In 1908, teams from four countries — the United States, France, Germany, and Italy — raced from New York to Paris by driving across the American west, and the frozen Bering Strait: The contestants represented an international roster of personalities. G. Bourcier de St. Chaffray, driving the French De Dion, once organized a motorboat race […]
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A former employee’s story of working inside the Sotheby’s auction house: Hired as a researcher, I was assigned the task of going through the catalogues raisonnés of the Contemporary Art department’s top-grossing artists—Warhol, Koons, Prince, Richter, Rothko—and determining the whereabouts of every piece that had ever come onto the global market. The Excel spreadsheets I […]
How did a blackjack player manage to win $15 million from Atlantic City casinos over the course of several months? As Johnson remembers it, the $800,000 hand started with him betting $100,000 and being dealt two eights. If a player is dealt two of a kind, he can choose to “split” the hand, which means […]
Nieman Storyboard’s “Why’s This So Good” explores what makes classic narrative nonfiction stories worth reading. This week: Thomas Curwen takes a look at Michael Paterniti’s “The Long Fall of One-Eleven Heavy,” which was originally published in Esquire in July 2000. The opening sequence of “The Long Fall” is a mere 500 words and, in my […]
The story of “the world’s most notorious weapons trafficker”: The longer we sat in the small, musty room, the more the tempered side of Bout’s personality receded. I asked whether he felt any remorse. “I did nothing in my mind that qualifies as a crime,” he replied. “Sure, I was doing transportation of arms,” he […]
A journalist’s lessons from two years working for Patch, AOL’s hyperlocal web experiment. Editors started with autonomy and generous budgets, but they were always understaffed and found little support from sales teams: In addition to the editorial and volunteer work, we fought to get our sites noticed—on and off the clock. The marketing dollars that […]
Roger Fidler was a head of innovation for Knight-Ridder who convinced his company to let him set up a lab in the early 1990s to explore the creation of tablet computers. They were next door to a lab owned by Apple: Fidler smiles through a scruffy gray Jobsian beard. He has known the answer for […]
The presidential bully pulpit isn’t as effective as one would think. Evidence shows that the louder a president speaks to support an issue or bill, the more committed the opposing party will be to ensure that it won’t pass: To test her theory, she created a database of eighty-six hundred Senate votes between 1981 and […]
The story of Dan Marlowe, a pulp writer who suffered from amnesia, befriended an ex-con, and later inspired writers like Stephen King: Physicians thought the amnesia was psychosomatic, brought on by stress and money troubles, but there were hints of physical problems too. Before his brain emptied out, Marlowe had been laid low by crushing […]
How officers in the 81st Precinct in Brooklyn were “juking the stats” to improve crime statistics in their area. The NYPD called it an isolated incident, but critics point to a culture of data-obsession that leads police to ignore, discard or downgrade complaints from victims: These weren’t minor incidents. The victims included a Chinese-food delivery […]
The story of the Polgar sisters, chess whizzes who were trained by their father from an early age: When Susan was the age of many of her students, she dominated the New York Open chess competition. At 16 she crushed several adult opponents and landed on the front page of The New York Times. The […]
[Not single-page] Sara Blakely went from auditioning to play Goofy at Disney World to founding an undergarment empire: Spanx. She still owns 100% equity in the company, making her the youngest female billionaire at age 41: Like many startups, Spanx began life as an answer to an irritating problem. The panty hose Blakely was forced […]
Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Paul Salopek treks through “the hunger zone” in northern Kenya with a nomadic goat herder to get a better understanding of a region persistently devastated by famine. While describing his experience, Salopek also takes us through a history of hunger and foreign food aid: Mister Inas then showed us a few wild […]
[May 2005] How Steve Martin transitioned from comedy to writing, and how celebrity affected his day-to-day life: SM: You know, there’s a moment when you’re famous when it’s unbearable to go out because you’re too famous. And then there’s a moment when you’re famous just right. [Laughs] And then there’s kind of a respect or […]
A group of teenagers in a small town mysteriously fall ill, suffering from uncontrollable twitching. Was the cause environmental, or psychological? Before the media vans took over Main Street, before the environmental testers came to dig at the soil, before the doctor came to take blood, before strangers started knocking on doors and asking question […]
How the former baseball star went from unlikely business success to financial ruin—and now sentenced to three years in prison: Even after his financial and legal troubles came to public light, Dykstra refused to give up the trappings of the gilded life. He continued to fly on private planes, and the charges that landed him […]
A moment-by-moment reconstruction of last year’s U.S. embassy attack in Kabul: In an image that remained strangely fixed in her mind afterward, Howell watched as he slowly peeled the skin off. As he was peeling off the very last bit, there came a heart-stopping screech and then the bang and shock of an impact. Something […]
[Fiction] Taking a trip to Times Square: Ginny had promised to take the girls to M&M World, that ridiculous place in Times Square they had passed too often in a taxi, Maggie scooting to press her face to the glass to watch the giant smiling M&M scale the Empire State Building on the electronic billboard […]
Which would be worse: Iran developing a nuclear weapon, or waging a war to prevent it? An examination of both scenarios: Given the momentousness of such an endeavor and how much prominence the Iranian nuclear issue has been given, one might think that talk about exercising the military option would be backed up by extensive […]
David Kushner’s new book explores the origins of the infamous videogame, which began as a straitlaced driving simulation: By casting the player as the cop, they realized, they had cut out the fun. Some dismissed it as Sims Driving Instructor. When an unruly gamer tried to drive his police car on the sidewalk or through […]
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