A Miami Clinic Supplies Drugs to Sports’ Biggest Names

An investigation reveals that Major League Baseball stars including the Yankees’ Alex Rodriguez and the Giants’ Melky Cabrera allegedly received banned substances:

“Open the neat spreadsheet and scroll past the listing of local developers, prominent attorneys, and personal trainers. You’ll find a lengthy list of nicknames: Mostro, Al Capone, El Cacique, Samurai, Yukon, Mohamad, Felix Cat, and D.R.

“Then check out the main column, where their real names flash like an all-star roster of professional athletes with Miami ties: San Francisco Giants outfielder Melky Cabrera, Oakland A’s hurler Bartolo Colón, pro tennis player Wayne Odesnik, budding Cuban superstar boxer Yuriorkis Gamboa, and Texas Rangers slugger Nelson Cruz. There’s even the New York Yankees’ $275 million man himself, Alex Rodriguez, who has sworn he stopped juicing a decade ago.”

Source: Miami New Times
Published: Jan 29, 2013
Length: 22 minutes (5,544 words)

When Science Meets Fiction

Examining how science is used in science fiction and popular TV shows:

“Of course, there are plenty of groan-worthy gaffes in the Buffyverse, too, as there are in just about any form of popular entertainment that dares to inject a bit of science. That’s why nerd-gassing is such a popular and time-honored pastime among the geekerati. I went to see J.J. Abrams’ Star Trek reboot with five PhD physicists, and the post-movie nerdgassing reached Olympic proportions. Their unanimous conclusion: ‘Red matter’ didn’t have to happen.

“Some people are in favor of this kind of sci-fi handwaving, as detailed in this post by Steven Padnick at Tor.com. I think Padnick is right in principle (science fiction should stretch the imagination and look beyond what is currently possible, and you don’t want to bog down your story with lengthy technical explanations) and wrong in the specific example of red matter, which is so ridiculous that it actually pulls the viewer out of the story — something no self-respecting creator of a fictional world wants to do.”

Published: Jan 27, 2013
Length: 9 minutes (2,481 words)

For 40 Years, This Russian Family Was Cut Off From All Human Contact, Unaware of World War II

In the summer of 1978, a group of geologists traveled into Siberia and discovered a family that had not had outside contact with anyone in four decades:

“In some respects, Peskov makes clear, the taiga did offer some abundance: ‘Beside the dwelling ran a clear, cold stream. Stands of larch, spruce, pine and birch yielded all that anyone could take.… Bilberries and raspberries were close to hand, firewood as well, and pine nuts fell right on the roof.’

“Yet the Lykovs lived permanently on the edge of famine. It was not until the late 1950s, when Dmitry reached manhood, that they first trapped animals for their meat and skins. Lacking guns and even bows, they could hunt only by digging traps or pursuing prey across the mountains until the animals collapsed from exhaustion. Dmitry built up astonishing endurance, and could hunt barefoot in winter, sometimes returning to the hut after several days, having slept in the open in 40 degrees of frost, a young elk across his shoulders. More often than not, though, there was no meat, and their diet gradually became more monotonous. Wild animals destroyed their crop of carrots, and Agafia recalled the late 1950s as ‘the hungry years.'”

Author: Mike Dash
Source: Smithsonian
Published: Jan 29, 2013
Length: 13 minutes (3,447 words)

Zusya on the Roof

[Fiction] An ailing man meets his grandchild:

“It had been years since his mind was so clear or focussed. Death had scoured it of the extraneous. His thoughts were of a different quality now, and bore sharply through. He had the feeling that at last he had got to the bottom of everything. He wanted to tell Mira. But where was Mira? All through the long days of illness she had sat in a chair at his bedside, leaving only for a few hours each night to sleep. In that instant, Brodman understood that his grandson had been born while he was dead. He wanted to know: had they named the boy after him?”

Source: The New Yorker
Published: Jan 28, 2013
Length: 19 minutes (4,858 words)

Trying to Unlock Secrets of Dead Serial Killer

A serial killer is caught, but takes his own life before revealing his list of victims:

“‘Why don’t you give us another name?’ asked Russo, a federal prosecutor.

Keyes was conflicted — he wanted his story out there, but worried about the impact it would have on friends and family (he has a daughter believed to be 10 or 11), says Goeden, the FBI agent. He rebuffed all appeals to bring peace to others.

“‘Think about your loved ones,’ Doll urged. ‘Wouldn’t you want to know if they’re never coming home?’

“He mulled it over and returned another day with his answer.

“‘I’d rather think my loved one was on a beach somewhere,’ he said, ‘other than being horribly murdered.'”

Published: Jan 26, 2013
Length: 11 minutes (2,858 words)

In Conversation: Steven Soderbergh

The director on what’s wrong with Hollywood today, why you should never use his name in a pitch, and why he’s retiring from movies to focus on painting:

“The worst development in filmmaking—particularly in the last five years—is how badly directors are treated. It’s become absolutely horrible the way the people with the money decide they can fart in the kitchen, to put it bluntly. It’s not just studios—it’s anyone who is ­financing a film. I guess I don’t understand the assumption that the director is presumptively wrong about what the audience wants or needs when they are the first audience, in a way. And probably got into making movies ­because of being in that audience.

“But an alarming thing I learned during Contagion is that the people who pay to make the movies and the audiences who see them are actually very much in sync. I remember during previews how upset the audience was by the Jude Law character. The fact that he created a sort of mixed reaction was viewed as a flaw in the filmmaking. Not, ‘Oh, that’s interesting, I’m not sure if this guy is an asshole or a hero.’ People were really annoyed by that. And I thought, Wow, so ambiguity is not on the table anymore. They were angry.”

Published: Jan 27, 2013
Length: 29 minutes (7,404 words)

The Last Beat

The story of Lucien Carr, who befriended Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and William S. Burroughs while he was a freshman at Columbia. The four friends had their lives changed when Carr murdered a man during his sophomore year:

“The day after Carr confessed, both Kerouac and Burroughs were arrested as material witnesses. Burroughs’s father came to New York to post his bail, but Kerouac’s family refused. Instead, his girlfriend Edie Parker came to his rescue, though the judge would not allow her to bail him out unless the pair married, which they did in a short ceremony on August 22, setting the course of Kerouac’s next several years.

“Though Ginsberg was the only one who escaped arrest, it was on him that the murder arguably had the gravest impact. Deeply in love with Carr, he had also developed a close friendship with Kammerer and was struggling with his own homosexuality. Johnson suggests in The Voice Is All that, while Carr denied it, Ginsberg may have experimented sexually with both men before the murder. And in August, she writes, Ginsberg ‘spent some intensely lonely weeks mourning the loss of Lucien and “wonderful, perverse Kammerer,” twice drafting suicide notes in his journal.'”

Published: Jan 25, 2013
Length: 12 minutes (3,103 words)

Please Feed The Meters: The Next Parking Revolution

Why did America give up on charging for parking? A proposed solution to congestion and sprawl:

“There’s plenty to hate about driving—traffic jams, car accidents, speeding tickets—not to mention the endless headache of finding a spot to park. So what if you discovered an invention that could wean us from our vehicles, combating suburban sprawl and making city streets less dangerous, congested, and polluted? Well, that device has been around for nearly 80 years: It’s called the parking meter.

“Contrary to popular belief, the parking meter was originally designed to keep traffic moving and make more spaces available for shoppers, a measure often lauded by local businesses as much as the public who paid their hourly rates. Beginning with the first parking meter, installed in 1935 on the corner of First Street and Robinson Avenue in Oklahoma City, and spreading clear across the United States, the device was hailed as the great solution to our parking woes. Yet decades of poor meter implementation, inane off-street parking requirements, and technological stasis slowly turned our city streets into a driver’s nightmare.”

(via The Browser)

Published: Jan 26, 2013
Length: 9 minutes (2,313 words)

Ann Kingman’s Project Short Story

[Fiction] Ann Kingman has resolved to read one short story per day in 2013. Here’s a list of what she’s discovered so far.

Published: Jan 26, 2013

Do We Really Want to Live Without the Post Office?

The U.S. Postal Service is losing $25 million per day—but its leadership is not giving up:

“The investment in the shipping and trucking and sorting infrastructure has already been made, so they’re exploring whether there are ways to get more value from it. Postal carriers already deliver one million packages of drugs and contact lenses per day. For an aging, longer-living, and ever-more-medicated population, Rx by mail could be vastly expanded. Delivery is confidential, tamper-proof, and utterly dependable. In the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, when subways and many drugstores in the Rockaways and elsewhere were shut down, the postal service was still delivering medicine to many of the elderly in the worst-hit areas.

“But there may also be other opportunities outside of mail and packages. The main battle in retail right now is over the ‘last mile.’ Amazon, Walmart, and eBay all want to be able to deliver their goods almost instantly. The postal service is uniquely suited to offer this. The idea would be that if you order a new toaster or jacket in the morning, your mail carrier would bring it to your door by dinner. According to Leon Nicholas, an analyst at consulting firm Kantar Retail, there have been high-level discussions between the postal service and Walmart over such an arrangement.”

Source: Esquire
Published: Jan 26, 2013
Length: 39 minutes (9,958 words)