The Unquiet Life of Franz Gayl
“I’d been expecting something like this for years, but they finally found a way to make it happen,” he said. The flash drive is a red herring, he believes—another in a series of reprisals against him by the Marines for revealing what he calls unconscionable mismanagement in the high command. After returning from a tour in Iraq, Gayl went public with an account of how Pentagon delays in sending protective equipment there may have cost troops their lives. He appeared on PBS’s NewsHour and testified before Congress, and in doing so crossed many people more powerful than himself, including General James Mattis, now the chief of U.S. Central Command and one of the most important men in the military.
‘We Wanted Flying Cars, Instead We Got 140 Characters’
VC manifesto from the Founders Fund. “To understand why VC has done so poorly, it helps to approach the future through the lens of VC portfolios during the industry’s heyday, comparing past portfolios to portfolios as they exist today. In the 1960s, venture closely associated with the emerging semiconductor industry (Intel, e.g., was one of the first – and is still one of the greatest – VC investments). In the 1970s, computer hardware and software companies received funding; the 1980s brought the first waves of biotech, mobility, and networking companies; and the 1990s added the Internet in its various guises.”
Via Negativa
(Fiction) There is a kind of minor writer who is found in a room of the library signing his novel. His index finger is the color of tea, his smile filled with bad teeth. He knows literature, however. His sad bones are made of it. He knows what was written and where writers died. His opinions are cold but accurate. They are pure, at least there is that.
God’s Own Warden
Everyone was there except the person I had come to see: Warden Burl Cain, a man with a near-mythical reputation for turning Angola, once known as the bloodiest prison in the South, into a model facility. Among born-again Christians, Cain is revered for delivering hundreds of incarcerated sinners to the Lord—running the nation’s largest maximum-security prison, as one evangelical publication put it, “with an iron fist and an even stronger love for Jesus.” To Cain’s more secular admirers, Angola demonstrates an attractive option for controlling the nation’s booming prison population at a time when the notion of rehabilitation has effectively been abandoned.
Little Sister
(Fiction) Whatever Marla did, she did so well. The golden spoon she’d been born with had never failed her, but her little sister had gagged on the same spoon. Little Sister wasn’t so little. She was a twelve-pound baby who inherited most of Marla’s toys. When she couldn’t solve their intricate engines, Marla would have to be called in. Little Sister had a name, but no one seemed to recollect it. She’d turn glum or fall into terrible fits. She struck Marla with a shoe when she was three and Marla was four.
‘Memory.’ The Introduction to Roger Ebert’s New Memoir ‘Life Itself’
The point for now is: I had no conception of such a show and no desire to work with Siskel. The three stages of my early career (writing and editing a newspaper, becoming a film critic, beginning a television show) were initiated by others. Between college and 2006, my life continued more or less on that track. I was a movie critic and I had a TV show. It could all have been lost through alcoholism (I believe I came closer than many people realized), but in 1979 I stopped drinking and the later chapters became possible.
Hack Work
In the past weeks, the fun has leached away. Readers and viewers who know Rupert Murdoch purely as a name—or as one of those figures so wealthy, and granted such frictionless mobility by their wealth, that they never seem to be in the part of the world that you expect them to be—were startled to see a senior gent, with sparse white hair and a clownish smile, descend upon London. He was seen jogging in one of the parks, in the thrall of a personal trainer. She was blond and wholly fearsome, like someone whom Sylvester Stallone very nearly married before changing his mind and hiding under the bed. As for her trainee, he was photographed with milk-white shanks exposed unkindly to the elements. This was Rupert Murdoch? The man to whom Prime Ministers bend the knee?
American Dream Lives in the Barrio (1983)
After 18 years, I went back to 812 N. Record Ave., to the house where I once lived, at the Belvedere Gardens barrio where I grew up. My barrio is unique in this megalopolis that is Los Angeles, an obscure corner of an affluent society, a place seldom visited by progress. For example. sidewalks and curbs were installed only recently. English is heard only occasionally.
The Kingdom and the Paywall
A funny thing happened on the way to the graveyard. Though the New York Times’ circulation dipped during the crash years, much of the lost revenue was made up for by doubling the newsstand price, from $1 to $2—evidence, the paper insisted, that its premium audience understood the value of a premium product. In March, after several years of planning and tens of millions in investments, the Times launched a digital-subscription plan—and the early signs were good. In fact, less than 48 hours before my interview, the Times announced it would finish paying back the Carlos Slim loan in full on August 15, three and a half years early.
Online Commenting: The Age of Rage
Deindividuation is what happens when we get behind the wheel of a car and feel moved to scream abuse at the woman in front who is slow in turning right. It is what motivates a responsible father in a football crowd to yell crude sexual hatred at the opposition or the referee. And it’s why under the cover of an alias or an avatar on a website or a blog – surrounded by virtual strangers – conventionally restrained individuals might be moved to suggest a comedian should suffer all manner of violent torture because they don’t like his jokes, or his face. Digital media allow almost unlimited opportunity for wilful deindividuation. They almost require it.
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