The Worldwide Leader in Dong Shots
With his leering coverage of Brett Favre’s penis (allegedly!), Rex Ryan’s foot fetish, and the surprising sex life of ESPN, A. J. Daulerio has turned Deadspin.com into the raunchiest, funniest, and most controversial sports site on the Web. But at what cost to his soul? And hell, to sports journalism itself?
The Worst Case
How health care reform really could get repealed—and why the repercussions would go well beyond health care. “The legal debate surrounding repeal is complicated and multi-dimensional. But part of it revolves around a novel philosophical twist: a distinction between activity and inactivity that, repeal advocates say, makes the insurance requirement an illegitimate exercise of federal authority.”
The White House Looks for Work
The path from crisis to anemic recovery was marked by turmoil inside the White House. The economic team fractured repeatedly over philosophy (should jobs or deficits take priority?) and personality (who got to attend which meetings?), resulting in feuds that ultimately helped break it apart. The word commonly used by those involved is “dysfunctional,” and in recent months, most of the initial team has left or made plans to leave, including Larry Summers, Christina Romer, Peter Orszag, Rahm Emanuel and Paul Volcker.
The Case Against Lance Armstrong
The FDA’s investigation, directed by agent Jeff Novitzky, is focused on whether Armstrong was involved in an organized doping operation as a member of the team sponsored by the U.S. Postal Service (USPS), an independent agency of the federal government. In light of this criminal inquiry involving the greatest Tour de France rider of all time, SI reviewed hundreds of pages of documents and interviewed dozens of sources in Europe, New Zealand and the U.S. Because the case could potentially involve accusations that are more than a decade old, SI also examined doping allegations against Armstrong throughout his career as a pro cyclist, discovering information that is reported here for the first time.
Why Does Roger Ailes Hate America?
Does any of us win all the time? Of course not, or else we wouldn’t be average. But Roger Ailes does. And so, Mr. Ailes, Esquire has a question, on behalf of other average Americans: What kind of man wins all the time? What kind of man gives his country, in roughly this order, Mike Douglas, Richard Nixon, Tom Snyder, Ronald Reagan’s “Morning in America,” the Willie Horton ad, the ad in which Michael Dukakis rides around in a tank and looks like a chipmunk, the presidency of George H. W. Bush, CNBC, Fox News (upstart-insurgent edition), Fox News (airwaves-of-the-empire edition), Fox News (“Obama sux” edition), and Fox News (Tea Party edition)? More pointedly, what kind of man figures out at age twenty-seven how to use television to legitimize Richard Nixon and then at age seventy to legitimize Sarah Palin?
Opium Wars
A key step to securing peace will be to wean Afghan farmers off growing poppies. “This is a bad way to make money. It trains you for no other occupation. When a father feeds a boy with money from poppies, he will grow poppies too. He’ll have no other skill. We have no carpenters, no engineers, no mechanics. We have nothing.” With a sad smile, the farmer says, “It is a kind of cancer on our country.”
Playboy Interview: Martin Luther King Jr.
I have a job to do. If I were constantly worried about death, I couldn’t function. After a while, if your life is more or less constantly in peril, you come to a point where you accept the possibility philosophically. I must face the fact, as all others in positions of leadership must do, that America today is an extremely sick nation, and that something could well happen to me at any time. I feel, though, that my cause is so right, so moral, that if I should lose my life, in some way it would aid the cause. #MLK
What We Can Learn from a Nuclear Reactor
The connection between banks and nuclear reactors is not obvious to most bankers, nor banking regulators. But to the men and women who study industrial accidents such as Three Mile Island, Deepwater Horizon, Bhopal or the Challenger shuttle—engineers, psychologists and even sociologists—the connection is obvious. James Reason, a psychologist who studies human error in aviation, medicine, shipping and industry, uses the downfall of Barings Bank as a favourite case study. “I used to speak to bankers about risk and accidents and they thought I was talking about people banging their shins,” he told me. “Then they discovered what a risk is. It came with the name of Nick Leeson.”
Detroitism: What Does ‘Ruin Porn’ Tell Us About the Motor City?
“Red Dawn 2,” the forthcoming sequel to the nineteen eighties B-movie about a Soviet occupation of America, was shot last year in downtown Detroit. A long-abandoned modernist skyscraper coincidentally undergoing demolition served as a backdrop for battle scenes between American guerrillas and the Communist occupiers, now Chinese. For weeks, Chinese propaganda posters fluttered in the foreground of the half-destroyed office building, whose jagged entrails were visible through the holes opened by the wrecking ball. It was an uncanny spectacle: the very real rubble of the Motor City’s industrial economy serving as the movie backdrop for post-industrial America’s paranoid fantasies of national victimization.
Don’t Look Back
Many politicians have committed indiscretions in earlier years: maybe they had an affair or hired an illegal immigrant as a nanny. Republican Congressman Darrell Issa, it turned out, had, among other things, been indicted for stealing a car, arrested for carrying a concealed weapon, and accused by former associates of burning down a building.
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