To Make Good Again

A woman looks back on her family’s history as Holocaust refugees, and her family’s use of German at home:

“‘Fräulein Raeff,’ she turned to me. I stood up. ‘Can you give another example of a taboo?’ I suppose again that she was trying to go easy on me, but, because I was slightly annoyed that she didn’t think I could handle a more difficult question and because my response was accurate, I replied, ‘An example of a taboo in Austria would be talking about the Holocaust.’

“Hearing this answer, she did not smile and say, ‘Richtig.’ She did not write my name down in her book. She did not tell me that I needed to go back to my notes or to study harder. She simply sat down and was silent.”

Author: Anne Raeff
Published: Dec 17, 2012
Length: 25 minutes (6,382 words)

The NRA vs. America

How the NRA changed its focus from gun owners to gun makers:

“Of the top 15 gun manufacturers, 11 now manufacture assault weapons, many of them variants of the AR-15 – derived from a military rifle designed to kill enemy soldiers at close-to-medium range with little marksmanship. The industry loves these ‘modern sporting rifles’ because they can be tricked out with expensive scopes, loaders, lights and lasers. ‘Most of the money is in accessories,’ says Feldman.

“As one gun rep recently boasted to an industry publication: ‘The AR platform is like Legos for grown men.’ And a 2012 report from Bushmaster’s parent company boasted that the industry’s embrace of these guns has led to ‘increased long-term growth in the long-gun market while attracting a younger generation of shooters.’ The campaign certainly seems to be working. Twenty-year-old Adam Lanza used a Bushmaster. Twenty-five-year-old James Holmes, the Aurora shooter, was in many ways the dream customer of the surging industry. He bought an AR-15 .233-caliberSmith & Wesson assault rifle – a category the company’s CEO bragged was ‘extremely hot’—tricked it out with a 100-round ultrahigh-capacity magazine and then purchased thousands of rounds from BulkAmmo.com, spending nearly $15,000 on his greater arsenal.”

Source: Rolling Stone
Published: Jan 31, 2013
Length: 22 minutes (5,700 words)

Sell Out: Part Three

[Fiction] The latest installment of Simon Rich’s serialized novella, in which the pickler hero attracts attention in Williamsburg:

“I do not know his words but I sense I am starting to lose him. I decide it is good time to make pitch.

“‘Whole Foods sells pickle jar for seven. I sell for four and include all the scum.’

“I point to the scum, which has collected nicely inside top of jar. The man smiles tightly as he hands me back the jar.

“‘I’ll come back later,’ he says.

“I sigh as he rides off on bicycle. It is almost seven and still I have no sales.

“‘Pickles here!’ I scream. ‘Pickles with garlic and scum!'”

Author: Simon Rich
Source: The New Yorker
Published: Jan 31, 2013
Length: 22 minutes (5,525 words)

Can $86 Million Save a Neighborhood?

In 1999, Gary Comer, the billionaire founder of Lands’ End walked into an elementary school in a struggling neighborhood in Chicago and wrote the principal a check for $68,000. Comer and his foundation have invested $86 million into the neighborhood since then:

“Comer’s Pocket Town project has already yielded some clear successes. The youth center, for example, offers not only recreational activities for kids who don’t have many but also provides hundreds of year-round jobs for them. The center’s garden yields 6,000 pounds of vegetables annually. Perhaps most important, the center serves as a much-needed haven from the violence that continues to plague the area. In 2012, Greater Grand Crossing saw 36 homicides—and one shooting in Pocket Town itself. ‘Being here has changed me because I’ve learned how to be safe,’ says Demetrius Walker, 15, a youth center regular. ‘It keeps me out of the streets.'”

“Comer’s health initiatives have been a slam dunk too. This year, for instance, the clinic has vaccinated 700 youths—a third of whom would not have been able to return to classrooms otherwise.

“Unfortunately, when it comes to schools and housing, results have been mixed.”

Published: Jan 17, 2013
Length: 12 minutes (3,215 words)

The Spy Novelist Who Knows Too Much

On the work of Gérard de Villiers, an 83-year-old French writer whose pulpy S.A.S. books have turned out to be eerily accurate:

“The books are strange hybrids: top-selling pulp-fiction vehicles that also serve as intelligence drop boxes for spy agencies around the world. De Villiers has spent most of his life cultivating spies and diplomats, who seem to enjoy seeing themselves and their secrets transfigured into pop fiction (with their own names carefully disguised), and his books regularly contain information about terror plots, espionage and wars that has never appeared elsewhere. Other pop novelists, like John le Carré and Tom Clancy, may flavor their work with a few real-world scenarios and some spy lingo, but de Villiers’s books are ahead of the news and sometimes even ahead of events themselves. Nearly a year ago he published a novel about the threat of Islamist groups in post-revolutionary Libya that focused on jihadis in Benghazi and on the role of the C.I.A. in fighting them. The novel, ‘Les Fous de Benghazi,’ came out six months before the death of the American ambassador, J. Christopher Stevens, and included descriptions of the C.I.A. command center in Benghazi (a closely held secret at that time), which was to become central in the controversy over Stevens’s death. Other de Villiers books have included even more striking auguries. In 1980, he wrote a novel in which militant Islamists murder the Egyptian president, Anwar Sadat, a year before the actual assassination took place. When I asked him about it, de Villiers responded with a Gallic shrug. ‘The Israelis knew it was going to happen,’ he said, ‘and did nothing.'”

Published: Jan 30, 2013
Length: 16 minutes (4,075 words)

Diary: Google Invades

Making sense of San Francisco through Google and Apple’s commuter buses to Silicon Valley:

“The buses roll up to San Francisco’s bus stops in the morning and evening, but they are unmarked, or nearly so, and not for the public. They have no signs or have discreet acronyms on the front windshield, and because they also have no rear doors they ingest and disgorge their passengers slowly, while the brightly lit funky orange public buses wait behind them. The luxury coach passengers ride for free and many take out their laptops and begin their work day on board; there is of course wifi. Most of them are gleaming white, with dark-tinted windows, like limousines, and some days I think of them as the spaceships on which our alien overlords have landed to rule over us.

“Other days I think of them as the company buses by which the coal miners get deposited at the minehead, and the work schedule involved would make a pit owner feel at home. Silicon Valley has long been famous for its endless work hours, for sucking in the young for decades of sixty or seventy-hour weeks, and the much celebrated perks on many jobsites – nap rooms, chefs, gyms, laundry – are meant to make spending most of your life at work less hideous.”

Published: Jan 30, 2013
Length: 12 minutes (3,215 words)

Sell Out: Part Two

[Fiction] From Simon Rich’s serialized novella for The New Yorker: A pickler strikes out on his own:

“Simon refills his coffee vat and smirks.

“‘Who’s going to hire you? You’ve got no education, no experience, no skills.’

“‘Simon,’ Claire says. ‘That’s rude.’

“‘It’s not rude,’ he says. ‘It’s realistic. I mean, for God’s sake, Hersch, you barely even know how to speak English.’

“My face begins suddenly to burn. It is painful to hear my great-great-grandson say these things. I know I am not so clever. I did not go to kindergarten like a fancy man. But I have always worked my best. I am not as worthless as he says.”

Author: Simon Rich
Source: The New Yorker
Published: Jan 30, 2013
Length: 17 minutes (4,383 words)

The Bite That Heals

Venom can be deadly, but it can also heal:

“The molecular gifts of toxic animals offer hope in the fight against a host of debilitating diseases. Heart patients owe gratitude to the Eastern green mamba, a deadly African tree snake whose venom impairs its victim’s nerves and blood circulation. Researchers at the Mayo Clinic fused a key peptide from the venom with a peptide from cells in the lining of human blood vessels to make cenderitide, the subject of clinical trials. It is intended not only to lower blood pressure and reduce fibrosis (the growth of excess connective tissue) in a failing heart but also to shield the kidneys from an overload of salt and water. ‘That’s the beauty of this drug,’ says Mayo cardiovascular researcher John Burnett. ‘It’s designed to cover both things.’ The closely related black mamba, a snake whose open mouth resembles a coffin and whose venom can quickly put you in one, holds a toxin with huge potential to be a powerful new painkiller.”

Published: Jan 28, 2013
Length: 15 minutes (3,962 words)

Libor Lies Revealed in Rigging of $300 Trillion Benchmark

On the biggest financial fraud in history:

“For years, traders at Deutsche Bank AG, UBS AG, Barclays, RBS and other banks colluded with colleagues responsible for setting the benchmark and their counterparts at other firms to rig the price of money, according to documents obtained by Bloomberg and interviews with two dozen current and former traders, lawyers and regulators. UBS traders went as far as offering bribes to brokers to persuade others to make favorable submissions on their behalf, regulatory filings show.

“Members of the close-knit group of traders knew each other from working at the same firms or going on trips organized by interdealer brokers, which line up buyers and sellers of securities, to French ski resort Chamonix and the Monaco Grand Prix. The manipulation flourished for years, even after bank supervisors were made aware of the system’s flaws.”

Source: Bloomberg
Published: Jan 28, 2013
Length: 18 minutes (4,502 words)

Sell Out: Part One

[Fiction] The first chapter of a serialized novella, about a pickle maker from the early 1900s who is transported to modern-day Brooklyn:

“The science men come and explain. I have been preserved in brine a hundred years and have not aged one day. They describe to me the reason (how this chemical mixed with that chemical, and so on and so on) but I am not paying attention. All I can think of is my beautiful Sarah. Years have passed and she is surely gone.
Soon, though, I have another thought. When I freeze in brine, Sarah was with child. Maybe I still have family in Brooklyn? Maybe our dreams have come true?

“The science man turns on computing box and types. I have one great-great-grandson still in Brooklyn, he says. By coincidence, he is twenty-seven years, just like me. His name is Simon Rich. I am so excited I can barely breathe. Maybe he is doctor, or even rabbi? I cannot wait to meet this man—to learn the ending of my family’s story.”

“‘How about Thai fusion?’ Simon asks me, as we walk along the street where I once lived. ‘This place has these amazing gluten-free ginger thingies.'”

Author: Simon Rich
Source: The New Yorker
Published: Jan 29, 2013
Length: 20 minutes (5,150 words)