The country’s huge challenges following the U.S. withdrawal, including corruption, new waves of violence and crippled infrastructure: The end of the U.S. military’s long, bloody adventure in Iraq signals the start of a new, highly uncertain chapter in the country’s development. In the scenario conjured by optimistic U.S. and Iraqi officials, an Iraq free of […]
Bloomberg Businessweek
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Lessons from inventor Lenn Rockford Hann’s negotiations with companies over a carbon-fiber shoe he patented in 2004: When it came time to talk price with New Balance, Hann set his offer sky-high. He says he meant it as a starting point, but company executives closed discussions. Hartner remains a supporter of the shoe, but says […]
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What a lede. Before the market crashed and home prices tumbled, before federal investigators showed up and hauled away the community records, before her property managers pled guilty for conspiring to rig neighborhood elections, and before her real estate lawyer allegedly tried to commit suicide by overdosing on drugs and setting fire to her home, […]
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There’s more to Sony’s problems than acts of God and currency traders. The maker of the Walkman and the Trinitron hasn’t driven pop culture for years. Sony thrived in an era of stand-alone electronics. When the Internet arose and digital began to mean connected, iPods became the center of people’s entertainment lives, then smartphones and […]
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In the weeks since the immigration law took hold, several hundred Americans have answered farmers’ ads for tomato pickers. A field over from where Juan Castro and his friends muse about the sorry state of the U.S. workforce, 34-year-old Jesse Durr stands among the vines. An aspiring rapper from inner-city Birmingham, he wears big jeans […]
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Graeber’s arguments place him squarely at odds with mainstream economic thought, and the discipline has, for the most part, ignored him. But his timing couldn’t be better to reach a popular audience. His writing provides an intellectual frame and a sort of genealogy for the movement he helped start. The inchoate anger of the Occupy […]
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The Green Bay Packers are a historical, cultural, and geographical anomaly, a publicly traded corporation in a league that doesn’t allow them, an immensely profitable company whose shareholders are forbidden by the corporate bylaws to receive a penny of that profit, a franchise that has flourished despite being in the smallest market in the NFL—with […]
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In many ways, Forstall is a mini-Steve. He’s a hard-driving manager who obsesses over every detail. He has Jobs’s knack for translating technical, feature-set jargon into plain English. He’s known to have a taste for the Mercedes-Benz SL55 AMG, in silver, the same car Jobs drove, and even has a signature on-stage costume: black shoes, […]
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“Bezos claims he doesn’t think defensively. ‘Everything we do is driven by seeing opportunity rather than being worried about defending,’ he says. Given Apple’s inroads into the media business, that’s hard to believe. Bezos is magnanimous toward Jobs. ‘On a personal level we have a tremendous amount of respect for Apple and Steve. I think […]
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Byron Reese & Demand Media’s Planet of the Algorithms
Every week, Reese would come up with an idea for something new to peddle. They would draft a business plan, launch a website, and measure consumers’ subsequent interest in a product. Efforts to sell coins and watches failed. At one point, Reese tried manufacturing family portraiture using inexpensive subcontractor artists in places such as Russia. […]