{"id":244364,"date":"2025-10-22T20:21:08","date_gmt":"2025-10-22T20:21:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/244364\/"},"modified":"2025-10-22T20:21:08","modified_gmt":"2025-10-22T20:21:08","slug":"when-reading-books-means-business","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/244364\/","title":{"rendered":"When Reading Books Means Business"},"content":{"rendered":"

Every year, the New Yorker\u2019s Money Issue examines a few of the most weird, riveting, and, often, troubling ways in which people pursue great wealth\u2014and spend it. The latest edition<\/a>, which was published on Monday, features pieces about an Irish cocaine kingpin<\/a> living freely in Dubai, whether Costco\u2019s magic<\/a> can survive changing times, and one of New York City\u2019s most hotly sought-after luxury-apartment stagers<\/a>. To accompany the issue, we asked a few of our writers to recommend books about business. Their picks\u2014which range from a history of the term \u201cgold-digger\u201d to a roman \u00e0 clef about an Amazon warehouse worker\u2014offer rich portraits of how money-making shapes, or warps, both individual lives and the wider world.<\/p>\n

The Tech Coup<\/p>\n

by Marietje Schaake<\/p>\n

Technology has been tangled up in modern life for a long time, but the entwinement of Big Tech, as an industry, with our daily habits\u2014everything from tracking friends to hiring cabs\u2014is new. Schaake, a Dutch politician and a former European Parliament member, seeks to shift the spotlight of accountability \u201cfrom Big Tech\u2019s scandals to the systematic erosion of democracy.\u201d Even when the industry is behaving well on its own terms, she thinks, it\u2019s going against democratic practice. That\u2019s just how its incentive structure works. Schaake is not a finger-wagging outsider\u2014while an E.P. member, she worked on a cyber-policy commission, and she is currently a director at Stanford\u2019s Cyber Policy Center\u2014and she has a wide and largely sympathetic view of the dynamics that she describes. \u201cIn many ways, Silicon Valley has become the antithesis of what its early pioneers set out to be: from dismissing government to literally taking on equivalent functions; from lauding freedom of speech to becoming curators and speech regulators; and from criticizing government overreach and abuse to accelerating it through spyware tools and opaque algorithms,\u201d she writes. The task now is not to resist the innovation business but to insist on regulating its behemoths, trapped by their own momentum, back to \u201chuman scale\u201d interests. Despite its lurid title, \u201cThe Tech Coup\u201d is one of the most informed and sensible assessments of the tech landscape I\u2019ve read.\u2014Nathan Heller<\/p>\n

American Gold Digger<\/p>\n

by Brian Donovan<\/p>\n

When the playwright Avery Hopwood titled his 1919 play about three Manhattan chorus girls struggling to make ends meet \u201cThe Gold Diggers,\u201d Broadway producers begged him to change the name. Audiences, they protested, would expect a play about hardscrabble panhandlers in the American West, not saucy minxes looking to score a rich husband . . . or someone else\u2019s. (Indeed, a Variety review of the play\u2019s d\u00e9but had to clarify that \u201cthe piece does not concern the mining of precious metal.\u201d) At the time, \u201cgold-digger\u201d was still merely dressing-room slang, used playfully between pretty underpaid showgirls. Among them, the term was a cross between a compliment and a word of encouragement: \u201cGirl, get that bag,\u201d avant la lettre. In \u201cAmerican Gold Digger,\u201d Donovan, a sociologist, traces how the phrase entered the broader lexicon and why it stuck. He argues that, as divorce rates rose in the twentieth century, a veritable moral panic over alimony ensued; a divorc\u00e9e was often deemed a \u201cparasite woman.\u201d There was no equivalent term for ex-husbands who dodged alimony by setting up shell companies and relocating to \u201calimony colonies,\u201d towns near New York where they could evade being served with writs. They were just \u201cmen.\u201d\u2014Jennifer Wilson<\/p>\n

Seasonal Associate<\/p>\n

by Heike Geissler<\/p>\n

The unnamed narrator of Geissler\u2019s novel, first published in German in 2014, is a writer and translator in Leipzig who takes a job at an Amazon fulfillment center in advance of the winter holidays. The work\u2014in a way, a series of encounters with random elements of one-click consumerism, including coloring books and marketing guides for dentists\u2014is tedious, repetitive, and demoralizing. The workplace is literally and emotionally cold; the corporate culture, such as it is, treats employees as disposable and generic. This is a business story only in the most banal sense, which is what makes it subversive and quietly thrilling. Even within the bowels of Amazon, a paragon of brutal efficiency, people flirt, fantasize, find camaraderie. (That\u2019s not to say that the book is uplifting.) The narrator\u2019s fellow-laborers are \u201cfun people, all of them with subtext, and all of them would rather be somewhere else.\u201d As her contract winds along, Geissler\u2019s narrator briefly entertains what resistance might look like: damaging goods, withholding items, misclassifying orders to make them late, sprinkling dust in books\u2014just the bad ones, she clarifies\u2014and inserting insulting Post-its into packages. There\u2019s a delight in the prospect of disobedience, but the reverie also serves as a reminder of the workers\u2019 necessity, humanity, and quiet potential for power.\u2014Anna Wiener<\/p>\n

Empire of the Elite<\/p>\n

by Michael M. Grynbaum<\/p>\n

This is, in a way, an anti-business book: the story of a time in which the publishing company Cond\u00e9 Nast (which has owned this magazine since 1985) was dedicated less to making money than to spending it. Grynbaum, a reporter at the Times, details the period from the eighties to the early two-thousands, during which the publishing heir Si Newhouse nurtured a coterie of publications, including Vogue and Vanity Fair, that \u201ctold the world what to buy, what to value . . . even what to think.\u201d They did so by embracing extravagance as a matter of principle. Yet even as the Newhouse ethos scorned petty matters of dollars and cents, it embraced the theatre of business\u2014of money and power, of wheeling and dealing. (The inspiration for \u201cSex and the City\u201d \u2019s Mr. Big was Candace Bushnell\u2019s onetime boyfriend Ron Galotti, a Cond\u00e9 executive.) The drama reaches its crescendo with Portfolio, a business magazine that launched on the eve of the Great Recession, paid Tom Wolfe a rumored twelve dollars a word, and hired a live elephant for a photo shoot rather than use a stock image. \u201cEmpire of the Elite\u201d captures the inexorable power of money, whether it\u2019s a matter of fantasy or economy.\u2014Molly Fischer<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Every year, the New Yorker\u2019s Money Issue examines a few of the most weird, riveting, and, often, troubling…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":15226,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[223,14487,88],"class_list":{"0":"post-244364","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-books","8":"tag-books","9":"tag-disable-inline-signup-unit","10":"tag-entertainment"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/244364","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=244364"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/244364\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/15226"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=244364"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=244364"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=244364"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}