The Quaid Conspiracy
They’re spending nights in their car, on the run from the same shadowy cabal—”the Hollywood Star Whackers”—who may have killed Heath Ledger, possibly sabotaged Jeremy Piven, and could now be targeting Lindsay Lohan. No, this is not the plot of Oscar nominee and Golden Globe winner Randy Quaid’s latest movie. It is what he and his wife, Evi, swear is really happening to them.
The House That Thurman Munson Built
Trust me, he said, and the last great brawling sports team in America did. Twenty years after Thurman Munson’s death, Reggie, Catfish, Goose, Gator, the Boss—and a nation of former boys—still aren’t over it. “I give you Thurman Munson in the eighth inning of a meaningless baseball game, in a half-empty stadium in a bad Yankee year during a fourteen-season Yankee drought, and Thurman Munson is running, arms pumping, busting his way from second to third like he’s taking Omaha Beach, sliding down in a cloud of luminous, Saharan dust, then up on two feet, clapping his hands, turtling his head once around, spitting diamonds of saliva: Safe.”
Divided We Eat
What food says about class in America. “In America,” epidemiologist Adam Drewnowski wrote in an e-mail, “food has become the premier marker of social distinctions, that is to say—social class. It used to be clothing and fashion, but no longer, now that ‘luxury’ has become affordable and available to all.” He points to an article in The New York Times, written by Michael Pollan, which describes a meal element by element, including “a basket of morels and porcini gathered near Mount Shasta.” “Pollan,” writes Drewnowski, “is drawing a picture of class privilege that is as acute as anything written by Edith Wharton or Henry James.”
Inside the Wild, Wacky, Profitable World of Boing Boing
We know what happens next: This hobby morphs into a successful business. But Boing Boing’s version of that tale is a little different. Mark Frauenfelder and his partners — Cory Doctorow, Xeni Jardin, and David Pescovitz — didn’t rake in investment capital, recruit a big staff and a hotshot CEO, or otherwise attempt to leverage themselves into a “real” media company. They didn’t even rent an office. They continued to treat their site as a side project, even as it became a business with revenue comfortably in the seven figures. Basically, they declined to professionalize. You could say they refused to grow up.
The Courage of Jill Costello
After a promising junior season as a coxswain at Cal, she learned she was in the late stages of cancer. The next year was her best. “When she asked her doctors about rejoining the team, they looked at her as if she were crazy. Crew? She’d need all her strength just to make it through each day. Jill didn’t care. She told her mom she saw cancer as ‘just another thing on my plate.’ Besides, she’d had three goals for the better part of her adult life: to graduate from Cal, to cox the first boat and to win nationals. She saw no reason to change them.”
Unwanted
Inside Colorado’s dysfunctional foster care system. “Like any new parent, she was learning as she went. Parents typically have nine months to prepare for a baby: paint the baby’s room, stock up on diapers, fret over which car seat to buy, moon over onesies, and read ‘What to Expect When You’re Expecting.’ Not Erika Righter. She’d had just a couple of days to prepare. Seventy-two hours earlier, she got the call to become a foster care mom. Now, in the hospital, as she held Josefina tight and watched Gabriel’s chest rise and fall in a steady rhythm, Righter thought, It wasn’t supposed to be like this.”
Don Draper’s Revenge
Everyone is waiting for Omnicom, Interpublic, WPP, and Publicis to fade away. But these lumbering advertising behemoths have advantages over smaller, cutting-edge firms. “All these little companies with fun names,” says David Lubars, “we’ve kicked their butts.” Lubars is chairman and chief creative officer of Omnicom’s BBDO North America, an 82-year-old Madison Avenue agency with more than 17,000 employees. “Americans like a story of the big guys getting taken down. But that doesn’t mean that’s what is actually happening.”
On the Death Sentence
Retired Supreme Court justice John Paul Stevens on David Garland’s “Peculiar Institution: America’s Death Penalty in an Age of Abolition.” “Two years ago, quoting from an earlier opinion written by Justice White, I wrote that the death penalty represents ‘the pointless and needless extinction of life with only marginal contributions to any discernible social or public purposes.’ Professor David Garland identifies arguably relevant purposes without expressly drawing the conclusion that I think they dictate.”
Monetizing the Celebrity Meltdown
Tom Barrack, a billionaire investor who made his fortune in real estate, has discovered a market in distressed celebrities. With Neverland Ranch and Miramax under his belt, he’s now on a shopping spree—and bringing along his buddy Rob Lowe.
Inside the Bloody World of Illegal Plastic Surgery
There are plastic drawers housing Andy’s tools: scalpel blades; surgical sutures and suture needles; silver nitrate in the form of lunar caustic; bottles of the local anaesthetic lidocaine and syringes with which to inject it. There are also piercing needles and body jewellery—by trade, he’s a body piercer, and sometimes he’ll do piercings here, too—but he has no use for them tonight. He bought all of these items legally; being in possession of them is not against the law. What he plans to do with them, however, will make him a criminal. He knows this.
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