The Weeklies

Inside the lives of homeless families who are staying at a Ramada Inn in the Colorado suburbs:

“At any given time, roughly 20 to 40 guests are staying long term. Since they pay by the week, they call themselves ‘weeklies.’ To score the cheap rates, $210 for individuals and slightly more for families, they must pay in advance. Residents sign a form that lists the activities that could get them kicked out (mostly involving drugs) and warns that they won’t get reimbursed if they leave early, no exceptions. Some families stay only for a few weeks, some for months, giving the hotel the feeling of a dormitory. A rotating cast of front-desk clerks sells candy and rations towels and washcloths. Though some of the clerks are kind and helpful, the guests think of them as enforcers, and the clerks tend to treat the weeklies less as customers than as undergraduates stealing toilet paper and sneaking in hot plates.”

Published: Mar 27, 2013
Length: 29 minutes (7,360 words)

Carl Icahn Unleashed

A profile of the Wall Street billionaire taking on Dell, Netflix, and other billionaire rivals:

“Reed Hastings, the CEO of Netflix, is learning to accept Icahn since he took a 10% stake in the company last fall. Icahn’s purchase prompted the company to adopt a so-called poison pill to prevent Icahn from buying more shares. ‘It’s like a chess opening. He does that move, and we do the pill. It’s pretty standard in all of these things,’ says Hastings. ‘I was worried about him when we didn’t know him, but I now must say that I enjoy his company.’ Responds Icahn: ‘We like Reed Hastings. I told him when a guy makes me 800 million bucks, I don’t punch him in the mouth.'”

Source: Forbes
Published: Mar 27, 2013
Length: 14 minutes (3,691 words)

The Not-Ready-for-Prime-Time Crime Lab

How an underfunded, understaffed crime lab in Hamilton County, Ohio manages to operate:

“On our tour we stop first in the trace evidence office, where analysts look for hair, fibers, paint chips, and other material left at a crime scene. The firearms office, which has a backlog of about 350 cases, has outgrown its own room and its machines have spilled into the trace evidence room; as a result, whenever trace evidence analysts have to look for gunshot residue—say, when they’re scouring a suspect’s garment to see if there’s any indication he fired a weapon—they must move the material two floors away to another office, to avoid contamination during testing or examination of the gunshot residue. The hallway outside is lined with microscopes and printers, and a folding ping-pong table nearby is pulled out whenever a large item needs to be spread out and examined.”

Published: Mar 22, 2013
Length: 13 minutes (3,313 words)

My Gucci Addiction

The Friday Night Lights author on his shopping addiction:

“I own forty-three pieces of Gucci—twelve leather jackets, six evening jackets, five pairs of pants, six pairs of boots, four shirts, seven pairs of gloves, and three scarves. I own items from Acne, Affliction, Alexander McQueen, Alexander Wang, Balmain, Band of Outsiders, Belstaff, Bottega Veneta, Brooks Brothers, Burberry, Chanel, Charles David, Diane von Furstenberg, Helmut Lang, Ines, Jan Hilmer, J.Crew, Jimmy Choo, Jitrois, Jos. A. Bank, Joseph, Junker Designs, Loewe, Lucchese, Marc Jacobs, Mr. S Leather, Nike, Northbound Leather, Prada, Rag & Bone, Ralph Lauren, Roberto Cavalli, Saint Laurent, 7 For All Mankind, Thomas Wylde, Valentino, Versace, and Wesco. I also have had several pieces custom-made for me by an amazing designer named Carla Dawn Behrle, who specializes in leather; they’re worth every penny and more, given her fastidiousness and attention to detail. I apologize to those letters of the alphabet I have not gotten to yet. Zara, don’t give up hope.”

Source: GQ
Published: Mar 26, 2013
Length: 26 minutes (6,645 words)

The Master

At Horace Mann—the prestigious Bronx private school rocked by allegations of sexual abuse from the 1960s into the 1990s—former students recall a pattern of abuse from one eccentric English teacher:

“And what about Mr. Berman—this odd, secretive man who frightened away many students, yet retired to a house that former students bought for him? He wasn’t mentioned in the Times stories, but he may have been the greatest enigma of all. I talked to more than a hundred alumni, to many teachers who worked with him in the sixties and seventies, and to administrators who dealt with complaints about teachers. Berman stood out for his extraordinary control over boys’ lives. Several of his former students have spent decades trying to grasp why they yearned to be close to him, and why they remained silent for so long after, by their accounts, he abused them. ‘Berman counted on everyone’s silence,’ one of the men who lived with him after graduating from Horace Mann told me. Like some of the others, he asked not to be named. ‘He assumed that our own humiliation would keep us quiet,’ he said.”

Source: The New Yorker
Published: Mar 26, 2013
Length: 51 minutes (12,758 words)

To Catch (and Release) a Predator With Rachel Graham

A profile of Rachel Graham, who works for the Wildlife Conservation Society to protect sharks that are disappearing from the ocean:

“Some eco groups suggest that as many as 73 million sharks are killed globally every year. Hammerheads, blue sharks, mako sharks – they’re disappearing, and they ain’t coming back.

“Unless activists like Graham have a say. Most of Graham’s life is now spent trying to reverse the damage that has already been done. She tells me that because sharks are almost all cartilage, there are no skeletons to recover and study. Basic information about their lives still eludes scientists.

“‘We don’t even know how long they gestate – no idea,’ explains Graham. ‘We can’t save them if we don’t know where they go and how they live.'”

Source: Men’s Journal
Published: Mar 20, 2013
Length: 16 minutes (4,148 words)

Long Night at ‘Today’

Turmoil at NBC’s “Today” show: How the dismissal of Ann Curry set off a chain of events that led to a ratings slump and now questions about Matt Lauer’s future:

“The producers of Today are employing every trick they know to rebuild the family’s chemistry, retooling the set, fiddling with the mix of stories, going for more uplift and smiles. But the show is still haunted by what happened, and is still happening, offscreen, the internal struggles and animosities casting strange shadows. Matt Lauer smiles for a living, but offstage he has been obsessed with the situation, brooding about his ratings and his enemies while trying to put forward his own version of events. If Lauer is guilty in the hosticide of Ann Curry (he’s certainly not innocent), he’s far from the only guilty party. For all the smiles, TV hosts often get offed, for all sorts of reasons. As Hyman Roth said in Godfather 2: This is the business they’ve chosen.”

Author: Joe Hagan
Published: Mar 24, 2013
Length: 26 minutes (6,556 words)

The Woman of the House

[Fiction] Two men are hired to paint a couple’s farmhouse in Ireland:

“They were distantly related, had been together in the farmhouse since his mother died, twelve years ago, and his father the following winter. Another distant relative had suggested the union, since Martina was on her own and only occasionally employed. Her cousin—for they had agreed that they were cousins of a kind—would have otherwise had to be taken into a home; and she herself had little to lose by coming to the farm. The grazing was parcelled out, rent received annually and now and again another field sold. Her crippled cousin, who since birth had been confined as he was now, had for Martina the attraction of a legal stipulation: in time she would inherit what was left.”

Source: The New Yorker
Published: Mar 23, 2013
Length: 22 minutes (5,571 words)

Unfit for Work

The number of Americans on disability has skyrocketed in the last three decades, and the Social Security Administration says the reserves in the disability insurance program are on track to run out in 2016:

“Scott tried school for a while, but hated it. So he took the advice of the rogue staffer who told him to suck all the benefits he could out of the system. He had a heart attack after the mill closed and figured, ‘Since I’ve had a bypass, maybe I can get on disability, and then I won’t have worry to about this stuff anymore.’ It worked; Scott is now on disability.

“Scott’s dad had a heart attack and went back to work in the mill. If there’d been a mill for Scott to go back to work in, he says, he’d have done that too. But there wasn’t a mill, so he went on disability. It wasn’t just Scott. I talked to a bunch of mill guys who took this path — one who shattered the bones in his ankle and leg, one with diabetes, another with a heart attack. When the mill shut down, they all went on disability.”

Source: Planet Money
Published: Mar 22, 2013
Length: 16 minutes (4,105 words)

The Hostage

War correspondent Richard Engel on his kidnapping in Syria last December:

“Abu Jaafar said, ‘Get the gasoline.’

“They drenched Abdelrazaq with liquid from a bottle.

“‘No, no!’ Abdelrazaq begged.

“‘Burn him,’ Abu Jaafar said.

“They splashed Abdelrazaq with more liquid.

“It was water.

“They wanted to break us and terrorize us and make us docile. They were having fun doing it. Abu Jaafar was laughing most of the time. In the coming days we would become familiar with his short, repetitive, girlish laugh: Heh, heh, heh, heh, heh.

Source: Vanity Fair
Published: Mar 20, 2013
Length: 25 minutes (6,323 words)