Search Results for: tech

Food For Thought: A Reading List

Longreads Pick

This week’s picks from Emily includes stories from Lucky Peach, Modern Farmer, Ars Technica, The Billfold, and The Walrus.

Source: Longreads
Published: Jun 8, 2014

Food For Thought: A Reading List

This week, we return to your regularly scheduled Longreads programming. The theme? Food: queering food, eating Pokemon, the potential of Soylent, tasting curly fries for a living, and Canadian food trucks.

1. “America, Your Food is So Gay.” (John Birdsall, Lucky Peach, June 2013)

“It’s food that takes pleasure seriously, as an end in itself, an assertion of politics or a human birthright, the product of culture—this is the legacy of gay food writers who shaped modern American food.”

Read more…

The Unlikely History of the Origins of Modern Maps

Longreads Pick

GIS technology has opened up new channels of understanding how the world works. But where did it begin?

Canada may be a large country, but the flight from Ottawa to Toronto is short – a mere hour. Still, in that time, Pratt and Tomlinson struck up a conversation and began chatting about their work. As Tomlinson listened to Pratt describe his plan to collect and synthesize thousands of maps to document the wealth of the vast Canadian landscape, he felt a rush of serendipity. After all, he’d been thinking about the challenge of representing multitudinous data in a map for most of his short career and was on the cusp of programming a computer system for geographic information.

Source: Smithsonian
Published: Jun 2, 2014
Length: 7 minutes (1,880 words)

Forget CSI

Longreads Pick

Faith in the forensic system—in large part due to Hollywood’s heroic portrayals of forensic investigators—is at an all time high. But despite its invincible aura, the actual system is deeply flawed and at times flat out fraudulent.

In San Francisco last year, a police technician pleaded guilty to stealing cocaine from a crime lab, leading to the dismissal of hundreds of criminal cases that depended on evidence analyzed at the unit. In 2012, a Minnesota lab was temporarily shut down after a report found deficiencies in virtually every aspect of its operation, including dirty equipment, inadequate documentation, and ignorance of basic scientific procedures. In Houston that same year, a lab technician was found to be fabricating results in drug cases; about one out of every three reports he submitted was found to be flawed. District attorneys in the area were told that up to 5,000 convictions in 36 counties could be in jeopardy. Similar failures were uncovered in Colorado Springs, Colorado; St. Paul, Minnesota; Chicago; and New York. Even the FBI has performed atrociously shoddy work.

Published: Apr 30, 2014
Length: 18 minutes (4,647 words)

The Self-Driving Revolution

Let’s be honest: Humans never should have been allowed behind the wheel in the first place. There’s so much that can go wrong, so much room for negligence—it’s incredible to think that we managed human-controlled cars for as long as we did.

Here’s a reading list covering the past, present and future of transportation. Read more…

Without Chief or Tribe: An Expat’s Guide to Having a Baby in Saudi Arabia

Nathan Deuel | Friday Was the Bomb | May 2014 | 21 minutes (5,178 words)

 

For our latest Longreads Member Pick, we’re thrilled to share a full chapter from Friday Was the Bomb, the new book by Nathan Deuel about moving to the Middle East with his wife in 2008. Deuel has been featured on Longreads in the past, and we’d like to thank him and Dzanc Books for sharing this chapter with the Longreads community. 

Download as a .mobi ebook (Kindle)

Download as an .epub ebook (iBooks)

 

Read more…

Press

2014

2011

2010

‘Let’s, Like, Demolish Laundry.’

Longreads Pick

A look at the highly competitive world of laundry startups:

In early October, Washio opened up shop in San Francisco. Not surprisingly, the area around Silicon Valley was already awash in laundry disrupters. In addition to Prim, there was Laundry Locker, along with three other locker-technology-enabled businesses: Sudzee, Drop Locker, and ­Bizzie Box. There was Sfwash, which offered ecofriendly cleaning on top of pickup and delivery. There was even, briefly, a service called Your Hero Delivery, whose driver-founders dressed like superheroes. (“At the end of the day, did we really want to spend our whole lives schlepping dirty laundry?” one of them told PandoDaily of their decision to fold. “No.”) Another upstart was about to launch: Rinse, whose founders described their business to a Dartmouth alumni newsletter as “an ‘Uber’ for dry cleaning and laundry.”

Metzner knew someone in common with the founders of Rinse, so he decided to give its CEO, Ajay Prakash, a call. Just to let him know his company was coming to San Francisco. And so forth. “It was, you know, a perfectly civil conversation,” says Prakash, which may have been what Alan Arkin termed a “business lie.”

Published: May 21, 2014
Length: 22 minutes (5,545 words)

Philip Welsh’s Simple Life

Longreads Pick

He chose a low-tech, simple life. Now his lack of a digital footprint is hampering the search for his killer.

By 1 p.m., Philip would leave the small yellow house in Silver Spring where he lived alone. He walked a half-block, waited for the No. 5 bus, took it to his job as a taxi dispatcher, returned home, cooked a late dinner, watched Charlie Rose and went to sleep. He never locked his front door and often left it wide open. Part was defiance. This is how I live. Part was warmth. Anyone is welcome.

Author: Dan Morse
Source: Washington Post
Published: May 6, 2014
Length: 7 minutes (1,934 words)

The Last Words of Tupac Shakur

Longreads Pick

One late-summer night in 1996, a rap superstar was gunned down just off the Strip. Since then, his story has become legend. But for the Metro cop who was first on the scene, that night remains unforgettably real.

Chris Carroll was a sergeant on the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department’s bike patrol unit on the Strip. The 12 officers under his command rode in pairs, but Carroll was riding solo when he got the call that night, September 7, 1996. Traffic on the Strip is always slow-moving on a Saturday evening, but it was especially thick in the aftermath of Mike Tyson’s first-round technical knockout of Bruce Seldon at the MGM Grand a few hours earlier. And, now, somewhere in the midst of all those vehicles was a caravan of cars, one of them perhaps carrying the shooter.

Carroll rode north to intercept them. “I’m thinking, ‘How am I going to stop these cars?’” Carroll says. “Usually on bikes, we used whistles and things like that, or we could call for a vehicle to help us. But as I’m riding toward them, I’m thinking, ‘These guys are on the run, there’s multiple cars and I’m heading nose-to-nose with them.’”

Source: Vegas Seven
Published: May 21, 2014
Length: 18 minutes (4,645 words)