When reading books means business
every year, The New YorkerOur book Money Matters addresses a few of the more unusual, interesting, and often disturbing ways in which people seek to acquire—and spend—great wealth. The latest edition, published Monday, features articles on an Irish cocaine kingpin living freely in Dubai, whether the magic of Costco can survive changing times, and one of the most sought-after luxury apartments in New York City. To go along with this number, we asked a few of our writers to recommend books about business. Their selections—ranging from the history of the term “gold digger” to a Roman clef about an Amazon warehouse worker—offer rich pictures of how the process of making money shapes or distorts, both the lives of individuals and the wider world.
Technological revolution
By Marietje Schacki
Technology has been intertwined with modern life for a long time, but the entanglement of big tech companies, as an industry, with our daily habits — everything from tracking friends to hiring taxis — is new. Schacke, a Dutch politician and former member of the European Parliament, seeks to shift the spotlight on accountability “from big tech scandals to the systemic erosion of democracy.” Even when the industry behaves well on its own terms, it believes this is inconsistent with democratic practice. This is how the incentive structure works. Schacke is no finger-waving outsider — when she was a member of the European Parliament, she served on the Cyber Policy Committee, and she is currently a director at the Cyber Policy Center at Stanford University — she has a broad and largely sympathetic view of the dynamics she describes. “In many ways, Silicon Valley has become the antithesis of what its early pioneers envisioned: from dismissing government to literally taking on similar jobs; from praising free speech to becoming curators and regulators of speech; from criticizing government overreach and abuses to accelerating them through spy tools and arcane algorithms,” she writes. The task now is not to resist the business of innovation, but to insist on regulating its corporate giants, trapped by their own momentum, and returning them to “human” interests. Despite its pathetic title, “The Tech Coup” is one of the most informed and rational reviews of the tech scene I’ve read.—Nathan Heller
American gold digger
By Brian Donovan
When playwright Avery Hopwood called his 1919 play about three Manhattan chorus girls struggling to make ends meet “The Gold Diggers,” Broadway producers begged him to change the name. They protested that audiences expected a play about tough beggars in the American West, not sassy girls looking to get a rich husband. . . Or someone else. (In fact, A diverse A review of the beginning of the play had to clarify that “the piece is not about prospecting for precious metals.” At that time, the word “gold digger” was still just locker room slang, used playfully among beautiful, underpaid showgirls. Among them, the term was a combination of a compliment and a word of encouragement: “Girl, get that bag,” before the letter. In his book “American Gold Digger,” 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 real moral panic arose about alimony; The divorced woman was often considered a “parasitic woman.” There was no term synonymous with ex-spouses who evaded alimony by setting up shell companies and moving to “alimony colonies,” cities near New York where they could evade receiving court orders. They were just “guys.”-Jennifer Wilson
Seasonal participant
By Heikki Geisler
The unnamed narrator of Gessler’s novel, first published in German in 2014, is a writer and translator in Leipzig who gets a job at an Amazon fulfillment center before the winter break. The work—in a way, a series of encounters with random items of one-click consumerism, including coloring books and marketing guides for dentists—is boring, repetitive, and frustrating. The workplace is literally and emotionally cold; The company culture, such as it is, treats employees as disposable and generic. This is a business story only in the most trivial sense, which is what makes it subversive and quietly exciting. Even within the bowels of the Amazon, a model of brutal efficiency, people flirt, fantasize, and find camaraderie. (Which is not to say the book is uplifting.) The narrator’s co-workers are “funny people, all with a subtext, all of whom would rather be somewhere else.” As her contract expires, Gessler’s narrator briefly recounts what resistance might look like: destroying merchandise, withholding items, misclassifying orders to delay them, sprinkling dust in books—only bad books, and inserting insulting sticky notes into packages. There is pleasure in the prospect of disobedience, but the daydreams also serve as a reminder of workers’ necessity, their humanity, and their quiet potential for power.-Anna Weiner
Elite empire
By Michael M. Greenbaum
It is, in a way, an anti-business book: it tells the story of a time when the publishing company Condé Nast (which has owned the magazine since 1985) was as dedicated to making money as it was spending it. Greenbaum, correspondent at timesdetails the period from the 1980s to the early 2000s, during which publishing heir Cy Newhouse sponsored a coterie of publications, including Vogue magazine and Vanity gallerywhich “told the world what it should buy, what it should value… and even what it should think about.” They did this by embracing opulence as a matter of principle. However, although Newhouse’s spirit was to mock the trivialities of dollars and cents, he embraced the theater of business – money and power, circulation and deliberation. (Mr. Big’s inspiration for “Sex and the City” was Candace Bushnell’s ex-boyfriend Ron Galeotti, a Condé executive.) The drama reaches its climax with filea business magazine launched on the eve of the Great Recession, paid Tom Wolfe a rumored twelve dollars per word, and hired a live elephant to pose for a photo rather than using a stock photo. “Empire of the Elite” embodies the stubborn power of money, whether it is imagination or economics.-Molly Fisher