My Kasual Kountry Weekend With the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan

A report from the KKK’s 2012 Faith and Freedom conference in Arkansas:

It's quite disconcerting in this modern age to be in a room full of white people who are all spouting the most vile racist slurs that one can imagine, openly, while everyone else laughs and applauds it. There is a Twilight Zone feeling to it, as if you'd stumbled into a secret clubhouse where white people can say those forbidden things—the Valhalla of dumb racist jokes.

2012 National Magazine Awards Finalists: Reporting

  1. Our Man in Kandahar (Matthieu Aikins, The Atlantic)On a 33-year-old warlord’s past deeds.

  2. What Happened To Mitrice Richardson? (Mike Kessler, Los AngelesSearching for answers after the mysterious death of a young woman.

  3. The Apostate (by Lawrence Wright, New Yorker) A screenwriter flees Scientology.

  4. Getting Bin Laden (Nicholas Schmidle, The New Yorker) What happened that night in Abbottabad.

  5. Echoes from a Distant Battlefield (Mark Bowden, Vanity FairThe battle of Wanat, seen from three perspectives: a dead soldier, his father, and his commander.

2012 National Magazine Awards Finalists: Profile Writing

  1. Game of Her Life (Tim Crothers, ESPN the Magazine) For 14-year-old chess progidy Phiona Mutesi, chess is a lifeline

  2. The Blind Man Who Taught Himself How to See (Michael Finkel, Men's Journal) Daniel Kish has been sightless since he was a year old. Yet he can mountain bike. How?

  3. Dewayne Dedmon's Leap Of Faith (Chris Ballard, Sports Illustrated)A young basketball player's choice between his mother’s faith and his own heart.

  4. Barrett Brown is Anonymous (Tim Rogers, D Magazine)On the young man who helped overthrow the government of Tunisia from a Dallas apartment.

2012 National Magazine Awards Finalists: Public Interest

  1. Direct Fail (Natasha Gardner, 5280) Colorado’s policy of sending kids to adult court.

  2. Tiny Little Laws (Kathy Dobie, Harper's) A plague of sexual violence in Indian country.

  3. The Big Business of Breast Cancer (Lea Goldman, Marie Claire) Inside a $6 billion-a-year industry.

  4. The Invisible Army(Sarah Stillman, New Yorker For foreign workers on U.S. bases in Iraq and Afghanistan, war can be hell.

2012 National Magazine Awards Finalists: Feature Writing

  1. "Heavenly Father" (by Luke Dittrich, Esquire) The stories of two dozen strangers who survived the Joplin, Mo., tornado by hiding in a walk-in beer cooler.

  2. The Man Who Sailed His House (Michael Paterniti, GQ) Two days after the Japanese tsunami, after the waves had left their destruction, as rescue workers searched the ruins, news came of an almost surreal survival: Miles out at sea, a

  3. You Blow My Mind, Hey Mickey (John Jeremiah Sullivan, New York Times Magazine) A journey to Disney World with kids and weed.

  4. A Murder Foretold (David Grann, New Yorker) In Guatemala, unravelling the ultimate political conspiracy.

  5. Arms and the Dudes (Guy Lawson, Rolling Stone)How two American kids became big time weapons dealers.

Bruce Springsteen's SXSW Keynote Address

Delivered at the Austin Convention Center on March 15, 2012.

In the beginning, every musician has their genesis moment. For you, it might have been the Sex Pistols, or Madonna, or Public Enemy. It's whatever initially inspires you to action. Mine was 1956, Elvis on the Ed Sullivan Show. It was the evening I realized a white man could make magic, that you did not have to be constrained by your upbringing, by the way you looked, or by the social context that oppressed you. You could call upon your own powers of imagination, and you could create a transformative self.

Ink, Inc.

How reality TV has changed tattooing.

Tattoos and tattoo artists have an undeniable power to attract, repulse, and intimidate. But when confronted with all this life and color, reality TV steamrolls it into the familiar “drama” of preening divas and wounded pride. “Everybody thinks they’re gonna change it,” said Anna Paige, an artist who said she’d turned down her chance at TV stardom. “Everybody thinks they’re gonna have some power.” But wait, isn’t she profiting from tattooing’s mass appeal? “I would have made money anyway.”

Dallas DA Craig Watkins on Witnessing His First Execution

An interview:

Watkins: And then, all of a sudden, you notice that it appears that he is falling asleep and gasping for air—like he is snoring, basically. You could classify it as snoring or as gasping for air. You see his chest moving, and then I guess very quickly—maybe two minutes in—his chest stops moving. And we stand there, I guess, for another 10 minutes, and everybody is just kind of standing there. D Magazine: In total silence? Watkins: No one’s talking. No one’s saying anything. And then you notice that the condemned, he starts to turn this bluish color. So I guess that’s when all his functions have stopped. And then a doctor walks in and takes his vital signs and announces that the person is—he looks at the clock and announces, “The person died at 6:22.” And then they open the door and we all walk out.

I Was a Teenage Gramlich

On competing in the High School Fed Challenge Championship as “Ed Gramlich”:

A team of five students prepares and presents a 15-minute analysis of the US economy, recommends a course of action with respect to interest rates, and then withstands a 10-minute question-and-answer period from a panel of Federal Reserve economists. To prepare for the competition, students look at the same economic indicators and the same forces influencing the economy that our nation's economic leaders examine. And to lend extra verisimilitude to the whole proceeding, competitors are also advised, as we were, to act out the parts of real members of the Federal Open Market Committee.

Kurt Vonnegut: The Art of Fiction No. 64

This interview with Kurt Vonnegut was originally a composite of four interviews done with the author over the past decade. The composite has gone through an extensive working over by the subject himself, who looks upon his own spoken words on the page with considerable misgivings . . . indeed, what follows can be considered an interview conducted with himself, by himself.

Odd Blood: Serodiscordancy, or, Life With an HIV-Positive Partner

I've grown, over the last few months, the beginnings of concerned; he's started to suffer bouts of malaise. Nothing too regular, or too terrible: mild stomach aches, sore joints, general lethargy. In anyone else, it could be anything, etc. In Chad, I grow attuned to the slightest variation in temperature, to the distracted look behind his eyes when food isn't sitting with him.