Inside Amazon's Warehouse
A look inside Amazon’s Pennsylvania distribution warehouse, where workers endure 110 degree temperatures and extreme productivity quotas.
A look inside Amazon’s Pennsylvania distribution warehouse, where workers endure 110 degree temperatures and extreme productivity quotas.
Spencer Soper The Morning Call Sep 2011 30min Permalink
On the battle between Shaquille O’Neal and his former IT guy, who’s in control of much of O’Neal’s archived (and often damning) correspondence.
Gus Garcia-Roberts The Miami New Times Sep 2011 20min Permalink
A visit with the novelist Jim Harrison.
Tom Bissell Outside Sep 2011 20min Permalink
On plagiarism.
Malcolm Gladwell New Yorker Nov 2004 25min Permalink
Rick Ross was born William Leonard Roberts II in 1976, and he borrowed his stage name (and the associated big-time cocaine-selling hustler persona) from the legendary L.A. drug lord Freeway Ricky Ross. But the website MediaTakeout uncovered a photograph of William Leonard Roberts II when he was a Florida corrections officer. Most people thought that'd be the end of his career. Freeway Ricky Ross then sued him for stealing his name. None of it mattered. Rick Ross the rapper just sold more records.
Devin Friedman GQ Oct 2011 20min Permalink
On being gay in the military, three years before Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell:
A vast majority of those interviewed had been interrogated at least once, and what they described was nearly the same. They said those under suspicion of homosexuality suffer bright lights in their eyes and sometimes handcuffs on their wrists, warnings that their parents will be informed or their hometown newspapers called, threats that their stripes will be torn off and they will pushed through the gates of the base before a jeering crowd.
Jane Gross New York Times Apr 1990 10min Permalink
On the marriage of Ponzi schemer Ken Starr and his fourth wife, Diane Passage, whom he met while she was dancing at a strip club.
Jessica Pressler New York Sep 2011 20min Permalink
On designer Jean Paul Gaultier and his inspirations.
Susan Orlean New Yorker Sep 2011 25min Permalink
Hartwick College didn’t really mean to annihilate the U.S. economy. A small liberal-arts school in the Catskills, Hartwick is the kind of sleepy institution that local worthies were in the habit of founding back in the 1790s; it counts a former ambassador to Belize among its more prominent alumni, and placidly reclines in its berth as the number-174-ranked liberal-arts college in the country. But along with charming buildings and a spring-fed lake, the college once possessed a rather more unusual feature: a slumbering giant of compound interest.
Paul Collins Lapham's Quarterly Sep 2011 Permalink
A year with an autistic 20-year-old.
Amy Harmon New York Times Sep 2011 30min Permalink
A profile of lifelong thief and 13-time escapee Chris Gay, aka “Little Houdini.”
Ben Montgomery The St. Petersburg Times Sep 2011 10min Permalink
On cell phones and the decline of public space.
One of the great irritations of modern technology is that when some new development has made my life palpably worse and is continuing to find new and different ways to bedevil it, I'm still allowed to complain for only a year or two before the peddlers of coolness start telling me to get over it already Grampaw--this is just the way life is now.
Jonathan Franzen Technology Review Sep 2008 Permalink
The story of the Caughnawagas, “the most footloose Indians in North America,” and their gradual assimilation.
Joseph Mitchell New Yorker Sep 1949 35min Permalink
A profile of gallery owner Paula Cooper.
Michael H. Miller The New York Observer Sep 2011 20min Permalink
A profile of Michel de Nostradame, better known as Nostradamus.
Colin Dickey Lapham's Quarterly Sep 2011 15min Permalink
On video game collectors’ “holy grail” – a Nintendo World Championships cartridge:
Wired.com tracked down some of the Nintendo World Championships participants and serious videogame collectors whose lives have touched by these coveted artifacts of a bygone 8-bit era. Here are their stories.
Chris Kohler Wired Sep 2011 20min Permalink
Profiles of Vietnam veterans several years after returning home.
Tracy Kidder The Atlantic Mar 1978 50min Permalink
Nearly four years later, I sometimes type his email address in the search box in my Gmail. Hundreds of results pop up, and I’ll pick a few at random to read. The ease of our everyday interactions is what kills me.
Remembering a relationship through IM.
Rebecca Armendariz Good Sep 2011 10min Permalink
The history of – and recent controversy over – the diagnosis.
A blow-by-blow account of Howard Unruh’s slow, deadly walk through Camden, New Jersey – filed an hour before deadline.
A profile of the comedian who’s “not so funny anymore”:
Jon Stewart has made a career of avoiding "Whooo" humor. He has flattered the prejudices of his audience, but he has always been funny, and he has always made them laugh. At the Juan Williams taping, however, at least half of Stewart's jokes elicited the sound of Whooo! instead of the sound of laughter. He's been able to concentrate his comedy into a kind of shorthand — a pause, or a raised eyebrow, is often all that is necessary now — but a stranger not cued to laugh could be forgiven for not laughing, indeed for thinking that what was going on in front of him was not comedy at all but rather high-toned journalism with a sense of humor. Which might be how Jon Stewart wants it by now.
A first-person account of an arrest:
I stared at the yellow walls and listened to a few officers talk about the overtime they were racking up, and I decided that I hated country music. I hated speedboats and shitty beer in coozies and fat bellies and rednecks. I thought about Abu Ghraib and the horror to which those prisoners were exposed. I thought about my dad and his prescience. I was glad he wasn’t alive to know about what was happening to me. I thought about my kids, and what would have happened if they had been there when I got taken away. I contemplated never flying again. I thought about the incredible waste of taxpayer dollars in conducting an operation like this. I wondered what my rights were, if I had any at all. Mostly, I could not believe I was sitting in some jail cell in some cold, undisclosed building surrounded by “the authorities.”
Shoshana Hebshi Stories from the Heartland Sep 2011 15min Permalink
After acting erratically and trying to skip out on a dinner bill, she was detained briefly in Malibu before being released in the middle of the night. Twenty-four years old and in an unfamiliar area, she had no car, no phone, and no wallet. A year later, her body was found in a nearby canyon. On the search for answers.
Mike Kessler Los Angeles Jan 2012 40min Permalink
In 2009, 300 people perished in an earthquake in L’Aquila, Italy. Next week, six Italian scientists and one government official will stand trial for manslaughter.
Stephen S. Hall Nature Sep 2011 20min Permalink
In a campaign supported by the Koch brothers, Republicans are working to prevent millions of Democrats from voting next year.
Ari Berman Rolling Stone Sep 2011 15min Permalink