December 2011
35 posts
3 tags
Reading List: John Jeremiah Sullivan
In my time running this website I’ve discovered, rediscovered, and otherwise enjoyed the works of various writers I might not have in other circumstances. Among my favourite discoveries this year was John Jeremiah Sullivan, who I’ll leave it to James Wood to introduce, from his review of Sullivan’s latest collection of essays, Pulphead:
He seems to have in abundance the...
2 tags
A Few Too Many →
Application of the hair of the dog may sound like nothing more than a way of getting yourself drunk enough so that you don’t notice you have a hangover, but, according to Wayne Jones, of the Swedish National Laboratory of Forensic Medicine, the biochemistry is probably more complicated than that. Jones’s theory is that the liver, in processing alcohol, first addresses itself to ethanol, which...
2 tags
Test of Time →
ESPN covets the international sports market, so The Boss dispatched me overseas for a cricket match between India and England. This made sense, as I’d recently covered the Cricket World Cup on the subcontinent. I knew the rules and knew that a Test match was the original and purest form of cricket, a game that can go on for five days. Forty hours. I thought the same thing any sane person...
1 tag
Apocalypse Soon →
New Age adherents of the 2012 prophecy, which has created an Internet frenzy and a small publishing industry, believe the end of the ancient Mayan calendar, on December 21, 2012, will coincide with the end of the world. Hal Lindsey and Carole C. Carlson’s The Late Great Planet Earth (1970), along with Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins’ Left Behind series, which has sold more than 35 million...
3 tags
The Collector →
On a warm Saturday in early July, an employee at the Maryland Historical Society placed a call to the police. He had noticed two visitors behaving strangely—a young, tall, handsome man with high cheekbones and full lips and a much older, heavier man, with dark, lank hair and a patchy, graying beard. The older man had called in advance to give the librarians a list of boxes of documents he...
2 tags
Fire in the Library →
Once, we stored our photos and other mementos in shoeboxes in the attic; now we keep them online. That puts our stuff at the mercy of companies that could decide to throw it away—unless Jason Scott and the Archive Team can get there first.
(Thanks, Alex)
How Luther Went Viral →
After decades of simmering discontent a new form of media gives opponents of an authoritarian regime a way to express their views, register their solidarity and co-ordinate their actions. The protesters’ message spreads virally through social networks, making it impossible to suppress and highlighting the extent of public support for revolution. The combination of improved publishing technology...
4 tags
Shattered Glass →
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.
1 tag
Working Arrangement →
Whether to denounce it as a step down the path to unspeakable decadence or to exalt it as self-evidently right and just, everyone in public life today has a position on gay marriage. All the presidential candidates in the current electoral cycle have been asked about it, and all have had responses carefully packaged to ingratiate themselves with their constituencies. If the past few years may...
2 tags
Hannah and Andrew →
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?
3 tags
A Thing or Two About Twins →
They have the same piercing eyes. The same color hair. One may be shy, while the other loves meeting new people. Discovering why identical twins differ—despite having the same DNA—could reveal a great deal about all of us.
1 tag
The Curse of Cow Clicker →
It’s a Facebook game called Cow Clicker, and it’s unlike anything Bogost ever made before, a borderline-evil piece of work that was intended to embody the worst aspects of the modern gaming industry. He meant Cow Clicker to be a satire with a short shelf life. Instead, it enslaved him and many of its players for much of the past 18 months. Even Bogost can’t decide whether it represents his...
3 tags
Discovering Autism: Unraveling An Epidemic →
Rates of autism have exploded over the last 20 years. In exploring the phenomenon and its repercussions, Los Angeles Times staff writer Alan Zarembo interviewed dozens of clinicians, researchers, parents and educators and reviewed scores of scientific studies. Zarembo, along with Doug Smith and Sandra Poindexter of the Times data team, also analyzed autism rates and public spending on autism in...
2 tags
Who Runs Russia? →
Russians have an oddly reverential attitude about their gangsters. For a small fee, tour guides will lead you through Moscow’s Vagankovskoye cemetery, where mafiosi of means are buried – some under life-sized statues or headstones etched with a likeness of the deceased standing next to his BMW. You can tune into Radio Shanson, named after a style of folk music devoted to ballads about prison...
2 tags
The Demands of Cold Blood →
When a crime reporter is told an outlandish account, his first obligation is to establish the facts. But when the story turns out to be far more shocking—a conspiracy, in fact, of appalling darkness—it can knock his sense of duty until it cracks.
2 tags
Topic of Cancer →
One fine June day, the author is launching his best-selling memoir, Hitch-22. The next, he’s throwing up backstage at The Daily Show, in a brief bout of denial, before entering the unfamiliar country—with its egalitarian spirit, martial metaphors, and hard bargains of people who have cancer.
Unanswerable Prayers:
What’s an atheist to think when thousands of believers (including prominent...
2 tags
A Massacre in Jamaica →
The trouble that led to the Tivoli Gardens deaths began in August, 2009, when the United States government requested the extradition of Christopher (Dudus) Coke. In the U.S., Coke stood charged in federal court of trafficking in narcotics and firearms; in Jamaica, he was known as the country’s most powerful “don,” a community leader who also runs a criminal enterprise. He lived in Tivoli, where...
1 tag
Say Hello To My Little Friend →
America’s fascination with “savages” and shrunken heads began in the early 1900s, with the publication of the first English-language Jívaro ethnographies and the arrival of the first tsantsas, as ceremonial heads are known, in U.S. museums. The fascination flourished throughout the first half of the 20th century. In the thirties and forties, self-styled “explorers” like Robert Ripley...
2 tags
The Feature's 2011 Highlights
Here are The Feature’s highlights of the year. This list is comprised of my favourites and reader favourites, selected from articles posted here in 2011 (limited to those originally published in 2011). Open this post in your browser to make use of the Read Later button accompanying each link.
Paul Haggis vs. the Church of Scientology
Lawrence Wright, The New Yorker
Haggis had not spoken...
2 tags
Vladimir Putin, Democracy, and Activism in Russia →
It is not the end of an epoch. It would be hasty, in fact, to declare the event the beginning of the end. Any comparison to the May Day events of 1990, much less to Tahrir Square, last winter—an event discussed constantly in political circles in Moscow—discounts the fact that millions of Russians remain apolitical and atomized, and have learned to live with a system that provides few legal...
2 tags
No Country for Innocent Men →
Texas has exonerated no fewer than 56 people. All had served years, sometimes decades, in prison; five were on death row. As Perry sees it, these exonerations don’t suggest a problem with the system—they demonstrate that it’s working. “We have a very lengthy and methodical process of appeals,” he said in March 2010. “And that is a great and good mark for...
1 tag
The Book of Jobs →
The trauma we’re experiencing right now resembles the trauma we experienced 80 years ago, during the Great Depression, and it has been brought on by an analogous set of circumstances. Then, as now, we faced a breakdown of the banking system. But then, as now, the breakdown of the banking system was in part a consequence of deeper problems. Even if we correctly respond to the trauma—the failures...
1 tag
Now That Books Mean Nothing →
As much as I may want (or have wanted) it to be so, books haven’t been a sufficient comfort or diversion as I prepared to lose my boobs, then lost them, and began trying to adjust to their absence from my body. If I pick a book up, I’ll read a few pages before setting it aside because the end just seems too far away, the time and attention it requires, too exhausting. I don’t have the energy or...
1 tag
The King of All Vegas Real Estate Scams →
Before the market crashed and home prices tumbled, before federal investigators showed up and hauled away the community records, before her property managers pled guilty for conspiring to rig neighborhood elections, and before her real estate lawyer allegedly tried to commit suicide by overdosing on drugs and setting fire to her home, Wanda Murray thought that buying a condominium in Las Vegas...
3 tags
Out-of-Body Experience: Master of Illusion →
It is not every day that you are separated from your body and then stabbed in the chest with a kitchen knife. But such experiences are routine in the lab of Henrik Ehrsson, a neuroscientist at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, who uses illusions to probe, stretch and displace people’s sense of self. Today, using little more than a video camera, goggles and two sticks, he has...
2 tags
Three at Last! →
They are notorious for, and can never escape, a crime they didn’t commit. Eighteen years ago, three teenagers in Arkansas were falsely accused of the murders of three young boys. It was an astounding abuse of justice, and it was all caught on film, in a series of HBO documentaries that gained a cult following and led celebrities like Johnny Depp and Eddie Vedder to take up the cause....
2 tags
How Investigators Unravelled Europe's Biggest-Ever... →
The coffee shop was noisy, but Xu was intently focused on the American as he ordered eight shipments of Plavix, Casodex, Tamiflu and Aricept, a drug for Alzheimer’s disease. Xu was excited; his deep-set features relaxed a little. This meeting was going better than he ever imagined. He could, potentially, be making millions of dollars within weeks. He did not know that the quiet American...
2 tags
Face to Face with Radovan Karadzic →
It is a tight fit, in the depths of the war crimes tribunal building in The Hague, in the tiny holding cell and visitors’ room. On the other side of the thick pane of bulletproof glass is Radovan Karadzic, leader of the Bosnian Serbs during the worst slaughter to blight Europe since the Third Reich, thereafter the world’s most wanted fugitive – and now on trial in The Hague. We...
2 tags
Rick Perry Has Three Strikes Against Him →
Rick Perry’s already lackluster presidential bid went on a deathwatch after his debate debacle. In talking to the many who have known Perry over the years, fellow Texan Bryan Burrough discovers the surprising reasons behind the campaign’s train wreck and how Perry, with an unbroken string of nine political victories, might yet stage a comeback—despite his shocking backroom dealings with big...
1 tag
Straight Time →
In their nightmares the cops came for Junior, not the person they entrusted with his health, his welfare, his very life—not Steve Izenstark, held to the floor with a knee against his spine, demanding to know why he was under arrest. Sims told him he could hear the charges in front of the kids and parents or in the squad car. When Steve chose to go quietly, he took with him all the crisis...
1 tag
A Monster Among the 'Frum' →
From the search coordinators he learned the basics: The boy, an 8-year-old named Leiby, was short and slight, with dark peyos, or side curls. He had disappeared on his way home from day camp at Yeshiva Boyan, a large neighborhood Jewish school. It was Leiby’s first time making the trip alone, but that his parents had allowed him to do so was not unusual. In Borough Park, crime rates are low,...
2 tags
Apple's Secret Plan to Steal Your Doctor's Heart →
It was Aug. 25, 2010, the last day of a long heatwave in Chicago. Luo — a second-year resident at the hospital’s internal medicine department — had been assigned the tricky task of figuring out whether a pilot program that put iPads in the hands of the hospital’s residents was working out. So she sent a note to the CEO of Apple.
Jobs didn’t get back to her, but at 5:21 a.m. the next day,...
2 tags
Monday Night Lights →
There is no rational way to explain the amount of time that Gruden invests in each “Monday Night Football” broadcast: he spends days memorizing the names, numbers, and tendencies of all fifty-three players on both teams, even though little of this information makes it onto the broadcast. Once he has a sense of each team, he starts editing, creating a series of four-minute demonstration reels,...
3 tags
Out of Thin Air →
The lowest point of his career occurred at the highest point he raced. Mexico City is surrounded by mountains and is over 7,000 feet above sea level. That the altitude would have an impact on the Games was predicted. Clarke had raised concerns himself, but had been told by the Australian sports authorities that whingeing was bad sportsmanship. Since those Olympics, however, scientists have...
1 tag
How Counterfeiting Led to a Major Overhaul of... →
Canada’s paper money, with its rainbow of colours and picturesque drawings, had become one of the most forged currencies in the G20, a group of the world’s biggest economies – ranking behind countries such as Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, Italy, France and Spain for the number of counterfeit notes detected in circulation. For every one million legitimate banknotes out there, Canada was finding 470...