Hitchcock’s Girl

Alfred Hitchcock made Tippi Hedren into a star—and then sabotaged her career when she rejected his advances:

“It started at the end of The Birds. To depict the notorious final sequence, when Melanie is attacked by dozens of birds on her own in an upstairs bedroom, Hedren was reassured that mechanical birds would be used. Yet Hitchcock had always planned otherwise. She arrived on set to discover cages of live birds were being put in position for the terrifying denouement. The reality was as horrific as the film. ‘I just kind of did it,’ says Hedren, with her eyes shut. ‘It was hardly even acting. They put bands around my waist and these bands had elastics pulled in different places through my dress. And the bird trainers tied the elastics to the feet of the birds, so they were all around me. One was even tied to my shoulder. At one point, it jumped up and almost clawed my eye.’

“The torment went on for five days. ‘At the end, I was so exhausted I just sat in the middle of the stage, sobbing.’ In the BBC film, Hedren is shown with clothes ripped, skin bleeding from pecks, hysterical, while Hitchcock impassively looks on, almost as if he is willing his film to break her.”

Source: Financial Times
Published: Jul 27, 2012
Length: 11 minutes (2,900 words)

Bo Xilai: Power, Death and Politics

The rise and fall of one of China’s most powerful politicians:

“At the opening of the annual Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference on March 2, Bo showed up and put on a brave face for the 3,000 assembled delegates and journalists. But in internal government meetings, Bo was livid, haranguing Chongqing officials and telling them that Wang’s flight and the rumours swirling around him were all part of a ‘plot instigated by foreign reactionary forces’. Over the next two weeks, Bo appeared in public nearly a dozen times. In a typical final bout of showmanship, he even held a two-hour press conference on the sidelines of the National People’s Congress.

“Appearing relaxed, Bo said that unspecified enemies had “formed criminal blocs with wide social ties and the ability to shape opinion” and were ‘pouring filth’ on him and his family. He also dismissed suggestions he was being investigated or in any political trouble. Four days later, on March 14, Bo attended the closing ceremony of the National People’s Congress and sat alongside his politburo colleagues on the stage in the Great Hall of the People. Looking tired and distracted, at one point he stared up at the cavernous ceiling of the Great Hall as if saying a silent prayer. As the ceremony ended and China’s most senior leaders got up to leave, Bo rose quickly and strode off the stage. Waiting in the wings were officers of the elite Central Guard Unit charged with protecting China’s top leaders, who led him away, according to two people with knowledge of the matter. Gu and more than a dozen of Bo’s close associates were detained at the same time and are currently being held in undisclosed locations around China.”

Source: Financial Times
Published: Jul 20, 2012
Length: 22 minutes (5,621 words)

Veterans’ Struggle

U.S. soldiers returning home face a culture that doesn’t understand them:

“The 1 percent tends to be concentrated in the southern states and among the working and lower-middle classes. With a few notable exceptions—such as vice-president Joe Biden’s son Beau—the children of the elite have not served in these wars. It’s a sharp change from the night of Pearl Harbor, when Eleanor Roosevelt told a radio audience, ‘I have a boy at sea on a destroyer, for all I know he may be on his way to the Pacific.’

“Instead, America now has its first generation of political and business leaders who have not served in the military, and it shows. With the Pentagon ordered to slash spending as part of wider government budget cutting, military benefits, such as pensions, and college education funding for veterans are on the chopping block.”

Source: Financial Times
Published: Jan 21, 2012
Length: 14 minutes (3,605 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)

Star-crossed

Nevertheless, the award of Michelin stars can add up to 30 per cent to takings, according to restaurant owners. The wealth just isn’t shared by the Guide Michelin, which is haemorrhaging more than €15m annually. Accenture, the consultancy firm, was brought in last year and issued a dire warning: the company needed to change rapidly or risk becoming a ­forgotten relic in the digital age. A year later, Michelin is still pondering what to do. And seven months after Naret’s departure, it has yet to announce a new editorial director.

Source: Financial Times
Published: Jul 16, 2011
Length: 12 minutes (3,121 words)

Lunch with David Mamet

As we eat our salads – I have ordered beetroot salad with goats’ cheese, chives and shallots – I take the opportunity of having this master craftsman in front of me to ask about writing. He commences by defining where others go wrong. “Anyone can write five people trapped in a snowstorm. The question is how you get them into the snowstorm. It’s hard to write a good play because it’s hard to structure a plot. If you can think of it off the top of your head, so can the audience. To think of a plot that is, as Aristotle says, surprising and yet inevitable, is a lot, lot, lot of work.”

Source: Financial Times
Published: Jun 10, 2011
Length: 10 minutes (2,684 words)

Welcome to the Firm

On Prince William and Kate Middleton’s wedding, and the state of the British monarchy. “Only churls will do anything other than look indulgently on their happiness. But since 1981 we should all have learnt much that eluded Diana and Cinderella. Being a princess is no fairytale; it may not even involve love. It is assumed this bride will one day be queen (as we assumed about Diana). But even if the best comes to the best, she faces a life in which her privileges will be balanced, and probably outweighed, by duty, constraint and the sheer embuggerance of it all. We can only hope the palace has learnt enough to give Kate the support that was denied to the mother-in-law she never knew. Britain is now, however, a very different country.”

Source: Financial Times
Published: Apr 23, 2011
Length: 12 minutes (3,121 words)

Hiding Out

The child of an outspoken Libyan dissident on attending boarding school in England. “I was to pretend that my mother was Egyptian and my father American. It was thought that this would explain, to any Arabs in the school, why my Arabic was Egyptian and why my English was American. My first name was Bob. Ziad chose it because both he and I were fans of Bob Marley and Bob Dylan.”

Source: Financial Times
Published: Feb 26, 2011
Length: 11 minutes (2,999 words)

The Sabotaging of Iran

Majid Shahriyari became an Iranian martyr while he was driving to work on an autumn day in Tehran. As he made his way along Artesh Boulevard, an explosive device ripped through his car. The 45-year-old was a devout man: Iranians would describe him as a Hizbollahi, a person fiercely loyal to the country’s Islamic system and easily identified by his unshaven face and simple clothes. But Shahriyari also stood out for another reason. He was one of Iran’s leading atomic scientists, an expert on nuclear chain reactions.

Author: Staff
Source: Financial Times
Published: Feb 11, 2011
Length: 17 minutes (4,421 words)

What We Can Learn from a Nuclear Reactor

The connection between banks and nuclear reactors is not obvious to most bankers, nor banking regulators. But to the men and women who study industrial accidents such as Three Mile Island, Deepwater Horizon, Bhopal or the Challenger shuttle—engineers, psychologists and even sociologists—the connection is obvious. James Reason, a psychologist who studies human error in aviation, medicine, shipping and industry, uses the downfall of Barings Bank as a favourite case study. “I used to speak to bankers about risk and accidents and they thought I was talking about people banging their shins,” he told me. “Then they discovered what a risk is. It came with the name of Nick Leeson.”

Source: Financial Times
Published: Jan 14, 2011
Length: 12 minutes (3,095 words)