We asked a few writers and editors to choose some of their favorite stories of the year in specific categories. Here, the best in science writing.
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Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
How a 26-Year-Old From Dallas Turned Fashion Blogging Into Big Business
Affiliate marketing is almost as old as the Internet; it developed back in 1994 thanks to pornography sites, and it was implemented by Jeff Bezos at Amazon shortly afterward. Here’s how it works: Say you search for flights on Priceline. The hyperlinked airfare results aren’t just any old links. They’re affiliate links. The act of […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
The Secret Behind Pixar's Storytelling Process
Fast Company has an excerpt from Creativity, Inc., the book by Pixar co-founder Ed Catmull (with Amy Wallace), which goes inside the creative process at the studio. Catmull attributes much of their creative success to their internal process for continually refining stories. It includes meetings with the Braintrust, a group of executives, directors and other […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
Can a Company Keep Innovating After the Founder Is Gone?
Marc Andreessen is obsessed with the idea that tech companies need to focus on innovation above all else. He believes that the “output” of technology companies isn’t products — at least not the way the “output” of Ford is cars. The “output” of tech companies, he says, is innovation. Andreessen’s second theory of innovation is […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
The Disruption Machine
Jill Lepore’s critical look at the language of innovation in tech: 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 […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
Joe McGinniss: 1942-2014
Nixon had refused the teleprompter from the start. He kept all the figures—crime rising nine times as fast … 300 cities … 200 dead … 7,000 injured … 43 percent of the American people afraid … He kept them all in his head, like the date of the Battle of Hastings. Now he was starting […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
Philip Welsh’s Simple Life
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 […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
How America’s Leading Science Fiction Authors Are Shaping Your Future
How science fiction writers inform the way we think about the real world: Jordin Kare, an astrophysicist at the Seattle-based tech company LaserMotive, who has done important practical and theoretical work on lasers, space elevators and light-sail propulsion, cheerfully acknowledges the effect science fiction has had on his life and career. “I went into astrophysics […]
Posted inNonfiction, Reading List
Taking Care of Business: A Reading List
Hackers! Gen Y CEOs! Multibillion dollar success stories! International expansion! Top-secret projects! Cute clothes! Hamburgers! Capitalism is so exciting, and so are these longreads about popular U.S. companies. 1. “In-N-Out’s Burger Queen.” (Patrick J. Kiger, Orange Coast, Jan. 2014) 31-year-old Lynsi Snyder presides over In-N-Out’s $1.1 billion industry, founded by her grandparents in the 1940s. […]
Posted inNonfiction, Story
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.”
