End of the Line

GM guaranteed the people of Janesville, Wisconsin, a good wage for a hard job. Those were the days.

Source: Mother Jones
Published: Sep 1, 2009
Length: 7 minutes (1,971 words)

China’s favorite Internet craze: ‘Jia Junpeng, your mom is calling you to come home and eat.’

The post appeared on a computer gaming forum in July and became a viral joke, popping up on T-shirts and ads and celebrated in song and doctored photos. Its author and motive are unknown.

Published: Sep 5, 2009
Length: 5 minutes (1,289 words)

Bootylicious

What do the pirates of yore tell us about their modern counterparts?

Source: The New Yorker
Published: Sep 7, 2009
Length: 16 minutes (4,244 words)

How Did Economists Get It So Wrong?

Few economists saw our current crisis coming, but this predictive failure was the least of the field’s problems. More important was the profession’s blindness to the very possibility of catastrophic failures in a market economy.

Published: Sep 2, 2009
Length: 26 minutes (6,695 words)

The Boy Who Heard Too Much

He was a 14-year-old blind kid, angry and alone. Then he discovered that he possessed a strange and fearsome superpower – one that put him in the cross hairs of the FBI

Source: Rolling Stone
Published: Aug 25, 2009
Length: 22 minutes (5,701 words)

Jay Leno Is the Future of TV. Seriously

Source: Time
Published: Sep 3, 2009
Length: 16 minutes (4,212 words)

Washington Redskins Sold Brokers Tickets Despite Wait List

Source: Washington Post
Published: Sep 2, 2009
Length: 13 minutes (3,294 words)

Google Books: A Metadata Train Wreck

Can we observe the way “happiness” replaced “felicity” in the seventeenth century, as Keith Thomas suggests? When did “the United States are” start to lose ground to “the United States is”? How did the use of propaganda rise and fall by decade over the course of the twentieth century? To answer those questions you need good metadata. And Google’s are a train wreck: a mish-mash wrapped in a muddle wrapped in a mess.

Source: Language Log
Published: Aug 29, 2009
Length: 9 minutes (2,315 words)

The Judgment of Sharon Keller

As she goes on trial this month, nearly everyone—journalists, lawyers, and even some of her colleagues—is calling for her head, but is the presiding judge of the Court of Criminal Appeals the monster she’s been made out to be?

Source: Texas Monthly
Published: Aug 1, 2009
Length: 31 minutes (7,832 words)

A Mugging on Lake Street

A veteran investigative reporter looks into his own beating and finds himself confronting harsh and lingering questions of race

Published: Sep 1, 2009
Length: 26 minutes (6,627 words)