Girl Power

Susan Orlean on the television show “Sabrina, the Teenage Witch,” and its then 22 year old star, Melissa Joan Hart:

I grew up in the sixties and seventies, under the spell of the old television show “Bewitched.” I saw every episode, and I loved them all. But lately I have been watching the television show “Sabrina, the Teenage Witch,” and I have come to regret that I was fifteen in the “Bewitched” years rather than now. Samantha Stephens, the witch on “Bewitched,” was a high-strung, self-doubting, cringing pre-feminist, who tidied her house and suppressed her magical powers and her intellect to mollify her wanky husband, Darrin. Sabrina, on the other hand, is a modern girl. She is independent, spunky, friendly with boys but not obsequious toward them, moderately athletic, unabashedly sentimental, and assertive in the way that only girls who have grown up taking feminism for granted are able to be. “Sabrina, the Teenage Witch” is shown Fridays at nine o’clock on ABC, and this year the network also broadcasts a rerun on Fridays at eight. The nine-o’clock “Sabrina” is watched by more young women, teens, and little kids than any other television program in that time slot, and both the eight-o’clock and the nine-o’clock episodes rank in the top-ten shows among all kids. For many millions of people, the embodiment of modern girlhood is Sabrina the Teenage Witch.

Source: New Yorker
Published: May 18, 1998
Length: 13 minutes (3,322 words)

What Pakistan Knew About Bin Laden

Did Pakistan know that Osama bin Laden was hiding inside the country? Carlotta Gall, who’s been reporting for the Times from Afghanistan and Pakistan, investigates:

Finally, on a winter evening in 2012, I got the confirmation I was looking for. According to one inside source, the ISI actually ran a special desk assigned to handle Bin Laden. It was operated independently, led by an officer who made his own decisions and did not report to a superior. He handled only one person: Bin Laden. I was sitting at an outdoor cafe when I learned this, and I remember gasping, though quietly so as not to draw attention.

Published: Mar 22, 2014
Length: 20 minutes (5,090 words)

Once Upon a Time in the West

How Mark Twain turned frontier humor into literature:

It wasn’t easy. The notion that literature could emerge from the frontier’s barbaric yawp encountered violent resistance from America’s literary establishment. It didn’t help that tall tales abounded in vulgarity, drunkenness, and depravity, not to mention perversions of proper English that would make a schoolteacher gasp. Proving the literary power of the frontier would be a central part of Twain’s legacy, and a pie in the face of the New England dons who had dominated the country’s high culture for much of the nineteenth century. He wasn’t immune to wanting their approval, but he came from a very different tradition. His ear hadn’t been trained at Harvard or Yale; it was tuned to the myriad voices of slaves and scoundrels, boatmen and gamblers.

Published: Mar 21, 2014
Length: 14 minutes (3,653 words)

Gold in the Mud

The Twisted Saga of Jailhouse Boxer James Scott’s Battle for Redemption:

Prison inmate No. 57735, accused of murder and serving a 30-40 year stretch inside Rahway State Prison for armed robbery, introduced himself in a letter to reporter Beth Schenerman at The New York Times on Dec. 17, 1978, writing, in a rare moment of understatement, “This is a unique story.” After returning to prison three years earlier, the former professional boxer had long since been recognized as one of the most feared and dangerous of the 1,150 inmates then living behind the walls of New Jersey’s most notorious maximum-security prison, a place journalist Ralph Wiley described “as if the world had dropped the sum of its sores into one of New Jersey’s gritty smokestacks, then chose not to watch as the results of the experiment filtered down into place.”

Source: SB Nation
Published: Mar 12, 2014
Length: 37 minutes (9,381 words)

Dropped

On the career of Anthony Gatto, arguably the greatest juggler alive, who at 40 is now running how own concrete resurfacing business:

Since 2010, Gatto has juggled in Cirque du Soleil’s La Nouba, a show based at Walt Disney World in Orlando. Recently, though, I heard a rumor that Gatto was getting ready to retire from juggling to open a coffee shop. I did some Internet searching and discovered he now runs a concrete company in Orlando. It’s called Big Top Concrete Resurfacing LLC. The “T” of the Big Top logo is in the shape of a circus tent, but otherwise there’s no hint of Gatto’s achievements on the company website. “We are committed to offering a cost effective solution to tearing out and replacing old, damaged and deteriorating concrete,” reads the “About” page. “From stained micro-toppings to metallic floor finishes, counter tops and garage floor epoxy coatings, we have the solution for you.” A small head shot shows what looks like a smiling Gatto. Next to the head shot is a name. The name is not the one that has amazed audiences for the last 30 years. “Owned and operated,” the page says, “by Anthony Commarota.”

How did the greatest juggler in the world end up working in concrete?

Source: Grantland
Published: Mar 18, 2014
Length: 25 minutes (6,300 words)

My Dementia

A writer’s account of developing and living with dementia:

I asked Peter to come along for my doctor’s appointment. Our primary care doctor politely entertained our doubts about the value of diagnosis. She heard out our pontifications about what we regarded as a worthwhile quality of life, and let us stew our own way into following her suggestion that I have an MRI. The scan results showed “white matter lesions”—an indication of clogged microvessels that prevent blood from reaching nearby brain areas. Dr. Eborn confirmed the Internet wisdom that microvascular dementia might benefit from cholesterol- and blood pressure-lowering medications to retard the clogging. However, a neurologist would first have to confirm a connection between my memory problems and the lesions.

One neurologist, one neuropsychologist, dozens of tests, and many hundreds of out-of-pocket dollars later, my neurologist delivered the D-word. Given how early I noticed my symptoms, she projected that two more neurological evaluations at two-year intervals would be needed before I would officially meet the criteria of dementia.

But in my heart I already knew: I am dementing I am dementing I am dementing.

Source: Slate
Published: Mar 19, 2014
Length: 43 minutes (10,987 words)

An Interview With a Therapist Who Was Once Insane

Joe Guppy is a writer, actor and psychotherapist living in Seattle. Thirty-five years ago, he was 23 years old and a mental patient. He spent 10 weeks in a mental hospital and another 10 weeks in a halfway house after Atabrine, an old-school malaria medication, gave him visions that he was living in hell and that his family was trying to kill him.

Thirty years after he was released, Guppy decided to investigate his own case of mental illness. Through physicians’ notes, journals and interviews, he took stock of how he got sick, how he got better and what his story says about how therapy helps people heal. He is working on a memoir about the experience, and was kind enough to send me a draft and let me interview him about what he found.

Source: Longreads
Published: Mar 19, 2014
Length: 9 minutes (2,425 words)

Putin’s Long-Term Strategy: The Eurasian Union

Neyfakh explores Vladimir Putin’s pursuit of a Eurasian Union, and the roots of Eurasianism:

Putin famously once said the breakup of the Soviet Union was “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century,” and has also reportedly promised that the Eurasian Union would be based on the “best values of the Soviet Union.” But to say the project is simply an effort to reassemble the USSR is crude and incorrect, say Russia analysts. Instead, Putin’s efforts should be seen as a realization of an entirely different, and much less familiar idea called Eurasianism—a philosophy that has roots in the 1920s, and which grew out of Russia’s longstanding identity crisis about whether or not it should strive to be a part of Europe.

Source: Boston Globe
Published: Mar 19, 2014
Length: 9 minutes (2,311 words)

Hoard d’Oeuvres

Art collecting for the 1% percent, and what it means for the rest of us:

Bernie Madoff’s prized piece of office art was a four-foot sculpture of a screw that he frequently dusted off himself (he, like Donald Trump and scores of other plutocrats, is a notorious neat freak). A defense lawyer pleaded for the valued object to be photoshopped out of court documents, lest it be prejudicial to members of the jury. When Madoff’s Ponzi scheme went bust, J. Ezra Merkin, whose feeder funds supplied Madoff with investors, was no longer Mastering the Universe quite so comfortably. So he sold his stunning batch of Rothkos for $310 million. Whenever I see a Rothko I think of Madoff, and how the afterlife of modern art is now yoked to the pissing matches performed by the big swinging SHLONGS of Wall Street.

Source: The Baffler
Published: Mar 15, 2014
Length: 22 minutes (5,634 words)

Pixel And Dimed: On (Not) Getting By In The Gig Economy

Kessler spends a month trying to make a living wage using new tech platforms like TaskRabbit and Postmates. The results aren’t promising:

My experiences in the gig economy raise troubling issues about what it means to be an employee today and what rights a worker, even on a assignment-by-assignment basis, are entitled to. The laws regarding what constitutes an employee have not yet caught up to the idea that jobs are now being doled out by iPhone push notification.

Source: Fast Company
Published: Mar 18, 2014
Length: 37 minutes (9,445 words)