With God On Their Side
437 children were removed from Yearning for Zion Ranch as part of the largest custody battle in American history. They were eventually returned to the compound polygamist Warren Jeffs made infamous—but questions remained.
Showing 25 articles matching physics of music.
437 children were removed from Yearning for Zion Ranch as part of the largest custody battle in American history. They were eventually returned to the compound polygamist Warren Jeffs made infamous—but questions remained.
Katy Vine Texas Monthly Oct 2009 35min Permalink
The author accompanies Toni Morrison to Stockholm, where she accepts the Nobel Prize in Literature.
"Hi," she said on the telephone, a week after the announcement. "This is Toni, your Nobelette. Are you ready for Stockholm?" Well, since she asked, why not? I left town for Greek light, German sausage, Russian soul, French sauce, Spanish bull, Zen jokes, the Heart of Darkness and the Blood of the Lamb. Toni Morrison's butter cakes and baby ghosts, her blade of blackbirds and her graveyard loves, her Not Doctor Street and No Mercy Hospital and all those maple syrup men "with the long-distance eyes" are a whole lot more transfiguring. Where else but Stockholm, even if she does seem to have been promiscuous with her invitations. I mean, she asked Bill Clinton, too, whose inaugural she had attended, and with whom she was intimate at a White House dinner party in March. (He told Toni's agent, Amanda "Binky" Urban, that he really wanted to go but... they wouldn't let him.) Salman Rushdie might also have gone except that the Swedish Academy declined officially to endorse him in his martyrdom, after which gutlessness three of the obligatory eighteen academicians resigned in protest, and can't be replaced, because you must die in your Stockholm saddle.
John Leonard The Nation Jan 1994 15min Permalink
As a teenager, Trey Smith snuck into the cash- and porn-filled home vault of his friend’s father. Fifteen years later, he told the story from prison.
Trey Smith D Magazine Jul 2011 15min Permalink
Notes from the campaign trail in Nevada with Ron Paul.
Part of Longform.org’s guide to the 2012 GOP field at Slate.
Tucker Carlson The New Republic Dec 2007 10min Permalink
In Cleveland, TX, nineteen men and boys gang raped an eleven-year-old girl in an abandoned trailer. This is the story of the victim and her community.
Kathy Dobie GQ Sep 2011 25min Permalink
Inside the Afghan Local Police, who are accused of killing and raping villagers, and are believed to be the United States’s last shot in Afghanistan.
Sixteen years after he was exposed as the most fraudulent journalist of his generation, Stephen Glass is confronted by an old friend.
Hanna Rosin The New Republic Nov 2014 25min Permalink
A profile of Anita Sarkeesian, who has recieved death threats as she exposes misogyny in the $25 billion video game industry.
Sheelah Kolhatkar Businessweek Nov 2014 15min Permalink
A mine fire in May killed 301 men, making it the worst industrial disaster in Turkish history. This is the story of two men who lived through it.
Suzy Hansen New York Times Magazine Nov 2014 30min Permalink
In the gentrifying Bywater, the intertwined destinies of a legendary gay pool-bar and a woman who was drugged there.
Kat Stoeffel Talking Points Memo Dec 2014 10min Permalink
The residents of Green Bank, West Virginia, can’t use cell phones, wi-fi, or other modern technology due to a high-tech government telescope. Recently, this ban has made the town a magnet for so-called electrosensitives, and the locals aren’t thrilled to have them.
Michael J. Gaynor Washingtonian Jan 2015 15min Permalink
For generations, plantation owners strove to keep black laborers on the farm and competing businesses out of town. Today, the towns faring best are the ones whose white residents stayed to reckon with their own history.
Alan Huffman The Atlantic Jan 2015 20min Permalink
On the set of ‘Show Me a Hero,’ his new HBO miniseries, Simon is as impassioned, cantankerous, and uncompromising as ever.
Amos Barshad Grantland Jan 2015 15min Permalink
The transcript of chats between Silk Road boss Ross Ulbricht and a man he believes to be a Hell’s Angel who agrees to supply “hitters” to carry out 5 assassinations.
Andy Greenberg Wired Feb 2015 25min Permalink
An investigation into the past of a prominent voice in the men’s rights movement.
Adam Serwer, Katie J.M. Baker Buzzfeed Feb 2015 25min Permalink
David Carr, the New York Times media reporter and a friend, died Thursday night in the newsroom.
Here are some of our favorite pieces from his archive.
“Journalists are the most craven recognition freaks on the planet. We make our mistakes in public because we want our innermost thoughts pasted on the refrigerator of American consciousness.”
David Carr Washington City Paper Apr 1999 10min
“Even people who used to say horrible things about [Ruth] Shalit at anonymous remove loved seeing her at parties, a cerebral confection of a person — you never knew what might pop out of those oddly colored lips.”
David Carr Washington City Paper Apr 1999
“What remains is still a neighborhood of people with hopes of mobility, but Chancellor Avenue, the heart of the Weequahic neighborhood, no longer has any commercial viability. Turn down the wrong block, some locals say, and commerce of another sort, furtive and transitory, is under way.”
David Carr New York Times Oct 2004
“I always thought that people who spent endless amounts of time drilling into their personal histories are fundamentally unhappy in their lives, and I’m not. I’m ecstatic in my own dark, morbid way and subscribe to a theory of the past that allows the future to unfold: We all did the best we could.”
David Carr New York Times Magazine Jul 2008 30min
“Behind the collapse of the Tribune deal and the bankruptcy is a classic example of financial hubris. Mr. Zell, a hard-charging real estate mogul with virtually no experience in the newspaper business, decided that a deal financed with heavy borrowing and followed with aggressive cost-cutting could succeed where the longtime Tribune executives he derided as bureaucrats had failed.”
David Carr New York Times Oct 2010 15min
“I mean, I live in New Jersey, which has a very good local paper called The Star-Ledger, but they’re about half as big as they used to be, and this place is a game-preserve of corruption—we needed three buses to haul away the mayors and various city council members the last time the FBI came in. I can’t help but think that the absence of high-level, sustained-accountability journalism had something to do with that.”
Aaron Sorkin Interview May 2011 10min
Apr 1999 – May 2011 Permalink
Identical twins in Pennsylvania have the same genes, the same upbringing, similar adult lives. And yet one crucial difference may have made one of them sick.
Robin Marantz Henig Nautilus Feb 2015 20min Permalink
</a>A collection of picks on the real-estate scion and accused killer.
Susan Berman's life was colorful. Her death was shrouded in mystery.
"I have information that's going to blow the top off things," Susan told her.
"What do you mean?" Kim asked. "What information?"
"Well, I don't have it myself," said Susan. "But I know how to get it."
Lisa DePaulo New York Mar 2001 25min
Kathie Durst’s friends spent almost twenty years hoping someone or something would catch up to Durst. They just didn’t think it would happen in the form of the murder of Morris Black.
Bobby was odd in other ways. He was a pothead—he smoked like a chimney. He had facial tics. But his strangest tendency—the thing that no one could ever fathom—was that Bobby belched. Belched and farted, actually. All the time. Anywhere. In front of anyone. Serial gas expulsion was his statement to the world, went the theory. It was his way of saying, “I’m Bobby Durst, and fuck you if you don’t like it.” That was the theory, anyway.
Ned Zeman Vanity Fair Feb 2002 30min
In Galveston, Durst made unusual friends in the seedy bars he frequented.
As the bus driver had guessed, the young black cross-dresser who rode the No. 6 and disembarked at 53rd and P 1/2 with Durst had indeed departed Galveston a few days after Morris Black's headless trunk and dismembered limbs were discovered in the bay. When I tracked down Frankie in an apartment in another Texas city this past January and asked about the timing of her departure, her bulbous eyes narrowed and she shook her head emphatically. "I'm not even gonna comment," she said quietly. "I didn't have nothing to do with it; I ain't gonna be nobody's damn witness; I'm not gonna be subpoenaed to come to no court—mm-mm! He cut that man up! First the head, then..."
Robert Draper GQ Apr 2002 20min
On living with Durst’s abandoned furniture in Galveston.
“Are you sure he won’t mind,” I asked Klaus, suddenly hesitant. Durst’s murder trial was underway in the county courthouse a few blocks away from where we were standing. He had been charged with first-degree murder, but was claiming self-defense. I imagined Durst on the witness stand and it seemed wrong, suddenly, to take his belongings without his permission. Later, people who learned about my furniture would tell me that taking Durst’s things was wrong for other reasons. How could you? they would ask, mouths agape. He was a murderer! But I’ve never been sentimental or superstitious. More than disgusted or scared by the furniture, I was curious. But at the same time, I didn’t want to feel like I was stealing from someone—murderer or not.
Sarah Viren Pinch Journal Dec 2014 20min
Mar 2001 – Dec 2014 Permalink
A profile of Judy Clarke, the publicity-shy anti-death-penalty attorney, who has defended the Unabomber, Susan Smith, and Jared Loughner.
Mark Bowden Vanity Fair Mar 2005 25min Permalink
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A conversation with Douglas Rushkoff, whose goal is to foster a deeper awareness among consumers of digital media.
“The whole reason to have a media-literate population is so that people can tell the difference between genuine connectivity and mediated or manufactured connectivity. Most people can’t.”
Ben Cosgrove HP Matter Apr 2015 Permalink
Decades after a young nun was murdered, a group of former Catholic high school students begin to suspect that an abusive priest may have been the culprit.
Laura Bassett Huffington Post May 2015 30min Permalink
A West Hollywood aesthetician made headlines after allegedly trying to have a business rival killed. But the real story, involving ongoing harassment and a member of the so-called Bling Ring, may be more complicated.
Greg Nichols Los Angeles May 2015 20min Permalink
When 25-year-old Valentine Strasser seized power in Sierra Leone in 1992, he became the world’s youngest head of state. Today he lives with his mother and spends his days drinking gin by the roadside.
Simon Akam New Statesman Feb 2012 20min Permalink
A group of teens allegedly create a violent game with a simple premise: “to knock out a stranger with a single punch.”
Todd C. Frankel The St. Louis Post-Dispatch Mar 2012 15min Permalink
Attending the two-day-long “Crap$ 101” course, where aspiring craps players learn the Golden Touch system of betting, visualize dice tosses, and pursue the elusive “controlled throw.”
Mattathias Schwartz Harper's Dec 2008 30min Permalink