The Anointing

[Fiction] A woman at the end of her rope turns to a pastor for help:

Seven months into her husband’s depression, Diane called the church secretary. She wanted the elders to come over and anoint Mitch with oil. He hadn’t put his pants on in a month. In the past week he hadn’t left the bed. When he spoke, it was about endings—the end of his career, the end of suffering. This morning, at 3:00 a.m., he’d woken her to ask if summer was over yet. It was early June. Diane was afraid he might kill himself.

She’d seen anointings performed twice before. The first time was at a Baptist summer camp when she was nine. During evening worship—held in a makeshift auditorium beneath a stained canvas tarp—a boy with braces on his legs was brought forward by his mother, his wheelchair leaving tracks in the sawdust. The camp’s pastor removed the braces, knelt in front of the chair, and rubbed oil all over the boy’s white calves as if he were applying sunscreen. The following summer the boy came back to camp still wearing the braces, though now he used crutches with metal cuffs around the wrists.

Published: Sep 4, 2012
Length: 15 minutes (3,757 words)

Rooked

A classic game is being undermined by technology, allowing players to come up with elaborate cheating schemes:

“In the 2006 World Open in Philadelphia, the most moneyed tournament in the land — this year’s event, which concluded in July, had a kitty of $250,000 — tournament director Mike Atkins got bad feelings about a competitor named Steve Rosenberg, entered in the 2000-and-under division (a category for competent but non-master players). Rosenberg came into the tournament having won 18 matches in a row. Then Rosenberg kept his winning streak going against superior competition in the early rounds of the World Open, all the while wearing several layers of clothing in the heat of the Northeastern summer and playing each game with his hands cupped over his ears. Atkins eventually surmised the oddball get-up was part of a scheme, and that Rosenberg was somehow getting moves fed to him. With Rosenberg undefeated heading into the late rounds of the tournament and one win away from taking home the $18,000 first prize, Atkins confronted him about his suspicions, and during the interrogation a tiny electronic device was discovered in Rosenberg’s ear. The player claimed it was a hearing aid; Atkins hopped on his laptop and from Internet research quickly found that the gadget, called a Phonito, was in fact a radio receiver that could be used to relay information from a third party, and, in this case, was likely a third party accessing Fritz or some other chess engine. (The $270 Phonito was manufactured by Phonak, a Swiss electronics firm that at that time was in the news as the sponsor of Floyd Landis during his Tour de France cheating episode.) Rosenberg declined to answer Atkins’s questions; given what was at stake, the tournament director took the non-answers as a confession and booted him out of the tournament.”

Source: Grantland
Published: Sep 12, 2012
Length: 17 minutes (4,281 words)

Obama’s Way

Lewis follows the president for six months—joining him for basketball pickup games, a trip on Air Force One, and inside a decision on how to handle Libya:

“Before big meetings the president is given a kind of road map, a list of who will be at the meeting and what they might be called on to contribute. The point of this particular meeting was for the people who knew something about Libya to describe what they thought Qad­da­fi might do, and then for the Pentagon to give the president his military options. ‘The intelligence was very abstract,’ says one witness. ‘Obama started asking questions about it. “What happens to the people in these cities when the cities fall? When you say Qaddafi takes a town, what happens?”‘ It didn’t take long to get the picture: if they did nothing they’d be looking at a horrific scenario, with tens and possibly hundreds of thousands of people slaughtered. (Qaddafi himself had given a speech on February 22, saying he planned to ‘cleanse Libya, house by house.’) The Pentagon then presented the president with two options: establish a no-fly zone or do nothing at all. The idea was that the people in the meeting would debate the merits of each, but Obama surprised the room by rejecting the premise of the meeting. ‘He instantly went off the road map,’ recalls one eyewitness. ‘He asked, “Would a no-fly zone do anything to stop the scenario we just heard?”‘ After it became clear that it would not, Obama said, ‘I want to hear from some of the other folks in the room.'”

Source: Vanity Fair
Published: Sep 11, 2012
Length: 55 minutes (13,989 words)

Crushing Debt Drove Me to Kosovo — And Then to Iraq

A man with $90,000 in debt makes some hard decisions about his life—starting with a trip to Kosovo for an IT job:

“Of course, all I understood at the time was JOB INTERVIEW and VIENNA. Prior to my application, I had never heard of the OSCE, and I knew next to nothing about Kosovo. My IT skills were rudimentary and my management experience nonexistent. I was mystified why I got a call. I was so completely unqualified for this job, I might have treated this like a mini-vacation but for one significant fact: the salary. The job paid $85,000 a year, tax-free (due to the glorious Foreign Earned Income Exclusion). This was an incomprehensible amount of money. It would fix everything. The pressure to do well in this interview, just for this one small chance at a dream life and the magical solution to all of my problems, was intense.

“I flew to Vienna two weeks later and interviewed the next morning in a small yellow room. It was 10 a.m.—4 a.m. EST. There was a panel, chaired by my would-be boss, a taciturn Austrian man. I was dressed in a garish blue Hugo Boss sport coat that I picked up at Century 21 a week earlier. I was over caffeinated, jet lagged, and clammy. I made nervous self-deprecating jokes, which translated poorly between our cultures. It was a disaster from start to finish. I left the interview thinking, ‘Thanks for the free trip to Vienna.’ I spent the rest of the day squandering my remaining per diem on beer and meat, refusing to think about what might have been. The next morning I flew home.”

Author: Anonymous
Source: The Billfold
Published: Sep 11, 2012
Length: 16 minutes (4,208 words)

Rising Together: A Corrective to Rosin’s ‘The End of Men’

A review of Hanna Rosin’s The End of Men:

“Equality is the pole star of my own politics, and that made it really tough going for me to read The End of Men objectively, or maybe even fairly, because it’s evident that Rosin believes women to be literally — and inherently — superior to men. This view is not only one I don’t share, it is anathema to me. It is the exact reason why I have never been able to call myself a feminist; it transgresses against my deepest conviction, namely, a belief in universal human equality. I believe that each of us — all human beings who share the same seemingly limitless abilities, and the same unfathomable doom — should be able to develop his or her potential and live freely and on equal terms in a condition of mutual respect and support. That is not quite the Rosin view. ‘It’s possible that girls have always had the raw material to make better students,’ she writes, ‘that they’ve always been more studious, organized, self-disciplined, and eager to please, but, because of limited opportunities, what did it matter?’ Or: ‘Many of us hold out the hope that there is a utopia in our future run by women, that power does not in fact corrupt equally.’ (Really, ‘many’ of us hold out this hope? I for one would be too scared it would turn out like that old Star Trek: TNG episode, ‘Angel One.’)”

Published: Sep 11, 2012
Length: 11 minutes (2,900 words)

Whoa, Dude, Are We Inside a Computer Right Now?

Meet a NASA scientist who suggests the possibility that we’re all living inside a video game:

“Two years ago, Rich Terrile appeared on Through the Wormhole, the Science Channel’s show about the mysteries of life and the universe. He was invited onto the program to discuss the theory that the human experience can be boiled down to something like an incredibly advanced, metaphysical version of The Sims.

“It’s an idea that every college student with a gravity bong and The Matrix on DVD has thought of before, but Rich is a well-regarded scientist, the director of the Center for Evolutionary Computation and Automated Design at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and is currently writing an as-yet-untitled book about the subject, so we’re going to go ahead and take him seriously.

“The essence of Rich’s theory is that a ‘programmer’ from the future designed our reality to simulate the course of what the programmer considers to be ancient history—for whatever reason, maybe because he’s bored.”

Author: Ben Makuch
Source: Vice Magazine
Published: Sep 8, 2012
Length: 6 minutes (1,537 words)

Who Wants to Be a Billionaire?

An excerpt from Stross’s new book, which goes inside Y Combinator, Paul Graham’s Silicon Valley startup incubator:

“The Kalvins are attempting an improbable thing, making a case for a nondigital product: ‘Having a physical product that you flip through and have on your coffee table and show your friends—it’s real­ly valuable! We’ve actually bought photo books for our friends and family. It sucks because you have to spend hours making them, finding the photos.’ Every dorm has to prepare one each year, pay a printer $20 a copy, and buy at least a hundred.

“Graham returns to his still-unanswered question: ‘Where does this expand?’

“A Kalvin suggests offering a book based on your personal calendar and Foursquare check-ins. Or your tweets for the year.

“‘You’re not serious, that people are going to print up tweets from last year?’ asks Trevor Blackwell, who is in his early 40s, about the same age as the other three founding partners. He too has a day job, as the chief executive of Anybots, the robot company that then shared its building with Y.C.

“‘Actually, I have a tweet book,’ says one of the Kalvins.”

Source: Vanity Fair
Published: Sep 10, 2012
Length: 20 minutes (5,153 words)

The New New Girl

Mindy Kaling has quickly progressed from a writer and cast member on NBC’s The Office to a best-selling author and star of her own new sitcom:

“To people who know her, it makes perfect sense that she would now have her own sitcom. It was simply a matter of course, on par with how, at 30, she decided to write a book of memoirish essays and observations called Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (And Other Concerns). What’s interesting is that the book exists at all. In the introduction, Kaling apologizes for its not being Tina Fey’s Bossypants, anticipating that the two will be compared, even though Fey published her book amid huge anticipation as the fortysomething lead and creator of 30 Rock who was also starring in movies and thriving off her Sarah Palin impersonation. Kaling wrote hers amid demand from herself and her publisher. One of the chapters is a detailed breakdown of just how famous she’d like to be, which is to say, famous enough that teenagers will copy her look and, when she’s old, she’ll be used as a sight gag on TV shows.”

Author: Jada Yuan
Published: Sep 10, 2012
Length: 15 minutes (3,779 words)

Old College Try? Meet New College Try

Solvency has haunted Antioch College, a liberal arts school in Yellow Springs Ohio with a storied history, which shuttered its doors in 2008. The college reopened last year with 35 students, and is looking for new ways to draw students and maintain financial stability:

“When the first students arrived on campus last fall, they found themselves with an unprecedented amount of influence over what Antioch would be. Administrators had set up a schedule that included intensive study of one subject over a few weeks; what that meant in reality was that students had mid-term exams about two weeks after starting a course. They complained, and in a major change that affected class sequences and faculty, the school dropped the schedule in favor of a more traditional one. Another adjustment: The school had planned to offer Portuguese to help with co-op positions in Brazil, but students persuaded administrators to replace it with Japanese. Students also sit in on faculty interviews and help write visitors’ policies, which is not a common practice at most colleges.

“That kind of influence is possible because Antioch, despite its rich history, is essentially a start-up, with all the opportunities and challenges that go along with a new venture. Money is a constant concern; the school’s endowment, which helps pay for current students’ tuition, is $44.5 million, far smaller than most liberal arts institutions, which means it can’t afford to spend the $75,000 or more per student that high-end liberal-arts colleges do. That’s led Antioch officials to focus on a narrow mission and do it well, acknowledging what they are not and what they cannot do.”

Published: Sep 1, 2012
Length: 15 minutes (3,791 words)

An Open Letter to Wikipedia

A mistake on a Wikipedia entry for one of his novels leads an author to set the record straight:

“My novel ‘The Human Stain’ was described in the entry as ‘allegedly inspired by the life of the writer Anatole Broyard.’ (The precise language has since been altered by Wikipedia’s collaborative editing, but this falsity still stands.)

“This alleged allegation is in no way substantiated by fact. ‘The Human Stain’ was inspired, rather, by an unhappy event in the life of my late friend Melvin Tumin, professor of sociology at Princeton for some thirty years. One day in the fall of 1985, while Mel, who was meticulous in all things large and small, was meticulously taking the roll in a sociology class, he noted that two of his students had as yet not attended a single class session or attempted to meet with him to explain their failure to appear, though it was by then the middle of the semester.

“Having finished taking the roll, Mel queried the class about these two students whom he had never met. ‘Does anyone know these people? Do they exist or are they spooks?’—unfortunately, the very words that Coleman Silk, the protagonist of ‘The Human Stain,’ asks of his classics class at Athena College in Massachusetts.

Source: New Yorker
Published: Sep 7, 2012
Length: 10 minutes (2,694 words)