Nancy Scola | Next City, Forefront magazine | November 2013 | 26 minutes (6,561 words) Illustration by Kjell Reigstad Longreads Members support this service and receive exclusive stories from the best publishers and writers in the world. Join us to receive our latest Member Pick—it’s a new story from journalist Nancy Scola, published in Next […]
tech
Posted inMember Pick, Nonfiction
The Black Car Company That People Love to Hate: Our Member Pick
Nancy Scola | Next City, Forefront magazine | November 2013 | 26 minutes (6,561 words) Illustration by Kjell Reigstad Longreads Members support this service and receive exclusive stories from the best publishers and writers in the world. Join us to receive our latest Member Pick—it’s a new story from journalist Nancy Scola, published in Next […]
Posted inUncategorized
The Future of Personal Data, Democracy, and Opting Out of Fitness Trackers
“People who say that tracking their fitness or location is merely an affirmative choice from which they can opt out have little knowledge of how institutions think. Once there are enough early adopters who self-track—and most of them are likely to gain something from it—those who refuse will no longer be seen as just quirky […]
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How a San Francisco Startup Dies
“In meetings on Sand Hill Road, Latour says, nearly everyone expressed enthusiasm for Everpix’s product. But one by one, they turned him down. After two meetings with one well-known firm, a partner sent Latour an email. ‘You guys seem to be a spectacularly talented team and some informal reference checking confirmed that, but everyone here […]
Posted inBooks, Member Pick, Nonfiction, Story
Ingenious
How to spend your entire income building a car to travel 100 miles on a gallon of gas.
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What the Smartphone Is Doing to Fiction
“There’s nothing worse for plots than cellphones. Once your characters have one, there’s no reason for them to get lost or stranded. Or miss each other at the top of the Empire State Building. If you want anything like that to happen, you either have to explain upfront what happened to the phones or you […]
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Longreads Member Pick: The Offline Wage Wars of Silicon Valley
For this week’s Longreads Member Pick, we’re excited to share a story from Next City’s Forefront magazine, by journalist Nona Willis Aronowitz. Aronowitz looks at the story behind the minimum wage increase in San Jose, which jumped to $10 per hour from $8 per hour after the city’s residents voted for the increase last November—”the […]
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Reading List: Examining Technology
Emily Perper is a word-writing human for hire. She blogs about her favorite longreads at Diet Coker. The following four pieces resist cliches about social media and its impact. These authors do not shame nor condone; they do not preach. They take a deeper look at the tendency and luxury to share our lives with […]
Posted inUncategorized
Reading List: Examining Technology
Emily Perper is a word-writing human for hire. She blogs about her favorite longreads at Diet Coker. The following four pieces resist cliches about social media and its impact. These authors do not shame nor condone; they do not preach. They take a deeper look at the tendency and luxury to share our lives with […]
Posted inUncategorized
The Secret History of Silicon Valley
‘Let’s enlist universities directly in the war effort.’ Our video pick of the day is this 2008 talk (1 hr.) by entrepreneur and Stanford professor Steve Blank about how the defense industry first shaped Silicon Valley—starting with Stanford, which after World War II “became a full partner in the military-industrial complex.” For a connection between […]