Falling Comet

In 1955 “Rock Around the Clock” went to the top of the charts and turned Bill Haley into the king of rock and roll. Twenty-five years later, he was holed up in a pool house in Harlingen, drunk, lonely, paranoid, and dying. After three decades of silence, his widow and his children tell the story of his years in Texas and his sad final days.

Source: Texas Monthly
Published: May 23, 2011
Length: 30 minutes (7,647 words)

How Gays Helped Make and Remake America

The American right presents homosexuality as something alien to the American experience—an intruder that inexplicably gate-crashed America in 1969 in the form of a rioting drag queen clutching a high heel in her fist as a weapon. The statements of Michele Bachman, Rick Santorum, or Mitt Romney insistently hint that the fag does not belong under the flag. But there’s something odd here. For people who talk incessantly about honoring American history, they have built a historical picture of their country that can only be sustained by scrubbing it clean of a significant part of the population, and everything they brought to the party (if not the Tea Party).

Source: Slate
Published: May 23, 2011
Length: 9 minutes (2,344 words)

The Life and Times of Harvey Updyke

“The weekend after the Iron Bowl, I went to Auburn, Ala., because I lived 30 miles away, and I poisoned the two Toomer’s trees. I put Spike 80DF in ’em.” … Harvey Updyke hung up the phone. He had just ruined his entire life in 62 words. Soon, the police would connect him with Al from Dadeville and nothing would ever be the same. “I’ll [be] honest with you,” he says. “I realized it was a bad idea when I was doing it. You know, I’m not stupid … “

Source: ESPN
Published: May 23, 2011
Length: 12 minutes (3,021 words)

Madoff’s Curveball

Nearly a decade ago, Fred Wilpon, the chairman and chief executive of the New York Mets, had his first meeting with the architects of what would become Citi Field, the team’s new ballpark, in Queens. “The first day the architects came to the site, they started saying blah, blah, blah, and I said to them, ‘Let me tell you how this is going to work,’ ” Wilpon told me recently. “ ‘The front of the building is going to look like Ebbets Field. And it’s going to have a rotunda—just like at Ebbets.’ And then I said, ‘Guess what. Here are the plans for Ebbets Field.’ And I handed them over.”

Source: The New Yorker
Published: May 30, 2011
Length: 42 minutes (10,716 words)

Inside Al Jazeera

On a cold March evening in Manhattan, Ayman Mohyeldin rode in the back of a black Lincoln Town Car on his way to an appearance on The Colbert Report. Mohyeldin (pronounced moh-hee-deen) is the Cairo correspondent for Al Jazeera English, which helps explain two things: (1) accustomed to the temperate winters of the Triumphant City along the lazy Nile, he was sorely underdressed for the windy stabs of Manhattan, and (2) after his network’s critically acclaimed coverage of the Egyptian uprising, he was in town to take his star turn on Stephen Colbert’s hot seat, constituting what promised to be a pop-cultural coming-out for Al Jazeera in the United States.

Source: GQ
Published: May 23, 2011
Length: 25 minutes (6,476 words)

Escape from Spiderhead

(Fiction) “He added some Verbaluce™ to the drip, and soon I was feeling the same things but saying them better. The garden still looked nice. It was like the bushes were so tight-seeming and the sun made everything stand out? It was like any moment you expected some Victorians to wander in with their cups of tea. It was as if the garden had become a sort of embodiment of the domestic dreams forever intrinsic to human consciousness.”

Source: The New Yorker
Published: Dec 20, 2010
Length: 29 minutes (7,390 words)

Cartwheels Over Broken Glass

That is the essence of Morrissey: his brand of loneliness and longing and hopelessness (all the stuff he sings about) is that of a person who finds it natural to have relationships with the unreachable – that’s to say, with images and works rather than people. Nostalgia is the be-all-and-end-all of pop, and Morrissey is the king of all that, so when he became a star himself (and began featuring his own mug on his record sleeves) he had succeeded in creating an audience literally after his own image, a tribe inured to the modes and manners of heightened fandom.

Published: Mar 4, 2004
Length: 16 minutes (4,127 words)

The Elephant in the Green Room

On Monday afternoon, March 28, Fox News chairman Roger Ailes summoned Glenn Beck to a meeting in his office on the second floor of News Corp.’s midtown headquarters to discuss his future at the network. Ailes had spent the better part of the weekend at his Putnam County estate thinking about how to stage-manage Beck’s departure from Fox, which at that point was all but inevitable. But, as with everything concerning Glenn Beck, the situation was a mess, simultaneously a negotiation and a therapy session.

Published: May 22, 2011
Length: 25 minutes (6,267 words)

How to Spot a Psychopath

It was the French psychiatrist Philippe Pinel who first suggested, early in the 19th century, that there was a madness that didn’t involve mania or depression or psychosis. He called it “manie sans délire” – insanity without delusions. He said sufferers appeared normal on the surface, but they lacked impulse controls and were prone to outbursts of violence. It wasn’t until 1891, when the German doctor JLA Koch published his book Die Psychopathischen Minderwertigkeiten, that it got its name: psychopathy.

Author: Jon Ronson
Source: The Guardian
Published: May 21, 2011
Length: 17 minutes (4,421 words)

Here We (Don’t) Go Again: Revisting the Millerites’ 1844 Rapture Prediction

Sociologists often argue that apocalyptic creeds appeal primarily to the poor and the disenfranchised – those for whom the afterlife promises more than life itself has ever offered. But on that day in 1844, judges, lawyers and doctors, farmers and factory workers and freed slaves, the educated and the ignorant, the wealthy and the impoverished: all of them gathered as one to await the Rapture

Published: May 20, 2011
Length: 23 minutes (5,939 words)