man moving out into a world that struggles to accommodate him. Neither is quite ready for the other; yet they engage, as they must. Gorgeously structured and an immense reward. (Bonus: She later tells how she put it together.)

Janet Malcolm’s “Art of Nonfiction” interview in Paris Review
Malcolm has written several of the best books I’ve ever read; The Silent Woman haunts me more on every reading. Here she reveals how she did it: a rigorous method wielded by a powerful mind and rarefied sensibility. Equally moving and informative were the Paris Review interview with John McPhee and a Chris Jones conversation with Gay Talese. I am now in love with Talese, though he never calls.

“Study of a lifetime,” by Helen Pearson, Nature
Pearson, Nature’s features editor, shows how fine science writing is done, following a set of researchers researching a set of people and they’re all trying to figure out the same thing: How to make sense of their lives. Lovely stuff, true to complex, incredibly valuable science about complex, richly textured lives.

“Climbers: A team of young cyclists tries to outrun the past,” by Philip Gourevitch, The New Yorker
Young Rwandan cyclists try to ride into the future. Some rough road, some fine riding (and writing).

“California and Bust,” by Michael Lewis, Vanity Fair
California as a formerly developed country. Includes deftly rendered bicycle ride with former governor Schwarzenegger. Lewis is writing some of the best stuff out there right now.

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Okay that was 5 and then some. But these I couldn’t’ leave out:

“The Apostate,” Lawrence Wright, The New Yorker
The Church of Scientology versus Wright and the New Yorker fact-checking department. Former is overmatched.

“The Incredible True Story of the Collar Bomb Heist,” by Rich Shapiro, Wired
Riveting and bizarre.

“The Promise,” by Joe Posnanski, at Joe Blogs
Promises made, broken, and kept, variously, by Bruce Springsteen, the United States of America, and Posnanski’s dad. 4 stars easy, 5 if you love Bruce. And who doesn’t?

“What Made This University Researcher Snap?” by Amy Wallace, Wired
How and why a scientist went postal. Amy Wallace gets inside a scary head.

too many Daves, by David Quigg
Blatant cheating, as this is a blog, and Quigg almost always writes very short posts But he’s reading long stuff, all good, and responding to it beautifully as writer and reader; almost no one gets so much done in so little space. If you harbor even a spark of literary love, he’ll fan it.

Disclosures: The Atavist and Nature published stories of mine this year, and Wired.com (actually a separate outfit from Wired the magazine) hosts my blog.


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Brain Pickings' Maria Popova: My Top 5 Longreads of 2011

Maria Popova is the founder and editor in chief of Brain Pickings, a writer for Wired UK, Design Observer, and The Atlantic, among others, and an MIT Futures of Entertainment fellow, spending far, far too much time curating the web’s interestingness as @brainpicker.

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I’ve always found reading, writing, and thinking to be so tightly interwoven that, when done correctly, they become indistinguishable from one another. Like architecting your life and your social circle, architecting your mind’s life is an exercise in immersing yourself in an eclectic mix of viewpoints and directions of thought. In that way, longform is like the most intense of friendships, where the time dedication and the active choice to show up far eclipse the noncommittal acquaintanceship of soundbite culture. A healthy longform diet must thus include something that breaks your heart, something that gives you hope, something by someone you find a little self-righteous, something by someone with whom you’re a little bit in love—and, ideally, the inability to fully tell which is which. With this in mind, here are the five finest pieces I laid eyes and neurons on this year, which did for me all of the above, and then some.

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“Mark Twain in Love,” by Ron Powers (Smithsonian)

A bittersweet story about Samuel Clemens, but really about something profoundly and universally human: love, timing, and the often tragic misalignment of the two. And in that story lies a subtle reminder that unless we pursue the heart’s desire with complete clarity of purpose and intention, we’re left forever playing out those could’ve-beens, as Twain did, in our dreams.

“Thus it was Sam’s stubbornness that foreclosed any further encounter with Laura Wright. Yet they did meet, time and again, over the years, in Clemens’ dreams. And dreams, Samuel Clemens came to believe, were as real as anything in the waking world.”

“Post-Artifact Books & Publishing,” by Craig Mod

As both a marginalia obsessive and a hopeless bibliophile torn between the love of books and the mesmerism of the web, I spend a lot of time thinking about the future of books—or, more accurately, about the function books have traditionally served as a medium for arguing and teasing out ideas of significance and cultural gravity. Hardly anyone fuses a bibliophile’s profound respect for books with a designer’s sensitivity to the reading experience and a digital entrepreneur’s visionary bravery more fluidly, articulately, and thoughtfully than Craig Mod.

“Manifested properly, each new person who participates in the production of digital marginalia changes the reading experience of that book for the next person. Analog marginalia doesn’t know other analog marginalia. Digital marginalia is a collective conversation, cumulative stratum.”

“How the Internet Gets Inside Us,” by Adam Gopnik (The New Yorker)

Gopnik is one of my favorite nonfiction authors working today. And this is no ordinary book review of what eventually became my favorite history book of 2011—it paints a riveting connect-the-dots portrait of information’s history and future through such fascinating and surprisingly related subjects as African drum languages, the Morse Code, Marshall McLuhan, and Google.

“Yet surely having something wrapped right around your mind is different from having your mind wrapped tightly around something. What we live in is not the age of the extended mind but the age of the inverted self. The things that have usually lived in the darker recesses or mad corners of our mind—sexual obsessions and conspiracy theories, paranoid fixations and fetishes—are now out there: you click once and you can read about the Kennedy autopsy or the Nazi salute or hog-tied Swedish flight attendants. But things that were once external and subject to the social rules of caution and embarrassment—above all, our interactions with other people—are now easily internalized, made to feel like mere workings of the id left on its own.”

“Lessons According to Salt,” by Liz Danzico

There is something magnificent and magical that happens when we open ourselves up to the poetry of possibility—of “overlookedness,” if you will. (Lesson #1.) 

“The saltbox itself as an object is unremarkable. Alone, it communicates nothing. Says nothing about its role. Its intention. Its history as a gift born out of a romance between my maternal grandparents. Says nothing of its possibilities.

But add people, and it becomes a central iterative device. The license to change, to iterate, to test, to add, to make, to make over, to create (clearly, with food). It gives license and latitude to stray from what has been written (recipes) for those too shy to do. Therefore, it gives strength. It gives iterative powers to those not comfortable with version control. With its subtlety comes comfort in change.

One might say the saltbox, and access to it, is magic.”

“Wikipedia And The Death of The Expert,” by Maria Bustillos (The Awl)

Picking just one of Maria Bustillos’ many brilliant pieces was excruciating, but this meditation on the future of authorship, content curation, and intellectual innovation is simply exquisite, and tickles my own restlessness about the changing currencies and sandboxes of authorship in the age of information overload.

“All these elements—the abandonment of ‘point of view,’ the willingness to consider the present with the same urgency as the past, the borrowing ‘of wit or wisdom from any man who is capable of lending us either,’ the desire to understand the mechanisms by which we are made to understand—are cornerstones of intellectual innovation in the Internet age. In particular, the liberation from ‘authorship’ (brought about by the emergence of a ‘hive mind’) is starting to have immediate implications that few beside McLuhan foresaw. His work represents a synthesis of the main precepts of New Criticism with what we have come to call cultural criticism and/or media theory.”

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