The Taming of the Chef
A profile of Gordon Ramsay.
A profile of Gordon Ramsay.
Bill Buford New Yorker Apr 2007 35min Permalink
Why “Father of Botox” Arnold Klein, whose famous clients once included Michael Jackson and Elizabeth Taylor, thinks everyone’s out to get him.
Mark Seal Vanity Fair Mar 2012 35min Permalink
In Michele Bachmann’s home district evangelicals have pushed anti-gay policies to the school board. After a rash of suicides, teens are fighting back.
Sabrina Rubin Erdely Rolling Stone Feb 2012 30min Permalink
The rise and fall of the Internet mogul.
Sean Gallagher Ars Technica Jan 2012 15min Permalink
The history of “‘50s-era market-tested USDA White Pan Loaf No. 1.”
Aaron Bobrow-Strain The Believer Feb 2012 25min Permalink
On the late Angelo Dundee, who trained Muhammad Ali.
Gary Smith Sports Illustrated Nov 1987 25min Permalink
On the Republican Party’s successful use of redistricting to “pass draconian anti-immigration laws, end integrated busing, drug-test welfare recipients and curb the ability of death-row inmates to challenge convictions based on racial bias.”
Ari Berman The Nation Feb 2012 15min Permalink
A history of Soul Train’s Chi-town origins.
Jake Austen Chicago Reader Oct 2008 20min Permalink
Fighting to the finish in the most dangerous region of Afghanistan.
Luke Mogelson New York Times Magazine Feb 2012 35min Permalink
On a U.S. soldier burned to the verge of death and the virtual-reality video game doctors used as treatment when he came home.
On the life of Ray Bradbury.
Daniel J. Flynn The American Conservative Jan 2012 15min Permalink
The story of Attila Ambrus, who was released from jail this morning in Hungary. Nicknamed the Whiskey Robber because witnesses always spotted him having a double across the street prior to his heists, Ambrus only stole from state-owned banks and post offices, becoming a Hungarian folk hero during his seven years on the lam. While on his spree he was also the goaltender for Budapest’s best-known hockey team and was arguably the worst pro goalie ever to play the sport, once giving up 23 goals in a single game.
Excerpted from Ballad of the Whiskey Robber: A True Story of Bank Heists, Ice Hockey, Transylvanian Pelt Smuggling, Moonlighting Detectives, and Broken Hearts.
How a drug store conquered New York.
Inside the lives of Sri Lanka’s Tamils as they emerge from a multi-decade war that defined and nearly destroyed them.
Anonymous The Caravan Jan 2012 40min Permalink
An oral history of Saturday Night Live.
Part of our guide to SNL for Slate.
James Andrew Miller, Tom Shales Vanity Fair Sep 2002 45min Permalink
The autonomous car of the future is here:
I was briefly nervous when Urmson first took his hands off the wheel and a synthy woman’s voice announced coolly, “Autodrive.” But after a few minutes, the idea of a computer-driven car seemed much less terrifying than the panorama of indecision, BlackBerry-fumbling, rule-flouting, and other vagaries of the humans around us—including the weaving driver who struggles to film us as he passes.
Tom Vanderbilt Wired Feb 2012 30min Permalink
A profile of the artist.
"Unfortunately, death is a fact of life. I don't think it's happened to me any more unfairly than to anyone else. It could always be worse. I've lost a lot of people, but I haven't lost everybody. I didn't lose my parents or my family. But it's been an incredible education, facing death, facing it the way that I've had to face it at this early age."
David Sheff Rolling Stone Aug 1989 40min Permalink
How the U.S. government used a serial con who was caught running a mail-order steroid pharmacy in Mexico to prove that Google was knowingly placing ads for illegal drugs.
Thomas Catan The Wall Street Journal Jan 2012 Permalink
How Tom Arnold’s little sister started the meth epidemic.
Karl Taro Greenfeld Playboy Jan 2012 30min Permalink
A history.
The explosion of publishing created a much more democratic and permanent network of public communication than had ever existed before. The mass proliferation of newspapers and magazines, and a new-found fascination with the boundaries of the private and the public, combined to produce the first age of sexual celebrity.
Faramerz Dabhoiwala The Guardian Jan 2012 Permalink
How investigators nabbed a key member of a group called “Lost Boy.”
John H. Tucker LA Weekly Jan 2012 25min Permalink
A Houston man allegedly tries to hire several hit men to kill his wife. Each fails miserably. It becomes the talk of the town.
Skip Hollandsworth Texas Monthly Feb 2012 Permalink
As mainstream news loses its relevance, Allred becomes only more relevant to mainstream news. She’s provided thousands of hours of titillating material that has helped keep cable networks from grinding to a halt. The players come and go. Past clients like Amber Frey and Tiger Woods Mistress No. 1 Rachel Uchitel slip back into obscurity. Scott Peterson rots disregarded on death row in San Quentin, and Woods’s sexual escapades no longer mesmerize. But Allred retains her significance. There are always new victims to premiere and promote, new serial sexual harassers or psychopaths to square off against. In this spectacle of scandal, grisly murder, and celebrity wrongdoing, Allred has made herself the stage manager, the content provider, the indispensable performer.
Ed Leibowitz Los Angeles Jan 2012 25min Permalink
Clarence Thomas, then-chairman of the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, profiled by Juan Williams:
He agrees with Reagan's characterization of the civil-rights leaders as old men fomenting discontent to justify their own "rather good positions." "The issue is economics—not who likes you." Thomas has told me. "And when you have the economics, people do have a way of changing their attitudes toward you. I don't see how the civil-rights people today can claim Malcolm X as one of their own. Where does he say black people should go begging the Labor Department for jobs? He was hell on integrationists. Where does he say you should sacrifice your institutions to be next to white people?"
Juan Williams The Atlantic Feb 1987 35min Permalink
“We’re trying really hard to make things better,” said one former Apple executive. “But most people would still be really disturbed if they saw where their iPhone comes from.”
Previously: “Apple, America and a Squeezed Middle Class”
Charles Duhigg, David Barboza New York Times Jan 2012 15min Permalink