Hermès: Handbag Heritage Under Assault
The luxury brand remains under tight control by the Hermès heirs, who have scattered across three continents to pursue careers as varied as deejaying, motorcycle sales, and investment banking. And they want nothing to do with their new minority shareholder. Bernard Arnault is the head of LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton and the fourth-richest man in the world. He has met, and overcome, resistance to his maneuvers before. He built LVMH into the No. 1 luxury group in the world by taking control—sometimes brutally—of more than 50 brands, including storied names such as Louis Vuitton, Givenchy, and Guerlain. Just this month he reeled in Bulgari, a 127-year-old Italian jewelry and watch company, once its family owners agreed to sell after a years-long courtship.
Anthrax Redux: Did the Feds Nab the Wrong Guy?
Even agent Edward Montooth, who ran the FBI’s hunt for the anthrax killer, says that—while he’s still convinced Ivins was the mailer—he’s unsure of many things, from Bruce Ivins’ motivation to when he brewed up the lethal spores. “We still have a difficult time nailing down the time frame,” he says. “We don’t know when he made or dried the spores.” In other words, it’s been 10 years since the deadliest biological terror attack in US history launched a manhunt that ruined one scientist’s reputation and saw a second driven to suicide, yet nagging problems remain. Problems that add up to an unsettling reality: Despite the FBI’s assurances, it’s not at all certain that the government could have ever convicted Ivins of a crime.
The Lost Boys
In December 1970 two teenagers disappeared from the Heights neighborhood, in Houston. Then another and another and another. As the number of missing kids grew, no one realized that the most prolific serial killer the country had ever seen—along with his teenage accomplices—was living comfortably among them. Or that the mystery of what happened to so many of his victims would haunt the city to this day.
Huffington’s Cultural Revolution
You can change the particulars however you want, and set the time anytime you want. Some examples: The website, famous for its slideshows and linkbait, wants real reporting now; the magazine, famous for its celebrity profiles and fashion spreads, wants features on the state of women in Afghanistan; the newspaper, famous for its discounting of the importance of work on the web, wants to liberate you to blog all day; the blog, famous for its short, pithy takes on other people’s news, wants long essays. A website that has traditionally treated its “editors” as “product managers” who spend more time in bizdev and marketing meetings than editorial meetings wants to liberate them to provide meaningful guidance, support and direction for a new editorial team with beefier journalistic bona fides.
Building a Better Reactor
Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, Fukushima. First the accident, then the predictable allegations in the postmortem: The design was flawed. Inspections were inadequate. Lines of defense crumbled, and reliable backups proved unreliable. Planners lacked the imagination or willpower to prepare for the very worst. There’s a way to break out of this pattern. Nuclear power plants will never be completely safe, but they can be made far safer than they are today. The key is humility. The next generation of plants must be built to work with nature—and human nature—rather than against them. They must be safe by design, so that even if every possible thing goes wrong, the outcome will stop short of disaster. In the language of the nuclear industry, they must be “walkaway safe.”
Trailers Are for Travelers
After weeks of surveillance, the Home Depot security officers knew they were onto something big, but they didn’t quite know how big. They didn’t know that the events of that day would unleash a bizarre yearlong investigation that will culminate in Oakland next week with the beginning of the sentencing process for Davenport, Hay, and Broderick on federal charges of conspiracy to commit wire fraud. They didn’t know that the trio’s trail would lead through at least 24 states, and that the investigation’s nationwide scope would draw in the FBI and the US Attorney’s Office. They didn’t know that the dent the three managed to make in Home Depot’s pocketbook, originally estimated at $400,000, would soar toward an estimated $1 million.
Going…Going…Gone
Since his final at-bat, on September 26, 2007, Barry Bonds has been living in near total seclusion. He’s made only a handful of public appearances and declined repeated requests to be interviewed for this story. But from more than thirty conversations with his friends, former teammates, agents, and baseball insiders, a portrait of Bonds in hiding emerges. He’s at an inflection point between his baseball past and an uncertain future. On many days, he enjoys his involuntary retirement and the privacy it affords him. But part of Bonds still desperately wants to play. He looks around, sees a sport that’s lousy with known juicers, and can’t comprehend why no one will make him an offer, even for the league minimum of $400,000 a year.
The Fire Last Time
A century ago, on March 25, 1911, 146 garment workers, most of them Jewish and Italian immigrant girls in their teens and twenties, perished after a fire broke out at the Triangle Waist Company in New York City’s Greenwich Village. Even after the fire, the city’s businesses continued to insist they could regulate themselves, but the deaths clearly demonstrated that companies like Triangle, if left to their own devices, would not concern themselves with their workers’ safety. Despite this business opposition, the public’s response to the fire and to the 146 deaths led to landmark state regulations.
How Carrots Became the New Junk Food
Crispin had done its own behavioral research, lurking in kitchens around the Boulder area. Staffers had watched suburban moms unpack their groceries and studied where kids looked for snacks when they got home from school. Kids seldom went to the refrigerator; instead, they went straight for the cupboards or the pantry. If they did go to the fridge, baby carrots were at least visible, out on a shelf. Full-size carrots, though, always went in the vegetable drawer. “The drawer of death,” one kid called it. Adults weren’t particularly fond of the vegetable drawer either. They tended to associate it with all the vegetables they buy and forget, and then discover weeks later, limp and leaking. A strategy began to emerge. Let regular carrots be the vegetable.
America’s Ancient Cave Art
And now we arrived at the panel of birds. Tiny birds, each about the size of a silver dollar. Turkey. Hawk. At least one small songbird. Very finely etched into the limestone with a flint tool. Another cave that began and ended in birds. Outside and resting before the hike back to the truck, Simek said, “Think about it. What was there none of in that cave?” I had no answer. Hadn’t there been everything in that cave? “Out of more than three hundred images, there wasn’t a single weapon anywhere,” he said. “We have here an early Mississippian art in which there are no images of violence, where the birds are pure birds, not linked to war—they’re in flight. Even the human figures are not obviously warriors.”
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