If You Want to Humble an Empire

If you want to humble an empire it makes sense to maim its cathedrals. They are symbols of its faith, and when they crumple and burn, it tells us we are not so powerful and we can’t be safe. The Twin Towers of the World Trade Center, planted at the base of Manhattan island with the Statue of Liberty as their sentry, and the Pentagon, a squat, concrete fort on the banks of the Potomac, are the sanctuaries of money and power that our enemies may imagine define us. But that assumes our faith rests on what we can buy and build, and that has never been America’s true God. #Sept11

Source: Time
Published: Sep 14, 2001
Length: 38 minutes (9,587 words)

Obit: Osama bin Laden—The Most Wanted Face of Terrorism

With the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001, Bin Laden was elevated to the realm of evil in the American imagination once reserved for dictators like Hitler and Stalin. He was a new national enemy, his face on wanted posters, gloating on videotape, taunting the united states and western civilization. #Sept11

Published: May 2, 2011
Length: 20 minutes (5,169 words)

Mad German Auteur, Now in 3-D!

The daring German filmmaker Werner Herzog once walked a thousand miles to propose to a woman. He once plotted to firebomb his leading man’s house and once ate his own shoe to square a bet. He once got shot in the stomach during a TV interview, then insisted on finishing. And despite it all, his latest adventure—a 3-D documentary about cave paintings—still sounds batshit crazy.

Source: GQ
Published: Apr 29, 2011
Length: 17 minutes (4,269 words)

Historic Jazz Recordings Find a Home in Harlem, But You Can’t Hear Them

The collection is, in a word, historic. “It is a wonderful addition to our knowledge of a great period in jazz,” says Dan Morgenstern, director of the Institute of Jazz Studies at Rutgers University in Newark, N.J. And, Morgenstern says, “the sound quality of many of these works is amazing. Some of it is of pristine quality. It is a cultural treasure and should be made widely available.” The question, however, is whether that will happen anytime soon. And if it doesn’t, music fans might be justified in putting the blame on copyright law.

Source: ABA Journal
Published: Apr 29, 2011
Length: 14 minutes (3,643 words)

Silver or Lead

(Overseas Press Club Award Winner, 2011.) On the morning before I arrived in Zitácuaro, a beautiful hill town in the western Mexican state of Michoacán, the dismembered body of a young man was left in the middle of the main intersection. It was what people call corpse messaging. Usually it involves a mutilated body—or a pile of bodies, or just a head—and a handwritten sign. “Talked too much.” “So that they learn to respect.” “You get what you deserve.” I didn’t see a sign, but the message—terror—was clear enough, and everybody knew who left it: La Familia Michoacana, a crime syndicate whose depredations pervade the life of the region.

Source: The New Yorker
Published: May 31, 2010
Length: 44 minutes (11,082 words)

An Inside Look at Robert Mueller and the FBI

The Stellar Wind confrontation was a rare moment in presidential history, an act of defiance that turned the Commander in Chief in his tracks. “You can only do that once, threaten to resign,” says Frances Fragos Townsend, who was then Bush’s counterterrorism adviser. “The second time you do it, you’re going to be told, ‘Accepted.'” That was not how it turned out for Mueller. He did it again two years later, with much the same result.

Source: Time
Published: Apr 28, 2011
Length: 26 minutes (6,520 words)

Accidental Hero: Beryl Shipley, 1926-2011

The onetime coach at Southwestern Louisiana was vilified for violating NCAA rules, but the author, who grew up in Cajun country, remembers Beryl Shipley for doing something courageous: helping to integrate college basketball in the Deep South

Published: Apr 28, 2011
Length: 20 minutes (5,237 words)

Writing Advice from George Saunders

“You may remember some of my other biggies, such as, ‘Any monkey in a story had better be a dead monkey,’ and ‘Aunts and uncles are best construed as the heliological equivalent of small-scale weather systems,’ or (the mother of all advice-quote-pairs): ‘The number of rooms in a fictional house should be inversely proportional to the years during which the couple living in that house enjoyed true happiness.'”

Source: BOMB Magazine
Published: Apr 27, 2011
Length: 16 minutes (4,096 words)

The Joy of Stats

Everyone at the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference was Jewish—and by “everyone” I mean that while Jews comprise 2 percent of the American population roughly every third person at the conference was Jewish. I met some kids from the Harvard Sports Analysis Collective, a group of terrifyingly bright 20-year-olds, and quickly learned, to my lack of shock, that most of them were Jews. The business majors and the MBAers were Jews; one conference organizer, a Sloan student with a distinctively Irish name told me how glad he was I was writing this story, because clearly everyone there, himself included, was Jewish. The journalists covering the conference were Jews. And Mark Cuban—his family name was Chopininski—is Jewish, too. This matters.

Author: Marc Tracy
Source: Tablet Magazine
Published: Apr 27, 2011
Length: 19 minutes (4,920 words)

The Comic Stylings of Brian Williams

Told of Seth Meyers’s admiration for his comic instrument, the anchor replies, “That’s odd, because we’ve never belonged to a health club together, and we’re both in successful long-term relationships.” It’s a classic Williams line: suggestive enough to shock—did Brian Williams just tell a penis joke?—yet veiled enough that it doesn’t seem untoward coming from the man my grandmother trusts to keep her up-to-date on rising health-care costs.

Published: Apr 27, 2011
Length: 14 minutes (3,695 words)