How My Parents Accidentally Got Caught Up in the Iranian Revolution
The author’s parents were working in Iran in the late ’70s as Christian missionaries when the Iranian Revolution occurred. A look back on their experience:
The community of expats was dwindling. Every week more people left, the congregation of the church smaller every Sunday. Dave’s Jewish colleague left the university in November, telling him, “It’s only a matter of time before they come for the Jews.” The Israeli dean of the dental school dressed up as a Bedouin and escaped by bus to Turkey.
The conversations at parties had once started with “Where are you from?” The question became “Why are you still here?”
Just Who Is Herman Curtis Malone?
Curtis Malone created a D.C. youth basketball empire. Turns out, he was a drug dealer, too:
The Malone these by-the-book high achievers know is, well, one of them. Over three decades, he guided hundreds — some say thousands — of teenage boys toward higher education, especially those whose skills on the basketball court set them apart from their peers. The athletically gifted youngsters often landed on the Amateur Athletic Union basketball team Malone founded with his friend Troy Weaver in 1993, D.C. Assault.Malone built a winning team, which attracted more talent, which meant more wins. Charismatic and driven, Malone grew D.C. Assault into one of the top AAU boys’ basketball programs in the United States with nine teams.
The Wolf Hunters of Wall Street
An adaptation from Michael Lewis’s new book, Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt, about high-frequency trading and the rigging of Wall Street:
“As the market problem got worse,” [Brad Katsuyama] says, “I started to just assume my real problem was with how bad their technology was.”
But as he talked to Wall Street investors, he came to realize that they were dealing with the same problem. He had a good friend who traded stocks at a big-time hedge fund in Stamford, Conn., called SAC Capital, which was famous (and soon to be infamous) for being one step ahead of the U.S. stock market. If anyone was going to know something about the market that Katsuyama didn’t know, he figured, it would be someone there. One spring morning, he took the train up to Stamford and spent the day watching his friend trade. Right away he saw that, even though his friend was using software supplied to him by Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley and the other big firms, he was experiencing exactly the same problem as RBC: He would hit a button to buy or sell a stock, and the market would move away from him. “When I see this guy trading, and he was getting screwed — I now see that it isn’t just me. My frustration is the market’s frustration. And I was like, ‘Whoa, this is serious.’ ”
The Boy Who Ran: The Life and Death of Avonte Oquendo
Last October a 14-year-old autistic boy went missing after running out of his school and disappearing. His body was found months later:
NBC and ABC sent reporters right away. They searched the neighborhood all night, along the waterfront, in garbage cans, in parks, under cars, and found nothing. The family kept searching. Avonte’s father came up from Florida to help, bringing Avonte’s half-brother, Daniel Oquendo Jr., with him. Good Samaritans set up tents outside the school to serve as the command station for a search. They handed out leaflets and organized volunteers. When it got colder, a New Jersey man donated a trailer that was kept parked nearby. Donations raised the award for Avonte’s discovery to $89,500. A growing number of volunteers offered to help. The police kept them at a distance, especially when some of their theories on the case started trickling into the news coverage.
A Family, a Fire and the Aftermath
Grant Cunningham’s violent death ricocheted over 18 years in the final fate of his brother Blair:
The air was cool and damp, the temperature hovering above zero but feeling colder, the last bite of winter pushing back against the warm spring sun. By the last Saturday in March, 2013, Blair Cunningham had moved into a new apartment. His mother helped him set up the place, and it was sparsely furnished with her extra towels and linens, an old coffee maker and a TV, a bed she bought for him.
He was back in the old neighbourhood in Mill Woods, living just down the street from where he grew up in the 1980s and ‘90s, when his brother and his dad were still alive; a time before Blair knew about murder and justice.
The Murders at the Lake
In 1982 three teenagers were found savagely stabbed to death by a lake in Waco, Texas. Four men were found guilty and two were sentenced to death. Were they guilty? Michael Hall spent one year reporting this five-parts series for Texas Monthly:
This story examines the case through the viewpoint of five people: a patrol sergeant who investigated the crime; a police detective who became skeptical of the investigation; an appellate lawyer who tried to stop the execution; a journalist whose reporting has raised new doubts about the case; and a convict who pleaded guilty but now vehemently proclaims his innocence.
Examining the Religious, Economic, Architectural, and Cultural Facets of Gentrification: A Reading List
This week’s picks from Emily includes stories from Christena Cleveland, Gothamist, The New York Times, and New Geography.
The Life and Career of Nile Rodgers, In His Own Words
Nile Rodgers reflects on how he ended up in the music business, producing hits for his own band Chic and artists including David Bowie and Daft Punk:
We took Chubby Checker’s “The Twist” and Joey D and the Starliters’ “ Peppermint Twist” and made it be about the “Freak.” To make it sound like it was ours, we called it “Le Freak.” But we didn’t tell people how to do the dance because we didn’t really know how to do it. It became better to speak of it in this euphoric way, and talk about the experience of doing it. We say, “Have you heard about the new dance craze.” We assume you haven’t. “We’ll show you the way.” But we don’t! The dance never became “the Twist” or even “the Hustle.” But the song is a triple-platinum single. And when we were on American Bandstand, Dick Clark introduced us in a really wonderful way. He said, “This is the biggest song by a band nobody knows about a dance that nobody knows how to do. Ladies and gentlemen, Chic! ‘Le Freak’!” It was so right on the money.
Life and Death At His Fingertips
Henry Marsh is one of Britain’s top neurosurgeons and a pioneer of neurosurgical advances in Ukraine. Erica Wagner witnesses life on a knife-edge:
I first encountered Henry Marsh late one night on my sofa. I was too tired to go to bed, and so kept the television on as one programme ended and another started. This was The English Surgeon, a 2007 documentary by Geoffrey Smith about the work that Henry has been doing for over 20 years now at the Lipska Street Hospital in Kyiv, Ukraine. Following a meeting with Igor Kurilets, a Ukrainian neurosurgeon struggling against the post-Soviet culture of poor resources and entrenched, old-fashioned thinking about medical care, Henry began volunteering his time in Kyiv. He brought not only his skills but equipment that had been discarded – generally for no good reason – by the NHS, packed up in wooden crates he made himself.
The 25-Year-Old at the Helm of Lonely Planet
Last year, a media-shy billionaire bought the flailing Lonely Planet travel-guide empire, then shocked observers by hiring an unknown 24-year-old former wedding photographer to save it.
But when I knock on his hotel room door at 7:30, Houghton, now 25, is chipper. The space is fastidiously organized: bed made, camera gear in one neat pile, North Face and J.Crew clothes in another. Houghton, who is six foot four and 150 pounds, with a long neck and blue eyes, has rewired the sound system in the room to allow him to play M83 and the Lord of the Rings soundtrack from his iPhone. As he waves me in, he’s on the line with his boss, billionaire Brad Kelley, the former tobacco magnate who bought Lonely Planet last year, when the storied company was in the midst of a financial nosedive. Houghton wishes Kelley a happy birthday, then we’re off to ride what’s billed as the steepest tree-to-tree zip-line on earth.
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