Month: January 2016

“Fairway kept expanding—stores in more places around New York—and they aimed more at the median shopper,” reports Pacific Standard. “Gradually, the store lost its edge, its quirkiness. With great size comes great McDonaldization—predictability, calculability. “Like no other market,” says every Fairway sign and every Fairway plastic bag. But it became like lots of other markets, with ‘specials’ and coupons. Coupons! Fairway never had coupons. Or specials.”

“In the first months after the private equity firm took Fairway public in 2013, the stock price was as high as $26 a share. The other day, it closed at $1.04.”

Slate: “With iTunes Terms and Conditions: The Graphic Novel, artist R. Sikoryak aims to achieve the impossible: to make us read a document that virtually all of us have willfully ignored. Sikoryak’s recently completed book, published serially on Tumblr, contains the entirety of Apple’s iTunes terms of service, spreading its 20,000-odd words out over 94 pages, each styled after the work of a different comics artist.”

“By breaking the dense legalistic language up and inserting it into classic comics pages, Sikoryak sought to appropriate the visual medium’s narrative drive, creating the implication of story where none exists.”

The Wall Street Journal: Companies from advertising firm Deutsch Inc. to hedge fund Bridgewater Associates are pushing workers to drop the polite workplace veneer and speak frankly to each other no matter what. The practice is referred to at some companies as “radical candor,” a “mokita” or “front-stabbing.”

“You have to have a thick skin to work here,” says Val DiFebo, chief executive of Deutsch’s New York office. That could be an understatement: The company once distributed T-shirts showing a giant scar with stitches over the heart.

Recipients of the critiques are expected to defend themselves or make changes, Ms. DiFebo says. “I think it’s actually more big-hearted and caring to be confrontational in that way than going behind someone’s back,” she says.