Category Archives: long reads

some of our favorite news items & stories from around the world

Apocalypse in New Orleans | Politics News | Rolling Stone

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Classic from the Rolling Stone archives

It’s a little before midnight on Friday, September 2nd, and I’m sitting in a hotel bar in Houston. Somewhere to the southeast, the worst natural disaster in American history is unfolding in the darkness, with an entire city shrouded in death, panic and disease – and here we are, a bunch of half-drunk, affluent white people quaffing eleven-dollar foreign beers and planning what appears to be a paramilitary mission to rescue two cats and a maid in the wreckage of New Orleans.

via Apocalypse in New Orleans | Politics News | Rolling Stone.

Why Things Fail: From Tires to Helicopter Blades, Everything Breaks Eventually | Wired Design | Wired.com

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In 2009, Mohawk Industries—one of the largest makers of carpeting in the country—was forced to discontinue an entire line of carpet tiles when the tiles failed unexpectedly, costing the company millions. In 2010, Johnson & Johnson had to recall 93,000 artificial hips after their metal joints started failing—inside patients. In 2011, Southwest Airlines grounded 79 planes after one of its Boeing 737s tore open in midflight. And just this past summer, GE issued a recall of 1.3 million dishwashers due to a defective heating element that could cause fires. Unexpected failure happens to everything, and so every manufacturer lives with some amount of risk: the risk of recalls, the risk of outsize warranty claims, the risk that a misbehaving product could hurt or kill a customer.

via Why Things Fail: From Tires to Helicopter Blades, Everything Breaks Eventually | Wired Design | Wired.com.

Tech City: two years in, how is east London’s technology hub faring? | Technology | The Observer

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At the Google campus in east London last month, an unshaven, scruffily dressed 31-year-old man took to the stage to address a packed room. Introducing the panel beside him – which included David “Two Brains” Willetts, the geekish minister for universities and science, and Mind Candy founder Michael Acton Smith – he remarked that the last time he’d visited the building, he’d been with George Osborne shortly after “that budget” and their ministerial car had been pelted with Cornish pasties (after the chancellor announced a so-called “pasty tax”). It’s fair to say that Rohan Silva, the senior prime ministerial adviser and the person many credit with putting east London’s technology cluster of startups on the map as “Tech City”, enjoyed a rather less hostile welcome this time, as he unveiled plans to open up London’s equity markets to high-growth tech companies.

via Tech City: two years in, how is east London’s technology hub faring? | Technology | The Observer.

East London hipsters are partying like it’s 2003

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It’s Thursday night in east London. The Alibi, a dive bar made entirely of chipboard, is brimming with kids dancing to unsociably loud music. If you’ve been taking notes on 2012 you might expect them to be listening to intelligent house, revivalist jungle or some other strain of dance music without choruses. As it turns out, everyone is losing their shit to Maxïmo Park.

Recently, London’s trendy types have started to mythologise guitar music again. Specifically guitar music made between 2002 and 2007. Nambucca, the scummy north London pub which once provided a home for the Holloways, is revered as a lost utopian paradise. Thamesbeat troubadours Larrikin Love are now discussed in hushed tones: martyrs for their art who mysteriously disappeared, possibly during the rapture.

read on at East London hipsters are partying like it’s 2003 | Music | The Guardian.

How indie labels changed the world

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How indie labels changed the world | Music | The Guardian

When Johnny Marr and Morrissey met for the second time in 1982 to discuss plans for their newly formed band, the pair wrote down ideas in a notebook in the singer’s bedroom. One of their first decisions was that the Smiths would sign to an independent label. Although Morrissey and Marr, along with anyone in Manchester with a passing interest in contemporary music, had links with Factory, the duo placed the London-based Rough Trade at the top of their wish list.

Read on at How indie labels changed the world | Music | The Guardian.