December 2009
42 posts
They Killed My Lawyer →
Sergei Magnitsky was our attorney, and friend, who died under excruciating circumstances in a Moscow pre-trial detention center on Nov. 16, 2009. His story is one of extraordinary bravery and heroism, and ultimately tragedy. It is also a story about how Stalinism and the gulags are alive and well in Russia today.
Rediscovering Central Asia →
It was once the “land of a thousand cities” and home to some of the world’s most renowned scientists, poets, and philosophers. Today it is seen mostly as a harsh backwater. To imagine Central Asia’s future, we must journey into its remarkable past.
Hollywood Royalty →
Two sides of Grace Kelly.
Ennui Becomes Us →
The increasing disorder of our world will lead eventually to a sort of global ennui mixed with a disturbingly large dose of individual extremism and dogmatic posturing by states. It is the result of the unstemmable tide of entropy. A world subsumed by the inexorable forces of randomness, tipped off its axis, swirling in a cloud of information overload.
How I Convinced a Death-Row Murderer Not to Die →
Eight years ago, Christian Longo murdered his wife and three children. On the lam, he assumed the identity of the author, a man he’d never met. Now their long, twisted relationship culminates in a final, chilling bargain.
Flat-pack accounting →
Forget about the Gates Foundation. The world’s biggest charity owns IKEA—and is devoted to interior design
The Things He Carried →
Airport security in America is a sham—“security theater” designed to make travelers feel better and catch stupid terrorists. Smart ones can get through security with fake boarding passes and all manner of prohibited items—as our correspondent did with ease.
The Silver Thief →
The Story of a Burglar Who Was Too Good for His Own Good
The Genesis 2.0 Project →
The L.H.C. is not merely the world’s largest particle accelerator but the largest machine ever built. At the center of just one of the four main experimental stations installed around its circumference, and not even the biggest of the four, is a magnet that generates a magnetic field 100,000 times as strong as Earth’s. And because the super-conducting, super-colliding guts of the collider must...
Frank Sinatra Has a Cold →
In the winter of 1965, writer Gay Talese arrived in Los Angeles with an assignment from Esquire to profile Frank Sinatra. The legendary singer was approaching fifty, under the weather, out of sorts, and unwilling to be interviewed. So Talese remained in L.A., hoping Sinatra might recover and reconsider, and he began talking to many of the people around Sinatra — his friends, his...
Tongue Twisters →
In search of the world’s hardest language
Baghdad year zero →
Pillaging Iraq in pursuit of a neocon utopia
The Neuroscience of Screwing Up →
The reason we’re so resistant to anomalous information — the real reason researchers automatically assume that every unexpected result is a stupid mistake — is rooted in the way the human brain works. Over the past few decades, psychologists have dismantled the myth of objectivity. The fact is, we carefully edit our reality, searching for evidence that confirms what we already believe. Although...
Tinker, tailor, soldier... illusionist? →
When the CIA tried its hand at magic
The Fall of Mexico →
In the almost three years since President Felipe Calderón launched a war on drug cartels, border towns in Mexico have turned into halls of mirrors where no one knows who is on which side or what chance remark could get you murdered. Some 14,000 people have been killed in that time—the worst carnage since the Mexican Revolution—and part of the country is effectively under martial law. Is this...
Alice's adventures in algebra: Wonderland solved →
What would Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland be without the Cheshire Cat, the trial, the Duchess’s baby or the Mad Hatter’s tea party? Look at the original story that the author told Alice Liddell and her two sisters one day during a boat trip near Oxford, though, and you’ll find that these famous characters and scenes are missing from the text.
David Simon →
Simon recently spoke with Vice from the Tremé production offices in New Orleans. This is the longest interview we’ve ever run by a long shot, but come on. It’s the guy who made The Wire. You’re lucky the entire issue isn’t about him.
Beware of minor spoilers.
The Hostage Business →
John had been working in the delta for 14 years when the kidnappings started. He saw the reports in early 2006 of expatriates being taken from offshore oil rigs by a group called the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta, or MEND. MEND pledged to cripple the Nigerian economy, and kidnapping foreign oil workers was one pillar of its strategy. Still, John didn’t think too much of it....
The Things That Carried Him →
As it wins the National Magazine Award for Feature Writing, revisit the true story behind one soldier’s last trip home
Faux Friendship →
We’re all on a first-name basis, and when we vote for president, we ask ourselves whom we’d rather have a beer with. As the anthropologist Robert Brain has put it, we’re friends with everyone now.
Yet what, in our brave new mediated world, is friendship becoming?
(Thanks, eush!)
50 Years of Stupid Grammar Advice →
The Elements of Style does not deserve the enormous esteem in which it is held by American college graduates. Its advice ranges from limp platitudes to inconsistent nonsense. Its enormous influence has not improved American students’ grasp of English grammar; it has significantly degraded it.
Game Brain →
Let’s say you run a multibillion-dollar football league. And let’s say the scientific community—starting with one young pathologist in Pittsburgh and growing into a chorus of neuroscientists across the country—comes to you and says concussions are making your players crazy, crazy enough to kill themselves, and here, in these slices of brain tissue, is the proof. Do you join these scientists and...
Did Christianity Cause the Crash? →
America’s mainstream religious denominations used to teach the faithful that they would be rewarded in the afterlife. But over the past generation, a different strain of Christian faith has proliferated—one that promises to make believers rich in the here and now. Known as the prosperity gospel, and claiming tens of millions of adherents, it fosters risk-taking and intense material optimism. It...
Who Can Name the Bigger Number? →
The key to the biggest number contest is not swift penmanship, but rather a potent paradigm for concisely capturing the gargantuan.
(Thanks, Tristan!)
Women Who Want to Want →
More than by any other sexual problem — the elusiveness of orgasm, say, or pain during sex — women feel plagued by low desire. The problems often overlap, but above all the others that can thwart an erotic life, the remoteness of lust is what impels women to seek treatment.
Why my old school ties no longer bind →
The new headmaster of my old school, an all-boys’ school, without even girls in the sixth form like some public schools have for the older boys to practise on, is a woman! What do you think about that, eh? Pretty interesting! Pretty radical!
The Gambler Who Blew $127 Million →
During a year-long gambling binge at the Caesars Palace and Rio casinos in 2007, Terrance Watanabe managed to lose nearly $127 million.
Pearl Harbor in Retrospect →
Wherever or whenever Washington may have thought the Japanese cat would probably jump, Hawaii’s primary mission was to meet it there if it came. Yet both the Army and Navy commands there acted as if there were no chance of a Japanese overseas attack on them. What they actually did and did not do, simply spelled ‘It can’t happen here.
Connecting the Dots →
The paradoxes of intelligence reform.
An Empire at Risk →
We won the cold war and weathered 9/11. But now economic weakness is endangering our global power.
The lion and the tiger →
Armenia excels at chess. Its top player now has a shot at becoming world champion. How did this tiny country become a giant at the game?
The parable of the sower →
The debate over whether Monsanto is a corporate sinner or saint.
The taste that launched 1,000 parking tickets →
Pinkberry addicts cramp the style of one neighborhood.
The Cyberwar Plan →
It’s not just a defensive game; cyber-security includes attack plans too, and the U.S. has already used some of them successfully.
Mrs. Kramer Vs. Mrs. Kramer →
It’s an old story—parents split and fight for custody. But when both are women, and one says she is no longer gay, it gets complicated.
(Thanks, cordfunnel)
The Origin of Big →
On this happy anniversay–the 150th anniversary of the Origin of Species–let us contemplate one of evolution’s great works: the origin of giants.
Into the Zombie Underworld →
An American tries to separate truth from lore as he searches for a lost soul in rural Haiti.
The Zealot →
Arthur Koestler’s manic intellectual career.
Secrets of the Phallus: Why Is the Penis Shaped... →
Evolutionary psychologists decipher the “Rosetta stone” of human sexuality
(Thanks, Tristan!)
The Science of Success →
Most of us have genes that make us as hardy as dandelions: able to take root and survive almost anywhere. A few of us, however, are more like the orchid: fragile and fickle, but capable of blooming spectacularly if given greenhouse care. So holds a provocative new theory of genetics, which asserts that the very genes that give us the most trouble as a species, causing behaviors that are...
Barack Obama's Work in Progress →
Over the past few years, we’ve gotten to know our president as a lot of different things: campaigner, lawyer, father, basketballer. But what if Obama’s first and truest calling—his desire to write—explains more about him than anything else? Robert Draper recounts the untold story of the first man since Teddy Roosevelt to serve as author in chief
Why we use cookbooks →
Our hunger for cookbooks.