Interesting Fast Company writing - with features by Jon Gertner & Charles Fishman

There's been a few different pieces from Fast Company recently that struck me as particularly noteworthy with two from the magazine and two the website.

The June issue of Fast Company featured the "100 Most Creative People in Business" and the people and write-ups I found to be most interesting were Carl June at #11, Scott Harrison at #10 and Nate Silver at #1. The pieces on June and Harrison were both very short, but on two people doing important work. Harrison is founder of the highly regarded Charity: Water and June an immunologist working on cancer treatments and who was featured in "Has Carl June Found a Key to Fighting Cancer?" by Jason Fagone for the August issue of Philadelphia Magazine.

The write-up of Silver as the founder of the (moving from the New York Times to ESPN) website FiveThirtyEight was a fairly lengthy feature by Jon Gertner and included some excellent material. Gertner made multiple references to the two concepts in the title of Silver's recent book The Signal and the Noise (which I reviewed last December), with the signal being actual valuable information and  the noise everything else. I also found interesting Gertner's note that "Silver enjoys capitalizing anytime he thinks someone is making a decision for the wrong reasons" and it reminded me of a blog post I wrote last year that got into stock valuations and how skewed or ethereal they can be, with Facebook's stock an example of that (just as Silver noted). The final thing that struck me from the Gertner piece on Silver was a fairly lengthy portion about how data analysis (often known as big data) has potential applications for public good, with specific mention of the areas of education and medicine. Noted in the piece were Rayid Ghani who was the chief scientist of the 2012 Obama campaign and Jake Porway who founded Datakind, a non-profit with the Twitter description "Connecting non-profits in need of data analysis with pro bono data scientists who can work to help them with data collection, analysis, visualization, and more."

Another Fast Company Magazine piece I found excellent lately was "The Road to Resilience: How Unscientific Innovation Saved Marlin Steel" from the July/August issue. The feature was written by Charles Fishman, whose writing I've posted on a few times on all the way back to "Message in a Bottle", his 2007 Fast Company feature on the bottled water industry. This latest piece by Fishman profiled a company that used to solely make bagel baskets and has grown tremendously with now the large majority of products being much more expensive baskets for industrial and manufacturing environments. Noted in the piece was an interesting quote from owner Drew Greenblatt with "What I realized is that the customers who are a pain in the neck are really the great customers."

The final interesting Fast Company pieces to note here were two shorts ones posted to the website. "How Vice Hacked Google Glass to Tell Crisis Stories" was by Neal Ungerleider about journalist Tim Pool and his on the job usage of Google glasses. Also was the Sarah Kessler piece "Pixar's John Lasseter on Steve Jobs, Creativity, and Disney Infinity" leading into the launch of a Disney game offering. In terms of Lasseter as a subject, it brought to mind the profile "Father of the Year" on him by Tom Junod for Esquire.

Charles Fishman on Water - from Fast Company Magazine

Excellent piece from the April 2011 issue of Fast Company, which brought to mind some other interesting writing on the same topic of... water.

The recent article was "Why GE, Coca-Cola, and IBM Are Getting Into the Water Business" by Charles Fishman. Adapted from Fishman's book The Big Thirst: The Secret Life and Turbulent Future of Water, it's an interesting look at how cheap and easy water is becoming more scarce... and what that means for both society and business.

It's really interesting reading and I imagine the book came out of Fishman's 2007 Fast Company article "Message in a Bottle".... with this original piece linked to and written on in this post also about bottled water and the found in plastic bottles industrial chemical BPA.

Solid writing on an important topic.

Best Magazine Writing: Bottled Water & BPA Articles

Following up on my "Best Magazine Writing: Esquire & Sports Illustrated"... which follows up on my "Stuff of Interest & Authors Enjoyed", I began looking at posts with BusinessWeek and Fast Company links and found some excellent writing from each magazine on both plastics and the bottled water industry.

Three different articles with three different angles... all raising red flags around bottled water and the plastic compound BPA.

From Dec 2007, Fast Company writer Charles Fishman wrote "Message in a Bottle" on the bottled water industry. This award winning article basically was an expose of many of the negative things about bottled water.

In July 2008, one of the earlier posts I did to this blog was titled Impact of Bottled Water on a Town and links to the BusinessWeek story "A Town Torn Apart by Nestlé." Not to get overly "up with small town, down with big corporation" here, but it's nettlesome when you have a company (Nestle for it's Arrowhead water brand) retaining a lawyer on behalf of a town (McCloud, CA) and then the company negotiating with the lawyer. Seems to raise just a few conflict of interest questions.

The first two blog posts and articles are around bottled water and one company that sells it, but the third is around a component that's in many of the bottles themselves. In Feb 2009 I did this blog post linking to the Fast Company feature "The Real Story Behind Bisphenol A." As the blog post and article (in of course much greater detail) covers, the compound BPA (or Bisphenol A) is a building block of many shatterproof plastics and can be found in products ranging from cell phones to drink cans and baby bottles.

The issue comes from the concerns around the product's potential to leech into water and impact the reproductive system... particularly given it's presence in products used by babies with highly undeveloped immune systems.

Three different pieces around three slightly different topics, but all linked together by excellent writing that raises some disconcerting questions about both bottled water and BPA.