Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
In 2006, Condé Nast, the New York-based publisher of Vogue and the New Yorker, among other magazines, bought a promising information-sharing and online-discussion startup called Reddit. At the time, social media was just taking off and big media conglomerates were scrambling for a piece of the action. Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. had recently outfoxed Sumner…
The video “Pantone Pixels,” published in 2011, was an independent art project that used a swath of colors to illustrate a picture of the creator’s parents. Last week, Vimeo took it down. Turns out it was too similar to “Pixels,” a 2015 movie starring Adam Sandler. A reasonable human being might wonder what a tiny…
Few banks are as close to the industries they serve as Silicon Valley Bank is to the technology world. An industry mainstay since the 1980s, the bank veers far from the course of conventional financial institutions. Part lender, part consultant, part cheerleader and part investor, Silicon Valley Bank has been a nursemaid to countless start-ups…
SeaWorld has suffered a 84% collapse in profits as customers have deserted the controversial aquatic theme park company following claims it mistreated orca whales. The company, which trains dolphins and killer whales to perform tricks in front of stadiums full of spectators, on Thursday reported declines in attendance, sales and profits because of “continued brand…
paging_filter Could it be? An old-fashioned newspaper war, but one fought in the digital trenches? Neither venerable news institution wants to call it a head-to-head battle, but the numbers are beginning to tell us otherwise. Meanwhile, we can only begin to speculate about the business implications of the numbers we see. Just now, The New…
There will tweets. There will be liveblogs. There will be thinkpieces. It’s the GOP debate tonight—and everyone on the Internet will have a whole lot to say. One more way to weigh in: The Washington Post is inviting anyone on the Internet to annotate the numbers, the zingers, the truths, and the lies that make their…
ONE of the perks of getting old is that you are allowed to talk nonsense about the young. Plato was said to have complained that young people “disrespect their elders” and “ignore the law”. Peter the Hermit griped that they “think of nothing but themselves” and are “impatient of all restraint”. Today, grizzled business pundits…
Back in May, I penned a missive entitled “If You Don’t Like It, Change It” which discussed the pending changes to the GDP calculation by the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA). To wit: “Now, for all of you playing the home version of “Nail That GDP Number,” it was just a couple of years ago…
Entry Text Think about everything you understood about our system of government here in the United States. We’re governed under a document that starts with the words, “We the People.” Right? When We the People agree that something should done to make our lives better, it’s supposed to get done. Right? You didn’t know it,…
Uber, Silicon Valley’s prized amoral unicorn, is presumed to be a financial titan and a sure-thing IPO in the near future. Which may be true. But one thing that’s frequently missing from the conversation about its inevitable dominance over virtually every facet of our lives is the answer to a fundamental question: Does it make…