The Things He Carried

Airport security in America is a sham—”security theater” designed to make travelers feel better and catch stupid terrorists. Smart ones can get through security with fake boarding passes and all manner of prohibited items—as our correspondent did with ease. #Sept11

Source: The Atlantic
Published: Nov 1, 2008
Length: 12 minutes (3,243 words)

Adrift but Unbroken

When their bomber crashed into the vast Pacific, in 1943, Louis Zamperini, Russell Phillips, and Francis McNamara’s odds were slim to none—even before their food and water ran out and the sharks began attacking. In an excerpt from her first book since Seabiscuit, the author reconstructs a historic struggle for survival.

Source: Vanity Fair
Published: Nov 11, 2010
Length: 34 minutes (8,698 words)

The Cold Hard Facts of Freezing to Death

You’ve now crossed the boundary into profound hypothermia. By the time your core temperature has fallen to 88 degrees, your body has abandoned the urge to warm itself by shivering. Your blood is thickening like crankcase oil in a cold engine. Your oxygen consumption, a measure of your metabolic rate, has fallen by more than a quarter. Your kidneys, however, work overtime to process the fluid overload that occurred when the blood vessels in your extremities constricted and squeezed fluids toward your center. You feel a powerful urge to urinate, the only thing you feel at all.

Source: Outside
Published: Jan 1, 1997
Length: 16 minutes (4,043 words)

Housewives of God

Priscilla Shirer’s marriage appears to be just the sort of enlightened partnership that would make feminists cheer. Yet Shirer avoids using words like “feminist” or “career woman” to describe herself. She is an evangelical Bible teacher who makes her living by guiding thousands of women through the study of Scripture in her books, videos and weekend conferences — in which she stresses that in a biblical home and church, the man is the head and the woman must submit.

Published: Nov 12, 2010
Length: 19 minutes (4,893 words)

The Shadow Scholar

You’ve never heard of me, but there’s a good chance that you’ve read some of my work. I’m a hired gun, a doctor of everything, an academic mercenary. My customers are your students. I promise you that. Somebody in your classroom uses a service that you can’t detect, that you can’t defend against, that you may not even know exists. I work at an online company that generates tens of thousands of dollars a month by creating original essays based on specific instructions provided by cheating students.

Author: Ed Dante
Published: Nov 12, 2010
Length: 13 minutes (3,477 words)

Burger Queen: April Bloomfield’s Gastropub Revolution

Jay-Z, an investor in the Spotted Pig, and a frequent patron, wanted the smoked-trout salad, but the kitchen was out. He and his group settled on the house specialty—burgers, which the restaurant’s chef, April Bloomfield, serves one way: char-grilled, on a brioche bun, topped with crumbled Roquefort. Only Lou Reed, a fixture in the neighborhood, is allowed to have his burger with onions, and that is owing to precedent: an awestruck employee took his order one afternoon when Bloomfield was out.

Source: The New Yorker
Published: Nov 15, 2010
Length: 33 minutes (8,419 words)

Stray Cat Blues

Liz Phair reviews Keith Richards’ autobiography, “Life.” “If Keith weren’t such a brilliant character, the reader might weary of his hypocrisy. But the truth is, he’s hilarious. I got tired of jotting ‘hahahaha’ and ‘LOL’ in the margins. James Fox, Keith’s co- author, deserves a lot of credit for editing, organizing and elegantly stepping out of the way of Keith’s remembrances. Reading ‘Life’ is like getting to corner Keith Richards in a room and ask him every thing you ever wanted to know about the Rolling Stones, and have him be completely honest with you.”

Author: Liz Phair
Published: Nov 14, 2010
Length: 13 minutes (3,405 words)

How Baidu Won China

Robin Li—the 41-year-old, American-educated chief executive officer of the Chinese search engine Baidu—has a fan club. And each year at the Baidu World conference in Beijing, the members of the Robin Li fan club come out to get close to the object of their worship. When Li emerges from a dark blue sedan, the fan club mobs him, waving signs and screaming his name while Li poses for pictures with a tight, uncomfortable smile before darting into the building to rehearse his keynote address. The exuberance, club members say later, was coordinated by Baidu. “If I want to know about what happens abroad, I will use Google,” says one of the students. “Baidu’s information is influenced by the government so much.”

Source: Businessweek
Published: Nov 12, 2010
Length: 18 minutes (4,523 words)

Hope. Change. Reality.

Attorney General Eric Holder entered the Justice Department on a mission to reinvent it. He’d rectify the dubious hires of the Bush era; he’d shut down Guantánamo and try the most notorious detainees here on U.S. soil; he’d speak forcefully and often about the return of the rule of law. Unfortunately, Washington doesn’t like an idealist

Source: GQ
Published: Nov 12, 2010
Length: 27 minutes (6,847 words)

Courts Helping Banks Screw Over Homeowners

The foreclosure lawyers down in Jacksonville had warned me, but I was skeptical. They told me the state of Florida had created a special super-high-speed housing court with a specific mandate to rubber-stamp the legally dicey foreclosures by corporate mortgage pushers like Deutsche Bank and JP Morgan Chase. This “rocket docket,” as it is called in town, is presided over by retired judges who seem to have no clue about the insanely complex financial instruments they are ruling on — securitized mortgages and laby rinthine derivative deals of a type that didn’t even exist when most of them were active members of the bench.

Source: Rolling Stone
Published: Nov 10, 2010
Length: 58 minutes (14,560 words)