A Fish Story

The political battle over the disappearance of the menhaden, a silvery, six-inch fish that’s food for larger fish and farmed for omega-3 oils and fertilizer:

“Harvested by the billions and then processed into various industrial products, menhaden are extruded into feed pellets that make up the staple food product for a booming global aquaculture market, diluted into oil for omega-3 health supplements, and sold in various meals and liquids to companies that make pet food, livestock feed, fertilizer, and cosmetics. We have all consumed menhaden one way or another. Pound for pound, more menhaden are pulled from the sea than any other fish species in the continental United States, and 80 percent of the menhaden netted from the Atlantic are the property of a single company.”

Published: May 10, 2012
Length: 28 minutes (7,051 words)

Mitt Romney’s Prep School Classmates Recall Pranks, But Also Troubling Incidents

The candidate’s former prep school classmates recall a bullying incident that still troubles them to this day:

“A few days later, Friedemann entered Stevens Hall off the school’s collegiate quad to find Romney marching out of his own room ahead of a prep school posse shouting about their plan to cut Lauber’s hair. Friedemann followed them to a nearby room where they came upon Lauber, tackled him and pinned him to the ground. As Lauber, his eyes filling with tears, screamed for help, Romney repeatedly clipped his hair with a pair of scissors.

“‘It happened very quickly, and to this day it troubles me,’ said Buford, the school’s wrestling champion, who said he joined Romney in restraining Lauber. Buford subsequently apologized to Lauber, who was ‘terrified,’ he said. ‘What a senseless, stupid, idiotic thing to do.'”

Source: Washington Post
Published: May 10, 2012
Length: 21 minutes (5,489 words)

How Goldman Sachs Blew the Facebook IPO

An inside look at how banks jockey for “left lead” status on an IPO—especially one as big as Facebook’s:

“For the past couple of decades, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley have ruled the tech IPO business, with one of the firms serving as lead manager on most of the hottest deals.

“Goldman took Microsoft, Yahoo, and eBay public, for example. Morgan won Netscape and Google. Although other firms have picked off an occasional deal over the years, when it comes to tech banking, Goldman and Morgan remain in a class by themselves. To be sure, having Morgan or Goldman take you public is no guarantee of success—they’ve banked plenty of dogs. But going public without Morgan or Goldman means signaling that you weren’t good enough for Morgan or Goldman. In other words, that your company is second-rate.

“In the last few years, though, there has been a shift in the Morgan-Goldman power balance in the Valley. Specifically, until very recently, Morgan Stanley has won almost all of the hot IPOs.”

Published: May 9, 2012
Length: 21 minutes (5,485 words)

In Libya, the Captors Have Become the Captive

With Qaddafi’s former guards now in prison, one man leads the interrogation of his brother’s killer:

“Nasser called Marwan’s father and invited him to come see his son. For the last six months, the family stayed away out of fear that the thuwar would take revenge on them all. On the following Friday, eight of them showed up at the base in Tajoura. Nasser greeted them at the door and led them downstairs. ‘It was a very emotional moment,’ Nasser said. ‘You can imagine how I felt when I saw my brother’s killer embracing his brother.’ The two brothers hugged each other for a long time, sobbing, until finally Nasser pushed them apart, because he could not bear it anymore. Later, he took one of the cousins aside and asked him if he knew why Marwan was being held. The man said no. ‘I told him: “Your cousin killed six very qualified people whom Libya will need, two doctors and four officers. One of them was my brother.” ‘ The cousin listened, and then he hugged Nasser before the family left.”

Published: May 9, 2012
Length: 32 minutes (8,006 words)

How Hewlett-Packard Lost Its Way

Inside the boardroom battles that led to the hiring (and firing) of CEO Léo Apotheker, formerly of SAP. Meg Whitman is now in charge of finding ways to fix the legendary tech company:

“A few months after she took over as the CEO of Hewlett-Packard last September, Meg Whitman held one in a series of get-to-know-you meetings with employees. To say the audience, a group of software engineers and managers, was sullen would be an understatement. As Whitman spoke, many of them glared at her. Others weren’t making eye contact with their new boss. Their heads were down, and they were tapping furiously on handheld devices.

“‘Your comments are being live-blogged,’ one employee told her defiantly. Whitman challenged the man. ‘You all have taken leaking to a new art form,’ she said. ‘It’s a sign of an unhappy company. You wish HP ill.’ The tapping suddenly stopped, and as the room fell silent, the mobile devices were lowered.”

Source: Fortune
Published: May 9, 2012
Length: 31 minutes (7,800 words)

When Illness Makes a Spouse a Stranger

A woman watched her husband’s behavior change dramatically—so much so she even considered divorce. He was eventually diagnosed with frontotemporal dementia, a rare and frequently misdiagnosed brain disease that affects personality and language skills:

“Looking back, Mrs. French, who is 66 and lives in Manhattan, recalled episodes of odd behavior over the years and realized that her husband’s mind had probably begun to slip while he was in his 50s, at least a decade before the disease was diagnosed. He had always changed jobs a lot. At the time she took it as a sign of a stubborn personality, not of illness — and it is still not clear which it was. He always wanted to do things his own way, and that did not sit well with some bosses.

“‘I thought it was just Michael being Michael,’ she said.

“A friend described Mr. French as being unable to read the tea leaves, oblivious of corporate politics. At one point Mrs. French even bought him a self-help book. But he never changed.”

Published: May 5, 2012
Length: 13 minutes (3,358 words)

Barbara Robbins: A Slain CIA Secretary’s Life and Death

The story of a 21-year-old who was the first American woman to die in the Vietnam War. For years the CIA refused to acknowledge that she worked for the agency:

“It is Warren who inherited from his dead parents the one thing that most illuminates his sister’s time in Vietnam: a trove of 30 letters she wrote home, dating from her arrival in Saigon to the week before her death.

“The letters offer a glimpse into the life of a young woman supposedly working for the State Department as she launched her career and looked for love amid Vietnam’s escalating violence.

“‘Reading these letters,’ said Warren, 65, a retired airline mechanic, who hadn’t looked at them since he was a kid, ‘it’s like I got to know her all over again.’

August 6 1964: Dear Mother, Dad & Warren , I think I’m going to really enjoy working for the State Dept. Security-wise we do have to be careful — but you’d never feel that way right here in Saigon if it weren’t for the Vietnamese Police all over the city.

Source: Washington Post
Published: May 7, 2012
Length: 8 minutes (2,223 words)

The Climate Fixers

Meet the researchers who are developing new methods for countering global warming using geoengineering. Some solutions come with great risks:

“While such tactics could clearly fail, perhaps the greater concern is what might happen if they succeeded in ways nobody had envisioned. Injecting sulfur dioxide, or particles that perform a similar function, would rapidly lower the temperature of the earth, at relatively little expense—most estimates put the cost at less than ten billion dollars a year. But it would do nothing to halt ocean acidification, which threatens to destroy coral reefs and wipe out an enormous number of aquatic species. The risks of reducing the amount of sunlight that reaches the atmosphere on that scale would be as obvious—and immediate—as the benefits. If such a program were suddenly to fall apart, the earth would be subjected to extremely rapid warming, with nothing to stop it. And while such an effort would cool the globe, it might do so in ways that disrupt the behavior of the Asian and African monsoons, which provide the water that billions of people need to drink and to grow their food.”

Source: The New Yorker
Published: May 7, 2012
Length: 25 minutes (6,341 words)

Who Invented Chaplin’s Tramp?

The evolution of Charlie Chaplin’s most famous character—and the woman who helped shape it. On actress-director Mabel Normand and her effect on Chaplin’s work:

“When Chaplin became the Tramp on Normand’s watch, he also learned to be a movie actor. As Sennett put it, Normand, ‘the greatest motion-picture comedienne of any day, was as deft in pantomime as Chaplin was… She worked in slapstick, but her stage business and her gestures were subtle, not broad.’ Normand, the first movie star actress who wasn’t stage trained, hadn’t been taught the comic conventions of the theater, or to project to the back of the house. She had a movie-bred patience for living in the moment. She was a movie star because while she was beautiful, she let you see inside, and people liked what they saw. Movies are supremely intimate, and Normand was consummate at drawing people in, and holding them. We can watch Chaplin learning Normand’s delicate skills.”

Published: May 7, 2012
Length: 16 minutes (4,053 words)

The Maturation of the Billionaire Boy-Man

[Not single-page] Facebook staffers once told Mark Zuckerberg he needed to take “CEO lessons.” How Zuckerberg responded, and what it means for Facebook leading up to its IPO:

“‘Basically, there are two ways to build an organization,’ a former Facebook employee explains. ‘You can be really, really good at hiring, or you can be really, really good at firing.’ Zuckerberg has been really good at firing. ‘We made some hires that weren’t the right ones. And we were pretty good at correcting that quickly. Mark deserves the credit for identifying and following through with that.’ In other cases, key personnel who were good fits simply got outgrown by the company. It can be even harder to jettison those kinds of employees, whose contributions have earned them the loyalty of business partners and colleagues. But here too Zuckerberg did not flinch.”

Published: May 7, 2012
Length: 19 minutes (4,799 words)