Larry King: ‘Is He Happy? Is He Alright?’

“I’ve had listeners send pictures: ‘This is me, listening to you,’ ” King says, amazed. “I swear to God. ‘Here I am, listening to you.’ … Sometimes, they write poems to me.” He thinks about this, wondering who else might inspire such a thing. “Would people write a poem to Walter Cronkite? I would bet not. But he came into their homes every night too. They would to Johnny Carson. They wouldn’t to Koppel. They would to Jane Pauley. They certainly would to Jane Pauley. Might to Bryant Gumbel. Would to Phil Donahue. Maybe.”

Source: Washington Post
Published: Jan 13, 1991
Length: 18 minutes (4,548 words)

How to Make Wealth

I think everyone who gets rich by their own efforts will be found to be in a situation with measurement and leverage. Everyone I can think of does: CEOs, movie stars, hedge fund managers, professional athletes. A good hint to the presence of leverage is the possibility of failure. Upside must be balanced by downside, so if there is big potential for gain there must also be a terrifying possibility of loss.

Source: Paul Graham
Published: May 1, 2004
Length: 35 minutes (8,871 words)

Topic of Cancer

One fine June day, the author is launching his best-selling memoir, Hitch-22. The next, he’s throwing up backstage at The Daily Show, in a brief bout of denial, before entering the unfamiliar country—with its egalitarian spirit, martial metaphors, and hard bargains of people who have cancer.

Source: Vanity Fair
Published: Sep 1, 2010
Length: 7 minutes (1,770 words)

The Inequality That Matters

Another root cause of growing inequality is that the modern world, by so limiting our downside risk, makes extreme risk-taking all too comfortable and easy. More risk-taking will mean more inequality, sooner or later, because winners always emerge from risk-taking. Yet bankers who take bad risks (provided those risks are legal) simply do not end up with bad outcomes in any absolute sense. They still have millions in the bank, lots of human capital and plenty of social status. We’re not going to bring back torture, trial by ordeal or debtors’ prisons, nor should we. Yet the threat of impoverishment and disgrace no longer looms the way it once did, so we no longer can constrain excess financial risk-taking. It’s too soft and cushy a world.

Published: Dec 14, 2010
Length: 23 minutes (5,972 words)

Hosed: FDNY’s Black Firefighter Problem

There’s no question that there is something very wrong with how the FDNY adds new employees. For nearly 40 years, various courts have issued injunctions to correct the miserable record of non-white hiring. New York’s fire department may, in fact, be the whitest large institution run by a major city in the United States. Your chance of becoming a firefighter in New York if you aren’t white, Irish, or Italian, and come from a family of firefighters has traditionally been very slim.

Source: Village Voice
Published: Dec 15, 2010
Length: 17 minutes (4,495 words)

Time Person of the Year 2010: Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg

Zuckerberg has often — possibly always — been described as remote and socially awkward, but that’s not quite right. True: holding a conversation with him can be challenging. He approaches conversation as a way of exchanging data as rapidly and efficiently as possible, rather than as a recreational activity undertaken for its own sake. He is formidably quick and talks rapidly and precisely, and if he has no data to transmit, he abruptly falls silent. (“I usually don’t like things that are too much about me” was how he began our first interview.) He cannot be relied on to throw the ball back or give you encouraging facial cues. His default expression is a direct and slightly wide-eyed stare that makes you wonder if you’ve got a spider on your forehead.

Source: Time
Published: Dec 15, 2010
Length: 33 minutes (8,471 words)

The Ongoing Mysteries of the Elizabeth Smart Case

A guilty verdict for Brian David Mitchell is in. But the questions the case raised about polygamy, prophecy, and insanity remain murky. “We knew Brian David Mitchell as a temple moth and thought he was crazy but harmless. This is why we didn’t suspect him, even when he walked around downtown with Elizabeth in tow, her face covered by a veil. It’s about the strangest thing that’s ever happened in Salt Lake City, and it could only have happened here, in this place and time, perhaps caused by the aura emanating from the temple itself.”

Source: Mother Jones
Published: Dec 14, 2010
Length: 24 minutes (6,065 words)

Murder Music

Jamaica’s dancehall music is being blamed for the country’s violent attacks on gays. But there are many who don’t see the music as homophobic, only the battle cry of a changing nation. “In no arena is dancehall—and Jamaican society overall—more troubled than in grappling with sexual orientation. Blaring on most street corners and from car radios, dancehall’s virulent homophobia, a curdled hatred for homosexuals explicitly and pervasively articulated in the music’s lyrics and deeply entrenched in dancehall culture, foments a quotidian reign of terror against Jamaican gay people. Jamaican gays call it murder music.”

Published: Dec 1, 2010
Length: 13 minutes (3,334 words)

The Last Mission

From 2009: Richard Holbrooke’s plan to avoid the mistakes of Vietnam in Afghanistan. “…Holbrooke couldn’t stop invoking the war of his youth. From Kabul, he called the journalist Stanley Karnow, an old friend, and put him on the phone with General McChrystal to discuss the lessons of Vietnam. He mentioned Vietnam in staff meetings in Washington, and he brought it up in a speech to American Embassy personnel on my last day in Kabul: ‘Having been in similar circumstances earlier in my career, in another war—as they say, in a distant galaxy and another time—I know what it’s like to be out here in difficult conditions without your family.'”

Source: The New Yorker
Published: Sep 29, 2009
Length: 59 minutes (14,846 words)

Ellen Ripley Saved My Life

On female sci-fi heroines. “So it’s a mercy we have Ripley. David Foster Wallace may not have agreed with his date that The Terminator was one long story about the evils of abortioning—but I do! Girl, call me!—but I find it not at all unreasonable to suggest that the entire Alien franchise is about people who are dealing with unplanned pregnancies, and would very much like the possibility of a safe and legal abortion, if only to keep their rib cages from exploding.”

Author: Sady Doyle
Source: The Awl
Published: Dec 7, 2010
Length: 15 minutes (3,834 words)