Showing 25 articles matching physics of music.
Paul Wayment made a profound mistake, left his 2-year-old son alone in his truck as he tracked deer in the wilderness. The boy was gone when he returned. The story of a collective struggle to find a just punishment.
A team of researchers at Columbia believe that small changes to college life could make campuses safer.
Iverson, Canseco, TO, and DiMaggio — a collection of picks on post-career woe.
“Jeffrey Levitt stole and misappropriated a grand total of fourteen million, six hundred ninety-nine thousand, nine hundred forty-seven dollars and fifty-eight cents. He stole all that. It was the largest single white-collar crime in Maryland history, almost bringing down the state’s entire savings and loan industry.” And it still wasn’t enough.
In 1967, a 56-year-old lawyer met a young inmate with a brilliant mind and horrifying stories about life inside. Their complicated alliance—and even more complicated romance—would shed light on a nationwide scandal, disrupt a system of abuse and virtual slavery across the state, and change incarceration in Texas forever.
A collection of picks about cities, nations, athletes, and writers going broke.
There’s a tale about a boy in Waycross. Near a canal, he struck a match, lit a piece of newspaper, and tossed it into the water. But when the burning paper touched the surface, it didn’t go out. The water burst into flames.
At 25, Stephen Glass was the most sought-after young reporter in the nation’s capital, producing knockout articles for magazines ranging from The New Republic to Rolling Stone. Trouble was, he made things up—sources, quotes, whole stories—in a breathtaking web of deception that emerged as the most sustained fraud in modern journalism.
Tessie Castillo, a journalist covering criminal justice reform, and George Wilkerson, a prisoner on death row in North Carolina, are two of the co-authors of Crimson Letters: Voices from Death Row.
“I want other people to see what I see, which is that the men on death row are human beings. They’re incredibly intelligent and insightful and they have so many redemptive qualities...I don’t think I could really convey that as well as if they get their own voice out there. So I wanted this book to be a platform for them and for their voices.” –Tessie Castillo
“For me, writing was like a form of conversation with myself or with my past, like therapy. So I just chose these periods in my life that I didn’t really understand and that were really powerful and impactful to me, and I just sat down and started writing to understand them and make peace with them.” –George Wilkerson
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Dee Dee Blancharde was a model parent: a tireless single mom taking care of her gravely ill child. But after Dee Dee was killed, it turned out her daughter Gypsy had never been sick at all.
In October 2006, a four-year-old from Corpus Christi named Andrew Burd died mysteriously of salt poisoning. His foster mother, Hannah Overton, was charged with capital murder, vilified from all quarters, and sent to prison for life. But was this churchgoing young woman a vicious child killer? Or had the tragedy claimed its second victim?
In November 1985, a woman who appeared to be a homeless drifter staked out the offices of 80-year-old banker Nicholas Deak, waited until he returned from lunch, then executed Deak and his secretary. As police wrestled her to the floor, she said “Don’t hurt me. He told me I could carry the gun.”
Sarah Marshall is a writer and hosts the podcast You're Wrong About.
”I love it when people tell me that listening to the way I talk about these people in the stories that we tell, and just about the world generally, has made them practice empathy more. I almost feel like I have preserved this a-little-bit-past version of myself, because I've been on this journey throughout the pandemic of becoming pretty cynical, and then deciding cynicism is a luxury and that it feels better, ultimately, to try to believe in people.”
Michael Pollan writes for The New York Times Magazine and The New Yorker and is the author of nine books. His latest is How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence.
“I don’t like writing as an expert. I’m fine doing public speeches as an expert. Or writing op-ed pieces as an expert. But as a writer, it’s a killer. Nobody likes an expert. Nobody likes to be lectured at. And if you’ve read anything I’ve written, I’m kind of an idiot on page one. I am the naïve fish out of water. I’m learning though. The narrative that we always have as writers is our own education on the topic. We can recreate the process of learning that's behind the book.”
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Evan Hughes is a journalist whose work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, GQ, The Atlantic, The Atavist and many others. His book, just out in paperback, is Pain Hustlers: Crime and Punishment at an Opioid Startup.
“It should be called slow-form journalism…. It is heavily edited. It’s heavily fact checked. And chances are, you’re not going to be the first. Maybe you’re going to be first to reveal some piece of it. I have made peace with like, I’m not the scoop guy. I’m the person who comes in and I’m good at telling the story in a thorough and deep way.”
S.L. Price is a senior writer at Sports Illustrated.
“The fact is, if you write about sports and people think they're just reading about sports, they'll read about drug use. They'll read about sex. They'll read about sex change. They'll read about communism. They'll read about issues they couldn't possibly care about, issues that if they saw them in any other part of the paper they would just gloss over. But because it's about sports—because there's a boxing ring or a baseball field or a football field—they'll be more patient and you can get some issues under the transom.”
Thanks to Pitt Writers and TinyLetter for sponsoring this week's episode.
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Our sponsor again this week is Aeon, a new digital magazine of ideas and culture. Aeon publishes an original essay every weekday, several of which have been picked for Longform. Here is a trio of recent favorites:
Luddite Love
Claire L Evans on why old relationships should fade like a photograph, not haunt your social networks forever.
Earth's Holy Fool?
Michael Ruse on the Gaia paradox — some scientists hate it, the public loves it, and they may both be right.
World Enough
John Quiggin on the emerging opportunity to simultaneously end poverty and protect the environment.
Read those stories and more at aeonmagazine.com.
In this special episode with Stephen Rodrick, contributing writer at the New York Times Magazine and contributing editor at Men's Journal, Rodrick discusses his recent story "Here Is What Happens When You Cast Lindsay Lohan in Your Movie."
"Publicists don't want to give you access because they're afraid of what you're going to see. But if you spend enough time with anybody, short of Mussolini or Ghengis Khan, they're going to humanize themselves. Because they're human beings, like you are. And they have whatever demented battles they're fighting, their version of crazy, but if you get to spend some time with them as flesh and blood, they're going to come across as flesh and blood in the story."
An indigenous leader reflects on a lifetime following the law of the land in Australia.
“What Aboriginal people ask is that the modern world now makes the sacrifices necessary to give us a real future. To relax its grip on us. To let us breathe, to let us be free of the determined control exerted on us to make us like you. And you should take that a step further and recognise us for who we are, and not who you want us to be. Let us be who we are – Aboriginal people in a modern world – and be proud of us. Acknowledge that we have survived the worst that the past had thrown at us, and we are here with our songs, our ceremonies, our land, our language and our people – our full identity. What a gift this is that we can give you, if you choose to accept us in a meaningful way.”
This guide is sponsored by Issuu, the world's fastest growing digital publishing platform. Issuu's publishers include the biggest names in fashion, lifestyle, art, sports, and global affairs. And many more publications are created by people just like you.
Tonight, one of those publishers, The Daily Front Row, is hosting the first annual Fashion Media Awards at Fashion Week. Eight of the fashion industry's most powerful and influential people will be honored. Tomorrow, The Daily Front Row will publish its annual Media Issue, which you can read on Issuu.</i>
Until then, check out these classic profiles of fashion media icons:
Less than half a decade after The Hills brought them massive celebrity, Heidi Montag and Spencer Pratt are broke and his living in his parent’s vacation house. Their onscreen relationship was mostly fake, but the reality, as their current situation attests, was far worse:
By the end of 2009 (and the show’s fifth season), their lives seemed insane. Instead of riding bikes, Spencer was holding guns. Heidi’s plastic surgeries gave her a distorted quality, but she vowed to have more. Spencer grew a thick beard, became obsessed with crystals, and was eventually told to leave the series. There were daily updates on gossip sites about them “living in squalor,” publicly feuding with their families, and attacking The Hills producers (or claiming The Hills producers attacked them). By the time they announced they were (fake) splitting, followed by Spencer threatening to release various sex tapes, and Heidi (fake) filing for divorce, it seemed like they had ventured into, at best,Joaquin Phoenix-like, life-as-performance-art notoriety and, at worst, truly bleakStar 80 territory that could end with one or both of them dead.
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What can be salvaged from publishing? What does it mean to write for the 50% of US adults who have trouble reading? What happens to crime reporting when you cover every victim, every suspect, every murder with the same care?
Contents publishes open-source editorial ideas for new journalism, digital publishing, content strategy, and everything in between. Always free, always online, fresh each week.
We recommend their latest piece, "House of Cards" by Robin Sloan.
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Tom Bissell is a journalist, critic, video game writer, and author of The Disaster Artist: My Life Inside The Room, the Greatest Bad Movie Ever Made. His latest book is Magic Hours.
“I kind of have come around to maybe not as monkish or fanatical devotion to sentence idolatry as I was when I was a younger writer, earlier in my career. I think I’m coming around to a place where a lot of middle-aged writers get to, which is: I tried to rewire and change the world with the beauty of language alone—it didn’t work. Now how about I try to write stuff that’s true, or that’s not determined to show people I am a Great Writer. Like a lot of young writers, you’re driven by that. Then at a certain point you realize A) you’re not going to be the Great Writer you wanted to be, and B) the determination of that is completely beyond your power to control, so best that you just write as best you can and as honestly as you can, and everything else just sort of becomes gravy.”
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Laura Shin is a journalist covering cryptocurrency and hosts the podcast Unchained. Her new book is The Cryptopians: Idealism, Greed, Lies, and the Making of the First Big Cryptocurrency Craze.
“I was extremely well-acquainted with what the failings were with our traditional financial system. I was seeing through my other reporting how everything works now, and really understanding, whoa, this is not a good system. And then getting this education on what bitcoin is, I understood right away: wow, this is going to change the world.”
Kathryn Schulz is a staff writer for The New Yorker. "The Really Big One," her article about the rupturing of the Cascadia fault line, won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize.
“I can tell you in absolute sincerity: I didn't realize I was writing a scary story. Obviously I know the earthquake is going to be terrifying, and that our lack of preparedness is genuinely really scary. But, as I think often happens as a reporter, you toggle between professional happiness, which is sometimes, frankly, even professional glee—you’re just so thrilled you’re getting what you’re getting—and then the sort of more human and humane response, which comes every time you really set down your pen and think about what it is you’re actually reporting about.”
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