Showing 25 articles matching physics of music.
Sunken by grief, Alenka Artnik found herself alone on a bridge, contemplating suicide. Ten years later, she is the world’s greatest female freediver and getting stronger with each record-breaking plunge. How one woman emerged from mental health struggles to push the limits of the human body.
“I think talk shows have kind of lost that. It’s mostly about super famous people telling long, dull stories about their swimming pools or something.”
Lissa Soep is an audio producer, editor and author whose latest book is Other People’s Words: Friendship, Loss, and the Conversations That Never End.
“I am so keenly aware of how much my own voice is a product of editing relationships and co-producing relationships with other people's words. … I will forever feel indebted to those then-young people who are now writers and educators and therapists. … I feel like my voice is sort of a product of that time.”
Malcolm Gladwell is a New Yorker staff writer, the author The Tipping Point and Blink, and the host of Revisionist History. His new podcast is Broken Record.
“The loveliest thing is to interview someone who’s never been interviewed before. To sort of watch them in a totally novel experience. Particularly when you’re interviewing them about things they never thought were worthy of an interview. That’s a really lovely experience. It’s like watching a kid on a roller coaster for the first time. But a celebrity is a very different kind of experience. The bar for them is quite high. They’ve been interviewed a million times, so you have to be on your game. You have to take them somewhere that’s a little unfamiliar to get them to perk up. Otherwise it’s just another of a long line of interviews. It’s a lot more demanding.”
Thanks to MailChimp, Aspen Ideas To Go, and Pitt Writers for sponsoring this week's episode.
Deep in the jungle, the tourists were targetted, but only the porters were hacked by the machetes. Was it a robbery? Or a deeper pattern of violence amongst ancient tribes?
From the Longform archive, more than 30 picks on Charles Manson, the Son of Sam, Ted Bundy and more.</p>
How a Chinese national, with the help of a suspected spy, disappeared with laptops and hard drives that may have contained sensitive information from the Arizona Counter Terrorism Information Center.
Tech investors gave Seth Bannon, co-founder of the seemingly surging startup Amicus, over four million dollars, despite knowing almost nothing about him.
What undercover investigators saw inside a factory farm.
Paul Ford is a writer and programmer.
"You don't really read a newspaper to preserve journalism, or save great journalism, or to keep the newspaper going. You read it because it gives you a sense of power or control over the environment that you're in, and actually sort of helps you define what your personal territory is, and what the things are that matter for you. As long as products serve that need—as long as books allow you to explore spaces that it's otherwise really hard for you to explore and so on—I think people will continue to read them."
On the potential existence of personalized bioweapons, which could attack a single individual without leaving a trace, and how they might be stopped.
“If you have read 6,000 books in your lifetime, or even 600, it’s probably because at some level you find “reality” a bit of a disappointment.”
An interview with a woman who works in one of the exclusive hostess bars in Tokyo’s Ginza district, where an elite clientele pay heavily for champagne, whiskey, and conversation, and client-hostess relationships can span decades.
A profile of the 23-year-old woman who was savagely raped on a private bus as it circled New Delhi.
When the East Coast mob showed up in L.A. in 1946, the LAPD formed a ruthess special unit to run them out of town: the Gangster Squad.
Welcome to World of Wonder, the Hollywood production company that celebrates “outsiders, 16th-minute celebrities, conspiracy theorists, penis puppeteers, dictators, street hustlers, porn stars, hackers, homicidal club kids, gender deviants, furries, plushies, and Tori Spelling.”
From 1975-1986, Anthony Edward Dokoupil distributed more than 50 tons of weed in the United States. The operation ruined his family and destroyed his life. Three decades later, his son came looking for answers.
A collection of picks about the best and worst bettors in the world.
The rise and fall of Synanon, an addiction-recovery cult in California, and its charismatic leader, a one-time homeless wino named Chuck Dederich who taught his followers to berate each other for therapy.
Best Article Politics Religion
In Ramapo, New York, the immigrant community and the growing population of Hasidic Jews had eyed each increasing wariness for years. Then the Hasidim took over the public schools, schools their children do not attend, and proceeded to gut them.
Sponsored
Our sponsor this week is Aeon, a great new digital magazine covering ideas and culture. Aeon publishes an original essay every weekday, several of which have been picked for Longform. Here are three recent favorites:
Spaced Out, by Greg Klerkx
Living in space was meant to be our next evolutionary step. What happened to the dream of the final frontier?
There’s an App for That, by John-Paul Flintoff
What to eat, when to meditate and whether to call your parents: can self-monitoring tools make a difference?
This Is Humankind, by Polina Aronson
If my grandfather could survive the Siege of Leningrad and still distinguish between a German and a Nazi, so can I.
Read those stories and more at aeonmagazine.com.
How a network of evangelical Christian crisis pregnancy centers turned the complex reality behind black abortion rates into a single, fictional story.
In the ring, Hector “Macho” Camacho was a champ. Out of it, he was a coke-fueled, womanizing wild man, until the appetites that consumed him cost him his life.
In early 2012, the bones of a woman and young boy were found near the Arizona-Mexico border. The author investigates who they were and how they died.
“It’s just beyond our experience—we have nothing in our evolutionary history that prepares us or primes us, no intellectual architecture, to try and grasp the remoteness of those odds.”
