Terrorists? Us?
How does the U.S. define what groups are terrorist organizations, and what groups are potential allies? Questions around the Mujahedin e Khalq (MEK) in Iran:
“The story of the People’s Mujahedin of Iran, also known as the Mujahedin e Khalq (MEK), is all about the way image management can enable a diehard enemy to become a cherished ally. The MEK is currently campaigning to be officially delisted in the US as a terrorist organisation. Once off the list it will be free to make use of its support on Capitol Hill in order to become America’s most favoured, and no doubt best funded, Iranian opposition group.
“The last outfit to achieve something similar was the Iraqi National Congress, the lobby group led by Ahmed Chalabi that talked of democracy and paved the way for the US invasion of Iraq by presenting Washington with highly questionable ‘evidence’ of weapons of mass destruction and Saddam Hussein’s links with al-Qaida.”
Maxim Interrogates the Makers and Stars of ‘The Wire’
An oral history of The Wire, 10 years after the show’s debut:
“Michael B. Jordan (Wallace, Barksdale gang dealer): This is some real shit. It was real to the point where crackheads would come up and try to cop. I had fake money, and they would come over, and an exchange would go down. I would think they were part of the crew, and I’d make the exchange. Then security would come around and be like, ‘No! No! No!’ and break it up. I was like, ‘Oh, shit! That’s really a crack-head! I’m sorry! I’m not really a drug dealer!'”
Girls Love Me
On the next Justin Bieber, 16-year-old Austin Mahone, and how pop stars are made:
Austin is already, in many senses, a rising star. At press time, more than 650,000 people were following him on Twitter. (By the time you read this, that number may well be a million.) And yet in Nashville, he was getting a crash course in how to do the thing that has traditionally been a prerequisite of musical stardom: live performance. He took a break, ate a slice of pepperoni pizza, and then launched into a rendition of the Bieber hit ‘One Less Lonely Girl.’ Though this was one of his favorite tunes, he seemed disconnected, and Cox was trying to pinpoint the reason. As usual, he was singing along to recorded instrument tracks (and, at times, his own guitar playing), so he should have felt comfortable. Only a handful of people were present, so he shouldn’t have felt intimidated. Finally, she realized he was adjusting to his ear monitors. ‘Is there too much reverb?’ Cox asked.
‘I don’t know,’ Austin replied. ‘What’s reverb?’
Hunting Down My Son’s Killer
A father recounts his family’s quest to diagnose a rare disease in their son:
“We discovered that my son inherited two different (thus-far-unique) mutations in the same gene—the NGLY1 gene—which encodes the enzyme N-glycanase 1. Consequently, he cannot make this enzyme.
“My son is the only human being known to lack this enzyme. Below, I’m documenting our journey to the unlikeliest of diagnoses. This is a story about the kind of hope that only science can provide. (An open access article in The Journal of Medical Genetics contains the detailed results from ground-breaking experiment that diagnosed him.)”
The Truth Is Out There: From The 1985 NBA Draft Lottery To The Olympics To Game-Fixing … Which Conspiracy Theory Can You Believe?
An investigation of sports’ biggest conspiracy theories, starting with the 1985 NBA draft:
“I believe in the fix. I believe in the hidden hand, that sports have a secret, redacted history. I believe that Game 6 of the 2002 NBA Western Conference Finals was a sham, that Spygate was a cover-up of a cover-up, that Super Bowl III was preordained, that Dale Earnhardt Jr.’s heartwarming 2001 victory at Daytona was, in fact, too good to be true, that Michael Jordan’s first baseball-playing retirement was anything but, that powerful forces don’t want me to write this because powerful forces don’t want you to read this. I believe that black is white, white is black, the 1990 World Cup draw was rigged[13] and Sophia Loren was definitely in on the con. Most of all, I believe that on June 18, 1985, inside the Starlight Room of the Waldorf-Astoria hotel in New York City, in front of Pat O’Brien and nearly 150 reporters and umpteen popping flashbulbs and an entire world utterly oblivious to the conspiracy about to take place before them in plain sight, David Joel Stern did not act alone.
“Of course, I might be crazy.”
The Great Taliban Jailbreak
An account of how hundreds of Taliban prisoners escaped from Kandahar’s Sarposa prison in Afghanistan through a tunnel in 2011:
“At 5 a.m., hours after Rahim and his cohorts passed directly beneath his office, the warden of Sarposa Prison, General Dastagir Mayar, was awakened. One of his guards stood in the doorway. The entire political block was empty, the guard said. A stout 57-year-old Pashtun from Wardak Province with a neat helmet of dark hair and a matching mustache, Mayar speaks quickly and with urgency, liberally gesticulating. He wanted to know how.
“‘You have to come and see,’ the guard told him. ‘There’s a hole.'”
To Cheat or Not to Cheat
[Not single-page] Ten years after Ken Caminiti became the first prominent Major League Baseball player to confess to steroid use, a look at four players whose lives and careers were forever changed:
“The 1994 Fort Myers Miracle, a Class A affiliate of the Minnesota Twins, included four pitchers of similar attributes. They each threw righthanded, with average velocity, and were either 23 or 24 years old and had been drafted out of four-year colleges in no higher than the fourth round. All would become good friends as they shared the torturous bus rides and even worse food through multiple rungs on the minor league ladder. All clutched the little boy’s dream of becoming a big leaguer. Only one of them made it. Only one of them used steroids. Only one of them considered taking his own life. Only one of them harbors enormous regret. The big leaguer, the juicer, the near suicide and the shamed are one and the same.”
The Recluse
The writer becomes pen pals with an ornery old poet, Hayden Carruth:
“For most of his life, the beard was cropped and average — it was an unserious beard. But by the time I met him in 2003, it was the broad, white beard of a poet in exile, grown out in his desolate corner of America, a nothing-town near Syracuse called Munnsville. ‘The kids call it Funs-ville,’ he told me. Walking into his rickety red house, I said something like, ‘What a nice house’ — to be polite. ‘Hayden tried to commit suicide in this house,’ his wife, Joe-Anne, shot out reflexively.
“‘No, I didn’t,’ Hayden said, barely turning his head from the picture window. ‘Yes, you did,’ Joe-Anne shouted. She nagged him. They bickered a while. Then he raised his voice, interrupted her and settled it: ‘The pills were in the house,’ Hayden said, ‘but I did it in the car.'”
Craig Venter’s Bugs Might Save the World
A look at the work of Craig Venter, one of the first scientists to map the human genome. Venter’s work in synthetic biology could one day change the world by producing clean fuels and biochemicals:
“Right now, Venter is thinking of a bug. He is thinking of a bug that could swim in a pond and soak up sunlight and urinate automotive fuel. He is thinking of a bug that could live in a factory and gobble exhaust and fart fresh air. He may not appear to be thinking about these things. He may not appear to be thinking at all. He may appear to be riding his German motorcycle through the California mountains, cutting the inside corners so close that his kneepads skim the pavement. This is how Venter thinks. He also enjoys thinking on the deck of his 95-foot sailboat, halfway across the Pacific Ocean in a gale, and while snorkeling naked in the Sargasso Sea surrounded by Portuguese men-of-war. When Venter was growing up in San Francisco, he would ride his bicycle to the airport and race passenger jets down the runway. As a Navy corpsman in Vietnam, he spent leisurely afternoons tootling up the coast in a dinghy, under a hail of enemy fire.”
Marjorie and the Birds
[Fiction] A widow settles into her new life, which includes bird-watching in Central Park:
“After her husband died, Marjorie took up hobbies, lots of them, just to see what stuck. She went on a cruise for widows and widowers, which was awful for everyone except the people who hadn’t really loved their spouses to begin with. She took up knitting, which made her fingers hurt, and modern dance for seniors, which made the rest of her body hurt, too. Most of all, Marjorie enjoyed birding, which didn’t seem like a hobby at all, but like agreeing to be more observant. She’d always been good at paying attention.”
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