Does a Sugar Bear Bite?
A profile of Suge Knight, 29 and the C.E.O. of Death Row Records, before the deaths of Tupac and Notorious B.I.G.
A profile of Suge Knight, 29 and the C.E.O. of Death Row Records, before the deaths of Tupac and Notorious B.I.G.
Lynn Hirschberg New York Times Magazine Jan 1996 35min Permalink
Dikembe Mutombo, humanitarian and former NBA center, and oil executive Kase Lawal arrange a ill-fated deal to buy $30 million in gold in Kenya.
Armin Rosen The Atlantic Mar 2012 20min Permalink
What really happened between the plaintiffs in Lawrence vs. Texas, the case that ended anti-sodomy laws?
Dahlia Lithwick New Yorker Mar 2012 15min Permalink
The hunt for rare 1933 Double Eagle coins:
The U.S. Secret Service, responsible for protecting the nation’s currency, has been pursuing them for nearly 70 years, through 13 Administrations and 12 different directors. The investigation has spanned three continents and involved some of the most famous coin collectors in the world, a confidential informant, a playboy king, and a sting operation at the Waldorf Astoria in Manhattan. It has inspired two novels, two nonfiction books, and a television documentary. And much of it has centered around a coin dealer, dead since 1990, whose shop is still open in South Philadelphia, run by his 82-year-old daughter.
Susan Berfield Businessweek Aug 2011 15min Permalink
"I thought dying for your country was the worst thing that could happen to you, and I don't think it is. I think killing for your country can be a lot worse. Because that's the memory that haunts."
On February 25, 1969, Bob Kerrey led a raid into a Vietnamese peasant hamlet during which at least 13 unarmed women and children were killed.
Gregory L. Vistica New York Times Magazine Apr 2001 30min Permalink
Inside a restaurant lawsuit.
Michael Chow’s complaint, which sought $21 million in damages, alleged that the team behind Philippe, including chef Philippe Chau, restaurateur Stratis Morfogen (also behind the well-received Ciano) and several codefendants, appropriated the Satay recipe and 11 other Mr Chow standbys, the “modern” decor of Mr Chow’s restaurants and even the name Chow—thereby engaging in deceptive trade practices, swiping trade secrets and infringing on the Mr Chow trademark.
Aaron Gell The New York Observer Feb 2012 15min Permalink
An essay on craft, excerpted from Writing About Architecture: Mastering the Language of Buildings and Cities.
Alexandra Lange Places Journal Mar 2012 10min Permalink
The artist discusses her latest record, Biophilia, science and music education.
Up until she developed a vocal-cord nodule a few years ago, Björk made a point of not investigating how that instrument worked. “With arrangements and lyrics,” she says, squinting over her coffee, “I work more with the left side of my brain. But my voice has always been very right brain. I didn’t try to analyze it at all. I didn’t even know until I started all this voice work, two years ago, what my range was. I didn’t want to let the academic side into that—I worried the mystery would go.”
Nitsuh Abebe New York Feb 2012 10min Permalink
An analysis of Dr. Seuss’ literature.
Louis Menand New Yorker Dec 2002 15min Permalink
The landmark article that changed the way communities were policed:
This wish to "decriminalize" disreputable behavior that "harms no one"- and thus remove the ultimate sanction the police can employ to maintain neighborhood order—is, we think, a mistake. Arresting a single drunk or a single vagrant who has harmed no identifiable person seems unjust, and in a sense it is. But failing to do anything about a score of drunks or a hundred vagrants may destroy an entire community. A particular rule that seems to make sense in the individual case makes no sense when it is made a universal rule and applied to all cases. It makes no sense because it fails to take into account the connection between one broken window left untended and a thousand broken windows.
George L. Kelling, James Q. Wilson The Atlantic Mar 1982 25min Permalink
A chronicle of the 2010 wildfire that burned down 169 homes in Colorado, told via the people who lived through it.
Robert Sanchez 5280 Sep 2011 30min Permalink
Putin v. Khodorkovsky:
Almost a decade ago, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, then the owner of the Yukos Oil Company and Russia’s richest man, completely miscalculated the consequences of standing up to Vladimir Putin, then Russia’s president. Putin had Khodorkovsky arrested, completely miscalculating the consequences of putting him in prison. During his eight years in confinement, Khodorkovsky has become Russia’s most trusted public figure and Putin’s biggest political liability. As long as Putin rules Russia and Khodorkovsky continues to act like Khodorkovsky, Khodorkovsky will remain in prison—and Putin will remain terrified of him.
Masha Gessen Vanity Fair Apr 2012 25min Permalink
Murder in the Juarez Valley:
A few weeks after Saul Reyes and his family fled Mexico, I drove to an immigrant shelter in downtown El Paso to see him. As the former city secretary of Guadalupe, Saul had once been in charge of recording the births and deaths of everyone in his hometown. He’d taken it upon himself now to collect every single name of those who had died or disappeared in Guadalupe since the killing began in 2008. Through media reports and meetings with the many valley exiles now living in Texas, Saul had compiled a list of the town’s dead and disappeared. Showing me the book, he turned page after page of names. So far he had counted 180 dead, 26 disappeared, and eight unknown bodies dumped in his small town of 3,000 people. “There are a lot more, but these are the ones I’ve been able to collect,” he said. In his careful, spidery script, he had written on one page the names of his six family members.
Melissa Del Bosque Texas Observer Feb 2012 35min Permalink
How the Justice Department killed a $2.5 billion industry.
Chris Parker Village Voice Feb 2012 20min Permalink
On the ever-expanding world of targeted online advertising.
Alexis Madrigal The Atlantic Feb 2012 15min Permalink
When computer science legend Jim Gray disappeared, his friends and colleagues – including Bill Gates and Larry Ellison – used every technological tool at their disposal to try to find him.
Steve Silberman Wired Jul 2007 30min Permalink
The Mouth of the South is leading a relatively quiet life.
Stephen Galloway The Hollywood Reporter Feb 2012 25min Permalink
An oral history of the Pacers/Pistons melee in 2004.
Jonathan Abrams Grantland Feb 2012 55min Permalink
A Romanian-German novelist on being pursued by Ceaucescu’s secret police.
Herta Müller Die Zeit Aug 2009 25min Permalink
The story of Southwest Airlines.
S. C. Gwynne Texas Monthly Mar 2012 25min Permalink
On prisoners with Alzheimer’s disease and their incarcerated caretakers.
Pam Belluck New York Times Feb 2012 Permalink
He was fired from the company he helped create, YouSendIt. Then the cyberattacks started.
"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.
Mormonism’s past and present.
Lawrence Wright New Yorker Jan 2002 50min Permalink
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 of journalism...in certain ways has aspects of a thinly disguised hit piece... a hole filled swiss cheese of wrong facts, misleading insinuations, and in general lazy, substandard, agendized non-reporting...again and again Mr. Heath attempts to turn the piece into a political piece...GQ has allowed Heath to go for the cheap shot..."
Chris Heath GQ Feb 2012 1h5min Permalink