The Hunted: Did American Conservationists In Africa Go Too Far?

Then comes an arresting sequence, one seldom seen on national television: the killing of a human. Vieira introduces the scene: “We were allowed to accompany patrols in Zambia after we agreed not to identify those involved, should a shooting occur. On this mission, we would witness the ultimate price paid by a suspected poacher.” A game scout in a green uniform walks in what appears to be a recently abandoned campsite. A pouch on the ground contains shotgun shells, and the scout removes a few of them to show the camera.

Source: The New Yorker
Published: Apr 5, 2010
Length: 66 minutes (16,722 words)

One Angry Man

Keith Olbermann’s success, like Bill O’Reilly’s, is evidence of viewer cocooning—the inclination to seek out programming that reinforces one’s own firmly held political views. “People want to identify,” MSNBC’s Phil Griffin says. “They want the shortcut. ‘Wow, that guy’s smart. I get him.’ In this crazy world of so much information, you look for places where you identify, or you see where you fit into the spectrum, because you get all this information all day long.”

Source: The New Yorker
Published: Jun 23, 2008
Length: 25 minutes (6,445 words)

Solitude and Leadership: On Learning to Be Alone With Your Thoughts

You will find yourself in environments where what is rewarded above all is conformity. I tell you so you can decide to be a different kind of leader. And I tell you for one other reason. As I thought about these things and put all these pieces together—the kind of students I had, the kind of leadership they were being trained for, the kind of leaders I saw in my own institution—I realized that this is a national problem. We have a crisis of leadership in this country, in every institution.

Published: Mar 1, 2010
Length: 24 minutes (6,030 words)

Jumpers: The Fatal Grandeur of the Golden Gate Bridge

Every two weeks, on average, someone jumps off the Golden Gate Bridge. It is the world’s leading suicide location. In the eighties, workers at a local lumberyard formed “the Golden Gate Leapers Association”—a sports pool in which bets were placed on which day of the week someone would jump. At least twelve hundred people have been seen jumping or have been found in the water since the bridge opened, in 1937, including Roy Raymond, the founder of Victoria’s Secret, in 1993, and Duane Garrett, a Democratic fund-raiser and a friend of Al Gore’s, in 1995.

Author: Tad Friend
Source: The New Yorker
Published: Oct 13, 2003
Length: 21 minutes (5,385 words)

Playboy Interview: Steve Jobs (1985)

“We’ve done studies that prove that the mouse is faster than traditional ways of moving through data or applications. Someday we may be able to build a color screen for a reasonable price. As to overpricing, the start-up of a new product makes it more expensive than it will be later. The more we can produce, the lower the price will get.”

Source: Playboy
Published: Feb 1, 1985
Length: 69 minutes (17,287 words)

Steve Jobs: The Rolling Stone Interview (1994)

“Microsoft has had two goals in the last 10 years. One was to copy the Mac, and the other was to copy Lotus’ success in the spreadsheet—basically, the applications business. And over the course of the last 10 years, Microsoft accomplished both of those goals. And now they are completely lost. They were able to copy the Mac because the Mac was frozen in time. The Mac didn’t change much for the last 10 years. It changed maybe 10 percent. It was a sitting duck. It’s amazing that it took Microsoft 10 years to copy something that was a sitting duck. Apple, unfortunately, doesn’t deserve too much sympathy.”

Source: Rolling Stone
Published: Jun 16, 1994
Length: 23 minutes (5,938 words)

The Final Comeback of Axl Rose

Four years after disappearing from public view, Axl Rose is back on the scene, looking like a wax figure of himself, absorbing the crushing blows of Tommy Hilfiger, biting the legs of security guards, and gyrating, shrieking, and storming off stages across the land. John Jeremiah Sullivan grapples with the ghosts of the greatest—or weirdest—frontman of all time.

Source: GQ
Published: Sep 1, 2006
Length: 35 minutes (8,911 words)

Federer as Religious Experience

This present article is more about a spectator’s experience of Federer, and its context. The specific thesis here is that if you’ve never seen the young man play live, and then do, in person, on the sacred grass of Wimbledon, through the literally withering heat and then wind and rain of the ’06 fortnight, then you are apt to have what one of the tournament’s press bus drivers describes as a “bloody near-religious experience.” It may be tempting, at first, to hear a phrase like this as just one more of the overheated tropes that people resort to to describe the feeling of Federer Moments. But the driver’s phrase turns out to be true — literally, for an instant ecstatically — though it takes some time and serious watching to see this truth emerge.

Published: Aug 20, 2006
Length: 26 minutes (6,728 words)

Playboy Interview: Steve Martin (1993)

The real laughs always come from something very small and surprising—although another one they didn’t get in “The Jerk” is when I’m hitchhiking to St. Louis. My character’s name is Navin Johnson. A guy pulls over in his car and asks, “St. Louis?” and I go, “Uh, no, Navin Johnson.” I told the line to Carl Reiner [the movie’s writer and director] and we laughed for forty-five minutes. It’s so stupid! But in the movie, it just kind of goes away.

Source: Playboy
Published: Jan 1, 1993
Length: 47 minutes (11,835 words)

Borges on the Couch

There’s an unhappy paradox about literary biographies. The majority of readers who will be interested in a writer’s bio, especially one as long and exhaustive as Edwin Williamson’s ”Borges: A Life,” will be admirers of the writer’s work. They will therefore usually be idealizers of that writer and perpetrators (consciously or not) of the intentional fallacy. Part of the appeal of the writer’s work for these fans will be the distinctive stamp of that writer’s personality, predilections, style, particular tics and obsessions — the sense that these stories were written by this author and could have been done by no other.

Published: Nov 7, 2004
Length: 10 minutes (2,726 words)