Remember This

There is a 41-year-old woman, an administrative assistant from California known in the medical literature only as “AJ,” who remembers almost every day of her life since age 11. There is an 85-year-old man, a retired lab technician called “EP,” who remembers only his most recent thought. She might have the best memory in the world. He could very well have the worst.

Published: Nov 1, 2007
Length: 22 minutes (5,542 words)

Marty Peretz in Exile

For decades, Martin Peretz taught at Harvard and presided over The New Republic—a fierce, if controversial, lion among American intellectuals and Zionists. Now, having been labeled a bigot, taunted at his alma mater, and stripped of his magazine, he has found peace in a place where there is little: Israel.

Published: Dec 27, 2010
Length: 22 minutes (5,549 words)

Paleo Fitness: The Workout that Time Forgot

“We live like zoo animals!” It’s an idea Erwan Le Corre borrowed from the British zoologist Desmond Morris, author of the 1967 classic “The Naked Ape,” and it’s central to his worldview: that we are essentially wild creatures ill-suited to desk jobs and processed foods. “We have become divorced from nature, trapped in colorless boxes,” Le Corre says. “We have lost our adaptability, and it’s threatening our health and longevity.”

Author: Nick Heil
Source: Outside
Published: Dec 17, 2010
Length: 18 minutes (4,600 words)

Pastry Chef Natalie Zarzour Doesn’t Tolerate People Who Cheapen Her Craft

To understand why customers disappeared, why she entered a self-described period of rage, why the cannoli now costs $9, why the Zarzours will close the shop when their lease runs out in September and how Natalie Zarzour became Chicago’s most provocative pastry chef in a profession with little provocation, just ask her about the “Lobster Tail.”

Author: Kevin Pang
Source: Chicago Tribune
Published: Dec 21, 2010
Length: 6 minutes (1,576 words)

The Nazi and the Psychiatrist

Encounters behind bars between Nazi war criminal Hermann Goering and an American doctor 65 years ago raise questions about responsibility, allegiance and the nature of evil. “After Goering matter-of-factly recounted the murder of a close associate that he had once set into motion, Kelley asked how he could bring himself to demand his old friend be killed. ‘Goering stopped talking and stared at me, puzzled, as if I were not quite bright,’ Kelley recalled. ‘Then he shrugged his great shoulders, turned up his palms and said slowly, in simple, one-syllable words: “But he was in my way….” ‘”

Published: Dec 26, 2010
Length: 12 minutes (3,178 words)

Deepwater Horizon’s Final Hours

The worst of the explosions gutted the Deepwater Horizon stem to stern. Crew members were cut down by shrapnel, hurled across rooms and buried under smoking wreckage. Some were swallowed by fireballs that raced through the oil rig’s shattered interior. Dazed and battered survivors, half-naked and dripping in highly combustible gas, crawled inch by inch in pitch darkness, willing themselves to the lifeboat deck. It was no better there.

Published: Dec 26, 2010
Length: 34 minutes (8,590 words)

Barry Hannah in Conversation with Wells Tower

“Barry Hannah is America’s greatest living writer” is something I started saying when I first read Hannah’s work in the late 1990s. I’m sad I had to stop saying it on March 1 of this year, when Barry passed away. … “HANNAH: The alcohol had the code and mystery about it as a writer’s drug, but I’m glad that’s been debunked. But the trouble with the drinking, much as I hate to admit it, is it helped the work. The first two drinks were always wonderfully liberating. You think better. You’re braver, and you’ll say anything. If you could just hang in there with two or three, it’d be beautiful. The trouble was I couldn’t.”

Source: The Believer
Published: Oct 1, 2010
Length: 17 minutes (4,488 words)

Grandpa Joe and Secretariat: A Christmas Story

In mid-October, he’d seen his beloved Charlie Rose interview Diane Lane and John Malkovich. Ever since that interview, he’d been carrying with him the notion that he would see this movie at his earliest opportunity. Never mind his preceding fondness for the racehorse and its moment in history–there was also *Diane Lane* to consider. (It turns out–and I never really knew this before–my grandfather has a major thing for Diane Lane.) And then there he was, stuck with cancer, stuck dying, stuck in movie limbo.

Published: Dec 23, 2010
Length: 8 minutes (2,168 words)

Personal History: Chicago Christmas, 1984

Then it was the Christmas party. The way we knew it was festive was the garage had been cleared of dog shit. It had also been cleared of the dog, a constantly barking mutt who even bit Warner. He bit Warner, he bit the shovel head Warner thrust at him, sometimes we came in and found him resolutely gnawing the leg of the worktable with a fine sustained rage. Tonight, festively, the dog was locked in the cab of a truck. Now and then, he would hurl himself against the windshield, and somebody, festively, would fling at the windshield a plastic fork or a hamburger bun. The other components of the festivity were a plate of cold cuts on the table where normally the gutters were pre-bent, a garbage can full of iced beer, and a cardboard box holding some dice.

Source: The New Yorker
Published: Dec 22, 2003
Length: 12 minutes (3,028 words)

Twin Freaks

Twin brothers Mike and Steve Marolt have combined genetic gifts and actuarial efficiency to become two of the most accomplished high-altitude skiers alive. “A number of renowned ski mountaineers told me, without wanting their names to be used, that they resented the attention the Marolts had received for their exploits—or, more to the point, the attention the Marolts had sought out. The criticism is that the Marolts ski (and climb) unremarkable, unstylish lines (‘tourist routes,’ as one put it), that they care less about summits than about altimeter readings, and that, above all, they make more of their feats than those feats merit. The fact that they’ve skied so often above 7,000 meters elicits a collective ‘So what?’ from the sport’s elites, who favor first descents and technical derring-do. One of them told me, ‘All it proves is that they have more time and money to waste on trying to get one boring run.'”

Source: Outside
Published: Sep 1, 2010
Length: 19 minutes (4,949 words)