Sublime
An inspiration engine for ideas
Harry Chandler, owner and publisher of the Los Angeles Times, the mighty daily whose incessant drumbeat for the region influenced the city it covered in a way few newspapers have before or since. Chandler’s use of his paper to promote projects around the city—many in which his family and friends had a financial interest—had already turned Los Angel
... See moreGustavo Arellano • Taco USA
describing the job of editor. It was not, he said, as it once had been, confined mainly to correcting spelling and punctuation. Rather, it was to know what to publish, how to get it, and what to do to help it achieve the largest readership. At
A. Scott Berg • Max Perkins: Editor of Genius
AT&T’s savior was Theodore Vail, who became its president in 1907, just a few years after Millikan’s friend Frank Jewett joined the company.11 In appearance, Vail seemed almost a caricature of a Gilded Age executive: Rotund and jowly, with a white walrus mustache, round spectacles, and a sweep of silver hair, he carried forth a magisterial conf
... See moreJon Gertner • The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation
Antonio Garcia Martinez • Twilight of the Media Elites
My uncle Howard was a small-town newspaperman, publishing the local paper for Richmond, Missouri (population 5,000). The paper, founded by my grandfather, was the family business, and ink ran in Howard’s blood. I can still remember him fulminating about the rise of USA Today; he criticized it as “TV on paper” and held it up as further evidence of t
... See moreClay Shirky • Here Comes Everybody
He was college president until 1973; he ran for the Senate in 1976, aged seventy, becoming a Republican for the first time.