Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle users, you can also get them as a Readlist. Sign up to receive this list free every Friday in your inbox. * * * 1. A Brand New World In Which Men Ruled Jodi Kantor | The New York Times | December 23, 2014 | 27 minutes […]
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The Hidden Truth About the Cold War Roomba
Over at Paleofuture, Matt Novak looks back at the 1959 Cold War cultural exhibitions hosted by both the United States and the Soviet Union. For the United States, the Moscow exhibition was a chance to show off the newest products and technology from companies like IBM, Sears and Kodak—and perhaps the most important innovation of […]
Who Counts as a 'Public Figure' in the Age of Social Media?
By the time I had a few thousand followers on Twitter, people began to refer to me as a “public figure.” While mine was a paltry fame compared to literally thousands of cishet white men in the industry, that type of visibility for women is far rarer due to sexism, misogyny, online harassment, the way […]
State of the #Longreads, 2014
Lately there has been some angst about the state of longform journalism on the Internet. So I thought I’d share some quick data on what we’ve seen within the Longreads community:
Trust Us: The Ethics of Our Automated Future
“You should presume that someday, we will be able to make machines that can reason, think and do things better than we can,” Google co-founder Sergey Brin said in a conversation with Khosla Ventures founder Vinod Khosla. To someone as smart as Brin, that comment is as normal as sipping on his super-green juice, but […]
Which Kind of Failure Are You?
Clay Christensen has compared the theory of disruptive innovation to a theory of nature: the theory of evolution. But among the many differences between disruption and evolution is that the advocates of disruption have an affinity for circular arguments. If an established company doesn’t disrupt, it will fail, and if it fails it must be […]
Longreads Best of 2015: Under-Recognized Stories
Stories that deserved more attention in 2015.
What Happens When the Internet Takes Over Your Home: Virus Edition
I wake up at four to some old-timey dubstep spewing from my pillows. The lights are flashing. My alarm clock is blasting Skrillex or Deadmau5 or something, I don’t know. I never listened to dubstep, and in fact the entire genre is on my banned list. You see, my house has a virus again. Technically […]
The Brutal Ageism of Tech
Scheiber meets founders and VCs who are fighting back against age bias in Silicon Valley: Silicon Valley has become one of the most ageist places in America. Tech luminaries who otherwise pride themselves on their dedication to meritocracy don’t think twice about deriding the not-actually-old. “Young people are just smarter,” Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg told […]
The Meaning We Put Behind Our Passwords
“Perhaps my biggest surprise has been how willing, eager actually, people are to openly discuss their keepsakes.”

