Incredible Edibles: The Mad Genius of ‘Modernist Cuisine’

The most instructive dish, however, was one of the failures, a slow-and-low chicken, cooked for several hours and served when its internal temperature had hit 149 degrees Fahrenheit. The problem was that, with all its juices still inside, it tasted far too chickeny. If you oven-roast chicken the regular way, you get used to the drying effect of the heat, and to the fact that some juices go into the pan and are recycled as gravy. With this version, the bird was so moist that its texture was almost jellied, the flesh was a faint pink, and the chicken-explosion of flavor was overwhelming. In a sense, it was too good. My roast-chicken-obsessed children threw down their cutlery in protest after a single mouthful.

Source: The New Yorker
Published: Mar 17, 2011
Length: 15 minutes (3,952 words)

The Stoner Arms Dealers

David Packouz and Efraim Diveroli had picked the perfect moment to get into the arms business. To fight simultaneous wars in both Afghanistan and Iraq, the Bush administration had decided to outsource virtually every facet of America’s military operations, from building and staffing Army bases to hiring mercenaries to provide security for diplomats abroad. After Bush took office, private military contracts soared from $145 billion in 2001 to $390 billion in 2008. Federal contracting rules were routinely ignored or skirted, and military-industrial giants like Raytheon and Lockheed Martin cashed in as war profiteering went from war crime to business model. Why shouldn’t a couple of inexperienced newcomers like Packouz and Diveroli get in on the action? After all, the two friends were after the same thing as everyone else in the arms business — lots and lots and lots of money.

Author: Guy Lawson
Source: Rolling Stone
Published: Mar 17, 2011
Length: 43 minutes (10,854 words)

A Talent for Sloth

My lookout tower is situated five miles from the nearest road, on a ten-thousand-foot peak in the Gila National Forest. I live here for several months each year, without electricity or running water. Although tens of thousands of acres are touched by fire here every year, I can go weeks without seeing a twist of smoke. During these lulls I simply watch and wait, my eyes becoming ever more intimate with an ecological transition zone encompassing dry grasslands, pinon-juniper foothills, ponderosa parkland, and spruce-fir high country.

Published: Mar 16, 2011
Length: 12 minutes (3,065 words)

Cannibals Seeking Same: A Visit To The Online World Of Flesh-Eaters

While it was shut down with a Denial of Service attack by the German authorities in late 2002, the website for the Cannibal Café can still be viewed online thanks to the Wayback Machine. Nine years is an eternity when it comes to the Internet and, suspended there in history, the website is a time capsule of early website-design features and flourishes, down to a .gif of dripping blood and the flashing “WARNING” sign. Its forum messages also carry the whiff of a different era; written at a time when people, unaware and unafraid of consequences, were more open with their identities online.

Author: Josh Kurp
Source: The Awl
Published: Mar 16, 2011
Length: 13 minutes (3,437 words)

The Boy from Gitmo

Eight years ago, an [REDACTED] Afghan kid—some say he was [REDACTED] years old, others say he was 12—was grabbed in a Kabul marketplace after a grenade attack on two American soldiers. He was interrogated, [REDACTED], and then taken to Guantánamo. He spent his teenage years there, seven in all, confined in a [REDACTED] [REDACTED] [REDACTED] with the supposed “worst of the worst.” But then, thanks ot the superhuman efforts of his defense team and one intense [REDACTED] military lawyer, the government’s case against him disintegrated. Now he’s back in Afghanistan, free as a badly damaged bird, in a [REDACTED] country he barely recognizes, wondering where you go when you grew up nowhere

Source: GQ
Published: Feb 1, 2011
Length: 36 minutes (9,063 words)

The Suburbanization of Mike Tyson

Kiki, who is 34, is a well-spoken, down-to-earth woman who seems pleasantly oblivious to her own exotically good looks and celebrity status by virtue of being Mike Tyson’s wife. Making a viable life with the complicated, demon-haunted man she has married requires patience. “It’s a struggle,” she says, speaking about his relapses post-rehab. “You’re always an addict and have to work at it. It’s easy for him to fall back in his own life. He surrounds himself with people who are sober and doesn’t go out to clubs. If his pattern shifts, you know something’s wrong.”

Published: Mar 16, 2011
Length: 19 minutes (4,996 words)

Owsley Stanley: The King of LSD

Owsley did not parachute in to the Human Be-In in January 1967, as was widely reported, but he did provide 300,000 hits of acid called “White Lightning” for the event. Five months later at Monterey Pop, Owsley passed out his “Monterey Purple” backstage to Jimi Hendrix, Pete Townshend and the Stones’ Brian Jones, not to mention much of the festival’s staff and crew. Owsley also sent a photographer back to England with a telephoto lens packed with tabs of purple acid on the condition that he share them with the Beatles. “The thing about Owsley,” Townshend said, “is that when he gave you something, he would take it too. Just to show you. He must have had the most extraordinary liver.” During this period, the Grateful Dead wrote “Alice D. Millionaire,” a play on words from a headline about Owsley in The San Francisco Chronicle that read, “LSD Millionaire Arrested.”

Source: Rolling Stone
Published: Jul 12, 2007
Length: 27 minutes (6,930 words)

Voices from Chernobyl

We were newlyweds. We still walked around holding hands, even if we were just going to the store. I would say to him, “I love you.” But I didn’t know then how much. I had no idea . . . We lived in the dormitory of the fire station where he worked. I always knew what was happening—where he was, how he was. One night I heard a noise. I looked out the window. He saw me. “Close the window and go back to sleep. There’s a fire at the reactor. I’ll be back soon.”

Published: Dec 1, 2004
Length: 38 minutes (9,707 words)

Seeing God in Tsunamis and Everyday Events

It’s only a matter of time—in fact, they’ve already started cropping up—before reality-challenged individuals begin pontificating about what God could have possibly been so hot-and-bothered about to trigger last week’s devastating earthquake and tsunami in Japan. (Surely, if we were to ask Westboro Baptist Church members, it must have something to do with the gays.) But from a psychological perspective, what type of mind does it take to see unexpected natural events such as the horrifying scenes still unfolding in Japan as “signs” or “omens” related to human behaviors?

Published: Mar 13, 2011
Length: 8 minutes (2,157 words)

Hollywood Shadows: A Cure for Blocked Screenwriters

The writer was in despair. For a year and a half, he had been trying to write a script that he owed to a studio, and had been unable to produce anything. Finally, he started seeing a therapist. The therapist, Barry Michels, told him to close his eyes and focus on the things he was grateful for. The first time he did this, in the therapist’s office, there was a long silence. “What about your dog?” Michels asked. “O.K. I’m grateful for my dog,” the writer said after a while. “The sun?” “Fine, the sun,” the writer said. “I’m grateful for sun. Sometimes.”

Source: The New Yorker
Published: Mar 15, 2011
Length: 21 minutes (5,383 words)