Search Results for: tech

Jeff Bezos: Hero or Villain?

Jeff Bezos
(Photo by David Ryder/Getty Images)

When the news of Amazon’s purchase of Whole Foods broke, some wondered whether Amazon owner Jeff Bezos was flying too close to the anti-trust sun, teetering on the verge of an unfair monopoly.

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Prosecutor, Interrupted: A Kamala Harris Reading List

(Photo by Aaron P. Bernstein/Getty Images)

The junior Senator from California, Kamala Harris had made headlines for more than a decade. She was the first woman appointed District Attorney of San Francisco, the first female and first non-white lawyer elected to the office of Attorney General in California, and the second black woman ever elected to the Senate. If it is possible to go too far with praise, President Barack Obama once had to apologize for calling her good-looking. Elected on the same day Hillary Clinton failed to shatter the presidential glass ceiling, the Sentor has been deemed “the center of the resistance” against President Donald Trump. And during Jeff Sessions’ testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee, she was criticized for being too good at her job.

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The ‘Smashing Things Together’ Approach to Editorial Illustration

Illustration by Kjell Reigstad (Airplane photo by GraphicaArtis/Getty Images)

Our Art Director Kjell Reigstad recently shared his insights on editorial illustration with our company colleagues. We thought you’d enjoy it too.


In my role on the Editorial team, I end up touching a lot of different parts of Automattic. I work on learning resources, company blogs, highlighting great users, longform publishing, and brand work, with the occasional theme and conference design thrown in. This sort of variety is absolutely amazing, and one of my favorite things about working here.Of all the projects I get to work on, my favorite thing to do may be illustrations for Longreads. It’s lovely to focus on reading and reflecting on stories, and to have the freedom to explore and experiment with visual representation.I’ve done over a hundred illustrations for Longreads over the years, and I thought I’d share a few notes on the concepting process I go through for each one.


I always start by reading the story (obviously!). While reading, I take note of all the visuals that pop into my head along the way. Most of them will end up being tossed out, but usually there are a few that help build the base of the illustration.For example, we recently published an essay where Jami Attenberg describes her battle with flight anxiety. Here’s the list I jotted down while reading her piece:

  • airplanes
  • airports
  • airplane seats
  • clouds
  • books
  • pills
  • xanax
  • pill bottles

When I’m finished reading the story, I run through a series of mental exercises that I picked up years ago in my “Visual Communication” class from design school. VisCom (as we called it) was a required course for all Design, Illustration, and Advertising majors, since at their core, all of those fields center around utilizing visuals to convey or enhance an idea. We were taught about symbolism, juxtaposition, and how to use use color, shapes, and text to get a message across. Here are the questions I ask myself:

  • Are any of these items a common symbol? If so, does it represent something that relates well to the story?
  • Can one of these items be turned into a new symbol?
  • Can I smash some of these images together to make something new?
  • Is there a scene from the story that I can build using these images?

My favorite of the bunch is the “smash things together” exercise. This usually involves taking two seemingly unrelated things and combining them to create greater meaning. In the case of Jami’s essay, I smashed clouds together with Xanax pills to depict the anxiety-ridden, Xanax-fueled flights she described throughout her story.

20170606-Airplane-Anxiety

Illustration by Kjell Reigstad (Airplane photo by GraphicaArtis/Getty Images)

Another great example of this approach is the illustration I did for Alexander Chee’s piece, “Our Well-Regulated Militia.” I smashed together a map of the United States and a gun rack to echo the article’s statement about the prevalence of guns in America:

20160413-Alexander-Chee

Illustration by: Kjell Reigstad

This technique doesn’t always work, but it does help kickstart creative thinking, and can help generate other solutions. I often run through 2–3 ideas for each illustration before finding one that sticks.


We’ve been building up our publishing pace and coverage lately at Longreads, and illustration plays a key part in making this successful. Our illustrations help attract readers, and if done well, they can amplify the message of the story itself. We’ve been bringing in some amazing freelance illustrators lately, and I want to close by showcasing some of the great work they’ve been doing too:

David Brown’s Quiet Resilience

(Photo by Stewart F. House/Getty Images)

David Gambacorta | Longreads | June 2017 | 15 minutes (3,755 words)

David Brown was a few months into his tenure as the head of the Dallas Police Department when his cell phone started to hum on a Sunday morning.

He’d been on the job long enough to know the drill: At any given moment, a phone call could be the harbinger of an administrative headache, a tactical crisis, or some gut-wrenching tragedy. But he resisted the reflexive urge to answer.

Brown was standing in a pew at the Oak Cliff Bible Fellowship Church. A low-slung building with a sharply pitched roof, the church and its weekly service was his temporary refuge from a chaotic world. He actually considered turning away from his faith once, when he was a younger man and inconsolable over the murder of a former partner, a blow that nearly drove him to quit the police force altogether.

But Brown came to understand loss, the way it coursed through and connected everyone around him like an unseen river. Such lessons had been present in his life from an early age. Brown was born at Parkland Memorial Hospital in 1960, three years before a team of trauma doctors there tried in vain to revive President John F. Kennedy after an assassin’s bullet had exploded through his skull. The very place that had given Brown life became synonymous with the death of a country’s tenuous sense of innocence.

He checked his phone when he left the Sunday service. It was hot outside; the temperature would touch 100 degrees that day. A voice message from the chief of a small-town police department 16 miles outside of Dallas was waiting. It was about Brown’s 27-year-old son, D.J., who suffered from adult-onset bipolar disorder.

D.J.’s behavior had turned erratic that morning, prompting his girlfriend to call 911. But everything was fine now, the chief calmly assured Brown. He tried to get in touch with D.J., but thought better of rushing to him; maybe his son just needed some time to cool down. A few hours later, Brown’s phone started rattling again. This time, it was a no-nonsense detective who took his breath away with just a few words: D.J. was dead.

He’d shot and killed an innocent passerby and a local police officer, the detective explained, and then engaged in a shootout with other cops. D.J. was cut down by police gunfire. The news hit Brown like a sledgehammer to the spine.

It was June 20, 2010. Father’s Day.

The grief could have broken a lesser man, could have swallowed him whole. But Brown clung to his faith, and he somehow endured. What he didn’t know then was that more sorrow was waiting for him down the road, the kind that would draw the world’s attention to Dallas like it was 1963 all over again. And Brown, a quiet, contemplative man who never imagined he’d be a police chief, would emerge from all of the darkness as the embodiment of grace—and the unlikely face of law enforcement in America. Read more…

A Sociology of the Smartphone

Photo by Alexander Koerner/Getty Images

Adam Greenfield | Radical Technologies: The Design of Everyday Life | Verso | June 2017 | 27 minutes (7,433 words) 

 

Below is an excerpt from Radical Technologies, by Adam Greenfield. This story is recommended by Longreads contributing editor Dana Snitzky.

* * *

They are the last thing we look at before sleep each night, and the first thing we reach for upon waking.

The smartphone is the signature artifact of our age. Less than a decade old, this protean object has become the universal, all-but-indispensable mediator of everyday life. Very few manufactured objects have ever been as ubiquitous as these glowing slabs of polycarbonate.

For many of us, they are the last thing we look at before sleep each night, and the first thing we reach for upon waking. We use them to meet people, to communicate, to entertain ourselves, and to find our way around. We buy and sell things with them. We rely on them to document the places we go, the things we do and the company we keep; we count on them to fill the dead spaces, the still moments and silences that used to occupy so much of our lives.

They have altered the texture of everyday life just about everywhere, digesting many longstanding spaces and rituals in their entirety, and transforming others beyond recognition. At this juncture in history, it simply isn’t possible to understand the ways in which we know and use the world around us without having some sense for the way the smartphone works, and the various infrastructures it depends on.

For all its ubiquity, though, the smartphone is not a simple thing. We use it so often that we don’t see it clearly; it appeared in our lives so suddenly and totally that the scale and force of the changes it has occasioned have largely receded from conscious awareness. In order to truly take the measure of these changes, we need to take a step or two back, to the very last historical moment in which we negotiated the world without smartphone in hand. Read more…

Pulse Nightclub Was My Home

Photo by Chris O'Meara/AP Images

Edgar Gomez | Longreads | June 2017 | 34 minutes (8,473 words)

It was Christmas Day in Orlando, just over six months after the Pulse Nightclub shooting, and my brother, Marco, and I drove through eerie, empty streets looking for anywhere open to eat. Most of the restaurants we passed were closed for the holiday, but still the city celebrated. Flashing neon lights framed a deli window where a mechanical display Santa waved us by with automated merriness. A swarm of inflatable reindeer grazed outside a “New York style” Chinese restaurant. Palm trees dressed as candy canes wrapped with red and white tinsel lined the sides of the road ahead. We were back in town to spend the holiday with our mother, who unexpectedly had to take off to Mexico the night before for a funeral, leaving Marco and me alone and scrambling to make conversation. He’d driven up from Miami. I’d flown in from California. We opted to listen to music instead. Marco steered with his knees, scrolling through playlists on his phone with one hand and smoking a cigarette with his other. He landed on a country song I’d never heard of before. I leaned out my window, away from his smoke, breathing in the spectacle of Christmas in Florida.

This was not my home anymore. I had moved to California in September, just two months earlier, but already the streets outside looked alien, every other light pole crowned with a flimsy-looking evergreen. Elves in swimming trunks were piled in sale bins outside of The Dollar General. I noticed that Marco’s seatbelt was unbuckled. If he were a friend, I would have lectured him about the dangers of driving recklessly, but because he was Marco, I left it alone. At 27, he was only three years older than me, though it was a wide enough age gap that any attempt to talk to each other was clumsy and forced.

When I asked him if he thought I dyed my hair too dark since he last saw me, he asked, “What’s the difference?” I was blond before. My new hair was black. He offered me a cigarette by tapping the carton on his thigh and flicking the lid open under my nose. I shook my head no and went back to staring out of the window, satisfied that we had at least tried to talk. I suggested Anthony’s Pizza, the place downtown with the newly minted mural featuring a flock of 49 doves of assorted colors representing the Pulse victims. No, he said.

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We Need to Talk About Uber: A Timeline of the Company’s Growing List of Problems

Uber CEO Travis Kalanick (Photo by Wang K'aichicn/VCG/VCG via Getty Images)

In a piece for the Financial Times titled “Fire Travis Kalanick,” Kadhim Shubber wrote of the founder of Uber: “One day we will look back at what will hopefully be the smouldering wreckage of Kalanick’s career and ask how a person so lacking in basic human and corporate ethics was allowed to run a company for so long.”

Founded in 2009, Uber was able to portray itself as an underdog “disruptor” into 2012, galvanizing support to beat back city lawmakers in Boston and Washington, D.C. who sought to impose regulations.

But then their practice of surge pricing during crises came under fire when ride prices doubled in New York City after Hurricane Sandy devastated the metropolis in 2012. When surge pricing reached nearly eight times the fare during a snowstorm in 2013, riders got angry.

At first, few reporters took to criticizing the company. When they did, Uber’s public relations machine responded by trashing those reporters in other outlets. When reports of assaults and misconduct by Uber drivers started to roll in, the company responded by claiming they were not responsible for the incidents because the drivers are “independent contractors.”

And since 2013, the missteps and scandals have only continued to pile up. Here is a not comprehensive timeline of all of the trouble Uber has gotten into to date:

January 2014: Pando reported that an Uber driver suspended after assaulting a passenger in San Francisco had a criminal record, including a felony conviction involving prison time. Uber has no explanation for why the driver cleared the background checks that California mandated they run. That same month, outlets nationwide report on the company getting hit with its first wrongful death suit stemming from a driver killing a 6-year-old girl in a San Francisco crash on New Year’s Eve. That driver also had a criminal record that included a conviction for reckless driving. Read more…

Please Watch This Video Showing the Unfathomable Cruelty of U.S. Immigration Policy

I’ve been obsessed with systems in government, and in business, that completely erase our humanity. That could mean an algorithm on Facebook that’s designed to prevent nudity but unwittingly bans one of those most powerful images from the Vietnam War. It means the lengths we’ll go to pretend that our phones are not built from slave labor. Or it could mean the layers of bureaucracy built into a company that allows its owner, now one of the President’s top advisers, to target and harass low-income tenants without sullying his own hands in the process. Read more…

Twinless in Twinsburg

Illustration by Laura McCabe

Anya Groner | Longreads | June 2017 | 20 minutes (5,065 words)

I’m stopped at a red light in Twinsburg, Ohio, when I spot my first pair riding in the Jeep behind me. Matching blond hair, bug-eye sunglasses, and pink chins fill the rearview mirror of my rental car. I glance and glance again before texting my sister. “It’s begun,” I type. “They’re here and you’re not.” I erase the last three words and press send. No point in guilting her for a decision she can’t reverse.

When the light turns green, I press the gas, heading to the local high school where a wiener picnic and silent auction will kick-off the 41st annual Twins Days festival. An identical twin myself, I’ll be eating my hot dog alone tonight. My sister, a marine biologist, has opted not to join me, instead signing up for a dive certification class the same weekend. Though she apologized for the timing, she didn’t offer to reschedule. Twins Days doesn’t interest her much.

I’m not sure what to expect or even why I’ve decided to come. The website tells me the three-day fete is patriotic and sweet, a massive show-and-tell where the attendees are also the main attraction. Last year, 2,053 sets of twins, triplets, and quads journeyed here from as far away as South Korea and Australia. The revelry includes competitive cornhole, look-alike and un-lookalike contests, talent shows, and a research plaza where scientists collect data from volunteers. My surface excuse for flying out is that I’m a writer, trying my hand at journalism, but even a rookie like me knows the event is far too personal for objectivity. I’ve known about the fest for as long as I can remember, and for most of those years I wouldn’t even consider attending. Lying on stacked bunks in our childhood bedroom well before our age reached double digits, my sister and I put Twins Days somewhere on the continuum between obnoxious and offensive, a gathering of voyeurs looking to celebrate sameness, the facet of our identity that frustrated us most. The best parts of twinhood we knew to be exclusive, shaped by our two unique personalities, shareable only with each other. For us, the festival held no appeal.

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Curing My Flight Anxiety, One Book Tour at a Time

Illustration by Kjell Reigstad (Airplane photo by GraphicaArtis/Getty Images)

Jami Attenberg | Longreads | June 2017 | 9 minutes (2,138 words)

 

There was a definitive start date to my flight anxiety. I know this because I was on an early morning flight back from a Midwestern city. I had been in town for an appearance. There was average attendance at the event; I had collected my check. Later, I had one of the hosts drop me off not at my hotel but an old lover’s house in the city. I’m sure she thought I was being sketchy. I wasn’t explaining the whole story. An old friend, I said. We were having dinner. But I took my luggage with me. She kept offering to buy me dinner, this nudgy, but kind woman. I didn’t feel like explaining anything. She was a stranger. It was my personal life.

These are not extraordinary circumstances, necessarily, although they are specific ones. You may not have to stand in front of an audience talking about a book you wrote, but you might have had to make a sales presentation to a regional office. You may not have a prying local escort, but you might have, say, a mother, or a friend, who doesn’t know when to drop it. And at some point in your life I bet you’ve made choices that other people might find questionable, even if you didn’t question them one bit.

The next morning I boarded this tiny plane, two seats on either side of the aisle, except for the very last seat, which was a single. That was where I was miserably stuck, directly across from the bathroom. I’d had about two hours of rest the night before and was hungover on arrival. I fell asleep almost immediately on the plane, a hazy, buzzed sleep. I woke as the beverage cart rolled over my foot, with a gasp and a start and a solid pounding in my chest. It was an almost instantaneous anxiety attack.

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