July 2011
29 posts
5 tags
The Demon in the Freezer →
by Richard Preston
How smallpox, a disease of officially eradicated twenty years ago, became the biggest bioterrorist threat we now face.
4 tags
Music is My Bag →
by Meghan Daum
The boy in the piano-key scarf definitely has music as his bag. He may not yet have the actual tote bag, but the hat, the Billy Joel, the tacit euphoria brought on by a sexual awakening that, for him, centers entirely around band, is all he needs to be delivered into the unmistakable realm that is Music Is My Bagdom.
5 tags
The Autumn of the Multitaskers →
by Walter Kirn
It was interesting to me - after having done some reading about the frenzied activity of the multitasking brain - how late in the process my prefrontal cortex changed its focus from the phone to the steel fence post sliding spear-like across my hood…
5 tags
The Secret Vice →
by Tom Wolfe
Real buttonholes. That’s it! A man can take his thumb and forefinger and unbutton his sleeve at the wrist because this kind of suit has real buttonholes there. Tom, boy, it’s terrible. Once you know about it, you start seeing it. All the time!
5 tags
High Times →
by Kevin Fedarko
In addition to presenting a rather grotesque perversion of pretty much everything that alpinism is supposed to represent, Everest Base Camp, an experimental theater for the sort of behavior that any self-respecting mountaineer finds repugnant, also happens to be, and I’m afraid there’s just no other way to put this, an absolute fricking blast.
6 tags
Let’s Die Together →
by David Samuels
From 2003 through 2005, 180 people died in 61 reported cases of Internet-assisted group suicide in Japan. The victims meet online, using anonymous screen names, and then take sleeping pills and use briquettes, charcoal burners, and tape to turn a car or van into a mobile gas chamber.
4 tags
What We've Learned, If Anything →
by Tony Judt
In the West we have made haste to dispense whenever possible with the economic, intellectual, and institutional baggage of the twentieth century and encouraged others to do likewise.
5 tags
Burkas and Birkins →
by Lindy West
I watched 146 minutes of Sex and the City 2, and all I got was this religious fundamentalism.
5 tags
This is Emo →
by Chuck Klosterman
I once loved a girl who almost loved me, but not as much as she loved John Cusack. Under certain circumstances, this would have been fine - if Cusack and I were competing for the same woman, I could easily accept losing. However, her relationship to Cusack was confined to watching him as a two-dimensional projection, pretending to be characters who don’t actually...
6 tags
Liking Is for Cowards →
by Jonathan Franzen
Do I need to point out that - absent some wild, anthropomorphizing projection in which my BlackBerry felt sad about the waning of my love for it - our relationship was entirely one-sided? Let me point it out anyway.
5 tags
The Real Housewives of Wall Street →
by Matt Taibbi
Neither Christy Mack nor Susan Karches has any serious history in business, but the Federal Reserve handed them both low-interest loans of nearly a quarter of a billion dollars. The federal aid they received falls under a broad category of bailout initiatives called “giving already stinking rich people gobs of money for no fucking reason at all.”
6 tags
Pop. Snort. Parachute. →
by David Amsden
To many teenagers, all the world’s a pharmacy. There distinction between pills for medication and for recreation is vanishing, and the much-touted risk of suicide misses the point.
6 tags
Farewell, My Lovely →
by E. B. White (from 1936)
The last Model T was built in 1927, and the car is fading from what scholars call the American scene - which is an understatement, because to a few million people who grew up with it, the old Ford practically was the American scene.
6 tags
Short but Sweet →
Two tasty little op-eds by Calvin Trillin
Half an Oaf There was a discussion at my house recently about whether or not I am an uncultured oaf. It’s not the first time the subject has come up.
Wall Street Smarts “The financial system nearly collapsed,” he said, “because smart guys had started working on Wall Street.”
5 tags
The Greatest Chef In The World →
By Michael Paterniti
The true tale of the alchemical miracles and transcendental gastronomy of Ferran Adriá, the world’s greatest chef.
5 tags
The Rumor →
by John Updike
When Sharon first heard the rumor that Frank had left her she had to laugh, for, far from having left her, there he was, right in the lamplit study with her, ripping pages out of ARTnews.
4 tags
The Life →
by Walter Kirn
A body in motion tends to stay in motion. And though these guys are always swearing, like shell-shocked combatants in a Hemingway novel, that they see themselves settling down in a couple of years (it’s always “a couple,” for some reason, never “a few”; two is the magic number of denial), and though they’re constantly singing the praises of...
5 tags
Learning to Lie →
By Po Bronson
Kids lie early, often, and for all sorts of reasons—to avoid punishment, to bond with friends, to gain a sense of control. But now there’s a singular theory for one way this habit develops: They are just copying their parents.
7 tags
The Happiest Man in Cuba →
by Rebecca Barry
My father has spotted some train tracks and is trying to drive and look at them at the same time. “Those look like narrow gauge,” he says. “I’ll be damned.” A man carrying a chicken pedals slowly by on his bicycle, staring into the car. Dad, busy scanning the cane fields for black smoke, swerves and honks the horn by accident.
3 tags
Inside the Dragon →
by Peter Hessler
“I’m a Chinese, but I feel it difficult to see my country clearly,” wrote a woman named Airane. “I believe there are many young people are as confused as I’m.”
5 tags
Gone →
by Tom Junod
What’s it like to be kidnapped and held for ransom, not as a political prisoner but as an economic one? What’s it like to live in the Ecuadoran jungle for 141 days? What’s it like not to sleep, to be bound in chains, to have your body invaded by living things, to waste away to the point of death? This is what it’s like.
5 tags
Sorry, But Your Soul Just Died →
by Tom Wolfe
Brain imaging was invented for medical diagnosis. But its far greater importance is that it may very well confirm, in ways too precise to be disputed, certain theories about “the mind,” “the self,” “the soul,” and “free will” that are already devoutly believed in by scholars in what is now the hottest field in the academic world,...
4 tags
Federer as Religious Experience →
by David Foster Wallace
It was impossible. It was like something out of “The Matrix.” I don’t know what-all sounds were involved, but my spouse says she hurried in and there was popcorn all over the couch and I was down on one knee and my eyeballs looked like novelty-shop eyeballs.
4 tags
Kid Cannabis →
by Mark Binelli
The Idea had more legs than your typical pot-inspired idea. It did not involve a second Twinkie inside the first one. It was, in fact, based on a practical application of global economic theory. That, and cheap weed in Canada.
6 tags
Say Everything →
by Emily Nussbaum
Kids today. They have no sense of shame. They have no sense of privacy. They’re show-offs, fame whores, pornographic little loons who post their diaries, their phone numbers, their stupid poetry - for God’s sake, their dirty photos! - online.
5 tags
The Wall →
by Michael Finkel
Wall builders will tell you that a stone, professionally speaking, is not always a stone.
6 tags
Recruiting for the Big Parade →
by Terry Southern
How I signed Up for $250 a Day for the Big Parade Through Havana Bla Bla Bla and Wound Up Working for the CIA in Guatemala.
6 tags
Life's Swell →
by Susan Orlean
To be a surfer girl in Maui is to be the luckiest of creatures. It means you’re beautiful and tan and ready to rip. It means you’ve caught the perfect dappled wave and are on a ride that can’t possibly end.
