Weekend Longreads 2021
Longread Links from The Ride Home Podcast
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Wednesday, December 29 2021
- How Discord, Born From an Obscure Game, Became a Social Hub for Young People (NYTimes)
- Here’s why streaming services are always duking it out over channels (The Verge)
- How Shopify Outfoxed Amazon to Become the Everywhere Store (Bloomberg Businessweek)
- We Are at the Dawn of the Age of Physics-Supplied Energy (Wired)
Friday, December 17 2021
- THE METAVERSE IS ALREADY HERE — AND IT’S FULL OF POKEMON, SAYS NIANTIC CEO JOHN HANKE (The Verge)
- The ‘To the Moon’ Crash Is Coming (Motherboard)
- Strange, horny game ads are flooding social media. I accidentally became obsessed (The Guardian)
- MATTER’S PLAN TO SAVE THE SMART HOME (The Verge)
- Computers Revolutionized Chess. Magnus Carlsen Wins by Being Human (WSJ)
Friday, December 10 2021
- Pokémon and the First Wave of Digital Nostalgia (The New Yorker)
- Half a Billion in Bitcoin, Lost in the Dump (The New Yorker)
- Amazon is making its own containers and bypassing supply chain chaos with chartered ships and long-haul planes (CNBC)
- HOW AN EXCEL TIKTOKER MANIFESTED HER WAY TO MAKING SIX FIGURES A DAY (The Verge)
- Three Steps To The Future (Ben Evans’ 2022 Slide Deck)
- On “Succession,” Jeremy Strong Doesn’t Get the Joke (The New Yorker)
Friday, December 03 2021
- Can a Digital Reality Be Jacked Directly Into Your Brain? (Wired)
- Metaverse Real Estate Piles Up Record Sales in Sandbox and Other Virtual Realms (WSJ)
- World’s first living robots can now reproduce, scientists say (CNN)
- Planetary scientists are starting to get stirred up by Starship’s potential (Ars Technica)
- ‘Oregon Trail’ at 50: How Three Teachers Created the Computer Game That Inspired — and Diverted — Generations of Students (the74million.org)
- Why the Beatles’ ‘Get Back’ May Stand as the Best Rock Doc Ever (Column)
Friday, November 19 2021
- The most influential man on the internet (ReadMax)
- Visions of a U.S. Computer Chip Boom Have Cities Hustling (NYTimes)
- The Video Game History Book I Mentioned
- GAMECUBE AT 20: NINTENDO INSIDERS ON THE FAILED CONSOLE THAT CHANGED THE INDUSTRY (Video Games Chronicle)
- How Xbox outgrew the console: inside Phil Spencer’s multi-billion dollar gamble (GQ)
- Who Knows Anthony Bourdain? (Eater)
Friday, November 12 2021
- The 10,000 Faces That Launched an NFT Revolution (Wired)
- The Metaverse and (near-)infinite economic growth (Noahpinion)
- Chip Shortage Creates New Power Players (NYTimes)
- The Craziest Sports Story of 2021 Is FC Sheriff (Futbol With Grant Wahl)
Friday, November 05 2021
- Hackers are stealing data today so quantum computers can crack it in a decade (TechnologyReview.com)
- The Booming Underground Market for Bots That Steal Your 2FA Codes (Motherboard)
- Farewell Offshoring, Outsourcing. Pandemic Rewrites CEO Playbook. (WSJ)
- Silicon Valley wants to power the U.S. war machine (Fast Company)
- The Metaverse Takes Manhattan (NYTimes)
Friday, October 29 2021
- MARK ZUCKERBERG ON WHY FACEBOOK IS REBRANDING TO META (The Verge)
- What the metaverse will (and won’t) be, according to 28 experts (Fast Company)
- Why Apple’s Privacy Changes Hurt Snap and Facebook but Benefited Google (WSJ)
- Why Your Group Chat Could Be Worth Millions (Intelligencer)
- Life in the FAST Lane: Free Streaming, Big Money (Vulture)
- A Very Big Little Country (Afar)
Friday, October 22 2021
- The Metaverse Is Bad (The Atlantic)
- DeFi Is Like Nothing Regulators Have Seen Before. How Should They Tackle It? (CoinDesk)
- Inside Wheel of Time, Amazon’s Huge Gamble on the Next Game of Thrones (GQ)
Friday, October 15 2021
- How Axie Infinity is turning gaming on its head (Platformer)
- Anyone Seen Tether’s Billions? (Bloomberg Businessweek)
- SLACKERS OF THE WORLD, UNITE! (The Atlantic)
- Starbucks Is 50 and Emboldening Its Rivals More Than Ever (Bloomberg Opinion)
Friday, October 08 2021
- How WhatsApp Swallowed Half The World (Gizmodo)
- Brazil’s Central Bank Built a Mobile Payment System With 110 Million Users (Bloomberg Businessweek)
- WeBack (Ramp Recap)
- Google’s recruiting system is famously brutal. Many workers think it’s also failing. (Protocol)
- HEY SIRI, WHAT HAPPENED? (The Verge)
- Planet Squid Game (Vulture)
Friday, October 01 2021
- How EA got into mobile — and figured out the future of gaming (Protocol)
- Toast built a $30 billion business by defying Silicon Valley and surviving a ‘suicide mission’ (CNBC)
- How Big Tech Runs Tech Projects and the Curious Absence of Scrum (The Pragmatic Engineer)
- APPLE’S FORTRESS OF SECRECY IS CRUMBLING FROM THE INSIDE (The Verge)
- Facebook’s Latest Scandals: The Banality Of Hubris; The Messiness Of Humanity (TechDirt)
Friday, September 24 2021
- Would-Be NFT Millionaires Throw Darts And Hit Duds (Bloomberg)
- FILE NOT FOUND (The Verge)
- How Apple built the iPhone 13’s Cinematic Mode (TechCrunch)
- How to move Google Authenticator to your new iPhone (Apple Insider)
- Nirvana in Bloom (The Ringer)
- Nirvana’s “Nevermind” (New Yorker)
- My Time with Kurt Cobain (New Yorker)
Friday, September 17 2021
- A Very, Very Crypto Insider-Trading Scandal (Intelligencer)
- What is Bored Ape Yacht Club? The Celebrity NFT of Choice (Decrypt)
- Jay-Z’s NFT Feud Spotlights Legal Peril in Hot Investment Trend (Bloomberg)
- THE PENTAGON’S ARMY OF NERDS (The Atlantic)
- Greg LeMond and the Amazing Candy-Colored Dream Bike (Wired)
Friday, September 10 2021
- The Screen in Your Car Is Beckoning (Slate)
- Russia Influences Hackers but Stops Short of Directing Them, Report Says (NYTimes)
- How Amazon’s cloud business generates billions in profit (CNBC)
- When the Techies Took Over Tahoe (Outside)
- Adult Swim: How an Animation Experiment Conquered Late-Night TV (NYTimes)
Friday, September 03 2021
- The Latest NFT Fad Is a Text-Based Fantasy Game Building Block (Coindesk)
- Gimme the Loot! (Collisions)
- NFTs, DeFi Boost for Ethereum Dims Clamor of Bitcoin Maximalists (Bloomberg)
- Wall Street Is Looking to Reddit for Investment Advice (WSJ)
- Here are all the companies from Y Combinator’s Summer 2021 Demo Day, Part 1 (TechCrunch)
- Here are all the companies from Day 2 of Y Combinator’s Summer 2021 Demo Day (TechCrunch)
Friday, August 27 2021
- Netflix and Video Games (MatthewBall.vc)
- Turns Out The Hardest Part of Making a Game Is…Everything (IGN)
- Cryptocurrency Companies Are Leaving China in ‘Great Mining Migration’ (WSJ)
- El Salvador Gets Ready for a Risky Bitcoin Experiment (WSJ)
- A decade and a half of instability: The history of Google messaging apps (Ars Technica)
- The Real C.E.O. of “Succession” (The New Yorker)
Friday, August 20 2021
- The FBI’s warning to Silicon Valley: China and Russia are trying to turn your employees into spies (Protocol)
- Electric cars and batteries: how will the world produce enough? (Nature)
- Waymo Is 99% of the Way to Self-Driving Cars. The Last 1% Is the Hardest (Bloomberg Businessweek)
- These People Who Work From Home Have a Secret: They Have Two Jobs (WSJ)
- Amazon Killed the Name Alexa (The Atlantic)
- Afghanistan - Part 1 (The Rest Is History Podcast)
Friday, August 13 2021
- Why the Stablecoin Issuers Will Inherit the Earth (Bloomberg)
- I Joined a Penguin NFT Club Because Apparently That’s What We Do Now (NYTimes)
- Status Monkeys (Not Boring)
- How Figma Became Design’s Hottest Startup, Valued At $10 Billion (Forbes)
- Massachusetts Start-Up Hopes to Move a Step Closer to Commercial Fusion (NYTimes)
Friday, August 06 2021
- The End of Venture Capital as We Know It (The Information)
- Deal Of The Century: How Michael Dell Turned His Declining PC Business Into A $40 Billion Windfall (Forbes)
- The Metaverse Has Always Been a Dystopian Idea (Vice)
- How Olympic Surfing Is Trying to Ride the Machine Learning Wave (WSJ)
Friday, July 30 2021
- Groceries in 10 Minutes: Delivery Start-Ups Crowd City Streets Across Globe (NYTimes)
- THE SUMMER INTEL FELL BEHIND (The Verge)
- Why the US can’t just beam internet into authoritarian states like Cuba (Quartz)
- Social-Media Manager, the Most Millennial Job, Comes of Age (WSJ)
- Hollywood Calls the Russo Brothers When It’s Time to Build a New Universe (Bloomberg Businessweek)
Friday, July 23 2021
- What Ever Happened to IBM’s Watson? (NYTimes)
- Startup Claims Breakthrough in Long-Duration Batteries (WSJ)
- The Novel Material That’s Shrinking Phone Chargers, Powering Up Electric Cars, and Making 5G Possible (WSJ)
- Robotaxis: have Google and Amazon backed the wrong technology? (FT)
Friday, July 16 2021
- THE GAME MAKERS AND ARTISTS PUSHING ROBLOX TO ITS LIMITS (The Verge)
- Obscure Cyber Agency Becomes Nemesis of China’s Tech Giants (Bloomberg)
- Tiger Global vs. SoftBank: Inside the investing playbooks that upended Silicon Valley (Protocol)
- Moderna’s Next Act Is Using mRNA vs. Flu, Zika, HIV, and Cancer (Bloomberg Businessweek)
Thursday, July 08 2021
- Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg’s Partnership Did Not Survive Trump (NYTimes)
- The U.S. says humans will always be in control of AI weapons. But the age of autonomous war is already here. (Washington Post)
- GitHub Copilot is not infringing your copyright (Julia Reda)
- Ireland’s Days as a Tax Haven May Be Ending, but Not Without a Fight (NYTimes)
Friday, July 02 2021
- Three Weeks with iOS and iPadOS 15: Foundational Updates (Mac Stories)
- Amazon Primed Andy Jassy to Be CEO. Can He Keep What Jeff Bezos Built? (WSJ)
- ROBBING THE XBOX VAULT: INSIDE A $10 MILLION GIFT CARD CHEAT (Bloomberg)
- ‘Time and space don’t exist in the spirit world’: How psychics are embracing remote work (LA Times)
- The Tin Man Gets His Heart: An Oral History of ‘Terminator 2: Judgment Day’ (The Ringer)
Friday, June 25 2021
- What Is Blue Box? A Vast Conspiracy Grips the Video Game World (Bloomberg)
- A very brief history of every Google messaging app (The Verge)
- The Boy Who Could DeFi: Meet the 13-Year-Old Who Built a $7M Money Manager on Ethereum (Decrypt)
- How Roku used the Netflix playbook to beat bigger players and rule streaming video (CNBC)
- Can a $110 Million Helmet Unlock the Secrets of the Mind? (Bloomberg)
Friday, June 18 2021
- Ransomware claims are roiling an entire segment of the insurance industry (Washington Post)
- THE RISE AND FALL OF AN AMERICAN TECH GIANT (The Atlantic)
- Anatomy of a Seed Round During COVID-19 (Fresh Paint)
- Meet Wu Dao 2.0, the Chinese AI model making the West sweat (Politico)
- Tech Companies Are Training AI to Read Your Lips (Vice)
- How governments and spies text each other (Wired)
- Airbnb Is Spending Millions of Dollars to Make Nightmares Go Away (Bloomberg)
Friday, June 11 2021
- The hard truth about ransomware: we aren’t prepared, it’s a battle with new rules, and it hasn’t near reached peak impact. (Double Pulsar)
- When ransomware strikes, this company helps victims make bitcoin payments (CNBC)
- APPLE ISN’T JUST A WALLED GARDEN, IT’S A CARRIER (The Verge)
- THE APP THAT MONETIZED DOING NOTHING (The Atlantic)
- Marcus Graham: Looking back on 10 years of Twitch’s experiment with livestreaming (Venture Beat)
Friday, June 04 2021
- How to Negotiate with Ransomware Hackers (The New Yorker)
- Inside The ‘World’s Largest’ Video Game Cheating Empire (Motherboard)
- The NFT Market Has Collapsed, Oh No (Kotaku)
- Armed Low-Cost Drones, Made by Turkey, Reshape Battlefields and Geopolitics (WSJ)
- Developer relations (Marco Arment)
- Apple WWDC 2021: iOS 15, new MacBook Pros, and what else to expect (The Verge)
Friday, May 28 2021
- ‘FIND THIS FUCK:’ Inside Citizen’s Dangerous Effort to Cash In On Vigilantism (Vice)
- Own the Internet (Not Boring)
- A New Crop in Pennsylvania: Warehouses (NYTimes)
- The Mystery of Magic’s Greatest Card Trick (NYTimes)
Friday, May 21 2021
- Now that WarnerMedia and Discovery have tied the knot, the pressure’s on ViacomCBS and NBCUniversal (CNBC)
- $ASS Coin Billionaire: Tales From the Fringe of the Crypto Craze (Bloomberg)
- Can Sony reclaim its former glory? (Engadget)
- How to Make Carbon-Neutral Gasoline Out of Thin Air (Intelligencer)
- Twitter Thread About Shift+2 (@figmadesign)
Friday, May 14 2021
- To Understand Amazon, We Must Understand Jeff Bezos (NYTimes)
- The PlayStation 5 Is Starting to Look Like the Revolution It Promised (Wired)
- Apple is Holding Back the Creator Economy (Every)
- Robinhood’s Big Gamble (The New Yorker)
- What Is an Entertainment Company in 2021 and Why Does the Answer Matter? (Matthew Ball)
- How the Personal Computer Broke the Human Body (Vice)
Friday, May 07 2021
- How Much Energy Does Bitcoin Actually Consume? (Harvard Business Review)
- Crypto pros are getting tired of the 79 billion dollar dogecoin joke (Bloomberg)
- I’m seeing a lot of people FOMO quit their jobs to join “crypto” (Jon Syu)
- THE LAST DAYS OF SATOSHI: WHAT HAPPENED WHEN BITCOIN’S CREATOR DISAPPEARED (Bitcoin Magazine)
- John Swartzwelder, Sage of “The Simpsons” (The New Yorker)
Friday, April 30 2021
- The new wave of crypto users: migrant workers (Rest of World)
- Europe Is Trying to Reclaim Its Lost Chipmaking Glory (Bloomberg)
- As Nintendo’s entertainment kingdom expands, it’s still about the games (Fast Company)
- Spotify’s Surprise (Stratechery)
- Artificial Intelligence Is Misreading Human Emotion (The Atlantic)
- mRNA vaccine technology (Peter Attia MD)
- How mRNA Technology Could Change the World (The Atlantic)
Friday, April 23 2021
- Netflix, Disney and Amazon’s Streaming Wars Heat Up Overseas (WSJ)
- The pandemic nearly crushed pet-care startup Rover (Business Insider)
- Meet Virtual Reality, Your New Physical Therapist (NYTimes)
- TMSC’s expansion challenge told in 10 timely charts (Bloomberg)
- Why the Chip Shortage Is So Hard to Overcome (WSJ)
- Designed by Apple in California, Not Assembled in China (Above Avalon)
- 15 Years of Spotify: How the Streaming Giant Has Changed and Reinvented the Music Industry (Variety)
Friday, April 16 2021
- Dogecoin: The meme that somehow became a real cryptocurrency (Cnet)
- They were ancient internet memes. Now NFTs are making them rich (Wired)
- Why did Microsoft spend $19.7 billion to purchase Nuance? The answer may lie beyond health care. (Protocol)
- A Little-Known Upstart Might Just Beat Google to Autonomous Driving (Bloomberg Businessweek)
- Hip-Hop Loves Cash App, and That Might Be Why Jack Dorsey Bought Tidal (GQ)
- Why a Chinese invasion of Taiwan would be a catastrophe for China and the world (Doxa)
- Strong Bad … thank you: The Flash icon endures as the internet rapidly changes (Polygon)
Friday, April 09 2021
- Silicon Valley Is Flooding Into a Reluctant Austin (Bloomberg Businessweek)
- Don’t pick up! The rise and fall of a massive industry based on missed calls (Rest of World)
- DoorDash Drivers Game Algorithm to Increase Pay (Bloomberg Businessweek)
- Revenge Of The Winklevii (Forbes)
- Bill Hwang Had $20 Billion, Then Lost It All in Two Days (Bloomberg Businessweek)
Friday, April 02 2021
- People’s Expensive NFTs Keep Vanishing. This Is Why (Motherboard)
- 5 Years After the Oculus Rift, Where Do VR and AR Go Next? (Wired)
- How a Chip Shortage Snarled Everything From Phones to Cars (Bloomberg)
- Why Computers Won’t Make Themselves Smarter (New Yorker)
- Graphene and Beyond: The Wonder Materials That Could Replace Silicon in Future Tech (WSJ)
- Turing Award Goes to Creators of Computer Programming Building Blocks (NYTimes)
Friday, March 26 2021
- Intel Unleashed, Gelsinger on Intel, IDM 2.0 (Stratechery)
- The long, complicated, and extremely frustrating history of Medium, 2012–present (NeimanLab)
- Microsoft CEO Hunts Anew for Creator Hub After TikTok Bid Fails (Bloomberg)
- The fuss about BitClout (Axios)
- Crypto social network BitClout arrives with a bevy of high-profile investors — and skeptics (TechCrunch)
- Analysis: Money no object as governments race to build chip arsenals (Reuters)
- Buffer overruns, license violations, and bad code: FreeBSD 13’s close call (Ars Technica)
- VC Firms Have Long Backed AI. Now, They Are Using It. (WSJ)
- The Hard Truth About Bitcoin’s Energy Consumption (Decrypt)
- Mac OS X Turns 20: A Look Back at the Operating System That Helped Save Apple (PCMag)
Friday, March 19 2021
- The End of Silicon Valley as We Know It? (O’Reilly)
- Moore’s Law for Everything (SamAltman.com)
- Empathetic Robots Are Killing Off the World’s Call-Center Industry (Bloomberg Businessweek)
- Loans that hijack your phone are coming to India (Rest of World)
- How a social app you’ve never heard of became a haven for Gen Z (Protocol)
Friday, March 12 2021
- Interview: Patrick Collison, co-founder and CEO of Stripe (Noahpinion.substack.com)
- TWITTER IS REINVENTING ITSELF (The Verge)
- Excel Never Dies (Not Boring)
- How Facebook got addicted to spreading misinformation (MIT Technology Review)
- Bilibili: How a Chinese site dedicated to anime subculture grew up with its Gen Z users to become a mainstream success (South China Morning Post)
- Sometimes It’s OK to Give Up (Wired)
Friday, March 05 2021
- The problem for Paramount+ (and every other streamer)? Everyone already has Netflix. (Recode)
- Who Really Writes Twitter’s ‘Trending’ Summaries (OneZero)
- Blockchain, QR codes and your phone: the race to build vaccine passports (Protocol)
- How a tiny startup is reinventing the DVR for the cord-cutter era (Fast Company)
- China’s Tencent Becomes an Investment Powerhouse, Using Deals to Expand Its Empire (WSJ)
- I have one of the most advanced prosthetic arms in the world — and I hate it (Input)
Friday, February 26 2021
- Xiaomi is undercutting the whole tech industry. And it’s working (Wired)
- American Idle (Eugene Wei)
- Why Plus Is a Minus When Naming Your Streaming Site (NYTimes)
- Shockingly Real Tom Cruise Deepfakes Are Invading TikTok (Daily Beast)
- We’re Just Rediscovering a 19th-Century Pandemic Strategy (The Atlantic)
Friday, February 19 2021
- The Bizarre Reaction To Facebook’s Decision To Get Out Of The News Business In Australia (TechDirt)
- Why did I leave Google or, why did I stay so long? (Noam Bardin)
- Why the three biggest vaccine makers failed on Covid-19 (FT)
- Citibank just got a $500 million lesson in the importance of UI design (Ars Technica)
- All Your Base Are Belong To Us has turned 20 (The Verge)
- What Peter Jackson’s original two-movie Lord of the Rings almost looked like (Polygon)
Friday, February 12 2021
- Non-Fungible Tokens (NFT): Beginner’s Guide (Decrypt)
- 20 years of orange cones: The history of VLC (Protocol)
- N.Y.’s Vaccine Websites Weren’t Working. He Built a New One for $50. (NYTimes)
- Cadillac Super Cruise Review: Better Than Tesla’s Autopilot (MotorTrend)
- Chip Shortage Spirals Beyond Cars to Phones and Consoles (Bloomberg)
- HOW SONY DESIGNED THE PS5’S ULTIMATE EASTER EGG (The Verge)
- Who Really Created the Marvel Universe? (The New Yorker)
Friday, February 05 2021
- Andy Jassy Twitter Thread (@ankithharathi)
- This Hedge Fund Made $700 Million on GameStop (WSJ)
- PFOF is the Ad Model for Brokerage (Justin Paterno)
- Superstar Cities Are in Trouble (The Atlantic)
- They’re Flocking to America to Make a Fortune Playing Video Games (NYTimes)
Friday, January 29 2021
- Inside the Reddit army that’s crushing Wall Street (CNN Business)
- The Big Short SQUEEZE from $5 to $50? Could GameStop stock (GME) explode higher?? Value investing! (Roaring Kitty)
- How a Penny Stock Explodes From Obscurity to 451% Gains Via Chat Forums (Bloomberg)
- Think Americans Wouldn’t Wager on Russian Table Tennis? Care to Bet? (NYTimes)
- CashApp Is King (Aika’s Newsletter)
- Can Growth Go Out of Style? (Irrelevant Investor)
- YouTube’s Spammy Sex Bots Make a Ton of Money (OneZero)
- Who’s Making All Those Scam Calls? (NYTimes Magazine)
Friday, January 22 2021
- Biden picks Jessica Rosenworcel as acting FCC chief (NBC News)
- The Inside Story of How the Lowly PDF Played the Longest Game in Tech (Marker)
- The Moderation War Is Coming to Spotify, Substack, and Clubhouse (OneZero)
- SAMSUNG GALAXY S21 ULTRA REVIEW: THE REAL DEAL (The Verge)
- Samsung Galaxy S21 review: The best Android phone for the money (Engadget)
Friday, January 15 2021
- Is Letterboxd Becoming a Blockbuster? (NYTimes)
- Why the Canadian Tech Scene Doesn’t Work (AlexDanco.com)
- An Oral History of Wikipedia, the Web’s Encyclopedia (OneZero)
- CRISPR and the Splice to Survive (The New Yorker)
- Spotify Bets Big on Podcasts as a Path to Profitability (Bloomberg Businessweek)
Friday, January 08 2021