Further Highlights
A deeper cut from decades on the business and technology beat.
More of the work I am most proud of, including market calls and valuation analysis, investigations, profiles, and the occasional voicier essay. Work is organized by year and drawn from The Boston Globe, Fortune, Yahoo Finance, Reuters, Businessweek, TheStreet.com, Bloomberg Markets, The Industry Standard, and Wired.
Students at the prestigious music school pushed back against AI songwriting tools they feared could eliminate their careers.
How a new category of startups is aiming to serve older consumers (from the Innovation Beat newsletter).
The tech pioneer and Lotus 1-2-3 founder returns to Cambridge to finish what he started.
During the final days of the beloved Allston diner, a showcase of the people who loved eating there and the people who served them.
What really happened to one of the city’s most-watched consumer startups, from explosive growth through Uber’s $1 billion acquisition to the quiet shutdown.
How a retired engineer built a $20-a-month AI image-recognition rig to keep Canada geese off his rowing club’s docks.
The untold story of two former Olin College students whose research helped lay the groundwork for ChatGPT — and what their move west says about Boston’s place in the AI race.
A first-person hunt for a lost local obsession. Magazine writing for a Sunday morning.
A road-trip experiment driving a couple of EVs across New England in search of sweet treats.
The prep school was one of the first in the country to bar smartphones from campus for teachers as well as kids.
The surprising behavioral science behind a Boston startup trying to fight addiction.
A Natick couple ran an industry newsletter for online sellers. Then eBay’s security team launched a stalking campaign against them. Their first print interview.
A deep dive into how the world’s largest video platform turned itself into a creator-driven advertising business that rivals Hollywood.
The turbulent journey of an autonomous Navy vessel built to track Chinese and Russian submarines.
The trillion-dollar stakes for the companies racing to deliver consumer connectivity from low-Earth orbit.
A six-week strike by 40,000 telecom workers ended on terms few outsiders ever saw. The narrative of how it happened, reconstructed from inside the room.
Sell-side analysts kept pumping BP’s stock after the Deepwater Horizon disaster.
In a busy year of corporate breakups at Tyco, American Standard, Temple-Inland, and Morgan Stanley’s Discover, a sum-of-the-parts analysis worked through how much of each parent’s debt would travel with the new units.
On the impending death of the compact disc, written two years before iTunes overtook Walmart as America’s largest music retailer.
A capacity-glut call at the top of the ethanol trade. A federal mandate pulled in far more capacity than was required in a business plagued by two volatile commodities. The sector collapsed.
Took apart the case for commodity index funds at the height of the inflows. The inflation-hedge rationale failed on the correlation data, and the return record depended on a roll yield worth roughly five percentage points a year that was disappearing as speculators crowded in.
A two-month investigation into the future of American commercial fishing. Reporting from Alaska, Maine, and Washington; cited in the federal regulatory debate that followed.
Debut column, published the morning after Google’s pricing guidance. Corrected the McDonald’s market-cap comparison then circulating by adjusting for leverage, reconstructed cash generation from the balance sheet before Google had filed a cash-flow statement, and valued the deal against Cisco’s 1990 IPO.
Archived copy at the Internet Archive; TheStreet.com’s own archive is no longer public.
Written two years before the peak and against Greenspan’s public position. Months-of-supply ratios understated the inventory overhang because record turnover was masking it; the pool of remaining renters was near a twenty-year low; price-to-income had reached 10x in Los Angeles and 14x in Orange County.
Archived copy at the Internet Archive; TheStreet.com’s own archive is no longer public.
A profile of Fidelity’s then–fund-division president on the mutual-fund scandals roiling her competitors.
The scoop that fed the broader mutual-fund scandal: Arizona regulators had been censuring Security Trust’s CEO for years before New York’s attorney general filed charges. Two months later, federal regulators ordered Security Trust dissolved and charged three top executives with fraud.
A San Francisco company had built a database of 150 million voters and was about to sell it to online marketers. After this story ran, they cancelled their IPO.
Reporting on online retail before “e-commerce” was a word people used. From the December 1995 issue, one of my earliest published tech stories.
For everything else, including the running tech beat at the Globe, recent newsletter columns, and the wider archive of work I haven’t curated here, the closest thing I have to a comprehensive index lives on Authory:
authory.com/AaronPressman →