John Jeremiah Sullivan on Longform
Life after The Real World, weed at Disney, the comeback of Axl Rose and more — browse our complete archive of articles by John Jeremiah Sullivan.
Showing 25 articles matching physics of music.
Life after The Real World, weed at Disney, the comeback of Axl Rose and more — browse our complete archive of articles by John Jeremiah Sullivan.
“Has anybody in Westchester County ever called the New York Times his or her ‘friend’? I realize that the rest of America, in its post-Katrina fatigue, is pretty tired of hearing New Orleanians, the city’s acolytes and defenders, always carrying on about how it’s the most unique city in America, but, the fact is, it is. Get over it.
And so, too, is its newspaper.”
Chris Rose Oxford American Sep 2012 15min Permalink
A prolific fundraiser and dean at St. John’s University, Cecilia Chang was also accused of murdering her husband and had connections to organized crime. Two days after she was convicted of stealing more than $1 million from the schoool, she took her own life.
He was a hedge-funder with a coke problem. She liked to drink and was thrice-divorced before they got married. When the police arrived, she was clutching his dead body in the shallow end of their pool. She would soon be accused of murder—not by the cops, but her Internet psychic.
Stephen Rodrick New York Feb 2008 30min Permalink
“Before Glenn Greenwald was the journalist who broke and defended the most important story of 2013, he was many other things: an underage South Florida politician, a lawyer at a high-powered corporate firm, Kips Bay’s most combative tenant, and even the legal arm of his business partner’s gay porn distribution company.”
Jessica Testa Buzzfeed Jun 2013 10min Permalink
Tereza Sedgwick trains to become a nurse aid, the fastest-growing job in America. It pays just better than minimum wage and has one of the highest burnout rates of any career.
Eli Saslow Washington Post May 2014 Permalink
A day after swimming in an Arkansas water park, Kali Harding was diagnosed with a brain-eating amoeba that kills 99% of the people infects. This is the story of how she survived.
Peter Andrey Smith Buzzfeed Jul 2014 25min Permalink
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The inside story of the Pink Panthers, the greatest bank robber in Texas history and the article that became The Bling Ring—a collection of our all-time favorite picks about thieves.
A story of diamonds, thieves, and the Balkans.
David Samuels The New Yorker Apr 2010 1h5min
The most prolific bank robber in Texas history.
Helen Thorpe Texas Monthly Mar 1997 30min
Gerald Blanchard, the world’s most ingenious thief, made his first swipe at age six. And he didn’t stop, robbing banks and stealing jewels around the world until a pair of obsessed Winnipeg cops took his case.
Joshuah Bearman Wired Mar 2010 25min
The motley gang of L.A. teens that cat-burgled celebrities, sometimes repeatedly, in search of designer clothes, jewelry, and something to do. The story that became The Bling Ring.
Nancy Jo Sales Vanity Fair Mar 2010 20min
After two New Jersey homes were robbed of their silver—only their silver—in the same night, the local police got a call from a detective in Greenwich, Connecticut. “I know the guy who’s doing your burglaries.”
Stephen J. Dubner The New Yorker May 2004 35min
Mar 1997 – Apr 2010 Permalink
“He’d gotten hold of this notion that one times one doesn’t equal one, but two. He began writing down his logic, in a language of his own devising that he calls Terryology. He wrote forward and backward, with both his right and left hands, sometimes using symbols he made up that look foreign, if not alien, to keep his ideas secret until they could be patented.”
Erik Hedegaard Rolling Stone Sep 2015 20min Permalink
When Chicago’s Stevens Hotel opened in 1927, it was the biggest hotel in the world. By the time it was closed, it had bankrupted and caused the suicide of a member of the Stevens’ family (which included a seven-year-old future Justice John Paul Stevens), and changed the city forever.
Charles Lane Chicago Magazine Aug 2006 Permalink
John Demjanjuk has had a huge year. Twenty years after being sentenced to die, he finally climbed to the pinnacle of the Wiesenthal Center's list of Nazi war criminals this April, shortly after the Germans filed the arrest warrant that allowed the OSI to put him on the jet to Munich.
Scott Raab Esquire Nov 2009 35min Permalink
What IARPA's project calls for is the deployment of spy resources against an entire language. Where you or I might parse a sentence, this project wants to parse, say, all the pages in Farsi on the Internet looking for hidden levers into the consciousness of a people.
Alexis Madrigal The Atlantic May 2011 10min Permalink
Timothy Brown was diagnosed with HIV in the ’90s. In 2006, he found that a new, unrelated disease threatened his life: leukemia. After chemo failed, doctors resorted to a bone marrow transplant. That transplant erased any trace of HIV from his body, and may hold the secret of curing AIDS.
Tina Rosenberg New York May 2011 15min Permalink
Edward Luttwak is a rare bird whose peripatetic life and work are the envy of academics and spies alike. ...he published his first book, Coup d’État: A Practical Handbook, at the age of 26. Over the past 40 years, he has made provocative and often deeply original contributions to multiple academic fields, including military strategy, Roman history, Byzantine history, and economics.
David Samuels, Edward Luttwak Tablet Sep 2011 Permalink
Considering the screen saver.
Even when napping, the computer seems beset by iterative nightmares of a deadline. The pipes come to represent, rather than imaginarily suspend, the clogging of the task queue when one is away. When the screen has become as dense as Celtic knot-work, the entire image cracks and dissipates, as if burned out from its involute frenzy—before beginning again in the dark.
Chinnie Ding The Believer Nov 2011 10min Permalink
"Of course, sexuality has never only been about reproduction, obviously, with human beings, anyway. But at the moment it's almost cut free to kind of float wherever it will float. And sexuality has been mixed with many things that I think the ancients would have been surprised to find it mixed with."
David Cronenberg, Jenni Miller GQ Nov 2011 10min Permalink
Three years after her gold-medal performance – and amidst rumors of a fall from grace – the author travels to Transylvania to track down gymnast Nadia Comaneci. He also enjoys several drinks with her coach, Bela Karolyi.
Part of our Olympics primer, on the Longform blog.
Bob Ottum Sports Illustrated Nov 1979 25min Permalink
He was just another coked-up agent (repping the likes of Steven Soderbergh) when he disappeared into Iraq, shooting heaps of footage he would attempt to package into a pro-war documentary. And that was just the beginning.
Evan Wright Vanity Fair Mar 2007 1h35min Permalink
“I saw the son of a bitch while I was up on my tractor, running the rotary cutter along a wall of green sagegrass that was five feet high. It was August in Mississippi, hot, on over in the afternoon but not near sundown. The sky had softened, and the coyote was trotting along in the open like the most unconcerned thing you could imagine.”
Larry Brown Men's Journal Jul 2000 15min Permalink
In October, Iraqi forces set out to retake Mosul, one of Iraq’s largest cities and ISIS’s biggest stronghold in the country. It would take them nine months and cost thousands of lives.
James Verini New York Times Magazine Jul 2017 45min Permalink
How can you know if you’re about to get replaced by an invading algorithm or an augmented immigrant? “If your job can be easily explained, it can be automated,” Anders Sandberg, of Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute, tells Oppenheimer. “If it can’t, it won’t.” (Rotten luck for people whose job description is “Predict the future.”)
Jill Lepore New Yorker Feb 2019 30min Permalink
Ex-Ivy Leaguer and NFL-er Jeff Hatch spent years telling audiences of his triumph over opioid addiction, to great acclaim. Then as the rehab center he worked at drew national attention, a tortuous backstory of cops, dealers and deception came to light.
Chris Ballard Sports Illustrated Oct 2019 25min Permalink
Paul Skalnik has a decades-long criminal record and may be one of the most prolific jailhouse informants in U.S. history. The state of Florida is planning to execute a man based largely on his word.
Pamela Colloff ProPublica Dec 2019 55min Permalink
Many of the 230,000 women and girls in U.S. jails and prisons were abuse survivors before they entered the system. And at least 30 percent of those serving time on murder or manslaughter charges were protecting themselves or a loved one from physical or sexual violence.
Justine van der Leun The New Republic Dec 2020 35min Permalink
Using several email addresses and a lot of exclamation points, teenager Jonathan Lebed worked finance message boards in the morning before school and made almost a million bucks. Then he made the head of the S.E.C. look like a fool.
Michael Lewis New York Times Magazine Feb 2001 35min Permalink