Sunday Longread linkdump
Mar. 27th, 2016 09:35 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
yendiI have tabs. They need closing and sharing.
1. Dan Lyons -- of Fake Steve Jobs fame -- was fired from NewsWeek a couple of years ago, and went to work marketing for glorified spam firm Hubspot, where he realized that all the cliches about startup culture were true. Mind you, I'm a fan of at least one thing he criticizes (walking meetings -- they can be damned useful, and not just when scripted by Aaron Sorkin), but some of the stuff discussed is horrifying (note that this is an excerpt from an upcoming book, so is lighter on details than you might expect). The coda -- that two HubSpot execs were fired (or quit before they could be fired) when they attempted to use possibly-illegal means to stop the book from getting published -- will likely lead to another fascinating read one day.
2. Buzzfeed, which has been on fire lately, especially with their Reader section, manages to make me care about something I'd never thought I'd care about: How Jennifer Garner Went Full “Minivan Majority”, by Anne Helen Petersen.
2.5 Other great things from Buzzfeed lately include a breathtaking story by Helen Oyeyemi, a fascinating by Sarah Weinman on one of the country's first mass-shootings, and a heartbreaking piece by Ian Carlos Crawford on finding a friend (and former lover) dead.
3. Patrick Klepek writes a piece interviewing the people who upload torrents. This one's more a medium than a long read, but is still interesting (although I'd love to get a sense from folks who torrent in other areas than just video games).
4. Sponsored content (content co-produced by an editorial group for advertising purposes) is a longtime thing in journalism, and the results aren't necessarily qualitatively bad (Slate and GE, for example, gave us The Message, a genuinely engrossing science fictions serial podcast). But Jacob Silverman's essay on the process at The Atlantic (which has a bad track record there to begin with, as he notes) definitely makes it sound ugly.
5. I am more terrible at the game of go than I am even at chess, but this article by Melissa Hillman at Quartz analyzing the games Google's AlphaGo played in its famous match earlier this year is fascinating nonetheless.
Bonus: It's not a longread at all, but here's Hannah Keyser at Deadspin on why butter crocks are a crock of bullshit.
1. Dan Lyons -- of Fake Steve Jobs fame -- was fired from NewsWeek a couple of years ago, and went to work marketing for glorified spam firm Hubspot, where he realized that all the cliches about startup culture were true. Mind you, I'm a fan of at least one thing he criticizes (walking meetings -- they can be damned useful, and not just when scripted by Aaron Sorkin), but some of the stuff discussed is horrifying (note that this is an excerpt from an upcoming book, so is lighter on details than you might expect). The coda -- that two HubSpot execs were fired (or quit before they could be fired) when they attempted to use possibly-illegal means to stop the book from getting published -- will likely lead to another fascinating read one day.
2. Buzzfeed, which has been on fire lately, especially with their Reader section, manages to make me care about something I'd never thought I'd care about: How Jennifer Garner Went Full “Minivan Majority”, by Anne Helen Petersen.
2.5 Other great things from Buzzfeed lately include a breathtaking story by Helen Oyeyemi, a fascinating by Sarah Weinman on one of the country's first mass-shootings, and a heartbreaking piece by Ian Carlos Crawford on finding a friend (and former lover) dead.
3. Patrick Klepek writes a piece interviewing the people who upload torrents. This one's more a medium than a long read, but is still interesting (although I'd love to get a sense from folks who torrent in other areas than just video games).
4. Sponsored content (content co-produced by an editorial group for advertising purposes) is a longtime thing in journalism, and the results aren't necessarily qualitatively bad (Slate and GE, for example, gave us The Message, a genuinely engrossing science fictions serial podcast). But Jacob Silverman's essay on the process at The Atlantic (which has a bad track record there to begin with, as he notes) definitely makes it sound ugly.
5. I am more terrible at the game of go than I am even at chess, but this article by Melissa Hillman at Quartz analyzing the games Google's AlphaGo played in its famous match earlier this year is fascinating nonetheless.
Bonus: It's not a longread at all, but here's Hannah Keyser at Deadspin on why butter crocks are a crock of bullshit.
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Date: 2016-03-27 03:10 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2016-03-28 01:20 pm (UTC)