The Power of Gabriel García Márquez
On Gabo and his complicated role in the country of his birth, Colombia.
On Gabo and his complicated role in the country of his birth, Colombia.
Jon Lee Anderson New Yorker Sep 1999 50min Permalink
A cultural history of the travel-writing.
Iain Manley Old World Wandering Oct 2011 20min Permalink
When your house is the set of One Tree Hill:
On one shoot, I remember, I'd been confused about where they needed to set up (confession: hungover), and as a result neglected to clean the bedroom. Later, a crew guy—the same one who'd told me about Blue Velvet—said, "I'm not used to picking up other people's underwear." I felt like saying, Then don't go into their bedrooms at nine o'clock in the morning! Except… he was paying to be in my bedroom.
John Jeremiah Sullivan GQ Oct 2011 25min Permalink
Nick now claims that he was searching for methamphetamine for his entire life, and when he tried it for the first time, as he says, ''That was that.'' It would have been no easier to see him strung out on heroin or cocaine, but as every parent of a methamphetamine addict comes to learn, this drug has a unique, horrific quality.
David Sheff New York Times Magazine Feb 2005 25min Permalink
Apple vs. Google vs. Facebook vs. Amazon.
Farhad Manjoo Fast Company Oct 2011 30min Permalink
On 20-somethings in America, or:
My screwed, coddled, self-absorbed, mocked, surprisingly resilient generation.
Noreen Malone New York Oct 2011 20min Permalink
A portrait of an ailing Evel Knievel.
Pat Jordan Maxim Nov 2007 10min Permalink
Assessing 40 years of treatment.
My abiding faith in the possibility of self-transformation propelled me from one therapist to the next, ever on the lookout for something that seemed tormentingly out of reach, some scenario that would allow me to live more comfortably in my own skin. For all my doubts about specific tenets and individual psychoanalysts, I believed in the surpassing value of insight and the curative potential of treatment — and that may have been the problem to begin with.
Daphne Merkin New York Times Magazine Aug 2010 45min Permalink
A profile of Elizabeth Warren.
Suzanna Andrews Vanity Fair Nov 2011 25min Permalink
On nostalgia for Communism.
Agata Pyzik Frieze Magazine Oct 2011 10min Permalink
The history of Trader Joe’s.
Dave Gardetta Los Angeles Sep 2011 20min Permalink
On the U.S. immigration prison-industrial complex.
Tom Barry Boston Review Nov 2009 35min Permalink
A profile of Mike Judge, creator of the now-resuscitated Beavis and Butthead.
Karen Olsson New York Times Magazine Oct 2011 Permalink
In 1972, James Wolcott arrived in New York armed with a letter of recommendation from Norman Mailer. He hoped to land a job at The Village Voice. Excerpted from his memoir, Lucking Out.
How lucky I was, arriving in New York just as everything was about to go to hell. I had no idea how fortunate I was at the time, eaten up as I was by my own present-tense concerns and taking for granted the lively decay, the intense dissonance, that seemed like normality.
James Wolcott Vanity Fair Nov 2011 25min Permalink
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 man was found, alone, riding on nothing but the roof of his house.
Michael Paterniti GQ Jan 2012 30min Permalink
Why the US intervened in Libya.
Michael Hastings Rolling Stone Oct 2011 30min Permalink
Why has the White House ignored clemency petitions?
Graham Rayman Village Voice Oct 2011 15min Permalink
THEY SAY YOU never hear the one that hits you. That's true of bullets, because, if you hear them, they are already past. But your correspondent heard the last shell that hit this hotel. He heard it start from the battery, then come with a whistling incommg roar like a subway train to crash against the cornice and shower the room with broken glass and plaster. And while the glass still tinkled down and you listened for the next one to start, you realized that now finally you were back in Madrid.
Ernest Hemingway The New Republic Jan 1938 Permalink
He rose from poverty to fame as a marathon champion at only 23. But was his fall from a balcony outside of Nairobi murder, accident, or suicide?
Anna Clark Grantland Oct 2011 15min Permalink
The prison-industrial complex is not only a set of interest groups and institutions. It is also a state of mind. The lure of big money is corrupting the nation's criminal-justice system, replacing notions of public service with a drive for higher profits. The eagerness of elected officials to pass "tough-on-crime" legislation — combined with their unwillingness to disclose the true costs of these laws — has encouraged all sorts of financial improprieties. The inner workings of the prison-industrial complex can be observed in the state of New York, where the prison boom started, transforming the economy of an entire region; in Texas and Tennessee, where private prison companies have thrived; and in California, where the correctional trends of the past two decades have converged and reached extremes.
Eric Schlosser The Atlantic Dec 1998 55min Permalink
On the Red Sox’s historic implosion:
Drinking beer in the Sox clubhouse is permissible. So is ordering take-out chicken and biscuits. Playing video games on one of the clubhouse’s flat-screen televisions is OK, too. But for the Sox pitching trio to do all three during games, rather than show solidarity with their teammates in the dugout, violated an unwritten rule that players support each other, especially in times of crisis.
Bob Hohler The Boston Globe Oct 2011 20min Permalink
From his arrival in New York as a penniless 22-year-old Dutch stowaway through years of obscurity until emerging as a major artist in his 50s.
Mark Stevens Smithsonian Oct 2011 1h10min Permalink
An interview with futurist Ray Kurzweil on the “Singularity” and the overlap between technology and spiritualism.
Cory Doctorow, Ray Kurzweil, singularity Asimov's Apr 2005 15min Permalink
The body of a 38-year-old woman lay on her couch with the TV continuously running BBC for three years. Who was she, and why did it take three years for her to be discovered?
Carol Morley The Guardian Oct 2011 20min Permalink
Retirement for chimps is, in its way, a perversely natural outcome, which is to say, one that only we, the most cranially endowed of the primates, could have possibly concocted. It's the final manifestation of the irrepressible and ultimately vain human impulse to bring inside the very walls that we erect against the wilderness its most inspiring representatives -- the chimps, our closest biological kin, the animal whose startling resemblance to us, both outward and inward, has long made it a ''can't miss'' for movies and Super Bowl commercials and a ''must have'' in our laboratories. Retirement homes are, in a sense, where we've been trying to get chimps all along: right next door.
Charles Siebert New York Times Magazine Jul 2005 30min Permalink