First Do No Harm
Georgeanne Mumm’s surgeon emerged from the operating room with welcome news for her worried family. He had removed her cancerous kidney, he said, and her outlook looked good. The surgeon failed to mention, however, that he also had accidentally removed part of her pancreas, having mistaken it for a tumor. Nor did he mention that he had in-advertently cut the blood flow to her spleen, damaging it irrevocably. Only an emergency operation by another doctor the next day kept Georgeanne from dying right then and there.
NPR Amps Up: Can Vivian Schiller Build a Journalism Juggernaut? (2010)
Schiller has animated the place with the energy of renewed ambition, a rededication to producing serious journalism. Her strategy rests on three pillars: expand original reporting at the national and local levels; provide free access to public media content regardless of platform; and serve audiences of all backgrounds and interests. To do all that, she wants to work in partnership with NPR’s member stations as well as independent producers and some of the new nonprofit journalism units springing up around the country.
North Korea’s Digital Underground
Their work is illegal and extremely dangerous, and it is producing results. In December 2009, for example, one reporter for the Daily NK, a Web site based in Seoul, embarrassed Pyongyang by intercepting a copy of Kim Jong Il’s annual message, a critical document that sets the ideological tone for the year, before it appeared in North Korea’s official newspaper, Rodong Sinmun. This past December, Open Radio North Korea, a broadcast-news organization, broke the story that a train headed for Pyongyang with gifts from China for Kim Jong Un, the heir apparent, was reportedly sabotaged and derailed, in one of several sporadic and mostly unreported acts of resistance that would have been unthinkable a few years ago.
Schemes of My Father
He’d been doing very well in Baltimore, earning six figures as the vice president of a bank, but he tossed his job out the window when some Reaganomics-drunk investor (“an admirer,” my father called him) phoned him out of the blue to see if he wanted to direct a savings and loan out west. And for a while after we moved, he seemed to live up to the opulent vision he’d dazzled me with on my first visit. Unsatisfied with our first house in Rolling Hills, he leased us a big Mediterranean nearby for $5,000 a month, roughly $11,000 today. There was a swimming pool and a tennis court and a barn where my father put up a pen for his two hunting dogs. I didn’t know what he was doing to make so much money, but I wholeheartedly endorsed it.
Two Men, Introduced in Gruesome Scene, Search for Answers
It was midday on a bleak and hard highway when bullets cut the air — cool, thin, Wyoming air. The first came through the windshield, into his left eye, stopping millimeters from his brain. If there was pain, he doesn’t remember. It’s the sensation of a falling red curtain he talks about. He slumped right, across the seat. Fumbling, he clutched the radio, screaming to dispatchers, “I’ve been shot! I’ve been shot! Help! Help!” Then it felt like burning iron thrusting again and again through the flesh of his lower back.
Showdown in the Sunshine State
Two of Wall Street’s savviest value investors, Bruce Berkowitz and David Einhorn, pride themselves on their rigorous analysis. Now they’re locked in a scorched-earth dispute over the value of some Florida real estate. How could they look at the same facts and reach such wildly different conclusions, and what does that say about the “value” of value investing?
Robots Say the Damnedest Things
“I’ve got a brother,” she finally says. “He’s a disabled vet from Vietnam. We haven’t heard from him in a while, so I think he might be deceased. I’m a realist.” Bina48’s eyes whir downward. “He was doing great for the first ten years after Vietnam. His wife got pregnant, and she had a baby, and he was doing a little worse, and then she had a second baby and he went kooky. Just crazy.” “In what way did he go crazy?” I ask. I can feel my heart pound. Talking to Bina48 has just become extraordinary. This woman who won’t meet the media is talking with me, compellingly, through her robot doppelgänger, and it is a fluid insight into a remarkable, if painful, family life.
Dan Rather: Inside Mark Cuban’s Gilded Cage
Neither Cuban nor his executives vet story ideas or scripts. Cuban just writes the checks and watches Rather’s show when it airs. This independence comes at a price, however. During his 44 years with CBS News, Rather became perhaps the nation’s best-known newsman, reaching 18 million viewers a night at his peak. HDNet is only available in about 20 million households—top 25 outlets like USA or the Discovery Channel boast more than 100 million. And since Cuban won’t pay for Nielsen ratings, Rather has little idea how many people are watching. HDNet’s mainstays are mixed martial arts, pro wrestling, a travel show hosted by women in bikinis, and “Girls Gone Wild Presents: Search for the Hottest Girl in America.”
Recap: ‘America’s Next Great Restaurant’
There’s a problem: THE TIFFIN BOX’s menu will “lean heavily towards vegetarian.” The judges are disgusted with this naked display of idealism. One of them asks, What percentage of Americans are vegetarian? “About 15%.” Then the judges make some weird calculations, like since only 15% Americans are vegetarian, only 15% of Americans would ever eat at The Tiffin Box. This makes no sense: I’m not a vegetarian, but I’ll eat at the Tiffin Box at least twice a week! “Where’s David?” “Oh you know him; he’s down at the ol’ Tiffin Box, eating the shit out of everything.” “I didn’t know David was vegetarian.” “I KNOW, IT’S SO CRAZY THAT SOMEBODY WHO EATS CHEESEBURGERS WOULD EVER NOT WANT TO EAT A CHEESEBURGER.”
Moby-Duck: Or, the Synthetic Wilderness of Childhood
Let’s draw a bath. Let’s set a rubber duck afloat. Look at it wobbling there. What misanthrope, what damp, misty November of a sourpuss, upon beholding a rubber duck afloat, does not feel a crayola ray of sunshine brightening his gloomy heart? Graphically, the rubber duck’s closest relative is not a bird or a toy but the yellow happy face of Wal-Mart commercials. A rubber duck is in effect a happy face with a body and lips—which is what the beak of the rubber duck has become: great, lipsticky, bee-stung lips. Both the happy face and the rubber duck reduce facial expressions to a kind of pictogram. They are both emoticons. And they are, of course, the same color—the yellow of an egg yolk or the eye of a daisy, a shade darker than a yellow raincoat, a shade lighter than a taxicab.
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