Vanishing Act
The last days of Spalding Gray.
The last days of Spalding Gray.
Alex Williams New York Feb 2004 25min Permalink
An investigation into The End.
Tom Bissell Harper's Feb 2003 45min Permalink
How the mall was born.
Malcolm Gladwell New Yorker Mar 2004 25min Permalink
The story of a Marine who saved innumerable lives, then got fired.
James Verini Washington Monthly Jul 2011 2h15min Permalink
On the oeuvre of Glenn Beck:
"The undisputed high point of Beck’s tenure in Baltimore was an elaborate prank built around a nonexistent theme park. The idea was to run a promotional campaign for the fictional grand opening of the world’s first air-conditioned underground amusement park, called Magicland. According to Beck and Gray, it was being completed just outside Baltimore. During the build-up, the two created an intricate and convincing radio world of theme-park jingles and promotions, which were rolled out in a slow buildup to the nonexistent park’s grand opening… On the day Magicland was supposed to throw open its air-conditioned doors, Beck and Gray took calls from enraged listeners who tried to find the park and failed. Among the disappointed and enraged was a woman who had canceled a no-refund cruise to attend the event." — from Alexander Zaitchik’s Common Nonsense: Glenn Beck and the Triumph of Ignorance
Inside Rupert Murdoch’s News of the World phone-hacking scandal.
Sarah Ellison Vanity Fair Jun 2011 30min Permalink
The disappearance of a legendary scavenger could have dire consequences for a swelling human population.
Meera Subramanian The Virginia Quarterly Review Jul 2011 30min Permalink
The jury room was a gray-green, institutional rectangle: coat hooks on the wall, two small bathrooms off to one side, a long, scarred table surrounded by wooden armchairs, wastebaskets, and a floor superficially clean, deeply filthy. We entered this room on a Friday at noon, most of us expecting to be gone from it by four or five that same day. We did not see the last of it until a full twelve hours had elapsed, by which time the grimy oppressiveness of the place had become, for me at least, inextricably bound up with psychological defeat.
Vivian Gornick The Atlantic Jun 1979 25min Permalink
Before the viewing ends at 4 p.m., 975 people pass through the evidence rooms, many of them former students, survivors, and friends and relatives of the dead. Absent, as they have consistently been in the five years since the massacre, are Wayne and Kathy Harris, Eric's parents, and Tom and Sue Klebold, who raised Dylan. Although they live in the same Littleton-area homes they occupied on April 20, 1999, they have contributed virtually nothing to the public's understanding of who their sons were and why they killed.
Peter Wilkinson Rolling Stone Apr 2004 Permalink
Next is "culture training," in which trainees memorize colloquialisms and state capitals, study clips of Seinfeld and photos of Walmarts, and eat in cafeterias serving paneer burgers and pizza topped with lamb pepperoni. Trainers aim to impart something they call "international culture"—which is, of course, no culture at all, but a garbled hybrid of Indian and Western signifiers designed to be recognizable to everyone and familiar to no one. The result is a comically botched translation—a multibillion dollar game of telephone. "The most marketable skill in India today," the Guardian wrote in 2003, "is the ability to abandon your identity and slip into someone else's."
Andrew Marantz Mother Jones Jul 2011 20min Permalink
A Denver businessman’s revolutionary green energy company turned out to be nothing but a Ponzi scheme built to fund a lifestyle of booze-soaked hotel orgies with flown-in prostitutes.
James Carlson 5280 Jul 2011 25min Permalink
Boris Yeltsin’s right-hand man tells the inside story of the 1991 coup that killed glasnost:
"That scum!" Boris Yeltsin fumed. "It's a coup. We can't let them get away with it."
Gennady Burbulis, Michele A. Berdy Foreign Policy Jun 2011 10min Permalink
A primer on competitive eating’s premier event, the Hot Dog Eating Contest, which airs today at noon EST:
1: During the allotted period of time, contestants eat as many hot dogs and buns (called "HDBs") as they can. 2: They're allowed to use a beverage of their choice to wash things down. 3: They must stay in full view of their own, personal "Bunnette" scorekeeper. 4: Condiments may be used, but are not required. 5: HDBs that are still in the mouth at the end of the contest only count if they are eventually swallowed. 6: Puking up the hot dogs before the end of the contest (called "a reversal") will result in a disqualification, unless you do something horrific to make up for it (more on this later.)
Mickey Duzyj The Mickey Duzyj Catalogue Jul 2011 10min Permalink
On Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg and the gender dynamics of Silicon Valley.
Ken Auletta New Yorker Jul 2011 35min Permalink
A profile of 17-year-old Teresa Scanlan, the newly crowned Miss America.
Molly Young New York Jul 2011 10min Permalink
A trip to the Cannabis Cup serves as a backdrop for the story of how the War on Drugs revolutionized the way marijuana is cultivated in America.
Michael Pollan New York Times Magazine Feb 1995 30min Permalink
David Headley helped plot the Mumbai terror attacks. Now his best friend is on trial for conspiring with him. The prosecution’s key witness: David Headley. The story of an informant trying to save his own life from the witness stand.
Liz Mermin The Caravan Jun 2011 30min Permalink
Tom Wolfe on the development of ”New Journalism,” an unconventional reporting style which he helped to pioneer.
I had the feeling, rightly or wrongly, that I was doing things no one had ever done before in journalism. I used to try to imagine the feeling readers must have had upon finding all this carrying on and cutting up in a Sunday supplement. I liked that idea. I had no sense of being a part of any normal journalistic or literary environment.
Uncovering Southern California’s country music roots.
Elisabeth Greenbaum Kasson Los Angeles Times Magazine Jun 2011 10min Permalink
Andrew MacGregor Marshall, a longtime Reuters reporter based in Thailand, resigned and forfeited his ability to enter the country in order to report on the revelations about the Thai royal family and military contained within the Wikileaks “Cablegate” dump.
Thailand has the world's harshest lèse majesté law. Any insult to Bhumibol, Queen Sirikit or their son Crown Prince Vajiralongkorn, is punishable by three to 15 years in jail.
The cables reveal a toxic power struggle between elected officials, the military, and the monarchy, with the huge shadow of exiled telecommunications billionaire Thaksin Shinawatra looming over the country’s post-King Bhumibol future.
The impending end of his reign has sparked intense national anxiety in Thailand. King Bhumibol's son and heir, Crown Prince Vajiralongkorn, has a reputation for being a cruel and corrupt womanizer. A notorious video showing a birthday party for his pet poodle Foo Foo -- who holds the rank of Air Chief Marshal -- has been widely circulated in Thailand; in it, the prince's third wife, Princess Srirasmi, dressed only in a thong, eats the dog's birthday cake off the floor while liveried servants look on.
Editor’s Note: Marshall’s findings will be published as a 4-part series, hosted here by the permission of the author, and re-publishable through a Creative Commons license. His writings on the topic have already reached near book length, for a good overview, see Marshall’s introduction in Foreign Policy.
Andrew MacGregor Marshall Creative Commons Jun 2011 3h35min Permalink
A profile of California congressman Darrell Issa:
A few days after we met in Las Vegas, Issa called me. He was concerned about all my questions regarding his early life and didn’t see why they were newsworthy. The conversation was awkward.
Ryan Lizza New Yorker Jan 2011 30min Permalink
How one man terrorized a small Illinois town.
Robert Kurson Chicago Magazine Sep 2002 Permalink
An investigation into clergy sexual abuse in Philadelphia.
Robert Huber Philadelphia Magazine Jun 2011 25min Permalink
The rise and dissolution of the magazine that nearly took down a president.
Byron York The Atlantic Nov 2001 50min Permalink
Best Article Science Tech World
On the development of South Korea’s New Songdo and Cisco’s plans to build smart cities which will “offer cities as a service, bundling urban necessities – water, power, traffic, telephony – into a single, Internet-enabled utility, taking a little extra off the top of every resident’s bill.” The demand for such cities is enormous:
China doesn't need cool, green, smart cities. It needs cities, period -- 500 New Songdos at the very least. One hundred of those will each house a million or more transplanted peasants. In fact, while humanity has been building cities for 9,000 years, that was apparently just a warm-up for the next 40. As of now, we're officially an urban species. More than half of us -- 3.3 billion people -- live in a city. Our numbers are projected to nearly double by 2050, adding roughly a New Songdo a day; the United Nations predicts the vast majority will flood smaller cities in Africa and Asia.
Greg Lindsay Fast Company Feb 2010 15min Permalink