The Demon Blogger of Fleet Street

Nick Denton cast himself as a media outsider. That’s how he made it inside.

Published: Sep 26, 2010
Length: 16 minutes (4,051 words)

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

Author: Alex Carp
Source: The Believer
Published: Sep 1, 2010
Length: 16 minutes (4,009 words)

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.

Published: Sep 24, 2010
Length: 20 minutes (5,239 words)

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.

Published: Jul 8, 2007
Length: 20 minutes (5,239 words)

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.

Published: Sep 19, 2010
Length: 18 minutes (4,546 words)

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.

Source: Time
Published: Jan 24, 1983
Length: 24 minutes (6,219 words)

The Connecticut-Country-Club Crackup

Author: Matt Bai
Published: Sep 23, 2010
Length: 19 minutes (4,801 words)

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.

Published: Oct 21, 2010
Length: 9 minutes (2,359 words)

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.

Published: Sep 20, 2010
Length: 16 minutes (4,086 words)

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

Source: GQ
Published: Oct 1, 2010
Length: 37 minutes (9,427 words)