Longreads

Whitney Houston was destined to become as revered as her godmother, Aretha Franklin, before drugs and a toxic marriage caused her to hit rock bottom. A look at the pop icon's rise and fall, and her final days, when it looked like Houston was going to make a comeback:

"[Clive Davis] enlisted Diane Warren to create songs for a new album. Warren tells me that she put herself in Houston’s mind when she wrote a song about struggle and rebirth, entitled 'I Didn’t Know My Own Strength.' As soon as Whitney heard the lyrics—'I thought I’d never make it through, I had no hope to hold on to I was not meant to break'—she told Warren that she’d written her life.

"But Warren and David Foster weren’t sure that Whitney had the vocal strength to sing it. In the end, she not only sang it, says Warren, 'she sang the shit out of it.' According to Gary Catona, 75 percent of Whitney’s vocal strength had returned by the time of her appearance at the American Music Awards in November 2009. When she came onstage in a white gown, singing the Warren song, the crowd leapt to its feet. 'The buzz was: Holy shit!' says Warren. 'It was one of the best performances I’d ever seen. It was: Whitney is back!'"

Excerpt from Maraniss's new biography of the president. A look at Obama's early twenties in New York, from the perspective of his girlfriend at the time:

"Genevieve was out of her mother’s Upper East Side apartment by then. Earlier that spring she had moved and was sharing the top floor of a brownstone at 640 Second Street in Park Slope. The routine with Barack was now back and forth, mostly his place, sometimes hers. When she told him that she loved him, his response was not 'I love you, too' but 'thank you'—as though he appreciated that someone loved him. The relationship still existed in its own little private world. They spent time cooking. Barack loved to make a ginger beef dish that he had picked up from his friend Sohale Siddiqi. He was also big on tuna-fish sandwiches made the way his grandfather had taught him, with finely chopped dill pickles. For a present, Genevieve bought him an early edition of The Joy of Cooking. They read books together and talked about what they had read. For a time they concentrated on black literature, the writers Maya Angelou, Toni Morrison, Toni Cade Bambara, and Ntozake Shange."

An oral history of Friends:

"JIM BURROWS (director): Based on the [live] audience for the Friends pilot, I knew how popular that show would be. The kids were all pretty and funny, so beautiful. I said to Les Moonves, who was head of Warner Bros., “Give me the plane. I’ll pay for dinner.” I took the cast to Vegas.

"MATT LeBLANC: Who goes to Vegas on a private jet? And Jimmy gave me 500 bucks to gamble.

"LISA KUDROW: On the plane he showed us the first episode of Friends. None of it had aired yet.

"Jimmy took us to dinner, and he gave us each a little money to gamble with. He said, “I want you to be aware that this is the last time that you all can be out and not be swarmed, because that’s what’s going to happen.” And everyone was like, 'Really?'"

Tracing fish from the chaos of Tokyo's Tsukji market, across the ocean and to the tables of North America and elsewhere.

"Tuna is the main event at Tsukiji, but everything from the sea—fresh fish, live fish, shrimp—is auctioned and sold here. At five in the morning, preceding the tuna auction, in another hall, there's the sea-urchin-roe auction. The most prized uni come from Hokkaido and its islands, and it's said that if you want to taste the best, freshest uni you must go there and eat it straight from the sea. But much of the uni laid out here in little boxes, often repackaged in Hokkaido, comes from California or Maine. Only in July, when sea urchins from the United States aren't available, are these boxes of uni not present. Color means more than size, and men roam the hall before the auction, smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee from paper cups, searching for uni of the most vibrant orange-golden hues. The northern-Japanese uni can fetch about ¥7,000, or about $60, for a little, 100-gram box, while the Maine uni go for much less, from a low of about ¥800 to a high of about ¥1,500, or between $6 and $13."

Survivors and crew members recount the Costa Concordia crash, in which 32 people lost their lives:

"The Concordia’s loss is also a landmark moment in naval history. It is the largest passenger ship ever wrecked. The 4,000 people who fled its slippery decks—nearly twice as many as were aboard the R.M.S. Titanic in 1912—represent the largest maritime evacuation in history. A story of heroism and disgrace, it is also, in the mistakes of its captain and certain officers, a tale of monumental human folly.

"'This was an episode of historic importance for those who study nautical issues,' says Ilarione Dell’Anna, the Italian Coast Guard admiral who oversaw much of the massive rescue effort that night. 'The old point of departure was the Titanic. I believe that today the new point of departure will be the Costa Concordia. There has never been anything like this before. We must study this, to see what happened and to see what we can learn.'"

A visit to Athens, and then to the Vopaidi monastery gives a rich history of the country and its finances.

"Oddly enough, the financiers in Greece remain more or less beyond reproach. They never ceased to be anything but sleepy old commercial bankers. Virtually alone among Europe’s bankers, they did not buy U.S. subprime-backed bonds, or leverage themselves to the hilt, or pay themselves huge sums of money. The biggest problem the banks had was that they had lent roughly 30 billion euros to the Greek government—where it was stolen or squandered. In Greece the banks didn’t sink the country. The country sank the banks."

A twisted story of intrigue and blackmail in the La Romanée-Conti vineyards of Burgundy, France:

"Inside the cylindrical container, the type an architect might use for blueprints, was a large parchment. Unrolled, the document was a detailed drawing of Romanée-Conti. While the 4.46-acre vineyard is essentially a rectangle, there are nuances to its shape. De Villaine noticed that whoever had sent this letter and sketched the vineyard knew its every contour, and what’s more, the author had noted every single one of its roughly 20,000 vine stocks. In the center of the vineyard sketch this person, or persons, had drawn a circle. There was a note, too, which conveyed that the vineyard would be destroyed unless certain demands were met; the note stated that another letter with further instructions would be coming in 10 to 15 days."

More actors, filmmakers and execs are using human growth hormone (H.G.H.) in an attempt to reverse the aging process. But is it really doing what its Beverly Hills evangelists are claiming?

"He has been giving himself H.G.H. injections for more than 20 years. And he does look terrific, with smooth skin and a lean body. And, by the way, H.G.H. needles are extremely thin, like those used by diabetics or acupuncturists. H.G.H. therapy, doctors say, is virtually painless.

"There’s just one catch. The vast majority of endocrinologists, when asked about the widespread treatment for H.G.H. deficiency, agree.

"It’s baloney."

Profile of Ken Bradshaw, who caught the largest wave ever surfed in 1998 in Oahu, when he was 45 years old:

"Bradshaw told me that in the darkness that night he did not feel afraid. Of course he didn’t. He said he felt the anxiety of anticipation. Of course he did. The entire direction of his life until then—the accumulation of every serious choice he had ever made—meant that he was going to take on those waves."

"Sitting with me on the ground overlooking the waves last winter, Bradshaw said, “It’s weird how a single wave can seem so important, when it’s all the waves it took to get there, and all the waves since, that actually count.” I nodded. He shrugged."