Holiday reads: Four recommendations from the SmartCompany team

The holiday season is the ideal time to enjoy longer reads from publications that you wouldn’t ordinarily have time for.

To help you find the most interesting and in-depth articles, the SmartCompany team has selected four of our recent favourites.

From an investigation into how the pandemic rocked the globe-trotting lifestyles of digital nomads, to insightful stories from The Atlantic, Harvard Business Review and Wired — here are four recommendations from us to you.

1. What my dad gave his shop — The Atlantic

Take a seat in your favourite lounge chair and read Francesca Mari’s homage to her father’s audio-visual equipment and repairs shop, which he has operated for 45 years in San Francisco.

It’s a moving account of life as a small business owner through the eyes of a family member, and of what it was like running a small business in the United States this year.

2. Which economies showed the most digital progress in 2020? — Harvard Business Review

In this article, researchers Bhaskar Chakravorti, Ajay Bhalla and Ravi Shankar Chaturvedi summarise the third edition of the Digital Evolution Scorecard developed by Tufts University’s Fletcher School and Mastercard. The scorecard indexes nations based on how well their economies are digitally evolving.

See how Australia fares compared to its neighbours.

3. Google’s antitrust cases: A guide for the perplexed — Wired

Privacy law isn’t simple to understand at the best of times, particularly when it concerns US law. In this easy-to-read explainer, Gilad Edelman lays out the three antitrust cases that have been brought against Google by the Department of Justice and three dozen states.

4. The digital nomads did not prepare for this — The New York Times

Many of us have read the 4-Hour Work Week and dreamt of travelling the world while working from our laptops. In this feature, Erin Griffith reveals just how fraught that dream was for digital nomads stranded in countries like Mexico this year as borders were closing and business dried up.