March 2012
70 posts
4 tags
Secrets of a Mind-Gamer →
by Joshua Foer
How I trained my brain and became a world-class memory athlete.
1 tag
My Father's Fashion Tips →
by Tom Junod
First it was Lubriderm, what my father rubbed briskly between his palms and extended in glistening offering. “How about a bit of the Lube?” he’d say when I walked into his bathroom. I was, like, 8 years old, or something, so I had no choice but to put my face in his shiny hands. Then, for a long time, it was Nivea. “How would you like a little…Nivea?” he’d ask, with his brown hands...
5 tags
2 Stories About Peeing →
by Mary Roach
Ladies who Spray - If you sprinkle when you tinkle, cut it out!
Bashful Bladders - Why some people, mostly men, can’t pee in public — or even in their own homes.
1 tag
The Letter of Last Resort →
By Ron Rosenbaum
At this very moment, miles beneath the surface of the ocean, there is a British nuclear submarine carrying nuclear-armed intercontinental ballistic missiles. In the control room of the sub, the Daily Mailreports, “there is a safe attached to a control room floor. Inside that, there is an inner safe. And inside that sits a letter. It is addressed to the submarine commander and...
3 tags
Kill Whitey. It’s the Right Thing to Do. →
by David Dobbs
A couple years ago David Pizarro, a young research psychologist at Cornell, brewed up a devious variation on the classic trolley problem. The trolley problem is that staple of moral psychology studies in which you ask someone to decide under what conditions it’s morally permissible to kill one person to save others…
1 tag
The Trendspotting Generation →
by Daniel Radosh
In days gone by, big news didn’t indulge our modern concept of social “trends.” There was simply no room or imagination for exposition along the lines of, Lately there is a vague sense that more and more people seem to be doing or thinking or buying something or other that might possibly reflect the mood or psyche or spirit of the nation as a whole. That wasn’t news; it was...
1 tag
Why Men Lie →
by Vince Passaro
There are things that everyone almost always lies about (cheating, stealing, sex), and there are things that women almost always lie about (food, money, orgasms), and then there’s the rest of life, which is what men tend to lie about. A female friend says of the men she’s known: “Are its lips moving? Then it’s lying.”
4 tags
Race Without Color →
by Jared Diamond
Race based body chemistry makes no more sense than race based on looks, but you do get to move the membership around.
2 tags
5 All-time Great Articles →
As chosen by Jared B. Keller
Jared B. Keller is an associate editor at The Atlantic, and one of the keepers of The Atlantic’s Tumblr. We asked him to choose the 5 articles he finds himself recommending over and over again, and here they are:
Have You Ever Tried to Sell a Diamond by Edward Jay Epstein (The Atlantic, 1982) - ”An unruly market may undo the work of a giant cartel and...
1 tag
7 Journalists We Love →
(with links to our favourite articles)
For great articles by each writer, click on the names below:
William Langewiesche - The consumate reporter, Langwiesche travels the world to investigate complex issues that affect us all.
Michael Lewis - The best financial journalist around, Lewis also writes fascinating articles about the world of professional sports.
Michael Paterniti - Somehow...
2 tags
Ten Authors We Love →
with links to 150+ outstanding articles & essays
Over the last few weeks we’ve been scouring the internet in search of all the best writing by our favourite authors. We’ve collected them all in new author pages — over 150 great reads so far:
David Foster Wallace - A non-fiction writer in a class of his own. All 20 of the DFW essays that we found online are listed here.
...
4 tags
Must Dog Eat Dog? →
by Susan McCarthy
After preaching that humans live by animal laws of aggression and selfishness, evolutionary psychologists are finding the animal kingdom is not as brutal as they imagined.
1 tag
Learning to Smoke →
by Tom Chiarella
This story isn’t about quitting smoking. It’s about starting. And starting, for me, included thirty-four different brands of cigarette, eleven lighters, spiritual revelations and moments of clarity, gatherings at alley mouths, unions with strangers on the streets of various cities, huddlings on a ragged porch watching the hand-cupped flare of a match in a snowstorm, a perpetual...
4 tags
Dirty Medicine →
by Mariah Blake
How medical supply behemoths stick it to the little guy, making America’s health care system more dangerous and expensive.
1 tag
The Shipbreakers →
by William Langewiesche
At Alang, in India, on a six-mile stretch of oily, smoky beach, 40,000 men tear apart half of the world’s discarded ships, each one a sump of toxic waste. Environmentalists in the West are outraged. The shipbreakers want to be left alone - and maybe they should be.
6 tags
The Connection Has Been Reset →
by James Fallows
China’s Great Firewall is crude, slapdash, and surprisingly easy to breach. Here’s why it’s so effective anyway.
1 tag
Inhaling the Spore: A Visit to the Museum of... →
by Lawrence Weschler
“Well,” Wilson replied coolly that first afternoon, unfazed, from behind his wooden desk (obviously he gets asked this sort of question all the time), “as you can see, we’re a small natural-history museum with an emphasis on curiosities and technological innovation.” He paused before going on: “We’re definitely interested in presenting phenomena that other natural-history...
4 tags
The Soundtrack of Your Life →
by David Owen
Muzak in the realm of retail theatre.
1 tag
Bring Back the Rails! →
By Tony Judt
The modern city was born of rail travel. The very possibility of placing millions of people in close proximity with one another, or else transporting them considerable distances from home to work and back, was the achievement of the railways.
6 tags
Hollywood Stole My Story →
by Tad Friend
As popcorn movies have become a tag-team-written jumble of curvy scientists, ninja studs, morphing cyborgs, and basement-loving psychos, one obscure writer after another has come forward to advance the claim that a studio stole his brainchild.
Excerpts from I Remember Nothing →
by Nora Ephron
The D Word - The most important thing about me, for quite a long chunk of my life, was that I was divorced. Even after I was no longer divorced but remarried, this was true. I have now been married to my third husband for more than twenty years. But when you’ve had children with someone you’re divorced from, divorce defines everything; it’s the lurking fact, a slice of anger in...
4 tags
Our Perfect Summer →
by David Sedaris
At some point in the mid- to late nineteen-sixties, North Carolina began referring to itself as “Variety Vacationland.” The words were stamped onto license plates, and a series of television commercials reminded us that, unlike certain of our neighbors, we had both the beach and the mountains…
1 tag
The String Theory →
By David Foster Wallace
What happens when all of a man’s intelligence and athleticism is focused on placing a fuzzy yellow ball where his opponent is not? An obsessive inquiry into the physics and metaphysics of tennis.
8 tags
The Senses →
A Tetw reading list
The Blind Man Who Learned To See by Michael Finkel - A fascinating profile of a man who is helping other blind people to see using echolocation.
Mixed Feelings by Sunny Bains - How researchers can tap the plasticity of the brain to hack our 5 senses, and build new ones.
Sense and Sensitivity by Andrea Bartz - Is it possible that some people are wired to take in more...
4 tags
The Egg Men →
by Burkhard Bilger
Las Vegas is a city built by breakfast specials. Sex and gambling, too, of course, and divorce and vaudeville and the creative use of neon. But the energy for all that vice had to come from somewhere, and mostly it came from eggs.
1 tag
Goodbye to All That →
By Joan Didion
When I first saw New York I was twenty, and it was summertime, and I got off a DC-7 at the old Idlewild temporary terminal in a new dress which had seemed very smart in Sacramento but seemed less smart already, even in the old Idlewild temporary terminal, and some instinct, programmed by all the movies I had ever seen and all the songs I had ever read about New York, informed me...
4 tags
Breaking Bread with a Spread →
by Sandra Cate
In many jails and prisons, inmates devise a cuisine that supplements – or replaces – the official meals provided them. Nearly every evening in the San Francisco County jails, inmates make “spread,” the generic term for this cuisine, out of dried ramen noodles and ingredients saved from their meal trays or purchased on weekly commissary orders.
1 tag
I Want This Apartment →
By Susan Orlean
Jill Meilus is a New York City real-estate broker. Like Superman, she can see through walls. Walking down a Manhattan street with her is a paranormal experience. “Nice building,” you might remark as you pass a handsome but unrevealing prewar facade, to which she might respond that the J-line apartment on the third floor has a new kitchen, that the guy in 8-A is being transferred...
5 tags
Redesigning the NYC Subway Map →
by Julie Steele
The long and complicated path that led to Eddie Jabbour’s KickMap.
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Pro-Life Nation →
By Jack Hitt
More than a dozen countries have liberalized their abortion laws in recent years, including South Africa, Switzerland, Cambodia and Chad. In a handful of others, including Russia and the United States (or parts of it), the movement has been toward criminalizing more and different types of abortions. In this new movement toward criminalization, El Salvador is in the vanguard.
5 tags
Losing It at Club Med →
by Po Bronson
There are palm trees and pool aerobics, searching singles and satiny sands. But a week at Club Med is not what you would expect.
1 tag
Video Games: The Addiction →
By Tom Bissell
Tom Bissell was an acclaimed, prize-winning young writer. Then he started playing the video game Grand Theft Auto. For three years he has been cocaine addicted, sleep deprived and barely able to write a word. Any regrets? Absolutely none.
6 tags
I Was a Warehouse Wage Slave →
by Mac McClelland
My brief, backbreaking, rage-inducing, low-paying, dildo-packing time inside the online-shipping machine.
1 tag
To Have is To Owe →
By David Graeber
For thousands of years, the struggle between rich and poor has largely taken the form of conflicts between creditors and debtors; of arguments about the rights and wrongs of interest payments, debt, amnesty, repossession, restitution, the sequestering of sheep, the seizing of vineyards, and the selling of children into slavery.
4 tags
Shop Class as Soul Craft →
by Matthew B. Crawford
What ordinary people once made, they buy; and what they once fixed for themselves, they replace entirely or hire an expert to repair. Perhaps the time is ripe for reconsideration of an ideal that has fallen out of favor: manual competence, and the stance it entails toward the built, material world.
1 tag
Depression Special: great articles about the... →
By Michael Lewis
Wall Street on the Tundra Iceland’s de facto bankruptcy - its currency (the krona) is kaput, its debt is 850 percent of G.D.P., its people are hoarding food and cash and blowing up their new Range Rovers for the insurance - resulted from a stunning collective madness. What led a tiny fishing nation, population 300,000, to decide, around 2003, to re-invent itself as a global...
5 tags
Deciderization 2007 →
by David Foster Wallace
Just about every important word on The Best American Essays 2007’s front cover turns out to be vague, debatable, slippery, disingenuous, or else ‘true’ only in certain contexts…
1 tag
Doomed Love at the Taco Stand →
By Hunter S. Thompson
Going to Hollywood is a dangerous high-pressure gig for most people, under any circumstances. It is like pumping hot steam into thousands of different-size boilers. The laws of physics mandate that some will explode before others—although all of them will explode sooner or later unless somebody cuts off the steam.
2 tags
Words →
A Tetw reading list
How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read by Pierre Bayard - Not reading is our main way of relating to most literature, find out how to make the most of your ignorance.
Tense Present by David Foster Wallace - In one of his finest essays, DFW reviews a dictionary of English usage, thereby tackling everything from democracy and free will to racism in academia.
The Rise of...
4 tags
Leaving Reality →
by John Jeremiah Sullivan
Where do you go after you leave the cast of The Real World? To a universe where your only job is to be young and famous and keep the party jumpin’. Or to a tiny hell of endless exploitation.
1 tag
Halle Berry's Date with a Perfect Stranger →
By Halle Berry & Tom Chiarella
A writer sat across the table from an actress. She told him most writers screw up the story. He told her writing isn’t easy. She asked to give it a shot. This is what happened.
5 tags
The Sure Thing →
by Malcolm Gladwell
The truly successful businessman is anything but a risk-taker. He is a predator, and predators always try to incur the least risk possible.
1 tag
Things We Think We Know →
By Chuck Klosterman
We all hate stereotypes. Stereotypes are killing us, and they are killing our children, and they are putting LSD into the water supply. Stereotypes are like rogue elephants with AIDS that have been set on fire by terrorists, except worse. We all hate stereotypes. Seriously. Dude, we fucking hate them… except that we don’t.
6 tags
A Newspaper Can’t Love You Back →
by David Simon
Few, if any, of the gray ladies are going to be better at what they do, most are in the middle of a lingering slide into mediocrity.
1 tag
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.
5 tags
Geeks in Toyland →
by Brendan I. Koerner
Lego built a global empire out of little plastic blocks, then conquered the wired world with a robot kit called Mindstorms. So when the time came for an upgrade, they turned to their obsessed fans - and rewrote the rules of the innovation game.
1 tag
To Have is To Owe →
By David Graeber
For thousands of years, the struggle between rich and poor has largely taken the form of conflicts between creditors and debtors; of arguments about the rights and wrongs of interest payments, debt, amnesty, repossession, restitution, the sequestering of sheep, the seizing of vineyards, and the selling of children into slavery.
5 tags
After the Fall →
by Tom Bissell and Morgan Meis
Certain parts of late-night Saigon have a windy quiet that seems almost pastoral. Maybe it’s the closeness of the city, the fortress-like squatness of its blocks, the numerous trees, or the way that the nighttime pinches out the faraway headlights and brake lights of the evening’s last scooters and taxis…
1 tag
Where's Willy →
By Susan Orlean
On the tail of the world’s most pampered whale - It was a hell of a time to be in Iceland, although by most accounts it is always a hell of a time to be in Iceland, where the wind never huffs or puffs but simply blows your house down.
5 tags
An Interview with Marshall McLuhan →
by Gary Wolf
The real message of media today is ubiquity. It is no longer something we do, but something we are part of. It is as if we have amputated not our ears or our eyes, but ourselves, and then established a total prosthesis – an automaton – in our place.
