February 2012
48 posts
2 tags
12 Great Articles that Inspired Films →
A Tetw reading list
The Man Who Knew Too Much by Marie Brenner - The Insider Death of an Innocent by Jon Krakauer - Into the Wild The Muse of Coyote Ugly Saloon by Elizabeth Gilbert - Coyote Ugly Racer X by Kenneth Li Rafael - The Fast and the Furious The Return of Superfly by Mark Jacobson - American Gangster Life’s Swell by Susan Orlean - Blue Crush A Farewell to Arms by John Carlin -...
4 tags
The Naked Face →
by Malcolm Gladwell
Face-reading depends not just on seeing facial expressions but also on taking them seriously.
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The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved →
by Hunter S. Thompson
I got off the plane around midnight and no one spoke as I crossed the dark runway to the terminal. The air was thick and hot, like wandering into a steam bath. Inside, people hugged each other and shook hands…big grins and a whoop here and there: “By God! You old bastard! Good to see you, boy! Damn good…and I mean it!”
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Violence of the Lambs →
by John Jeremiah Sullivan
The greatest threat to civilization in the next half century is not nuclear arms or global warming or a super-resistant virus that will wipe us out by the millions. John Jeremiah Sullivan contemplates the coming battle between man and beast.
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A Fleet of One →
By John McPhee
While Ainsworth was outside fuelling the truck, I sat inside in my freedom hat saying “Biscuits and gravy” to a waitress. She went “Oooooo wheeeee” and I thought my cover wasn’t working, but a trucker passing her had slipped his hand between the cheeks of her buttocks, and she did not stop writing.
7 tags
On Morality →
by Joan Didion
I cannot seem to make the air conditioner work, but there is a small refrigerator, and I can wrap ice cubes in a towel and hold them against the small of my back. With the help of the ice cubes I have been trying to think, because The American Scholar asked me to, in some abstract way about “morality,” a word I distrust more every day, but my mind veers inflexibly toward the...
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The Peekaboo Paradox →
By Gene Weingarten
There are dozens of professional children’s entertainers in the Washington area, but only one is as successful and intriguing, and as completely over-the-top preposterous, as the Great Zucchini. And if you want to know why that is, it’s going to take some time…
To College, or Not To College? →
What higher education is really about…
***Update: Another article that definitely belongs on this list: College for $99 a Month by Kevin Carey - How online education could be great for students - and catastrophic for universities.***
The University Has No Clothes by Daniel B. Smith - A critical review of the spate of prominent attacks aimed at college education.
Learning by Degress by Rebecca...
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The Case Against Babies →
by Joy Williams
Babies, babies, babies. There’s a plague of babies. Too many rabbits or elephants or mustangs or swans brings out the myxomatosis, the culling guns, the sterility drugs, the scientific brigade of egg smashers. Other species can ‘strain their environments’ or ‘overrun their range’ or clash with their human ‘neighbours’, but human babies...
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If You Knew Sushi →
By Nick Tosches
In the end, it’s one of those choices we have to make in life: icefish and tuna sinew or that new TV for the next season of American Idol.
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How I Stopped Multitasking →
by A.J. Jacobs
One man’s quest to go from manic multitasker to Zen unitasker in one month flat.
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City of Fear →
By William Langewiesche
For seven days last May the city of São Paulo, Brazil, teetered on the edge of a feral zone where governments and countries lose their meaning. That zone is a wilderness inhabited already by large populations worldwide, but officially denied and rarely described.
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Crank →
by Walter Kirn
It’s a full-moon Friday night, and Jennifer, 25, has been wide awake around the clock for almost four days. She isn’t yet seeing plastic people, shadow men or transparent spiders - just three of the fabled hallucinations of the Billings, Mont., crank scene, a hyperstimulated subculture sickeningly rich in slang and folklore.
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Jonathan Lebed's Extracurricular Activities →
By Michael Lewis
On Sept. 20, 2000, the SEC settled its case against a 15-year-old high-school student named Jonathan Lebed, the first minor ever to face proceedings for stock-market fraud.
3 tags
Or Are You Just Pleased to See Me? →
by Evan Hughes
Her first move, it must be said, was devastating. Straddling my legs with her knees on my chair, she flicked her long blonde hair over the top of my head so that the two of us were now in a sort of dark, warm tent, eye to eye.
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The Coming Anarchy →
By Robert D. Kaplan
How scarcity, crime, overpopulation, tribalism, and disease are rapidly destroying the social fabric of our planet.
3 tags
The Height Gap →
by Burkhard Bilger
Why Europeans are getting taller and taller - and Americans aren’t.
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The Radioactive Boy Scout →
By Ken Silverstein
…the truth is far more bizarre: the Golf Manor Superfund cleanup was provoked by the boy next door, David Hahn, who attempted to build a nuclear breeder reactor in his mother’s potting shed as part of a Boy Scout merit-badge project.
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The Atlantic's Ideas Tour →
A Tetw reading list
In 2007 The Atlantic celebrated 150 years in circulation by putting together a collection of outstanding articles from its archives. Timely as ever, here is a selection of our favourite pieces:
No Apparent Motive by P. J. O’Rourke Master of political polemic, O’Rourke looks at the sickness that drives people into politics.
Building Wealth by Lester C. Thurow A...
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Zion's Vital Signs →
by P. J. O’Rourke
A journey through modern Israel, where terrorism has been a fact of ordinary life for decades and where ordinary life defeats terrorism.
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They Know What Boy's Want →
By Alex Morris
It’s 1:32 a.m., and I’m on my computer, clicking through pictures of a young girl named Cristal. There she is lounging on a bed in short shorts, her knees drawn up to show the undersides of her thighs, her hot-pink bra peeking out from behind a low-cut tank top….
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Beautiful Brains →
by David Dobbs
Moody. Impulsive. Maddening. Why do teenagers act the way they do? Viewed through the eyes of evolution, their most exasperating traits may be the key to success as adults.
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Space Stasis →
By Neal Stephenson
There is no way to guess how rockets might have developed, or failed to, were it not for the fact that, during the 1940s, the world’s most technically sophisticated nation was under the absolute control of a crazy dictator who decreed that vast physical and intellectual resources should be hurled into the project of creating rockets of hitherto unimagined size.
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How to Operate a Shower Curtain →
by Ian Frazier
Dear Guest: The shower curtain in this bathroom has been purchased with care at a reputable “big box” store in order to provide maximum convenience in showering. After you have read these instructions, you will find with a little practice that our shower curtain is as easy to use as the one you have at home.
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Triumph Of The Swoosh →
By Donald Katz
With impressive speed Nike has come to signify status, glamour, competitive edge and the myriad intricacies of cool. Especially for the young, Nike shoes conjure up a yearning and fascination that for much of the century has been inspired by cars.
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Different Kinds of People →
by Lindy West
Am I making this up? I feel like every time someone uses the word “hobo” to mean “homeless person,” somebody else has to climb up on their high horse and don their semantics cap and start getting highfalutin all over town about how “a hobo is someone who rides the rails in the Great Depression…”
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Haggling for Hot Dogs →
By Tom Chiarella
Buying a hot dog is an essential, unquestionable transaction, the lowest common denominator of American commerce. That’s why I wanted a deal.
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The Sanguine Sex →
by Caitlin Flanagan
Women will always have emotional needs that they can fill through sex, and men will always use those needs to their advantage. But men will never bear the brunt of sexuality.
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Being James Brown →
By Jonathan Lethem
When James Brown enters the recording studio, the recording studio becomes a stage. It is not merely that attention quickens in any room this human being inhabits. The phenomenon is more akin to a kind of grade-school physics experiment: Lines of force are suddenly visible in the air, rearranged, oriented. The band, the hangers-on, the very oxygen, every trace particle is...
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More Great Reads from... →
Another collection of excellent reading recommendations from our friends over at the American Scholar:
A Jew in the Northwest by William Deresiewicz The author muses on Jewishness, his forebears, and the East Coast/West Coast culture clash
Stuttgart: Continental Drifter by Olufemi Terry A West African émigré reports on Stuttgart 21, a controversial project that was marred with with heavy...
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A Brief History of the Corporation →
by Venkat Rao
It is a sort of grim privilege for the generations living today to watch the slow demise of such a spectacularly effective intellectual construct. The Age of Corporations is coming to an end. The traditional corporation won’t vanish, but it will cease to be the center of gravity of economic life in another generation or two. They will live on as religion does today, as weakened...
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The Roots of Muslim Rage →
By Bernard Lewis
(From 1990)
Nowhere in the Muslim world, in the Middle East or elsewhere, has American policy suffered disasters or encountered problems comparable to those in Southeast Asia or Central America. There is no Cuba, no Vietnam, in the Muslim world, and no place where American forces are involved as combatants or even as “advisers.” But there is a Libya, an Iran, and a Lebanon,...
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The Movie Set That Ate Itself →
by Michael Idov
Five years ago, a relatively unknown director began one of the wildest experiments in film history. Armed with total creative control, he invaded a Ukrainian city, marshalled a cast of thousands and thousands, and constructed a totalitarian society in which the cameras are always rolling and the actors never go home.
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Generation Why? →
By Zadie Smith
How long is a generation these days? I must be in Mark Zuckerberg’s generation - there are only nine years between us - but somehow it doesn’t feel that way. This despite the fact that I can say (like everyone else on Harvard’s campus in the fall of 2003) that “I was there” at Facebook’s inception.
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Remember This →
by Joshua Foer
In the archives of the brain our lives linger or disappear.
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Consider the Lobster →
by David Foster Wallace
For practical purposes, everyone knows what a lobster is. As usual, though, there’s much more to know than most of us care about—it’s all a matter of what your interests are.
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Cute Inc. →
by Mary Roach
The Japanese are born into cute and raised with cute. They grow up saving with cute (Miffy the bunny on Asahi Bank ATM cards), to pray with cute (Hello Kitty charm bags at Shinto shrines), and have sex with cute (prophylactics decorated with Monkichi the monkey).
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My Zombie, Myself: Why Modern Life Feels Rather... →
By Chuck Klosterman
This is our collective fear projection: that we will be consumed. Zombies are like the Internet and the media and every conversation we don’t want to have. All of it comes at us endlessly (and thoughtlessly), and — if we surrender — we will be overtaken and absorbed. Yet this war is manageable, if not necessarily winnable. As long we keep deleting whatever’s directly in...
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111 Essential Articles and Essays →
A Tetw reading list
A huge collection of the very best magazine length non-fiction. Includes stacks of classic material from DFW, JJS, HST, Joan Didion, Chuck Klosterman, Malcolm Gladwell, Susan Orlean, David Sedaris, Annie Dillard, Walter Kirn, Tom Woolfe, and many others.
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Protesting All Fiction Writers →
by Tom Bissell
DISCUSSED: Nerdily Private Dreams, Species of Outsider, Manifesto, The Housing Works Incident, Populists, Writing in Plain English, Connections, Raw Authenticity, Alienated Socioeconomic Posturing, Injustice, Selling the Sacred, Art and Death.
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The End of Men →
By Hanna Rosin
Earlier this year, women became the majority of the U.S. workforce for the first time in history. Most managers are now women too. And for every two men who get a college degree this year, three women will do the same. For years, women’s progress has been cast as a struggle for equality, but what if equality isn’t the end point? What if modern, postindustrial society is simply...
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How a Tokyo Earthquake Could Devastate the World... →
by Michael Lewis
In the late 80s, Michael Lewis traveled to Japan for an article that would appear in a 1989 issue of the Manhattan, Inc. magazine. His piece asked what the economic fallout would be if a 7.9-magnitude earthquake struck Tokyo. Here, in full text, is the original piece.
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A Few Words About Breasts →
By Nora Ephron
I was boyish. I was athletic, ambitious, outspoken, competitive, noisy, rambunctious. I had scabs on my knees and my socks slid into my loafers and I could throw a football. I wanted desperately not to be that way, not to be a mixture of both things but instead just one, a girl, a definite indisputable girl. As soft and as pink as a nursery. And nothing would do that for me, I...
4 tags
Something's Got to Give →
by Darcy Frey
All the way down the bank of radar scopes, the air traffic controllers have that savage, bug-eyed look, like men on the verge of drowning, as they watch the computer blips proliferate and speak in frantic bursts of techno-chatter to the pilots.
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How to Get a Nuclear Bomb →
by William Langewiesche
It wouldn’t be easy. But it wouldn’t be impossible. A reporter travels the world to find out how.
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Building the VW of PC's →
by Po Bronson
“Shiny shoes have to be continually reshined. Why would I buy a pair of shoes that have to be continuously reshined when I could buy a pair - for no more money - that don’t have to be reshined?”
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Butcher →
By Tom Chiarella
They want answers, and they want meat. A butcher has to have a lot of each. So that’s when I lean in, against the solidity of the counter, into the skin of the apron. I’ve been there long enough to be a guy with some answers, a guy with trusted skills. Butcher.
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You Are In Paradise →
By Zadie Smith
If you are brown and decide to date a British man, sooner or later he will present you with a Paul Gauguin. It may come in postcard form or as a valentine, as a framed print for your birthday or repeated many times across wrapping paper, but it will come.
January 2012
38 posts
4 tags
Why the Poor Pay More →
by DeNeen L. Brown
You have to be rich to be poor. That’s what some people who have never lived below the poverty line don’t understand. Put it another way: The poorer you are, the more things cost.
6 tags
In the Waiting Room →
by David Sedaris
Six months after moving to Paris, I gave up on French school and decided to take the easy way out… I started just saying, “D’accord,” which translates to “I am in agreement,” and means, basically, “O.K.” The word was a key to a magic door, and every time I said it I felt the thrill of possibility.