September 2009
63 posts
The Making of an Agent →
After 16 weeks of action-packed exercises that will test them to the core, the recruits in Training Class No. 283 will pass into the elite ranks of the Secret Service — or leave humiliated
The Age of the Essay →
The most obvious difference between real essays and the things one has to write in school is that real essays are not exclusively about English literature. Certainly schools should teach students how to write. But due to a series of historical accidents the teaching of writing has gotten mixed together with the study of literature. And so all over the country students are writing not about how...
Haggling for Hot Dogs →
Everything is open to negotiation. Everything. For three months, the author treated the world that way. This is what ensued.
Inside the Apocalyptic Soviet Doomsday Machine →
Yarynich is talking about Russia’s doomsday machine. That’s right, an actual doomsday device—a real, functioning version of the ultimate weapon, always presumed to exist only as a fantasy of apocalypse-obsessed science fiction writers and paranoid über-hawks. The thing that historian Lewis Mumford called “the central symbol of this scientifically organized nightmare of mass...
The New Science of Causation →
Causality is a concept as meaningless as “the soul” and just as inappropriate for modern mathematical science. And yet, somehow, this doesn’t seem quite right. If causation is nothing but a meaningless word that laypeople have layered over correlation, then why the ceaseless insistence that “correlation does not imply causation”? Why are our thoughts filled with causal comments (he made me do...
The Rise of the Professional Blogger →
In early July, Laura McKenna, a widely respected and longtime blogger, argued on her site, 11D, that blogging has perceptibly changed over the six years she’s been at it. Many of blogging’s heavy hitters, she observed, have ended up “absorbed into some other professional enterprise.” Meanwhile, newer or lesser-known bloggers aren’t getting the kind of links and attention they used to, which...
Big and Bad →
In the history of the automotive industry, few things have been quite as unexpected as the rise of the S.U.V. Detroit is a town of engineers, and engineers like to believe that there is some connection between the success of a vehicle and its technical merits. But the S.U.V. boom was like Apple’s bringing back the Macintosh, dressing it up in colorful plastic, and suddenly creating a...
How to Write With Style, by Kurt Vonnegut →
Newspaper reporters and technical writers are trained to reveal almost nothing about themselves in their writings. This makes them freaks in the world of writers, since almost all of the other ink-stained wretches in that world reveal a lot about themselves to readers. We call these revelations, accidental and intentional, elements of style.
Cheap Laughs →
The merry month of July 2009 had barely witnessed the spectacle of Al Franken eventually taking his seat as the junior senator from Minnesota when, immediately following the death of Walter Cronkite, Time magazine took an online poll to determine who was now “America’s most trusted newscaster.” Seven percent of those responding named Katie Couric. Nineteen percent nominated Charles Gibson....
The Tortured Brain →
Scientists do not pretend to know, in any individual case, whether torture might extract useful information. But as neurobiologist Shane O’Mara of the Trinity College Institute of Neuroscience in Dublin explains in a paper in the journal Trends in Cognitive Sciencecalled “Torturing the Brain,” “the use of such techniques appears motivated by a folk psychology that is...
The Age of Undoing →
“What’s done cannot be undone,” moaned Lady Macbeth in her famous sleepwalking scene. If she woke up in the 21st century, she would be pleased to discover that whatever can be done can be undone, too.
Coming Out in Middle School →
Austin didn’t know what to wear to his first gay dance last spring. It was bad enough that the gangly 13-year-old from Sand Springs, Okla., had to go without his boyfriend at the time, a 14-year-old star athlete at another middle school, but there were also laundry issues. “I don’t have any clean clothes!” he complained to me by text message, his favored method of communication.
What Alters Our Genes →
For a time, it was the most famous fraud in biology. From 1906 to 1923, Austrian biologist Paul Kammerer reported remarkable results in experiments with the midwife toad. Highly unusual for an amphibian, Alytes obstetricans mates on land, not water, and the males incubate the eggs on their legs, also on land. But when Kammerer housed midwife toads in a hot, dry terrarium, they spent most of...
Outbreak! →
The Roman senate, in the 2nd century BC, expressed horror and anxiety about the way the public following of the Bacchanalia was getting out of hand. It began in Greece as a harmless daylight gathering of women, but by the time it took hold in Italy it had become a continuous orgy of indiscriminate sex, violence and crime. The senators were so convinced that this breakdown of law and order...
The Rural Brain Drain →
What is going on in small-town America? The nation’s mythology of small towns comes to us straight from the The Music Man’s set designers. Many Americans think about flyover country or Red America only during the culture war’s skirmishes or campaign season. Most of the time, the rural crisis takes a back seat to more visible big-city troubles. So while there is a veritable...
Grammar Puss →
Language is a human instinct. All societies have complex language, and everywhere the languages use the same kinds of grammatical machinery like nouns, verbs, auxiliaries, and agreement. All normal children develop language without conscious effort or formal lessons, and by the age of three they speak in fluent grammatical sentences, outperforming the most sophisticated computers. Brain damage...
Surprises from General Relativity: "Swimming" in... →
The possibility of “swimming” and “gliding” in curved, empty space shows that even after nine decades, Einstein’s theory of general relativity continues to amaze
See Jerry Run. Again. →
California is still living with the consequences of Jerry Brown’s first governorship. Now the state is poised to elect him again.
The jet-propelled couch: Part I →
The chair behind the psychoanalyst’s couch is not the stationary object it seems. I have traveled all over the world on it, and back and forth in time. But it remained for Kirk Allen to take me out of this world when he transformed the couch in my consulting room into a space ship.
The jet-propelled couch: Part II →
For many days I pondered the question of how Kirk Allen could be restored to sanity–and yet remain alive. For there seemed to be nothing that could compete with the unending gratifications of his fantasy. Meanwhile Kirk turned over to me all of his records.
Hollywood: The Ad →
The techniques and the cartoon-like moral vision of television advertising are exerting more and more influence over American moviemaking.
A Life of Its Own →
Where will synthetic biology lead us?
The Mystery Pit of Oak Island →
One can only wonder what would have happened if young Daniel McGinnis had chosen to go exploring somewhere else on that fateful day in the summer of 1795.
The doctors were about to stick a needle in my... →
Apologies if I sound a tad woozy, but yesterday I left Planet Earth for some time and apparently enjoyed exploring some other reality while medical professionals did something fancy with my neck. It was a minor procedure. Minor by modern standards, that is.
Carl Jung and the Holy Grail of the Unconscious →
This is a story about a nearly 100-year-old book, bound in red leather, which has spent the last quarter century secreted away in a bank vault in Switzerland. The book is big and heavy and its spine is etched with gold letters that say “Liber Novus,” which is Latin for “New Book.” Its pages are made from thick cream-colored parchment and filled with paintings of otherworldly creatures and...
The God in the Machine →
President Barack Obama during his first months in office seldom has missed a chance to liken the country’s healthcare system to an unburied corpse, which, if left lying around in the sun by the 111th Congress, threatens to foul the sweet summer air of the American dream. The prognosis doesn’t admit of a second or third opinion. Whether on call to the Democratic left or the Republican right, the...
The Deal of the Century →
As our financial system entered free fall last September and the people who ran Wall Street struggled to avert a complete economic collapse, an epic battle for power and, above all, cash was being waged between Barclays and JPMorgan Chase. The inside story of how Bob Diamond walked away with everything he wanted.
Two AI Pioneers. Two Bizarre Suicides. What Really... →
On the morning of June 12, 1990, Chris McKinstry went looking for a gun. At 11 am, he walked into Nick’s Sport Shop on a busy street in downtown Toronto and approached the saleswoman behind the counter. “I’ll take a Winchester Defender,” he said, referring to a 12-gauge shotgun in the display. She eyeballed the skinny 23-year-old and told him he’d need a...
Rumination on the Life, Death, and Particularly... →
Watching the legions of Michael Jackson fans make pilgrimages to and build cairns of flowers and stuffed toys at the Neverland Ranch in southern California, I can’t say I shared their sorrow exactly. I did sympathize: Boy, had I been there. When David Foster Wallace hanged himself at his own southern California home on September 12, 2008—that’s the closest I’ve ever been to crying over the...
How to read articles about health →
If you’ve just read a health-related headline that’s caused you to spit out your morning coffee (“Coffee causes cancer” usually does the trick) it’s always best to follow the Blitz slogan: “Keep Calm and Carry On”. On reading further you’ll often find the headline has left out something important, like “Injecting five rats with really highly concentrated coffee solution caused some changes in...
Is Happiness Catching? →
[T]wo years ago, a pair of social scientists named Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler used the information collected over the years about Joseph and Eileen and several thousand of their neighbors to make an entirely different kind of discovery. By analyzing the Framingham data, Christakis and Fowler say, they have for the first time found some solid basis for a potentially powerful theory in...
The ecological disaster that is dolphin safe tuna →
Most environmental activists (indeed, most people) have heard the phrase “dolphin safe tuna”, but few know the details other than that it is tuna captured in a way that is better for dolphins.
Bench Press →
Are Obama’s judges really liberals?
The Secrets Inside Your Dog's Mind →
Understanding a pointed finger may seem easy, but consider this: while humans and canines can do it naturally, no other known species in the animal kingdom can. Consider too all the mental work that goes into figuring out what a pointed finger means: paying close attention to a person, recognizing that a gesture reflects a thought, that another animal can even have a thought.
Confessions of a Car Salesman →
We hired Chandler Phillips, a veteran journalist, to go undercover by working at two new car dealerships in the Los Angeles area. First, he would work at a high-volume, high-pressure dealership selling Japanese cars. Then, he’d change over to a smaller car lot that sold domestic cars at “no haggle” prices.
We invite you to read the following account of Phillips’...
The Deal of the Century →
On September 23, 2008, Gerard LaRocca, a senior executive at Barclays Capital, the investment bank, got an emergency phone call from one of his employees in the bank’s operations department. The employee was looking at Barclays’ bank statement from its account with JPMorgan. There had been $7 billion in the account, and the employee had been authorized to move the cash from JPMorgan...
Life In (and After) Our Great Recession →
Dashed hopes, less sex, even more Sisyphean labor for women—what the histories of the Depression era tell us about middle-class families in crisis, both then and now.
The Falling Man →
Do you remember this photograph? In the United States, people have taken pains to banish it from the record of September 11, 2001. The story behind it, though, and the search for the man pictured in it, are our most intimate connection to the horror of that day.
The Revolutionary →
As a gawky teenager in the 1960s, Dick Fosbury just wanted to find something he was really good at. Little did he know he would become an olympic champion and turn a sport literally upside down.
4 Days With the Taliban →
Stephen Farrell, a reporter for The New York Times, and Sultan M. Munadi, an Afghan journalist working with him, were kidnapped by the Taliban in northern Afghanistan on Saturday. In a British raid to free them early Wednesday, Mr. Munadi was killed, as was a British soldier who has not been identified. This is Mr. Farrell’s account of the four-day ordeal.
Gordon Brown: I'm proud to say sorry to a real war... →
Turing was a quite brilliant mathematician, most famous for his work on breaking the German Enigma codes. It is no exaggeration to say that, without his outstanding contribution, the history of the Second World War could have been very different. He truly was one of those individuals we can point to whose unique contribution helped to turn the tide of war. The debt of gratitude he is owed makes...
Waiting for the Weekend →
A whole two days off from work, in which we can do what we please, has only recently become a near-universal right. What we choose to do looks increasingly like work, and idleness has acquired a bad name. Herein, a history of leisure
Sick and Wrong →
How Washington is screwing up health care reform – and why it may take a revolt to fix it
High Fidelity →
Music that lives in the headphones of angry teens.
A history of pirates →
What do the pirates of yore tell us about their modern counterparts?
Zappos, the online shoe shopping utopia →
The Customer Loyalty Team, or C.L.T., is the nerve center of Zappos, whose thirty-five-year-old C.E.O., Tony Hsieh, has earned a zealous following by imposing an ethos of live human connection on the chilly, anonymous bazaar of the Internet. He talks about being the architect of a movement to spread happiness, or “Zappiness,” via three “C”s: clothing, customer service, and company culture.
The Author and the Wonderful, Horrible, No Fun,... →
The worst moment in a writer’s life is the day he receives his first rejection slip. The second worst is the day his first book is published.
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How American Health Care Killed My Father →
Almost two years ago, my father was killed by a hospital-borne infection in the intensive-care unit of a well-regarded nonprofit hospital in New York City. Dad had just turned 83, and he had a variety of the ailments common to men of his age. But he was still working on the day he walked into the hospital with pneumonia. Within 36 hours, he had developed sepsis. Over the next five weeks in the...
Bringing ‘Where the Wild Things Are’ to the Screen →
In February 2008, a blogger named Devin Faraci led off a post on the Hollywood news site CHUD (Cinematic Happenings Under Development) with a solemn proclamation: “We’re on the verge of losing a movie.” He was referring to “Where the Wild Things Are,” a big-budget adaptation of Maurice Sendak’s classic picture book for children.
What Pilots Fear →
Flying is now safer than at any time since the Wright Brothers, but noted pilot Patrick Smith says beware the looming threats: exploding laptops, runway chaos, and cockpit rookies.