December 2011
34 posts
4 tags
The People on the Bus →
by Adam Gopnik
Bus-blindness is a standard New York illness; of all the regularities of life here, the bus is the least celebrated, the least inclined to tug at the heart, or be made into a symbol of our condition.
3 tags
How a Holiday Party Went Wrong →
by George Saunders
At twenty-six, at the embarrassing end of a series of attempts at channelling Kerouac, I was beyond broke, back in my home town, living in my aunt and uncle’s basement…
4 tags
Mirrorings →
by Lucy Grealy
There was a long period of time, almost a year, during which I never looked in a mirror. It wasn’t easy, for I’d never suspected just how omnipresent are our own images.
4 tags
The Story of a Gun →
by Erik Larson
After 60,000 deaths from firearms use over the past two years, America is in a gun crisis. Yet gun laws remain weak, gunmakers continue to promote killing power, and gun dealers accept no responsibility for the criminal use of what they sell.
4 tags
Open Secrets →
by Malcolm Gladwell
Enron, intelligence, and the perils of too much information.
6 tags
The Stolen Forests →
by Raffi Khatchadourian
Suifenhe is a place of singular purpose. Nearly every train from Russia brings in just one commodity: wood. And because as much as half of it is harvested in violation of Russian law, it is likely that any given piece of wood in the city has been logged illegally.
7 tags
Why Mow? →
by Michael Pollan
No lawn is an island, at least in America. Starting at my front stoop, this scruffy green carpet tumbles down a hill and leaps across a one‑lane road into my neighbor’s yard. From there it skips over some wooded patches and stone walls before finding its way across a dozen other unfenced properties that lead down into the Housatonic Valley…
7 tags
Kashmiri Extremism →
by Kevin Fedarko
It’s 4:00 a.m., and outside the fog-shrouded windows of the kashmir Alpine Ski Shop, the Indian village of Gulmarg sleeps in the shadow of a 13,576-foot ridge that looks directly into Pakistan.
4 tags
The Way We Age Now →
by Atul Gawande
Experts say they can gauge a person’s age to within five years from the examination of a single tooth - if they have any left to examine.
6 tags
The Dumbass, The Daytrader, and The New Democracy →
by Joey Anuff and Gary Wolf
Anthony Elgindy, the Mad Max of Wall Street, has seen the revolution: thousands upon thousands flooding into the electronically liberated stock market. “The public is there for one reason and one reason only, they are there to absorb the risk.” And guess who will drive you to maximum absorption?
4 tags
What Is a Man? →
by Tom Chiarella
At a party recently I watched a four-year-old boy drop his pants in a corner of the yard and take a leak. No one blinked. Boys do this in the darkling night. The kid seemed to take in the ocean view as he threaded the darkness with his piss.
5 tags
Love in the Time of No Time →
by Jennifer Egan
The city is full of people we can’t reach. We pass them on sidewalks, sit across from them in the subway and in restaurants; we glimpse their lighted windows from our own lighted windows late at night…
5 tags
The Fringes of the Physical World →
by Meghan Daum
One morning I logged on to my America Online account to find a message under the heading “is this the real meghan daum?” It came from someone with the screen name PFSlider. The body of the message consisted of five sentences, entirely in lowercase letters, of perfectly turned flattery…
5 tags
Adventures in My Bed →
by Bucky McMahon
This story is just like the dreams that inspired it: lucid, erotic, and not terribly long. One man’s quest to control his dreams.
4 tags
Want to Remember Everything You'll Ever Learn? →
by Gary Wolf
Given the chance to observe our behaviors, computers can run simulations, modeling different versions of our path through the world. By tuning these models for top performance, computers will give us rules to live by, telling us when to wake, sleep, learn, and exercise; they will cue us to remember what we’ve read, help us track whom we’ve met, and remind us of our...
3 tags
The Organization Kid →
by David Brooks
The young men and women of America’s future elite work their laptops to the bone, rarely question authority, and happily accept their positions at the top of the heap as part of the natural order of life.
3 tags
How To Be a Person →
by Lindy West
A Guide to Life for the Recent Graduate.
5 tags
Pieces Of You →
by Walter Kirn
The hottest girl in the room isn’t necessarily who you think.
7 tags
The Rip-Off in Iraq →
by Matt Taibbi
How is it done? How do you screw the taxpayer for millions, get away with it and then ride off into the sunset with one middle finger extended, the other wrapped around a chilled martini?
5 tags
Adrift →
by Bucky McMahon
One man. One modest raft. One big freakin’ ocean. So bring on the waves, the sharks, the tankers - they’re nothing compared with the mind-bending solitude.
4 tags
The Red and the White →
by Calvin Trillin
Is it possible that wine connoisseurs can’t tell them apart?
3 tags
The Science of Shopping →
by Malcolm Gladwell
The American shopper has never been so fickle. What are stores, including the new flagship designer boutiques, doing about it? Applying science.
5 tags
A Voyage to the Sun →
by Michael Paterniti
Under a ring of water in a sealed chamber in the desert Southwest lies the heart of a machine that could change the world. A machine called Z.
4 tags
Is It a Crime to Be Poor? →
by Barbara Ehrenreich
In defiance of all reason and compassion, the criminalization of poverty has actually been intensifying as the recession generates ever more poverty.
5 tags
Guarding Sing Sing →
by Ted Connover
Half the inmates in Sing Sing seem to have been stabbed or shot at some point in their lives. Often the scars are on the face: a pale thick line across the back of the skull where no hair grows, a sliced nostril imperfectly healed, a gash along a cheek which ended when the blade passed through a lip.
4 tags
I Think You're Fat →
by A.J. Jacobs
To be totally honest, I was sorry I mentioned this idea to my boss about three seconds after I opened my mouth. Because I knew the article would be a pain in the ass to pull off. I should have let my colleague Tom Chiarella write it. But I didn’t want to seem lazy.
4 tags
Hello, I Am Fat →
by Lindy West
This is my body. It is MINE. I am not ashamed of it. In fact, I love everything about it. Men find it attractive. Clothes look awesome on it. My brain rides around in it all day and comes up with funny jokes.
4 tags
Six to Eight Black Men →
by David Sedaris
The words silly and unrealistic were redefined when I learned that Saint Nicholas travels with what was consistently described as “six to eight black men.” I asked several Dutch people to narrow it down, but none of them could give me an exact number. It was always “six to eight,” which seems strange, seeing as they’ve had hundreds of years to get...
6 tags
China is Killing U.S. →
by Matt Taibbi
Let’s just lock up our high school dropouts in toy factories, get those little bastards making radioactive Lego sets six days a week for a buck a shift. Imagine the profits!
5 tags
The Fracturing of Pennsylvania →
by Eliza Griswold
There are more than 4,000 Marcellus wells in Pennsylvania, which have given the area an injection of new income, but they have also spurred one of the first E.P.A. investigations into fracking’s effects on rivers, streams, drinking water and human health.
4 tags
Time and Distance Overcome →
by Eula Biss
“Of what use is such an invention?” the New York World asked shortly after Alexander Graham Bell first demonstrated his telephone in 1876…
3 tags
Tangled Up in Spam →
by James Gleick
The spam epidemic has just a few themes and variations: phone cards, cable descramblers, vacation prizes. Easy credit, easy weight loss, free vacations, free Girlz. Inkjet cartridges and black-market Viagra, get-rich-quick schemes and every possible form of pornography.
5 tags
The Omega Glory →
by Michael Chabon
The future, by definition, does not exist. It is always just an idea, a proposal, a scenario.
4 tags
Countdown →
by Jonathan Franzen
I was alone in the back seat again. I went to sleep, and my mother took out her magazines, and the weight of the long July drive fell squarely on my father.
