August 2010
46 posts
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Eleven Lives →
The oil will have stopped gushing into the Gulf. The shoreline and the estuaries and the beaches will have been scrubbed clean by man and nature. BP and Transocean will have resumed business as usual. But the original wound will never heal. This is the story of what’s been lost.
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Covering Vaccines →
Science, policy and politics in the minefield.
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Experience: I Spent 29 Years in Solitary... →
‘I talk about my years in solitary as if it was the past, but the truth is it never leaves you. In some ways I am still there.’
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Are You Being Served? →
When it comes to customer service, it seems, people are unhappy no matter what side of the counter they’re on. Why can’t we get it right?
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Can Preschoolers Be Depressed? →
Is it really possible to diagnose such a grown-up affliction in such a young child? And is diagnosing clinical depression in a preschooler a good idea, or are children that young too immature, too changeable, too temperamental to be laden with such a momentous label?
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College Dropout Factories →
School reformers, including President Obama, often talk about high school “dropout factories.” These are the roughly 2,000 public high schools, about 15 percent of the total, with the nation’s highest dropout rates
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Urban Legends →
Why suburbs, not cities, are the answer.
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Unforgiven →
Would-be draftee Tony Washington’s NFL future is being derailed by his sad past.
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Does Your Language Shape How You Think? →
Seventy years ago, in 1940, a popular science magazine published a short article that set in motion one of the trendiest intellectual fads of the 20th century.
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And the World Turned →
Cheesy, clichéd, and still strangely bewitching, soap operas are falling victim to their own bastard children.
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The World's Greatest Con Man: Helg Sgarbi →
Seducing, swindling, and blackmailing European matrons, Helg Sgarbi perfected a scam that made him a fortune. Then one day he met the billionaire BMW heiress.
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The 72-Hour Expert →
Everything you always wanted to know about Afghanistan
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Been There. Done What? →
Jillian Lauren opens up about her life as a teenage harem girl in Brunei
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Terra Infirma →
The rise and fall of quicksand.
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Inside the Secret World of Trader Joe's →
It’s an offbeat, fun discovery zone that elevates food shopping from a chore to a cultural experience. It stocks its shelves with a winning combination of low-cost, yuppie-friendly staples (cage-free eggs and organic blue agave sweetener) and exotic, affordable luxuries — Belgian butter waffle cookies or Thai lime-and-chili cashews — that you simply can’t find anyplace...
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Lady Trouble →
Chicago was once full of killer broads.
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To Infinity and Beyond: The Struggle to Save... →
Mathematicians are facing a stark choice – embrace monstrous infinite entities or admit the basic rules of arithmetic are broken.
(Thanks, Tristan)
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My Kushy New Job →
With pot laws changing, we thought it’d be a good idea to send our weed-averse correspondent to see what life is really like in Amsterdam, the world’s cannabis capital. He took a job at a marijuana coffee shop, inhaled the best stuff on earth, and saw the totally righteous future of legalized ganja.
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Sex, Shame and Indian Cinema →
Why the continent is the most sexually contradictory place on earth.
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Inside the Knockoff-Tennis-Shoe Factory →
Lin has spent most of his adult life making sneakers, though he only entered the counterfeit business about five years ago. “What we make depends on the order,” Lin said. “But if someone wants Nikes, we’ll make them Nikes.”
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The Most Isolated Man on the Planet →
He’s alone in the Brazilian Amazon, but for how long?
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Nation Shudders At Large Block Of Uninterrupted... →
Unable to rest their eyes on a colorful photograph or boldface heading that could be easily skimmed and forgotten about, Americans collectively recoiled Monday when confronted with a solid block of uninterrupted text.
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What Is It About 20-Somethings? →
Why are so many people in their 20s taking so long to grow up?
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Sweet Memories: How Jelly Belly Invents Flavors →
In an echoing, high-ceilinged chamber in Northern California, there spin row upon row of what look like small cement mixers. The gleaming metal drums churn for hours on end while white-uniformed technicians pour in sugar, corn starch, color, and certain other, more miraculous concoctions. Out of one drum comes a whiff of red apple, conjuring a fall afternoon spent picking fruit; from another...
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Manifold Destiny →
A legendary problem and the battle over who solved it.
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Washington, We Have a Problem →
How broken is Washington? Beyond repair? A day in the life of the president reveals that Barack Obama’s job would be almost unrecognizable to most of his predecessors—thanks to the enormous bureaucracy, congressional paralysis, systemic corruption (with lobbyists spending $3.5 billion last year), and disintegrating media.
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Searching For Me in Red Dead Redemption →
A modern tale of heartbreak and video games.
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Reclaiming the Imagination →
Why did humans evolve the capacity to imagine alternatives to reality? Was story-telling in prehistoric times like the peacock’s tail, of no direct practical use but a good way of attracting a mate?
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A Dying Man Trusted You to Save His Baby — Don’t... →
The Pakistan floods have devastated a nation already reeling from violence and poverty. Unless the West steps up its aid, the Taliban will fill the void
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If You Want to Write, Get Threatened →
One of the side-effects of having your work appear in a public forum such as this is that people often email me asking for advice on how to break into writing, presumably figuring that if a drooling gum-brain like me can scrape a living witlessly pawing at a keyboard, there’s hope for anyone.
Status Update: "Honey, will you marry me?" →
Andrew Tolve investigates the latest trend—a marriage proposal for all the world to see.
(Thanks, Lisa Hickey)
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Inside America's Kidnapping Capital of Phoenix,... →
The promise of making living wages is what drove Maria and the others to walk through the desert for eight days, crawl through tunnels, and move from camp to camp, car to car, and from one band of coyotes to another within the same smuggling operation. Money was also the motivation behind kidnappers’ demands that Maria, her husband and the other victims come up with large ransoms for...
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Open letter to Wikileaks founder Julian Assange →
Reporters Without Borders, an international press freedom organisation, regrets the incredible irresponsibility you showed when posting your article “Afghan War Diary 2004 - 2010” on the Wikileaks website on 25 July together with 92,000 leaked documents disclosing the names of Afghans who have provided information to the international military coalition that has been in Afghanistan since 2001.
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Plugging the Leaks →
Barack Obama hates leaks, and thanks to a tenacious prosecutor, the Justice Department is on its way to setting a record for leak prosecutions.
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Prison Without Walls →
Incarceration in America is a failure by almost any measure. But what if the prisons could be turned inside out, with convicts released into society under constant electronic surveillance? Radical though it may seem, early experiments suggest that such a science-fiction scenario might cut crime, reduce costs, and even prove more just.
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Voices of a Nation →
In the 19th century, American writers struggled to discover who they were and who we are.
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The BP Cover-Up →
BP and the government say the spill is fast disappearing—but dramatic new science reveals that its worst effects may be yet to come.
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The Pac-Man Dossier →
[Pac-Man]’s creation was a year and five months in the making—the longest ever for a video game to that point. Finally, on May 22nd, 1980, it was released to arcades in Japan. Initially, the game did moderately well, but was no overnight sensation.
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Wrongly Imprisoned, Cavs Fan Starts Fresh →
Maybe for everyone else in that arena that night in May, Game 5 was the nastiest of reality checks. But for Towler, it meant something else entirely.
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The Music-Copyright Enforcers →
Once, a venue owner exploded, kicked her off his property and told her, as she recalled, “to get the bleep outta here.” Another hissed at her that she was “nothing more than a vulture that flew over and came down and ate up all of the little people.” It wasn’t fun. It was just the sort of thing, in fact, that could bring Devon Baker to tears.
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Roald Dahl's Darkest Hour →
Even Roald Dahl could not have dreamt up the horrifying series of events that rocked his family in the 1960s, just as his career was taking off.
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The Franchise →
The inside story of how “Madden NFL” became a video game dynasty.
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Invasion →
You think it’d be impossible to share your house with your wife, your daughter, and fifty million or so Argentine ants. And you would be correct.
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Bridging the Chasm between Two Cultures →
A former leader in the New Age culture—author of nine titles on auras, chakras, “energy,” and so on—chronicles her difficult and painful transition to skepticism.
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U.S. Court Overturns Calif. Same-Sex Marriage Ban →
Saying that it discriminates against gay men and women, a federal judge in San Francisco struck down California’s voter-approved ban on same-sex marriage on Wednesday, handing supporters of such unions at least a temporary victory in a legal battle that seems all but certain to be settled by the Supreme Court.
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My Life in Therapy →
To this day, I’m not sure that I am in possession of substantially greater self-knowledge than someone who has never been inside a therapist’s office. What I do know, aside from the fact that the unconscious plays strange tricks and that the past stalks the present in ways we can’t begin to imagine, is a certain language, a certain style of thinking that, in its capacity for reframing your life...