The Plot to Turn On the World: The Leary/Ginsberg Acid Conspiracy

As the public faces of the psychedelic revolution, Allen Ginsberg and Timothy Leary made a dynamic duo. The charming, boyish, Irish Harvard professor and the ecstatic, boldly gay, Hebraically-bearded Jersey bard became the de facto gurus of the movement they’d helped create — father figures for a generation of lysergic pilgrims who temporarily jettisoned their own fathers in their quest for renewable revelation.

Source: PLoS
Published: Apr 21, 2011
Length: 17 minutes (4,373 words)

Flu Warning: Beware the Drug Companies!

The predicted dire emergency [with H1N1] did not occur. In the 2009–2010 “influenza season” about 18,000 people died from the disease worldwide, fewer than in previous years, and the vast majority of victims had serious underlying conditions such as cancer, lung disease, AIDS, or severe obesity, which can impair breathing.7 Since one influenza strain usually dominates all others during a typical flu season, H1N1 may actually have saved lives by displacing more aggressive viruses. The WHO maintains that its decisions were based on the best available evidence, but last year European governments, stuck with hundreds of millions of euros’ worth of unused medicines and vaccines, began asking questions.

Published: Apr 22, 2011
Length: 18 minutes (4,588 words)

Silicon Valley Cashes Out Selling Private Shares

Vince Thompson doesn’t appear in any accounts of Facebook’s early years. Few of the more than 2,000 employees at the company even know his name. The AOL veteran’s brief stint as Facebook’s first official ad-sales chief lasted less than six months. Even so, when Thompson left the company in early 2006, he exercised his options to buy Facebook stock, as is the custom in Silicon Valley, and took a sizable chunk of shares with him. About 18 months later he moved to Los Angeles and started consulting for media clients such as TVGuide.com on how to tap new sources of revenue, and he began to think about how to create one for himself. He set out on a quest, talking to friends in the New York investment banking world about an unorthodox idea: selling a portion of his Facebook shares, packaged with those of a colleague who left Facebook shortly after he did.

Author: Brad Stone
Source: Businessweek
Published: Apr 21, 2011
Length: 16 minutes (4,102 words)

Elif Batuman: Life After a Bestseller

“Things started out innocuously enough. ‘I’m a huge fan!’ I exclaimed. ‘Right back at you,’ Franzen replied, explaining that he had bought my book as a Christmas present for multiple people, though he hadn’t yet read it himself. ‘But I’ve read parts of it!’ I told him that I had loved Freedom, which is true and would have been a great ending point for our exchange. So it’s difficult to articulate what possessed me, at a later, boozier point in the dinner, to ask Franzen whether he had any weed.”

Source: The Guardian
Published: Apr 21, 2011
Length: 12 minutes (3,211 words)

Lot 800: The Bainbridge Vase

The story of an antique Chinese vase, found in a house clearance in Pinner and sold for £43m in a small auction room, was a suburban fairytale. Was it also too good to be true?

Author: Sam Knight
Source: Prospect
Published: Apr 21, 2011
Length: 22 minutes (5,562 words)

Bonobos, “Killer Apes” and Human Origins

The concept of the “killer ape” offers a pessimistic reflection of humanity and its genesis, but the latest research shows that a primate species whose success is based on mutual aid and pleasure, not violence, is a better model for human origins.

Published: Apr 21, 2011
Length: 13 minutes (3,280 words)

Obama’s Young Mother Abroad

She carried her chin a few degrees higher than most. His right hand rested on her shoulder, lightly. The photograph, taken on a Manhattan rooftop in August 1987 and e-mailed to me 20 years later, was a revelation and a puzzle. The man was Barack Obama at 26, the community organizer from Chicago on a visit to New York. The woman was Stanley Ann Dunham, his mother. It was impossible not to be struck by the similarities, and the dissimilarities, between them. It was impossible not to question the stereotype to which she had been expediently reduced: the white woman from Kansas.

Published: Apr 20, 2011
Length: 24 minutes (6,215 words)

How These Two White Guys Wound Up In This Kendrick Perkins Family Photo

For the next four hours, they watched television, ate Funyuns, and talked about the Kevin Garnett trade and the upcoming season. Perk was still skeptical about the deal that sent his friend Al Jefferson to Minnesota for KG. Brian remembers Perk saying that the Celtics better win a title that year or else “they’re gonna blame me.” At the end of the night, Perk brought Brian and Justin into the kitchen and offered them some homemade spaghetti and meat sauce. For some reason, Perk didn’t want them to eat in front of him. Instead, he shoveled single portions of pasta into plastic containers and instructed his new buddies to call him later, when they were finished with dinner.

Source: Deadspin
Published: Apr 20, 2011
Length: 10 minutes (2,663 words)

Mister Lytle: An Essay

When I was twenty years old, I became a kind of apprentice to a man named Andrew Lytle, whom pretty much no one apart from his negligibly less ancient sister, Polly, had addressed except as Mister Lytle in at least a decade. She called him Brother. Or Brutha—I don’t suppose either of them had ever voiced a terminal r. His two grown daughters did call him Daddy. Certainly I never felt even the most obscure impulse to call him Andrew, or “old man,” or any other familiarism, though he frequently gave me to know it would be all right if I were to call him mon vieux. He, for his part, called me boy, and beloved, and once, in a letter, “Breath of My Nostrils.” (National Magazine Award winner 2011)

Published: Oct 1, 2010
Length: 30 minutes (7,507 words)

Kiki Kannibal: The Girl Who Played With Fire

The first thing Kiki Ostrenga saw as she ran out the front door of her family’s white ranch house were the neon-green words spray-painted across the front path: “Regal Slut.” She stopped short. Maybe this is just a dream, she thought. The 14-year-old took a few fearful steps forward. She gasped when she reached the driveway. Her parents’ home was splattered with ketchup, chocolate syrup and eggs. And across the garage door, big as a billboard, was scrawled the word “SLUT.”

Source: Rolling Stone
Published: Apr 18, 2011
Length: 25 minutes (6,281 words)