February 2012
42 posts
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The Big Reveal →
The Bible, as every Sunday-school student learns, has a Hollywood ending. Not a happy ending, certainly, but one where all the dramatic plot points left open earlier, to the whispered uncertainty of the audience (“I don’t get it—when did he say he was coming back?”), are resolved in a rush, and a final, climactic confrontation between the stern-lipped action hero and the really bad guys takes...
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Those Fabulous Confabs →
Smart talk has never been such a valuable commodity. It’s spawned conferences like TED, Davos, and now a slew of upstart competitors. It has made the eighteen‑minute TED lecture a viral online phenomenon. But are we running out of things to say?
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I Was a Warehouse Wage Slave →
Several months prior, I’d reported on an Ohio warehouse where workers shipped products for online retailers under conditions that were surprisingly demoralizing and dehumanizing, even to someone who’s spent a lot of time working in warehouses, which I have. And then my editors sat me down. “We want you to go work for Amalgamated Product Giant Shipping Worldwide Inc.,”...
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The Lost Party →
If either Romney or Santorum gains the nomination and then falls before Obama, flubbing an election that just months ago seemed eminently winnable, it will unleash a GOP apocalypse on November 7—followed by an epic struggle between the regulars and red-hots to refashion the party. And make no mistake: A loss is what the GOP’s political class now expects. “Six months before this thing got going,...
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The Gary Oldman Story That Almost Wasn't →
Nearly three years ago, GQ sat down with one of Hollywood’s great underappreciated screen actors for a sprawling profile about the untamed days of his youth and the quiet life he had managed to piece together in his middle age. Now, with Oldman just days away from his first Oscar night as a nominated actor, we are proud to finally share the full original story. Why now? That will take...
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Brain in a Box →
It wasn’t quite the lynching that Henry Markram had expected. But the barrage of sceptical comments from his fellow neuroscientists — “It’s crap,” said one — definitely made the day feel like a tribunal. Officially, the Swiss Academy of Sciences meeting in Bern on 20 January was an overview of large-scale computer modelling in neuroscience. Unofficially, it was...
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Mitt Romney’s Abortion Record →
To understand Mitt Romney, you have to understand the most difficult passage of his political life: how he changed his position on abortion. Not the story he tells about it, but the real story.
Romney began his political career as a pro-choicer. In the story he tells, he had an epiphany, a flash of insight, and committed himself thereafter to protecting life. But that isn’t what happened. The...
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The Boy Who Played With Fusion →
This is before Taylor would transform the family’s garage into a mysterious, glow-in-the-dark cache of rocks and metals and liquids with unimaginable powers. Before he would conceive, in a series of unlikely epiphanies, new ways to use neutrons to confront some of the biggest challenges of our time: cancer and nuclear terrorism. Before he would build a reactor that could hurl atoms together in...
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The Secret Life of Bees →
The decision-making power of honeybees is a prime example of what scientists call swarm intelligence. Clouds of locusts, schools of fish, flocks of birds and colonies of termites display it as well. And in the field of swarm intelligence, Seeley is a towering figure. For 40 years he has come up with experiments that have allowed him to decipher the rules honeybees use for their collective...
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Burn All the Liars →
An unfinished autobiography and a 1980s biopic turned Frances Farmer, one of the great golden-era stars, into a lobotomized zombie. The main trouble: Frances Farmer wasn’t lobotomized. An investigation to set one of Hollywood’s most convoluted stories straight.
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Fishing as Slaves on the High Seas →
The experiences of the fishermen on the Melilla 203 were not unique. In a six-month investigation spanning three continents, Bloomberg Businessweek found cases of debt bondage on the Melilla 203 and at least nine other ships that have operated in New Zealand’s waters. As recently as November 2011, fish from the Melilla 203 and other suspect vessels was bought and processed by United Fisheries,...
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The Jerusalem Syndrome: Why Some Religious... →
There’s a joke in psychiatry: If you talk to God, it’s called praying; if God talks to you, you’re nuts. In Jerusalem, God seems to be particularly chatty around Easter, Passover, and Christmas—the peak seasons for the syndrome. It affects an estimated 50 to 100 tourists each year, the overwhelming majority of whom are evangelical Christians. Some of these cases simply involve tourists becoming...
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Party Crasher →
Paul is running for President again this year, in a field that many Republicans find disappointing. And yet, while Paul is doing better, state by state, than he did in 2008, he has conspicuously failed to establish himself as this year’s Tea Party candidate. Polls have shown that voters who support the Tea Party are actually less likely to support Paul—some have gone for Newt Gingrich, whose...
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The Making Of "Homer At The Bat," The Episode That... →
On Feb. 20, 1992, more American homes tuned into The Simpsons than they did The Cosby Show or the Winter Olympics from Albertville, France. A foul-mouthed cartoon on a fourth-place network bested the Huxtables and the world’s best amateur athletes. Fox over NBC and CBS—its first-ever victory in prime time. New over old.
Why the shift? Well, the Olympic programming that night featured...
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The Story Behind the Olympus Scandal →
Woodford, 51, recounted how he had just returned from Hong Kong, having fled Tokyo after a board meeting in which Olympus Chairman Tsuyoshi Kikukawa had fired him. The cause for dismissal, according to Woodford: his insistence that Olympus officials come clean about a series of questionable purchases dating to 2006, totaling $1.6 billion, none of which had been adequately reported in the...
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Shark in the Kiddie Pool →
Meet Nick Roses, called “the most hated 21-year-old” in Hollywood, who climbed to the top of a growing field—child talent management—while still a kid himself. But Roses’s tactics—he was accused of financially preying on young clients and their starry-eyed moms—have landed him in hot water.
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Rhino Wars →
And so goes a night on the front lines of southern Africa’s ruthless and murky rhino war, which since 2006 has seen more than a thousand rhinos slaughtered, some 22 poachers gunned down and more than 200 arrested last year in South Africa alone. At the bloody heart of this conflict is the rhino’s horn, a prized ingredient in traditional Asian medicines. Though black market prices...
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The Forgetting Pill Erases Painful Memories... →
This new model of memory isn’t just a theory—neuroscientists actually have a molecular explanation of how and why memories change. In fact, their definition of memory has broadened to encompass not only the cliché cinematic scenes from childhood but also the persisting mental loops of illnesses like PTSD and addiction—and even pain disorders like neuropathy. Unlike most brain research, the...
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A Better Brew →
Then came Prohibition, followed hard by industrialization. Beer went from barrel to bottle and from saloon to home refrigerator, and only the largest companies could afford to manufacture and distribute it. A generation raised on Coca-Cola had a hard time readjusting to beer’s bitterness, and brewers diluted their recipes accordingly. In 1953, Miller High Life was dismissed by one competitor as...
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The Arcades Project: Martin Amis’ Guide to Classic... →
Like most Amis fanciers, I had heard of the existence of this video game book –- the full title of which is Invasion of the Space Invaders: An Addict’s Guide to Battle Tactics, Big Scores and the Best Machines –- but knew very little about it. What I did know was that he dashed it off at some point during the time he was writing Money, one of the great British novels of the 1980s, and that it...
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Romance Novels, The Last Great Bastion Of... →
Romance fiction is widely reckoned to be a very low form of literature. Maybe the lowest, if we’re not counting the writing at Groupon, or on Splenda packets. Romance fiction: probably the worst! An addictive, absurd, unintellectual literature, literature for nonreaders, literature for stupid people—literature for women! Books Just For Her! Low or not, romance is by far the most popular...
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The Montauk Grifter →
He is Dan Kaufman, Dan Kay, Dan Katze. He is a celebrity chef, an internet entrepreneur, a television producer. He has worked for Apple, Google, AOL, the Rainbow Room. He hangs out with Steve Case, Gordon Ramsey, Tim Armstrong. He’s a world-class surfer, a AAA baseball legend, the founder of a seminal punk band. He’s one of the more persistent and obsessive grifters to ply the...
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Buju Banton is Innocent →
It’s a case built upon the handiwork of a mendacious snitch — Alex Johnson, AKA Junior — with an extensive criminal history and clear financial motives to see Buju arrested. An aggressive federal prosecutor spent big in two weeklong trials in Tampa to secure a celebrity conviction. The saga sheds light on how far the government will go and how dirty it will play to win the few big battles...
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The Plagiarist's Tale →
Originality is a relative concept in literature. As writers from T. S. Eliot to Harold Bloom have pointed out, ideas are doomed to be rehashed. This wasn’t always regarded as a problem. Roman writers subscribed to the idea of imitatio: they viewed their role as emulating and reworking earlier masterpieces. It wasn’t until the Romantic era, which introduced the notion of the author as solitary...
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Muscle Beach and the Dawn of Huge →
In the 1970s, a new breed of American man emerged from the weight rooms of Gold’s Gym in Venice Beach. Led by Arnold Schwarzenegger, a clique of world-class bodybuilders — muscle-bound, steroid-fueled, bronzed like suntanned gods — pumped iron, chased girls, and changed the world’s exercise culture forever.
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The Mystery of the Millionaire Metaphysician →
In June 2000, the philosopher Dean Zimmerman moved from the University of Notre Dame to Syracuse University with his wife and three kids, only to see their new house catch fire the day they moved in. Much of what they owned was destroyed. “We were out of the house for six months,” he recalls. “It was a miserable experience.”
The week after the fire, Zimmerman got a...
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Dinner at Rupert's →
Red wine in hand, Rupert Murdoch chatted with guests at his London townhouse on what would be one of the most important nights to the future of his company. Gathered for cocktails were Rupert’s son James, heir apparent to the family media empire; Rebekah Brooks, the chiefexecutive of News Corp.’s (NWSA) U.K. unit; and Chase Carey, the New York-based president and chief operating officer....
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The Mysteries of the Suicide Tourist →
Researchers stumbled on a striking fact about suicides in New York: A surprising number of people who kill themselves in the city come here from out of town, and many appear to come expressly to take their own lives. In a report published last fall called “Suicide Tourism in Manhattan, New York City, 1990–2004,” researchers at the New York Academy of Medicine and Weill Cornell Medical College...
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Open Your Mouth And You're Dead →
The freediving world championships occur at the outer limits of competitive risk. During the 2011 event, held off the coast of Greece, more than 130 athletes assembled to swim hundreds of feet straight down on a single breath—without (they hoped) passing out, freaking out, or drowning.
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How Your Cat Is Making You Crazy →
Jaroslav Flegr is no kook. And yet, for years, he suspected his mind had been taken over by parasites that had invaded his brain. So the prolific biologist took his science-fiction hunch into the lab. What he’s now discovering will startle you. Could tiny organisms carried by house cats be creeping into our brains, causing everything from car wrecks to schizophrenia? A biologist’s science-...
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Making the World's Largest Airline Fly →
All this amalgamating may be a good thing for the airlines. It could wring redundancies out of the system and, done right, bring order and discipline to an industry that since its deregulation in 1978 has been prone to destabilizing price wars and chronic overexpansion. (It’s also likely to raise fares, at least on some routes.) In buying Continental, United promised Wall Street $1.2 billion in...
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The End of Wall Street As They Knew It →
On Wall Street, the misery index is as high as it’s been since brokers were on window ledges back in 1929. But sentiments like that, accompanied by a full orchestra of the world’s tiniest violins, are only part of the conversation in Wall Street offices and trading desks. Along with the complaint is something that might be called soul-searching—which is, in itself, a surprising development....
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Piltdown Man: British Archaeology's Greatest Hoax →
When the find was revealed to be a ‘cheap fraud’, several eminent men – including Sir Arthur Conan Doyle – were put in the frame. Now scientists aim to put an end to the mystery once and for all
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18 Tigers, 17 Lions, 8 Bears, 3 Cougars,2 Wolves,... →
The miracle of the great Zanesville zoo escape—which began last fall when a depressed, desperate man named Terry Thompson set free his vast collection of exotic animals—was that not a single innocent person was hurt. The incident made global news. It also thrust into daylight, if only for a brief moment, a secret world of privately owned exotic animals living off the grid, and often right next...
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The Super Power of Franz Liszt →
The bicentenary of Franz Liszt (1811–1886) follows hard upon those of Berlioz, Mendelssohn, Chopin, and Schumann, and he has conserved his place as one of the supreme Romantic composers. Nevertheless, his career as a composer was always cursed by the fact that he was also, it is generally agreed, the greatest pianist who ever lived. The major part of his work was for piano, much of it tailored...
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The Afterlife of Technology at the End of the... →
The Jamesburg Earth Station is a massive satellite receiver in a remote valley in California. It played a central role in satellite communications for three decades, but had been forgotten until the current owner put it up for sale, promoting it as a great place to spend the apocalypse. It stands feet from a trailer park and down the road from a Buddhist retreat. This is the story of one of the...
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The Devil in Greg Dark →
I met him four years ago. He was making pornography then. He was famous for it, sort of—famous for making the worst pornography, a pornography of transgression and violation, a pornography that seemed intended less to glorify sex than to advertise the death of the soul. People were calling him the devil back then—in fact, that’s exactly what he said when I met him:...
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Feet In Smoke: A Story About Electrified... →
On the morning of April 21, 1995, my elder brother, Worth (short for Ellsworth), put his mouth to a microphone in a garage in Lexington, Kentucky, and in the strict sense of having been “shocked to death,” was electrocuted. He and his band, the Moviegoers, had stopped for a day to rehearse on their way from Chicago to a concert in Tennessee, where I was in school. Just a couple of...
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Why the Clean Tech Boom Went Bust →
In 2005, VC investment in clean tech measured in the hundreds of millions of dollars. The following year, it ballooned to $1.75 billion, according to the National Venture Capital Association. By 2008, the year after Doerr’s speech, it had leaped to $4.1 billion. And the federal government followed. Through a mix of loans, subsidies, and tax breaks, it directed roughly $44.5 billion into the...
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Burning Man →
On his first tour of duty in Afghanistan, Sam Brown was set on fire by an improvised explosive device. He survived, only to find himself, like thousands of other vets, doomed to a post-traumatic life of unbearable pain. Even hallucinogen-grade drugs offered little relief, and little hope. Then his doctors told him about an experimental treatment, a painkilling video game supposedly more...
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The Mark →
The Federal Bureau of Investigation maintains more than fifteen thousand “confidential human sources.” The Drug Enforcement Administration has its own tipsters, as do the Secret Service and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives; over all, the Justice Department pays informants as much as a hundred million dollars a year. Trained agents like Grimm generally create new identities...
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Raise the Crime Rate →
America’s prison system is a moral catastrophe. The eerie sense of security that prevails on the streets of lower Manhattan obscures, and depends upon, a system of state-sponsored suffering as vicious and widespread as any in human history. Dismantling the system of American gulags, and holding accountable those responsible for their operation, presents the most urgent humanitarian imperative...