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The Top 10 Longreads of 2011

I should preface this by saying I didn’t plan to do a list, because all of your Top 5 Longreads of 2011 really represent what the Longreads community is all about. But, in true WWIC form, I couldn’t resist.  Thank you for an incredible year. Special thanks to the entire Longreads team: Joyce King Thomas, Kjell Reigstad, Hakan Bakkalbasi and […]

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Matt Pearce: My Top 5 Longreads

Matt Pearce is a contributing writer for The Los Angeles Times, The New Inquiry, and The Pitch. He’s based in Kansas City and recently covered the Egyptian elections and uprisings on Tahrir Square. ••• 1. Paul Ford – “The Epiphanator” – New York magazine I think this year we’ve reached this saturation point where a […]

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The origins and the politics of the New York-based Freelancers Union—now 150,000 members strong: The shift toward short-term contracts was underway long before the 2008 financial crash. Charles Heckscher, director of the Center for Workplace Transformation at Rutgers University, sits on the board of the Freelancers Union, and likes to describe this shift in terms […]

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On modern manufacturing in the U.S. and the unskilled-skilled labor gap—with 92-year-old Standard Motor Products serving as a case study:  Across America, many factory floors look radically different than they did 20 years ago: far fewer people, far more high-tech machines, and entirely different demands on the workers who remain. The still-unfolding story of manufacturing’s […]

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Meet Martin, the I.T. guy who’s helped everyone from drug dealers needing to dodge wiretaps, to restaurants looking to inflate their Foursquare numbers: If you’ve seen that episode of The Wire, you know principle behind Martin’s system: ‘Burners,’ prepaid cell phones drug dealers use for a short time then abandon to thwart wiretaps. Prepaid phones […]

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A look at which alternative energy initiatives succeeded, which ones failed, and whether there’s hope for a rebound: In 2005, VC investment in clean tech measured in the hundreds of millions of dollars. The following year, it ballooned to $1.75 billion, according to the National Venture Capital Association. By 2008, the year after Doerr’s speech, […]

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U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu’s path from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory to Washington—where he and the Obama administration have been forced to retreat on many of their alternative energy plans: On a cold morning in mid-November, Chu was hauled into a committee room on Capitol Hill. The hearing was the spectacle of the week, […]

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Khalid Shaikh helped create the file-uploading company YouSendIt. After battling with the CEO, he was fired—and he soon launched a series of cyberattacks: In Shaikh’s absence, YouSendIt had continued to grow. It had raised an additional $14 million in VC funding and had 100,000 paying subscribers. Still, Shaikh marveled at how often YouSendIt’s site went […]

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