Sleeping with Cannibals
For days I've been slogging through a rain-soaked jungle in Indonesian New Guinea, on a quest to visit members of the Korowai tribe, among the last people on earth to practice cannibalism.
Showing 25 articles matching paul tough.
For days I've been slogging through a rain-soaked jungle in Indonesian New Guinea, on a quest to visit members of the Korowai tribe, among the last people on earth to practice cannibalism.
Paul Raffaele Smithsonian Sep 2006 30min Permalink
“It’s an old book!” Harper Lee told a mutual friend of ours who’d seen her while I was in Monroeville. “But if someone wants to read it, fine!”
Paul Theroux Smithsonian Jun 2015 25min Permalink
In 2001, a young Japanese woman walked into the North Dakota woods and froze to death. Had she come in search of the $1 million dollars buried nearby in the film Fargo?
Paul Berczeller The Guardian Jun 2003 15min Permalink
Paul Le Roux could have been Mark Zuckerberg. Instead he became a 21st century John Gotti, running a massive criminal empire from his computer until he became an asset of the United States government.
A 7-part serialized story, written by Longform Podcast co-host Evan Ratliff.
Exposure to the internet did not make us into a nation of yeoman mind-farmers (unless you count Minecraft). That people in the billions would self-assemble, and that these assemblies could operate in their own best interests, was … optimistic.
Paul was in his 80s when someone called to say she was his daughter, conceived in a fertility clinic with his sperm. The only problem? He’d never donated any.
Jenny Kleeman Guardian Sep 2021 25min Permalink
For 187 harrowing minutes, the president watched his supporters attack the Capitol—and resisted pleas to stop them.
Jimmy Carter pardoned Peter Yarrow for what he did to a 14-year-old girl in a D.C. hotel room in 1969. But the Peter, Paul and Mary star is accused of sexually assaulting others, too.
Gillian Brockell Washington Post May 2021 15min Permalink
Paul Simon’s Graceland at 25.
The Paul Simon who, on a bus en route to New York City told his sleeping girlfriend that he was empty and aching and he didn’t know why, that Simon belongs to our parents. My generation may love him but he’s not ours. The Simon who is soft in the middle (or at least feels an affinity for men who happen to be), however, the one who reminds young women of money, who has been divorced and has a kid to prove it, and who has the means to catch a cab uptown and take it all the way downtown talking dispassionately while doing so about the comings and goings of breakdowns, that Simon belongs to us as much as he does to our folks because he is our folks.
Nell Boeschenstein This Recording Apr 2011 10min Permalink
The night America elected Donald J. Trump president, 38-year-old Richard B. Spencer, who fancies himself the “Karl Marx of the alt-right” and envisions a “white homeland,” crowed, “we’re the establishment now.” If so, then the architect of the new establishment is Spencer’s former mentor, Paul Gottfried, a retired Jewish academic...
Jacob Siegel Tablet Nov 2016 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
The North Korean dictator kidnaps a famous actress and her film director husband, then invites them to dinner to chat about it.
Paul Fischer Esquire Feb 2015 20min 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
If you were a U.S. prison warden trying to figure out how to kill people with an electric chair in the ‘80s, there was basically one guy to call. His name was Fred A. Leuchter Jr. He ran a business out of his house in the Boston suburbs, providing consulting or execution equipment to at least 27 states between 1979 and 1990. Some of Fred Leuchter’s equipment is still in use today, which is why I wanted to talk to him.
Paul Bowers Welcome To Hell World Jun 2021 Permalink
Returning to Forth Worth after two and a half defection years in the Soviet Union, Lee Harvey Oswald became friends with a Russian emigre family with a son of his age. After Kennedy was shot, they would be called on to translate the Secret Service interrogation of his young Russian wife.
Paul Gregory New York Times Magazine Nov 2013 20min Permalink
David Remnick is the editor of The New Yorker.
“I think it’s important — not just for me, but for the readers — that this thing exists at the highest possible level in 2016, in 2017, and on. That there’s a continuity to it. I know, because I’m not entirely stupid, that these institutions, no matter how good they are, all institutions are innately fragile. Innately fragile.”
Thanks to MailChimp, Audible, EveryLibrary, and Igloo for sponsoring this week's episode.
Jul 2016 Permalink
Hartwick College didn’t really mean to annihilate the U.S. economy. A small liberal-arts school in the Catskills, Hartwick is the kind of sleepy institution that local worthies were in the habit of founding back in the 1790s; it counts a former ambassador to Belize among its more prominent alumni, and placidly reclines in its berth as the number-174-ranked liberal-arts college in the country. But along with charming buildings and a spring-fed lake, the college once possessed a rather more unusual feature: a slumbering giant of compound interest.
Paul Collins Lapham's Quarterly Sep 2011 Permalink
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.
"What’s it like to be giving birth at home, and see blood pooling between your legs, and look up at the ashen faces of a birth attendant, a midwife, a spouse? What’s it like to feel the earth tremble and see the roof and walls of your home or school fall towards you? More to the point, in terms of survival: what happens next? It depends. Not just on the severity of the injury, but on who and where you are."
Paul Farmer London Review of Books Jan 2015 30min Permalink
Kelefa Sanneh is a staff writer at The New Yorker. His book is Major Labels: A History of Popular Music in Seven Genres.
“I’m always thinking about how to not be that person at a party who corners you and tells you about their favorite thing and you’re trying to get away. It’s got to feel light and fun. And what that means in practice is writing about music for readers who don’t care about music, while at the same time writing something that the connoisseurs don’t roll their eyes too hard at.”
Dec 2021 Permalink
Miles Johnson is an investigative reporter for the Financial Times. He is the author of Chasing Shadows: A True Story of Drugs, War and the Secret World of International Crime and the host of Hot Money: The New Narcos.
“I’m really fascinated always by the ways in which people just have to do really boring parts of running a crime organization … I love the banalities of this stuff. We have a fictionalized version of crime groups and it’s obviously glamorous, and they’re really smart, but there’s a lot of stuff that’s bumbling incompetence as well or just quite unglamorous.”
Jan 2024 Permalink
People know Krugman these days as a feisty political polemicist, but back when he was less politically engaged he was absolutely one of the very finest popularizers of economic ideas ever. This piece is a wonderful, brief introduction to the fundamental economic forces driving the world and a lot of my current thinking is preoccupied with the questions it raises. Reading it again, I realized that a point I like to make about the elevator being a great mass transit technology is almost certainly something I subconsciously picked up here.
Paul Krugman New York Times Magazine Sep 1996 Permalink
An essay on a pregnancy attempted:
When I tell people what we are doing, they want to hear about the room where you produce. I tell them that there is a lot of paperwork. That they take your picture and look at your license. Then they walk you back to the room. You are handed a list of instructions and some stickers and a plastic cup. The cup has a forest-green lid. In the room is a VCR. I like to write down the names of the videos so I can share them with my wife and friends: Ass Angels #4, Original Black Queens of Porn (Afro-Centrix #113), and Chock Full of Asians. The latter features a woman with enlarged breasts so swollen they look luminous, like the sense apparatus of a recently discovered deep-sea fish.
Paul Ford The Morning News Jul 2011 10min Permalink
Evan Ratliff, a co-host of the Longform Podcast, discusses "The Mastermind,” his new 7-part serialized story in The Atavist Magazine.
“On several occasions [sources] didn’t want to go into the details of how they were identified. They were just like, ‘My safety is in your hands. Just be careful.’ And I didn’t really know what to do with that. I was sort of trying to balance what to include and what not to include and trying to make these decisions. Will Paul Le Roux know it’s this person? It’s impossible to know. I tried to err on the side of caution, but there’s no ethics hotline you can call and be like, ‘What do I do in this situation?’”
Thanks to our friends at MailChimp for making today's episode possible.
Apr 2016 Permalink
Roger D. Hodge is the editor of Oxford American.
"My career isn't all that interesting insofar as I've been an editor. I'm much more interested in talking about writers and stories. That's the main thing: telling these stories, creating this platform, this context for the best possible storytelling."
Thanks to TinyLetter and Random House for sponsoring this week's episode.
Jan 2014 Permalink