At Los Alamos
A physicist reflects on life at Los Alamos in the late 1950s.
I was about to enter the ‘need to know’ world. I decided that under no circumstances would I ask any questions. I had no legitimate need to know. I had no idea of our itinerary. I knew that we would have to get from Las Vegas to Mercury, Nevada, the location of the test site, some 65 miles north-west of Las Vegas. That nuclear weapons were being exploded above ground – dumping thousands of kilocuries of radiation into the atmosphere – so close to a major city shows the craziness of the time. I knew that blackjack was part of the Los Alamos culture. In 1956 four American soldiers stationed at the Aberdeen Proving Ground near Baltimore had published a paper in the Journal of the American Statistical Association entitled ‘The Optimum Strategy in Blackjack’. They explained how to optimise your chances by using the casino rules. The theorists at Los Alamos programmed the Maniac computer to run tens of thousands of hands to see if the strategy actually worked. They were satisfied that it did, and gave a little card showing how to play the game to Los Alamos people who went to Mercury. Francis had made a study of the method and concluded that if you were lucky you might match the federal minimum wage. After we landed at Las Vegas and were met by a small delegation of Los Alamos people in a government car, a casino was our first stop.
Who Were Those Masked Men, Anyway?
How a trio of bank robbers—inspired by The Town—disguised themselves as white cops and almost got away with a 200k heist:
When Visconti watched the security footage, he saw a team of professionals. The masks were Hollywood-quality, realistic enough to fool people standing inches away. In an era when images spread around the world with the click of a finger, these robbers had managed to throw their pursuers far off the scent. They had turned the law’s most powerful tool to their advantage. Then there was the speed: in and out in three minutes. And the spoils: They had scored more than $200,000 cash. These guys were pros.
A Reading List for People Who Never Want to Drive Again
Let’s be honest: Humans never should have been allowed behind the wheel in the first place.
Jimmy Iovine: The Man With the Magic Ears
An in-depth 2012 interview with the music mogul turned Apple employee, on how he began his career, working in the studio with John Lennon, Bruce Springsteen and Tom Petty:
Did engineering for Spector and Lennon prepare you for Springsteen’s vision of a wall of sound?
With John, I learned to make sure the band felt right around the vocal. That’s how you get the take, not the other way around. You don’t get the music and then sing it. On [U2’s] Rattle and Hum, I wouldn’t record the take unless Bono was there. I didn’t care if he had words or not. I wanted to hear his voice, the moment where it all connects.
I learned all about that power. You can’t really pick out what’s playing. But if you listen closely, you can hear each instrument. Phil called that a wall. Bruce wanted that. My whole life became about that. It was brutally painful, feeling like we were never going to get there. This is beyond all our grasps, what this guy has in his head. We were all deathly afraid of Springsteen.
The Search for Psychology’s Lost Boy
In 2009 the decades-old mystery of ‘Little Albert’ was finally solved. Or was it?
In the following scene, the rat returns. The baby cries, attempts to crawl away. The rabbit and the monkey also return, along with a different dog, and the baby cries each time—even without the loud noise. The once-placid infant is now a wailing wreck.
The grainy, black-and-white footage, filmed in 1919 and 1920, documents what has become a classic psychology experiment, described again and again in articles and books. The idea is that the baby was conditioned to be afraid, instilled with a phobia of all things furry.
Springtime in Tiananmen Square, 1989
While teaching English in Beijing, the author witnessed one of the most tumultuous protests in modern history.
We were young, and maybe a little naive, and we were angry at injustice. Whenever a group of us foreign teachers got together to share a meal or some beers, Chuck, the most cantankerous of our lot, would find an opportunity to say, “America is a toilet that flushes itself with five times more water than any other toilet in the world.” We were disenchanted with the me-first materialism of Reagan/Bush America. We wanted to live conscientiously. China in 1988 was a slumbering giant just beginning to awake. None of us expected our lives there to be easy, or profitable, or flashy like those of other young English teachers in trendier, booming Japan, but we were intrigued by the country’s recent reopening, and up for a challenge.
A Cat Burglar in the House
An investigation of Douglas T. “Chase” Fonteno, who has made a living stealing seemingly abandoned homes and selling them to the poor:
Adverse possession — commonly known as squatter’s rights — made dozens of his acquisitions possible, though not necessarily legally defensible. It’s based on a century-old law that applies almost exclusively to rural land, mining rights and boundary disputes. Experts can’t point to a single time it has been upheld in court as a means of taking urban houses.
Throughout the last decade — and as recently as last month — Fonteno and his associates saw a way to profit by acquiring what they believed to be abandoned houses for which they paid nothing to the legal owners. Instead they filed claims of adverse possession, then sold these houses at inflated values to clients lured by promises of low mortgage payments and no credit checks, according to official property records and interviews with former Fonteno clients and business associates.
Can’t Do It Alone
Susan Cahill lost everything when her clinic was vandalized. Now western Montana risks losing one of its only abortion providers.
Moving men carry a small white refrigerator into a truck parked outside, then return for a large plastic bin full of forceps and speculums. The equipment will remain in storage until Cahill decides whether to use them again. Following the break-in and the calculated dismantling of her professional equipment and personal items, Cahill, 64, has yet to decide if she’ll ever return to the Flathead Valley practice she’s built up over the course of her career.
Being Gay in Iran
What happens when a young man in Iran is outed by a documentary:
“May I ask you something personal?”
I know what’s coming.
I look at my aunt as she takes her time to assemble the correct words. She is a tiny, sweet woman wearing a loosely draped head scarf, staring at me with shining dark-brown eyes. I love her more dearly than anything in the world. Of course I will tell her the truth. I can’t think of a reason to hide from her. It isn’t as if she might murder me or run around spreading my secret. She’s not one of those closed-minded, brainwashed people who would automatically judge me. She spent most of her life outside of Iran, living and working as an architect in Norway and Germany. If there is anyone out there who would understand me, it’s her.
“Are you gay, Feri Kitty?” she asks.
James Joyce: You Can’t Ignore the Bastard
The great Irish writer still casts a shadow:
I grew up, the son of an Irish fireman and nurse, in a house with few books. We had a nursing manual, packed with astonishing photographs of extreme, untreated diseases; a Collier’s Encyclopedia, bought from a door-to-door salesman (to educate, by osmosis, me and my brother); and a lot of paperback Dick Francis racing thrillers. But, right beside the encyclopedia (where the Bible would have been, a generation earlier), there was one anomalous, thick, squat, hardback novel.
I grew obsessed with this 1967 Bodley Head edition of Ulysses. And not just because my father had thoughtfully marked “the dirty bits” in the margins in blue biro, so you wouldn’t have to reread the whole book to find them. My father’s considered opinion of James Joyce was, “That man is obsessed with shite.” I disagreed; Joyce simply gave everything equal weight and attention, including what had previously been taboo. He didn’t look away as Bloom entered the backyard jakes, or fade to black as the lads entered the brothel. Shocking. But exciting. Liberating.
You must be logged in to post a comment.