Maltreated and Hazed, a Soldier Is Driven to Take His Own Life

For Army Spc. Brushaun Anderson, there was no escaping his torment. The senior noncommissioned officers who ruled his life at a remote patrol base in Iraq ordered him to wear a plastic trash bag because they said he was “dirty.” They forced him to perform excessive physical exercises in his body armor over and over again. They made him build a sandbag wall that served no military purpose. Anderson seemed to take it all in stride. Until New Year’s Day 2010, when the once-eager 20-year-old soldier locked himself inside a portable toilet, picked up his M4 rifle, aimed the barrel at his forehead and pulled the trigger.

Author: Megan Rose
Published: Jun 7, 2011
Length: 16 minutes (4,232 words)

Revisiting the 1987 NFL Replacements

A persistent man with an offer was calling, but Robert Williams had to be practical. He was turning 25, and it was time to be an adult. He had a wife to think about, plus a couple of kids. He had a stable, albeit ordinary, job in Waco, Texas, and that was just fine. See, a time comes in every man’s life when a dream dies, and Williams apparently had come to peace with that when his phone rang in the fall of 1987. If he could just … get this guy from Dallas … off the phone …

Source: ESPN
Published: Jun 9, 2011
Length: 12 minutes (3,023 words)

Why Me? Alec Baldwin’s Disappointment, Undimmed by Success

“In East Hampton, I’m a nudist and I eat meat,” Baldwin—a vegetarian—had said before my visit, expanding on the idea that he lived a quite different life on Long Island than he did in New York. “I shoot deer with a bow and arrow. I smoke the deer meat and eat it every morning with my eggs and toast. I am a homosexual. I listen to rock music, loud.”

Author: Ian Parker
Source: The New Yorker
Published: Sep 8, 2008
Length: 32 minutes (8,204 words)

The Getaway Car

For a long time now, I’ve been looking forward to this year with apprehension: 2011 is when my daughter, Julia, now 18, will undertake that very American rite of passage and “go away to college” — a phrase whose operative word is “away.” We live in Seattle, and in the Pacific Northwest, “collegeland,” as my daughter calls it, is centered in New England and New York, where most of her immediate friends will be going in September.

Published: Jun 10, 2011
Length: 20 minutes (5,082 words)

Something’s Wrong But You’ll Never Know What It Is

Dunning and Kruger argued in their paper, “When people are incompetent in the strategies they adopt to achieve success and satisfaction, they suffer a dual burden: Not only do they reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the ability to realize it. Instead, like Mr. Wheeler, they are left with the erroneous impression they are doing just fine.” It became known as the Dunning-Kruger Effect — our incompetence masks our ability to recognize our incompetence. But just how prevalent is this effect?

Published: Jun 20, 2010
Length: 13 minutes (3,434 words)

Press X for Beer Bottle: On L.A. Noire

Interactivity sabotages storytelling. There is no longer any use arguing to the contrary. Thus, the story of L.A. Noire can never be good — at least, not in the way it is trying to be. As a story, then, L.A. Noire is not successful. As a game, too, L.A. Noire fails. In a lot of ways, it is a terrible game: frustratingly arbitrary, puzzlingly noncommunicative, and not very fun. But I love L.A. Noire. I think it’s fantastic. What this suggests is that we need a new name for whatever it is that L.A. Noire does.

Source: Grantland
Published: Jun 9, 2011
Length: 24 minutes (6,052 words)

The End Of The Rodeo For The World’s Greatest Cowboy

The World’s Greatest Cowboy had to be peeled off his barstool and carried home the night he killed a man. The next morning, in the presence of two deputies from the DeSoto County Sheriff’s Department, the cowboy sat, elbows on his knees, face protected from the light of day by a latticework of fingers, and tried to remember shooting Edward Delaney. He sucked in air, and smelled burnt powder. He breathed out, and caught a whiff of high-proof mucus. He remembered nothing.

Author: Mike Riggs
Source: The Awl
Published: Jun 9, 2011
Length: 21 minutes (5,298 words)

For Better or for Worse

And so, trying to gain some control, she has come to a lawyer to see about getting a divorce. Her name is Valerie. Her maiden name is Perrino. Her married name is something she doesn’t want published because she has two young children, and because she has no idea what is about to happen to their lives. She is 34, lives in Northern Virginia, has lost 17 pounds since the day her husband left, and now finds herself in Vienna, across from a lawyer named Mark Barondess, who is sitting beneath a large photograph of a snarling Doberman pinscher.

Source: Washington Post
Published: Jun 11, 1995
Length: 36 minutes (9,213 words)

Marriage Lessons from My Turkish Grandmother

The stories my grandmother, my anneanne, told me when I was a child are anything but children’s stories. They are folktales that have a common theme – the triumph of wily wives over evil husbands (jealous, repressive skinflints) through crafty subterfuge. My grandmother always launched into these torrid tales as if she were telling them for the first time, and the contradiction between her placid, proper widowhood and her clear delight in the salacious plots of her stories horrified yet fascinated me. I too delighted in these gory, grotesque tales, and revelled in their message of Old World female empowerment.

Source: Granta
Published: Jun 9, 2011
Length: 11 minutes (2,935 words)

The Mystery of the Canadian Whiskey Fungus

When he arrived at the warehouse, the first thing he noticed (after “the beautiful, sweet, mellow smell of aging Canadian whiskey,” he says) was the black stuff. It was everywhere—on the walls of buildings, on chain-link fences, on metal street signs, as if a battalion of Dickensian chimney sweeps had careened through town. “In the back of the property, there was an old stainless steel fermenter tank,” Scott says. “It was lying on its side, and it had this fungus growing all over it. Stainless steel!” The whole point of stainless steel is that things don’t grow on it.

Source: Wired
Published: May 17, 2011
Length: 14 minutes (3,617 words)