Lessons
[Fiction, not single-page] A father, his sons, and what he teaches them:
“When we got home from school Paps was in the kitchen, cooking and listening to music and feeling fine. He whiffed the steam coming off a pot, then clapped his hands together and rubbed them briskly. His eyes were wet and sparkled with giddy life. He turned up the volume on the stereo and it was mambo, it was Tito Puente.
“‘Watch out,’ he said, and spun, with grace, on one slippered foot, his bathrobe twirling out around him. In his fist was a glistening, greasy metal spatula, which he pumped in the air to the beat of the bongo drums.”
Man as Machine
The early days of robots. The Age of Enlightenment inspired inventors like Jacques de Vaucanson to create ever more realistic machines that mimicked human behavior:
“Vaucanson, however, was less a philosophical theorist than a practical, even greedy businessman. In 1739, as profits from the Flute Player’s performances began to decline, he added two new automatons to his exhibit. One was a pipe-and-drum player. The other—which was to make him, for a time, one of the most famous men in Europe—was a mechanical duck.
“And not merely a wind-up duck that flapped its wings and quacked and turned its head. If you held out a bit of food in your palm, the duck’s head would lower, its beak would fall open, and the automaton would actually gulp down the morsel. And then, some minutes later—Reader, I am not making this up—the duck would excrete it.”
Dr. Yang’s Fight Club
A kung fu master looks for new disciples to pass on his wisdom:
“Dr. Yang had never had difficulty attracting students in the past—YMAA, the Boston-based organization he founded in 1982, operates more than 60 martial arts schools worldwide—but after more than 25 years, Dr. Yang was growing tired of doling out his ancient teachings piecemeal. If he died, only fragments of that knowledge would survive.
“His dream was to transfer his entire legacy to a new generation in one fat chunk. But the legacy—white crane kung fu—was locked in his sinews, and the transfer would take time: 10 years, by his estimate, at the rate of six days per week. At the end of 10 years, Dr. Yang would be in his 70s and at the end of his ability to teach kung fu. It’s this urgency that explained the almost neurotic vigor he brought to his search for worthy disciples. He couldn’t risk investing effort in anyone who might bow out before the training was complete.”
The Frog of War
Scientist Tyrone B. Hayes discovered a link between the herbicide atrazine and male frogs developing female body parts. His work led to a bizarre battle with atrazine manufacturer Syngenta, in which the two taunted each other over email:
“When a batch of these emails became public in 2010, Hayes’ supporters and critics alike were stunned. Here was one of the top scientists in his field, provoking one of the world’s largest agrichemical companies with crude sexual innuendos and LL Cool J-inspired raps:
“tyrone b hayes is hard as hell
“battle anybody, i don’t care who you tell
“you object! you will fail!
“mercy for the weak is not for sale
“‘It hasn’t been productive in the debate, and it hasn’t helped him,’ Skelly says. ‘I mean, why do that?'”
The End of Wall Street as They Knew It
[Not single-page.] Financial reform has been more successful at changing Wall Street’s business than many imagined—and the public outcry from Occupy and elsewhere has led to some soul-searching:
“For New York’s bankers and traders, the new math suddenly reordered their assumptions about their place in a post-crash city. ‘After tax, that’s like, what, $75,000?’ an investment banker at a rival firm said as he contemplated Morgan Stanley’s decision. He ran the numbers, modeling the implications. ‘I’m not married and I take the subway and I watch what I spend very carefully. But my girlfriend likes to eat good food. It all adds up really quick. A taxi here, another taxi there. I just bought an apartment, so now I have a big old mortgage bill.’ ‘If you’re a smart Ph.D. from MIT, you’d never go to Wall Street now,’ says a hedge-fund executive. ‘You’d go to Silicon Valley. There’s at least a prospect for a huge gain. You’d have the potential to be the next Mark Zuckerberg. It looks like he has a lot more fun.'”
A Reverse Migration from Post-Crack New York
On making a move from the City to the South. Steven Boone and other New Yorkers have headed to Warner Robins, Georgia:
“Like so many young black parents, she moved south not just to provide her children with a more secure environment but also to escape the punishing New York rents. In Warner Robins, entire homes in quiet areas rent for less than a single room in Bed Stuy. Townhouses on well-kept complexes, complete with pool and 24-hour gym access, go for as little as $450 a month and rarely higher than $850. In Macon, the college town next door (and geographically the true dead center of Georgia), gorgeous historic homes rent for as low as $400 a month and often no more than $650. (The local rumor is that, as lovely as the homes are, the ghosts in them insure frequent turnaround. Cool.)
“This new wave of African-Americans heading south has been called the Second Great Migration or the Reverse Migration, in contrast to last century’s black exodus from a segregated, hostile South to opportunities in the North.”
We’re All in the Same Boat—Aren’t We?
A brief history of the cruise ship industry—from its early idealism to its evolution into “funships” for “Huggets”:
“Arison found a Norwegian called Knut Kloster who had a suitable boat. Kloster also came from an old shipping family. They had made their fortune shipping ice to Europe from Norway, and they now ran a vast fleet of tankers. In 1966 Kloster and Arison set up a company called Norwegian Cruise Lines based in Miami.
“Kloster believed that the aim of capitalism was not just to make money but to use its power to improve society. He saw the world as divided between the rich, industrial west – and the ‘third world’ which was struggling to escape from the debilitating legacy of colonialism, and the still vastly unequal distribution of global power.
“So his cruise ships were going to remedy that.”
Muggins Here
[Fiction] Life behind the cash register, and other possibilities:
“A proper mental Saturday it is, what with New Sue off with her hernia and the Lukes of Hazzard gone AWOL, so Muggins Here’ll have to cover for everyone else’s break. Not New Sue and Beverly are still giving me the silent treatment ’cause I can’t let them take the bank holiday off, but it’s water off a duck’s back by this point. By ten o’clock the queues are looping back, and it’s like all Greenland’s one of those swilling dreams you get with ‘flu. Full of eyes, drilling into me. Philpotts can’t get close enough to fire off a ‘What are half your team doing without their name-badges, Pearl?’ but I need the loo – no chance, not ’til all the breaks are over. This beardy customer’s spitting, ‘Twenty-three minutes I’ve been in this queue!’ I tell him, ‘It certainly is a busy morning’ so in he leans, breath all pilchardy, and says, ‘Then hire – more – staff!’, like I’m backwards, like Gary used to do sometimes.”
Three Trials for Murder
Tim Hennis was an Army sergeant serving at Fort Bragg in 1985 when he was charged with the murder of a woman and her two young daughters. His case has gone to trial three separate times, and the military’s intervention has raised questions about what constitutes double jeopardy:
“That Saturday, Hennis’s neighbors recalled, he had poured lighter fluid into a fifty-five-gallon barrel and stoked a bonfire for at least five hours. Had he burned evidence? Hennis did go voluntarily to the police station, but Bittle told me that this was a tactic regularly employed by a certain class of criminal. ‘Why do people rob banks? They think that others didn’t know how to do it right. That was Tim Hennis’s attitude: “You can’t get me. I am smarter than you are.” ‘”
Making the World’s Largest Airline Fly
An inside look at the operational challenges facing United and Continental as they merge—from the union negotiations to the choice of in-flight coffee:
“On July 1 the new United introduced its new coffee. Fliers on the ‘legacy United’ fleet, accustomed to Starbucks, let out a collective yowl of protest. Pineau-Boddison had expected some resistance—Starbucks, after all, is a popular brand—but this was something else. Flight attendants reported a barrage of complaints. Pineau-Boddison received angry e-mails from customers, as did Smisek. The coffee, fliers complained, was watery.
“The beverage committee launched an inquiry. The coffee itself, they discovered, was only part of the problem. Airplane coffee is made from small, premeasured ‘pillow packs’ that sit in a brew basket drawer at the top of the galley coffee machine. When the drawer is closed, boiling water flows through the pillow into the pot below. The old United brew baskets, the committee discovered, sit a quarter of an inch lower than Continental’s, leaving a space for water to leak around the pillow pack.”
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