Synanon’s Sober Utopia
How a drug rehab program became a violent cult:
In 1970, George Lucas needed dozens of actors with shaved heads for his sci-fi dystopian movie THX 1138. He had trouble filling the roles at first, since so few actresses wanted to cut their locks, but Lucas eventually found the extras he needed in a strange utopian community where everyone worshipped sobriety and expressed solidarity by shaving their heads. It was called Synanon, and over the course of three decades it would become one of the weirdest and most vindictive cults of the 20th century.
Witness to an Execution
A son remembers his slain father, and returns home to Texas to watch his father’s killer die.
I’ll never, ever, ever forget October 15, 1997. In my memory, it’s as vivid as anything I did earlier today. I was living in an apartment in College Station, and the phone rang at about three in the morning. Kerr County sheriff Frances Kaiser identified herself. She put my mother on the phone. My mother was sobbing hysterically. “Daddy’s been killed. We think he’s dead.” My first thought: What kind of accident were my parents in that killed him but she survived? Then Sheriff Kaiser took the phone back, and she told me the general details. My mother was robbed and attacked. They assumed the body behind the house was my father, but it had been beaten so badly the face was not recognizable.
The Private Lives of Public Bathrooms
The public collides uncomfortably with the private in the bathroom as it does nowhere else. How psychology, gender roles, and design explain the distinctive way we behave in the world’s stalls:
The vulnerability and exposure of using a urinal seems to create the need for additional social boundaries, in place of even “flimsy” physical ones. A famous, though ethically questionable, study from 1976 found that invading this socially agreed-upon bubble of personal space made it much more difficult for men to pee. To discover this, one researcher hid in a bathroom stall and watched men at the urinals through a periscope, timing the “delay and persistence” of urination when a confederate came into the bathroom and stood right next to or one urinal removed from the unknowing participant. The closer the confederate was, the longer the delay before the man was able to go, and the less time he peed overall. Whether he would have been able to go at all had he known someone was spying on him through a periscope, no one can say.
Why I Fixed Fights
A longtime manager on the dirty business of professional boxing:
I fixed a lot of fights over the years. In two I didn’t fix but should have, people paid heavily for my carelessness. Even though I set up Mitch “Blood” Green and Leon Spinks cushion-soft in their comeback fights, I managed to get one embarrassed and the other nearly killed. There had been opportunities for them, deals that came undone when they lost. It wasn’t as if the winners benefited in any tangible way either. At best their victories brought them smallish short-term bragging rights. Among boxing insiders they were objects of scorn for having won, as incompetent at their jobs as Green, Spinks, and I were at ours.
The Truth About Google X
Space elevators, teleportation, hoverboards, and driverless cars: The top-secret Google X innovation lab opens up about what it does—and how it thinks.
If there’s a master plan behind X, it’s that a frictional arrangement of ragtag intellects is the best hope for creating products that can solve the world’s most intractable issues. Yet Google X, as Teller describes it, is an experiment in itself–an effort to reconfigure the process by which a corporate lab functions, in this case by taking incredible risks across a wide variety of technological domains, and by not hesitating to stray far from its parent company’s business. We don’t yet know if this will prove to be genius or folly. There’s actually no historical model, no precedent, for what these people are doing.
Lessons of Immortality and Mortality From My Father, Carl Sagan
Sasha Sagan on the life lessons given to her by her father, astronomer and author Carl Sagan:
After days at elementary school, I came home to immersive tutorials on skeptical thought and secular history lessons of the universe, one dinner table conversation at a time. My parents would patiently entertain an endless series of “why?” questions, never meeting a single one with a “because I said so” or “that’s just how it is.” Each query was met with a thoughtful, and honest, response — even the ones for which there are no answers.
It’s Adventure Time
The writer spends some time with the creators of “Adventure Time”—a wildly popular animated TV series on the Cartoon Network—to discuss what makes the show so magical:
We began by talking about humor. Children’s humor, I suggested, is commonly thought of as a kind of “diversion” from fear or sadness. But Adventure Time confronts very dark themes head on: The apocalypse, the possibility of loss and pain, grief and mortality. Yet somehow it makes these grave things seem so simple, unthreatening, even hilarious.
“It’s funnier when you’re sad, I think,” he said. “I’ve heard laughter is releasing stress from your body, like when you go, ’HA! Haaaa!’—you know, you get it out of you. My favorite kind of humor is dark comedies, because I think, mmm… I guess that’s my personality, maybe I’m more cynical about things, so I laugh stuff off easily, and life is really scary?”
This Book Is Now a Pulitzer Prize Winner: An Excerpt from ‘Toms River’ by Dan Fagin
This year’s Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction was awarded yesterday to Dan Fagin, an NYU science journalism professor, for Toms River: A Story of Science and Salvation. According to the Pulitzer committee, Fagin’s book, which chronicles the effects of chemical waste dumping on a small New Jersey community, “deftly combines investigative reporting and historical research to probe a New Jersey seashore town’s cluster of childhood cancers linked to water and air pollution.” Thank you to Fagin and Bantam Books for allowing us to reprint the excerpt here.
The History of the Future: A Reading List
A new technology reading list by Daniel A. Gross, featuring Wired, The Atlantic and Esquire.
Escape from Cuba: Yasiel Puig’s Untold Journey to the Dodgers
The story of how L.A. Dodgers star Yasiel Puig defected from Cuba to come to the U.S. to play baseball:
Given the riches that await in el exterior, it is remarkable not that so many Cuban athletes leave but that so many more stay. Nobody needs to remind them that the decision to flee is irrevocable, a one-way journey from privation to overload. “You’re afraid to leave your family, you’re afraid that maybe you won’t triumph, you’re afraid of…I don’t know, it’s just a very difficult step,” rookie infielder and Cuban defector Alexander Guerrero, in the first year of a $28 million deal, told me at the Dodgers’ spring training camp in Arizona. It took Guerrero years to build up the gumption to flee, then three attempts to succeed. “Once you board one of those boats,” he added, “you don’t know who is who and how those people are going to react, or what’s going to happen out in the sea.”
An elaborate underground of couriers and bagmen is forever shadowing Cuba’s best ballplayers. So is a state-sponsored network of secret police and paid informants. When you are being lured and monitored at every turn, caught between ambition and duty, survival sometimes means playing both sides.
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