The Woman Who Knew Too Much

At the end of his remarks, Obama turned to Warren and kissed her on the cheek. She smiled gamely, though if there are kisses a woman can do without, this was one of them. A Judas kiss, some would say. But if so, the betrayal was not just of Elizabeth Warren. In his remarks, Obama would hint at what had happened to Warren, commenting that she had faced “very tough opposition” and had taken “a fair amount of heat.” He also alluded to the powerful forces arrayed against her, and against the C.F.P.B.—“the army of lobbyists and lawyers right now working to water down the protections and reforms that we’ve passed,” the corporations that pumped “tens of millions of dollars” into the fight, and “[their] allies in Congress.”

Source: Vanity Fair
Published: Oct 11, 2011
Length: 23 minutes (5,860 words)

The Man with the Lapdog

[Fiction] Almost every morning, as Lyle was getting ready to take the dog for a walk along the bay, his wife would ask, “Are ye down the prom, then?” They had met and married thirty years before, in Vermont, when she was Mary Curtin and he’d thought her a happy combination of exotic and domestic. At sixty, after their life in the States, she still called herself a Galway girl; at sixty-seven, after two years of retirement in Galway, Lyle still considered a prom a high school dance, not two miles of sidewalk beside the water.

Source: The Atlantic
Published: Feb 1, 1999
Length: 21 minutes (5,492 words)

The Mysterious Death of Sammy Wanjiru

Here is what we know about the death of Sammy Wanjiru: It happened late in the early hours of May 15 at his posh home in Nyahururu, a Rift Valley town about 100 miles from Nairobi. Sammy fell from a second-story balcony — a drop of about 16 feet — and landed on the pavement outside. He lost consciousness. Hospital doctors could not revive him.

Here is the mystery: whether Sammy fell, jumped, or was pushed.

Author: Anna Clark
Source: Grantland
Published: Oct 6, 2011
Length: 12 minutes (3,043 words)

Interview: Mike O’Brien

The make-out game Seven Minutes In Heaven can evoke painful memories of awkwardly fumbling through puberty in a dark closet at a junior high boy-girl party. But Mike O’Brien, a former Chicago performer in his third season as a writer for Saturday Night Live, is slowly helping replace those memories with more enjoyable ones of Kristen Wiig, Amy Poehler, and Tracy Morgan hanging out with him in his closet in his new NBC web series, 7 Minutes In Heaven. O’Brien and director Rob Klein place celebrities in a small closet with cameras, suits, ties, hats, and only O’Brien. For a few minutes, they share the tight space with O’Brien as he asks them a barrage of quick-hitting, mostly nonsensical questions, such as “Please talk about ways that you are or are not similar to a horse.”

Source: Onion A.V. Club
Published: Oct 6, 2011
Length: 15 minutes (3,971 words)

Just Kids

When Jeffrey Eugenides moved to New York, he was 28 years old and things were not looking good. After graduating from Brown in 1983, he and Rick Moody, a college friend, had driven out to San Francisco with no real plan other than making a go of it as writers, and lived together awhile on Haight Street, listening to the sound of the electric typewriter coming from the other room. … That same summer, Jonathan Franzen, also 28, was living in Jackson Heights, Queens, and feeling “totally, totally isolated.” The neighborhood was an immigrant jumble, and Franzen was a solemn, intellectual guy from St. Louis without much occasion to leave the house. He had gotten some attention and money for his debut novel, The Twenty-Seventh City, but the axis of the planet had not obediently shifted. He was frustrated with living in “shared monastic seclusion” with his then-wife, he says, when he got a fan letter from a writer he knew of but had never read. David Foster Wallace, then 26, was having dire troubles of his own and wrote to praise what Franzen had done in a “freaking first novel.”

Published: Oct 10, 2011
Length: 17 minutes (4,371 words)

Mirrors

[Fiction] When he thinks about the people he’s known in his life, a good many of them seem to have cultivated some curious strand of asceticism, contrived some gesture of renunciation. They give up sugar. Or meat. Or newspapers. Or neckties. They sell their second car or disconnect the television. They might make a point of staying at home on Sunday evenings or abjuring chemical sprays. Something anyway, that signals dissent and cuts across the beating heart of their circumstances, reminding them of their other, leaner selves. Their better selves.

Source: Prairie Fire
Published: Oct 9, 1995
Length: 13 minutes (3,257 words)

Elizabeth Eckford and Hazel Bryan: The Story Behind the Photograph that Shamed America

On her first morning of school, September 4 1957, Elizabeth Eckford’s primary concern was looking nice. Her mother had done her hair the night before; an elaborate two-hour ritual, with a hot iron and a hotter stove, of straightening and curling. Then there were her clothes. People in black Little Rock knew that the Eckford girls were expert seamstresses; practically everything they wore they made themselves, and not from the basic patterns of McCall’s but from the more complicated ones in Vogue. It was a practice borne of tradition, pride, and necessity: homemade was cheaper, and it spared black children the humiliation of having to ask to try things on in the segregated department stores downtown. In the fall of 1957, Elizabeth was among the nine black students who had enlisted, then been selected, to enter Little Rock Central High School.

Source: The Telegraph
Published: Oct 9, 2011
Length: 11 minutes (2,823 words)

Love for Wounded Soldier Upon Return from Afghanistan

Rebecca’s college roommate worried that Rebecca was mistaking empathy for romantic love and would find herself in a relationship that she could not end. “Who could break the heart of an Army officer who lost both his legs?” Sabrina recalled thinking.

Author: Greg Jaffe
Source: Washington Post
Published: Oct 8, 2011
Length: 16 minutes (4,148 words)

The Arrival of LL Cool J

Adam Horovitz: He was a kid. He had the classic early eighties b-boy look: tight Lee jeans, adidas shell toes, fat laces going up the leg, a Kangol, Cazals, a Le Tigre shirt. And LL was just like, “Who are these people? What’s up with these white boys?” Not only that, but Rick was in this weird dorm room. I’m assuming LL expected it to be an office with a secretary and coffee—like on TV. He was just shocked. It was really funny.

LL Cool J: When Rick came downstairs, the first thing I said was, “Yo, you Rick?” He said, “Yeah.” I said, “I thought you was black.” He said, “Cool.”

Source: GQ
Published: Oct 4, 2011
Length: 8 minutes (2,170 words)

Hostages of Child Prostitution

Maria had nothing of her own besides socks and a blouse, potentially giving a pimp an opening to woo her with niceties. So Quintero pawed through V-necks, corduroys and bags of underwear at an on-site donation center. She packed a bag: hair spray, razors, lavender shampoo-conditioner, “Chicken Soup for the Teenage Soul,” and a flowered journal because Maria liked to write poems. Quintero tried to shake off her misgivings: With a bag of stuff, was it easier for Maria to run? A week later, in Voy’s courtroom, the judge was grim. The night after Maria’s hearing, she ran off. Quintero never found out if she took the bag.

Published: Oct 6, 2011
Length: 8 minutes (2,124 words)