Is Amazon Unstoppable?
Politicians want to rein in the retail giant. But Jeff Bezos, the master of cutthroat capitalism, is ready to fight back.
Politicians want to rein in the retail giant. But Jeff Bezos, the master of cutthroat capitalism, is ready to fight back.
Charles Duhigg New Yorker Oct 2019 50min Permalink
Some risky but practical proposals to harness a superpower that has clearly lost control.
Samanth Subramanian Huffington Post Highline Oct 2019 25min Permalink
Murderous readers and a house of memory.
Bud Smith The Nervous Breakdown Oct 2019 10min Permalink
An oil tanker was ordered to save more than 100 migrants floating in the middle of the Mediterranean. Europe didn’t want them. They couldn’t go back to Libya. How would they survive?
Zach Campbell The Atavist Magazine Oct 2019 30min Permalink
Elizabeth Pierce impressed investors with hefty contracts for fiber—until they learned she was the only one who’d signed them.
Austin Carr Bloomberg Businessweek Oct 2019 15min Permalink
Why everything is getting louder.
Bianca Bosker The Atlantic Oct 2019 15min Permalink
Radhika Jones is the editor-in-chief of Vanity Fair and the editor of Women on Women.
“There are a lot of people who still see the value of talking to someone, having a real conversation — about the things that they’re doing, the things that they’re caring about, the things that they’re afraid of, the things that are challenging — because in that conversation, they themselves will discover things that they didn’t realize. It obviously takes courage. It’s a payoff for the reader, certainly, but I think that there are subjects who understand that there is something there for them, too.”
Thanks to Mailchimp and Pitt Writers for sponsoring this week's episode.
Oct 2019 Permalink
One teammate made tennis his whole life. The other had a grandfather whose company invented Hot Pockets. Guess which one went to Georgetown as a Division I recruit.
Daniel Golden, Doris Burke ProPublica Oct 2019 30min Permalink
Where will predictive text take us?
John Seabrook New Yorker Oct 2019 30min Permalink
An oral history of the war in Afghanistan.
Fahim Abed, Fatima Faizi New York Times Magazine Oct 2019 30min Permalink
The view of a life from cruising altitude.
Mark Sundeen Outside Oct 2019 25min Permalink
This presentation was shown to potential recruits for the new Maven SI venture, and it details exactly how the people now in charge of Sports Illustrated plan on turning it into the sort of volume-driven content farm that ruled the web a dozen or so tweaks of the Google algorithm ago.
Laura Wagner, Kelsey McKinney, David Roth Deadspin Oct 2019 30min Permalink
A profile of the Korean director.
E. Alex Jung New York Oct 2019 25min Permalink
In the early 1960s, the paranoid Hoffa asked Chuckie to buy thousands of copies of George Orwell’s 1984 and distribute them to union locals around the country. “Some of these poor guys, the only thing they knew was how to drive a truck or work at a warehouse,” Chuckie told me. “They didn’t have the knowledge of the electronic shit. Mr. Hoffa wanted them to read that book and said that this is what’s going to happen to not only us but to everybody—and exactly what he’s predicted has happened.”
Jack Goldsmith The Atlantic Oct 2019 30min Permalink
Ex-Ivy Leaguer and NFL-er Jeff Hatch spent years telling audiences of his triumph over opioid addiction, to great acclaim. Then as the rehab center he worked at drew national attention, a tortuous backstory of cops, dealers and deception came to light.
Chris Ballard Sports Illustrated Oct 2019 25min Permalink
From pecan pralines to ‘dots.’
Richard Davies The Guardian Aug 2019 Permalink
The untold story of Patriots owner Robert Kraft’s two visits to the Orchids of Asia Day Spa.
May Jeong Vanity Fair Oct 2019 30min Permalink
Firsthand accounts of the largest and most ambitious internment drive of a minority group since Nazi Germany, emerging from a region of totalitarian surveillance and control.
Ben Mauk The Believer Oct 2019 1h30min Permalink
Haley downloaded the app for fun. Now millions of people watch her videos.
Rebecca Jennings Vox Oct 2019 25min Permalink
The long, loving search for Betsy, bovine escape artist.
Clio Chang California Sunday Oct 2019 10min Permalink
On surfer girls in Maui; the story that led to the film Blue Crush.
Susan Orlean Outside Sep 1998 20min Permalink
The complexities of aging and desire.
Ben Tanzer Maudlin House Sep 2019 10min Permalink
After two officers came to a Pacific Northwest community, longtime residents began to disappear.
McKenzie Funk New York Times Magazine Oct 2019 40min Permalink
The country was captivated by the Balloon Boy. But what really happened?
Robert Sanchez 5280 Oct 2019 25min Permalink
No one can seem to agree on his surviving merits. He wrote like an angel, the consensus goes, except when he was writing like a malfunctioning sex robot attempting to administer cunnilingus to his typewriter.
Patricia Lockwood London Review of Books Oct 2019 30min Permalink