A couple’s personal experience dealing with Texas’s new sonogram law, which requires a woman to have a sonogram and hear a doctor describe her child before moving forward with an abortion:
“I don’t want to have to do this at all,” I told her. “I’m doing this to prevent my baby’s suffering. I don’t want another sonogram when I’ve already had two today. I don’t want to hear a description of the life I’m about to end. Please,” I said, “I can’t take any more pain.” I confess that I don’t know why I said that. I knew it was fait accompli. The counselor could no more change the government requirement than I could. Yet here was a superfluous layer of torment piled upon an already horrific day, and I wanted this woman to know it.
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 from Marseille to Algiers that resulted in every single boat sinking in the Mediterranean. His captain was Hans Hendrick Hansen, a swashbuckling Norwegian who claimed to have sailed a Viking ship, solo, to the North Pole. He declared that he and his companions would reach Paris or “our bodies will be found inside the car.” Frenchman Charles Godard, driving the Moto-Bloc, participated in the Peking-to-Paris race without having driven a car and set an endurance record by driving singlehandedly for 24 hours nonstop.
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 said. “But it was occasionally. Three hundred and sixty days were normal shipments. For five days, I shipped arms and made a couple of hundred thousand dollars.” (Mirchev, by contrast, recalls a period of “almost daily flights” for UNITA.)
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 we were given, if any, usually came with the understanding that we would be manning booths at community events, or taking the lead in finding sponsorship opportunities, like supporting the local hayride or Little League team.
It seemed I could control every aspect of my site’s being, but making it sustainable was out of my grasp. And for me, it was aggravating to know that my site was not profitable.
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 after question, Katie Krautwurst, a high-school cheerleader from Le Roy, N.Y., woke up from a nap. Instantly, she knew something was wrong. Her chin was jutting forward uncontrollably and her face was contracting into spasms. She was still twitching a few weeks later when her best friend, Thera Sanchez, captain of one of the school’s cheerleading squads, awoke from a nap stuttering and then later started twitching, her arms flailing and head jerking. Two weeks after that, Lydia Parker, also a senior, erupted in tics and arm swings and hums. Then word got around that Chelsey Dumars, another cheerleader, who recently moved to town, was making the same strange noises, the same strange movements, leaving school early on the days she could make it to class at all. The numbers grew — 12, then 16, then 18, in a school of 600 — and as they swelled, the ranks of the sufferers came to include a wider swath of the Le Roy high-school hierarchy: girls who weren’t cheerleaders, girls who kept to themselves and had studs in their lips. There was even one boy and an older woman, age 36.
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 traffic lights, a persnickety programmer reminded him that the stop lights needed to be obeyed. Were they building a video game or a train set? Even worse, the pedestrians milling around the game created frustrating obstacles. It was almost impossible to drive fast without taking people down, and, because the player was a cop, he had to be punished for hit-and-runs.
A selection of all-time favourite articles from Wired contributing editor, former Slate and New York Times columnist, and the author of 2 excellent books, Brendan I. Koerner:
The Hunger Warriors by Scott Anderson – The story of Turkish women starving themselves to death for the most head-scratching of causes. Behold the sinister power of peer pressure.
Does a Sugar Bear Bite? by Lynn Hirschberg – A classic profile of Suge Knight at the zenith of his power. Maybe the best intro scene of any celebrity profile in history.
Pat Dollard’s War on Hollywood by Evan Wright – Rob Capps, my editor at Wired, turned me onto Wright’s work. This is my personal favorite—a portrait of a man blessed with bottomless energy and ambition, though only the smallest trace of empathy for his fellow man.
Reefer Madness by Eric Schlosser – A master class in narrative contrarianism. Deeply and elegantly reported, with a real human tragedy at its core.
A Better Brew by Burkhard Bilger – Perhaps the best story ever by one of my favorite writers. (His piece on cockfighting from several years back is a classic, too.) Bilger does a tremendous job of creating real tension, while never losing sight of his primary duty as an explainer of business and science.
And a few you’ll need a subscription to read:
Rock is Dead by David Samuels – This is what it felt like to be young in the ’90s. A terrifying portrait of morality adrift in a sea of excess.
Gangland by Jon Lee Anderson – There is no more badass reporter working in journalism today. No one else could have set up an interview with the most violent (yet complex) gangster in all of Rio’s slums. Truly intrepid reporting.
After Welfare” by Katherine Boo – The story that got me into Boo’s now much-heralded work. Still haunted by the scene of the two kids eating ramen and boiled eggs.
For more from the man himself head over to his blog or sign up for updates via Twitter.
Nieman Storyboard’s “Why’s This So Good” explores what makes classic narrative nonfiction stories worth reading.
This week: Laurie Hertzel takes a look at Darcy Frey’s “Something’s Got to Give,” which was originally published in The New York Times Magazine in 1996.
“Savage, bug-eyed.” “Frantic bursts of techno-chatter.” “Sucks down coffee.” Casual words, carefully chosen to set a particular scene and a particular jittery mood. Throughout the piece, controllers don’t eat; they “take chow.” They aren’t startled or worried or annoyed – the machines “mess with their heads.” These men look like they’re on the verge of drowning. Their legs pump like pneumatic drills. They fume and squint and scramble and pant. It makes me anxious just to read about them.
Frey’s verbs are powerful and carefully chosen: Huge, passenger-packed jumbo jets barrel up the river and streak across the sky, nervous controllers curse and twitch. They don’t just bite their nails; they “sink their teeth” into their cuticles.
How the 2012 GOP primary became such a mess—and what it means for the future of the party:
That Mitt Romney finds himself so imperiled by Rick Santorum—Rick Santorum!—is just the latest in a series of jaw-dropping developments in what has been the most volatile, unpredictable, and just plain wackadoodle Republican-nomination contest ever. Part of the explanation lies in Romney’s lameness as a candidate, in Santorum’s strength, and in the sudden efflorescence of social issues in what was supposed to be an all-economy-all-the-time affair. But even more important have been the seismic changes within the Republican Party. “Compared to 2008, all the candidates are way to the right of John McCain,” says longtime conservative activist Jeff Bell. “The fact that Romney is running with basically the same views as then but is seen as too moderate tells you that the base has moved rightward and doesn’t simply want a conservative candidate—it wants a very conservative one.”
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