From Russia With Blood
Mikhail Kalashnikov’s brainchild, Avtomat Kalashnikovais aka the AK-47, is the most stockpiled firearm in the world and has altered the last century like no other product. C.J. Chivers, author of The Gun, discusses.
Showing 25 articles matching physics of music.
Mikhail Kalashnikov’s brainchild, Avtomat Kalashnikovais aka the AK-47, is the most stockpiled firearm in the world and has altered the last century like no other product. C.J. Chivers, author of The Gun, discusses.
Charles Homans Foreign Policy Oct 2010 Permalink
Li Dao, a young Minnesota nurse, appeared in suicide chat rooms, contacted the most desperate, and made pacts to die with them via webcam. After some in the forum caught on, Dao disappeared; or rather, Dao had never existed at all. She was a middle-aged man. And he may have encouraged and witnessed dozens of live suicides.
Nadya Labi GQ Oct 2010 25min Permalink
Henry Heimlich saved untold choking victimes when he invented his maneuver in 1974. Since then, he’s searched in vain for another miracle treatment—pushing ethical boundaries along the way. Now at the end of his career, Heimlich has hired an investigator to find an anonymous critic working full-time to destroy his legacy.
Jason Zengerle The New Republic Apr 2007 25min Permalink
Hervé Falciani, a computer engineer working at HSBC, stole the bank’s list of secret accounts. But was he out to expose tax cheats or get rich himself? Perhaps both.
Patrick Radden Keefe New Yorker May 2016 40min Permalink
The International Criminal Court embodied the hope of bringing warlords and demagogues to justice. Then Luis Moreno-Ocampo took on the heir to Kenya’s most powerful political dynasty.
James Verini The New York Times Jun 2016 25min Permalink
A political history of Britain.
“On the day after the referendum, many Britons woke up with the feeling – some for better, some for worse – that they were suddenly living in a different country. But it is not a different country: what brought us here has been brewing for a very long time.”
Gary Younge The Guardian Jun 2016 20min Permalink
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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 New Yorker May 2004 35min
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
Over the last several years, millions of dollars worth of antique rhino horns have been stolen form collections around the world. The only thing more unusual than the crimes is the theory about who is responsible: A handful of families from rural Ireland known as the Rathkeale Rovers.
Charles Homans The Atavist Magazine Mar 2014 1h15min
Dozens of fake identities. More than 1,000 break-ins. A haul of gold, jewelry, and art worth an estimated $40 million. For 16 months, no wealthy Angeleno was safe from Ignacio Del Río.
Luke O'Brien Details May 2010 15min
Magicians, mafiosos, a missing painting and the heist of a lifetime.
Joshua Davis, David Wolman Epic Oct 2014 35min
May 2004 – Oct 2014 Permalink
The 79-year-old actor, too creaky to get off the couch, interviewed at his palatial Florida mansion about love, fame, and how he’s in okay financial shape despite the fact that a surveyor is taking measurements of his house as he speaks.
Ned Zeman Vanity Fair Nov 2015 15min Permalink
Feature Writing, Reporting, Essays and Criticism, Public Interest — a full list of the articles nominated today, including work by Kathryn Schulz, Luke Mogelson, Michael Paterniti and more.
In 1980, four American nuns were murdered in El Salvador. This is the story of how a young American official stationed there singlehandedly found the culprits.
Excerpted from Weakness and Deceit: America and El Salvador's Dirty War
Raymond Bonner The Atlantic Feb 2016 20min Permalink
“Was she supposed to play by the rules and let her talent rot inside her extraordinary body? She’s saying that for girls like her, playing nice and fair would have gotten her nowhere. If it had worked out, we would say she was the manifestation of the American dream. Now instead we just say she’s very American.”
Taffy Brodesser-Akner New York Times Jan 2018 20min Permalink
A Venezuelan cop who had previously starred in an action movie stole a helicopter and fired on the Supreme Court. He became a rebel folk hero, moving amongst safe houses with a small band of followers, until he was killed in a shoot-out that he broadcast live on Instagram.
Nicholas Casey New York Times Jan 2018 10min Permalink
The Bashar al-Assad regime’s indiscriminate air strikes have terrorized civilians for years. Now a small band of activist-entrepreneurs is building a sensor network that listens for warplanes and warns people when and where the bombs will fall.
Danny Gold Wired Aug 2018 15min Permalink
Jerome Jacobson and his network of mobsters, psychics, strip club owners, and drug traffickers won almost every prize for 12 years, until the FBI launched Operation ‘Final Answer.’
Jeff Maysh Daily Beast Jul 2018 35min Permalink
The agonies of being overweight—or running a diet company—in a culture that likes to pretend it only cares about health, not size.
Taffy Brodesser-Akner New York Times Magazine Aug 2017 30min Permalink
They call me the Greeter. I sell shoes at the Boca Raton Town Center mall — bedazzled stilettos and platforms, neon-strapped pumps saved for special occasions. I stand by the entrance of the store, heels dug into the carpet, tummy tucked in, and I greet people. Hi, how are you, sunshine? Have you seen our shoes today?
T Kira Madden The Sun Magazine Mar 2019 20min Permalink
No house is private. It may be purchased, and thus legally private property, but it doesn’t stand alone. Through its extending wires, pipes, inputs and outputs, the house (with few off-grid exceptions) is tied up in the cyborg systems of the city and the supply chains and logistical inputs that extend around the globe.
Kelly Pendergrast Real Life Aug 2020 15min Permalink
Aaron Lammer is a co-host of the Longform Podcast and the host of the podcast Exit Scam: The Death and Afterlife of Gerald Cotten.
“Something I got from a number of reporters that I’ve interviewed on the Longform Podcast is letting the story guide you, and ultimately that led me to an ambiguous ending. Early on, I was like, the pinnacle achievement is to solve this case. But ultimately, I felt like an ambiguous ending was the most honest to what I actually experienced in reporting it.”
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Jul 2021 Permalink
Judge Donna Scott Davenport oversees a juvenile justice system in Rutherford County, Tennessee, with a staggering history of jailing children. She said kids must face consequences, which rarely seem to apply to her or the other adults in charge.
Meribah Knight, Ken Armstrong ProPublica Oct 2021 45min Permalink
Jason Fagone, a contributing editor at Wired and a writer-at-large for Philadelphia, is the author of Ingenious.
"It seemed like all the big guys in American society had let us down, all the elites. And here was a contest that was explicitly looking to the little guy and saying, 'We don't care what you've done before or how much money you have in your pocket. If you solve this problem, you win the money.' There was something so optimistic and hopeful and cool about that to me."
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Dec 2013 Permalink
Masha Gessen has written for The New York Times, The London Review of Books, Vanity Fair, and others. Her book about Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, The Brothers: The Road to an American Tragedy, came out in April.
“The moment she said it, it was obvious that I'd been created to write this story. I'd covered both wars in Chechnya. I'd covered a lot of terrorism. I'd studied terrorism. And I'd been a Russian-speaking immigrant in Boston, which actually is the most important qualification for writing this book. It didn't give me special knowledge, but it gave me a lot of questions that I knew to ask that other people wouldn't.”
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May 2015 Permalink
Rachel Monroe is a freelance writer based in Texas.
“I will totally go emotionally deep with people. If I can find a subject who is into that then it will probably be a good story. Whether that person is a victim of a crime, or a committer of a crime, or a woman who spends a lot of time on the internet looking for hoaxes, or whatever it may be—I guess I just think people are interesting. Particularly when those people have gone through some sort of extreme situation.”
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Aug 2016 Permalink
Brooke Gladstone is the host of On the Media.
“I’ve learned so much about how easy it is to redefine reality in this era of billions of filter bubbles. How easy it is to cast doubt on what is undeniably true. And I think that that’s what frightens me the most. I actually think that’s what frightens most people the most. How do we make sure that we all live in the same world? Or do we?”
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Feb 2017 Permalink
Megha Rajagopalan is a senior correspondent for Buzzfeed News. She won a Pulitzer for her coverage of the Xinjiang detention camps.
“It’s not so much that I talk to [the Chinese government] to get information. It’s more that I talk to them to see how they think about things and what’s important to them and what’s their view of the world. … There are so many journalists that have been thrown out of China, so there’s very few people that are able to actually have those conversations. And in the U.S., there are these seismic decisions being made about China policy, and if you don’t talk to the people that run the country, it’s a problem.”
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Jun 2021 Permalink