February 2012
6 posts
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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...
January 2012
50 posts
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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...
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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...
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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.
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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...
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What's Wrong With the Teenage Mind? →
What happens when children reach puberty earlier and adulthood later? The answer is: a good deal of teenage weirdness. Fortunately, developmental psychologists and neuroscientists are starting to explain the foundations of that weirdness. The crucial new idea is that there are two different neural and psychological systems that interact to turn children into adults. Over the past two centuries,...
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Amazon's Hit Man →
In interviews, Amazon executives cast their new effort as an experiment in the booming world of e-books, not a plan to displace the Big Six—Random House, Simon & Schuster, HarperCollins, Penguin, Hachette, and Macmillan. “What we’re building is more like an in-house laboratory where authors and editors and marketers can test new ideas,” says Jeff Belle, vice-president of Amazon Publishing...
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The Long Goodbye →
Augustus Monroe figured he’d drop dead long before he’d need a nursing home. A decade later, his son considers the weighty financial and emotional costs that come with a parent’s immortality.
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Let the Robot Drive: The Autonomous Car of the... →
As we drive the Google car—or are driven by it—I watch the action unfold on the computer monitor mounted on the passenger side of the dashboard. It shows how the car is interpreting the world: lanes, signs, cars, speeds, distances, vectors. The rendering is nothing special—a lot of blocky wireframe that puts me in mind of Atari’s classic Battlezone. (The display is just one of a host of geeky...
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The Behavioral Sink →
So what exactly happened in Universe 25? Past day 315, population growth slowed. More than six hundred mice now lived in Universe 25, constantly rubbing shoulders on their way up and down the stairwells to eat, drink, and sleep. Mice found themselves born into a world that was more crowded every day, and there were far more mice than meaningful social roles. With more and more peers to defend...
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The Caging of America →
The scale and the brutality of our prisons are the moral scandal of American life. Every day, at least fifty thousand men—a full house at Yankee Stadium—wake in solitary confinement, often in “supermax” prisons or prison wings, in which men are locked in small cells, where they see no one, cannot freely read and write, and are allowed out just once a day for an hour’s solo “exercise.” (Lock...
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The New French Hacker-Artist Underground →
The first experiment by UX, in September 1981, was an accidental one. A Parisian middle schooler named Andrei was trying to impress a couple of older classmates, boasting that he and his friend Peter often snuck into places and were about to hit the Pantheon, an enormous former church that towers over the fifth arrondissement. Andrei got in so deep with his boast that to save face he had to...
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The Mystery Behind Anesthesia →
But though doctors have been putting people under for more than 150 years, what happens in the brain during general anesthesia is a mystery. Scientists don’t know much about the extent to which these drugs tap into the same brain circuitry we use when we sleep, or how being anesthetized differs from other ways of losing consciousness, such as slipping into a coma following an injury. Are...
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The Devastating Costs of the Amazon Gold Rush →
In Peru alone, while no one knows for certain the total acreage that has been ravaged, at least 64,000 acres—possibly much more—have been razed. The destruction is more absolute than that caused by ranching or logging, which accounts, at least for now, for vastly more rainforest loss. Not only are gold miners burning the forest, they are stripping away the surface of the earth, perhaps 50 feet...
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All Aboard the Cocaine Express →
Twenty-one metres long and constructed mainly of fibreglass, the craft had room for a six-member crew and 6,435 litres of diesel fuel. It was equipped with bunk beds, a ballast mechanism, a global positioning system, a 346-horsepower diesel engine, “scrubbing” devices to clean the air, a conning tower and a periscope with a night-vision camera. One estimate put the cost of constructing such a...
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The Smart Way to Play God with Earth's Limited... →
Can humans grow enough food, produce enough energy and still preserve some of the last refuges of other species—both plant and animal—on the planet?
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Madden NFL and the Future of Video Game Sports →
I think we’re pretty much done with the Are Games Art? question. How about this one: Are Sports Games Art? Not a few of the people who make sports games, I now know, regard that question as somewhat hilarious and way, way too parlor-room aesthete. (They probably wouldn’t put it that way.) Many of the games most of us feel comfortable viewing as art are, most basically, rule-set...
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Peeling Oniontown →
There are certain places that, by their very nature, seem forsaken. Afghanistan is one. Another lies an hour and a half north of New York City outside the bucolic little Hudson Valley hamlet of Dover Plains. It’s a place called Oniontown. Despite its name, Oniontown isn’t an actual town—it’s more of a mountainside enclave filled with a haphazard collection of run-down trailers on a dead-end...
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The Boy Who Heard Too Much →
Like a comic-book villain transformed by a tragic accident, Weigman discovered at an early age that his acute hearing gave him superpowers on the telephone. He could impersonate any voice, memorize phone numbers by the sound of the buttons and decipher the inner workings of a phone system by the frequencies and clicks on a call, which he refers to as “songs.” The knowledge enabled him to hack...
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Counter-Terrorism Is Getting Complicated →
It is the central mystery of the case, one even more perplexing than the mystery of whether the old conspirators would ever have been capable of doing what they were talking about doing, or whether, if they weren’t capable, they could be guilty of any crimes. By all accounts, Fred Thomas had lived an exemplary life of loyalty and leadership, with a devoted wife, a son nearby, a secure...
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National Public Rodeo →
When most people hear “NPR,” they think Cokie Roberts, Nina Totenberg, Robert Siegel, and for some on the far right, all that is wrong with the mainstream liberal media. But beneath the veneer of the “Minnesota nice,” a simmering battle has been waged, and in the balance hangs NPR’s future and perhaps even its soul—as either a nonpartisan defender of in-depth journalism or a target...
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The Architect, The "It” Girl And The Toy Pistol... →
One warm June night in 1906, Albert Payson Terhune could be found engaged in battle for a telephone booth in the old Madison Square Garden while wearing a tuxedo. He had forcibly removed a man mid-conversation, and now, as he shouted into the phone, he kicked out a leg and swung his free arm to fend off the displaced caller and another man wielding a chair. Moments before and one floor above,...
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Art of the Steal: On the Trail of World’s Most... →
“Cunning, clever, conniving, and creative,” as one prosecutor would call him, Blanchard eluded the police for years. But eventually he made a mistake. And that mistake would take two officers from the modest police force of Winnipeg, Canada, on a wild ride of high tech capers across Africa, Canada, and Europe. Says Mitch McCormick, one of those Winnipeg investigators, “We had never seen...
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Euphemisms: Making Murder Respectable →
Euphemisms range promiscuously, from diplomacy (“the minister is indisposed”, meaning he won’t be coming) to the bedroom (a grande horizontale in France is a notable courtesan). But it is possible to attempt a euphemistic taxonomy. One way to categorise them is ethical. In “Politics and the English Language”, George Orwell wrote that obfuscatory political language is designed “to make lies...
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The Mystery Woman Behind the Murdoch Mess →
Rebekah Brooks was running the News of the World at 31, and Rupert Murdoch’s entire British newspaper empire at 41. A virtual member of the Murdoch family, close to Prime Ministers Blair, Brown, and Cameron, she relished her power—until the phone-hacking scandal took her down.
See also: Give Me Something To Read’s phone-hacking scandal reading list.
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The Greatest Running Shoe Never Sold →
It took him eleven years, but Hann finally converted his airport research into a breakthrough sneaker patented in 2004, a shoe with an entirely different system to cushion and propel the foot. It quickly attracted the attention of fast-growing athletic brand Under Armour (UA), which spent two years and hundreds of thousands of dollars to develop it as the prospective centerpiece of the...
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Steve Ballmer Reboots →
For many, the lasting impression of Ballmer is the sweaty, breathless, booming clown seen in countless YouTube clips, such as the “monkey boy” dance from a decade ago. He plays the cheerleader in public appearances in an apparent effort to prove that no one can top his love of Microsoft—and he succeeds cringingly well. Six feet tall and stocky, Ballmer has an enthusiasm that makes him even...
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Love, Boxing, and Hunter S. Thompson →
When John Kaye sent this report it made me realize that two of my great literary touchstones — Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Tristram Shandy — have much more in common than I had ever noticed. They are both colossal failures of mission, spectacular performances of the art of being sidetracked, of being shanghaied by errant attention, or, perhaps, perfect examples of the way art is, at its...
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Who Pinched My Ride? →
Stolen bicycles have become a solvent in America’s underground economy, a currency in the world of drug addicts and petty thieves. Bikes are portable and easily converted to cash, and they usually vanish without a trace—in some places, only 5 percent are even reported stolen. Stealing one is routinely treated as a misdemeanor, even though, in the age of electronic derailleurs and $5,000...
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What Remains: Conversations With America's Funeral... →
The funeral industry is in the midst of a transition of titanic proportions. America is secularizing at a rapid pace, with almost 25% of the country describing itself as un-church. Americans, embracing a less religious view of the afterlife, are now asking for a “spiritual” funeral instead of a religious one. And cremation numbers are up. Way up.
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Prohibition's Premier Hooch Hounds →
One of alcohol’s most formidable (and unlikely) foes was Isidor Einstein, a 40-year-old pushcart peddler and a postal clerk on the Lower East Side. After Prohibition took effect, he applied for a job as an enforcement agent at the Southern New York division headquarters of the Federal Prohibition Bureau. The pay was $40 a week, and to Izzy it seemed “a good chance for a fellow with ambition.”
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Reversal of Fortune →
When the verdict was issued in Lago Agrio, Chevron declared the judgment to be “illegitimate and unenforceable,” and said that the company, which has no assets in Ecuador, would not pay. Instead, it countered with an audacious move—suing Steven Donziger, the architect of the suit against it. At the very moment that Donziger might have been celebrating a landmark victory in Ecuador, he found...
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The Fragile Teenage Brain →
If the sport of football ever dies, it will die from the outside in. It won’t be undone by a labor lockout or a broken business model — football owners know how to make money. Instead, the death will start with those furthest from the paychecks, the unpaid high school athletes playing on Friday nights. It will begin with nervous parents reading about brain trauma, with doctors warning...
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Making It in America →
In the past decade, the flow of goods emerging from U.S. factories has risen by about a third. Factory employment has fallen by roughly the same fraction. The story of Standard Motor Products, a 92-year-old, family-run manufacturer based in Queens, sheds light on both phenomena. It’s a story of hustle, ingenuity, competitive success, and promise for America’s economy. It also illuminates why...
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The Whole True Story of the Dougherty Crime Gang →
They shot at cops! The sister’s a stripper! It’s like Bonnie and Clyde! These were the irresistible beats of the media’s giddy coverage of one of the most bizarre crime sprees in recent memory. Kathy Dobie retraces the eight-day, fifteen-state, AK-47-inclusive journey of Ryan, Dylan, and Lee-Grace Dougherty—and discovers that the siblings’ saga is even weirder than you...
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Torturer’s Apprentice →
The new science of interrogation is not, in fact, so new at all: “extraordinary rendition” and “enhanced interrogation” and “waterboarding” all spring directly from the practices of the medieval Roman Catholic Church. The distance, in both technique and ideology, between the Inquisition’s interrogation regime and 21st-century America’s is uncomfortably short—and provides a chilling harbinger of...
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Dark Matter Mysteries: A True Game of Shadows →
It’s a troubling time to be looking for the universe’s missing matter. On the face of it, it shouldn’t be. Deep underground, several experiments have been buzzing with possible sightings of dark matter, the hitherto invisible stuff that is believed to make up around 85 per cent of all matter in the cosmos. Detecting dark matter would be a major triumph. Yet any hopes that the...
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Behaviorism at 100 →
Behaviorism as a philosophy of science began with an article by John B. Watson in 1913, and its several varieties inform different behavior-related disciplines. During the past 100 years, disciplinary developments have led to a clarified version of behaviorism informing a basic, separate natural science of behavior. This recently emerged independent discipline not only complements other natural...
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The New Diamond Age →
Recent decades have seen some modest successes. Starting in the 1950s, engineers managed to produce tiny crystals for industrial purposes - to coat saws, drill bits, and grinding wheels. But this summer, the first wave of gem-quality manufactured diamonds began to hit the market. They are grown in a warehouse in Florida by a roomful of Russian-designed machines spitting out 3-carat roughs 24...
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Streaming Dreams →
YouTube was created by three former employees of PayPal, in a Silicon Valley garage, in early 2005. According to two of the founders, Chad Hurley and Steven Chen, a graphic designer and a software engineer, respectively, the idea grew out of a dinner party at Chen’s home in San Francisco, in the winter of 2004-05. Guests had made videos of one another, but they couldn’t share them easily. The...
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Insider Baseball →
When we talk about the process, then, we are talking, increasingly, not about “the democratic process,” or the general mechanism affording the citizens of a state a voice in its affairs, but the reverse: a mechanism seen as so specialized that access to it is correctly limited to its own professionals, to those who manage policy and those who report on it, to those who run the polls and those...
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To Know, But Not Understand →
In 1963, Bernard K. Forscher of the Mayo Clinic complained in a now famous letter printed in the prestigious journal Science that scientists were generating too many facts. Titled Chaos in the Brickyard, the letter warned that the new generation of scientists was too busy churning out bricks — facts — without regard to how they go together. Brickmaking, Forscher feared, had become...
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The Epic Struggle to Tunnel Under the Thames →
Today, engineers deal with treacherous ground by pressurizing their workfaces (though that solution still leaves tunnelers vulnerable to the problems that come from working in high-pressure environments, including bone-rot and even the bends). In the early 19th century, such measures were still decades away. The first men to attempt a tunnel beneath the Thames—gangs of Cornish miners brought to...
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Behind Every Great Woman →
As more women earn high-level corporate roles, more husbands are staying home, raising the kids, and changing the rules
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New York Air Safety on the Cheap →
Jackson makes sure no one enters the gate area without passing through the Transportation Security Administration screening checkpoints. He ensures no one unauthorized exits the access doors to the tarmac. He guards the employee entrance and makes sure only properly accredited staff come in. He responds to alarms. Charged with keeping the terminals safe, Jackson is an integral part of aviation...