The Last Temptation of Ted Haggard

When the reverend Ted Haggard was outed four years ago, it was in a ball of biblical hellfire—crystal meth! Gay sex! Unholy massages! Banished from the church he founded, he was forced to wander the Arizona desert selling insurance. Now Pastor Ted returns with his wife by his side, a new church, and a more open theology. Is he chastened? Somewhat. Straight? Hmm. Ready for a second coming? Absolutely.

Source: GQ
Published: Jan 26, 2011
Length: 18 minutes (4,711 words)

How Billionaires Rule Our Schools

Hundreds of private philanthropies together spend almost $4 billion annually to support or transform K–12 education, most of it directed to schools that serve low-income children. But three funders—the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation, and the Walton Family Foundation—working in sync, command the field. Whatever nuances differentiate the motivations of the Big Three, their market-based goals for overhauling public education coincide: choice, competition, deregulation, accountability, and data-based decision-making.

Source: Dissent
Published: Jan 18, 2011
Length: 21 minutes (5,496 words)

Body Snatchers

In 2004, 244 corpses supposedly destined for cremation at a Philadelphia funeral home were hacked apart, their organs and tissue sold for transplantation. It’s a gruesome story of betrayal, for both the grieving families and the unwitting recipients of diseased body parts.

Author: Dan P. Lee
Published: Mar 25, 2008
Length: 21 minutes (5,343 words)

In Norway, Startups Say Ja to Socialism

We venture to the very heart of the hell that is Scandinavian socialism—and find out that it’s not so bad. Pricey, yes, but a good place to start and run a company. What exactly does that suggest about the link between taxes and entrepreneurship? “Whereas most entrepreneurs in Dalmo’s position develop a retching distaste for paying taxes, Dalmo doesn’t mind them much. ‘The tax system is good—it’s fair,’ he tells me. ‘What we’re doing when we are paying taxes is buying a product. So the question isn’t how you pay for the product; it’s the quality of the product.’ Dalmo likes the government’s services, and he believes that he is paying a fair price.”

Source: Inc.
Published: Jan 20, 2011
Length: 24 minutes (6,026 words)

Robbing from the Poor (Writer)

“Robin Hood” opens a year late, with a Tomatometer rating of 44% and it is not expected to unseat “Iron Man 2” as #1 film over the weekend. Oh, and they disliked it at Cannes. Oh, and the budget is rumored to be $250 million and maybe even more. Would you believe this film began with one of the hottest screenplays in town? A screenplay that *was not about* Robin Hood?

Published: May 14, 2010
Length: 16 minutes (4,221 words)

Travis the Menace

He was the most famous ape in America. But to really understand a chimp, you have to know his mother. “In her arms, swaddled and in a diaper, lay tiny Travis—named after her favorite singer, Travis Tritt. Travis was the son of Coco, who’d been snatched from the jungles of equatorial Africa in the early seventies and purchased for $12,000, and an 11-year-old retired zoo chimp named Suzy.”

Author: Dan P. Lee
Published: Jan 24, 2011
Length: 24 minutes (6,096 words)

Mike Bloomberg Will Save Us from Ourselves If Only We Let Him

Mike Bloomberg has become important because he represents a great American dream, not the one about owning a home or becoming more successful than your father but the one beneath all of those, the foundational American dream — the dream of freedom from politics. Bloomberg is the ultimate independent, the calm modern technocrat rooted in metrics and cleansed of ideology, come to drain the swamps of government with his amazing modern business-management techniques … unless he’s actually just an old-fashioned autocrat looking down on us from above and tinkering with our lives like a science experiment, stripping our noisy polis of all its native poetry.

Source: Esquire
Published: Jan 24, 2011
Length: 29 minutes (7,356 words)

The Foreskin Renaissance

Tally is short for Tallywacker, a British nickname for penis. It is also the nom de Internet of a 55-year-old, heterosexual, happily married attorney in Tennessee who is at the vanguard of the foreskin restoration movement. With evangelical zest, he shares his story, and a sequential series of photographs of his penis, to thousands of private members and hundreds of daily visitors to his websites, RestoringForeskin.org and RestoringTally.com.

Published: Jan 18, 2011
Length: 14 minutes (3,707 words)

The West Wing, Season II

For Obama, retooling on this scale does not come naturally or happily. Among the hallmarks of his political career has been constancy: a tight and basically static cadre of close advisers and a stubborn resistance to calls for midcourse corrections. Yet in a series of interviews in early January with senior White House officials and many of Obama’s closest confidants outside the building, a picture emerged of a president engaged in a searching, clear-eyed, and sometimes painful process of self-scrutiny, and now determined to implement a plan to fix what has ailed his enterprise—and himself.

Published: Jan 24, 2011
Length: 26 minutes (6,696 words)

Does Football Have a Future? The NFL and the Concussion Crisis

“In the past, it was a style of ball that was three yards and a cloud of dust, so you didn’t see too many of these big hits, because there wasn’t so much space between players,” the Steelers’ Troy Polamalu said. “I mean, with the passing game now, you get four-wide-receiver sets, sometimes five-wide-receiver sets. You get guys coming across the middle, you get zone coverages. You know, there’s more space between these big hits, so there’s more opportunity for these big hits.”

Source: The New Yorker
Published: Jan 24, 2011
Length: 38 minutes (9,502 words)