Real Editors Ship

People often think that editors are there to read things and tell people “no.” Saying “no” is a tiny part of the job. Editors are first and foremost there to ship the product without getting sued. They order the raw materials—words, sounds, images—mill them to approved tolerances, and ship. No one wrote a book called Editors: Get Real and Ship or suggested that publishers use agile; they don’t live in a “culture” of shipping, any more than we live in a culture of breathing.

Author: Paul Ford
Source: Ftrain
Published: Jul 20, 2010
Length: 7 minutes (1,929 words)

The Volcker Rule

Obama’s economic adviser and his battles over the financial-reform bill.

Source: The New Yorker
Published: Jul 26, 2010
Length: 22 minutes (5,605 words)

A hidden world, growing beyond control

Source: Washington Post
Published: Jul 19, 2010
Length: 21 minutes (5,322 words)

When Funny Goes Viral

One weekend this spring, close to 1,000 people gathered on the campus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to attend a sold-out conference devoted to the question “What is awesome on the Internet?” While the event included presenters and moderators with respectable research credentials from the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard and the like, what they had gathered to examine, more or less seriously, is what might be called the ROFL universe.

Author: Rob Walker
Published: Jul 16, 2010
Length: 18 minutes (4,580 words)

Adopting Guatemalan

Since Guatemala’s civil war, a thirty-six year struggle that started in 1960 during which a quarter of a million people were killed or “disappeared,” Guatemalan children have been adopted abroad in steadily rising numbers. The few hundred brought to the U.S. annually in the mid-nineties, when that war ended, rose to nearly five thousand in 2006, or one baby out of every one hundred and ten births that year in Guatemala. The more than twenty-six thousand Guatemalan children adopted into the United States over the past decade are not orphans without families.

Author: Molly Beer
Published: Jul 1, 2010
Length: 8 minutes (2,080 words)

By Bread Alone

Some Pakistanis have begun blaming Afghan immigrants for bringing “their” war into Pakistan—one Afghan baker’s story of harassment, corruption, and exile.

Published: Jul 1, 2010
Length: 15 minutes (3,954 words)

‘Predators’: Robert Rodriguez Gets to the Chopper

he second version of Rodriguez’s Predators script contains the lines “This is not your father’s Predator” and “Think Predator on steroids.” At the same time, Antal and Rodriguez have talked in interviews about wanting to humanize the predators. It’s Bigger. Faster. MORE. Mostly MORE. The original single predator handily eliminated a team “accused of being the the best” in one 24-hour period. Now we are to believe a rag-tag bunch of killers is going to fight off a whole hunting party of predators, their predator falcon and predator dogs?

Author: Abe Sauer
Source: The Awl
Published: Jul 12, 2010
Length: 10 minutes (2,613 words)

The New Abortion Providers

Published: Jul 14, 2010
Length: 32 minutes (8,018 words)

The Man Who Would Fall to Earth

From 120,000 feet, Felix Baumgartner will step from a sealed capsule and drop 23 miles. In 35 seconds, he will become the first human to free-fall through the sound barrier. What happens after that, nobody knows…

Source: Esquire
Published: Aug 1, 2010
Length: 27 minutes (6,879 words)

The Hunters

Author: Rick Bass
Source: VQR
Published: Jul 10, 2010
Length: 16 minutes (4,173 words)