Long Reads for the Long Weekend - Summer 2025

Enjoy the EntStrategyGuy's recommended reading for the long weekend...

Jul 04, 2025

(Welcome to the Entertainment Strategy Guy, a newsletter on the entertainment industry and business strategy. I write a weekly Streaming Ratings Report and a bi-weekly strategy column, along with occasional deep dives into other topics, like today’s article. Please subscribe.)

Happy Fourth of July! As has been a tradition of mine going back to the beginning of the EntStrategyGuy website, then newsletter, I’m sharing my favorite long reads of the last year, as I’ve done in 2019, 2020, 2021, and 2024. As for how I pick these links, well, it’s just my favorite things I read all year.

Let’s dive right in!

“Yeah, America can still build stuff” by Kevin Drum in Jabberwocking

Last November, I saved this gigantic blog post from Kevin Drum for this very column, because he rarely wrote really long posts (he mostly wrote very, very short old-school-style-blogging posts), and because the argument was just so good. Especially in an age of “Abundance” discourse—if you haven’t been following it, “abundance” is the debate over whether or not to deregulate government bureaucracy to promote “building things again”, an idea to which I’m somewhat sympathetic, with caveats1—but this is a good counter to the most hyperbolic claims from the YIMBY movement.

Now, seven months later, after Kevin Drum’s very tragic passing, this blog post is also a terrific example of what we’re losing: Drum’s data-based, “Well, actually, the data says this” contrarianism. The world and the media discourse need way more nuance and way more people using smart data analysis, but we lost the master of it this year.

“Escape From the Box: New technology and old tactics have made buying a car a death march of deception” by David Dayen in The American Prospect

There are a lot of great articles out there, but how many actually help you buy a car? This classic from David Dayen literally helped me and my editor/researcher buy a car. No, seriously, when my editor/researcher was shopping for a car last summer, the first place they went to included an add-on for nitrogen in the tires for over $300; thanks to Dayen’s reporting, he knew that he could call BS.

“Testing AI's GeoGuessr Genius: Seeing a world in a grain of sand” and“How Did You Do On The AI Art Turing Test?” both by Scott Alexander at Astral Codex Ten by Scott Alexander

I feel like each person’s experience with AI often comes down to some neat party trick that, when you see it, makes you say, “Whoa, the future is now.” Scott Alexander had two such articles this year.

In one, he had the audience guess if a piece of art was human or AI; most people weren’t good at telling the difference. The AI pieces also won a lot of “favorite” awards, too, meaning humans subjectively appreciated them.

In another, he explored how AI has gotten very good at the online game GeoGuessr, though it’s also a little complicated how good LLMs actually are or whether they’re actually better than people. Still, it’s really impressive! (And for me, it shows that a lot of improving AI usage comes to how you define the prompt. The prompt used to win GeoGuesser is very long and detailed.)

"The Ghosts in the Machine: Spotify’s plot against musicians” by Liz Pelly in Harper's Magazine

Liz Pelly’s exposé of how Spotify is “filling its most popular playlists with stock music attributed to pseudonymous musicians—variously called ghost or fake artists—presumably in an effort to reduce its royalty payouts” is a must-read.

My editor/researcher loves many of the genres cited in the article as the biggest targets of this effort; he took it personally (even though he mostly curates his own playlists and doesn’t use Spotify’s algorithm or playlists).

“Did a Private Equity Fire Truck Roll-Up Worsen the L.A. Fires?” “Hatching a Conspiracy: A BIG Investigation into Egg Prices” and “Messing With Texas: How Big Homebuilders and Private Equity Made American Cities Unaffordable” by Basel Musharbash at BIG

EntStrategyGuy readers know that I love Matt Stoller’s excellent anti-monopoly newsletter, Big. Well, he’s got some stiff competition now from antitrust attorney Basel Musharbash, who has just been killing it on, checks notes, oh, Matt Stoller’s newsletter.

Seriously, if I were a concentrated industry, and I heard Musharbash had started analyzing us, I’d call my lawyers.

All year, whenever a big news story broke, either egg prices or the CA fires or the “Abundance” discourse2 I mentioned above, Basel swooped in to connect it to competition (meaning monopolization or oligopolization) concerns. Well done!

“The Great Grocery Squeeze: How a federal policy change in the 1980s created the modern food desert” by Stacy Mitchell at The Atlantic

This is one of those articles that, once I read it, I had a literal “a-ha!” moment for me. Everyone who grew up in the 90s knows the story of Walmart taking over retail (and countless news stories about them destroying small towns) allegedly due to smarter logistics and shipping plans.

But how many people realize that this growth (and the in-general consolidation of retail) stems from an obscure, not-noticed-at-the-time decision by the government to stopping enforcing the Robinson-Patman act, a literal law that is on the books, which used to forbid price discrimination—essentially meaning large stores can’t use their size to demand better prices than smaller stores—between vendors?

Size doesn’t mean “efficiency” in retail, since the new firms are simply capturing value from suppliers. The larger you are as a retailer, the better terms you can demand, creating a flywheel (but the evil kind) where larger size creates a larger and larger gap between the large retailer and mom and pop stores.

“Debanking (and Debunking?)” by Patrick McKenzie at Bits about Money

This explainer on banking and how de-banking works is really, really long, but so fascinating. I love hyper-in-depth essays like this.

“Asleep at the Wheel in the Headlight Brightness Wars” by Nate Rogers at The Ringer

Man, I loathe how bright that headlights have gotten in recent years, but even with that hatred, I couldn’t imagine writing over 5,000 well-reported, very-readable words on the subject. Bravo, Nate Rogers!

“How 'fake streamers' steal your Steam keys - and why!” by Simon Carliss at The GameDiscoverCo

I wanted to highlight this excellent mini-dive by Simon Carliss into scammers stealing Steam Keys (or codes to play video games for free, usually meant for the press), because piracy is a huge issue, but also, what sort of psycho does this? Anyone who has read anything about the video game industry knows how brutal it is to succeed, or even just survive. Plus, these scammers seem to be especially targeting smaller publishers.

“Do People Actually Hate 'Forrest Gump'? A Statistical Analysis” by Daniel Parris at Stat Significant

Of all of Daniel Parris of Stat Significant’s article, I loved his breakdown of Forrest Gump best, especially since I, like him, assumed people hated it, but as he shows, these days on the internet, a very, very small group of tastemakers can influence what “everyone” thinks or believes.

“Will A.I. Become the New McKinsey?” by Ted Chiang in The New Yorker

I love the New Yorker and I love Ted Chiang, an excellent sci-fi writer, and his thoughts on AI are always a must-read. The takeaway paragraph to me:

“But many of the people who work in A.I. regard it as more important than inventing new flavors of potato chip. They say it’s a world-changing technology. If that’s the case, then they have a duty to find ways for A.I. to make the world better without first making it worse...The tendency to think of A.I. as a magical problem solver is indicative of a desire to avoid the hard work that building a better world requires...For technologists, the hardest work of all—the task that they most want to avoid—will be questioning the assumption that more technology is always better, and the belief that they can continue with business as usual and everything will simply work itself out.”

The Entertainment Strategy Guy