The Commandments: The Constitution and Its Worshippers

Crying constitution is a minor American art form. “This is my copy of the Constitution,” John Boehner, the Speaker of the House, said at a Tea Party rally in Ohio last year, holding up a pocket-size pamphlet. “And I’m going to stand here with the Founding Fathers, who wrote in the preamble, ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights including life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.’ ” Not to nitpick, but this is not the preamble to the Constitution. It is the second sentence of the Declaration of Independence.

Source: The New Yorker
Published: Jan 10, 2011
Length: 23 minutes (5,921 words)

Our Desperate, 250-Year-Long Search for a Gender-Neutral Pronoun

The 1970s saw the next wave of pronoun debates—not coincidentally, in the wake of a second women’s movement. There was a volley of new pronouns, despite the fact that none of the 19th-century ones had gotten anywhere. By the end of the 1970s over eighty new gender-neutral pronouns had been coughed up, including en, thon, hir, hesh, hizer, hirm, sheehy, and sap. As well, the currently fashionable “she” was proposed around this time.

Source: The Awl
Published: Jan 8, 2011
Length: 11 minutes (2,835 words)

The Fresh Air Interview: Joan Rivers

“Some man, 60 years old, that couldn’t take the business and went and killed himself. How do you deal with that? How do you deal with that when you’ve got a 16-year-old daughter who gets the call? Huh? And I’ll tell you how you deal with that. You go through it, and you make jokes about it, and you continue with it, and you move forward. That’s how you do it, or that’s how I do it. Everyone handles things differently. How do you make jokes about how to deal with bankruptcy? How do you deal with your fired from Fox when your numbers were still good, and you can’t get a job for a year and a half? You do it. And I do it by making jokes.”

Source: NPR
Published: Jun 9, 2010
Length: 28 minutes (7,120 words)

The Blown Call That Haunts Major League Baseball Umpire Jim Joyce

He gets to home plate to exchange the lineup cards, and that’s when Armando Galarraga appears out of the dugout. The crowd stands and applauds, and when Galarraga hands Joyce the lineup card, Joyce can’t even read it, the names a fuzzy blur through the tears. The images from that moment, captured live and broadcast across the country, will change how Galarraga and Joyce will be remembered.

Source: ESPN
Published: Jan 6, 2011
Length: 11 minutes (2,918 words)

A Son of the Bayou, Torn Over the Shrimping Life

A few months later, Buddy traded $800 and bartered time and equipment for a 51-foot boat that needed, among other things, a new layer of fiberglass. When the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded 41 miles offshore last April, they were almost done with the seemingly endless repairs. Their goal had been to finish before the young brown shrimp, at their sweetest and most succulent, began to move in May from the marshes to spawn in the salty gulf. And when the oil company’s efforts to cap its leaking well fell short, Aaron recorded it on his Facebook wall. “BP fails…. AGAIN!!!” he posted on May 29. Then, on June 15: “Sleepless night, lots of thinkin goin on.”

Author: Amy Harmon
Published: Jan 7, 2011
Length: 11 minutes (2,941 words)

The Boy Who Died of Football

Three days after he collapsed from heatstroke at practice in 2008, 15-year-old Max Gilpin became one of at least 665 boys since 1931 to die as a result of high school football. Here’s what made his case different: The Commonwealth of Kentucky tried to prove Max’s coach had a hand in killing him.

Published: Dec 6, 2010
Length: 30 minutes (7,664 words)

Afghanistan: Land of War and Opportunity

In Herat, Kabul, and cities large and small, Paul Brinkley serves as tour guide, ambassador, fixer, motivational speaker, and leader of the unofficial Afghanistan chamber of commerce. With all of his titles and duties, he prefers to think of himself primarily as a matchmaker, negotiating high-stakes unions between multinational companies like IBM and JPMorgan Chase and Afghan officials and entrepreneurs. Building a culture of business is the only way Brinkley and General David Petraeus, commander of NATO forces in Afghanistan, believe they can counteract the legendary forces of destruction here—from decades of war and deprivation to the brutal rule of the Taliban and a reliance on opium as a chief export.

Source: Businessweek
Published: Jan 7, 2011
Length: 17 minutes (4,292 words)

The Web Is a Customer Service Medium

The web was surprisingly good at emulating a TV, a newspaper, a book, or a radio. Which meant that people expected it to answer the questions of each medium, and with the promise of advertising revenue as incentive, web developers set out to provide those answers. As a result, people in the newspaper industry saw the web as a newspaper. People in TV saw the web as TV, and people in book publishing saw it as a weird kind of potential book. But the web is not just some kind of magic all-absorbing meta-medium. It’s its own thing. And like other media it has a question that it answers better than any other. That question is: “Why wasn’t I consulted?”

Author: Paul Ford
Source: Ftrain
Published: Jan 6, 2011
Length: 10 minutes (2,603 words)

The Tyranny of Defense Inc.

For those at the top, the American military profession is that rare calling where retirement need not imply a reduced income. On the contrary: senior serving officers shed their uniforms not merely to take up golf or go fishing but with the reasonable expectation of raking in big money. In a recent e-mail, a serving officer who is a former student of mine reported that on a visit to the annual meeting of the Association of the United States Army—in his words, “the Sodom and Gomorrah of the Military Industrial Complex”—he was “accosted by two dozen former bosses, now in suits with fancy ties and business cards, hawking the latest defense technologies.”

Source: The Atlantic
Published: Jan 4, 2011
Length: 13 minutes (3,410 words)

The Man Who Spilled the Secrets

The collaboration between WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, the Web’s notorious information anarchist, and some of the world’s most respected news organizations began at The Guardian, a nearly 200-year-old British paper. What followed was a clash of civilizations—and ambitions—as Guardian editors and their colleagues at The New York Times and other media outlets struggled to corral a whistle-blowing stampede amid growing distrust and anger. With Assange detained in the U.K., the author reveals the story behind the headlines.

Source: Vanity Fair
Published: Jan 6, 2011
Length: 29 minutes (7,338 words)