Jonah Peretti: I think there’s an interesting tension between what’s good for the user and what’s good for the industry. That was really created by Google. Say The New Yorker writes a really long 12,000 word piece on Scientology. That takes lots of reporting and lots of investment. That’s important work that our industry should […]
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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 inEditor's Pick
The Founder of Flickr and Slack on the Psychological Torture of Selling Too Early
A snapshot of the current Bay Area tech and media scene, as told through the career of Stewart Butterfield, the founder of Flickr who’s back with a new company, the workplace chat app Slack.
Posted inBooks, Nonfiction, Story
When the Messiah Came to America, She Was a Woman
On the rise and fall of American utopia.
Posted inNonfiction
Longreads Best of 2015: Under-Recognized Stories
Stories that deserved more attention in 2015.
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
When the Internet Takes Away Our Paul Newman
Building up to 2005, [Tom] Cruise had tackled some of the most challenging dramas of any actor of his generation: Eyes Wide Shut, Magnolia, Vanilla Sky. Even his popcorn flicks — Minority Report,Collateral, War of the Worlds — were intriguingly dark. He’d never played it safe or shot a cash-grab. He trusted that if he chose movies he believed in, the […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
Before Google: Larry Page’s Early Ideas for Changing the World
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 […]
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 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.”
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. […]
