The Memorial

People talk a lot about the “healing process.” Well, this is New York. In the aftermath of a tragedy of monumental proportions, the healing process has been noisy and rude, with elbows out, redolent of greed, power, and the darker forces that drive human existence. And most of the shouting has been about how to make a fitting monument to what happened here. But in a hundred years, all the shouting and all the politics will be forgotten. What will be remembered is what is built here, now, on these sixteen acres. #Sept11

Author: Scott Raab
Source: Esquire
Published: Aug 16, 2011
Length: 28 minutes (7,085 words)

Something Better Than This

(Fiction) It’s one of those raw, wrung out Yonge Street Saturday mornings. The smog-gray sky is just congealing into blue over the buildings and concrete. A dozen or so kids in denim are lollygagging outside Mr. Submarine sandwich plaza. They’re wearing T-shirts with messages like “Have a shitty day” emblazoned on them, and they all look bewildered. They aren’t the only people in the street. The old men in coats are shuffling along, mumbling in a phlegy secret language and spitting all over the crusty sidewalk. Then there’s the woman in a short, pubis-gripping skirt and the occasional cop floating by in a yellow cruiser, eating a choco-cherry donut and beating out “Here Comes My Baby” on the dashboard.

Source: Fictionaut
Published: Sep 23, 2010
Length: 15 minutes (3,764 words)

The Visionary

Jaron Lanier has become the go-to pundit for people lamenting the social changes wrought by modern technology. Last year, he published “You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto,” a provocative critique of digital technologies, including Wikipedia (which he called a triumph of “intellectual mob rule”) and social-networking sites like Facebook and Twitter, which he has described as dehumanizing and designed to encourage shallow interactions. Teen-agers, he writes, may vigilantly maintain their online reputations, but they do so “driven more by fear than by love.” In our conversation about Facebook’s face-recognition software, he added, “It’ll just create a more paranoid society with a fakey-fakey social life—much like what happened in Communist countries, where people had a fake social life that the Stasi could see, and then this underground life.”

Published: Jul 11, 2011
Length: 20 minutes (5,039 words)

He Served 10 Presidents, but Died Alone in Squalor: What Happened to Theodoric C. James?

Theodoric C. James Jr. was clearly in trouble. He wasn’t showering anymore. He wore the same ragged clothing day after day. Rats rummaged through the weeds and mounds of trash in his yard. He started going to the bathroom in buckets on his front porch. His neighbor Alex Dobbins was afraid that something terrible was going to happen. They had been friends since their days at Howard University and had lived in adjoining rowhouses in the 16th Street Heights section of Northwest Washington for 37 years. But this was not the man he had known. The man who had served in the White House for almost 50 years, under every president from Kennedy to Obama. The man who read and catalogued many of the documents that flow through the Oval Office: memos to the president, letters, pieces of legislation, nomination packets, even classified material that required him to have a security clearance.

Source: Washington Post
Published: Aug 13, 2011
Length: 7 minutes (1,907 words)

The Prettiest Boy in the World

He shook his head in amazement and reluctantly continued down the street, completely unaware that the woman he had just encountered was not a woman at all but was in fact Andrej Pejic, a male model who has garnered much attention in the fashion world for his recent success modeling women’s clothing. That day, in addition to the shorts, Pejic was sporting a lacy black blouse over a black tank top, long blond hair, and smoky eyes. He had just come from a shoot for a Spanish magazine where he had shown to good effect a number of items generally considered to be in women’s domain: a floor-length wrap dress, a fur coat, a wide-brimmed felt hat, and, toward the end of the day, a rosy lip stain.

Published: Aug 15, 2011
Length: 15 minutes (3,752 words)

Little Girl Found

This child’s mother had chosen the spot carefully: only steps from one of the best hotels in Shanghai, beside a Dunkin’ Donuts franchise patronised mostly by foreigners. I had been meeting my friend John there for a quick doughnut fix, and it was he who heard the baby’s cries as he chained his bicycle to the alleyway gate.
“There’s a baby outside!” John exclaimed as he slid into the seat beside me, still blustery from the cold. “What do you mean, there’s a baby outside?” I asked in alarm, bolting out of the door to see what he was talking about.

Source: Financial Times
Published: Aug 14, 2011
Length: 15 minutes (3,868 words)

Someone I’d Like You to Meet

(Fiction) Veblen MacKay-Sim was engaged to Paul Vreeland, a postgraduate research fellow in neuroscience, and the time had finally come to bring him home to meet the family. A classic rite of passage, except that the irregularities of her mother’s personality held a certain terror for her. She was often reminded that humans were flawed, no families faultless, and no matter what happened that day, it was all part of the rich tapestry of life. Her mother would surely rise to such an occasion. And Paul, who routinely examined brain-injured cadavers, could surely endure it too.

Source: The Atlantic
Published: Aug 14, 2011
Length: 26 minutes (6,690 words)

The Elusive Big Idea

It is certainly no accident that the post-idea world has sprung up alongside the social networking world. Even though there are sites and blogs dedicated to ideas, Twitter, Facebook, Myspace, Flickr, etc., the most popular sites on the Web, are basically information exchanges, designed to feed the insatiable information hunger, though this is hardly the kind of information that generates ideas. It is largely useless except insofar as it makes the possessor of the information feel, well, informed. Of course, one could argue that these sites are no different than conversation was for previous generations, and that conversation seldom generated big ideas either, and one would be right.

Published: Aug 14, 2011
Length: 7 minutes (1,884 words)

The Great Campaigner

“I guess I’d call Rick Perry’s campaign ghostly, because he was not the main character. (Karl) Rove, who recruited him to switch parties and run against me, directed the effort. Perry was not any good at campaigning; he had no idea how to deal with Houston and Dallas and San Antonio and South Texas and all that, though I don’t know of any inappropriate comments that he made, because he wasn’t really getting any media. Rove got frustrated with him and sent him out to West Texas to attend Farm Bureau county meetings while Rove raised, I think it was about $3 million, and threw it into TV ads against me. They ran ads of me endorsing Jesse Jackson—ran that in East Texas. One ad showed a hippie setting a flag on fire and throwing it on the ground, and my picture came up out of the flames. So I had supporters in Dallas and Houston and East Texas who said, ‘Well, I liked ol’ Hightower but I didn’t know he burned flags.'”

Author: Staff
Source: Texas Monthly
Published: Aug 14, 2011
Length: 17 minutes (4,427 words)

Rodman Cut His Own Path to Hall of Fame

When Dennis Rodman took the stage, he was overcome by the moment. He cried his eyes out. He couldn’t speak. He gestured to his presenter and former Bulls coach, Phil Jackson, and it looked like the Worm might not say anything at all. “Hang in there Big Um!” Raglin yelled from the fifth row, and the new Hall of Famer froze. Then, Rodman rallied. He gave a speech that was everything it should have been – heartfelt, messy, profane (he called himself a couple of names, and no one in his inner circle felt compelled to offer objections), uncomfortable, silly and bleeding all over the place. He told his children he strove to be a better father and admitted to his mother, Shirley, that he needed to let go of his resentment toward her and be a better son.

Source: Yahoo! Sports
Published: Aug 14, 2011
Length: 11 minutes (2,951 words)