“Recipes I’ve seen suggest it was about 0.01 grams of cocaine used in fountain sodas. That’s about a tenth of a line of coke,” he says. “It’s hard to be sure, but I don’t think it would’ve given people a massive high. It would definitely be enough to have some kind of effect, probably stronger […]
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Highlights Page 94
Paul Krugman, in the New York Review of Books, on Capital in the Twenty-First Century, the new book from Thomas Piketty, professor at the Paris School of Economics: It therefore came as a revelation when Piketty and his colleagues showed that incomes of the now famous “one percent,” and of even narrower groups, are actually […]
There are a number of difficulties with dirty words, the first of which is that there aren’t nearly enough of them; the second is that the people who use them are normally numskulls and prudes; the third is that in general they’re not at all sexy, and the main reason for this is that no one loves them enough…. Thin in […]
Chris Wilson: I still remember the very first time I got HTML content pulled over the network through Libwww and I was displaying it on my debugging monitor in my office at NCSA with Jon Mittelhauser sitting over my shoulder looking at it, and thinking that was amazing. I knew that it was going to […]
Once the lords of East Africa, the Maasai have been close to peerless in the modern age for maintaining the continuity of their traditions—traditions now imperiled by the tentacles of the market and by technology, as cell phones and cheap Chinese motorcycles, like the one we rode, upend the very possibility of isolation. Compulsory and […]
The dream of the “Food Movement” is for all meat to be humanely raised and locally sourced so we can all be “conscientious carnivores.” In The American Scholar, James McWilliams looks at a dilemma the Food Movement is facing: Can animals be raised humanely if the end goal is not for animals to live a […]
In trying to prove that the ISI knew of Bin Laden’s whereabouts and protected him, I struggled for more than two years to piece together something other than circumstantial evidence and suppositions from sources with no direct knowledge. Only one man, a former ISI chief and retired general, Ziauddin Butt, told me that he thought […]
I think the look of the show is great. There was a bit of an adjustment for me. I had been living with these characters and this world since 1991, so I had close to twenty years of pictures in my head of what these characters looked like, and the banners and the castles, and […]
The worry about mental laziness is a really big one; the idea that because we can turn to Wikipedia or turn to our phone and we can get an answer to a question that somehow our brain is becoming slack like an empty wine bladder. In a way, when I started the book [Smarter Than […]
Sometimes I tried to persuade myself that she was not really deaf. She was a mischievous prankster, and what better way to keep everyone hopping than to pretend she was deaf, the way every child has, at one point or another, pretended to be blind, or played dead? For some reason, she had forgotten to […]
There are times you see the rot you’ve always been. My days were a trail of liquor-store bumblings and sunrise guilt, and every penny I’d earned these years had come to rest in a dirty glass. I’d ceased caring for others, and definitely for myself. The only things that mattered were booze and books. Scrubbing […]
There is the scientific and ideological language for what is happening to the weather, but there are hardly any intimate words. Is that surprising? People in mourning tend to use euphemism; likewise the guilty and ashamed. The most melancholy of all the euphemisms: “The new normal.” “It’s the new normal,” I think, as a beloved […]
This post comes via Longreads contributor Laura Bliss: In this week’s Economist, a remembrance of “font-god” Mike Parker, the typographer who developed more than 1000 fonts in his 50+ year career. Parker, who died last month at age 84, was a champion of great type: never drawing fonts himself, but rather coaxing others into perfection. His […]
Fast Company has an excerpt from Creativity, Inc., the book by Pixar co-founder Ed Catmull (with Amy Wallace), which goes inside the creative process at the studio. Catmull attributes much of their creative success to their internal process for continually refining stories. It includes meetings with the Braintrust, a group of executives, directors and other […]
In a new essay for Collectors Weekly, Hunter Oatman-Stanford and Peter Norton, author of Fighting Traffic, examine the history of the automobile in America, and how our perception of city streets changed: In 1924, recognizing the crisis on America’s streets, President Herbert Hoover launched the National Conference on Street and Highway Safety. Any organizations interested […]
The following is from Rachael Maddux, who wrote about contemplating the idea of death and mortality at a young age. Maddux wrote this essay for The Paris Review last June: For almost as long as I’ve been alive I have known that I am going to die. This awareness came to me when I was […]
Matt was the bravest writer I’ve ever known. He covered conflict, climbed mountains, and followed in the exploratory footsteps of so many unfortunate travelers of yore in order to write his own account of what such trips felt like today, to a modern consciousness. This last piece was his specialty. They were why we read […]
Nixon had refused the teleprompter from the start. He kept all the figures—crime rising nine times as fast … 300 cities … 200 dead … 7,000 injured … 43 percent of the American people afraid … He kept them all in his head, like the date of the Battle of Hastings. Now he was starting […]
In 1998 a district attorney sent a teenager to life in prison for his role in a murder of a 16-year-old girl. In Texas Monthly, Pamela Colloff revisits the case and looks at why the DA is questioning the life sentence years later: The DA did not pull any punches once The State of Texas […]
In the latest New York Times Magazine, Ron Suskind explores how his autistic son Owen found a voice through the lessons and sidekicks in Disney films. The story is an excerpt from the journalist’s new book, Life, Animated: Owen’s chosen affinity clearly opened a window to myth, fable and legend that Disney lifted and retooled, […]
Solomon [Northup], the subject of the following narrative, is a free colored citizen of the United States; was born in Essex County, New York, about the year 1808; became early a resident of Washington County, and married there in 1829. His father and mother resided in the county of Washington about fifty years, till their […]
Pakistani author Mohsin Hamid, writing in The New York Times Book Review, about television vs. the novel: Television is not the new novel. Television is the old novel. In the future, novelists need not abandon plot and character, but would do well to bear in mind the novel’s weirdness. At this point in our technological evolution, […]
Wired senior editor Bill Wasik on the public’s changing relationship with both Silicon Valley and the technology it creates and promotes: One of the most toxic memes to waft out of the industry recently has been the idea of quasi-secession, whether it was Peter Thiel’s dream of floating hacker communities or Tim Draper’s plan to make Silicon […]
Soon, the rewards of leaning in doubled. Then they quadrupled. Then they began to increase exponentially. I leaned in some more. I ate protein bars and made important telephone calls during my morning commute. I stopped reading novels so I could write more articles and memos and make more handicrafts to contribute to the school […]
How did sources treat you differently than your male colleagues? The bad news was you weren’t one of the guys so you didn’t chum it up with them and go drinking. The good news was they assumed you were young and stupid. I was young. I wasn’t stupid. They would very often say the most incredible things […]
These principal writers in various ways all tried to capture something of the flavor of jazz. Certainly Ginsberg and Kerouac. Kerouac wanted to write lines of prose or poetry that captured something of, say, the saxophonist art. He was interested in extemporization; he was interested in improvisation. And when he heard figures like Lester Young, […]
An elephant mysteriously vanishes. A giant frog is waiting in your apartment. Your cat mysteriously vanishes. Two moons hang in the sky. Your wife mysteriously vanishes. A strange man comes to you and asks you to find a sheep, or a woman calls and asks for ten minutes of your time. You might be the […]
One great problem with financial journalism, especially in the decades leading up to the crash, has been that it’s often written in an argot understandable only to the already highly financially literate. Andrew Ross Sorkin doesn’t usually employ such specialized language. This has led to the mistaken belief that he’s explaining the industry to regular […]