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"Nickel and Dimed for the Amazon age," (Salon) the bitingly funny, eye-opening story of finding work in the automated and time-starved world of hourly low-wage laborAfter the local newspaper where she worked as a reporter closed, Emily Guendelsberger took a pre-Christmas job at an Amazon fulfillment center outside Louisville, Kentucky. There, the v...
Christopher Mims
Apr 10, 2021Probationary Constable Peter Grant dreams of being a detective in London’s Metropolitan Police. Too bad his superior plans to assign him to the Case Progression Unit, where the biggest threat he’ll face is a paper cut. But Peter’s prospects change in the aftermath of a puzzling murder, when he gains exclusive information from an eyewitness who happ...
Christopher Mims
Apr 08, 2021Also recommended by
Brandy JensenFrom a brilliant young historian, a colorful journey through 7,000 years and twenty-six world cities that shows how urban living has been the spur and incubator to humankind's greatest innovations.In the two hundred millennia of our existence, nothing has shaped us more profoundly than the city. Historian Ben Wilson, author of bestselling and award...
Christopher Mims
Mar 26, 2021From the beet fields of North Dakota to the campgrounds of California to Amazon’s CamperForce program in Texas, employers have discovered a new, low-cost labor pool, made up largely of transient older adults. These invisible casualties of the Great Recession have taken to the road by the tens of thousands in RVs and modified vans, forming a growing...
Christopher Mims
In the spirit of Steve Jobs and Moneyball, Elon Musk is both an illuminating and authorized look at the extraordinary life of one of Silicon Valley’s most exciting, unpredictable, and ambitious entrepreneurs—a real-life Tony Stark—and a fascinating exploration of the renewal of American invention and its new “makers.”Elon Musk spotlights the techno...
Christopher Mims

Ninety Percent of Everything
Inside Shipping, the Invisible Industry That Puts Clothes on Your Back, Gas in Your Car, and Food on Your Plate
On ship-tracking Web sites, the waters are black with dots. Each dot is a ship; each ship is laden with boxes; each box is laden with goods. In postindustrial economies, we no longer produce but buy, and so we must ship. Without shipping there would be no clothes, food, paper, or fuel. Without all those dots, the world would not work. Yet freight s...
Christopher Mims

Insanely Great
The Life and Times of Macintosh, the Computer that changed Everything
The creation of the Mac in 1984 catapulted America into the digital millennium, captured a fanatic cult audience, and transformed the computer industry into an unprecedented mix of technology, economics, and show business. Now veteran technology writer and Newsweek senior editor Steven Levy zooms in on the great machine and the fortunes of the uniq...
Christopher Mims

The One Best Way
Frederick Winslow Taylor and the Enigma of Efficiency (The MIT Press)
The definitive biography of the first efficiency expert.Frederick Winslow Taylor (1856-1915) was the first efficiency expert, the original time-and-motion man--the father of scientific management, the inventor of a system that became known, inevitably enough, as Taylorism. In the past the man has been first. In the future the System will be first, ...
Christopher Mims