What’s With You, Man?

HEY, JIMMIE JOHNSON You’re the best ever, Superman in a firesuit, a three-time NASCAR champion rolling toward your fourth straight Cup—fourth straight!—and yet you’re humble and quiet and polite and nice …

Published: Nov 9, 2009
Length: 16 minutes (4,244 words)

Flesh of Your Flesh

Should you eat meat?

Source: The New Yorker
Published: Nov 9, 2009
Length: 16 minutes (4,021 words)

Gutenberg and How Typography Is Like Music

Typography has a visceral and direct effect on everybody who reads. It can inhibit or enhance the feel of reading without being consciously noticeable. It does so by combining specific visuals that echo cultural memories, which are hopefully servile to the words they spell. Not unlike your favorite food tasting better on fine china then on paper plates, the choice of typeface can radically impact meaning while hopefully going consciously unnoticed. Try to exhort that indefinable magic in words, and you may as well be doing that over-quoted dance about architecture.

Source: McSweeney’s
Published: Nov 6, 2009
Length: 6 minutes (1,590 words)

The undignified near-death of Miramax

Why Disney turned Harvey Weinstein’s legendary indie empire into a zombie slave — and why it doesn’t much matter

Source: Salon
Published: Nov 5, 2009
Length: 9 minutes (2,271 words)

Big Bird, Meet Dick and Jane

A critique of Sesame Street

Author: John Holt
Source: The Atlantic
Published: May 1, 1971
Length: 31 minutes (7,880 words)

Dick Armey Is Back on the Attack

Since retiring from the House in 2003, Armey, like legions of other former elected officials, has burrowed into Washington’s establishment, never fully returning home to his 89 acres north of Dallas, his “ranchette,” as he calls it.

Published: Nov 4, 2009
Length: 26 minutes (6,573 words)

How to Make It As An Artist In New York 101

Marco Antonini stood in front of a tiny classroom at the Brooklyn art collective 3rd Ward on Monday night working a PowerPoint and explaining to a group of young artists how to make it in the New York art world.

Published: Nov 3, 2009
Length: 7 minutes (1,899 words)

Why Britain can’t do The Wire

The critically acclaimed US television drama could not be made here. We have writing talent in abundance, but its output is controlled by a stifling monopoly—the BBC. Plus, an interview with “The Wire”‘s creator David Simon

Source: Prospect
Published: Oct 21, 2009
Length: 17 minutes (4,485 words)

Rap Sheet

Why is American history so murderous?

Source: The New Yorker
Published: Nov 9, 2009
Length: 40 minutes (10,188 words)

The Disappearance of Ford Beckman

How A Celebrated American Artist Was Forced To Trade His Multimillion-Dollar Collection For A Job Selling Donuts

Source: The Believer
Published: Nov 1, 2009
Length: 27 minutes (6,816 words)