Reading List: You Know You Don’t HAVE To Pitch A Forbes Cover If You Don’t Want To, Right?
Friends, there’s just SO MUCH TO READ this weekend! I don’t know if it’s the summer so writers/editors have a big more wiggle room to dive deep into insane subjects, but there’s so much good stuff out there! So let’s get to it, why don’t we?
Angel Au-Yeung, Exclusive Investigation: Sex, Drugs, Misogyny And Sleaze At The HQ Of Bumble’s Owner (Forbes) - As a communications professional, reading what I imagine was initially pitched as a profile puff piece (look at the access given! And the glossy lead photo!) unfold as a an expose of a tax-dodging originator of an insanely toxic work environment is causing me to actually, physically cringe IRL. It’s like watching a slow motion train wreck, if one had tried to hide a bunch of angry bees in one section of said train before pitching an exclusive on the Bee Train speeding towards a dead end. Take this quote from a former employee… WOOF: “Everyone was naked and doing lines of coke, and they were sending these photos over the internal email system.”
Tim Alberta, ‘Mother Is Not Going to Like This’: The 48 Hours That Almost Brought Down Trump (POLITICO) - This excerpt from Tim Alberta’s new book on the revelation and aftermath of Trump’s Access Hollywood video is BANANAS, until you remember that feeling you had hearing that tape for the first time, as a human woman existing in the world, and then it becomes a soul-scorching reminder of the character of those currently running this country. Sigh. See also: Alexandra Petri’s: Do NOT leave me alone with a woman.
Jason D. Rowley, The Q2 2019 Global Venture Capital Report: A Market Gone Sideways (Crunchbase) - If you want to better understand the current state of VC, Crunchbase’s deep dives are must-reads. The best part is that, in addition to being exhaustive and insanely well-researched, Jason’s piece is accessible to those of us who don’t live and breath term sheets every day. So if you want to be the smartest person at your Silicon Valley BBQ this weekend, get to reading this.
Luke Taylor, I Was Banned From Twitter for Threatening to Kill Mr. Peanut (Vice) - This piece makes me so angry, and not for the reasons you may think. It makes me angry because I was once a social media manager, and the fact that this guy thinks it’s LOL SO FUNNY to send off constant “ironic” death threats to a corporate account belies the fact that it seems we as an interwebz culture forget that actual humans trying to do their jobs are behind the screens. And the tweets? Not great! Grumble grumble don’t be a jerk grumble grumble.
Zach Whittaker, The sinkhole that saved the internet (TechCrunch) SOMEONE OPTION THIS ARTICLE FOR A MOVIE, STAT. This oral history of the WannaCry ransomware outbreak in 2017 is SO GOOD. I’ve never found a cybersecurity crisis post-mortem this riveting, and can someone give Marcus Hutchins and Jamie Hankins a boat or something for basically saving all of our butts?!?! Zach Whittaker, more of this please!
Get to reading, my dearests! And be kind to each other, ok?
Xoxo Amy