How Companies Learn Your Secrets

The power of habits in guiding our behavior—and how companies like Target have used customer data to create new buying habits:

“There are, however, some brief periods in a person’s life when old routines fall apart and buying habits are suddenly in flux. One of those moments — the moment, really — is right around the birth of a child, when parents are exhausted and overwhelmed and their shopping patterns and brand loyalties are up for grabs. But as Target’s marketers explained to Pole, timing is everything. Because birth records are usually public, the moment a couple have a new baby, they are almost instantaneously barraged with offers and incentives and advertisements from all sorts of companies. Which means that the key is to reach them earlier, before any other retailers know a baby is on the way. Specifically, the marketers said they wanted to send specially designed ads to women in their second trimester, which is when most expectant mothers begin buying all sorts of new things, like prenatal vitamins and maternity clothing. ‘Can you give us a list?’ the marketers asked.”

Published: Feb 16, 2012
Length: 27 minutes (6,835 words)

Romance Novels, The Last Great Bastion Of Underground Writing

The art of writing romance novels:

“The romance heroine, though possessed of heart, intelligence and beauty, is at the mercy of her own self-criticism most of the time. As the story begins, she is scared and isolated, poor, or abandoned, or lonely. Not infrequently, the book opens with her having just suffered some terrible loss; her husband has just died in a plane crash, or her parents or beloved guardians have died, and now she is forced to work as a paid companion to a rich and disagreeable widow, maybe, or she’s just come to Australia from England to live with her grandfather, who is mean as a snake. Then she runs into an unusual and interesting man who openly demonstrates his dislike for her, or else pretty much ignores her entirely.

“Difficulties will multiply. And almost always, as the tension builds, the heroine is beset with doubts about her own competence, attractiveness and worth.

“That’s just how I feel! the reader cries inwardly.”

Source: The Awl
Published: Feb 15, 2012
Length: 16 minutes (4,043 words)

The Crackdown

How the uprising in Bahrain failed, and how the United States looked the other way:

“What this silence conceals is the story of what really happened in the Gulf kingdom last year, and the full story of America’s halfhearted attempts to intervene, which ultimately went nowhere. What it also obscures is that last year’s events may mark an ominous turning point in the tiny country’s history. Bahrain’s uprising grew out of a long-running conflict between the country’s Sunni ruling class and its marginalized Shiite majority. But its aftermath has taken on the dimensions of something darker still—a vastly asymmetrical battle that, in the words of Marina Ottaway, a scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, has assumed the ‘ugly overtones of ethnic cleansing and collective punishment.'”

Published: Feb 15, 2012
Length: 24 minutes (6,183 words)

The Legacy Of Wes Leonard

A Michigan high school basketball player hits the game-winning shot. Moments later he collapses from cardiac arrest and dies:

“After the autopsy, when the doctor found white blossoms of scar tissue on Wes Leonard’s heart, he guessed they had been secretly building there for several months. That would mean Wes’s heart was slowly breaking throughout the Fennville Blackhawks’ 2010–11 regular season, when he led them in scoring and the team won 20 games without a loss.

“It would mean his heart was already moving toward electrical meltdown in December, when he scored 26 on Decatur with that big left shoulder clearing a path to the hoop. It would mean his heart swelled and weakened all through January (25 against Hopkins, 33 against Martin) even as it pumped enough blood to fill at least 10 swimming pools.”

Published: Feb 14, 2012
Length: 25 minutes (6,491 words)

How to Say I Love You

100 ways to say the words to that special someone:

“(36) She stands on the unpaved road with your newborn son on her breast. Even though she can’t hear you over the sound of the helicopter, you’re screaming the words. Six months and you’ll send for her. You promise.

“On a rainy midspring morning 26 years later your son appears at the electronics store where you are senior sales. He’s been looking for you for 15 years, since his mother brought him to the States. He asks to buy a VCR. All you can see is that he’s a young guy, good-looking, but nervous. That’s normal; even at $200 it’s still a big-ticket item for a lot of people.”

Author: Paul Ford
Published: Feb 14, 2012
Length: 9 minutes (2,277 words)

What Makes a Perfect Spy Tick?

The evolution of how we recruit and train spies—starting with the OSS in the 1940s—and our changing expectations of what the job entails and what motivates those who sign up:

“I remember him saying something like: ‘This is the only thing in the Army that you can volunteer for and then get out of if you change your mind.’ That’s because we had signed up for something illegal, even immoral, according to some people, he said.

“It was called espionage. We were not going to be turned into spies, he explained, but ‘case officers’ — the people who recruit foreigners to be spies. Put another way, he went on, we were going to persuade foreigners to be traitors, to steal their countries’ secrets. We were going to learn how to lie, steal, cheat to accomplish our mission, he said — and betray people who trusted us, if need be. Anyone who objected, he concluded, could walk out right now.

“He looked around. One man got up and left. The rest of us, a little anxious, stayed put.”

Author: Jeff Stein
Source: Washington Post
Published: Feb 9, 2012
Length: 12 minutes (3,249 words)

The Guardians

Remembering a New York friendship. Excerpted from Manguso’s new book, The Guardians: An Elegy, out Feb. 28:

“The Thursday edition of the Riverdale Press carried a story that began An unidentified white man was struck and instantly killed by a Metro-North train last night as it pulled into the Riverdale station on West 254th Street.

“The train’s engineer told the police that the man was alone and that he jumped. The police officers pulled the body from the track and found no identification. The train’s 425 passengers were transferred to another train and delayed about twenty minutes.”

Published: Feb 14, 2012
Length: 9 minutes (2,368 words)

Adele: One and Only

The newly minted Grammy winner’s lows and highs—from throat surgery and heartbreak to the biggest-selling album of last year:

“Every singer knows the List: citrus, vinegar, mint, dairy, spicy or fried foods, fizzy drinks, caffeine, cigarettes, and alcohol. These are the vocal cords’ enemies. And when one has a five-octave contralto as dynamic, award-winning, money­making, and record-breaking as Adele Laurie Blue Adkins does, one figures out how to avoid these things. Some require less effort than others. Mint? Vinegar? Feh. Cigarettes? Not so easy. Over the few days that I spend around Adele, I see her sneak a fag here and there. No one is perfect. But alcohol? For a once hard-drinking South London pub girl who has admitted that she has written some of her best songs after a few belts, I would have thought this might present something of a challenge. Not so much, it turns out. Adele hasn’t had a drink since last June.”

More Van Meter on Amazon: Last Good Time: Skinny D’amato, The Notorious 500 Club, And The Rise And Fall Of Atlantic City

Source: Vogue
Published: Feb 13, 2012
Length: 23 minutes (5,961 words)

The Living Nightmare

Quanitta Underwood suffered years of sexual abuse by her father. She’s now an Olympic contender in boxing, and a public voice for other survivors:

“Underwood, of course, covets a gold medal and the fame that would come with it. ‘I want to take that ride,’ she says. ‘I want to be a household name.’

“But beyond that, she wants to be a symbol of hope to anyone who has ever been sexually abused, though to do so requires something harder for her than a thousand hours of hitting the heavy bag. She has to talk about what happened.”

Published: Feb 13, 2012
Length: 17 minutes (4,383 words)

Turnabout

[Fiction] A favor from an ex, with a catch:

“DENNIS
Let me guess. Is this about money? Now that I have it? Or do you suddenly need me on some emotional level heretofore unrealized?

Pause.

JOSH
Yes. I need money.

Silence.

Published: Jan 1, 2012
Length: 19 minutes (4,849 words)