Africa: Coke’s Last Frontier
Annual per capita consumption of Coca-Cola in Kenya is 39 servings. In more developed countries like Mexico, which consumes more Coca-Cola than any other country, it runs 665 servings per year. One does not need an MBA to see the possibilities.
The New Humanism
There was no objection to chapel and Sunday school … But my home was a religion-free zone: no grace before meals, no prayers at bedtime, and the Bible wedged firmly on the shelf between the Oxford Dictionary and Winston Churchill’s “History of the Second World War.”
The Unsocial Network
Plunging ratings. Tense negotiations. A bewildered, increasingly outraged Conan O’Brien and an anxiously pragmatic Jay Leno. In this excerpt from his new book, Bill Carter unfurls the behind-the-scenes story of late night’s explosive 2010 showdown. (“What does Jay have on you?” Conan asked, his voice still low, his tone still even. “What does this guy have on you people? What the hell is it about Jay?”)
Mikhail Prokhorov, the Playboy and His Power Games
You might think that Mikhail Prokhorov would have had a not-so-soft case of buyer’s remorse this past spring. A month before the start of the National Basketball Association season, the 45-year-old Russian billionaire struck a deal to buy the New Jersey Nets from the real estate developer Bruce C. Ratner. When the league owners finally ratified the sale eight months later, the Nets record stood at 12 wins and 70 losses, and Prokhorov’s shiny new team was the laughingstock of the NBA
The Art of Humor No. 1, Woody Allen
“A word about this interview. It was hard for me because I don’t like to aggrandize my work by discussing its influences or my themes or that kind of thing. That kind of talk is more applicable to works of greater stature. I say this with no false modesty—that I feel I have done no really significant work, whatsoever, in any medium.”
The Hits That Are Changing Football
Dr. Ann McKee, an associate professor of neurology and pathology at Boston University who has been studying the brains of deceased football players, wanted to illustrate the damage that repeated hits to the helmet can cause. This slide of a cross-section of a human male brain, magnified 100 times, showed scores, maybe hundreds, of tiny brownish triangular bits of a toxic protein called tau, choking off cellular life in the brain.
Hugh Hefner Has Been Good for Us
Hefner and Playboy have been around so long that not everyone remembers what America used to be like. It was sexually repressed and socially restrictive. Many people joined in the fight against that unhealthy society. Hefner was one of them, and a case can can be made that Playboy had a greater influence on our society in its first half-century than any other magazine.
What Was the Hipster?
If I speak of the degeneration of our most visible recent subculture, the hipster, it’s an awkward occasion. Someone will point out that hipsters are not dead, they still breathe, they live on my block. Yet it is evident that we have reached the end of an epoch in the life of the type.
The Final Days of Gary Condit
For almost a year, since the disappearance of Chandra Ann Levy, Gary and his family and his staff had been subjected to intense public scrutiny. “I know what they want me to say … They want me to say that I did her.”
Cherayla Davis, Amateur
All six of the contestants at the Apollo Amateur Night semifinals had already advanced through two rounds. Of them, only Cherayla Davis had won first place in both of her appearances. When James Brown competed in Amateur Night, he was booed. Luther Vandross and Lauryn Hill were also booed. Dave Chappelle: booed. Cherayla Davis had never been booed. And this night, she was going out first.
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