July 2010
58 posts
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A Thread Across The Ocean →
Cyrus Field and the epic struggle to lay the first transatlantic cable.
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Dark Secrets of Death in China's Mine Shafts →
Illegal coal mines near Beijing used to provide the perfect cover for murder-extortion plots, before the truth came to light.
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NYU Journalism's Top Ten Works of Journalism of... →
The faculty of New York University’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute, together with a group of distinguished outside judges, has selected “The Top Ten Works of Journalism of the Decade in the United States.” We began with a list of eighty nominees. Our purpose was to call attention to and honor work of exceptional importance and quality - journalism that brilliantly met...
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The Best Magazine Articles Ever →
The following are suggestions for the best magazine articles (in English) ever. Arranged in chronological order.
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A Life Revealed →
Her eyes have captivated the world since she appeared on our cover in 1985. Now we can tell her story.
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Does Language Influence Culture? →
New cognitive research suggests that language profoundly influences the way people see the world; a different sense of blame in Japanese and Spanish.
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Letting Go →
What should medicine do when it can’t save your life?
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Afghanistan war logs: Story behind biggest leak in... →
From US military computers to a cafe in Brussels, how thousands of classified papers found their way to online activists.
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Inside the Fog of War →
A six-year archive of classified military documents made public on Sunday offers an unvarnished, ground-level picture of the war in Afghanistan that is in many respects more grim than the official portrayal.
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Betty Goes Reno →
A visit to the glamorous divorce ranches of the Mad Men era.
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Walk of Fame polisher is the keeper of the stars →
John Peterson has kept the Hollywood emblems gleaming for 14 years. With 2,412 stars, that’s 110 a day and a full-time job.
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Ron Fanelli Was My Friend. How Did He Go On to be... →
Ron Fanelli was a poker player: loud, brash, rightwing, ex-US navy. Victoria Coren liked him. Then last week she learned that he had confessed to killing bar girl Wanphen Pienjai in Thailand and chopping up her body.
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Malwebolence →
Measured in terms of depravity, insularity and traffic-driven turnover, the culture of /b/ has little precedent. /b/ reads like the inside of a high-school bathroom stall, or an obscene telephone party line, or a blog with no posts and all comments filled with slang that you are too old to understand.
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Soccer Explains Nothing →
Stop looking to the World Cup for history lessons. It’s just a game and, frankly, that’s good enough.
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The Web Means the End of Forgetting →
Technological advances have often presented new threats to privacy. In 1890, in perhaps the most famous article on privacy ever written, Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis complained that because of new technology — like the Kodak camera and the tabloid press — “gossip is no longer the resource of the idle and of the vicious but has become a trade.” But the mild society gossip of the Gilded Age...
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I Was With Coco →
A year ago, Todd Levin got the job of a lifetime—writing for ‘The Tonight Show.’ Nine months later, he was packing his desk. Now he recounts what it was really like: helping reboot a fifty-six-year-old franchise; watching his boss, Conan O’Brien, get screwed; and saying good-bye to the funniest late-night show to barely exist.
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Scenes from the Violent Twilight Oil →
It succors and drowns human life. And for the last eight years, oil — and the people and places that make it — was my obsession.
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Would you rent a friend? →
Feeling lonely? Don’t have anyone to go to the pub with? Then a friend rental service could be just the thing you need. But what’s it like to spend a day with someone you’re paying to be your friend?
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What It's Really Like To Be A Copy Editor →
I never necessarily aspired to be a copy editor. I enjoyed the experience—seriously, your job is to sit and read articles—but when my day-camp counselor asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I did not tell her that I hoped one day to correct who-whom mix-ups or determine whether “faucetry” was a real, dictionary-approved word. I told her I wanted to be a princess.
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Tajikistan: In Search of the Yeti →
In a valley of penury, 65km from Dushanbe, they have started to see monsters. Romit Valley curves towards the mountains, sprinkled with medieval hamlets and third-world townlets. They are not frightened of the mujahideen but they are scared of the Yeti.
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National Security Inc. →
To ensure that the country’s most sensitive duties are carried out only by people loyal above all to the nation’s interest, federal rules say contractors may not perform what are called “inherently government functions.” But they do, all the time and in every intelligence and counterterrorism agency, according to a two-year investigation by The Washington Post.
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Living with the Enemy →
Applying the ideas of Holocaust survivor Jean Améry to present day Rwanda, our author argues that reconciliation after genocide is just another form of torture.
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A Custom Fades in India →
Now 70 and a widow who is still married— one of her husbands is dead — Ms. Devi is a ghost of another time, one of a shrinking handful of people who still live in families here that follow the ancient practice of polyandry. In the remote villages of this Himalayan valley, polyandry, the practice of multiple men marrying one wife, was for centuries a practical solution to a set of geographic,...
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Shutting Themselves In →
One morning when he was 15, Takeshi shut the door to his bedroom, and for the next four years he did not come out. He didn’t go to school. He didn’t have a job. He didn’t have friends. Month after month, he spent 23 hours a day in a room no bigger than a king-size mattress, where he ate dumplings, rice and other leftovers that his mother had cooked, watched TV game shows and...
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Nightmare in Apartment 9B →
The housekeeper, June Gordon, pushed past the dogs in the pantry that May morning in 2005. She moved deeper into the apartment that was like some cobwebby Miss Havisham version of high-end Manhattan living, with peeling paint, torn furniture and a permanent stink of cigarettes. She found Joyce Cheney on the small red sofa in the big living room, with its impressive view south over the tops of...
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American Murder Mystery →
Why is crime rising in so many American cities? The answer implicates one of the most celebrated antipoverty programs of recent decades.
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Love in the Age of the Pickup Artist →
Stendhal Among the Seducers
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LAUSD's Dance of the Lemons →
Why firing the desk-sleepers, burnouts, hotheads and other failed teachers is all but impossible.
In Search of the Meaning of 'Mozingo' →
Curious about his unusual name, a journalist and father traces his lineage to the 1600s — and unearths a conflicted past.
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The Hunted →
Did American conservationists in Africa go too far?
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The Failure of the American Jewish Establishment →
In 2003, several prominent Jewish philanthropists hired Republican pollster Frank Luntz to explain why American Jewish college students were not more vigorously rebutting campus criticism of Israel.
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The New Abortion Providers →
Over the last decade, abortion-rights advocates have quietly worked to reverse the marginalization encouraged by activists like Randall Terry. Abortion-rights proponents are fighting back on precisely the same turf that Terry demarcated: the place of abortion within mainstream medicine. This abortion-rights campaign, led by physicians themselves, is trying to recast doctors, changing them from...
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The Hunters →
I’m not writing to offer an apologia, but I have to say, life in the oilfield was wonderful.
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The Angriest Man In Television →
How David Simon’s disappointment with the industry that let him down made The Wire the greatest show on television—and why his searing vision shouldn’t be confused with reality.
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Lincoln's Great Depression →
Abraham Lincoln fought clinical depression all his life, and if he were alive today, his condition would be treated as a “character issue”—that is, as a political liability. His condition was indeed a character issue: it gave him the tools to save the nation.
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At a Slaughterhouse, Some Things Never Die →
Who kills, who cuts, who bosses can depend on race.
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Dirty Medicine →
How medical supply behemoths stick it to the little guy, making America’s health care system more dangerous and expensive.
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The Turn →
At the very heart of winged flight lies the banked turn, a procedure that by now seems so routine and familiar that airline passengers appreciate neither its elegance and mystery nor its dangerously delusive character.
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I Was Russell Crowe's Stooge →
It was March 2005 when the Oscar-winning movie star called me. He had read an article I had written and had tracked down my number. He wanted to meet over lunch.
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How Facts Backfire →
Researchers discover a surprising threat to democracy: our brains.
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Descent Into the American Dream →
In Vietnam she was a rich woman, but in the U.S. she toiled stocking convenience store shelves. Why did Thao decide to immigrate?
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Living Dolls →
They parade in miniature ballgowns, where false eyelashes and can be as young as five… We venture into the world of mini beauty pageants to meet the young princesses and their pushy parents.
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I Invented the Vuvuzela →
I invented the vuvuzela 35 years ago but, of course, it’s only since the start of the World Cup that it has become quite so well known globally. Whatever people may say about the sound it makes, it has never been so popular. That makes me proud; I see so many visitors taking vuvuzelas home with them, to Europe, South America and beyond.
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The Agnostic Cartographer →
How Google’s open-ended maps are embroiling the company in some of the world’s touchiest geopolitical disputes.
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The Truth About Recovering from a Brain Injury →
Life after a brain injury teaches you a lot about yourself. But mainly it teaches you about the grind of illness and recovery.
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Newly Published Mark Twain Essay, 'Concerning the... →
Thanks to the Mark Twain Foundation and its trustees, the PBS NewsHour brings you for the first known time in print an essay by the American literary giant on a topic dear to our hearts — the journalistic interview.
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The Dirtiest Player →
Was it only last season that Marvin Harrison was still catching TD passes for Peyton Manning and the Indianapolis Colts? Now, in the wake of a brazen but mysterious Philadelphia gunfight—many details of which are reported here for the first time—the man who holds the NFL record for most receptions in a season may yet find himself with a permanent record of a different sort.
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Deep Throat →
The depravity of Major League Eating.
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Death On the CNN Curve →
It was fame that killed Robert O’Donnell, killed him as surely as that shotgun blast he fired into his brain on a dark, dusty, West Texas road, miles and years away from the thing that made him famous in the first place.
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Cary in the Sky with Diamonds →
Before Timothy Leary and the Beatles, LSD was largely unknown and unregulated. But in the 1950s, as many as 100 Hollywood luminaries—Cary Grant and Esther Williams among them—began taking the drug as part of psychotherapy.