July 2012
73 posts
4 tags
Faking It →
by Michael Lewis
If you wanted a fast-growing economy, you needed to promote rapid change, and if you promote rapid change, children enjoy one big advantage over adults: they haven’t decided who they are. They haven’t sunk a lot of psychological capital into a particular self.
1 tag
Marrying Absurd →
by Joan Didion
To be married in Las Vegas a bride must swear that she is eighteen or has parental permission and a bridegroom that he is twenty-one or has parental permission. Someone must put up five dollars for the license. Nothing else is required.
1 tag
Night-Shifting for the Hip Fleet →
by Mark Jacobson
A college education is not required to drive for Dover Taxi Garage - all you have to do is pass a test on which the hardest question is “Where is Yankee Stadium?” — but almost everyone on the night line has at least a B.A.
1 tag
The Most Emailed 'New York Times' Article Ever →
by David Parker
It’s a week before the biggest day of her life, and Anna Williams is multitasking. While waiting to hear back from the Ivy League colleges she’s hoping to attend, the seventeen-year-old senior at one of Manhattan’s most exclusive private schools is doing research for a paper about organic farming in the West Bank…
4 tags
The Last Don →
by Devin Friedman
Bernardo Provenzano was the boss of all bosses of the Sicilian Mafia. He had been a fugitive since 1963, longer than anyone else anywhere in the world. Then, last April, on a small farm near Corleone, his years on the run came to an end.
1 tag
One Giant Leap to Nowhere →
by Tom Wolfe
The space program, the greatest, grandest, most Promethean quest in the history of the world, died in infancy at 10:56 p.m. New York time on July 20, 1969, the moment the foot of Apollo 11’s Commander Armstrong touched the surface of the Moon.
4 tags
The Search for Adam and Eve →
by John Tierney
She was not the only woman on earth, nor necessarily the most attractive or maternal. She was simply the most fruitful, if that is measured by success in propagating a certain set of genes.
1 tag
Coffee and a Doughnut →
by Geoff Dyer
It was a thrill to discover the perfect cappuccino and doughnut in a New York cafe. But the ritual of their daily consumption soon spiralled out of control.
3 tags
How Geniuses Think →
by Michael Michalko
What characterizes the thinking strategies of the Einsteins, Edisons, daVincis, Darwins, Picassos, Michelangelos, Galileos, Freuds, and Mozarts of history?
1 tag
The 36-Hour Dinner Party →
by Michael Pollan
Build a single wood fire and, over the course of 30-plus hours, use it to roast, braise, bake, simmer and grill as many different dishes as possible - for lunch, dinner, breakfast and lunch again.
2 tags
6 More Great Reads →
As chosen by the Tomorrow Mag crew
The fallout from the list of classic non-fiction we dropped last week continues. We asked the people over at Tommorow Magazine what was missing, and they (modestly) suggested a bunch of articles they wrote themselves. Luckily they were really good, so we can reproduce the list here with a clean conscience:
The End of Cheap Coffee by Zak Stone - How...
5 tags
Work →
by Ryan D’Agostino
Nothing gives a man more of a sense of purpose, and there remains nothing more dignified, than hauling yourself out of bed and going to work. But some of those jobs that went away in the recession — some whole professions — are never coming back. That’s what the men in this story are facing. They are men. That we all know. They might even be us.
5 tags
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. I wanted to be a girl, as soft and as pink as a nursery. And nothing would do that for me, I felt, but breasts.
1 tag
Oil →
A Tetw reading list
Blood Oil by Sebastian Junger - Could a bunch of men in speedboats bring about a U.S. recession? Deep in the Niger-delta, the author meets the nightmarish result of decades of corruption.
The Incredible Half-Billion-Dollar Oil Swindle by Peter Elkind - How some of the world’s top investors got burned in Azerbaijan.
The Oil We Eat by Richard Manning - Why the US food...
1 tag
The Vietnam Syndrome →
by Christopher Hitchens
To be writing these words is, for me, to undergo the severest test of my core belief - that sentences can be more powerful than pictures. A writer can hope to do what a photographer cannot: convey how things smelled and sounded as well as how things looked. I seriously doubt my ability to perform this task on this occasion. Unless you see the landscape of ecocide, or...
3 tags
What's So Bad About Hate →
by Andrew Sullivan
For all our documentation of hate crimes, our political and moral disgust at them, our morbid fascination with them, our sensitivity to their social meaning, we seem at times to have no better idea now than we ever had of what exactly they are about.
1 tag
15 More Classic Articles and Essays →
As chosen by @simon_frantz
Last week we posted a big list of essential articles and essays. Simon Frantz, the Science, Technology and Features Editor at BBC.com sent us this list of articles he thinks were missing:
The Long Tail by Chris Anderson The Duke in his Domain by Truman Capote The Peekaboo Paradox by Gene Weingarten Consider the Lobster by David Foster Wallace Secrets of the Little...
4 tags
Welcome to the Future Nauseous →
by Venkat Rao (via @jkleske)
Sure, we can all see the small clues all around us: cellphones, laptops, Facebook, Prius cars on the street. Yet, somehow, the future always seems like something that is going to happen rather than something that is happening.
1 tag
Nickel And Dimed →
by Barbara Ehrenreich
In June 1998 I left behind everything that usually soothes and sustains me - home, career, companion, reputation, ATM card - and become part of the low-wage workforce.
4 tags
Why Are British Sex Scandals So Much Better than... →
by James Wolcott
Comparing Washington sex scandals with those of Britain’s political class is enough to make Americans blush with shame.
1 tag
Rhymes With Rich →
by Sandra Tsing Loh
More and more these days, reading women’s writing fills me with a vague, creeping, slightly nauseating feeling. Problems of affluence have been recast as the struggles of feminism, and you find yourself in a dreamlike state of reading first person essays about them, over and over again.
1 tag
150 Essential Articles and Essays →
A Tetw reading list
A huge collection of the very best magazine length non-fiction. Includes stacks of classics from DFW, JJS, HST, Joan Didion, Malcolm Gladwell, Susan Orlean, Tom Woolfe, David Sedaris, Walter Kirn, Chuck Klosterman, Michael Lewis and many others.
4 tags
How to Get Rich →
by Jared Diamond
Why was it Europeans who conquered the world and colonized other people, rather than the Chinese or the people of India or the Middle East?
1 tag
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.
3 tags
Running After Your Hat →
by G. K. Chesterton
A man running after a hat is not half so ridiculous as a man running after a wife.
1 tag
Java Man →
by Malcolm Gladwell
One of the things that have always made drugs so powerful is their cultural adaptability, their way of acquiring meanings beyond their pharmacology. And there is no drug quite as effortlessly adaptable as caffeine, the Zelig of chemical stimulants.
3 tags
Plastic →
by Roland Barthes
Despite having names of Greek shepherds (Polystyrene, Polyvinyl, Polyethylene), plastics are in essence the stuff of alchemy.
1 tag
The Rise of the Essay →
by Zadie Smith
Why do novelists write essays? Most publishers would rather have a novel. Bookshops don’t know where to put them. It’s a rare reader who seeks them out with any sense of urgency. Still, in recent months Jonathan Safran Foer, Margaret Drabble, Chinua Achebe and Michael Chabon, among others, have published essays, and so this month will I…
4 tags
Under One Roof →
by Adam Gopnik
The great department stores of New York lie on the avenues now like luxury liners becalmed in a lagoon, big ships in shallow water.
1 tag
The Motorcycle Gangs →
by Hunter S. Thompson
Ever since World War II, California has been strangely plagued by wild men on motorcycles. They usually travel in groups of ten to thirty, booming along the highways and stopping here are there to get drunk and raise hell.
Great Articles that Became Films →
A Tetw reading list
Four Good Legs Between Us by Laura Hillenbrand - Seabiscuit 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...
4 tags
The Unbearable Awkwardness of Being →
by Devin Friedman
I have, and it’s humiliating to type this, kind of always wanted to go back to high school. I (and this is even more humiliating) miss it.
1 tag
The Birth of The New Journalism →
by Tom Wolfe
The original 1972 masterpiece. (Part II unavailable online. Another great Wolfe article from 2008 describes the ‘New Yorker Affair’ and the early days of NY Magazine).
1 tag
150 Essential Articles and Essays →
A Tetw reading list
A huge collection of the very best magazine length non-fiction. Includes stacks of classics from DFW, JJS, HST, Joan Didion, Malcolm Gladwell, Susan Orlean, Tom Woolfe, David Sedaris, Walter Kirn, Chuck Klosterman, Michael Lewis and many others
1 tag
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4 tags
The Tyranny Of The Clock →
by George Woodcock
The clock represents an element of mechanical tyranny in the lives of modern men more potent than any individual exploiter or any other machine.
1 tag
FX Porn →
by David Foster Wallace
Terminator 2 and Jurassic Park aren’t really “movies” in the standard sense at all. What they really are is half a dozen or so isolated, spectacular scenes - scenes comprising maybe twenty or thirty minutes of riveting, sensuous payoff - strung together via another sixty to ninety minutes of flat, dead, and often hilariously insipid narrative.
4 tags
Baby, Give Me a Kiss →
by Claire Hoffman
Joe Francis, the founder of the “Girls Gone Wild” empire, is humiliating me. He has my face pressed against the hood of a car, my arms twisted hard behind my back. He’s pushing himself against me, shouting: “This is what they did to me in Panama City!”
1 tag
The Place to Disapear →
by Susan Orlean
Thailand, the most pliant of places, has always accommodated even the rudest of visitors. Starting in the early eighties, when foreigners started trekking to such places as Myanmar and Tibet and Vietnam, Thailand took on another hostessing job, because Bangkok was the safest, easiest, most Westernized place from which to launch a trip through Asia.
3 tags
Black Men in Public Spaces →
by Brent Staples
My first victim was a woman-white, well dressed, probably in her early twenties. I came upon her late one evening on a deserted street in Hyde Park…
1 tag
My Endless New York →
by Tony Judt
Just what is a “world city”? Mexico City, at 18 million people, or São Paulo at near that, are unmanageable urban sprawls; they are not “world cities.” Conversely, Paris - where the population has never exceeded three million - was the capital of the 19th century.
4 tags
The Dubai Job →
by Ronen Bergman
One year ago, an elite Mossad hit squad traveled to Dubai to kill a high-ranking member of Hamas. They completed the mission, but their covers were blown, and Israel was humiliated by the twenty-seven-minute video of their movements that was posted online for all the world to see.
1 tag
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.
4 tags
The New Old Economy →
by Jonathan Rauch
Why knowledge, not petroleum, is becoming the critical resource in the oil business.
4 tags
Our Good Earth →
by Charles C. Mann
Scientists at the International Soil Reference and Information Centre in the Netherlands estimate that humankind has degraded more than 7.5 million square miles of land, an area the size of the United States and Canada combined.
3 tags
The Mohawks in High Steel →
by Joseph Mitchell
The most footloose Indians in North America are a band of mixed‑blood Mohawks whose home, the Caughnawaga Reservation, is on the St. Lawrence River in Quebec…
1 tag
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.
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...
1 tag
Education →
A Tetw reading list
Building a Better Teacher by Elizabeth Green - How to find the best teachers and share the secrets of their success.
The Growth of DIY Education by Linda Perlstein - Once the preserve of religious fundamentalists, why a signigicant number educated urban parents are chossing to teach their kids at home.
Coach Fitz’s Management Theory by Michael Lewis - Do kids these...
4 tags
The Rich Have Feelings, Too →
by Tom Wolfe
One of the sweetest sounds in the world was Corky making the rounds up here on the executive floor, saying in his laid-back voice, “I feel like boffing some bimbos in the Caribbean. Anybody like to come along?”
