January 2012
31 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.
3 tags
The Electric Cough-Syrup Acid Test →
by Jim Hogshire
Dextromethorphan Hydrobromide, the “DM” in DM cough syrups such as Robitussin Maximum Strength Cough, is one of the most mystifying drugs in the pharmacopia. Even though it can be found in virtually every over-the-counter cold, flu, and cough remedy, most reference works hardly mention it; when they do, their information is sketchy and sometimes contradictory…
1 tag
To College, or Not To College? →
A Tetw reading list
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 Mead - A strong argument against measuring the value of a degree in purely economic terms.
In the Basement of the Ivory Tower by Professor X - An anonymous instructor at a low-end college makes the case that...
3 tags
Here is New york →
by E. B. White
On any person who desires such queer prizes, New York will bestow the gift of loneliness and the gift of privacy.
5 tags
Double Vision →
by Lawrence Weschler
Try this: Closing your right eye, gaze to the right with your left. Notice how your nose blocks a good part of the view in that direction. Now, shift eyes: closing your left eye and peering left with your right. Same thing. Pretty obvious. Only, now, with both eyes open, gaze right, and notice how your nose pretty much disappears from your visual field, even though your...
5 tags
The Tipping Point →
by Malcolm Gladwell
As you drive east on Atlantic Avenue, through the part of New York City that the Police Department refers to as Brooklyn North, the neighborhoods slowly start to empty out: the genteel brownstones of the western part of Brooklyn give way to sprawling housing projects and vacant lots.
5 tags
The Arrow of Disease →
by Jared Diamond
When Columbus and his successors invaded the Americas, the most potent weapons they carried were germs. But why didn’t deadly disease flow the other way, from the New World to the Old?
5 tags
Class Dismissed →
by Walter Kirn
The senior year of public high school is less a climactic academic experience than an occasion for oafish goofing off, chronic truancy, random bullying, sloppy dancing in rented formalwear and interludes of moody, wan philosophizing about the looming bummer of adulthood.
4 tags
My Bodyguards →
by Tom Chiarella
I would like to know what it’s like to arrive at a curb, have the velvet rope unhooked, be whisked into a club surrounded by two or three large men in mysteriously classy but unobtrusive overcoats.
5 tags
Autobiography of a Body →
by Lucy Grealy
I began my seductions incognito, as a boy. With hair shorter than my brothers’ had ever been and my thin body almost breastless, the only thing which might have given away my true sex were my rather curvy hips.
5 tags
Come to Happyland →
by Michael Paterniti
Discover Burma, the dictators say, Southeast Asia’s most beautiful and friendly country. And so he did. A visit to an anesthetized state.
3 tags
William and I →
by Michael Chabon
I don’t know what a woman needs to do to impel a perfect stranger to inform her in the grocery store that she is a really good mom. Perhaps perform an emergency tracheotomy with a Bic pen on her eldest child while simultaneously nursing her infant and buying two weeks’ worth of healthy but appealing breaktime snacks for the entire cast of Lion King, Jr.
5 tags
Gold Mania in the Yukon →
by Gary Wolf
Ryan is the king of a new Yukon gold rush, the biggest since the legendary Klondike stampede a century ago. Behind the stampede is the rising price of gold, and behind that price is fear.
5 tags
How to Raise Men →
by A.J. Jacobs
Unexpectedly, with frightening speed, the boy’s Y chromosome kicks in. It’s a remarkable thing to watch. If anyone thinks gender is purely a social construct - as I once did - they should spend a couple hours with my sons. It’s like my boys read a book called The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Fulfilling Male Stereotypes.
4 tags
John Wayne: a Love Song →
by Joan Didion
In the summer of 1943 I was eight, and my father and mother and small brother and I were at Peterson Field in Colorado Springs. A hot wind blew through that summer, blew until it seemed that before August broke, all the dust in Kansas would be in Colorado, would have drifted over the tar-paper barracks and the temporary strip and stopped only when it hit Pikes Peak…
3 tags
The Pirate Pose →
by Tom Wolfe
Twenty years after The Bonfire of the Vanities, the author checks in on the new masters of the universe and finds them even coarser and ruder than their predecessors could have ever imagined being.
4 tags
Marshmallow Boy vs. Pokemon Kid →
by Po Bronson
If I could use subtitles on this blog, this one would read: Why the most famous study of child-distraction is itself a huge distraction.
4 tags
Holy Water →
by Bucky McMahon
Before it was an issue, it was an island. For fifty years, with cannons, Hellfire missiles, and napalm, the U. S. Navy has bombed the daylights out of Vieques, P. R., whose best-kept secret remains a bay that glows in the dark.
5 tags
A Guide to Friendship, Schmoozing, and Social... →
by Glenn O’Brien
Modern advice on how to win friends and influence people - while always making sure you’re moving up.
3 tags
Swamp's Last Day on Earth →
by Evan Wright
It’s a couple of Saturdays before Christmas at the Out of the Fog coffee shop in Eugene, Oregon, a place where Santa Claus is just another capitalist oppressor…
2 tags
Why's this so good? →
27 top writers, journalists and editors select their favourite pieces of classic non-fiction
For the past couple of months Nieman Storyboard has been asking experts to describe what makes their all-time favourite articles and essays so good. To read the 27 excellent short essays click here.
Together, the articles they have chosen make up one of the best reading lists we’ve seen, ...
4 tags
Sport and Stats →
by Michael Lewis
Two classic articles from the author of Moneyball:
The Trading Desk - For the past four years, working with one of the lowest payrolls in the game, the Oakland A’s have won as many regular-season games as any other team except the Atlanta Braves. They’ve been to the playoffs three years in a row and twice taken the richest team in baseball, the Yankees, to within a...
4 tags
The Moon And Danzel Cabral →
by Bucky McMahon
Off the coast of Belize, on an island no bigger than your backyard, the hermit of french louis caye watches the world through his radio.
3 tags
The Death of Kings →
by Nick Paumgarten
A private-equity executive I talked to said that he sensed the jig was up when his cleaning woman - “from Nicaragua or El Salvador or wherever the fuck she’s from” - took out a subprime loan to buy a house in Virginia.
5 tags
Venture Kapital →
by Gary Wolf
Some look at the reconstruction of Berlin and see the heart of a new Europe. Others envision the hottest ticket in urban theater. Then again, maybe what’s really going on here at the border of the 21st century is the creation of a monumental branding event.
4 tags
In the Red Tent →
by Lindy West
The Stranger Gets a Press Release for a Gathering in a Red Tent Honoring Women and Their Menstrual Cycles and Sends Lindy West and Her Womb to Investigate.
3 tags
The Man Upstairs →
by David Sedaris
What religious people call fate, I call luck, and what they call God’s will, I call bad luck. Accept a canceled flight and suddenly you’re on a roll, opening yourself to the possibilities of tax audits and spinal-cord injuries. Anything can happen once the precedent’s been set.
4 tags
Beasts on the Bus →
by Matt Taibbi
“So, you’re doing a Boys on the Bus thing, right?” The original Boys on the Bus raised a few eyebrows, sure, but no one anywhere is threatened by a “Boys on the Bus thing” now.
6 tags
The Fast Track to Dharma →
by Michael Paterniti
60 Degrees Straight Down, Mind the Boulders and Avalanches. A postcard from La Grave, France - alpinism’s new lost horizon.
4 tags
Say No More →
by Jack Hitt
Linguists now estimate that half of the more than 6,000 languages currently spoken in the world will become extinct by the end of this century. In reaction, there are numerous efforts to slow the die-off.
