Even in Google’s earliest days, Page had always wanted the company to do more than just basic Web search. Since he was a kid, he’d been dreaming up world-changing schemes. As an undergrad at the University of Michigan, he’d proposed that the school replace its bus system with something he called a PRT, or personal […]
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Posted inEditor's Pick
The Complete, Complicated History of San Francisco Housing: Tech, Rent Control and Prop 13
Cutler investigates the complete history of the Bay Area’s housing crisis—from technology and rent control to California’s Proposition 13: Earlier in the summer of 1978, a cantankerous former small-town newspaper publisher named Howard Jarvis led a “taxpayer revolt” as property prices were soaring, threatening to throw home owners out of their homes because of rising […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
How ‘Shawshank Redemption’ Keeps Paying, 20 Years Later
“Shawshank” only began to get moviegoers’ attention after the Oscars, where it received seven nominations (but won no awards) and promptly was rereleased in theaters. The second run grossed an additional $10 million and primed it for its debut on home video, which at the time was still a robust revenue source. If Andy Dufresne […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
Heirs, Heiresses and Inheriting a Company
America is not kind to the heir. He is a stereotypical figure in our literature, and not an appealing one at that. He tends to be depicted as weak, pampered, flawed, a diluted strain of the hardy founding stock. America celebrates the self-made. Unless an heir veers sharply from his father’s path, he is not […]
Posted inCollege, Nonfiction, Uncategorized
The Creeping Tech Angst in Silicon Valley: Our College Pick
Yiren Lu, a recent Harvard grad who now studies computer science at Columbia, takes a step back from the startup world to wonder what it means for our tech infrastructure when all the bright young things want to make apps but aren’t skilled in networks and hardware — the stuff that makes the Internet go. […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
The $30 Million Clinkle Mystery
Clinkle’s growth team proved effective at signing up more than 100,000 would-be users — this, despite being a little hazy about precisely what they were selling. Says one former growth team member, “I never saw a direct demonstration of the product.” The growth teams met ambitious goals by targeting the most influential students on campus, […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
Netscape, 20 Years Later
Chris Wilson: I still remember the very first time I got HTML content pulled over the network through Libwww and I was displaying it on my debugging monitor in my office at NCSA with Jon Mittelhauser sitting over my shoulder looking at it, and thinking that was amazing. I knew that it was going to […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
The Creeping Tech Angst in Silicon Valley: Our College Pick
Every week, Syracuse University professor Aileen Gallagher helps Longreads highlight the best of college journalism. Here’s this week’s pick.
Posted inCollege, Nonfiction, Uncategorized
The Creeping Tech Angst in Silicon Valley: Our College Pick
Yiren Lu, a recent Harvard grad who now studies computer science at Columbia, takes a step back from the startup world to wonder what it means for our tech infrastructure when all the bright young things want to make apps but aren’t skilled in networks and hardware — the stuff that makes the Internet go. […]
Posted inNonfiction
The Rise and Fall of John DeLorean
“It was the end of the story of John DeLorean as part of the American Dream—how a humble kid from Detroit could rise to the very top.”
