Showing 25 articles matching physics of music.
When Randy Lanier sped to Rookie of the Year honors at the 1986 Indianapolis 500, few knew his racing credentials, let alone his status as one of the nation’s most prolific drug runners, smuggling in tons of marijuana when he wasn’t on the track. Now, after 27 years in prison, Lanier is looking to the road ahead.
“For hours, days, I fixated on the patch of sunlight cast against my wall through those barred and grated windows. When, after five weeks, my knees buckled and I fell to the ground utterly broken, sobbing and rocking to the beat of my heart, it was the patch of sunlight that brought me back.”
“Places like the New York Times, Le Monde and the Washington Post are not given to elevating editors—of any gender—who would accept anything other than the highest of standards. As in tough, demanding, challenging. But there’s no doubt that many find this off-putting and threatening from a certain kind of woman. Like me.”
On George Plimpton and the founders of The Paris Review.
Early in the fifties another young generation of American expatriates in Paris became twenty-six years old, but they were not Sad Young Men, nor were they Lost; they were the witty, irreverent sons of a conquering nation.
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.
Undercover as a student at Phoenix University, the largest for-profit higher education company in the country and the second-largest enroller of students (behind the SUNY system), where only 12 percent of first-time students graduate and the ad budget accounts for 30 percent of overall spending.
“The specific dissonance of Trumpism—advocacy for discriminatory, even cruel, policies combined with vehement denials that such policies are racially motivated—provides the emotional core of its appeal. It is the most recent manifestation of a contradiction as old as the United States, a society founded by slaveholders on the principle that all men are created equal.”
A few miles north of San Francisco, off the coast of Sausalito, is Richardson Bay, a saltwater estuary where roughly one hundred people live out of sight from the world. Known as anchor-outs, they make their homes a quarter mile from the shore, on abandoned and unseaworthy vessels, doing their best, with little or no money, to survive.
This presentation was shown to potential recruits for the new Maven SI venture, and it details exactly how the people now in charge of Sports Illustrated plan on turning it into the sort of volume-driven content farm that ruled the web a dozen or so tweaks of the Google algorithm ago.
Former Washington Post opinion page editor Greenfield on not being overwhelmed by the past in the search for a “better truth”:
History helps guard against moral smugness too, or it should, anyway. For you are obliged, if you are honest, to acknowledge at least some reflection or resonance of the fallen ones in your own nature. Such humility is a conspicuously missing aspect of our contemporary culture, however. What might be a becoming spell of moral introspection, tends instead to become an orgy of bashing and blaming. I observe that now, as always in this country, when people speak of a terrible, all embracing decline in ethical standards, they are invariably speaking of the decline in their next door neighbor's standards, not their own.
On the hanging of James Murphy, murderer.
Adventures with a group of young Hasidic men looking for God in psychedelic drugs.
How Norman Mailer and other writers wanted to go out.
An inside account of the Nairobi mall attack.
A profile of New York Times obituary writer Alden Whitman.
A profile of the comedian.
An examination of the Minutemen movement and death on the border.
The challenges of establishing a legal marijuana economy in Washington State.
On recreational genetics, privacy and the new vulnerability of family secrets.
Life on the other side of the laptop.
The tale of the only art exhibit in space.
The behind-the-scenes story of how NFL prospect Michael Sam came out.
On the culture of abuse and coverup at Patrick Henry College.
Andrew Ross Sorkin’s intimate coverage of Wall Street.
The undoing of Los Angeles County Sheriff Lee Baca, who resigned in January amidst multiple swirling scandals.
