A Summer at Camp Kweebec

[Not single-page] A visit to one of Philly’s most iconic summer camps:

“White’s runner arrived at the stage first, and Tyler, a Villanova bunk member who’d been watching older campers do this for years, thrust his face into the dessert topping. A chant rose: ‘Eat that pie! Eat that pie!’ About five minutes into the munch, the inevitable happened. Tyler lurched a little, and a burst of purple mud seeped out of his mouth, back onto the pie plate.

“I had been told that regurgitation wouldn’t end a pie-eating effort. I never imagined this rule would come into play, that one young man would have to make the ultimate sacrifice for his team. There have been legendary moments in the annals of Philadelphia sports: Chamberlain’s 100-point game, the Flyers’ 1974 Cup championship. I’ll spare the details, but Tyler cleaned his plate first. He won the Apache Relay. His teammates mobbed the stage. Someone shouted ‘That’s how to get it done!’ and slapped him on the back. Younger boys gaped in awe. Someday, they dared to dream, that’s gonna be me.”

Published: Jun 29, 2012
Length: 10 minutes (2,685 words)

Rachel Maddow’s Quiet War

On what drives the MSNBC star, and how she’s attempted to move her show beyond partisan shouting:

“Back in 2008, shortly after Phil Griffin called Maddow and told her he was giving her a prime-time television show of her own, she inherited the staff of Verdict With Dan Abrams, a show that embodied the gimmicky emptiness Maddow detests. The Sunday night before her first show, her executive producer, Bill Wolff, threw a launch party at his apartment and invited the entire Verdict staff. When everyone was sufficiently liquored up, Maddow gave a speech. ‘The point was to get everyone excited,’ Wolff recalls. ‘”OK, go get ’em, let’s go do this.”‘ What Maddow told them, instead, was that they needed to forget everything they had ever learned – that this show would be completely different from the one they’d been working on, that they must forget all of the skills they’d spent their careers building.

“‘That is crystallized in my memory,’ says Susan Mikula, Maddow’s partner of 13 years, who attended the party. ‘Everyone was pale. It could not have been more of a bummer. Or more quiet.’

“Maddow knew she had blown it. ‘I think Day One I was a bummer,’ she says. ‘Forget everything you’ve learned! Which implicitly says everything you’ve learned doesn’t matter to me.'”

Source: Rolling Stone
Published: Jun 27, 2012
Length: 22 minutes (5,500 words)

The Well-Hung Boy Next Door

Men rarely become porn stars, but James Deen has found a large following simply by being “average”:

“James Deen, whose real name is Bryan Sevilla, grew up in Pasadena, California. His parents are both, after a fashion, rocket scientists. His father is a mechanical engineer for NASA. His mother does data analysis for the space agency. Deen, contrary to our notion of porn stars as survivors of sexual trauma, does not recall any sexual abuse or destructive misadventures, other than a teacher who Deen says tried to molest him when he was 8 or 9, but Deen “punched his testicles a lot” and made good his escape.

“Deen lost his virginity at age 12 during a sleepover at a Jewish camp. Not long after, in junior high school, he made enemies of the football team by having sex with a player’s sister in the school pool during gym. He had some drug escapades in junior high. He spent a couple of years in outpatient rehab. Around age 15, he left high school and moved out and spent two years more or less homeless, hanging around with a crew of gutter punks. Relations with his parents remained reasonably cordial. They furnished him with a cell phone, and he periodically snuck into his mom’s house to do laundry. (Deen’s parents are divorced.)”

Source: GQ
Published: Jul 2, 2012
Length: 30 minutes (7,570 words)

The Money-Empathy Gap

[Not single-page] Does having more money make a person have less empathy?

“Earlier this year, Piff, who is 30, published a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that made him semi-famous. Titled ‘Higher Social Class Predicts Increased Unethical Behavior,’ it showed through quizzes, online games, questionnaires, in-lab manipulations, and field studies that living high on the socioeconomic ladder can, colloquially speaking, dehumanize people. It can make them less ethical, more selfish, more insular, and less compassionate than other people. It can make them more likely, as Piff demonstrated in one of his experiments, to take candy from a bowl of sweets designated for children. ‘While having money doesn’t necessarily make anybody anything,’ Piff says, ‘the rich are way more likely to prioritize their own self-interests above the interests of other people. It makes them more likely to exhibit characteristics that we would stereotypically associate with, say, assholes.'”

Published: Jul 1, 2012
Length: 20 minutes (5,199 words)

The First Week of After

A couple learns about a cancer diagnosis:

“I watch your hand starting to shake as you write down information that will sit on a small square of paper for months, impossible to get rid of. I stand two feet away and watch your lips. I hear you say, Is that all you can tell me…. Right here, midsentence, your eyes move to mine, and in this instant I have the feeling that I have it all wrong, that I am misreading the shaking, the tone—that it is not the worst thing and that I just slipped for a moment into that parallel universe that floats next to ours, the one we all peek into when somebody is an hour late driving home in heavy rain, the one most of us back out of, returning to the familiar world where the unthinkable happens to other people. And then the frozen moment passes, and you finish your sentence. I hear you say, Is that all you can tell me, a tumor-like growth? The words have force enough to move matter; they push me two steps back.

“It is a simple moment. A tumor-like growth.

Source: Missouri Review
Published: Dec 1, 2008
Length: 17 minutes (4,306 words)

This Beautiful, Sweet Little Town Is Just Gone

On March 2, 2012, a tornado hit the village of Moscow, Ohio. A look at how the residents fared:

“At approximately 4:47 p.m., it hits the riverfront homes. In the first second, a tornado can break every window in a house. It rips shingles loose and pries the roof free, moving over it like air over a jet wing. With the windows now holes, the houses fill with wind. Roofs lift, exterior walls push outward, interior walls collapse. With nothing left to protect the structure, the tornado takes what’s inside—papers, furniture, tools, photographs, instruments, lamps, antique dressers, refrigerators, chairs, sofas, beds—and adds it to its growing, spinning wall.

“On the riverfront, Linda Niehoff doesn’t hear the tornado the way almost everyone else will. It hits too fast for that. She is on the second floor of her large brick home, trying to get downstairs, when the lights go out. The tornado is here, she knows it; there’s no time to make it to the lower level so she dives into the bathroom, near an interior wall where the chimney comes up from the floor below. She crouches in a fireplace as the tornado demolishes her walls and roof, carrying away everything the floods hadn’t been able to over the last 214 years.”

Published: Jun 29, 2012
Length: 19 minutes (4,918 words)

A Snitch’s Dilemma

In Atlanta, a drug dealer is asked to become a confidential informant for cops in a narcotics unit. He ends up turning them in when the officers try to cover up a botched drug bust that ends up killing an innocent woman:

“‘You made a buy today for us,’ Smith explained. ‘Two $25 baggies of crack.’

“‘I did?’ White asked. It took him a moment to register. ‘O.K. Who did I buy it from?’

“‘Dude named Sam.’ Smith described the imaginary seller, told how Sam had taken his money then walked White to the back of the house and handed him the drugs as Smith and a fellow officer, Arthur Tesler, watched from a car across the street.

“‘O.K.,’ White said. ‘Where?’

“Smith said: ‘933 Neal Street. I’ll call you later.’

“Now in the living room, the TV reporter was saying how a 92-year-old woman had died in the incident, and people were suggesting that the police had shot her. Two and two came together in White’s mind. They did it, he suddenly knew. They messed up. They killed that old lady. Now his heart pounded as the implications became clear. And they want me to cover for them.

Published: Jun 29, 2012
Length: 30 minutes (7,688 words)

The Little-Known History of How the Modern Olympics Got Their Start

Tracing the modern Olympics back to their origin in rural England, where there was a very different set of competitive events:

“Ah, but in Much Wenlock, the Olympic spirit thrived, year after year—as it does to this day. Penny Brookes had first scheduled the games on October 22, 1850, in an effort ‘to promote the moral, physical and intellectual improvement of the inhabitants’ of Wenlock. However, notwithstanding this high-minded purpose, and unlike the sanctimonious claptrap that suffocates the Games today, Penny Brookes also knew how to put a smile on the Olympic face. His annual Much Wenlock games had the breezy ambience of a medieval county fair. The parade to the ‘Olympian Fields’ began, appropriately, at the two taverns in town, accompanied by heralds and bands, with children singing, gaily tossing flower petals. The winners were crowned with laurel wreaths, laid on by the begowned fairest of Much Wenlock’s fair maids. Besides the classic Greek fare, the competitions themselves tended to the eclectic. One year there was a blindfolded wheelbarrow race, another offered ‘an old woman’s race for a pound of tea’ and on yet another occasion there was a pig chase, with the intrepid swine squealing past the town’s limestone cottages until cornered ‘in the cellar of Mr. Blakeway’s house.'”

Source: Smithsonian
Published: Jun 29, 2012
Length: 25 minutes (6,278 words)

Finding Poetry in Illness

A woman recovering from a kidney transplant finds solace in poetry:

“I began with C.K. Williams’s ‘Dream’ (‘Mad dreams! Mad love!’) and ended with Kyger’s ‘[He is pruning the privet]’: ‘You are not alone is this world / not a lone a parallel world of reflection / in a window keeps the fire burning.’ In between, I found Swithering by Robin Robertson and through ‘Trysts’ met him on the riverbed. Ada Limón’s ‘Crush’ cut ‘the right branch / and a sort of light / woke up underneath.’ I ached for the current between Donald Hall and Jane Kenyon, and the ancient liberties taken by Cavafy and Catullus. I luxuriated in the ecstatic poetry of Mirabai and mused on the grand time Jane Hirshfield and Robert Bly must have shared while making their translations. I grabbed onto Kevin Young’s shirttails for a wild ride, and I was no less than razed and rebuilt by Richard Siken’s ‘Litany in Which Certain Things Are Crossed Out’: ‘The entire history of human desire takes about seventy minutes to tell. / Unfortunately, we don’t have that kind of time.’ Mary Oliver’s West Wind dazzled me with its investigation into longing, and in American Primitive I cherished Oliver’s ‘The Plum Trees,’ with its advice that ‘the only way / to tempt happiness into your mind is by taking it / into the body first, like small / wild plums.'”

Published: May 10, 2012
Length: 9 minutes (2,422 words)

Seeing Nora Everywhere

The Girls creator remembers her friendship with Nora Ephron:

“Her advice was unparalleled. At one of our lunches this past January, I was sheepishly describing a male companion’s lack of support for my professional endeavors. She nodded in a very ‘don’t be stupid’ way, as if I already knew what I had to do: ‘You can’t possibly meet someone right now. When I met Nick, I was already totally notorious’—note: Nora was the only person who could make that word sound neither braggy nor sinister—’and he understood exactly what he was getting into. You can’t meet someone until you’ve become what you’re becoming.’ Panicked, I asked, ‘How long will that take?’

“Nora considered a moment. ‘Give it six months.'”

Source: The New Yorker
Published: Jun 28, 2012
Length: 7 minutes (1,914 words)