January 2011
87 posts
1 tag
The Great Afghan Bank Heist →
Poring over stacks of documents, investigators at the American Embassy in Kabul have pinpointed dozens of instances in which Kabul Bank executives may have bribed Afghan officials, including a successful bid to hold the contract to process the salaries that the government pays its employees each month—approximately seventy-five million dollars. Access to the salaries would give bank officials an...
1 tag
Why Reality Shows Failed on Russian TV →
For the Russian version of “The Apprentice,” Vladimir Potanin, a metals oligarch worth more than $10 billion, was recruited to be the boss choosing between the candidates competing for the dream job. Potanin goaded, teased and tortured the candidates as they went through increasingly difficult challenges. The show looked great, the stories and dramas all worked, but there was a...
2 tags
The Daily Beast's Longreads List: 8 Essential... →
1 tag
Show the Monster: Guillermo del Toro's Quest To... →
The size of the collection was disconcerting; it was as if the 40-Year-Old Virgin had been handed a three-million-dollar decorating budget. Del Toro owned more than five thousand comic books and several puppets of Nosferatu. On a shelf, a posed plastic figurine of Leatherface, from “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre,” battled Edward Scissorhands. A life-size statue of Boris Karloff, in the guise of...
1 tag
Steven Slater's Landing →
When an irate female passenger cursed him out after their plane arrived at JFK, the then-38-year-old JetBlue flight attendant with twenty years in the flying business grabbed two cans of beer off the beverage cart, activated the emergency-escape chute, and promptly exited the aircraft, his job, and much of his former life. He now refers to that day simply as “August 9th,” as if it were a major...
1 tag
I Was Teenage Hockey Message Board Jailbait →
Have you ever been caught in a lie? Or caught stealing or speeding or cheating? Maybe you’ve known the impossible weight of the hand on your shoulder, the blinding twirl of the lights in your rearview mirror, the razor-sharp voice of your teacher or wife. Maybe you’ve felt yourself melting, cold water pooling deep down in your gut, the icy clench of humiliation and fear and regret:...
1 tag
The New School of Fish →
Belov was incensed about the tuna, and he took it off his menu. He’ll keep it off until he can find an honest dealer.
“That one was hard, pulling ahi tuna off my menu,” he says, and then pauses. “I had so many people walk up to the fish market and say, ‘What do you mean, you don’t carry it? Mollie Stone’s carries it. Whole Foods carries it.’ ” They assume...
1 tag
The Wave-Maker: On Big Wave Surfer Ken Bradshaw →
[Mark] Foo said, “But, no, no, this is really it, isn’t it? Just two guys in the water. Fifteen- to 18-foot swells. Perfect waves. No sections. This is as good as it gets.”
Bradshaw said, “Yes, Mark. This is what it’s about.” A light came on in his head. He thought, Wow, Mark actually does get it. He actually understands why we do this. Bradshaw said, “There’s just the two of us in...
1 tag
Dealing with Julian Assange and the Secrets He... →
Criminalizing the publication of such secrets by someone who has no official obligation seems to me to run up against the First Amendment and the best traditions of this country. As one of my colleagues asks: If Assange were an understated professorial type rather than a character from a missing Stieg Larsson novel, and if WikiLeaks were not suffused with such glib antipathy toward the United...
1 tag
The Last Temptation of Ted Haggard →
What his wife’s book didn’t do was settle the question of Ted’s sexuality or give insight into how it plays out in their marriage now—whether Ted still battles the same urges that got him to Mike Jones’s massage table. And if so, does he tell her when it happens? Does she worry that he’ll lapse again or that after everything they’ve been through, he’ll...
1 tag
Body Snatchers →
About the same time that Rose Oprea was hospitalized for her stroke, the 62nd precinct of the New York City police department, in Brooklyn, was notified of a possible case of fraud. A couple — Deborah Johnson and her husband, Robert Nelms — had recently purchased the Daniel George & Son Funeral Home. A man had come to the home wishing to bury his aunt, who had prepaid for her funeral;...
1 tag
In Norway, Startups Say Ja to Socialism →
Whereas most entrepreneurs in Dalmo’s position develop a retching distaste for paying taxes, Dalmo doesn’t mind them much. “The tax system is good—it’s fair,” he tells me. “What we’re doing when we are paying taxes is buying a product. So the question isn’t how you pay for the product; it’s the quality of the product.” Dalmo likes the...
1 tag
Robbing from the Poor (Writer) →
“Robin Hood” opens a year late, with a Tomatometer rating of 44% and it is not expected to unseat “Iron Man 2” as #1 film over the weekend. Oh, and they disliked it at Cannes. Oh, and the budget is rumored to be $250 million and maybe even more. Would you believe this film began with one of the hottest screenplays in town? A screenplay that *was not about* Robin Hood?
...
1 tag
Travis the Menace →
Virtually everyone made light of the escapade downtown. The state Department of Environmental Protection was aware of what happened, and also that the Herolds were in violation of a new statute that required a permit to keep a primate over 50 pounds. But they determined that pressing any action would amount to a most likely unwinnable battle to “take custody of a local celebrity” and opted not...
1 tag
Mike Bloomberg Will Save Us from Ourselves If Only... →
Mike Bloomberg has become important because he represents a great American dream, not the one about owning a home or becoming more successful than your father but the one beneath all of those, the foundational American dream — the dream of freedom from politics. Bloomberg is the ultimate independent, the calm modern technocrat rooted in metrics and cleansed of ideology, come to drain the swamps...
1 tag
Meet the Foreskin Restoration Movement →
For Matt, the worst thing about his restoration adventure was the influence the people on the Internet had on him. When he told the story of his two re-circumcisions online, others in the community accused him of lying. “They said how evil circumcision is. Some said they hated their parents because they let it be done to them.”
By Laura Novak, The Good Men Project
2 tags
Jared Keller: Cities and Urban Life: A #Longreads...
jaredbkeller:
I often find that urbanism and urban living are overly romanticized, more often by citydwellers themselves: Stumbling through concrete caravans dripping with mystique, a day-to-day narrative of tempered chaos, or an odd catharsis as told through the lens of sidewalk meet-cute. I often long for life closer to the wilderness, clogged by forests and dirty roads, but I remain...
1 tag
Does Football Have a Future? The NFL and the... →
“In the past, it was a style of ball that was three yards and a cloud of dust, so you didn’t see too many of these big hits, because there wasn’t so much space between players,” the Steelers’ Troy Polamalu said. “I mean, with the passing game now, you get four-wide-receiver sets, sometimes five-wide-receiver sets. You get guys coming across the middle, you get zone...
2 tags
maria bustillos: my #longreads #list : WikiLeaks →
dorkismo:
Here is my entry for the #longreads #list: five essential things to read about WikiLeaks. Julian Assange’s 2006 essays, “State and Terrorist Conspiracies” and “Conspiracies as Governance”, which contextualize the author’s efforts better than any interview or article has yet done. 3,164 words:…
1 tag
Back to the Future with Peter Thiel →
One important difference between the housing bubble and the education bubble is that there was sort of a class aspect to the housing bubble: upper-middle-class people in the U.S. tend to be invested in equities, and middle-class people tend to be invested in housing, so there was a way in which the housing bubble was a way of making fun of the middle class for various sophisticated elites that...
1 tag
Forever 21's Fast (and Loose) Fashion Empire →
How did the Changs, Korean immigrants who opened their first store in a gritty section of Los Angeles in 1984, become such important players in fast fashion? The family credits its accomplishments to hard work, faith, and frugality, though Forever 21 has not prospered without controversy. The company has been accused many times of not just following the trends but selling copies of clothes...
1 tag
Forty Years Later: How 'Oregon Trail' Was Born →
For the next two weeks, Dillenberger and Heinemann spent each night wedged into a tiny computer office—a former janitor’s closet at Bryant Junior High School—tapping code into a teletype machine. The teletype was a screen-less, electromechanical typewriter connected via telephone to a mainframe computer that could issue prompts, receive commands, and run primitive programs.
With no...
1 tag
Playboy Interview: Bill Gates (1994) →
PLAYBOY: What else is Microsoft involved in? We’ve heard about software that can control washing machines, for instance.
GATES: [Laughs] The washing machine example is extreme, but people do sometimes kid us that we see an opportunity to sell our software in broad areas. We are involved in a new generation of fax machines that we think will be better and easier to use. And a generation of...
1 tag
Return of the Hit Man →
Cradling a cosmopolitan in his plump right hand, Don Kirshner is reminiscing about his former life as a pop-music mogul and getting a little wistful. All the hits, all the bands, all the favors he did for up-and-comers. But here he sits, at the best table in this swanky restaurant, pretty much forgotten. Slighted is a better word for it, or that’s the way he feels, anyway. Yes, the maitre...
1 tag
The Secrets Behind Your Flowers: The Path from... →
In 1967 David Cheever, a graduate student in horticulture at Colorado State University, wrote a term paper titled “Bogotá, Colombia as a Cut-Flower Exporter for World Markets.” The paper suggested that the savanna near Colombia’s capital was an ideal place to grow flowers to sell in the United States. After graduating, Cheever put his theories into practice. He and three partners...
1 tag
The Worldwide Leader in Dong Shots →
“It isn’t a question of whether or not he should have done the story. It’s a story,” says Frank Deford, who’s been writing for Sports Illustrated since 1962. “But aren’t there better stories to do? Do we really want to know about Brett Favre trying to get laid? Wouldn’t you rather spend your time delving into the evils of college athletics, or...
1 tag
The White House Looks for Work →
At the center was Summers, a larger-than-life figure who by many accounts was ill suited to run a bureaucratic process. To some of his colleagues, Summers was an eye-rolling intellectual bully. “He’s much better at telling you why you’re stupid than creating a system that can produce usable policy solutions,” said one Obama adviser, who, like others, did not want to be named criticizing Summers....
1 tag
The Case Against Lance Armstrong →
Mike Anderson says he felt a dull sadness as he stared at the little white cardboard box in Armstrong’s bathroom cabinet. His eyes focused on the word ANDRO written on the label. Anderson tried to rationalize it. Maybe it was leftover cancer medication, but this was 2004, long after Armstrong’s disease had been defeated, and there was no prescription attached.
Today Anderson runs...
1 tag
The Worst Case: How the Courts Might Decide On... →
It revolves around a novel philosophical twist: a distinction between activity and inactivity that, repeal advocates say, makes the insurance requirement an illegitimate exercise of federal authority. It’s an arcane legal point, but, suddenly, a consequential one, and not just because of its relevance to health care. Some experts believe that a ruling striking down part of the Affordable Care...
1 tag
Opium Wars: Can Afghan Farmers Really Stop Growing... →
“We have two forms of money here: poppy, and American dollars,” says a beardless 33-year-old Helmand farmer named Rehmatou as he leaves the Marine base with his fertilizer. “This is our economy. The Taliban aren’t pressuring me—that’s just a story you see on TV. I grow for myself. I smuggle for myself. The Taliban are not the reason. Poverty is the reason. And...
1 tag
Why Does Roger Ailes Hate America? →
Does any of us win all the time? Of course not, or else we wouldn’t be average. But Roger Ailes does. And so, Mr. Ailes, Esquire has a question, on behalf of other average Americans: What kind of man wins all the time? What kind of man gives his country, in roughly this order, Mike Douglas, Richard Nixon, Tom Snyder, Ronald Reagan’s “Morning in America,” the Willie Horton ad, the ad in which...
1 tag
Longreads Topic Du Jour: The Playboy Interview →
This morning we posted a classic—Alex Haley’s 1965 Playboy Interview with Martin Luther King Jr. —which served as another reminder of how many great (and, yes, long) interviews Hef’s magazine has published over the years.
Here are a few more from the Longreads archive (Jimmy Carter, John & Yoko, Steve Jobs). We’d love to hear about your own favorites: Tag them with...
1 tag
What We Can Learn from a Nuclear Reactor →
The connection between banks and nuclear reactors is not obvious to most bankers, nor banking regulators. But to the men and women who study industrial accidents such as Three Mile Island, Deepwater Horizon, Bhopal or the Challenger shuttle—engineers, psychologists and even sociologists—the connection is obvious. James Reason, a psychologist who studies human error in aviation, medicine,...
2 tags
pegb: Longreads: new and old favorites
pegb:
Pirate’s Booty by Dave Gardetta
Technosexual: One Man’s Tale of Robot Love by Addy Dugdale
Et Tu, Brooklyn? by Allison Silverman
The Golden Suicides by Nancy Jo Sales
Addiction Files: Recovering From Drug Addiction, Without Abstinence by Maia Szalavitz
Addiction Files: How Do We Define Recovery? by Maia Szalavitz
Secret of AA: After 75 Years, We Don’t Know How It Works by Brendan...
1 tag
Detroitism: What Does 'Ruin Porn' Tell Us About... →
The third major subgenre of the popular Detroit narrative is a backlash against the pornographic excesses of the Lament and is, at best, an attempt to find a new definition of urban vitality. The Utopians are well-meaning defenders of the city’s possibilities. Locally, they are often politically active, often young, and, it should be noted, often white. This class of Detroit story chronicles...
1 tag
Don't Look Back: Republican Congressman Darrell... →
Many politicians have committed indiscretions in earlier years: maybe they had an affair or hired an illegal immigrant as a nanny. Republican Congressman Darrell Issa, it turned out, had, among other things, been indicted for stealing a car, arrested for carrying a concealed weapon, and accused by former associates of burning down a building.
By Ryan Lizza, The New Yorker
1 tag
In a House by the River →
Jerry had been drinking on February 18, 1995, the night he died just a few hundred feet from our cabin. He was alone there that weekend; my mom and I were skiing in Tahoe. I was 13, old enough to feel the calamity of his death but too young for anyone to entrust me with the details. At the time, Mom told me Jerry had gotten into a fight and that his body had been found in the doorway of the...
1 tag
Jeff Smith Was a Rising Political star. Then the... →
That evening, Smith gave a speech at a fund-raiser in a downtown loft. He found it difficult to focus. “As I was talking, I had an ominous sense of foreboding about what was to come,” he says. “I looked around the crowd and thought to myself, ‘This is going to be our last fund-raiser.’”
By Jason Zengerle, The New Republic
1 tag
George Lois on Advertising and the Death of the... →
“[Magazine covers] are very carefully researched. They test them: ‘Do you like this line better than this one?’ If you have to depend on blurbs to have people buy your magazine then you’ve got a piece of shit! You don’t have a brand! You don’t design a magazine for your audience; you create a great magazine for yourself. I’ve had this discussion with...
1 tag
A Solitary Jailhouse Lawyer Argues His Way Out of... →
There was no crusading journalist, no nonprofit group taking up his cause, just Inmate 95A2646, a high-school dropout from Brooklyn, alone in a computerless prison law library. Jabbar Collins pried documents from wary prosecutors, tracked down reluctant witnesses and persuaded them, at least once through trickery, to reveal what allegedly went on before and at the trial where he was convicted of...
1 tag
The History of the Glock in America—and What... →
Glock led the charge back into the large-capacity clip business. Other gun and accessory makers also pushed ever-larger magazines. Today, Sportsman’s Warehouse in Tucson, where Loughner bought his Glock, advertises a 50-round “Tactical Solutions Drum Magazine” for .22 caliber Ruger rifles priced at $64.99. The store also sells Glock-factory magazines, designed for six to 17...
1 tag
The Man Who Wouldn't Die: Meet Olympian and... →
Ru left a message on Grant’s machine. “Hey, brotha,” he said matter-of-factly. “Hey, I just wanted you to know that we crashed into Lake Powell yesterday, and we swam two miles and huddled up like puppies through the night, and we survived. We’re okay, we’re fine. We were discovered this morning. We’re alive. I’ll see you when we get back, man....
1 tag
Europe's Odd Couple →
zeketurner:
That is when she had to face Sarkozy. “She’s a scientist, almost like a German cliché, planning everything, going step by step, unemotional, not a show horse,” Stefan Kornelius, a senior editor of the Süddeutsche Zeitung, told me. “But Sarkozy’s the kind of macho man that she doesn’t like at all. And she and the chancellery are irritated by his jumping from issue to issue, his...
2 tags
AIDS and Media Coverage, the Early Years: A...
Logan Sachon is a writer and editor based in Portland.
***
Rare cancer seen in 41 homosexuals
1981. New York Times. Lawrence K. Altman.
903 words / 3.5 minutes
No mention of AIDS, no utter of HIV, but this is where mainstream media’s coverage of AIDS starts, with the New York Times first mention of a new disease in 1981.
—-
AIDS in the heartland
1987. St Paul Pioneer Press....
1 tag
Gram Junkies: In Transportation Design the Key... →
Transport economist Chris Bradshaw wants planners and designers to respect what he calls “the scalar hierarchy.” This is when trips taken most frequently are short enough to be made by walking (even if pulling a small cart), while the next more frequent trips require a bike or street car and so on. “If one adheres to this, then there are so few trips to be made by car, that...
1 tag
Transcript: President Obama's Address in Tucson →
I want us to live up to her expectations. I want our democracy to be as good as she imagined it. All of us – we should do everything we can to make sure this country lives up to our children’s expectations.
1 tag
The Terminator Scenario: Are We Giving Our... →
Dahm’s vision, however, suggests another “Terminator scenario,” one more plausible and not without menace. Over the course of dozens of interviews with military officials, robot designers and technology ethicists, I came to understand that we are at work on not one but two major projects, the first to give machines ever greater intelligence and autonomy, and the second to maintain control of...
1 tag
Night-Shifting For the Hip Fleet →
Cab stories are tales of survived disasters. The flat-tire-with-no-spare-on-Eighth-Avenue-and-135th-Street is a good cab story. The no-brakes-on-the-park-transverse-at-50-miles-an-hour is a good cab story. The stopped-for-a-red-light-with-teen-agers-crawling-on-the-windshield is not too bad. They’re all good cab stories if you live to tell about them. But a year later the cab stories at Dover...
1 tag
The Road to Economic Crisis Is Paved with Euros →
The advantages of a single European currency were obvious. No more need to change money when you arrived in another country; no more uncertainty on the part of importers about what a contract would actually end up costing or on the part of exporters about what promised payment would actually be worth. Meanwhile, the shared currency would strengthen the sense of European unity. What could go...
1 tag
Whatever Happened to Alternative Nation? Part 7:... →
Search for Bradley Nowell videos on YouTube and you’ll find a smattering of interview clips recorded a year or so before he died. Here he is backstage on the Warped Tour looking like one of the many shirtless, deeply tanned, and blond bros lurking in the audience. He’s wearing gold Elvis sunglasses and talking about partying with the other bands on tour and hanging with champion skateboarder...
