How the 42-year-old Wisconsin representative (and now Mitt Romney VP pick) took a leading role in the Republican Party’s budget battle with President Obama: Three days later, the White House started a livelier debate with Ryan. In a press briefing, Peter Orszag, the budget director at the time, dismantled Ryan’s plan, point by point. Ryan’s […]
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An interview with the humorist and essayist about his book, Half Empty, his Academy Award-winning short film, and his recurrence of cancer: GROSS: You were diagnosed with cancer in your 20s. Now you’re in your 40s and have a cancer diagnosis again. Are you dealing with it emotionally differently now in your 40s than you […]
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A writer meets with “grinders”—people who are obsessed with human enhancement through the manipulation of their body with technology—and then decides to implant a magnet in his finger: I chatted with Warwick from his office at The University of Reading, stacked floor to ceiling with books and papers. He has light brown hair that falls […]
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A history of Mormonism and how it has evolved: Yet how much do specifically Mormon beliefs matter to contemporary Mormons? Brooks’s story, give or take a Nephite or two, could unfold in any fundamentalist community that provides comfort and meaning if you’re prepared to park your critical intelligence in the lot outside the church door. […]
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The new Ohio State football coach made a promise to his family that he’d put them first. Will he keep it? Eighty or so people filed into the school cafeteria. Urban and his wife, Shelley, joined their daughter at the front table, watching as Gigi stood and spoke. She’d been nervous all day, and with […]
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A trip to the Democratic Republic of Congo, joining a UN mission to investigate the massacres there: In the last few months, I’ve spent time in the Democratic Republic of Congo where I used an embarrassing fuck-up by one of the world’s most publicly accountable organizations as a bargaining tool to get a story. A […]
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A look at the illegal tunnels that have been dug under the Arizona-Mexico border by Mexican cartels to smuggle drugs, and how U.S. law enforcement teams are dealing with them: Crime has been coming up out of the ground in Nogales for a while now. Since 1995 more than 90 illicit underground passageways have been […]
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An examination of authors Gore Vidal and Terry Southern’s literary erotica: Gore Vidal was a friend and admirer of Terry Southern, calling him ‘the most profoundly witty writer of our generation’ and he could not have failed to have had the example of Candy in mind as he embarked on his own adventure in black-humored […]
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A writer loses everything on his iPhone, his iPad and his Mac—including all of the photos from the first year and a half of his daughter’s life—after a hacker infiltrates his Amazon, Apple, Gmail and Twitter accounts: Had I been regularly backing up the data on my MacBook, I wouldn’t have had to worry about […]
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What can hospitals learn from a national restaurant chain like Cheesecake Factory? ‘It is unbelievable to me that they would not manage this better,’ Luz said. I asked him what he would do if he were the manager of a neurology unit or a cardiology clinic. ‘I don’t know anything about medicine,’ he said. But […]