Peter Neufeld is the co-director and one of the two founders of the Innocence Project – the organization I mentioned earlier that uses DNA evidence to overturn wrongful convictions. In addition to trying to free innocent people from prison, he and his colleagues work to improve criminal justice procedures so that fewer mistaken incarcerations occur […]
Automattic
R.E.M. in the Real World
After the show, Buck grabs a six-pack from the tour bus and heads toward his room. Like the other members of the band, he isn’t sure that when it comes to venues, bigger is better. He for one isn’t interested in having R.E.M. become an arena band. “People have been trying to convince me for […]
Dr. Don
Don Colcord has owned Nucla’s Apothecary Shoppe for more than thirty years. In the past, such stores played a key role in American rural health care, and this region had three more pharmacies, but all of them have closed. Some people drive eighty miles just to visit the Apothecary Shoppe. It consists of a few […]
The Surreal Ruins of Qaddafi’s Never-Never Land
Everyone in Tripoli, it seemed, had been with Qaddafi, at least for show; and now everyone was against him. But where did their loyalty end and their rebellion begin? Sometimes I wondered if the speakers themselves knew. Collectively, they offered an appealing narrative: the city had been liberated from within, not just by NATO’s relentless […]
The Art Of Winning An (even More) Unfair Game
The secrets of Moneyball, eight years later. “The young men had heaps of fun, working crazy hours and, to blow off steam, knocking golf balls around the office, playing football among the cubicles and celebrating big wins with postgame refreshments at Boston watering holes. Then one day in 2002, a best-selling writer by the name […]
Radiolab: An Appreciation by Ira Glass
I marvel at Radiolab when I hear it. I feel jealous. Its co-creators Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich have digested all the storytelling and production tricks of everyone in public radio before them, invented some slick moves of their own, and ended up creating the rarest thing you can create in any medium: a new […]
Lars Attacks!
“Ayee-eeee…” Lars von Trier says, physically wincing, as it begins. (His ramblings are prompted by a question partly inquiring about the interest he had expressed to a Danish film magazine about the Nazi aesthetic and their achievements in the field of design.) “Yeah, okay. I remember that…” He asks me to stop it for a […]
After Suicides, a Family’s Journey Toward Grace
He grew up the middle of three brothers. By his 25th birthday, he was the only one left. Brett, the youngest, killed himself in December 2005, two months before he turned 20. His depression could appear with a stunning swiftness. On that final night, he talked of forgiveness and the future. And then, like the […]
Predators and Robots at War
Most Americans are probably unaware, for example, that the US Air Force now trains more UAV operators each year than traditional pilots. (Indeed, the Air Force insists on referring to drones as “remotely piloted aircraft” in order to dispel any suspicions that it is moving out of the business of putting humans into the air.) […]
The Hunter’s Wife
(Fiction) It was the hunter’s first time outside Montana. He woke, stricken still with the hours-old vision of ascending through rose-lit cumulus, of houses and barns like specks deep in the snowed-in valleys, all the scrolling country below looking December—brown and black hills streaked with snow, flashes of iced-over lakes, the long braids of a […]
