Kurt Cobain: The Rolling Stone Interview (1994)

“I’ve been relieved of so much pressure in the last year and a half,” Cobain says with discernible relief in his voice. “I’m still kind of mesmerized by it.” He ticks off the reasons for his content: “Pulling this [Nirvana] record off. My family. My child. Meeting William Burroughs and doing a record with him. Just little things that no one would recognize or care about. And it has a lot to do with this band. If it wasn’t for this band, those things never would have happened. I’m really thankful, and every month I come to more optimistic conclusions.”

Source: Rolling Stone
Published: Jan 27, 1994
Length: 25 minutes (6,264 words)

Sabermetrician In Exile

A decade after Baseball Prospectus let Voros McCracken spread the gospel in a story that popularized DIPS across the sport, it remains among the most seminal theories developed by sabermetrics, the nickname given to quantitative baseball study. It’s almost certainly the most revolutionary. Nothing before or since has so upended an entire line of thought and forced teams to assess a wide breadth of players in a different fashion. Of course, one great idea guarantees nothing. McCracken lives paycheck to paycheck. He couldn’t make rent on his apartment last year.

Source: The Post Game
Published: Jan 25, 2011
Length: 14 minutes (3,680 words)

From 2004: In Mubarak’s Egypt, Democracy Is an Idea Whose Time Has Not Yet Come

“Mubarak fears that if he widens the margins of democracy things will happen,” Essam al-Eryam, one of the Muslim Brotherhood’s most prominent middle-aged leaders, told me at the Brotherhood’s headquarters. “There will be democracy here, sooner or later. It requires patience, and we are more patient because we are, as an organization, seventy-six years old. You have already seen some countries—Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, Sudan, Iran—describe themselves as Islamic regimes. There’s a diversity of models, even among the Sunni and the Shia. Egypt can present a model that is more just and tolerant.”

Source: The New Yorker
Published: Jul 12, 2004
Length: 31 minutes (7,786 words)

On Homophobia and Recruiting in Women’s College Basketball

Emily Nkosi, who as Emily Niemann hit five three-pointers for Baylor in its 2005 title win against Michigan State, remembers that when recruiters came to her Houston home, as they did by the dozens in 2002, they had to pass a test. “On home visits,” Nkosi says, “my dad was assigned the question: ‘Do you have a bunch of lesbians on your team?'” Nkosi says her youth coaches abetted the process, vetting programs with their own inquiries about a “healthy climate” and the like. “You know,” Nkosi says, “the code words.” This line of questioning was especially fraught for Nkosi because, deep down, she knew she was a lesbian. But she was also a fundamentalist Christian who feared the religious repercussions of that reality.

Source: ESPN
Published: Jan 26, 2011
Length: 12 minutes (3,053 words)

The Hot Spotters

Can we lower medical costs by giving the neediest patients better care? “The program, Fernandopulle told me, is still discovering new tricks. His team just recently figured out, for instance, that one reason some patients call 911 for problems the clinic would handle better is that they don’t have the clinic’s twenty-four-hour call number at hand when they need it. The health coaches told the patients to program it into their cell-phone speed dial, but many didn’t know how to do that. So the health coaches began doing it for them, and the number of 911 calls fell. High-cost habits are sticky; staff members are still learning the subtleties of unsticking them.”

Source: The New Yorker
Published: Jan 24, 2011
Length: 36 minutes (9,005 words)

I Was Teenage Hockey Message Board Jailbait

If you Google hard enough, you can locate a thread deep within the Internet that was posted to the alt.sports.hockey.nhl.phila-flyers Usenet newsgroup on March 22, 2000. “Where oh where is Katie Baker??” reads the subject line. “What the hell happened to her?” says the post. The responses are mercifully cryptic. “Detention,” wrote one man. “Isn’t she trapped in Cambridge?” cracked another. “Harvard has a high school? :)” responded someone with the username Nastyflyersgirl. “Wow,” wrote one lady called Starr. “No one is safe with any secrets here. Like they say, the truth is bound to come out sooner or later.”

Source: Deadspin
Published: Jan 27, 2011
Length: 21 minutes (5,284 words)

The New School of Fish

The Bay Area’s smartest diners, chefs, and purveyors now know (and care) where every cut of grass-fed beef and stalk of pesticide-free produce comes from. Yet nearly all look the other way when fish is on the plate. “I had so many people walk up to the fish market and say, ‘What do you mean, you don’t carry it? Mollie Stone’s carries it. Whole Foods carries it.’?” They assume that if you can find ahi tuna at Whole Foods Market, a store that calls itself the “world’s largest retailer of natural and organic foods,” it must be okay.

Author: Erik Vance
Published: Jan 27, 2011
Length: 21 minutes (5,473 words)

Larry Page’s Google 3.0

In the 1.0 era, which ran from 1996 to 2001, Page and Brin incubated the company at Stanford University and in a Menlo Park (Calif.) garage. In 2001 they ushered in the triumphant 2.0 era by hiring Schmidt, a tech industry grown-up who’d been CEO of Novell. Now comes the third phase, led by Page and dedicated to rooting out bureaucracy and rediscovering the nimble moves of youth.

Author: Brad Stone
Source: Businessweek
Published: Jan 27, 2011
Length: 15 minutes (3,989 words)

The Wave-Maker

When Ken Bradshaw caught the largest wave ever surfed, in 1998, he was riding on pure, single-minded passion. But that same quality—plus a deep antipathy to hype—has put him at odds with the increasingly crowded, commercialized world of big-wave surfing. On Oahu’s famed North Shore, the author learns about the 58-year-old maverick’s record-breaking encounter with 85 feet of “Condition Black” water, the battles he still fights, and his unlikely friendship with the publicity-loving Mark Foo, who was killed on a wave he “stole” from Bradshaw.

Source: Vanity Fair
Published: Jan 27, 2011
Length: 37 minutes (9,268 words)

Dealing with Julian Assange and the Secrets He Spilled

Criminalizing the publication of such secrets by someone who has no official obligation seems to me to run up against the First Amendment and the best traditions of this country. As one of my colleagues asks: If Assange were an understated professorial type rather than a character from a missing Stieg Larsson novel, and if WikiLeaks were not suffused with such glib antipathy toward the United States, would the reaction to the leaks be quite so ferocious? And would more Americans be speaking up against the threat of reprisals?

Published: Jan 26, 2011
Length: 32 minutes (8,020 words)