Obama’s Flunking Economy: The Real Cause

Indeed, the greatest confidence man of the last few years, at least going by Suskind’s definition, was not Larry Summers or Timothy Geithner, but Barack Obama. Being a confidence man is almost in the job description of the insurgent presidential candidate. Having not been president before, you must, by definition, ask the American people for a trust you have not earned.

Author: Ezra Klein
Published: Nov 24, 2011
Length: 18 minutes (4,573 words)

The Tweaker

Was Steve Jobs a Samuel Crompton or was he a Richard Roberts? In the eulogies that followed Jobs’s death, last month, he was repeatedly referred to as a large-scale visionary and inventor. But Isaacson’s biography suggests that he was much more of a tweaker. He borrowed the characteristic features of the Macintosh—the mouse and the icons on the screen—from the engineers at Xerox PARC, after his famous visit there, in 1979. The first portable digital music players came out in 1996. Apple introduced the iPod, in 2001, because Jobs looked at the existing music players on the market and concluded that they “truly sucked.”

Source: The New Yorker
Published: Nov 14, 2011
Length: 11 minutes (2,986 words)

Lex Luger Can Write a Hit Rap Song in the Time It Takes to Read This

It happens about once a year in hip-hop production: someone invents or perfects a sound, someone figures out how to get a weird noise out of some piece of technology not designed to make that noise, someone figures out a way to make a drum machine say the same old thing with a different accent and the whole rap world tilts on its axis. If you manage to change the beat — if your sound drifts upstream from mix tapes to pop radio, if it becomes the only thing anybody wants to hear — you can change hip-hop.

Published: Nov 4, 2011
Length: 14 minutes (3,571 words)

The Forgotten Hero

Doyle approached him and said, “Do you know there’s a retired number in Williams football?”

“Williams doesn’t retire numbers,” Quinn replied.

“Apparently it does,” Doyle said.

On the Monday after that game Quinn called Boyer and asked, “Williams has a retired football number?”

“I don’t know about retired,” Boyer said, “but there’s this box down here.

Author: Tim Layden
Published: Nov 7, 2011
Length: 27 minutes (6,766 words)

The Code of the Winklevii

More people now recognized the Winklevosses as either themselves or a recently cloned Armie Hammer, and Felipe assumed the proprietary grandeur of a Victorian circus impresario before some engagingly deformed beast. “These are the ones who came up with the idea for the Facebook, but had it stolen from them,” he explained to one and all, in Spanish. “But don’t ask them that. If you do, they might get offended.”

The Mexican soccer team defeated America 4–2, a victory sweetened by the presence of a compound American marvel, Harvard-pedigreed, Hollywood-certified, flesh-made-celluloid, celluloid-made-flesh. They signed autographs, received party invitations, and posed for iPhone pictures with locals who examined the photos as soon as they got their phones back, finger-zooming in and out with awe of self, child-like, fleetingly possessed of the primitive wonder which ascribes photography directly to magic, and once inspired fear of Xerox machines, and keeps the millions wondering why they can’t stop staring at a Web site whose greatest debt will always be to Pavlov.

Source: Vanity Fair
Published: Dec 1, 2011
Length: 16 minutes (4,215 words)

Eyes Like Lithium

It’s easy to turn away. It’s much easier than looking directly. He walks quickly with his head down, arms stiff at his sides. Or he paces the room and is unable to stop. Unable to stop making repetitive motions and sounds, fragments of sentences, noises that have no connection to the context (screech, yelp, pop, clap). He hits himself in the head. Stupid. Retard. When strangers come, he keeps to the corners, twitching and grinning wide, but unable to approach. It’s embarrassing. I’m embarrassed for him, for them, for myself. A brave stranger holds out his hand and walks toward Micah slowly, speaking evenly, as if he were a stray dog let into the house. My father says, amused, “Say hi, Micah.” Micah grins like a stray dog let into the house.

Published: Nov 1, 2011
Length: 9 minutes (2,481 words)

With Vaccines, Bill Gates Changes The World Again

While Gates’ vaccine-based giving—closing in on $6 billion to fight measles, hepatitis B, rotavirus and AIDS, among others—is part of the largest, most human-driven philanthropy in the history of mankind, what’s missing in his language are the individual ­humans.

In many ways that’s the point. Gates’ clipped manner in discussing the children he and his wife met in India and Africa (“Melinda and I spend time with these kids, and we see that they’re suffering; they’re dying”) disappears when the underlying numbers come up, his speech getting more rapid, his voice ever higher. “A 23-cent vaccine,” he says, “and you’ll never get measles,” a disease that “at its peak was killing about a million and a half a year; it’s down below 300,000.” Gates rattles off milestones in the history of global health and the prices of vaccines down to the penny, but blanks on the name of one of his favorite vaccine heroes, John Enders, the late Nobel laureate, or Joe Cohen, a key inventor of the new malaria vaccine Gates helped bankroll.

Source: Forbes
Published: Nov 2, 2011
Length: 12 minutes (3,088 words)

‘Our Worst Fears Have Come True’

It was around 7:30, the sky dark but not black, the air crisp but not cold. I parked my 1996 Buick Regal, which Adam had driven before he left, but gave to me while he was in Iraq. When I saw my uncle and his family from Pickerington through the living room window, I paused. Why would they be here? Then my mom opened the door and walked toward me, her facial expression a mix of agony and attempted composure.

“Our worst fears have come true,” she said as I walked up the driveway.

I knew what she meant.

I had to ask, though, just to hear the words. To let them hit home.

“Adam?” I said. “He’s dead?”

Author: Tom Knox
Published: Nov 1, 2011
Length: 10 minutes (2,576 words)

The Trials of Bidder 70

In December 2008, DeChristopher shot to fame as Bidder 70 when he entered a Bureau of Land Management (BLM) oil- and gas-lease auction in Utah, posed as a buyer, and laid claim to 22,500 acres of wilderness worth nearly $1.8 million. His comeuppance, handed down in early March, a month before Power Shift, was a federal conviction on two felony counts: making false statements and violating the Federal Onshore Oil and Gas Leasing Reform Act. Together they carry a maximum sentence of $750,000 in fines and up to ten years in prison—a prospect that explains why he’s been packing on the muscle. DeChristopher’s reward, however, has been a rapid rise to folk-hero status.

Author: Abe Streep
Source: Outside
Published: Nov 27, 2011
Length: 25 minutes (6,434 words)

Deep Intellect: Inside the Mind of the Octopus

Octopuses have the largest brains of any invertebrate. Athena’s is the size of a walnut—as big as the brain of the famous African gray parrot, Alex, who learned to use more than one hundred spoken words meaningfully. That’s proportionally bigger than the brains of most of the largest dinosaurs.

Another measure of intelligence: you can count neurons. The common octopus has about 130 million of them in its brain. A human has 100 billion. But this is where things get weird. Three-fifths of an octopus’s neurons are not in the brain; they’re in its arms.

Source: Orion Magazine
Published: Nov 1, 2011
Length: 19 minutes (4,794 words)