How YouTube and Internet Journalism Destroyed Tom Cruise, Our Last Real Movie Star

A look back at 2005, the year YouTube, Perez Hilton and Oprah’s couch changed how we looked at celebrity:

Hilton had already nicknamed Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie “Brangelina” (“It was just such a long time ago that people don’t remember,” he sighs). When Cruise coupled with Katie Holmes, Hilton was thrilled to have another massive romance to flog. TomKat went public on April 27, and PerezHilton.com embraced their relationship with exuberant cynicism. Wrote Hilton, “We can’t get enough of the TomKat show because eventually the paint will start to chip and we will hopefully see all the ugliness as openly as we’ve been shoved the lovey-dovey bullshit.”

Source: LA Weekly
Published: May 20, 2014
Length: 20 minutes (5,090 words)

The Los Angeles Review of Cups

Maria Bustillos reviews Chipotle’s new literary series, curated by Jonathan Safran Foer:

Jonathan Safran Foer’s new Cultivating Thought: Author Series at Chipotle has a slightly uncomfortable name. It suggests that we Chipotle patrons had just kind of been sitting here, mowing down our lunches, blankly existing, uncultivated, thought-less, until Foer came along with his “brainchild”: to provide us all with short works from famous writers printed right on our soda cups and burrito bags. But so many literary lions participated that I was instantly wild to read Chipotle’s whole catalog. I have now done so, and will review each publication below.

Published: May 20, 2014
Length: 6 minutes (1,672 words)

Never Forgetting a Face

Joseph Atick, a pioneer of facial-recognition systems, is now cautioning against their unfettered use:

In 2001, his worst-case scenario materialized. A competitor supplied the Tampa police with a face-recognition system; officers covertly deployed it on fans attending Super Bowl XXXV. The police scanned tens of thousands of fans without their awareness, identifying a handful of petty criminals, but no one was detained.

Journalists coined it the “Snooper Bowl.” Public outrage and congressional criticism ensued, raising issues about the potential intrusiveness and fallibility of face recognition that have yet to be resolved.

Dr. Atick says he thought this fiasco had doomed the industry: “I had to explain to the media this was not responsible use.”

Published: May 17, 2014
Length: 12 minutes (3,157 words)

Why Men Love War

Originally published in Esquire nearly three decades ago, Broyles’ essay is an American classic. Drawing from the author’s own experience in Vietnam, “Why Men Love War” is a meditation on the intense, complicated, and at times near-erotic relationship between men and battle.

War is beautiful. There is something about a firefight at night, something about the mechanical elegance of an M -60 machine gun. They are everything they should be, perfect examples of their form. When you are firing out at night, the red racers go out into tile blackness is if you were drawing with a light pen. Then little dots of light start winking back, and green tracers from the AK-47s begin to weave ill with the red to form brilliant patterns that seem, given their great speeds, oddly timeless, as if they had been etched on the night. And then perhaps the gunships called Spooky come in and fire their incredible guns like huge hoses washing down from the sky, like something God would do when He was really ticked off. And then the flares pop, casting eerie shadows as they float down on their little parachutes, swinging in the breeze, and anyone who moves, in their light seems a ghost escaped from hell.

Daytime offers nothing so spectacular, but it also has its charms. Many men loved napalm, loved its silent power, the way it could make tree lines or houses explode as if by spontaneous combustion. But I always thought napalm was greatly overrated, unless you enjoy watching tires burn. I preferred white phosphorus, which exploded with a fulsome elegance, wreathing its target in intense and billowing white smoke, throwing out glowing red comets trailing brilliant white plumes I loved it more–not less –because of its function: to destroy, to kill. The seduction of War is in its offering such intense beauty–divorced from I all civilized values, but beauty still.

Source: Esquire
Published: Jan 1, 1984
Length: 18 minutes (4,604 words)

The Worst Day Of My Life Is Now New York’s Hottest Tourist Attraction

Nearly 13 years after his sister’s death, Kandell visits the 9/11 Memorial Museum:

I am allowed to enter the 9/11 Museum a few days before this week’s grand opening for the general public, but why would I want that? Why would I accept an invitation to a roughly $350 million, 110,000-square-foot refutation of everything we tried to practice, a gleaming monument to What Happened, not What Happened to Us? Something snapped while reading about the gift shop — I didn’t want to duck and hide, I wanted to run straight into the absurdity and horror and feel every bit of the righteous indignation and come out the other side raw. I call my mother to tell her I’m doing this but that she shouldn’t come, and she doesn’t disagree. I find the ticket booth, exhale deeply, and say the magic words.

#sept11

Source: BuzzFeed
Published: May 20, 2014
Length: 8 minutes (2,224 words)

The Path to Pearl Harbor

How Japan found itself on the brink of war in December 1941:

By the mid–1930s, much of northern China was essentially under Japanese influence. Then, on July 7, 1937, a small-scale clash between local Chinese and Japanese troops at the Marco Polo Bridge in Wanping, a small village outside Beijing, escalated. The Japanese prime minister, Prince Konoe, used the clash to make further territorial demands on China. Chiang Kai-shek, leader of the Nationalist government, decided that the moment had come to confront Japan rather than appease it, and full-scale war broke out between the two sides.

Published: May 19, 2014
Length: 14 minutes (3,543 words)

Tutankhamun’s Blood

Researchers have long viewed the mummy of Tutankhamun as the key to ancient Egypt’s secrets:

THE TOMB IS DRY AND HOT. Opposite looms the gowned shape of Hawass, who is scrutinizing Gad’s every move; squeezed into the corner is Discovery’s film crew. Gad tries to hide his nerves. He knows that the others doubt his ability, and for good reason: he has little practice working with mummies. Back in his Cairo lab, he has always been supervised by a foreign tutor. But his very first day pulling DNA without his teacher will be watched by the world, and his subject is the incalculably precious mummy of Tutankhamun.

Source: Matter
Published: Mar 15, 2014
Length: 32 minutes (8,182 words)

Baseball’s Best Lobbyist

Meet Scott Boras, the superagent who scored the Nats their top talent—at top dollar.

Boras seems to get his way at least in part through willpower. Jerry Maguire he is not. During negotiations, Boras doesn’t scream. He isn’t manic. Baseball insiders consistently describe him with two words: prepared and relentless.

“At meetings, a GM might have the executive suite in the hotel—Boras has the presidential suite,” says Bowden, the Nats’ former GM. “He’s up jogging at 5 am. You walk into the arbitration hearing and his eight guys have Armani suits and matching ties. I worked in baseball front offices for 25 years. I never met anyone looking forward to a negotiation session with Scott Boras.”

Source: Washingtonian
Published: May 12, 2014
Length: 18 minutes (4,600 words)

Love and Loss on the Seine

The river is a lure for romantics, tourists, sunbathers, anglers, psychiatric patients—le tout Paris.

Most every morning at nine, the emergency responders assigned to the Seine pull on their wet suits and swim around the Île de la Cité. In the course of their circuit around this teardrop-shaped island in the middle of the river in the middle of Paris, the firemen-divers scour the bottom, retrieving bikes, cutlery (which they clean and use in the nearby houseboat where they live), cell phones, old coins, crucifixes, guns, and once, a museum-grade Roman clasp.

By the Pont des Arts, where lovers affix brass locks inscribed with their names (“Steve + Linda Pour la Vie”), they retrieve keys tossed in the water by couples hoping to affirm the eternal nature of their padlocked love. One bridge upriver, at the Pont Neuf, near the Palace of Justice law courts where divorces are decreed, they find wedding bands, discarded when eternal love turns out to be ephemeral.

Published: May 1, 2014
Length: 16 minutes (4,000 words)

‘We weren’t out to change government, we were out to destroy it’

How an Army private plotted murder, and attempted to form an anti-government militia made up of U.S. soldiers:

After extra duty one night, Aguigui remembers, Salmon told him that “the leader of the resistance in the game was identical to how he envisioned me.” When Aguigui responded, “We could do this,” Salmon told him, “I’ll follow you to Hell, brother.” Aguigui told me that this was when his network of disaffected soldiers started thinking of itself as a militia. “That was the moment it all began,” he said. “We weren’t out to change the government, we were out to destroy it.” Aguigui named his group fear, which stood for Forever Enduring Always Ready. “I believe most Americans share my beliefs; they’re just afraid to show it,” he explained. “The only way to overcome all fear is to become something everyone else fears.” He referred to key members of the group, like Burnett and the Salmons, as the Family.

Author: Nadya Labi
Source: The New Yorker
Published: May 19, 2014
Length: 37 minutes (9,455 words)