Disarming Viktor Bout
A profile of the world’s most notorious weapons trafficker.
A profile of the world’s most notorious weapons trafficker.
Nicholas Schmidle New Yorker Mar 2012 35min Permalink
On a press junket in Ecuador, the author investigates the ethics of shopping.
Amanda Hess Good Mar 2012 Permalink
The unlikely story of Spanx.
Alexandra Jacobs New Yorker Mar 2011 20min Permalink
The beginnings of the best-selling video game, from a chapter of David Kushner’s new book on the subject.
David Kushner Gamespot Mar 2012 15min Permalink
Lance Butterfield was the captain of the football team, had a 4.0 GPA and a girl he loved. It wasn’t enough for his dad. And then his dad became too much for him.
Part of our guide to Skip Hollandsworth’s true crime writing at Slate.
Skip Hollandsworth Texas Monthly Jun 1998 30min Permalink
Interviews with modern travelling salesmen. The article inspired Kirn’s novel Up in the Air.
What makes this a truly military culture, besides its overwhelming maleness, its air of emotional deprivation and the lousy rations, is its obsession with rank and hierarchy. Like jungle gorillas, business travelers always know where they stand versus the rest of the group. In this parallel universe of upgrade vouchers and priority-boarding privileges, everyone has a number and a position, and who gets that open aisle seat in first class means even more on the road then who earns what.
Walter Kirn GQ Jun 2000 15min Permalink
Why Greece has really failed.
Aristos Doxiadis Open Democracy Sep 2010 20min Permalink
On Jonny Greenwood:
Greenwood is an anomaly: a musician who made his name with a rock band and who is now embraced by the modern-music establishment as an actual, serious composer. The night before the Alvernia session, he was onstage in an aircraft-hangar-size room at a steel plant in Krakow, performing the minimalist composer Steve Reich’s “Electric Counterpoint” for an audience that included Reich himself, as part of a weeklong new-music festival, Sacrum Profanum. (Reich is a fan; he praises Greenwood’s decision to have the string section play with guitar picks on “Popcorn Superhet” as “the first new approach to pizzicato since Bartok.”) He wasn’t the only performer at Sacrum Profanum with pop-music credentials — the bill also included the techno provocateur Aphex Twin and Adrian Utley, from the trip-hop band Portishead. But he was the only guy from a superfamous rock band whose singer has appeared on the cover of Rolling Stone.
Alex Pappademas New York Times Magazine Mar 2012 15min Permalink
An essay on working at Sotheby’s.
Art pricing is not absolute magic; there are certain rules, which to an outsider can sound parodic. Paintings with red in them usually sell for more than paintings without red in them. Warhol’s women are worth more, on average, than Warhol’s men. The reason for this is a rhetorical question, asked in a smooth continental accent: “Who would want the face of some man on their wall?”
Alice Gregory n+1 Mar 2012 20min Permalink
A profile of the “acrobatic genius of the trapeze”:
As he spoke, he looked up at the pipes and swings in the arena ceiling. A mechanic was working on the rigging, but Tito spoke thoughtfully, for he seemed to be seeing something else. "Sometimes I see movies of myself in the air and I say, 'Jesus, how can I do that?' I wonder who do I think I am ... but, yes, I do admire myself in films sometimes as if I am watching another person. I have sometimes dreamed my tricks at night, you know, and then tried to master them from the dream."
William Johnson Sports Illustrated Apr 1974 25min Permalink
A group of teens allegedly create a violent game with a simple premise: “to knock out a stranger with a single punch.”
Todd C. Frankel The St. Louis Post-Dispatch Mar 2012 15min Permalink
The Republican candidate works a room, as excerpted from Richard Ben Cramer’s biography of the senator:
No one can do that day after day, week after week, for years ... without some rock-hard certainty that can't be milled away by nonsense and stress. He has to know: Why him? And: Why now? ... He has to know that he is The One. And if he's strong enough to keep going-if he's able, smart, and lucky-then, he'll get to the final twist in the road, when things catch fire, he can see how his words make the people feel, he can feel how those words now matter to him. He can make all the difference just by walking into a room. There are thousands of people -- and they want him. He and his campaign fill the lives of people who are almost strangers, and he takes over the life of everyone dear to him. He has to, it's all right -- because it's that important. Now, he knows: Not only should I be President, I am going to be President!
Richard Ben Cramer Frontline Oct 1996 15min Permalink
A profile of William Heirens, the convicted “Lipstick Killer” of Chicago, who died this week.
Robert McClory Chicago Reader Aug 1989 35min Permalink
How a mysterious twitching epidemic overtook one Western New York town.
Susan Dominus New York Times Magazine Mar 2012 30min Permalink
All violence is not like all other violence. Every Jewish death is not like every other Jewish death. To believe otherwise is to revive the old typological thinking about Jewish history, according to which every enemy of the Jews is the same enemy, and there is only one war, and it is a war against extinction, and it is a timeless war.
Leon Wieseltier The New Republic May 2002 15min Permalink
Can The Washington Post be saved?
Sarah Ellison Vanity Fair Apr 2012 30min Permalink
On solitary confinement:
"Two or three hundred years from now people will look back on this lockdown mania like we look back on the burning of witches."
In which the author’s wife attempts to break the world record in Tetris.
Billy Baker The Boston Globe Aug 2007 25min Permalink
The profile of a crime syndicate which dominates the European cocaine trade.
Andreas Ulrich Der Spiegel Jan 2012 20min Permalink
A profile of the Bronx immigrant family on the other end of your Chinese takeout menu.
Kevin Heldman Capital New York Oct 2011 20min Permalink
A profile of thriller writer Harlan Coben and what it takes to succeed as a novelist even when the literary establishment doesn’t acknowledge your existence.
Eric Koningsberg The Atlantic Jul 2007 30min Permalink
In 1970s Britain, conservative philosophy was the preoccupation of a few half-mad recluses. Searching the library of my college, I found Marx, Lenin, and Mao, but no Strauss, Voegelin, Hayek, or Friedman. I found every variety of socialist monthly, weekly, or quarterly, but not a single journal that confessed to being conservative.
A young Brit goes against the political grain.
Roger Scruton New Criterion Feb 2003 1h25min Permalink
Forty years ago, a man was killed in Chicago because he was black. The daughter he never met is still searching for clues about his death.
Steve Bogira Chicago Reader Mar 2012 45min Permalink
People know Krugman these days as a feisty political polemicist, but back when he was less politically engaged he was absolutely one of the very finest popularizers of economic ideas ever. This piece is a wonderful, brief introduction to the fundamental economic forces driving the world and a lot of my current thinking is preoccupied with the questions it raises. Reading it again, I realized that a point I like to make about the elevator being a great mass transit technology is almost certainly something I subconsciously picked up here.
Paul Krugman New York Times Magazine Sep 1996 Permalink
Jane Jacobs has a somewhat ambiguous legacy—or at least one that's contested by different factions in the present-day debate over cities and urbanism—but to me her most important idea is encapsulated in the title and spirit of this piece. It's old and, I think, utterly prescient about what successive waves of planning fads miss. The purpose of urban space is for people to use it. A great place is a place where people want to be.
Jane Jacobs Fortune Apr 1958 25min Permalink