Search Results for: New York Magazine

A look into the lives of female war correspondents Christiane Amanpour, Marie Colvin, Janine di Giovanni, Maggie O’Kane, and Jacky Rowland:

Amanpour and her colleagues are reporters, they insist, not women reporters, as rugged as any man, and they’ve got the war stories to prove it. Take Afghanistan alone. Amanpour discovered what she believes were “mini– training camps” and a trove of documents about how to make chemical and nuclear weapons. The BBC’s newest sensation, a confident and exuberant 37-year-old Brit, Jacky Rowland, completed her mission of being one of the first Western correspondents into that country after September 11. “We left CNN and their equipment on the tarmac [in Tajikistan], which was a sheer delight,” says Rowland. During the first few days of the U.S. bombing, The Guardian’s Maggie O’Kane—a disheveled human tornado from Ireland who now lives in Edinburgh—endured a weeklong trek from Pakistan into Afghanistan, traversing “Horse Killer Pass.” Janine di Giovanni, an Italian-American with Jessica Rabbit looks, who writes for the London Times (and is a contributing editor at this magazine), vigorously dodged al-Qaeda fire while in Tora Bora. The only member of the group not to have recently visited Afghanistan is the toughest of them all, Marie Colvin, an American who writes for The Sunday Times of London. Instead, she was relearning to negotiate stairs after losing sight in one eye to shrapnel. She now wears a black pirate’s patch. She also has a beaded, sparkly one that was given to her by her friend Helen Fielding, who wrote Bridget Jones’s Diary. “It’s my party patch,” says Colvin as she brings her shaky match to her Silk Cut cigarette. “I never thought in my life I’d be the woman with the patch. But there you are, life changes.”

“The Girls at the Front.” — Evgenia Peretz, Vanity Fair, June 2002

See also: “4 Times Journalists Held Captive in Libya Faced Days of Brutality.” — Anthony Shadid, Lynsey Addario, Stephen Farrell and Tyler Hicks, The New York Times, March 22, 2011

What it’s like to be a bisexual man in a world that wants you to choose between being either gay or straight:

Recently, on OKCupid, a woman messaged me: “Are you truly into ladies, and if so, what type? Finding a truly bi man is like finding a unicorn.”

If I’m a unicorn where I live now, in L.A., then I was a unicorn rocky mountain oyster when I moved to the old rustbelt city of Syracuse, New York to go to grad school and live for the first time as a fully out bi man. There was one other mythical bi man in the entire city, but try as I might, I never found him. At the gay bar, I sometimes got called a “half-breeder.” Straight people treated me just as shittily as they treat gay people. Three times, gay men hit me in the back of the head when they saw my head turn for a women. For the most part, straight women wouldn’t date me because, as one said, “You’re just gonna leave me to go suck a dick.” For the first time in my life, frat boys called me fag. My professor said, “The world just isn’t ready for gay marriage.” I emailed him “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.” Then I went out with friends and my gay friends didn’t know what to do because I got drunk and flirted with a lesbian. A friend said she thought bi people didn’t exist. I said, “I’m sitting right here,” because that was my answer, but I was starting to believe her. I stopped telling people what I was. I let people think what they wanted, which was usually that I was like them.

“Notes From a Unicorn.” — Seth Fischer, The Rumpus

See also: “Teaching Good Sex.” — Laurie Abraham, The New York Times Magazine, Nov. 16, 2011

Filmmaker Kunle Afolayan is looking to push the boundaries of moviemaking in Nigeria—but it’s still too early to know whether the audiences can support a film with even a $500,000 budget:

Twenty years after bursting from the grungy street markets of Lagos, the $500 million Nigerian movie business churns out more than a thousand titles a year on average, and trails only Hollywood and Bollywood in terms of revenues. The films are hastily shot and then burned onto video CDs, a cheap alternative to DVDs. They are seldom seen in the developed world, but all over Africa consumers snap up the latest releases from video peddlers for a dollar or two. And so while Afolayan’s name is unknown outside Africa, at home, the actor-director is one of the most famous faces in the exploding entertainment scene known — inevitably — as “Nollywood.”

On a continent where economies usually depend on extracting natural resources or on charity, moviemaking is now one of Nigeria’s largest sources of private-sector employment.

“A Scorsese in Lagos: The Making of Nigeria’s Film Industry.” — Andrew Rice, New York Times Magazine

More film #longreads: “I Watched Every Steven Soderbergh Movie.” — Dan Kois, Slate, Sept. 14, 2011

More than 100 police officers from 18 different agencies accessed the driver’s license records of Rasmussen, a former officer. She’s now suing for invasion of privacy:

Rasmusson’s lawsuit, which will be filed in the coming weeks, alleges that not only was her privacy compromised, but that her story is merely a symptom of a larger culture of data abuse by police. Her attorneys charge that while police are trained to use the driver’s license database for official purposes only, in reality it’s more like a Facebook for cops.

The agencies involved have maintained that this is an isolated incident. But one officer, who would not use his name for fear of further discipline, says that the practice is commonplace.

“I get Anne’s side of it,” he says. “But every single cop in the state has done this. Chiefs on down.”

“Is Anne Marie Rasmusson Too Hot to Have a Driver’s License?” — Jessica Lussenhop, City Pages

See also: “The Web Means the End of Forgetting.” — Jeffrey Rosen, New York Times, July 21, 2010

Featured Longreader: Jonah Ogles, an associate editor at Cincinnati magazine. See his story picks from the magazine, plus more from The New York Review of Books, Outside magazine, plus more on his #longreads page.

Top 5 #Longreads of the Week: The New York Times Magazine, Washington Post, Washington Monthly, The Millions, a fiction pick, plus a guest pick from Alexandra Jaffe.

[Not single-page] Tory Burch’s ex-husband Christopher Burch has a new fashion line called C. Wonder. But some in her circle wonder if it draws a little too much inspiration from her own brand:

To Chris Burch, C. Wonder is the realization of a long-held dream to provide low-to-mid-price retail in a luxury setting. To Tory Burch, he might as well have erected a giant lacquered middle finger in the front window, directly facing the orange-lacquered doors of her eponymous store a few blocks away. “It’s a rip-off, Tory knows it, and everyone knows it,” says someone we will refer to as a Friend of Tory. “The interior is blatantly plagiarized. Then there’s the snap bracelets. The wallets. The buttons … ”

“His. Hers.” — Jessica Pressler, New York magazine

See also: “Forever 21’s Fast (and Loose) Fashion Empire.” — Susan Berfield, Businessweek, Jan. 21, 2011

The search for an amateur philosopher who anonymously paid university professors thousands of dollars to review his work:

The institute’s letter claimed that a “very substantial sum” had been earmarked to help contribute to “the revival of traditional metaphysics.” Given the number of philosophers involved, that sum was at least in the neighborhood of $125,000. Who could afford to spend that much money on philosophy? And of those who could, who would want to? No one had a clue.

To judge from both the reviewer’s contract and “Coming to Understanding” itself, the institute meant business. For one thing, the manuscript, signed by one A.M. Monius, suggested the handiwork of a serious thinker—not a prankster. “It didn’t seem like a joke,” Zimmerman says. ‘“t wasn’t that funny. It was clearly the work of a fairly able writer—a smart person, one capable of making some gross philosophical errors while at the same time having some clever ideas.”

“The Mystery of the Millionaire Metaphysician.” — James Ryerson, Lingua Franca (2001)

See also: “Cass Sunstein Wants to Nudge Us.” — Benjamin Wallace-Wells, New York Times, May 13, 2010

[Not single-page.] Financial reform has been more successful at changing Wall Street’s business than many imagined—and the public outcry from Occupy and elsewhere has led to some soul-searching: 

For New York’s bankers and traders, the new math suddenly reordered their assumptions about their place in a post-crash city. “After tax, that’s like, what, $75,000?” an investment banker at a rival firm said as he contemplated Morgan Stanley’s decision. He ran the numbers, modeling the implications. “I’m not married and I take the subway and I watch what I spend very carefully. But my girlfriend likes to eat good food. It all adds up really quick. A taxi here, another taxi there. I just bought an apartment, so now I have a big old mortgage bill.” “If you’re a smart Ph.D. from MIT, you’d never go to Wall Street now,” says a hedge-fund executive. “You’d go to Silicon Valley. There’s at least a prospect for a huge gain. You’d have the potential to be the next Mark Zuckerberg. It looks like he has a lot more fun.”

“The End of Wall Street as They Knew It.” — Gabriel Sherman, New York magazine

See more #longreads about Wall Street

Top 5 #Longreads of the Week: Featuring Rolling Stone, The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The New Republic, The Los Angeles Times, a #fiction pick, plus a guest pick from @Kaisertalk.

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