Service Appropriately Compensated
“We are seriously exploring collecting a service charge from our customers and paying our employees a weekly, merit-based salary,” said Jimmy Haber, managing partner of ESquared Hospitality, which owns...
View ArticleValue Established
“Newsquest, the UK’s third largest publisher of local and regional newspapers, is charging students £120 for the chance to have their work published in its titles.”
View ArticleFinancing Ventured
Facing overwhelming demand from institutional investors, Uber has expanded its Series E round of venture financing by $1 billion, according to documents filed Wednesday with the Delaware secretary of...
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A Luxury Tower on the Upper East Side, a 2br in the Village, a Studio in...
Welcome to Surreal Estate, a new column in which we will explore listings from the tumultuous New York City real estate market. Two Sutton Place North • $3,020-9,760/month • 0-3 Bed On the Upper East...
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Wonder and Control
I love the Apple Watch commercial. Its syncopated ticks and whirs, the cog-like rotation of the band with snare-drum clicks transforming the entire spinning timepiece into a synecdochic gear, or maybe...
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Room Versus Board
On Monday, an anti-Airbnb advocacy group called “Share Better” released a minute-long satirical video titled “Save the Moguls.” It’s a parody of the charity-drive commercial genre: There’s a female...
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The Last Trailer Park in Techland
In October 2013, Joe Jisser, the manager of Buena Vista Mobile Home Park in Palo Alto, sent a letter to the park’s four hundred and seventeen mostly low-income, mostly Hispanic residents. It informed...
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The Towers That Tax Breaks Built
Earlier this week, the Independent Budget Office of New York City published a report examining tax breaks that Extell Development Company received for its mixed-use luxury condominium skyscraper at 157...
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Everybody Is Flipping Out, Man
Distribution of a proposed one percent sales tax on flips in 2014 In real estate, “flipping” is the practice of buying a piece of property and then selling it a short time later, often having...
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If You Don't Click on This Story, I Don't Get Paid
Over the course of the last three months, I have interviewed more than twenty writers, editors, media people, and journalism professors about the state of being a freelance writer in 2015. The general...
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Welcome to the Block Party
In a 1997 segment on the short-lived tech TV show The Site, host Soledad O’Brien sits at a bar in front of a laptop computer, talking to Dev Null, a full-scale human avatar with frosted fuchsia tips...
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How Much Do You Bring to the Table, Content Human?
The German publisher Axel Springer DE is purchasing 88 percent of Henry Blodget’s extremely popular travel blog, Business Insider, for 343 million dollars in cash; its stake is valued at 390 million...
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The Value of Content
In 2013, Noah Davis wrote a story about what writers get paid to produce words for the internet. (Not much.) Earlier this year, he wanted to do a follow-up to see if things had changed after two solid...
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Money from the Sky
An amorphous group of well-connected bankers and economists—and the politicians they support—run global economic policy. On Wall Street, its members are called Smart Money, and they usually come in...
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Scenes From The Financial Future
What does our financial future look like? Awl pal Hallie Bateman has some thoughts.
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Counting to a Billion
Last week, Forbes published its list of the richest people in the world. This list, in the suggestive words of Peter Bernstein and Annalyn Swan, is “the big-banana index—simple, primal, direct”—a...
View ArticleDrain Circled
Is Felix Salmon the reason journalism has no future? Sure, why the hell not.
View ArticleBitcoin: Wha?
I have read, by conservative estimate, over a dozen pieces about Bitcoin in the last two years and I still could not accurately convey what it is or how it works even if for some reason the accurate...
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The Trailer Park at the Center of the Universe
by Andrew Thompson The longest road in California is El Camino Real, a six-hundred-mile route that once connected twenty-one Spanish missions from San Diego to Sonoma. While the state began to pave...
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