Longform

Caitlin Curran was fired from WNYC for attending an Occupy Wall Street protest. The author explains why her boss was wrong.

It had seemed simple in the beginning. Now everything was so complicated, he wasn’t sure what the truth was. He had to admit that he might have gotten involved with the wrong people—that he might have become part of a scam within a scam.

An investigation into the events surrounding Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s May 2011 arrest for sexual assault.

Tom Wicker was without a notebook on November 22, 1963. Instead, reported Gay Talese, he “scribbled his observations and facts across the back of a mimeographed itinerary of Kennedy’s two-day tour of Texas.”

Here’s the 3,700-word masterpiece he filed.

New from 7STOPS: </em>Donald Judd, Judge Roy Bean, and the impact each man had on his West Texas home.

How the People’s Temple tore one family apart, told in part via letters:

We have at long last opened our hearts to you, expressing the sorrow and agony which we have restrained over six long years. Any time you express the wish to resume normal relations and exchange with us, the past will be forgotten. For after all we do love you and the children more than any other persons. We shall continue to cherish you to our last day on earth. The peerless joy of raising you from childhood to youth is a unique life experience, indeed. Your father and mother

I first learned about cloud lovers in a police report concerning a man who received a blowjob from a young woman and went mad. The man — let's call him Carl (police reports have the names of suspects and victims redacted) — was in his 40s, and the woman, let's call her Lisa, was almost 18. The two first met in the fall of 2003 at a local TV station that was holding a contest to find the best video footage of Northwest clouds. According to the report, which was lost when I cleaned my messy desk in 2005 (I'm recalling all of this from an imperfect memory), Carl, who was married and well-to-do, fell in love with Lisa, whose family was not so well-off, upon seeing her for the first time. He had a videocassette in his hand; she had a videocassette in her hand. He showed his tape to the station's weatherman (sun, sky, clouds). She showed hers (clouds, sky, sun). During the contest, his eyes could not escape her beauty. After the contest, the impression she made on his mind intensified. That bewitching coin in the short story by Jorge Luis Borges, "The Zahir," comes to mind. If a person sees this coin only once, the memory of its image begins to more and more dominate his/her thoughts and dreams. Soon the coin becomes the mind's sole reality. Lisa's face was Carl's Zahir.

Law enforcement vs. local fishermen in Massachusetts.

A profile of the late actor-turned NRA president:

A figure emerges from the wings, more than six feet tall but appearing shorter, his torso inclined forward. Speedo propylene beach slippers make the journey to the podium with hesitant steps. Hip-replacement surgery and old age have dampened the fabled dynamism: no more battles with broadswords; no more chariot races for him. But above the uncertain legs, the chest is still massive, the cheekbones still chiseled, the broken nose as resolute as the NRA eagle on all those baseball caps bobbing above the crowd. As Charlton Heston approaches the microphone, his lungs swell, the vocal cords making their splendid, vibrant music out of ordinary air. "I'm inclined to quit while I'm ahead," he jokes. "But I won't. No!"

On a breed at risk.

Rule #5: “Be unflappable.”

In that first New York City apartment, not once but twice, cops came to bust brothels operating on our floor. When they attempted to batter down our door instead of our neighbors', we opened up, pointed them in the right direction, and explained cheerily, "Oh, we're not hookers!" To our great satisfaction, the mystery of why that man was always washing sheets in the shared laundry room had finally been solved.

On the occasion of Hamid Karzai’s visit to the White House, a fever dream tour of the Afghanistan war through the eyes of the leaders who gave birth to its narrative.

The limited vision of the news gurus.

A profile of Jim Henson before the release of the first Muppet movie.

A statistics-based argument that drug pricing, not drug use or law enformencement, is the only way to predict swings in violent crime rates.

The demise of America’s favorite mega-bookstore and the factors beyond the e-book boom that fueled the book retail meltdown.

Breaking the news of the Kennedy assassination, an oral history:

Wicker: [In the press room] we received an account from Julian Reed, a staff assistant, of Mrs. John Connally’s recollection of the shooting…. The doctors had hardly left before Hawks came in and told us Mr. Johnson would be sworn in immediately at the airport. We dashed for the press buses, still parked outside. Many a campaign had taught me something about press buses and I ran a little harder, got there first, and went to the wide rear seat. That is the best place on a bus to open up a typewriter and get some work done.

On Michael Lewis and the global financial crisis.

Previously: The Michael Lewis World Tour of Economic Collapse

A profile of Ozzy Osbourne.

The Occupy Wall Street origin story.

Because women and girls don’t always kick ass, and neither should our heroines:

Bella Swan, by contrast, is a much more honest though cringe-inducing representation of adolescence. She doesn’t know who she is or what she wants. She’s clumsy, obtuse, and aggravating in her helplessness. She is also entirely internal, almost alienatingly so. One of my favorite passages from the novel New Moon is when Stephenie Meyer inserts a series of blank pages to stand in for the months that pass while Bella mourns — out of any reasonable proportion — Edward’s desertion. Bella, kind of wonderfully, takes her time.

The Starbucks-fueled saga of how Jim Romenesko, beloved journalism blogger, took an early retirement.

A look at Andy Warhol’s enduring popularity and power in the art market.

Warhol’s art was not supposed to be a matter of emotion, introspection or spiritual quest; it was to be an image, pure and simple. “During the 1960s,” he wrote knowingly in 1975, “I think, people forgot what emotions were supposed to be. And I don’t think they’ve ever remembered.”

A profile of Seif Qaddafi.