Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
(istock) During a recent talk in Washington, Google’s “people operations” chief Laszlo Bock said something notable about fixing the equal pay conundrum. While he admitted that men tend to negotiate more than women, what he didn’t do was suggest — as is so often the case — that solving the gender wage gap is simply a matter of women negotiating more. Rather,…
Los Angeles spends more than $100 million a year coping with homelessness, including as much as $87 million that goes to arrests, skid row patrols and mental health interventions, according to a report released Thursday. City librarians, recreation and parks, sanitation and paramedics also devote significant resources to handling homeless people, without clear guidelines or…
The Virginia Supreme Court ruled that lower courts in the state did not have jurisdiction over Yelp because the company was located in California and its data being sought was stored in that state. (Tim Boyle/Bloomberg) The Virginia Supreme Court ruled Thursday that a judge did not have the authority to compel Yelp to reveal…
Slack announced yesterday that it raised $160 million at a $2.8 billion valuation. The company hasn’t spent a penny of the $120 million it raised just last October. When Slack raised that money, founder Stewart Butterfield said it was enough to last them 60 years. Besides creating a Scrooge McDuck style swimming pool, why exactly would a company take…
Washington-based website and newsletter The Politico, like the CBS procedural dramas CSI and NCIS before it, is hoping to recapture the magic with a series of region-specific spin-offs. First, already extant The Politico-owned news site Capital New York will “rebrand” itself as The Politico New York, much like when Macy’s bought every regional department store…
Just last year, Ben Bernanke was still serving as the head of the Federal Reserve—the most powerful central banking position in the world. Now, he’s going to work for a hedge fund. Is it possible—just possible—that we have a systemic problem? The “revolving door” between powerful governmental (or quasi-governmental, in the case of central bankers)…
What the online juggernaut can learn from Time, USA Today,and MTV Adrienne LaFrance and Robinson Meyer April 15, 2015 Before Nyan Cat, before “Imma let you finish,” even before rickrolling, there was a small startup in New York dedicated to finding pre-viral content online. The first employees of BuzzFeed wrote about Borat, MySpace, and the “highly…
Bravo for companies that are starting to focus on innovation again! It’s about time. But even with this renewed attention to innovation, some managers keep projects resource-starved, in the belief that scarcity drives creative invention. Although ingenuity can sometimes spring up when means are scarce, managers beware: It is a dangerous miscalculation to think that…
Single: article; “It’s like an ever-descending spiral for you…” (Michal Dzierza / Flickr) In 1975 Susan Sontag, the American intellectual famous for On Photography and Against Interpretation, was diagnosed with Stage 4 breast cancer and survived after a radical mastectomy, extensive radiation treatments, and thirty months of debilitating chemotherapy. In the aftermath she needed someone…
Once upon a time, circa 1995, Yahoo cofounders Jerry Yang and David Filo were setting up the company’s first office. It was a pretty drab place, so they decided to redo the walls. Filo headed out to pick up some paint. A notoriously thrifty type—his official title is “Chief Yahoo,” but his colleagues have been…