Three-Man Weave

In this particular game, a team won with only three players on the floor. And this was not a “metaphorical” victory or a “moral” victory: They literally won the game, 84-81, finishing the final 66 seconds by playing three-on-five. To refer to this as a David and Goliath battle devalues the impact of that cliché; it was more like a blind, one-armed David fighting Goliath without a rock. Yet there was no trick to this win and there was no deception — the team won by playing precisely how you’d expect. The crazy part is that it worked.

Source: Grantland
Published: Jun 8, 2011
Length: 8 minutes (2,048 words)

You Blow My Mind. Hey, Mickey!

Trevor scrolled it down to a posting, the subject of which read, “Re: Hello from Disney World.” An anonymous person, evidently the veteran of a staggering number of weed-smoking experiences in the park, had done a solid for the community and laid out his or her knowledge in a systematic way. It was nothing less than a fiend’s guide to Disney World. It pinpointed the safest places for burning the proverbial rope, telling what in particular to watch for at each spot.

Published: Jun 8, 2011
Length: 27 minutes (6,878 words)

How to Throw a No-Hitter on Acid

“Dock,” she said. “You’re supposed to pitch today.” Ellis focused his mind. No. Friday. He wasn’t pitching until Friday. He was sure. “Baby,” she replied. “It is Friday. You slept through Thursday.” Ellis remained calm. The game would start late. Ample time for the acid to wear off. Then it struck him: doubleheader. The Pirates had a doubleheader. And he was pitching the first game. He had four hours to get to San Diego, warm up and pitch.

Source: Dallas Observer
Published: Jun 8, 2011
Length: 17 minutes (4,254 words)

Keith Olbermann on Why He Left MSNBC, and How He Plans to Get Even

“I didn’t have time to sit around going, ‘Gee, I wonder if there’s a better environment for me.’ No, Al Gore’s going to be my boss! I slept on it overnight, and we started going with it on Sunday. Everything since then has been like that. ‘What do you need?’ We’re not doing this new show to find a place for me to have a home—we’re going to do this right. We’re going to take MSNBC’s business away from them—that’s the idea, to do it better.”

Source: Rolling Stone
Published: Jun 7, 2011
Length: 17 minutes (4,349 words)

Exposing India’s Blood Farmers

For the last three years the man had been held captive in a brick-and-tin shed just a few minutes’ walk from where the farmers were drinking tea. The marks on his arms weren’t the tell-tale signs of heroin addiction; they came from where his captor, a ruthless modern-day vampire and also a local dairy farmer and respected landowner named Papu Yadhav, punctured his skin with a hollow syringe. He had kept the man captive so he could drain his blood and sell it to blood banks. The man had managed to slip out when Yadhav had forgotten to lock the door behind him.

Source: Wired
Published: Jun 6, 2011
Length: 12 minutes (3,196 words)

A Chef’s Painful Road to Rehab

A week earlier, Brandon Baltzley, 26, was the head chef at Tribute, an ambitious, 170-seat restaurant set to open in the Essex Inn in the South Loop. He spent months developing his menu, crafting a document to tell the world: This is who I am. Instead, on this morning in late May, he will check himself into a drug rehabilitation program on the West Side. The night before, he paid $100 he owed his dealer. He gave his apartment keys to a friend with instructions on locating his cocaine paraphernalia. Throw it all away, he told him.

Author: Kevin Pang
Source: Chicago Tribune
Published: Jun 6, 2011
Length: 8 minutes (2,085 words)

Ode to a Four-Letter Word

When it comes to profanity, I hail from what you might call a mixed background. My father swears freely and ­exuberantly—although, when I was a child, he did so exclusively in Polish. In moments of paternal irritation, an entire shtetl sprang to life in our suburban home. Psia krew, cholera, curwa, szmata: excrement, cholera, whores, rags. (Predictably, that gritty archipelago of my father’s native tongue is all the Polish I ever learned.) My mother, by contrast, swears approximately never. Moreover, some years ago, she confessed that she hates it when I do so.

Published: Jun 5, 2011
Length: 7 minutes (1,982 words)

Interview: Steven Spielberg on Jaws

“[Reagan] just stood up and he looked around the room, almost like he was doing a headcount, and he said, ‘I wanted to thank you for bringing E.T. to the White House. We really enjoyed your movie,’ and then he looked around the room and said, ‘And there are a number of people in this room who know that everything on that screen is absolutely true.’ And he said it without smiling! But he said that and everybody laughed, by the way. The whole room laughed because he presented it like a joke, but he wasn’t smiling as he said it.”

Published: Jun 7, 2011
Length: 28 minutes (7,030 words)

AIDS at 30: A Time Capsule

It is difficult now to call up the particular mood that prevailed in the AIDS epidemic’s early years. I am not talking about the first rumblings, when no one knew enough to be afraid, but further in. In those post-AZT, pre-ARV-drug days, there was very little one could do if infected. Primitive prophylaxes against certain diseases offered one’s best bet but certainly no guarantee that one wouldn’t die of Kaposi’s sarcoma or cytomegalovirus or pneumocystis carinii pneumonia. The idea of life without AIDS, much less of being alive in thirty years, was almost unimaginable. Which is why in the late eighties, coworkers and I at the San Francisco AIDS Foundation came up with an idea to get people—gay men, in particular—thinking about the future. We decided to create a time capsule.

Author: Bill Hayes
Published: Jun 6, 2011
Length: 11 minutes (2,769 words)

Paw Paw & Lady Love

Hers is a story that wove itself into American popular culture, chronicled on television and in the tabloids (and even, recently, on a London stage as an acclaimed new opera). And yet until now, much of Anna Nicole Smith’s life has remained hidden, or willfully distorted by those who knew her, so that by the time she died she was less well known than when she first attracted the world’s attention almost twenty years ago.

Author: Dan P. Lee
Published: Jun 6, 2011
Length: 32 minutes (8,036 words)