Mastering the Machine
How Ray Dalio built the world’s richest and strangest hedge fund.
How Ray Dalio built the world’s richest and strangest hedge fund.
John Cassidy New Yorker Jul 2011 35min Permalink
A youth set to the shifting sounds of CCM, Christian Contemporary Music:
This, by the way, is considered the ultimate sign of quality CCM, even amongst Christians: the ability to pass as secular. Every band’s goal was to have teenagers stop their grooving mid-song and exclaim, like a soda commercial actress who’s just realized she’s been drinking Diet, “Wait, this is Christian?”
Meghan O’Gieblyn Guernica Jul 2011 20min Permalink
How a Massachusetts psychotherapist fell for a Nigerian e-mail scam.
Mitchell Zuckoff New Yorker May 2006 20min Permalink
An essay on poetry and madness.
People still think of poets as an odd bunch, as you’ll know if you’ve been introduced as one at a wedding. Some poets spotlight this conception by saying otherworldly things, playing up afflictions and dramas, and otherwise hinting that they might be visionaries. In the past few centuries, of course, the standard picture of psychopathology has changed a great deal. But as it’s often invoked, the idea of the mad poet preserves, in fossil form, a stubbornly outdated and incomplete image of madness. Modern psychiatry and neuroscience have supplanted this image almost everywhere else.
Joshua Mehigan Poetry Jul 2011 20min Permalink
On Rwanda’s cycling team.
Philip Gourevitch New Yorker Jul 2011 50min Permalink
Part one of a planned nine-part serialized biography of Harrison Gray Otis, the “inventor of modern Los Angeles.”
Future installments will include Otis’s interlude as “emperor of the Pribilofs,” his military atrocities in the Philippines, his bitter legal battles with the Theosophists, the Otis-Chandler empire in the Mexicali Valley, the Times bombing in 1910, the notorious discovery of fellatio in Long Beach, and Otis’s quixotic plan for world government.
It was the confluence of two streams of development that transformed Ted Kaczynski into the Unabomber. One stream was personal, fed by his anger toward his family and those who he felt had slighted or hurt him, in high school and college. The other derived from his philosophical critique of society and its institutions, and reflected the culture of despair he encountered at Harvard and later.
Alston Chase The Atlantic Jun 2000 1h10min Permalink
Inside a transport service for “problem” children:
In his first year of business, [Rick Strawn] escorted eight teens to behavior modification schools. Since then, his company has transported more than 700 kids between the ages of 8 and 17.
Nadya Labi Legal Affairs Jul 2004 30min Permalink
In Afghanistan and other zones of international crisis with John Kerry:
Why, then, does Kerry bother? Why is he racing back and forth to put out the fires being set by a serial arsonist? I asked him about this on the short flight from Kabul to Islamabad. Kerry tried to put the best possible face on what he had learned. Despite the warlords in Kabul, he said, Karzai had appointed some talented officials at the provincial and district levels. “It’s a mixed bag,” he concluded gamely. Kerry knew Karzai’s failings as well as anyone, but he was not prepared to abandon Afghanistan’s president, because he was not prepared to abandon Afghanistan. But why not?
James Traub New York Times Magazine Jul 2011 25min Permalink
Best Article Arts Business Tech Music
Is the streaming Swedish music service, now making its U.S. debut, the best shot the industry has at staying profitable and relevant?
Brendan Greeley Businessweek Jul 2011 20min Permalink
To this day, no one (outside of the movie's own crew) knows how the Muppets rode bicycles in The Great Muppet Caper, the classic Henson movie from 1981. In that scene, Kermit stands up on one frog-leg on the seat of his bicycle to impress Miss Piggy, and then the whole gang joins them on their bikes, doing circles and figure eights, singing “Couldn’t We Ride?” It's a wonderful piece of filmmaking, and still a complete delight to watch because the effect relied on the ingenuity and bravado of the puppeteers and crew, not CGI wizardry. Contrast the joy and ebullience of this scene to the elegant chiaroscuro slickness of the post-Henson Muppet Christmas Carol in which we see old fogies Statler and Waldorf, as the Marley brothers, floating in mid air. No viewer is impressed; no one really thinks about it at all. And that's because when a then 29-year-old Brian Henson directed that film, he threw the rules out the window. Statler and Waldorf “float” because Goelz and Nelson, the men working the old guys, were standing behind them during filming and then were removed in post production. It’s an elegant fix—a cutting of the Gordian knot—but it is a complete break with an aesthetic 35 years in the making.
Elizabeth Stevens The Awl Jul 2011 20min Permalink
At work with Jean-Claude Carrière, screenwriter of choice for an entire generation of top-flight directors.
A 1980 profile of Nolan Ryan by Tony Kornheiser from Inside Sports, annotated 30 years later by Michael MacCambridge and Kornheiser. The first story in Grantland’s Director’s Cut series, which “looks back at classic works of sports journalism and gives the writers, athletes, and other figures involved in making the articles an opportunity to reflect on their work and recall some deleted scenes.”
Michael MacCambridge, Tony Kornheiser Grantland Jul 2011 30min Permalink
How a musical subculture evolved alongside a technological subculture:
Rave's rise mirrors the Web's in many ways. Both mixed rhetorical utopianism with insider snobbery. Both were future-forward "free spaces" with special appeal to geeks and wonks.
Michaelangelo Matos NPR Jul 2011 15min Permalink
Slowly, Bobo pulled off his shoes, his socks. He stood up, unbuttoned his shirt, dropped his pants, his shorts. He stood there naked. It was Sunday morning, a little before 7.
William Bradford Huie Look Jan 1956 15min Permalink
A profile of the hard-living, cop-dodging artist Dash Snow, published two years before his death of an overdose.
Ariel Levy New York Jan 2007 30min Permalink
FRANCO: “Straight” and “gay” are fairly recent phenomena. One of the things the great book Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture and the Making of the Gay World, 1890–1940 is about is the way those labels have changed behavior. Between World War I and World War II, straight guys could have sex with other guys and still be perceived as straight as long as they acted masculine. Whether you were considered a “fairy” or a “queer” back then wasn’t based on sexual acts so much as outward behavior. Into the 1950s, 1960s and so on, the straight and gay thing came up based on your sexual partner. Because of those labels, you do it once and you’re gay, so you get fewer guys who are kind of in the middle zone. It sounds as though I’m advocating for an ambiguous zone or something, but I’m just interested in the way perception changes behavior.
James Franco, Stephen Rebello Playboy Jul 2011 30min Permalink
How Frank and Jamie McCourt bought the Dodgers for “for less than the price of an oceanfront home in Southampton” and eventually became entangled in one of the most expensive divorces in California history, which laid bare their finances and confirmed what many already knew: they had bankrupted one of the most storied franchises in baseball.
In all, the McCourts reportedly took $108 million out of the team in personal distributions over five years—a sum that Molly Knight, a reporter with ESPN who has extensively covered the story, notes is eerily similar to the cash payment that she says Frank McCourt has claimed he made for the team.
Vanessa Grigoriadis Vanity Fair Aug 2011 30min Permalink
The Stanford Prison Experiment, revisited 40 years later.
Romesh Ratnesar Stanford Magazine Jul 2011 15min Permalink
Three interviews with John Gardner, author of Grendel and The Art of Fiction, conducted over the last decade of his life.
Frank McConnell, John Gardner, John R. Maier, Paul F. Ferguson, Sara Matthiessen The Paris Review Apr 1979 50min Permalink
A profile of Hollywood agent Irving “Swifty” Lazar.
Michael Korda New Yorker Mar 1993 35min Permalink
John Walker Lindh’s father on why his son is an innocent victim of the War on Terror.
Frank Lindh The Guardian Jul 2011 25min Permalink
Behind a financial fraud lay a secret plan to create a “mothership for con artists worldwide”:
Gamboa's tale involves secret ore deposits, hidden stocks of Soviet nuclear armaments, the Queen Mary ocean liner, portions of Antarctica, a new version of the Bible, allegations of fake deaths and miraculous resurrections, and a collection of some of the most colorful aliases ever to grace America's criminal and civil case dockets. (According to court documents, Korem also answers to the names Tzemach Ben David Netzer Korem and Branch Vinedresser.)
Peter Jamison SF Weekly Jul 2011 20min Permalink
The story of an imam convicted on a suspect terrorism charge and the place he was sent: a jail in the Midwest where nearly all of the prisoners are Muslims.
Christopher S. Stewart New York Jul 2011 20min Permalink
A visit to the Museum of Broken Relationships.
Olinka and Drazen are artists, and after some time passed, they did what artists often do: they put their feelings on display. They became investigators into the plane wreck of love, bagging and tagging individual pieces of evidence. Their collection of breakup mementos was accepted into a local art festival. It was a smash hit. Soon they were putting up installations in Berlin, San Francisco, and Istanbul, showing the concept to the world. Everywhere they went, from Bloomington to Belgrade, people packed the halls and delivered their own relics of extinguished love: “The Silver Watch” with the pin pulled out at the moment he first said, “I love you.” The wood-handled “Ex Axe” that a woman used to chop her cheating lover’s furniture into tiny bits. Trinkets that had meaning to only two souls found resonance with a worldwide audience that seemed to recognize the same heartache all too well.
Shannon Service Brink Magazine May 2011 20min Permalink