My Mom Couldn’t Cook

This, however, is not a story of my cooking, or the odd combination of freedom and thralldom it confers. It’s the story of what — or who — inspired my decision to be my family’s cook, gave me the will to do it, and made it both a practical and, apparently, a psychological necessity. It is the story of my mother — of my mother’s cooking.

Author: Tom Junod
Source: Esquire
Published: Sep 1, 2010
Length: 12 minutes (3,248 words)

Sons of the Revolution

His wife and their two young daughters were in Virginia, he explained, but he and his two sons were in Libya, doing whatever they could for the revolution. While Osama was driving his improvised ambulance, his younger son, Yousef, a seventeen-year-old high-school student who was living in Benghazi with a relative, was taking part in the rallies held daily in front of the revolution’s headquarters, a beat-up courthouse on the city’s seafront promenade.

Source: The New Yorker
Published: May 2, 2011
Length: 38 minutes (9,713 words)

Interrogating Saddam Hussein

As soon as FBI agent George Piro began to speak, Saddam knew the agent was Lebanese and Christian—a good background for the interrogation: Lebanese in the Middle East are generally neutral, and being a Christian meant that Piro didn’t have a bone in Iraq’s intense Sunni/Shiite Muslim rivalry. Saddam tried to be helpful by speaking Arabic with a Lebanese accent, even as, month after month, Piro’s Arabic acquired an Iraqi inflection.

Source: Washingtonian
Published: May 5, 2011
Length: 18 minutes (4,672 words)

I Was a Russian Tabloid Star

The Russian GQ had rented out the theater, a hideous 1990s edifice glowing at the sidestreet’s end, to hold its Man of the Year awards: “the unofficial start,” in the breathless tabloid formulation, “of Moscow’s social season.” In New York, I don’t usually get to such events without a reporter’s pad. Here, I couldn’t have a deeper cover if I tried. I was a nominee in the Writer of the Year category.

Source: The Awl
Published: May 4, 2011
Length: 17 minutes (4,428 words)

Who Is WikiLeaks Suspect Bradley Manning?

For most of the past year, Manning spent 23 hours a day alone in a 6-by-12-foot jail cell. His case has become a rallying point for free-information activists, who say the leaked information belongs to the American people. They compare the 23-year-old former intelligence analyst to Daniel Ellsberg, leaker of the Vietnam War-era Pentagon Papers, and decry excessive government secrecy. “What is happening to our government when Bradley Manning is charged with aiding the enemy?” asked Pete Perry, an organizer with the Bradley Manning Support Network. “Who is the enemy? Information? The American people?”

Source: Washington Post
Published: May 5, 2011
Length: 23 minutes (5,972 words)

What Happened to Air France Flight 447?

The vanishing of Flight 447 was easy to bend into myth. No other passenger jet in modern history had disappeared so completely — without a Mayday call or a witness or even a trace on radar. The airplane itself, an Airbus A330, was considered to be among the safest. It was equipped with the automated fly-by-wire system, which is designed to reduce human error by letting computers control many aspects of the flight. And when, in the middle of the night, in the middle of the ocean, Flight 447 seemed to disappear from the sky, it was tempting to deliver a tidy narrative about the hubris of building a self-flying airplane, Icarus falling from the sky. Or maybe Flight 447 was the Titanic, an uncrashable ship at the bottom of the sea.

Published: May 4, 2011
Length: 30 minutes (7,615 words)

We’re No. 1: Def Leppard’s ‘Hysteria’

Even if the hugeness of Hysteria can be plainly seen in statistical terms, wrapping your head around it is difficult nearly 25 years later. We still have hit records, and artists and producers obsessed with discovering the newest ways of making them, but being No. 1 on the charts doesn’t have quite the same significance anymore. If you reach the top of the heap, you’ll be disappointed to find that the heap is much smaller than it used to be, and there are lots of other heaps nearby that are approximately the same size.

Source: Onion A.V. Club
Published: May 4, 2011
Length: 18 minutes (4,598 words)

The Last Two Veterans of WWI

Nine years ago, there were 700 left alive.?? With the recent deaths of Frank Buckles, John Babcock and Harry Patch, we are left with Claude Choules and Florence Green. (Upon learning this, Claude remarked: “Everything comes to those who wait and wait.”) Nearly 10,000,000 men were killed in the conflict, 65 million participated, and now we are left with two. Think about that. Think about those numbers. What are you supposed to do when an era is inches away from disappearing???

Source: The Awl
Published: May 3, 2011
Length: 28 minutes (7,169 words)

Behind the Hunt for Bin Laden

Back in Washington, Mr. Panetta met with Mr. Obama and his most senior national security aides, including Mr. Biden, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates. The meeting was considered so secret that White House officials didn’t even list the topic in their alerts to each other. That day, Mr. Panetta spoke at length about Bin Laden and his presumed hiding place. “It was electric,” an administration official who attended the meeting said. “For so long, we’d been trying to get a handle on this guy. And all of a sudden, it was like, wow, there he is.”

Published: May 3, 2011
Length: 12 minutes (3,060 words)

The Battle for Tora Bora

Tora Bora was not yet a familiar name to many Americans. But what would unfold there over the subsequent days remains, eight years later, the single most consequential battle of the war on terrorism. Presented with an opportunity to kill or capture Al Qaeda’s top leadership just three months after September 11, the United States was instead outmaneuvered by bin Laden, who slipped into Pakistan, largely disappeared from U.S. radar, and slowly began rebuilding his organization. #Sept11

Published: Dec 1, 2009
Length: 22 minutes (5,542 words)