Paradise (1933)

Cain, writer of “The Postman Always Rings Twice,” “Double Indemnity” and “Mildred Pierce,” on the pros and cons of living in L.A. and Southern California in the 1930s:

“There is no reward for aesthetic virtue here, no punishment for aesthetic crime; nothing but a vast cosmic indifference, and that is the one thing the human imagination cannot stand. It withers, or else, frantic to make itself felt, goes off into feverish and idiotic excursions that have neither reason, rhyme, nor point, and that even fail in their one, purpose, which is to attract notice.

“Now, in spite of the foregoing, when you come to consider the life that is encountered here, you have to admit that there is a great deal to be said for it.”

Published: Mar 1, 1933
Length: 38 minutes (9,665 words)

Barry Minkow: All-American Con Man

An investigation of the many scams of Minkow—who goes from prison, to church, and then back to prison:

“Minkow was the boy-wonder business phenom of the 1980s. In 1982, at age 16, he started ZZZZ Best, a carpet-cleaning company, from his parents’ garage in Reseda, Calif., in the San Fernando Valley. The business expanded rapidly and went public in 1986, making Minkow, at age 20, worth more than $100 million on paper. But it was a giant Ponzi scheme and collapsed in May 1987. Minkow was convicted of 57 federal felonies, sentenced to 25 years, and ordered to pay $26 million in restitution. …

“The story of Minkow’s life is comic, tragic, and psychologically perplexing. Minkow is blessed with intelligence, courage, indomitable drive, rhetorical gifts, an apparent desire to do good, and a record of documented beneficent deeds. Yet he also keeps doing ghastly things. His story is hard to read without pondering the question, Is character destiny? More narrowly, can a con man ever be redeemed?”

Source: Fortune
Published: Jan 5, 2012
Length: 32 minutes (8,176 words)

On the Trail of an Intercontinental Killer

In 1990, a trash bag with human remains was found in the Vinegar Hill neighborhood of Brooklyn. The investigation soon expanded to killings in Albania and Belgium, and focused on the activity of a Yugoslavian former cab driver named Smajo Dzurlic:

“Smajo Dzurlic, who is now 71, shuffled into the room, his wrists and ankles unbound. He wore a brown argyle V-neck sweater, and his head barely came up to the guard’s chest. ‘Do I look dangerous to you?’ he asked, as we sat beside each other at the end of a long, rectangular table. ‘They figured I was some big man, like Son of Sam or something,’ Dzurlic said in rusty English. ‘But they gave me time for no reason. I’m not a murderer. Not a murderer whatsoever.'”

Published: Jan 5, 2012
Length: 17 minutes (4,483 words)

Creative Writing

[Fiction] A couple, and a writing workshop:

“Her third story started out funny. It was about a woman who gave birth to a cat. The hero of the story was the husband, who suspected that the cat wasn’t his. A fat ginger tomcat that slept on the lid of the dumpster right below the window of the couple’s bedroom gave the husband a condescending look every time he went downstairs to throw out the garbage. In the end, there was a violent clash between the husband and the cat. The husband threw a stone at the cat, which countered with bites and scratches. The injured husband, his wife, and the kitten she was breastfeeding went to the clinic for him to get a rabies shot. He was humiliated and in pain but tried not to cry while they were waiting. The kitten, sensing his suffering, uncurled itself from its mother’s embrace, went over to him, and licked his face tenderly, offering a consoling ‘Meow.’ ‘Did you hear that?’ the mother asked emotionally. ‘He said “Daddy.” ‘”

Source: The New Yorker
Published: Jan 2, 2012
Length: 6 minutes (1,687 words)

The ‘I’ in Union

The origins and the politics of the New York-based Freelancers Union—now 150,000 members strong:

“The shift toward short-term contracts was underway long before the 2008 financial crash. Charles Heckscher, director of the Center for Workplace Transformation at Rutgers University, sits on the board of the Freelancers Union, and likes to describe this shift in terms of ‘flexibility.’ As the economy shifted away from manufacturing jobs and toward knowledge- and tech-based ones, he argues, ‘companies have clearly and widely moved away from taking responsibility for long-term careers. These certainly include crude cost-cutting considerations, but they also reflect the deeper economic changes…with skills and demand metamorphosing so rapidly in so many domains, it is often more effective to look for those with needed skills on the open market rather than developing them internally. Once companies begin to do that, they tend to break the whole pattern of expectations and commitments which grounded the classic system.'”

Source: Dissent
Published: Jan 4, 2012
Length: 14 minutes (3,701 words)

The Writearound: Louis C.K.

The comedian on his early influences, stand-up career and his hatred of traditional sitcom writing:

“I was explaining to my girls, we went by a Chinese restaurant that has the big LED sign, and it has this sweeping pattern, then flashes red, then blue, then blue sweeps across from left to right, right to left, red sweeps across, and they said, ‘How does it do it?’ and I said, ‘There’s a circuit, somebody writes a program that tells the stupid lights to do this pattern, and they burn the program onto a circuit, and so that circuit just keeps taking this one trip.’ So there’s a guy on every show that does that, he has his one way, he has his variety, about eight different joke formulas, and you refill them with different stuff. He’s either the dumb guy or, like, Lisa Kudrow’s character on Friends or whatever. ‘I thought coffee was from Brazil.’ ‘Ugh, no the guy’s name is Coffee. He’s from Italy.’ Garbage like that. Then you start building the story, then you go away on an act break. Then you build a third act that just is the train wreck of not really much fun, but it pays everything off, it leaves everybody feeling exactly the same way they left, that they felt before the show started. That’s what shows are meant to do, is leave on par and leave a few jokes behind, to be printed in Entertainment Weekly’s sound bites.”

Source: jonahweiner.com
Published: Jan 4, 2012
Length: 43 minutes (10,888 words)

Insider Baseball

On the 1988 presidential campaign:

“Among those who traveled regularly with the campaigns, in other words, it was taken for granted that these ‘events’ they were covering, and on which they were in fact filing, were not merely meaningless but deliberately so: occasions on which film could be shot and no mistakes made (‘They hope he won’t make any big mistakes,’ the NBC correspondent covering George Bush kept saying the evening of the September 25 debate at Wake Forest University, and, an hour and a half later, ‘He didn’t make any big mistakes’), events designed only to provide settings for those unpaid television spots which in this case were appearing, even as we spoke, on the local news in California’s three major media markets. ‘On the fishing trip, there was no way for television crews to get videotapes out,’ the Los Angeles Times noted a few weeks later in a piece about how ‘poorly designed and executed’ events had interfered with coverage of a Bush campaign ‘environmental’ swing through the Pacific Northwest. ‘At the lumber mill, Bush’s advance team arranged camera angles so poorly that in one set-up only his legs could get on camera.’ A Bush adviser had been quoted: ‘There is no reason for camera angles not being provided for. We’re going to sit down and talk about these things at length.'”

Published: Oct 27, 1988
Length: 39 minutes (9,980 words)

The Epic Struggle to Tunnel Under the Thames

A brief history of the many attempts during the 19th Century to build a tunnel under the Thames River in London:

“Another bridge was out of the question—it would deny sailing ships access to the Pool of London—and ambitious men turned their thoughts to driving a tunnel beneath the Thames instead. This was not such an obvious idea as it might appear. Although demand for coal was growing fast as the industrial revolution hit high gear, working methods remained primitive. Tunnels were dug by men wielding picks in sputtering candlelight.

“No engineers had tunneled under a major river, and the Thames was an especially tricky river. To the north, London was built on a solid bed of clay, ideal tunneling material. To the south and east, however, lay deeper strata of water-bearing sand, gravel and oozing quicksand, all broken up by layers of gravel, silt, petrified trees and the debris of ancient oyster beds. The ground was semi-liquid, and at depth it became highly pressurized, threatening to burst into any construction site.”

Author: Mike Dash
Source: Smithsonian
Published: Jan 3, 2012
Length: 9 minutes (2,399 words)

How Many Stephen Colberts Are There?

The making of a comedian and his super PAC:

“In August, during the run-up to the Ames straw poll, some Iowans were baffled to turn on their TVs and see a commercial that featured shots of ruddy-cheeked farm families, an astronaut on the moon and an ear of hot buttered corn. It urged viewers to cast write-in votes for Rick Perry by spelling his name with an ‘a’ — ‘for America.’ A voice-over at the end announced that the commercial had been paid for by an organization called Americans for a Better Tomorrow, Tomorrow, which is the name of Colbert’s super PAC, an entity that, like any other super PAC, is entitled to raise and spend unlimited amounts of soft money in support of candidates as long as it doesn’t ‘coordinate’ with them, whatever that means. Of such super-PAC efforts, Colbert said, ‘This is 100 percent legal and at least 10 percent ethical.'”

Published: Jan 4, 2012
Length: 22 minutes (5,644 words)

Heroes of the Hot Zone

On the Japanese workers—some 18,000 of them—who have ventured into the radioactive exclusion zone following the meltdowns at Fukushima, and the work of radiation expert Dr. Robert Gale:

“The worries about the spread of radiation have hardly abated, but the workers remain all but nameless and faceless; they rarely speak to the press—for fear of being fired—and all that most of us see of them are pictures of virtually extraterrestrial figures in HAZMAT suits and masks clomping around a wasteland eerily emptied of 100,000 people. (It is estimated that more than 19,000 people have died in the disaster.) They’re shedding a little of their anonymity today, though, because word has gotten out that one of the world’s most celebrated experts on radiation has come to talk to them, and to try to put their concerns into perspective. As Gale walks the streets of the small town 115 miles north of Tokyo, one set of workers after another asks to talk to him, if only so they can share their worries as they can with few others—even if his reassurances may echo some of those given by their government. One worker, at the end of a long evening, even wraps Gale in a bear hug, an all but unheard-of show of affection in reserved Japan.”

Author: Pico Iyer
Source: Vanity Fair
Published: Jan 2, 2012
Length: 14 minutes (3,546 words)