February 2012
114 posts
The Malice at the Palace →
An oral history of the Pacers/Pistons melee in 2004.
Jonathan Abrams |
Grantland |
Feb 2012
Securitate In All But Name →
A Romanian-German novelist on being pursued by Ceaucescu’s secret police.
Herta Müller |
Die Zeit |
Aug 2009
Luv and War at 30,000 Feet →
The story of Southwest Airlines.
S. C. Gwynne |
Texas Monthly |
Mar 2012
Life, With Dementia →
On prisoners with Alzheimer’s disease and their incarcerated caretakers.
Pam Belluck |
New York Times |
Feb 2012
A Silicon Valley Tale of Humiliation and Revenge →
He was fired from the company he helped create, YouSendIt. Then the cyberattacks started.
Burt Helm |
Inc. |
Feb 2012
Longform @ SXSW →
longform:
Headed to Austin for SX? Longform’s Max Linsky will be moderating a panel on curation. Great lineup: David Carr, Maria Popova (aka Brainpicker), Mia Quagliarello of Flipboard and Noah Brier of Percolate.
Come thru!
Opium’s Varied Dreams →
“Opium does not deprive you of your senses. It does not make a madman of you. But drink does. See? Who ever heard of a man committing murder when full of hop. Get him full of whiskey and he might kill his father.”
A journey into New York’s turn-of-the-century opium dens to find out who gets hooked and why.
Stephen Crane |
Maggie: A Girl of the Streets |
Jun 1896
Lives of the Saints →
Mormonism’s past and present.
Lawrence Wright |
New Yorker |
Jan 2002
What Do You Think of Ted Williams Now? →
Ted Williams grows old.
Richard Ben Cramer |
Esquire |
Jun 1986
The Gary Oldman Story That Almost Wasn’t →
The strange saga of a 2009 Gary Oldman profile that his manager, Douglas Urbanski, aggressively sought to kill.
“Mr. Heath’s motives are dishonest in the least…supposed ‘journalism’ at its very lowest…while Mr. Heath may find his sloppy reporting cute, in fact it is destructive, and he knows it…his out of context and uninformed pot shots…out of context swipes at me…stretching the most basic rules...
Nubia: the Life, Death of an Abused Child →
Jorge and Carmen Barahona are awaiting trial. Both are charged with murder. The Department of Children & Families, which received numerous calls about Nubia to its child abuse hot line but did not protect her, has been flagellated for failure to do its job.
That is the story of Nubia Barahona’s death.
This — from voluminous court records, audio recordings, hundreds of family photos...
I Was a Warehouse Wage Slave →
Reporting undercover from inside the online-shipping industry.
Mac McClelland |
Mother Jones |
Feb 2012
Magic Mountain →
A trip to the World Economic Forum in Davos.
Nick Paumgarten |
New Yorker |
Feb 2012
Faces of Paris →
Gentrification and its discontents in Paris, throughout the centuries.
Eric Hazan |
New Left Review |
Apr 2010
The Man in the Glass House →
A pilgrimage to J.D. Salinger’s New Hampshire home
The silence surrounding this place is not just any silence. It is the work of a lifetime. It is the work of renunciation and determination and expensive litigation. It is a silence of self-exile, cunning, and contemplation. In its own powerful, invisible way, the silence is in itself an eloquent work of art. It is the Great Wall of Silence J.D....
A Scorsese in Lagos →
On the difficult challenges faced by an auteur in Nigeria’s burgeoning Nollywood film economy.
Andrew Rice |
New York Times Magazine |
Feb 2012
Burn All the Liars →
An investigation into the myth of actress Frances Farmer’s lobotomy.
Matt Evans |
The Morning News |
Feb 2012
Basic police work ignored in autistic patient’s... →
An autistic man dies at a state-run institution in California. Was it an accident? Or murder?
Ryan Gabrielson |
California Watch |
Feb 2012
The Girl on the Bridge →
Seattle’s Aurora Bridge has been the most notorious suicide site in the Northwest for 80 years. On one man’s fight to erect a fence and the race to save one last jumper.
James Ross Gardner |
Seattle Met |
Jul 2011
The Last Gentleman →
On New Yorker writer George W. S. Trow’s descent into madness.
Ariel Levy |
New York Magazine |
Mar 2007
The Mysterious Mr. Zedzed: The Wickedest Man in... →
Few men have acquired so scandalous a reputation as did Basil Zaharoff, alias Count Zacharoff, alias Prince Zacharias Basileus Zacharoff, known to his intimates as “Zedzed.” Born in Anatolia, then part of the Ottoman Empire, perhaps in 1849, Zaharoff was a brothel tout, bigamist and arsonist, a benefactor of great universities and an intimate of royalty who reached his peak of infamy as an...
The Journey of Judge Joan Lefkow →
What happened after Joan Lefkow’s husband and mother were murdered in her home.
Mary Schmich |
Chicago Tribune |
Nov 2005
Scott Ritter’s Other War →
How the former U.N. weapon’s inspector and “loudest and most credible skeptic of the Bush administration’s contention that Hussein was hiding weapons of mass destruction” ended up embroiled in an Internet sex scandal involving underage girls.
Matt Bai |
New York Times Magazine |
Feb 2012
Sixteen-year-old Tara Perry followed her man into... →
Three months before it all started, she’d been a shy sophomore at Aurora Central High School, a member of the soccer and speech teams. Then Randy Miller had come out of prison and back into her world. A 22-year-old former child prostitute and drug dealer, Miller had promised to take her away from a tumultuous and painful home life. But the journey he had in mind led downward, into a terrifying...
The Tree of Strife →
Two Houston performance artists faux-marry an oak. Controversy ensues about the live installation’s relationship to the gay marriage debate.
Mimi Swartz |
Texas Monthly |
March 2012
Me & My Monkey →
Confessions of a white-collar dope fiend.
Anonymous |
Washington City Paper |
Jan 1995
Seeing Red →
Can Netflix bounce back?
William D. Cohan |
Vanity Fair |
Feb 2012
The Dartmouth Winter Carnival →
The On the Waterfront screenwriter visits Dartmouth College on the occasion of its annual “30-ring circus that makes Ringling Brothers look like a two-wagon job on a vacant lot in Sapulpa.”
Budd Schulberg |
Sports Illustrated |
Feb 1955
The Conversion →
An exhaustive examination of Mitt Romney’s record on abortion.
William Saletan |
Slate |
Feb 2012
Mother’s Boys →
In court and visiting prison with the parents of young Russian Nationalists who’ve killed.
Olesya Gerasimenko |
Open Democracy |
Feb 2012
Left Behind →
How Yvette Vickers, a B-movie starlet who had appeared in Attack of the 50 Ft. Woman, ended up mummified in her Los Angeles home last year.
Steven Mikulan |
Los Angeles Magazine |
Feb 2012
The Book of Jobs →
What it means to stay true to the Steve Jobs brand.
Maureen Tkacik |
Reuters |
Feb 2012
A Question of Identity →
On the “unfair significance” of Jeremy Lin.
Jay Caspian Kang |
Grantland |
Feb 2012
KINSHASA →
Kinshasa was a magical place for young party-goers in the 60s. But outside the capital rebel armies led by foreign mercenaries engaged in ruthless war. “Mad Mike” Hoare proved to be too much for Che Guevara:
Che spent his days waiting in the mountains for the rebel leader Laurent Kabila to turn up. He gave the rebels classes in how to be “new men” but they laughed at him, he got dysentery, he...
Resurrecting The Champ →
A newspaper writer’s attempt to solve the mystery of a homeless man who claims to be a once-famous boxer.
J. R. Moehringer |
LA Times Magazine |
May 1997
Cable: A Caucasus Wedding →
The lavish display and heavy drinking concealed the deadly serious North Caucasus politics of land, ethnicity, clan, and alliance.
In a cable brought to light by Wikileaks, the Ambassador to Russia describes a raucous three-day Dagestani wedding attended by Chechnya’s president Ramzan Kadyrov.
William Burns |
The Guardian |
Aug 2006
Absent Things as if They Are Present →
A history of erasure as literature.
Jeannie Vanasco |
The Believer |
Jan 2012
Anatomy of the Great Adderall Drought →
Last Fall, America’s favorite focus drug suddenly went into short supply.
Kelly Bourdet |
Motherboard |
Feb 2012
The Comedians, The Mob and the American Supperclub →
It didn’t matter if these clubs were in Cleveland, Portland, Corpus Christi or Baton Rouge—if it was a nightclub, the owners were the Mob. For a good forty years the Mob controlled American show business.
Kliph Nesteroff |
WFMU |
Feb 2012
Listening to Books →
An essay on audio books.
Maggie Gram |
N+1 |
Feb 2012
America is Bull →
On the rodeo.
Jeanne Marie Laskas |
Esquire |
Jan 1999
Party Crasher →
A profile of Ron Paul.
Kelefa Sanneh |
New Yorker |
Feb 2012
Between Roses in Mumbai →
The story of a young man on the run in the slum he dreams of escaping.
Katherine Boo |
NY Review of Books |
Feb 2012
60 Lives, 30 Kidneys, All Linked →
The stories of a record-setting chain of transplants.
Kevin Sack |
New York Times |
Feb 2012
How I Killed My Mother →
Exploring the relationship between authors and their parents.
It mattered to her that she could have, or might have, been a writer, and perhaps it mattered to me more than I fully understood. She watched my books appear with considerable interest, and wrote me an oddly formal letter about the style of each one, but she was, I knew, also uneasy about my novels. She found them too slow and sad and...
The Forgetting Pill Erases Painful Memories... →
“In the very near future, the act of remembering will become a choice.”
Jonah Lehrer |
Wired |
Feb 2012
Gone Fishing →
A profile of New York chef and fisherman David Pasternack.
Mark Singer |
New Yorker |
Sep 2005
How First Baptist’s Robert Jeffress Ordained... →
Before I met Robert Jeffress, I wanted to hate him. Jeffress is the conservative preacher who made national headlines in October, when he called Mormonism a cult. He’s the senior pastor at First Baptist Dallas, the oldest megachurch in America, and I am certainly not a Baptist. He endorsed Rick Perry for president, and I’m definitely no fan of Perry’s. As a matter of fact, Robert Jeffress and I...
Gaudi From The Grave →
Contemplating Gaudi’s unfinished masterpiece, the Sagrada Familia church, as the controversial finishing work is completed.
Stephen Crittenden |
The Global Mail |
Feb 2012