3rd February 2012
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: “People call me the devil”—but I liked him immediately. He was solicitous, and he was smart. He talked about surrealism and breaking down the wall between viewer and participant. Then I went to watch him make a pornographic movie out in the Valley and saw something so irredeemably obscene that I figured, Okay, Gregory Dark really is the devil, or at least someone I should stay away from.
Then, last year, I watched a Britney Spears video for a song called “From the Bottom of My Broken Heart” on MTV. I kept waiting for that adorable little cutlet to break out into a suggestive hootchy-koo, but she never did. The video was aggressively wholesome—given over to a wholesomeness that was unreal and fetishized—and at the end of it, when I looked for the name of its director, I saw that it was Gregory Dark. Then I saw a video by Mandy Moore, another teenage glamour-puss, who is marketed to little girls who are still too innocent for the coy come-ons of Britney Spears and the frank sexual howling of Christina Aguilera. Gregory Dark directed the Mandy Moore video, too. I called him up, and he said, “Oh, yes, I remember you—we were sort of friends.” He said that he didn’t make pornography anymore but had, in the years since, made about a hundred music videos. He said that he was in great demand, and that in fact he was trying to work out a deal to direct a feature film for New Line. I asked him what he was doing next, and he said he was directing a video for a fourteen-year-old girl. I asked whether I could come out and see him, and he hesitated—he was, he said, a changed man, and he didn’t want to be judged as a pornographer anymore. I pressed. I said, C’mon, man, you know me. At last he gave in, and I went out to see whether Gregory Dark was indeed a changed man or had simply cut some kind of crafty deal to take control of the hearts of America’s virgin daughters.
Feet In Smoke: A Story About Electrified Near-Death
“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 days earlier, he had called to ask if there were any songs I wanted to hear at the show. I asked for something new, a song he’d written and played for me the last time I’d seen him, on Christmas Day. Our holidays always end the same way, with the two of us up late drinking and trying out our new “tunes” on each other. There’s something biologically satisfying about harmonizing with a sibling. We’ve gotten to where we communicate through music, using guitars the way fathers and sons use baseball, as a kind of emotional code. Worth is seven years older than I am, an age difference that can make brothers strangers. I’m fairly sure the first time he ever felt we had anything to talk about was the day he caught me in his basement bedroom at our old house in Indiana, trying to teach myself how to play “Radio Free Europe” on a black Telecaster he’d forbidden me to touch.
The song I had asked for, “Is It All Over,” was not a typical Moviegoers song. It was simpler and more earnest than the infectious power-pop they made their specialty. The changes were still unfamiliar to the rest of the band, and Worth had been about to lead them through the first verse, had just leaned forward to sing the opening lines—”Is it all over? I’m scanning the paper / For someone to replace her”—when a surge of electricity arced through his body, magnetizing the mike to his chest like a tiny but obstinate missile, searing the first string and fret into his palm, and stopping his heart. He fell backward and crashed, already dying.
2nd February 2012
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 sector between late 2009 and late 2011. Avarice, altruism, and policy had aligned to fuel a spectacular boom. Anyone who has heard the name Solyndra knows how this all panned out. Due to a confluence of factors—including fluctuating silicon prices, newly cheap natural gas, the 2008 financial crisis, China’s ascendant solar industry, and certain technological realities—the clean-tech bubble has burst, leaving us with a traditional energy infrastructure still overwhelmingly reliant on fossil fuels. The fallout has hit almost every niche in the clean-tech sector—wind, biofuels, electric cars, and fuel cells—but none more dramatically than solar.
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 effective than morphine. If successful, it would deliver Brown from his living hell into a strange new world—a digital winter wonderland.
1st February 2012
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 for their jobs, and spend months or years building up connections and gaining the trust of criminals. Confidential informants like von Habsburg simply operate within their normal lives. Informants are especially valuable because they can collect evidence that would require court orders if they were government agents. In almost every successful case against a large-scale criminal enterprise—from the one against John Gotti’s Mob operation to those involving terrorists plotting against New York synagogues and subways—an informant has played a central role. “The human-source program is the lifeblood of the F.B.I.,” an assistant director of the Bureau told a congressional hearing in 2007.
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 of our time.
31st January 2012
Tyler Clementi’s Suicide and Dharun Ravi’s Trial
“On a Saturday night in August, 2010, a week before starting college, Dharun Ravi decided to look online for his future Rutgers roommate. He was living with his parents in Plainsboro. Ravi, who was planning to major in math and economics, had learned that he had been assigned to Davidson Hall—a collection of single-story, barracks-like dorms on Busch campus, which is considered the dullest of the four Rutgers campuses in New Brunswick and neighboring Piscataway. He would be in Davidson Hall C, a coed dorm for about eighty students. He knew Clementi’s first name and that his last name started with C; he also knew his e-mail address, keybowvio@yahoo.com—apparently, a distillation of musical terms—and had e-mailed him but received no reply.
A Fighter Abroad
“On December 10, 1810, in a muddy field around 25 miles from London, a fight took place that was so dramatic, controversial, and ferocious that it continues to haunt the imagination of boxing more than 200 years later. One of the fighters was the greatest champion of his age, a bareknuckle boxer so tough he reportedly trained by punching the bark off trees. The other was a freed slave, an illiterate African-American who had made the voyage across the Atlantic to seek glory in the ring. Rumors about the match had circulated for weeks, transfixing England. Thousands of fans braved a pounding rain to watch the bout. Some of the first professional sportswriters were on hand to record it.
The Hunter Becomes the Hunted
“You don’t know his name, and you’ve never seen his face. But this year, as America leaves Iraq for good after eight years of war, we also leave behind a man believed by our military and intelligence agencies to be the best terrorist hunter alive. He’s still there, hunting. And so are the terrorists.
30th January 2012
Sex, Lies, and Hit Men!
“Jeffrey Stern was a wealthy personal injury lawyer who drove a Maserati. His wife, Yvonne, was a stunning carpool mom who loved Fendi dresses and Hermès handbags. Together they were the envy of their exclusive Bellaire neighborhood. Then came three bungled attempts on her life, the revelation that Jeffrey had taken a mistress, and the bombshell that investigators had accused the lovers of plotting to kill Yvonne.
