February 2011
68 posts
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James L. Brooks on Journalism, the Oscars, and... →
We filmed it almost entirely in sequence. We even broke up the newsroom scenes just so we could shoot the picture in sequence. And that means we kept informing ourselves. That means we woke up and these things happened with people in the sequence they’re supposed to happen. So that’s “process,” as you say. But keep in mind—we wouldn’t be sitting here talking about...
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The Madoff Tapes →
And so, sitting alone with his therapist, in the prison khakis he irons himself, he seeks reassurance. “Everybody on the outside kept claiming I was a sociopath,” Madoff told her one day. “I asked her, ‘Am I a sociopath?’ ” He waited expectantly, his eyelids squeezing open and shut, that famous tic. “She said, ‘You’re absolutely not a sociopath. You have morals. You have remorse.’ ” Madoff...
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Story's End: Grief and Writing a Mother's Death →
It was my mother who had long ago planted in me the habit of writing things down in order to understand them. When I was five, she gave me a red corduroy-covered notebook for Christmas. I sat in my floral nightgown turning the blank pages, puzzled.
“What do I do with it?” I wanted to know.
“You write down things that happened to you that day.”
“Why would I want to do that?”
“Because maybe...
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Coke, Hookers, Hospital, Repeat →
“Here’s a peek into my insanity,” Charlie Sheen tells me one afternoon in February. “People say, ‘What are you thinking?’ and here’s the truth. It’s generally a quote from Apocalypse Now or Jaws.”
It’s Sheen’s fourteenth day of sobriety (this time around), and he’s calling from a baseball diamond on the west side of Los...
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Clayton Christensen: The Survivor →
Clayton
I got Type 1 diabetes at 30. It hit me in 1982 when I was a White House Fellow in Washington. I had viral pneumonia. I lost 35 pounds in six weeks. And I couldn’t see anything. Everything was blurry. I was always thirsty.
Matthew
One time we visited my mom’s sister in Charlottesville. My mom is the oldest of 12 children, 9 boys. My dad drank a full 2 liters of Seven Up at...
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USA Inc.: An Open Letter to Shareholders, by Mary... →
What you’ll see on the following pages is hard to misinterpret: We have big issues, but the U.S. is in sounder shape than Apple was in 1997, when it lost a billion dollars. That’s the year Steve Jobs returned as CEO and took extreme measures, including agreeing to make Internet Explorer the Mac’s default browser. Jobs also got Microsoft to buy $150 million in nonvoting Apple...
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The Cherokees vs. Andrew Jackson →
To a degree unique among the five major tribes in the South, the Cherokees used diplomacy and legal argument to protect their interests. With the help of a forward-looking warrior named Major Ridge, John Ross became the tribe’s primary negotiator with officials in Washington, D.C., adept at citing both federal law and details from a dozen treaties the Cherokees signed with the federal government...
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If She Did It →
No one expected Judith Regan to go quietly. After dropping out of sight for much of this year, on Nov. 13 she filed a lawsuit against News Corp, HarperCollins, and Jane Friedman for defamation, breach of contract, and sex discrimination. Most spectacularly, the lawsuit alleges that Ms. Regan was the victim of a vast conspiracy, set in motion by two unnamed News Corp executives, who were worried...
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'I'm Glad I Went to Prison' →
He entered school with vague ambitions of returning to his previous career, that of a grinding forward in the NHL. Although he still would one day like to play professional hockey again, now his long-term goal is to earn a Ph.D. in psychology. His professors say that’s no pipe dream. “He’s an absolutely outstanding student. He handed in a paper that I can freely say is one of...
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Army Deploys Psy-Ops on U.S. Senators →
theatlantic:
This is like something right out of “The Manchurian Candidate”:
The U.S. Army illegally ordered a team of soldiers specializing in “psychological operations” to manipulate visiting American senators into providing more troops and funding for the war, Rolling Stone has learned – and when an officer tried to stop the operation, he was railroaded by military investigators.
The...
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The Radical →
By day, Joseph Harris studied potential treatments for gastrointestinal cancer — work that invariably required the use of animal models. By night, he crusaded against such animal research, sabotaging companies with links to it. Within a month, Harris would be caught vandalizing another company. Ultimately, he would become the first person in the United Kingdom to be convicted under a law...
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Laura Vanderkam: Where Did the Korean Greengrocers... →
ladyjournos:
The entrepreneurs who nourished New York have moved up and out.
City Journal || Winter 2010
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Playboy Bunnies. $2 Million Bugattis. Meet the... →
Teodorin’s 68-year-old father, Brig. Gen. Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo, seized power of Equatorial Guinea in a 1979 coup and has made apparent his intent to hand over power to a chosen successor. Obiang has sired an unknown number of children with multiple women, but 41-year-old Teodorin is his clear favorite and is being groomed to take over. That’s a scary prospect both for the...
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The Rude Warrior →
At the time of Mel Gibson’s July 2006 arrest for driving under the influence, he had just come back from shooting Apocalypto in Mexico, where he’d apparently started drinking again. According to one source, his first reaction when he was pulled over (before going off on the Jews), never reported in the press, was “My life is over. I’m fucked. Robyn’s going to leave me.” The couple’s...
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Tales from the Essay Test-Scoring Business →
Then came the question from hell out of Louisiana: “What are the qualities of a good leader?”
One student wrote, “Martin Luther King Jr. was a good leader.” With artfulness far beyond the student’s age, the essay delved into King’s history with the civil rights movement, pointing out the key moments that had shown his leadership.
There was just one problem:...
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“The idea that men will be turned off by ambition or success is just another part...”
– Molly Lambert, In Which We Teach You How To Be A Woman In Any Boys’ Club (via meaghano)
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The Stutterer: How He Makes His Voice Heard →
Today, I am still being jolted, and the jagged terrain behind bears the track marks of my own innumerable small humiliations. In the seventh grade: A substitute asks the class to read out loud, and when I stumble over my first sentence, she inquires of the other students whether I’m “OK” and “always like this,” and while I continue fighting with a “pr”...
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Whatever Happened to Alternative Nation? Part 10:... →
After losing money on the first Woodstock sequel in 1994, Scher told reporters at Woodstock 99 that he was determined “to try and make a profit on this one.” Organizers were later criticized for charging $150 a ticket ($180 at the gate) and $5 for beer, though those prices now seem comparable to festivals of similar size and stature. Less excusable was how decisions vital to the functionality of...
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The People V. Football →
She had no idea, back then, that he was sick. She had no idea he was losing his mind. Something neurological, the doctors are now saying, some kind of sludge blocking pathways in his brain. Would it have made a difference if she knew? Of course it would have. But you can’t think like that. And you can’t give a shit about people whispering behind your back. You hear about Fred...
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Rage Against Your Machine: Drivers vs. Cyclists in... →
“As a couples therapist, I tell people that we take things so personally,” he says as we near the Whitestone Bridge, on the first dedicated bike path we’ve seen in more than two hours. It’s easy, when a car edges too close or cuts him off, to “go to that paranoid place where they’re just trying to fuck with me. We’re so worried that someone else can...
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The Truth About Sex Addiction →
Within a half-hour of my first meeting Neil Melinkovich, a 59-year-old life coach, sometime writer and former model who has been in Sex Addicts Anonymous for more than 20 years, he told me about the time in 1987 that he made a quick detour from picking up his girlfriend at the Los Angeles airport so he could purchase a service from a prostitute. Afterward, he noticed what he thought was red...
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The Loneliness of the American College Transfer... →
I don’t usually bother telling people I went to Michigan for a single semester anymore. There isn’t much point because I’m at the age where people don’t give a shit where you went to school. They just ask you that question as a way of passing the time. But I also don’t mention it much because frankly, I’m still somewhat embarrassed by it. I transferred from...
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Taming the Wild →
Mavrik, the object of Trut’s attention, is about the size of a Shetland sheepdog, with chestnut orange fur and a white bib down his front. He plays his designated role in turn: wagging his tail, rolling on his back, panting eagerly in anticipation of attention. Trut reaches in and scoops him up, then hands him over to me. Cradled in my arms, gently jawing my hand in his mouth, he’s...
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The Day the Movies Died →
“Fear has descended,” says James Schamus, the screenwriter-producer who also heads the profitable indie company Focus Features, “and nobody in Hollywood wants to be the person who green-lit a movie that not only crashes but about which you can’t protect yourself by saying, ‘But at least it was based on a comic book!’ “
By Mark Harris, GQ
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Turks and Caicos: Caribbean Hangover →
The blue water is so clear you can count every reef, so still you can see the odd cloud reflected in it. Lucy and Jeff have agreed to offer a view from the sky of what wary developers wrought on the ground: shuttered private-island resorts and abandoned luxury hotels marring the landscape, suspended in time by financing woes, criminal investigations, or both. This British territory, largely...
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The One-Man Political Machine →
On a brutally cold morning in mid-December, Rahm Emanuel, hatless and wearing a glove on only his left hand, stood for an hour in front of the turnstiles at the Paulina el station, which sits in his old Congressional district on Chicago’s North Side. As the trains slammed and screeched overhead, he offered his hand to the mostly young and professional commuters heading downtown. Emanuel’s manner...
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Tabloid Takedown →
The John Edwards tale began, like so many National Enquirer investigations, with a phone call. When the tip line rang in the paper’s Santa Monica office, reporters often raced to answer it. Rick Egusquiza grabbed it late one afternoon in fall 2007, knowing full well that nine out of 10 calls were worthless, just wackos promising the story of the decade. Egusquiza, 44, had been a Venice Beach...
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Why Isn't Wall Street In Jail? →
Over drinks at a bar on a dreary, snowy night in Washington this past month, a former Senate investigator laughed as he polished off his beer.
“Everything’s fucked up, and nobody goes to jail,” he said. “That’s your whole story right there. Hell, you don’t even have to write the rest of it. Just write that.”
I put down my notebook. “Just that?”
“That’s right,” he said, signaling to the...
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Meet the Heroes of Early Scientology Reporting →
Then came the six-part expose published June 24th through 29th, 1990, in the Los Angeles Times, a story that conclusively divided the wheat from the chaff where Scientology rumors were concerned. Joel Sappell and Robert W. Welkos spent five years on the story and it was, and still is, a corker. The other day Sappell told me that the Times’ Scientology investigation began when he learned...
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Is Ecstasy a Viable Treatment for Post-Traumatic... →
The pioneer of PE therapy is Edna Foa, PhD, professor of clinical psychology at the University of Pennsylvania and director of its renowned Center for the Treatment and Study of Anxiety. Foa says she was intrigued when Michael Mithoefer first described his MDMA study to her. Then she watched a video of a session. “I didn’t know what was going on there. I was alarmed,” she says. “Two therapists,...
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Making Chicago's Top Chef →
With three Michelin stars to Grant Achatz’s name and many critics convinced that Alinea is now the best restaurant in the United States, Achatz and Kokonas are in an enviable position: They can do what they want. … Take, for instance, Next’s reservation system. There are no reservations. If you want to eat there, you will have to buy tickets through Next’s website. So...
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How Egypt's Leaders Found 'Off' Switch for the... →
Epitaphs for the Mubarak government all note that the mobilizing power of the Internet was one of the Egyptian opposition’s most potent weapons. But quickly lost in the swirl of revolution was the government’s ferocious counterattack, a dark achievement that many had thought impossible in the age of global connectedness. In a span of minutes just after midnight on Jan. 28, a technologically...
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The Hard Luck and Beautiful Life of Liam Neeson →
Liam Neeson and I last spoke a week before I wrote this sentence. At that time, I asked him what he remembered about the interview I’d done with him at a restaurant in New York almost three weeks before that. He said, “I remember you told me that story about your accident, and that was pretty hard for you. I remember that you made me draw that picture of my house, and I remember that...
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Bohemian Cove: Inside Malibu's Hottest Trailer... →
In the 1990s, some of the trailers at Paradise Cove went for as little as $25,000, while trailers with an ocean view sold for up to $400,000. But in the housing boom of 2006, prices went up tenfold, much more than in the rest of Malibu, even though buying a trailer is a pretty sketchy real-estate deal. The owner of the park still controls the land, and you’re just buying the...
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Diseases in a Dish →
On June 26, 2007, Wendy Chung, director of clinical genetics at Columbia University, drove to the New York City borough of Queens with a delicate request for the Croatian matriarchs of a star-crossed family. She asked the two sisters, one 82 and the other 89, if they would donate some of their skin cells for an ambitious, highly uncertain experiment that, if it succeeded, promised a double...
Utne Reader: The Best Tumblrs for Magazine Freaks →
utnereader:
Longreads - A regularly-updated aggregator of the best long-form journalism
Mother Jones - Only one thing is as delightful to read as the kicking-ass-and-taking-names investigative journalism of Mother Jones: the snarky, up-to-the-minute commentary from the MoJo web crew
FastCo - …
Thanks Utne Reader!
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The Sabotaging of Iran →
Majid Shahriyari became an Iranian martyr while he was driving to work on an autumn day in Tehran. As he made his way along Artesh Boulevard, an explosive device ripped through his car. The 45-year-old was a devout man: Iranians would describe him as a Hizbollahi, a person fiercely loyal to the country’s Islamic system and easily identified by his unshaven face and simple clothes. But Shahriyari...
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The Life and Death of Blago Aide Christopher Kelly →
“He was part of [Blagojevich’s] inner, inner circle, about as close to the sun as you can get.”
Those days were gone. Now Kelly was holing up on and off in this trailer near 173rd and Cicero. His marriage was on the rocks—he was shacking up in a downtown condo with his girlfriend, Clarissa Flores-Buhelos, a married woman two decades his junior. The feds had indicted him three times in two...
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The Untold Story of How My Dad Helped Invent the... →
Jef Raskin, my father, helped develop the Macintosh, and I was recently looking at some of his old documents and came across his February 16, 1981 memo detailing the genesis of the Macintosh. It was written in reaction to Steve Jobs taking over managing hardware development. Reading through it, I was struck by a number of the core principles Apple now holds that were set in play three years...
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The Printed World →
The printing of parts and products has the potential to transform manufacturing because it lowers the costs and risks. No longer does a producer have to make thousands, or hundreds of thousands, of items to recover his fixed costs. In a world where economies of scale do not matter any more, mass-manufacturing identical items may not be necessary or appropriate, especially as 3D printing allows...
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One Very, Very Indie Band →
“For ‘Neon Bible,’ we met with a lot of dudes, but honestly it wasn’t that interesting,” Win says. “Merge is like the labels used to be, based on someone’s tastes and interest in music —”
“—instead of statistics and marketing,” Régine says.
“If you look at the Web sites of a lot of the majors,” Win goes on, “they’re selling everything — hip-hop, country, Disney soundtracks. It’s the...
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Why Fashion Keeps Tripping Over Race →
They were cheering the black women, but not because they had performed dramatic runway pyrotechnics. They were cheering the women for the great accomplishment of simply being black, which, one might argue, in an industry that remains stubbornly homogeneous in many respects, is a feat worth getting excited about. In fact, when the black model Jourdan Dunn appeared in 2008 in what had been up...
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The Lisa Simpson Book Club: Lisa's Longreads →
lisasimpsonbookclub:
1. A Convesation With Gore Vidal (The Atlantic)
Gore Vidal may have kissed more boys than Lisa, that didn’t stop her from enjoying The City and the Pillar. For a quicker (let more substantive) taste of the Ambrosia Vidal, read this 2009 interview with John Meroney in The Atlantic, where GV touches on the Obama presidency, the sexual exploits of Bill Clinton, and more.
...
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The Irish Affliction →
Certainly many Irish people find the idea of abandoning Catholicism to be as counterintuitive as giving up their racial or sexual identity. A televised panel discussion on the abuse crisis last summer ended with a reporter asking a woman who was voicing her anger if she was ready to leave the Catholic Church. She paused, as if befuddled, then said, “Where would I go?” Then again, while until...
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The Complete Oral History of 'Party Down' →
“Let’s put it this way: We were asked by the network, and not in an offensive way, to explore premium content, and part of that was some nudity if it was possible. It made us all flinch a little bit. Porn awards [‘Sin Say Shun Awards Afterparty’] was born from trying to take that request and figure out a way to do it that will enhance the show. Failed orgy [‘Nick...
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Consumed →
To be a kayaker in Africa is to be constantly warned that the rivers are too dangerous—too many lethal rapids, too many angry hippos, too many hungry crocodiles. Like John Goddard and others before them, Hendrik Coetzee, Ben Stookesberry, and Chris Korbulic had simply come to terms with the risks. The new team did, however, have one serious misunderstanding of the small rivers that feed the...
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The Fresh Air Interview: Church of Scientology,... →
GROSS: There was a meeting that you refer to in your article about Scientology, where people from the New Yorker staff met with representatives from Scientology. What was this meeting about?
Mr. WRIGHT: That was one of the most amazing days of my life. I had been out to Los Angeles to interview Tommy Davis over the Memorial Day weekend. And when he finally did come to meet with me, he said that...
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What Was He Thinking? →
Jake Plummer never went to Tampa Bay, of course, just as he never offered his services to any other NFL team. Upon retiring in March 2007, he held a press conference at the Denver Athletic Club. Grasping a lectern, he told a crowd of reporters that he was “running away from the game” but not in “fear or fright.” He credited his teammates for his success, invoked his...
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How Great Entrepreneurs Think →
“OK, I need to know which of their various groups of students, trainees, and individuals would be most interested so I can target the audience a little bit more. What other information…I’ve never done consumer marketing, so I don’t really know. I think probably…I think mostly I’d just try to…I would…I wouldn’t do all this, actually. I’d...
