Where the Buffalo Roam

The notion that people living on the Plains should cede their land to bison is rooted in a deliberately heretical 1987 article in the academic magazine Planning, titled “The Great Plains: From Dust to Dust.” Authored by professors Frank and Deborah Popper (he teaches at Princeton and Rutgers; she teaches at Princeton and the City University of New York), it suggested that a large portion of the Great Plains—comprising most of Montana, the Dakotas, Wyoming, and parts of six other Western and Midwestern states—would become almost completely depopulated within a single generation, and should therefore be “returned to its original pre-white state,” i.e., a bison range.

Source: Mother Jones
Published: Apr 4, 2011
Length: 21 minutes (5,326 words)

Sardine Life

New York didn’t invent the apartment. Shopkeepers in ancient Rome lived above the store, Chinese clans crowded into multistory circular tulou, and sixteenth-century Yemenites lived in the mud-brick skyscrapers of Shibam. But New York re-invented the apartment many times over, developing the airborne slice of real estate into a symbol of exquisite urbanity. Sure, we still have our brownstones and our townhouses, but in the popular imagination today’s New Yorker occupies a glassed-in aerie, a shared walk-up, a rambling prewar with walls thickened by layers of paint, or a pristine white loft.

Published: Apr 4, 2011
Length: 15 minutes (3,776 words)

On the Bubble

And yes, every time I talk to a Valley person about this they go on about how marketers want more data and they’ll pay for it, and they want to know everything about a person and oh man do you know how much advertisers would pay for this data? Well, yes, I do. But I guarantee you, YOU DO NOT KNOW. They have fixed budgets. I could tell you EXACTLY how much they will spend, because I spend that money. It is not bottomless. The endless quest for advertisers to know everything about their customers may never end, but its budgets will not increase forever. We will pick the best 3-10 data sources and stick with them.

Author: Rick Webb
Source: Rick Webb
Published: Apr 3, 2011
Length: 7 minutes (1,987 words)

After the Uprising: Yemen’s Protests and the Hope for Reform

Though Ali Abdullah Saleh has proved deft at maintaining power, he has accomplished little else. Forty per cent of Yemeni adults are illiterate, and more than half the country’s children are malnourished. In addition to the bribes—one of Yemen’s largest expenditures—there is corruption. The government in Sanaa makes even the Karzai regime, in Afghanistan, seem like a model of propriety. Mohamed Ali Jubran, an economist at Sanaa University, told me, “Any resources that the government is able to get its hands on are siphoned off by the people around the President. What is left over is not enough to meet the demands of the Yemeni people.”

Source: The New Yorker
Published: Apr 4, 2011
Length: 43 minutes (10,995 words)

How Slavery Really Ended in America

Butler was no abolitionist, but the three slaves presented a problem. True, the laws of the United States were clear: all fugitives must be returned to their masters. The founding fathers enshrined this in the Constitution; Congress reinforced it in 1850 with the Fugitive Slave Act; and it was still the law of the land — including, as far as the federal government was concerned, within the so-called Confederate states. The war had done nothing to change it.

Published: Apr 1, 2011
Length: 17 minutes (4,486 words)

A Different Gandhi

Even in his lifetime the legend of Mahatma Gandhi had grown to such proportions that the man himself can be said to have disappeared as if into a dust storm. Joseph Lelyveld’s new biography sets out to find him. His subtitle alerts us that this is not a conventional biography in that he does not repeat the well-documented story of Gandhi’s struggle for India but rather his struggle with India, the country that exasperated, infuriated, and dismayed him, notwithstanding his love for it.

Published: Apr 2, 2011
Length: 17 minutes (4,253 words)

Canada! How Does It Work?

Friday’s vote took the form of a vote to hold the government in contempt of Parliament for failing to release financial projections about its purchase of 65 fighter jets and certain proposed anti-crime measures. This is the first time in Canadian history a government has been found in contempt of Parliament. But no one who isn’t an op-ed pundit cares about that. The real issue is that our politics is paralyzed—largely by mediocrity but also by certain historical circumstances related to the party machinery in Canada.

Source: The Awl
Published: Mar 30, 2011
Length: 11 minutes (2,920 words)

The Assassin in the Vineyard

Who would poison the vines of La Romanée-Conti, the tiny, centuries-old vineyard that produces what most agree is Burgundy’s ?nest, rarest, and most expensive wine? When Aubert de Villaine received an anonymous note, in January 2010, threatening the destruction of his priceless heritage unless he paid a one-million-euro ransom, he thought it was a sick joke. But, as Maximillian Potter reveals, the attack on Romanée-Conti was only too real: an unprecedented and decidedly un-French crime.

Source: Vanity Fair
Published: Apr 1, 2011
Length: 24 minutes (6,052 words)

I’ve Seen Every Woody Allen Movie. Here’s What I’ve Learned

Like Ian Fleming and P.G. Wodehouse, Woody Allen returns compulsively to the same creative ground. In Allen’s case, it’s ground trod by anxious, well-to-do white people, who swap partners and drop cultural references in an empty, godless universe. The extent of the similarities from one film to the next is remarkable. It’s not just that he recasts actors or that he revisits the themes of domestic boredom and cosmic insignificance. He reuses the same font, EF Windsor Light Condensed, for his titles and credits. He recycles character types: the neurotic Jewish New Yorker (the filmmaker’s spit and image), the adulterous intellectual, the hypochondriac intellectual. He recycles plot lines. He even recycles punch lines.

Source: Slate
Published: Mar 31, 2011
Length: 9 minutes (2,267 words)

Johnson & Johnson’s Quality Catastrophe

After 50-plus product recalls in 15 months, the $60 billion company is fighting to clear its once-trusted name. “Not only is J&J bigger and more decentralized; it’s also much more profitable. Its operating margin in 1990 was 17.7 percent; in 2010 it was 26.8 percent. ‘Where did that increase in margin come from?’ asks Sucher, the Harvard business professor. When J&J acquired Pfizer’s consumer health-care division in 2006, it predicted cost savings of $500 million to $600 million. Sucher says numbers like that suggest cost-cutting may have gone too far.”

Source: Businessweek
Published: Apr 1, 2011
Length: 23 minutes (5,881 words)