After 300 years of breathtaking innovation, people aren’t massively unemployed or indentured by machines. But to suggest how this could change, some economists have pointed to the defunct career of the second-most-important species in U.S. economic history: the horse. For many centuries, people created technologies that made the horse more productive and more valuable—like plows […]
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Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
Brussels Playbook: Meet the Mike Allen of Europe
A 35-year-old Australian, [Ryan] Heath rises every morning at 4.30 to finish off the day’s Brussels Playbook, which in only a month and a half already goes out to almost 40,000 people. (The site itself received, in May, about 1.7m page views, from just over 700,000 unique visitors. The original Politico receives 7m monthly uniques, though […]
Posted inMember Pick, Nonfiction
Friendship Is Complicated
Art, commerce, and the battle for the soul of My Little Pony.
Posted inEditor's Pick
The Billionaires at Burning Man
What happens when tech billionaires start bringing their private planes, chefs and staff to Burning Man? It’s not exactly class warfare, but it certainly raises larger questions about how a festival devoted to “radical inclusion” can adapt.
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
The Old Music Industry: ‘A System Specifically Engineered to Waste the Band’s Money’
During the 90s there was something of an arms race to see who could write the biggest deal. That is, the deal with the most money being spent on the band’s behalf. In a singularly painless contest the money would either be paid to the band as a royalty, which would take that money out […]
Posted inNonfiction, Reading List
Why the World Is Betting on a Better Battery: A Reading List
Nick Leiber | Longreads | March 2015 The first battery, a pile of copper and zinc discs, was invented more than 200 years ago, ushering in the electric age. Subsequent versions led to portable electronics, mobile computing, and our current love affair with smartphones (1,000 of which are shipped every 22 seconds). Now batteries are […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
The Moment Firestone Teamed Up with a Warlord
An excerpt from ProPublica and Frontline’s investigation into how the U.S. tire and rubber company Firestone ended up partnering with warlord Charles Taylor, who was taking over Liberia during the civil war in the early 1990s.
Posted inEditor's Pick
A Brand New World In Which Men Ruled
Examining the gender gap in the tech industry through the lens of Stanford University’s pioneering class of 1994.
Posted inReading List
#NoShame in Mental Illness: A Reading List
Here, I’ve collected several stories about mental illness, many written by writers of color.
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
The Pioneering Women Assigned to Program One of the Earliest Computers
After six weeks of training, the women returned to Penn, where they were given poster-size diagrams and charts describing ENIAC. “Somebody gave us a whole stack of blueprints, and these were the wiring diagrams for all the panels, and they said, ‘Here, figure out how the machine works and then figure out how to program […]
