Whatever Happened to Alternative Nation? Part 10: Woodstock ’99

Promoter John Scher insisted instead that the ugliness of Woodstock 99 reflected a larger moral chasm in the souls of the attendees. “I think, in some respects, the generation was irresponsible and they gave me and themselves the finger,” Scher told Spin. He wasn’t the only one who felt that Woodstock 99 amounted to a big “fuck you!” from legions of incorrigible kids. More than one writer likened Woodstock 99 to “The Day Of The Locust,” the 1939 Nathanael West novel about wanton sin and alienation in Los Angeles that ends with violent mob violence.

Source: Onion A.V. Club
Published: Feb 22, 2011
Length: 15 minutes (3,866 words)

The People V. Football

When Jeanne Marie Laskas started reporting on the devastating impact of repeated hits to football players’ brains in 2009, the NFL was still in denial. By now the evidence is irrefutable, and every bloody Sunday (and Monday and Thursday) it becomes a little harder not to cringe with each collision. But if you’re a guy like former star linebacker Fred McNeill who’s living with the effects of those hits, the question is: How can we keep watching the game—and how can we keep asking our kids to play it?

Source: GQ
Published: Feb 22, 2011
Length: 26 minutes (6,582 words)

Rage Against Your Machine: Drivers vs. Cyclists in America

“As a couples therapist, I tell people that we take things so personally,” he says as we near the Whitestone Bridge, on the first dedicated bike path we’ve seen in more than two hours. It’s easy, when a car edges too close or cuts him off, to “go to that paranoid place where they’re just trying to fuck with me. We’re so worried that someone else can steal our sense of self that we fight for it at every turn.” But it could have been just that the driver didn’t see him. Under the spell of what’s called “inattentional blindness,” people have been known to miss obvious things simply because they’re not looking for them. Either that or what seems inconsequential in a car—passing by within a foot or two—can be terrifying to someone on a bike.

Source: Outside
Published: Feb 21, 2011
Length: 19 minutes (4,865 words)

On the Square: Were the Egyptian Protesters Right to Trust the Military?

We discussed possible leaders. None of the opposition parties had been able to garner any significant support among the protesters. Most seemed well-meaning but amateurish, and were headed by an older generation. I mentioned Mohamed ElBaradei, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate, who had returned to Egypt from Vienna, where he lives, and quickly became associated with the protests. Sherif, like many on the square, was unimpressed: “Baradei? Where is he? He came to the square for four or five minutes and then left. My sister says he’s on the news channels every five minutes, saying, I did this and I did that and I said all that and I predicted that. But he’s been in Vienna this whole time.”

Source: The New Yorker
Published: Feb 21, 2011
Length: 30 minutes (7,501 words)

The Truth About Sex Addiction

Within a half-hour of my first meeting Neil Melinkovich, a 59-year-old life coach, sometime writer and former model who has been in Sex Addicts Anonymous for more than 20 years, he told me about the time in 1987 that he made a quick detour from picking up his girlfriend at the Los Angeles airport so he could purchase a service from a prostitute. Afterward, he noticed what he thought was red lipstick on himself. It turned out to be blood from the woman’s mouth. He washed in a gas-station bathroom, met his girlfriend at the airport and then, in the grip of his insatiability, had unprotected sex with her as soon as they got home–in the same bed he said he had used to entertain three other women in the days before.

Author: John Cloud
Source: Time
Published: Feb 19, 2011
Length: 12 minutes (3,072 words)

The Loneliness of the American College Transfer Student

I don’t usually bother telling people I went to Michigan for a single semester anymore. There isn’t much point because I’m at the age where people don’t give a shit where you went to school. They just ask you that question as a way of passing the time. But I also don’t mention it much because frankly, I’m still somewhat embarrassed by it. I transferred from Michigan, and while being a transfer student isn’t that big of a deal if you happen to be a D-I athlete shuttling between programs, it means something quite a bit different when you’re just a plain old kid.

Source: Deadspin
Published: Feb 17, 2011
Length: 8 minutes (2,099 words)

Taming the Wild

Mavrik, the object of Trut’s attention, is about the size of a Shetland sheepdog, with chestnut orange fur and a white bib down his front. He plays his designated role in turn: wagging his tail, rolling on his back, panting eagerly in anticipation of attention. Trut reaches in and scoops him up, then hands him over to me. Cradled in my arms, gently jawing my hand in his mouth, he’s as docile as any lapdog. Except that Mavrik, as it happens, is not a dog at all. He’s a fox. Hidden away on this overgrown property, flanked by birch forests and barred by a rusty metal gate, he and several hundred of his relatives are the only population of domesticated silver foxes in the world.

Published: Feb 18, 2011
Length: 17 minutes (4,446 words)

The Day the Movies Died

“Fear has descended,” says James Schamus, the screenwriter-producer who also heads the profitable indie company Focus Features, “and nobody in Hollywood wants to be the person who green-lit a movie that not only crashes but about which you can’t protect yourself by saying, ‘But at least it was based on a comic book!’ “

Source: GQ
Published: Feb 17, 2011
Length: 20 minutes (5,177 words)

Turks and Caicos: Caribbean Hangover

The blue water is so clear you can count every reef, so still you can see the odd cloud reflected in it. Lucy and Jeff have agreed to offer a view from the sky of what wary developers wrought on the ground: shuttered private-island resorts and abandoned luxury hotels marring the landscape, suspended in time by financing woes, criminal investigations, or both. This British territory, largely undeveloped in the 20th century, became a playground for celebrities and the ultrarich as its reputation grew along with the easy money and loose credit of the boom years.

Source: Businessweek
Published: Feb 17, 2011
Length: 14 minutes (3,685 words)

Why Isn’t Wall Street In Jail?

In the end, of course, it wasn’t just the executives of Lehman and AIGFP who got passes. Virtually every one of the major players on Wall Street was similarly embroiled in scandal, yet their executives skated off into the sunset, uncharged and unfined. Goldman Sachs paid $550 million last year when it was caught defrauding investors with crappy mortgages, but no executive has been fined or jailed — not even Fabrice “Fabulous Fab” Tourre, Goldman’s outrageous Euro-douche who gleefully e-mailed a pal about the “surreal” transactions in the middle of a meeting with the firm’s victims. In a similar case, a sales executive at the German powerhouse Deutsche Bank got off on charges of insider trading; its general counsel at the time of the questionable deals, Robert Khuzami, now serves as director of enforcement for the SEC.

Source: Rolling Stone
Published: Feb 16, 2011
Length: 24 minutes (6,189 words)