The Feature

The Comedian Comedians Were Afraid Of

Wed, 16 May 2012 11:59:33 -0400

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.

Word on the Suite

Wed, 16 May 2012 09:59:25 -0400

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 half of all albums sold.

Blood in the Water

Wed, 16 May 2012 07:37:46 -0400

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?

Money Unlimited

Tue, 15 May 2012 10:56:54 -0400

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 United era, the credit or the blame goes mostly to him.

Château Sucker

Tue, 15 May 2012 09:24:39 -0400

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 answers. Guests at tastings don’t want to bite the hand that quenches them. Auctioneers may not want to risk losing consignments by nitpicking ambiguous bottles. Winemakers don’t like to talk about counterfeiting, for fear of the taint. Also, one thing not high on the FBI’s list of investigative priorities: billionaires getting snowed by wine forgers. It’s clear to everyone on this rarefied circuit that wine fraud is rampant. It’s also clear not many insiders feel an urgency to do anything about it.

Psychiatry's "Bible" Gets an Overhaul

Mon, 14 May 2012 10:53:31 -0400

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 therapy. Many state educational and social services—such as after-school programs for kids with autism—also require a DSM diagnosis. Consequently, psychiatrists cannot dole out diagnoses of their own invention. They are bound to the disorders defined by the DSM.

Therefore, psychiatrists cannot ignore the new manual and go about business as usual. They must adapt, especially if they want to be sure that their patients keep receiving affordable treatment. Yet this diagnostic bible is a work in progress. In fact, although the revisions are 90 percent complete, the APA may still make significant changes and even delay the book’s official release. Even after its publication, the DSM will remain a snapshot of a field in flux—an ambitious attempt to capture an evolving, often ambiguous science.

Scamworld

Mon, 14 May 2012 09:01:30 -0400

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 happened to Richard Joseph: after requesting free information online, some unscrupulous Internet Marketer sold his name to Raygoza’s company, PushTraffic, who ripped Joseph off.

Two Hundred Years of Surgery

Tue, 08 May 2012 09:24:57 -0400

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 development of mankind’s abilities to heal the sick.

Inside the Quidditch World Cup

Tue, 08 May 2012 09:24:53 -0400

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.

The Kentucky Derby and the Slow Death of Horse Racing

Sat, 05 May 2012 10:37:44 -0400

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 of a century, an entire generation, has come and gone without such a champion. In the meantime, chaos. The great gaming monopoly that once was horse racing has devolved into a rudderless mess.

The Mysterious Case of the Vanishing Genius

Sat, 05 May 2012 10:37:40 -0400

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 about female reproduction that pushed the boundaries of evolutionary biology, forcing an entire field to take note. Indeed, back then it was hard not to notice Margie Profet, a vibrant young woman who made a “forever impression” on grade school chums and Harvard Ph.D.s alike. Today, the most salient fact about Profet is her absence. Neither friends, former advisers, publishers, nor ex-lovers has any idea what happened to her or where she is today. Sometime between 2002 and 2005, Profet, who was then in her mid-40s, vanished without a trace.

Uncatchable

Thu, 03 May 2012 11:25:01 -0400

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.

The Perfect Milk Machine

Thu, 03 May 2012 09:41:36 -0400

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. This is quite a career for a young animal: He was only born in 2004.

Is An ESPN Columnist Scamming People On The Internet?

Thu, 03 May 2012 09:01:01 -0400

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 Wiley, and Hunter S. Thompson, and which has now been rebranded as ESPN’s Playbook. The swiftness of her ascent gave her that weird sort of internet half-celebrity whereby she became moderately famous before anyone really knew who she was.

Alone, 'Riodoce' Covers the Mexican Drug Cartel Beat

Tue, 01 May 2012 11:51:00 -0400

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 the son of Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzmán, the head of the Sinaloa cartel and the most powerful drug kingpin in Mexico. Two and a half years earlier, when another of El Chapo’s sons was gunned down by the rival Beltrán Leyva cartel, it ignited a bloody war—387 people were killed in Culiacán in three months. In a way, El Chapo (Spanish for “Shorty”; Guzmán is 5’6”) and his empire are the main subjects of Riodoce, one of the only periodicals in Mexico that seriously investigates drug violence.

A Giant Among Giants

Tue, 01 May 2012 10:01:06 -0400

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 a review of leaked corporate records, dossiers prepared by private investigative firms, court documents, and various international investigations — is at once simpler and far more complicated than it appears. Like all traders, Glencore makes its money at the margins, but Glencore, even more so than its competitors, profits by working in the globe’s most marginal business regions and often, investigators have found, at the margins of what is legal.

Pantone color forecasts: Are they accurate?

Tue, 01 May 2012 08:01:19 -0400

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 color forecaster (heading the Textile Color Card Association for four decades), traveled to the Paris shows each summer to soak up the latest tints, like the brownish-green Vert Amande— ven employing an American foreign correspondent, Bettina Bedwell, to act as a “spy.” (Intel from Bedwell, in 1936: “Many Frenchwomen are getting away from black.”)

This idea—that color trends begin on Paris runways, still holds a certain sway, at least in the popular imagination; witness the “cerulean blue” monologue in The Devil Wears Prada, in which Meryl Streep as an imperious fashion editor describes how a color that begins life in gowns by Oscar de la Renta in 2002 is then copied by other designers and is ultimately “filtered down through the department stores and then trickled on down into some tragic Casual Corner.” But Paris may not be the ultimate source; as Blascyzk points out, cerulean blue was tapped by Pantone in 1999 as the “Color of the Millennium.” Coincidence?

Machine Politics

Mon, 30 Apr 2012 12:01:06 -0400

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 which it wasn’t designed. In one respect, hacking is an act of hypnosis. As Hotz describes it, the secret is to figure out how to speak to the device, then persuade it to obey your wishes. After weeks of research with other hackers online, Hotz realized that, if he could make a chip inside the phone think it had been erased, it was “like talking to a baby, and it’s really easy to persuade a baby.”

(More David Kushner)

The Real CSI: What Happens at a Crime Scene?

Mon, 30 Apr 2012 09:59:41 -0400

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?

Runner's World: Usain Bolt and His Entourage

Mon, 30 Apr 2012 08:01:07 -0400

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.