The Demon Blogger of Fleet Street
Nick Denton cast himself as a media outsider. That’s how he made it inside.
Robin Nagle, New York’s Garbage Anthropologist
Obstacles faced by the modern sanitation worker: Fourteen thousand tons of household waste per day Constant reminders of their inherent mortality The stench Arthur, the cartoon aardvark
Planet Zoo
More than a generation of Americans have been urged to save the Earth. After surveying the current climate and every H.G. Wells-inspired geoengineering project, Anthony Doerr says it’s time to pray for Homo sapiens.
The Gregarious Brain
If a person suffers the small genetic accident that creates Williams syndrome, he’ll live with not only some fairly conventional cognitive deficits, like trouble with space and numbers, but also a strange set of traits that researchers call the Williams social phenotype or, less formally, the “Williams personality”: a love of company and conversation combined, often awkwardly, with a poor understanding of social dynamics and a lack of social inhibition.
The Man Who Fell to Shore
Reid Stowe spent 1,152 days on the open sea, the longest continuous journey ever undertaken by one person. He came back to a brand-new family, but not exactly a hero’s welcome.
The Death Penalty: An Eye for an Eye
The chair is bolted to the floor near the back of a 12-ft. by 18-ft. room. You sit on a seat of cracked rubber secured by rows of copper tacks. Your ankles are strapped into half-moon-shaped foot cuffs lined with canvas. A 2-in.-wide greasy leather belt with 28 buckle holes and worn grooves where it has been pulled very tight many times is secured around your waist just above the hips. A cool metal cone encircles your head. You are now only moments away from death.
The Connecticut-Country-Club Crackup
Dickens in Lagos
At street level the city feels like sheer, threatening chaos. In fact a complex, informal, but quite rigid hierarchy controls life in Lagos, one that a reader of Oliver Twist would immediately recognize.
Afghan Boys Are Prized, So Girls Live the Part
Afghan families have many reasons for pretending their girls are boys, including economic need, social pressure to have sons, and in some cases, a superstition that doing so can lead to the birth of a real boy. Lacking a son, the parents decide to make one up, usually by cutting the hair of a daughter and dressing her in typical Afghan men’s clothing.
Getting Made The Scorsese Way
Twenty years after the release of GoodFellas, the good people behind it — Scorsese, Liotta, De Niro! — re-create the making of the truest, bloodiest, greatest gangster film of all time
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