Search Results for: tech

We’re Living in the Golden Age of the Corporate Takedown

Elizabeth Holmes. Photo: AP Images

Miki Agrawal, co-founder and “She-EO” of menstrual underwear phenom Thinx, raised eyebrows when she stepped down from her role in the company in early March. Agrawal had long been infamous for her company’s boundary-pushing ads and her well-publicized hesitance to use the word “feminist.” Within days of Agrawal’s announcement, Racked published a gripping article examining corporate dysfunction and alleged sexism at Thinx, and Agrawal struck back with a lengthy post on Medium that detailed her “incredible ride” with the company. “I didn’t put HR practices in place because I was on the road speaking, doing press, brand partnerships, editing all of the creative and shouting from the rooftops about Thinx,” she wrote. Less than a week later, Agrawal was accused of sexual harassment by a former employee.

Such is the power of the corporate hit piece: Fueled by eyewitness accounts, scorned ex-employees, and juicy tidbits about a CEO’s bad behavior, a corporate identity that took years to build can unravel in days. These piquant stories might smack of a slow-motion trainwreck, but they satisfy more than our inner gossips and gawkers. Today, the myth of a CEO is often of their own making—once minted by years of climbing the corporate ladder, now CEOs are made in weeks or months. CEO, we are told, is less a work status than a state of mind.

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Seven Stories About the Science Behind Fast Food

(AP Photo/Sunday Alamba, File)

I am a pizza apostate. Not only do I use a fork and knife whenever I eat pizza, I also sometimes bypass my normal slice joint for the siren call of deliciously buttered-and-garlic salted crust that only Dominos can deliver.

According to Bloomberg, I am not the only one who can’t resist the Michigan chain’s pies: the company is now worth a staggering $9 billion—its share price has risen more than 2,000 percent since 2010 (outpacing the likes of Google and Apple)—and Dominos has not only been brought back to life, it is now the leading force in the intersection of fast food and technology. As Susan Berfield writes,

Domino’s has always understood the importance of not having to go anywhere. Although you can still walk into a restaurant if you must, there are at least a dozen ways to order a Domino’s pizza in absentia. Some are self-explanatory: mobile apps, Apple Watch, Facebook Messenger. Others need some explanation. To order via Twitter, you must create an online account, save a pizza as your favorite (known as your Easy Order), and connect it to your Twitter account. Then tweet a pizza emoji to @dominos. “We’ll know who you are, what pizza you want, your default location and payment,” Maloney says. “We send a ‘Sounds awesome, are you sure?’ You send a thumbs up.” But if you want to order something other than your favorite, you’re out of luck.

Maloney clears away the remains of our lunch (Pacific Veggie, thin crust) to show me option 12 on his phone: zero-click ordering. “This will freak you out,” he says. “What’s the easiest way to order? When you don’t have to do anything.” One day Maloney and Garcia were in the car with their ad guys, dreaming of how to one-up Amazon’s one-click ordering. Three months later they had their zero-click app, which does require one click to start. “Tap the Domino’s icon to open it and find my Easy Order,” Maloney says. That’s it. “I have 10 seconds before it automatically places the order.” A big countdown clock appears on Maloney’s screen. If he does nothing, his Easy Order, a 12-inch hand-tossed pizza, will be on its way to his home.

While Dominos is at the forefront of our fast food, it isn’t the only company to have paired food science and tech to deliver a product that is utterly craveable. The following are some of the best pieces in the past several years to capture this culinary shift. Read more…

20 Years of Talking in Maths and Buzzing Like a Fridge

A Radiohead ticket from 1997
Photo by Harry Potts via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

Fellow ’90s music lovers, join me in feeling old today: Radiohead’s OK Computer is 20 this year, and Radiohead tickets will never again cost twelve quid. Writer Anwen Crawford was 15 when the late ’90s alt-rock masterpiece was released, and penned a lovely review-slash-analysis-slash-ode to this enduring album in Pitchfork.

The standard gloss on OK Computer, both at the time of its release and in the 20 years since, has been to call it an album about technology. But it seemed clear even in 1997 that it was also—or more so—an album about infrastructure, both the physical infrastructure of “motorways and tramlines,” as Yorke hymned it on “Let Down,” and the more elusive, “soft” infrastructure of global logistics, surveillance, finance, and banking. All those painterly, semi-abstract sounds—guitars that ping and squawk and melt, the wavering Mellotron choir, the glockenspiel, the shimmering cymbals, the quarter-tone violins—create a sense of a world in which human beings are irretrievably tangled inside systems of our own making. There’s so much damn noise (and remember, OK Computer was made several years before Wi-Fi, smartphones, and social media turned us all into twitching, overloaded fools), and sometimes the excess is amusing. Surely no-one can take the prog-baroque gabber of “Paranoid Android” with an entirely straight face. But the laughter is several shades of bleak. Think you can escape all this? Get in the car and drive? The joke’s on you. Capitalism’s insatiable, undead spirit has always arrived at your destination in advance.

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March Madness Has Its Own ‘Heidi Game’

North Carolina forward Luke Maye (32) shoots the winning basket as Kentucky guard Isaiah Briscoe (13) defends in the second half of the South Regional final game in the NCAA college basketball tournament Sunday, March 26, 2017, in Memphis, Tenn. The basket gave North Carolina a 75-73 win. (AP Photo/Brandon Dill)

With 16 seconds remaining in what had already been a classic Elite Eight game between No. 1 North Carolina and No. 2 Kentucky this past Sunday, the unthinkable happened —a TV station cut away from the NCAA tournament.

For the thousands who were ready to explode following Kentucky’s Malik Monk’s game-tying three-pointer, or UNC’s Luke Maye hitting what’ll go down as one of the all-time greatest shots in Tar Heel history, CBS affiliate WBNS in Columbus, Ohio instead flashed a blank screen—for six minutes—for a tornado warning. Suffice to say, Twitter was not amused:

Several Ohio counties received the tornado warning, but those folks gladly would have rather watched the scintillating 16 seconds of March Madness glory before hunkering down in the basement or root cellar as any potential storm passed above ground. But instead, WBNS pulled the feed, followed by a less-than-endearing mea culpa:

We had a massive technical failure in the final seconds of the NCAA basketball game between the University of Kentucky and the University of North Carolina.

Once the situation was remedied we were under a tornado warning and lives were in danger. Upon the conclusion of the warning we aired the remaining minutes of the game.

We apologize for the inconvenience.

The similarities between this Elite Eight snafu and the infamous Heidi game are glaring. Forty-nine years ago, 65 seconds was all that stood between the New York Jets and a 32-29 victory against the Oakland Raiders. The game had drawn millions of eyeballs, who were all eagerly waiting to see the Jets win its fifth straight game when NBC, which aired the contest, switched to the TV adaptation of Heidi. The channel had planned to air the movie regardless of the game’s score, and so rather than watch the Raiders rally with a 43-yard touchdown pass (followed by another TD after the Jets fumbled the ensuing kickoff), viewers were treated to the story of an orphaned Swiss girl.

As SB Nation’s David Pincus recounted in 2009:

The network, bombarded with complaints and hate mail, issued a formal apology. Many fans were so irate at the discovery of what happened that they complained to the NYPD (since the NBC switchboards were still out). The gaffe made the front page of the New York Times, where Cline was described by David Brinkley as a “faceless button pusher in the bowels of NBC”; the New York Daily News covered it with the headline, “Jets 32, Raiders 29, Heidi 14.” … The fiasco brought many changes to football telecasts. The NFL now includes a stipulation in its television contracts stating that local games must be aired to their completion, regardless of what the score is. It’s also why paid programming or filler typically follows NFL broadcasts on Sundays, so as not to repeat the same mistake. NBC installed a phone in the control room to separate calls from irate customers and network executives; to this day, the phone is referred to as the “Heidi Phone.”

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Want To See a Polar Bear? Just Follow the Bones

a polar bear walks on the ice
A female polar bear near Kaktovik, Alaska (photo by rubyblossom via Flickr, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

In Kaktovik, Alaska, dozens of polar bears take advantage of the bone pile—the remains of this community’s yearly quota of bowhead whales, which locals butcher right on the shore—to supplement meager summertime hunting. The bone pile is also a bounty for locals like hunter and guide Robert Thompson, who’s booked solid through 2017 taking hopeful wildlife photographers on polar bear tours. Michael Englehard tells the story in Hakai magazine.

The juncture of lingering bears waiting for freeze-up, the windfall of a bone and blubber cache, and a nearby community eager for economic opportunities, has resulted in a burgeoning bear watching industry in Kaktovik. Thompson, one of seven coast guard-certified tour boat captains, makes a good living from the castaways at the bone pile between September and November. A popular captain who is already fully booked for 2017, he can get so busy that he rushes to work without breakfast, grabbing a fistful of coffee beans to chew on his way out the door. His boat Seanachaí, Irish for storyteller, is aptly named—the man who can see bears making a beeline to the bone pile from his living room chair and who once got charged by a marauding male right on his doorstep regales visitors with tidbits about life in the North. A favorite is the technique for how to prepare a polar bear skin. “You stuff it through a hole in the ice and let shrimp pick it clean,” he says, adding that he’s also seen bears steal from set fishing nets and once watched one pull a net to shore. Thompson’s porch is a still life of body parts and implements: a pot with chunks of unidentifiable meat chilling in the frigid air; a caribou leg for his dogs; snowmobile parts; a gas tank; and, like a cluster of fallen angels, a brace of unplucked, white-phase ptarmigans. On a driftwood stump near the shed grins a mossy polar bear skull; it’s not a scene for tender romantics.

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The Sense of an Endling

Elena Passarello / Animals Strike Curious Poses / Sarabande Books / March 2017 / 12 minutes (3,100 words)

Illustrations from “The Last Menagerie” by Nicole Antebi.

The last Woolly Mammoths died on an island now called Wrangel, which broke from the mainland twelve thousand years ago. They inhabited it for at least eight millennia, slowly inbreeding themselves into extinction. Even as humans developed their civilizations, the mammoths remained, isolated but relatively safe. While the Akkadian king conquered Mesopotamia and the first settlements began at Troy, the final mammoth was still here on Earth, wandering an Arctic island alone.

The last female aurochs died of old age in the Jaktorów Forest in 1627. When the male perished the year before, its horn was hollowed, capped in gold, and used as a hunting bugle by the king of Poland.

The last pair of great auks had hidden themselves on a huge rock in the northern Atlantic. In 1844, a trio of Icelandic bounty hunters found them in a crag, incubating an egg. Two of the hunters strangled the adults to get to the egg, and the third accidentally crushed its shell under his boot.

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A Culinary Legend’s Next Fight

Paula Wolfert
Paula Wolfert in 1978.

Emily Kaiser Thelin | Longreads | March 2017 | 9 minutes (2,256 words)

The following is a Longreads exclusive excerpt from Unforgettable: The Bold Flavors of Paula Wolfert’s Renegade Life, the new book by author Emily Kaiser Thelin about the extraordinary life of culinary legend Paula Wolfert, who was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease in 2013. Our thanks to Thelin for sharing this story with the Longreads community.

***

In an impossibly narrow lane in the crowded ancient medina of Marrakech, a motor scooter zipped past, a horned ram bleating between the driver’s legs, bound for sacrifice for the Muslim holiday of Eid al-Adha. I jumped to get out of the way and promptly collided with a family headed home for the holiday, a small lamb chewing on weeds while straddling the shoulders of the man. I cinched my coat tighter against the wet, cold December day and pushed on against the crowds.

It was December 2008. I had come to Morocco on an assignment for Food & Wine to profile legendary cookbook author Paula Wolfert, a longtime contributor to the magazine whom I had edited as a staffer there since 2006. This was the culinary equivalent of a journey through the Arabian dunes with T. E. Lawrence or a trip to Kitty Hawk with the Wright Brothers—the chance to tour the place where a titan of my field first made her name. She and I had met in person only twice before, once at a food conference and then for lunch at her house in Sonoma. She had returned to Morocco because her publisher, HarperCollins, had suggested she update her first book, the 1973 landmark Couscous and Other Good Food from Morocco. Read more…

Literature by the Numbers

Photo credit: Sierra Katow

Jessica Gross | Longreads | March 2017 | 12 minutes (2,982 words)

 

If you’ve ever taken a writing class—or enrolled in high school English—you’ve probably been advised to use fewer adverbs. But does a glut of adverbs really degrade writing? Moreover, do the writers who’ve given this advice even follow it?

This is just the opening gambit of data journalist Ben Blatt’s deep dive into the mathematics of literature. In his new book, Nabokov’s Favorite Word Is Mauve: What the Numbers Reveal About the Classics, Bestsellers, and Our Own Writing, Blatt examines the stylistic fingerprints of writers (which follow them even when they write under pen names in different genres), whether Americans are “louder” than Brits in their writing, the differences between how men and women write, whether books are getting simpler (yup), and many other curiosities.

Blatt has a penchant for numbers. In his first book, I Don’t Care if We Never Get Back (co-written with his friend Eric Brewster), Blatt mathematically engineers the ideal baseball road trip. In this new book, he makes a convincing case that words aren’t any less suited for mathematical analysis than baseball is—and that data can actually help us see and appreciate rule-breaking that really works. We spoke by phone about why he’s drawn to treating art as data, as well as some of his most compelling findings.

* * *

I’m not sure if you chose the title Nabokov’s Favorite Word Is Mauve or if your publisher did—but if it was you, I wondered if you could walk me through that choice. Was that finding the most delightful to you?

So, the title was a collaboration between me and the publisher. But what we were going for was, the book covers a lot. It covers the reading level of New York Times Best Sellers, the adverb use of your classic authors, the difference in how men and women write, book cover design—and with this title, we were going for a bit of intrigue, and a bit of the possibilities of combining numbers and writing, or science and art. And yes, the specific finding about Nabokov was very exciting when I stumbled across it.

In an interview, Ray Bradbury had said his favorite word was “cinnamon.” If you look at the numbers, he actually does use the word “cinnamon” at a high rate. And his reasoning for liking cinnamon was that it reminded him of his grandmother’s pantry. If you look at a bunch of other words that relate to pantries, spices and smells, he also uses those at an extremely high rate. So I repeated that experiment on a hundred other authors, not knowing what to expect or if anything would come up.

For Nabokov, I found that his favorite word was “mauve,” and that struck me as a bit curious. And then I remembered, and found in some further reading, that he had synesthesia. He wrote in his autobiography about how when he would write a certain sound or letters, he would visualize, automatically, that color in his head. And mauve was one of them. I thought this was a nice way of showing that there’s not an opposition between the numbers and the words. This is probably what he would say his favorite word was anyway, but the numbers do back it up.

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Back in the Kitchen: A Reading List About Gender and Food

I’m notoriously grumpy while grocery shopping. Once, my partner and I got into a fight in the Aldi parking lot because one of the eggs in our carton broke. He does his best to keep us supplied in soups and noodles–simple things I can heat up when I’m anxious and depressed — but I find myself yearning for expensive, fresh produce. As much as cooking intimidates me, I eat constantly — popcorn, apples, Toblerone, peanut butter and crackers — whatever I can find. I scry for news of the downtown market that was promised two years ago. I grow hungry and impatient. The world of food seems impenetrable, a place for people with money and time, and I never feel as though I have either. Read more…

A Nuclear Bomb at Ground Zero, and What Happens Next

Photo by Stiller Beobachter (CC BY-SA 2.0)

At The AtlanticKaveh Waddell has a conversation with researcher William Kennedy, who along with Andrew Crooks, is mining data from past tragedies such as the 1917 Halifax Explosion, 9/11, and Hurricane Katrina to run computer simulations studying how humans would respond after a nuclear attack on Manhattan.

Kennedy: We’ve found that people seem to be reasonably well behaved and do what they’ve been trained to, or are asked or told to do by local authorities. Reports from 9/11 show that people walked down many tens of flights of stairs, relatively quietly, sometimes carrying each other, to escape buildings.

We’re finding those kinds of reports from other disasters as well—except after Hurricane Katrina. There, we have reports that people already didn’t trust the government, and then with the isolation resulting from the flooding, they were actually shooting at people trying to help.

So we’re going to model individuals responding to the immediate situation around them. They’re trying to leave the area, find food, water, and shelter: basic Maslow-like necessities.

Waddell: What are the goals that each individual agent will be balancing? Safety, hunger, family and friends, getting out of the area—how will the model treat those needs?

Kennedy: One of the aspects we’ll be modeling is the individual agents’ social networks. Communications with those people, and confirmation of their status, seems to be one of the first urgencies that people feel, after their immediate survival of the event.

Part of our modeling challenge is going to be figuring out if a parent would go through a contaminated area to retrieve a child at a daycare or school, putting themselves at risk in the process, because it’s important to them to physically be there with their children. Or do they realize that they’re isolated, that communications aren’t going to be available in the near term, and they only deal with their local folks who are now their family? That’s the sense we get.

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