May 2012
25 posts
1 tag
A Life Worth Ending →
In 1990, there were slightly more than 3 million Americans over the age of 85. Now there are almost 6 million. By 2050 there will be 19 million—approaching 5 percent of the population. There are various ways to look at this. If you are responsible for governmental budgets, it’s a knotty policy issue. If you are in marketing, it suggests new opportunities (and not just Depends). If you are my...
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Jamming Tripoli: Inside Moammar Gadhafi's Secret... →
By now, it’s well known that the Arab Spring showed the promise of the Internet as a crucible for democratic activism. But, in the shadows, a second narrative unfolded, one that demonstrated the Internet’s equal potential for government surveillance and repression on a scale unimaginable with the old analog techniques of phone taps and informants. Today, with Gadhafi dead and a provisional...
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The Yankee Commandante →
It was March 11, 1961, two years after Morgan had helped to overthrow the dictator Fulgencio Batista, bringing Castro to power. The revolution had since fractured, its leaders devouring their own, like Saturn, but the sight of Morgan before a firing squad was a shock. In 1957, when Castro was still widely seen as fighting for democracy, Morgan had travelled from Florida to Cuba and headed into...
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All the World is Staged →
On the morning of Feb. 20, 2011, a man from Singapore walked into the central police station of Rovaniemi, Finland, a town that sits along the Arctic Circle. The man told officers that another Singaporean, Wilson Raj Perumal, was in Rovaniemi on a false passport. He offered no other information before leaving the station abruptly.
Though puzzled by the seemingly random tip, Rovaniemi...
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The Ultimate Counterfeiter Isn't a Crook—He's an... →
With a cigarette in one hand and a money- marking pen in the other, Kuhl began his quest to conquer the dollar by thumbing through thick binders of paper samples. Money-marking pens draw a black line on paper made with starch but not on stock that lacks starch, such as the ultrafine cotton-linen sheets manufactured by Crane & Co. of Dalton, Massachusetts, the sole provider of US dollar...
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George Romney for President, 1968 →
You could say that the end of the moderate-Republican Establishment—the days when the smoke-filled rooms started to empty of father figures, and the casual country-club banter was replaced by something angrier—began at the party’s 1964 convention, at the Cow Palace, just south of downtown San Francisco, a week that ended with Barry Goldwater nominated for president. Political revolutions are...
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Brothel, Washington DC →
This floor was entirely asleep; others were roaming, and the last of us wouldn’t be back from work until nearly dawn; The Pimp (hereinafter referred to as [Name Withheld]) was snoring to the south, and the dear, 300-pound, peach-complected Commander (Navy, retired,) who owned the whorehouse, was snuggled with his boyfriend to the north. To be fair, we did not call it a whorehouse, despite the...
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Tupac Shakur, the Los Angeles Times, and Why I'm... →
Last week, a trial in Brooklyn started off with a strange twist. At the federal criminal trial of James Rosemond — a/k/a Jimmy Henchman — one of the first things Rosemond’s attorney did was kick an unemployed journalist named Chuck Philips out of the courtroom by naming him a witness in the case.
Philips was a reporter at the Los Angeles Times for 18 years covering crime...
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The Comedian Comedians Were Afraid Of →
Patrice O’Neal didn’t just want to be famous, he wanted to be as good as Richard Pryor. To hear his fellow comics tell it, he was—a brutal truth-teller who spared no one, starting with those closest to him.
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Word on the Suite →
Superabundant, super-confident, flashy – rap is channelling the spirit of rock music’s golden age. In the 1970s, booming album sales transformed rock into a highly lucrative business, dominated by a handful of major record labels. By 1973, the US music industry was pulling in $2bn a year, about the same as the film and sports industries combined. Rock was the dominant genre: it accounted for...
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Blood in the Water →
The op-ed heard round the world—Greg Smith’s scathing New York Times attack on Goldman Sachs, his employer of nearly 12 years—dealt another blow to the firm’s reeling reputation. Now the questions are louder than ever: Will C.E.O. Lloyd Blankfein have to go? Who might succeed him? And does it matter?
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Money Unlimited →
When the Court announced its final ruling on Citizens United, on January 21, 2010, the vote was five to four and the majority opinion was written by Anthony Kennedy. Above all, though, the result represented a triumph for Chief Justice Roberts. Even without writing the opinion, Roberts, more than anyone, shaped what the Court did. As American politics assumes its new form in the post-Citizens...
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Château Sucker →
In the rare-wine world, doubts are endemic; murkiness is built into a product that is concealed by tinted glass and banded wooden cases and opaque provenance and the fog of history. At the same time, the whole apparatus of the rare-wine market is about converting doubt into mystique. Most wealthy collectors want to spend big and drink famous labels, not necessarily ask questions or hear the...
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Psychiatry's "Bible" Gets an Overhaul →
The debates surrounding the manual’s revisions are not merely back-office chatter. Although many psychiatrists do not sit down with the DSM and take its scripture literally—relying instead on personal expertise to make a diagnosis—the DSM largely determines the type of diagnoses clinicians make. Insurance companies often demand an official DSM diagnosis before they pay for medication and...
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Scamworld →
The path to internet riches begins with an introductory product, such as a book or DVD. This is often a loss leader: the real value for the Internet Marketer is that it allows him to capture your contact information. Once you’re in the system, your inbox will be flooded with offers for software, DVD sets, and coaching programs costing several hundreds or thousands of dollars.
This is what...
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Two Hundred Years of Surgery →
Surgery is a profession defined by its authority to cure by means of bodily invasion. The brutality and risks of opening a living person’s body have long been apparent, the benefits only slowly and haltingly worked out. Nonetheless, over the past two centuries, surgery has become radically more effective, and its violence substantially reduced — changes that have proved central to the...
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Inside the Quidditch World Cup →
The Quidditch World Cup sounds dorky, and make no mistake: it is. But these sorcery-loving Harry Potter fans play pretty rough, as ERIC HANSEN found out when he captained a bad-news team of ex-athletes, ultimate Frisbee studs, slobs, drunks, and some people he knows from Iceland. Brooms up, and may the best Muggles win.
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The Kentucky Derby and the Slow Death of Horse... →
This dark and stormy Derby week, there is no other way to put it. These are dismal days for horse racing in North America. We once said, in the grandstands and along the backstretches, that all horse racing needed to reassert itself onto the American sporting scene was a Triple Crown winner. But the last 3-year-old colt to accomplish that task was Affirmed in 1978. And that means that a third...
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The Mysterious Case of the Vanishing Genius →
Margie Profet was always a study in sharp contradictions. A maverick thinker remembered for her innocent demeanor, she was a woman who paired running shorts with heavy sweaters year-round, and had a professional pedigree as eccentric as her clothing choices: Profet had multiple academic degrees but no true perch in academe. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Profet published original theories...
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Uncatchable →
George Wright, America’s most elusive fugitive, ran for forty years. He ran from the cops after escaping from prison. He ran from the feds after the most brazen hijacking in history. He ran from the authorities on three continents, hiding out and blending in wherever he went. It was a historic run—and now that it’s over, he might just pull off the greatest escape of all.
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The Perfect Milk Machine →
While there are more than 8 million Holstein dairy cows in the United States, there is exactly one bull that has been scientifically calculated to be the very best in the land. He goes by the name of Badger-Bluff Fanny Freddie. Already, Badger-Bluff Fanny Freddie has 346 daughters who are on the books and thousands more that will be added to his progeny count when they start producing milk....
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Is An ESPN Columnist Scamming People On The... →
Is Sarah Phillips for real? Thirteen months ago, she was an unknown message-board participant at Covers.com, a gambling website. Then Covers plucked her from the boards and gave her a weekly column, sight unseen. Five months after that, she was tapped by Lynn Hoppes, an editor for ESPN.com, to write a weekly column for ESPN’s Page 2—once the home of writers like David Halberstam, Ralph...
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Alone, 'Riodoce' Covers the Mexican Drug Cartel... →
Early on Aug. 29, 2010, Ismael Bojórquez, editor of the newsweekly Riodoce, in the Mexican city of Culiacán, learned that a man in his 20s had been found dead of bullet wounds in a white Lamborghini. Murders of young men are common in Culiacán, the capital of the state of Sinaloa and the seat of power of the cartel of the same name, but this one was different. The victim, Bojórquez heard, was...
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A Giant Among Giants →
What the IPO filing did not make clear was just how Glencore, founded four decades ago by Marc Rich, a defiant friend of dictators and spies who later became one of the world’s richest fugitives, achieved this kind of global dominance. The answer — pieced together for this article over a year of reporting that included numerous interviews with past and current Glencore employees and...
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Pantone color forecasts: Are they accurate? →
Color forecasting is almost as old as the fashion industry itself. In the late 19th century, color cards issued by French textile mills were snapped up by their American counterparts, eager for ideas and direction. As Regina Lee Blaszczyk, a historian and author of the forthcoming book The Color Revolution, notes, Margaret Hayden Rorke, an American actress, suffragist, and the country’s first...
April 2012
59 posts
1 tag
Machine Politics →
In the summer of 2007, Apple released the iPhone, in an exclusive partnership with A.T. & T. George Hotz, a seventeen-year-old from Glen Rock, New Jersey, was a T-Mobile subscriber. He wanted an iPhone, but he also wanted to make calls using his existing network, so he decided to hack the phone.
Every hack poses the same basic challenge: how to make something function in a way for...
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The Real CSI: What Happens at a Crime Scene? →
From the diver who finds the body parts, to the forensic specialist who identifies flecks of paint on the victim and the handwriting expert who examines the killer’s notes. What happens behind the yellow tape of one crime scene?
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Runner's World: Usain Bolt and His Entourage →
The madness that surrounds him is growing. A global television audience of four billion is expected to watch Bolt perform at the London 2012 Olympic Games this summer. If the 25-year-old is nervous, it doesn’t show.
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The Stalking of Korean Hip Hop Superstar Daniel... →
By that summer, Lee’s alleged fraud had become one of Korea’s top news items. Death threats streamed in, and Lee found himself accosted by angry people on the street. Since his face was so recognizable, he became a virtual prisoner in his Seoul apartment. In a matter of weeks, he went from being one of the most beloved figures in the country to one of the most reviled. But in fact Lee had not...
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Can an Algorithm Write a Better News Story Than a... →
Had Narrative Science — a company that trains computers to write news stories—created this piece, it probably would not mention that the company’s Chicago headquarters lie only a long baseball toss from the Tribune newspaper building. Nor would it dwell on the fact that this potentially job-killing technology was incubated in part at Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated...
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The Man Who Hacked Hollywood →
The hacker’s eyes widened as the image filled his screen. There, without her makeup, stood Scarlett Johansson, her famous face unmistakable in the foreground, her naked backside reflected in the bathroom mirror behind her, a cell phone poised in her hand snapping the shot. Holy shit, he thought. This was a find—even for him. For years, he had stealthily broken into the e-mail accounts of...
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The Operator →
Still, nobody knew just how “in” Simmons intended to be until this February, when Federal Election Commission (FEC) filings revealed him to be the single largest contributor in American politics. In late March, the Dallas billionaire told the Journal that, along with his wife and his holding company, Contran, he had donated $18.7 million to Republican political organizations—not just Crossroads...
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The Woman Who Edited Nuts Magazine →
As the sound of jazz filled the air in the office that night I diligently got on with the task at hand. It was slow. It was laborious. It was tedious. It was decapitating topless women. I was associate editor on the best-selling men’s weekly magazine Nuts and tomorrow was the launch of Assess My Breasts – an online brand extension inviting women to upload pictures of themselves (or...
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On the Origins of the Arts →
We are forced to stumble through our chemically challenged lives in a chemosensory biosphere, relying on sound and vision that evolved primarily for life in the trees. Only through science and technology has humanity penetrated the immense sensory worlds in the rest of the biosphere. With instrumentation, we are able to translate the sensory worlds of the rest of life into our own. And in the...
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Expletives Not Deleted →
Armando Iannucci, the British comedy writer and director, is short and slight, and, at forty-eight, he is going bald in the old-fashioned, uncropped way, with tufts of hair here and there. He has a soft Scottish accent and a demure, bookish manner. A scholar of John Milton, he is a former classical-music columnist for Gramophone. In recent years, he has become best known in Britain for creating...
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Another Night to Remember →
When the Costa Concordia, a floating pleasure palace carrying 4,200 people, hit a rock off the Italian coast on January 13, it became the largest passenger ship ever wrecked, supplanting the Titanic in maritime history. From the moments when the captain made the first in a series of incredible blunders, through a harrowing night of mindless panic and deadly peril, in which rescuers and...
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Reefer Madness →
Marijuana has not been de facto legalized, and the war on drugs is not just about cocaine and heroin. In fact, today, when we don’t have enough jail cells for murderers, rapists, and other violent criminals, there may be more people in federal and state prisons for marijuana offenses than at any other time in U.S. history.
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Getting Plowed →
Montreal is famous for its turf wars, which have brought firebombings and shootings to some rather unexpected places: daycares, funeral homes, pet stores. Snow removal is no exception. In true local style, no patch of snow or rusty sidewalk blower is trivial enough to escape the collusion, death threats and property destruction that have long been hallmarks of doing business in la belle ville.
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The SEC: Outmanned, Outgunned, and On a Roll →
One late afternoon in March 2007, Sanjay Wadhwa sat at his desk transfixed by the data on his computer screen. Wadhwa was then a low-level supervisor in the Wall Street office of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission investigating a supposedly routine case of “cherry-picking.” The SEC had gotten a complaint that Rengan Rajaratnam, the founder of Sedna Capital Management, a small hedge...
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The Rise of the Killer Drones: How America Goes to... →
During the invasion of Iraq in 2003, the military conducted only a handful of drone missions. Today, the Pentagon deploys a fleet of 19,000 drones, relying on them for classified missions that once belonged exclusively to Special Forces units or covert operatives on the ground. American drones have been sent to spy on or kill targets in Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Syria, Somalia...
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Mitt Romney, American Parasite →
At the time, Mitt Romney had been running Bain Capital since 1984, minting a reputation as a prince of private investment. A future prospectus by Deutsche Bank would reveal that by the time he left in 1999, Bain had averaged a shimmering 88 percent annual return on investment. Romney would use that success to launch his political career.
His specialty was flipping companies—or what he...
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Forty Years in Solitary →
On Tuesday, Wallace and his friend Albert Woodfox will mark one of the more unusual, and shameful, anniversaries in American penal history. Forty years ago to the day, they were put into solitary confinement in Louisiana’s notorious Angola jail. They have been there ever since.
They have spent 23 hours of every one of the past 14,610 days locked in their single-occupancy 9ft-by-6ft...
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Karma Crash →
John Friend created a yoga empire with Anusara, which grew to 600,000 students and made him one of the most popular yoga teachers in the United States. It all unraveled following a scandal involving sex with students and financial mismanagement
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What It Cost Eight Women Writers To Make It In New... →
We’ve looked at how much the costs of things like Reeses peanut butter cups and TV sets have changed over time—very specific items. Let’s cast a wider net. For more than a century, the young flock to New York as the place to launch a career in the arts. Is it as expensive a proposition now as it always has been? Has the size of the potential rewards increased or decreased? And more...
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Six Degrees of Aggregation →
Of the many and conflicting stories about how Huffington Post came to be—how it boasts 68 sections, three international editions (with more to come), 1.2 billion monthly page views and 54 million comments in the past year alone, how it came to surpass the traffic of virtually all the nation’s established news organizations and amass content so voluminous that a visit to the website feels like a...
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Battleground America →
There are nearly three hundred million privately owned firearms in the United States: a hundred and six million handguns, a hundred and five million rifles, and eighty-three million shotguns. That works out to about one gun for every American. The gun that T. J. Lane brought to Chardon High School belonged to his uncle, who had bought it in 2010, at a gun shop. Both of Lane’s parents had been...
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Downtown's Daughter →
As a general principle, Lena Dunham does not believe in removing anything that she has posted to the Internet; but, after she received a million and a half hits on YouTube for a video that showed her stripping down to a bikini, climbing into a fountain on the campus of Oberlin College, and performing her ablutions, she reconsidered the value of having personal boundaries. The six-minute video...
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Truth or Consequences →
Eight years ago, Dan Rather broadcast an explosive report on the Air National Guard service of President George W. Bush. It was supposed to be the legendary newsman’s finest hour. Instead, it blew up in his face, tarnishing his career forever and casting a dark cloud of doubt and suspicion over his reporting—and that of every other journalist on the case. This month, as Rather returns with a...
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Ultimate Fighting vs. Math →
It can be surprisingly difficult to say with any specificity what makes a mixed martial artist great, or what makes one fighter better than another. In baseball, there are home run tallies and RBIs and countless more obscure measures of a player’s skills. In MMA, fans find it easy to call someone a force of nature, but historically, it’s been impossible to back it up with data. In some cases,...
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The Crisis in American Walking →
Despite these upsides, in an America enraptured by the cultural prosthesis that is the automobile, walking has become a lost mode, perceived as not a legitimate way to travel but a necessary adjunct to one’s car journey, a hobby, or something that people without cars—those pitiable “vulnerable road users,” as they are called with charitable condescension—do. To decry these facts—to examine, as...