Florida Farm Workers Tell How Drugs, Debt Bind Them in Modern Slavery

A former crack addict sues a Florida farm, accusing the owners of modern-day slavery—set up to live in an environment that preyed on his addiction and left him without a paycheck:

“There’s something going on in this small town and it might be hard to care because the victims are often homeless black men who live mostly in the shadows. Many have criminal records and sins in their past.

“But many served in the armed forces and lived good lives before they dropped out of society and wound up in bondage.

“Authorities have failed to stop a form of slavery that begins with indebtedness and sometimes doesn’t end until a worker is dead.

“And it continues today.”

Source: Tampa Bay Times
Published: May 13, 2012
Length: 9 minutes (2,451 words)

Money Unlimited

How the Supreme Court dismantled campaign-finance reform—and how government missteps in the Citizens United case inadvertently aided in its undoing:

“Alito wanted to push Stewart down a slippery slope. Since McCain-Feingold forbade the broadcast of ‘electronic communications’ shortly before elections, this was a case about movies and television commercials. What else might the law regulate? ‘Do you think the Constitution required Congress to draw the line where it did, limiting this to broadcast and cable and so forth?’ Alito said. Could the law limit a corporation from ‘providing the same thing in a book? Would the Constitution permit the restriction of all those as well?’

“Yes, Stewart said: ‘Those could have been applied to additional media as well.’

“The Justices leaned forward.”

Source: The New Yorker
Published: May 14, 2012
Length: 39 minutes (9,780 words)

Château Sucker

[Not single-page] The case against Rudy Kurniawan, who arrived on the wine scene less than a decade ago and now stands accused of selling millions of dollars in fake wines:

“Among a privileged set, though, Kurniawan’s quirks and résumé gaps were of much less interest than his generosity. After one tasting, Wasserman hailed him for having ‘poured the sickest lineup of wines I have ever had in one evening’ and told him that ‘the scepter, the crown, the ermine cape is yours.’ Meadows, too, became a beneficiary of Kurniawan’s largesse, through which he tasted wines even he had never encountered. Grateful, he took pains to field Kurniawan’s often arcane queries about labeling and capsule nomenclature. ‘I thought at the time, “Jesus Christ, he must take these bottles to bed,” ’ Meadows says. Soon, he was publishing tasting notes based on Kurniawan bottles, lending his blue-chip imprimatur to the young man and his wines. Robert Parker, the world’s most powerful wine critic, also drank them and pronounced Kurniawan ‘a very sweet and generous man.'”

Published: May 14, 2012
Length: 20 minutes (5,098 words)

Excerpt: The Trap of Marginal Thinking

From Clay Christensen’s forthcoming book How Will You Measure Your Life?, an examination of how businesses and individuals fail to understand the challenges posed by smaller competitors with less to lose:

“Case studies such as this one helped me resolve a paradox that has appeared repeatedly in my attempts to help established companies that are confronted by disruptive entrants—as was the case with Blockbuster. Once their executives understood the peril that the disruptive attackers posed, I would say, ‘Okay. Now the problem is that your sales force is not going to be able to sell these disruptive products. They need to be sold to different customers, for different purposes. You need to create a different sales force.’ Inevitably they would respond, ‘Clay, you have no idea how much it costs to create a new sales force. We need to leverage our existing sales team.’

“The language of the disruptive attackers was completely different: ‘It’s time to create the sales force.’ Hence, the paradox: Why is it that the big, established companies that have so much capital find these initiatives to be so costly? And why do the small entrants with much less capital find them to be straightforward?”

Published: May 14, 2012
Length: 8 minutes (2,160 words)

The Cooler Me

A writer investigates what it would be like if he never got married, had kids, or settled into a stable job. He decides to search for his carefree doppelgänger—a 39-year-old singer-songwriter named Kyle Field:

“‘What time can I come by?’ I asked.

“‘Oh, anytime. I’ll just be kicking it around the house.’

“Kicking it. This is not a concept in our house. I drove out to the scruffy edge of southeastern Portland and pulled up to the place where my doppelgänger was staying, nervous about intruding. The house was everything I’d ever dreamed of—at least when I used to dream of such a life. There was a pile of construction lumber in the front yard, and the porch was covered in beer cans and Goodwill furniture and well-thumbed paperbacks, some of them as warped as giant clams.”

Source: GQ
Published: May 12, 2012
Length: 22 minutes (5,549 words)

The Dinner Party

[Fiction] A couple prepares for another predictable evening with old friends:

“Later, he came out of the bathroom just as the toilet was completing its roar. She was no longer in the kitchen. He took another cheese and cracker. He walked past the dressed table to the living room. She sat on the sofa reading the same magazine he had been reading. He stood in the middle of the room and raised his hands. ‘Where are they?’

“‘If there’s one thing that’s predictable,’ she said.

“‘But it’s almost forty-five minutes.’

“‘They’ll be eating some very cold appetizers.'”

Source: The New Yorker
Published: Aug 11, 2008
Length: 20 minutes (5,210 words)

How Wall Street Killed Financial Reform

The many ways to dismantle a law: How the 2,300-page Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act has been attacked and weakened since its passage in 2010:

“The fate of Dodd-Frank over the past two years is an object lesson in the government’s inability to institute even the simplest and most obvious reforms, especially if those reforms happen to clash with powerful financial interests. From the moment it was signed into law, lobbyists and lawyers have fought regulators over every line in the rulemaking process. Congressmen and presidents may be able to get a law passed once in a while – but they can no longer make sure it stays passed. You win the modern financial-regulation game by filing the most motions, attending the most hearings, giving the most money to the most politicians and, above all, by keeping at it, day after day, year after fiscal year, until stealing is legal again. ‘It’s like a scorched-earth policy,’ says Michael Greenberger, a former regulator who was heavily involved with the drafting of Dodd-Frank. ‘It requires constant combat. And it never, ever ends.'”

Source: Rolling Stone
Published: May 11, 2012
Length: 26 minutes (6,625 words)

Reality Check

A startup founder struggles with what’s next after a period of slow growth:

“It was late on a gloomy Saturday afternoon in Mountain View, and we were doing a walk’n’talk ‘office hours’ session with Paul Graham – ‘PG’ – on the street outside the Y Combinator office.

“‘What do you have to show for the funding you’ve taken so far?’

“I tried to explain. ‘We felt we needed to build our own technology platform for flight search, because nothing already existed to support the product we were trying to build. So, basically we spent it on back-end engineering.’

“‘Well that sure was a mistake,’ he huffed.

“‘How do you know your product is something people want?’ The pg-bot had engaged.

“It was hard to explain.”

Author: Tom Howard
Source: Tom Howard
Published: May 11, 2012
Length: 20 minutes (5,235 words)

Laboratory Confidential

A look back at James Watson’s book The Double Helix and the controversy it stirred in the science community.

Watson expanded the boundaries of science writing to include not only the formal, public face of Nobel-winning discoveries but also the day-to-day life of working scientists—both inside and outside the lab. The Double Helix rejuvenated a genre that had been largely academic or hagiographic. Its success showed that there was and is an appetite for the story of science; that the stories can be human and exciting; that scientists can be flawed characters; that the whole endeavor doesn’t collapse if you depict it with something less than reverence.

Although the book caused an international scandal that winter, I don’t think any word of the controversy reached me at Classical High School. As a freshman, I read The Double Helix as a story of pure triumph. Now, of course, I can see what I couldn’t then: an epic of the loss of innocence, writ small and large. And I can see the arc of Watson’s life since 1968, which has been another epic of triumph and hubris, ending with a fall. So now I see the darkness around the shining cup.

Published: May 10, 2012
Length: 13 minutes (3,471 words)

You Are Very Cold, and This Feels Like an Adventure

A writer adopts the Choose Your Own Adventure book format to write a story about a disastrous love affair:

“The answer, of course, is that you should dump Anne before it’s too late. But the absurd options the book gives ‘you’— later ‘choices’ include dueling with an Ant-Warrior, or attacking the Evil Power Master—simply highlight the completely screwed-up perspective of the co-dependent. When I was stuck in one of those terrible relationships, and friends told me it was time to break it off, I looked at them as if they were crazy—as if the options they were offering had so little to do with my actual situation they were functionally useless.”

Author: Dan Kois
Source: Slate
Published: May 5, 2012
Length: 6 minutes (1,579 words)