Desperately Seeking Mitt
[Not single-page] What is Mitt Romney’s true personality? And can joining the press on his campaign bus for five months shed any light on it?
“When the speech winds down, I talk with a woman named Pam DeLong, who is a Tea Partier here in Laurens. She is for Newt because he’s for real, he’s a smarty, and because of stuff like the Jordan Cash moment. ‘When that little boy came over, he stopped and talked to him, and he was so natural, and then he just went back into his speech without missing a beat. Romney couldn’t do that. Newt knows what he’s talking about. He doesn’t let things fluster him, which is why I think he’d be the best guy to take on Obama.’
“In other words, Newt is an ideal candidate because when an infant pestered him, he hacked it, took it like a man, a pro. If it were Romney? And an infant started fucking with him? You know it would be bad, some pediatric version of the time he sang ‘Who Let the Dogs Out’ to black teens in Florida. ‘Hello, little organism different from myself. I will now make noises that I believe are comprehensible to your kind.'”
‘Is he coming? Is he? Oh God, I think he is.’
[Not single-page] One year later, the survivors of the 2011 massacre in Norway recount what happened:
“At a pub across the street from the courthouse, he is seated at a sidewalk table with Anita, drinking beer and hand-rolling cigarettes. He has sad eyes and stubble and a gold hoop in his ear. On his right wrist is a black rubber bracelet embossed in white letters with a thought that a young woman active in the AUF named Helle Gannestad tweeted eight hours after Breivik’s arrest. ‘If one man can cause so much pain,’ it reads, ‘imagine how much love we can create together.’ It’s become sort of a national sentiment.
“Freddy also has a copy of Dagbladet, which in that day’s edition has a story about Elisabeth and Cathrine, and there is a large photograph of both girls spread across a page, their heads tilted together, both of them smiling. Elisabeth’s family didn’t want her to be remembered as victim number nineteen on the seventh page of an indictment.
“‘Elisabeth,’ Freddy says, ‘she was the perfect one. She was pretty, she had a lot of friends. If one of her friends had a problem, they came to her.’
“And Cathrine? She still gets winded climbing stairs, but Freddy says she’s doing better, physically. ‘Cathrine, she says, “Why me? Elisabeth was the pretty one. She had all the friends. Why did she die? Why not me?” ‘ Freddy looks away for a moment, then turns back. ‘What do you say to that? Speechless.'”
Wanna Be Veep? Okay, but This is Going to Hurt
A writer goes through “the most invasive process in politics”—being vetted as a running mate by the same person who vetted Sarah Palin in 2008:
“It starts unobtrusively enough. ‘So you’re the vice president, and the president is visiting Seoul,’ Frank begins, unspooling an elaborate scenario in which the president’s hotel gets decimated by a car bomb, 200,000 North Korean troops cross the DMZ, and the Joint Chiefs urge me to take out Pyongyang with a tactical nuclear weapon. ‘Do you authorize the strike?’ he asks, trying to get a sense of my political judgment (as much a part of the vet now as excavating secrets). I wonder if the question is also a reaction to Frank’s Palin experience, recalling the scene in Game Change in which Palin reveals that she doesn’t even know that there are two Koreas. But I push those thoughts aside and dodge the question by asking for more military options, trying to cover my fecklessness by name-dropping Seal Team Six. Next, Frank hits me with an easier hypothetical, about a deadlocked Senate and a Supreme Court nominee who appears to be against gay marriage. ‘Do you support the president and cast the tiebreaker in favor of the president’s nominee?’ he asks. Of course I do, I respond. I’m a team player. The president can always count on me.“
The Well-Hung Boy Next Door
Men rarely become porn stars, but James Deen has found a large following simply by being “average”:
“James Deen, whose real name is Bryan Sevilla, grew up in Pasadena, California. His parents are both, after a fashion, rocket scientists. His father is a mechanical engineer for NASA. His mother does data analysis for the space agency. Deen, contrary to our notion of porn stars as survivors of sexual trauma, does not recall any sexual abuse or destructive misadventures, other than a teacher who Deen says tried to molest him when he was 8 or 9, but Deen “punched his testicles a lot” and made good his escape.
“Deen lost his virginity at age 12 during a sleepover at a Jewish camp. Not long after, in junior high school, he made enemies of the football team by having sex with a player’s sister in the school pool during gym. He had some drug escapades in junior high. He spent a couple of years in outpatient rehab. Around age 15, he left high school and moved out and spent two years more or less homeless, hanging around with a crew of gutter punks. Relations with his parents remained reasonably cordial. They furnished him with a cell phone, and he periodically snuck into his mom’s house to do laundry. (Deen’s parents are divorced.)”
Papa
A look at the complicated afterlife of James Brown, and the battle over his estate among children he did, and did not, acknowledge:
“Yet Mr. Brown was not wholly unprepared to die, either. Several years earlier, in August 2000, he’d drawn up a will in which he bequeathed his ‘personal and household effects’—his linens and china and such—to six adult children from two ex-wives and two other women. He was very clear, too, that those were the only heirs he intended to favor. ‘I have intentionally failed to provide for any other relatives or other persons,’ he wrote in the will. ‘Such failure is intentional and not occasioned by accident or mistake.'”
The Dream Will Never Die: An Oral History of the Dream Team
Twenty years later, how Michael, Magic and the NBA’s best players sought to regain U.S. dominance in Olympic basketball:
Nathaniel Butler (official NBA photographer): We were sitting on the baseline. Magic is backing a guy down, and the guy on defense is yelling at his bench, “Now! Now!” And on the bench, one guy’s pulling a camera out of his sock and taking a photo of his teammate.
Hubbard: One time they were playing against Venezuela, and the guy who was guarding Magic kept on saying, “I need your shoes! I need your shoes!”During the game. And Magic goes, “Look, I need my shoes!”
The Great Taliban Jailbreak
An account of how hundreds of Taliban prisoners escaped from Kandahar’s Sarposa prison in Afghanistan through a tunnel in 2011:
“At 5 a.m., hours after Rahim and his cohorts passed directly beneath his office, the warden of Sarposa Prison, General Dastagir Mayar, was awakened. One of his guards stood in the doorway. The entire political block was empty, the guard said. A stout 57-year-old Pashtun from Wardak Province with a neat helmet of dark hair and a matching mustache, Mayar speaks quickly and with urgency, liberally gesticulating. He wanted to know how.
“‘You have to come and see,’ the guard told him. ‘There’s a hole.'”
Amen! (D’Angelo’s Back)
The gifted R&B singer, who’s spent years fighting addiction, attempts a comeback:
“Black stardom is rough, dude,” Chris Rock tells me when I reach him to talk about D. “I always say Tom Hanks is an amazing actor and Denzel Washington is a god to his people. If you’re a black ballerina, you represent the race, and you have responsibilities that go beyond your art. How dare you just be excellent?”
After Brown Sugar went platinum, Rock put D’Angelo on The Chris Rock Show. Later, when D was mixing Voodoo, Rock hung out some in the studio. No surprise, then, that the first thing out of Rock’s mouth after “Hello” is a joyful “He’s back!” But he adds a sobering downbeat: “D’Angelo. Chris Tucker. Dave Chappelle. Lauryn Hill. They all hang out on the same island. The island of What Do We Do with All This Talent? It frustrates me.”
The Cooler Me
A writer investigates what it would be like if he never got married, had kids, or settled into a stable job. He decides to search for his carefree doppelgänger—a 39-year-old singer-songwriter named Kyle Field:
“‘What time can I come by?’ I asked.
“‘Oh, anytime. I’ll just be kicking it around the house.’
“Kicking it. This is not a concept in our house. I drove out to the scruffy edge of southeastern Portland and pulled up to the place where my doppelgänger was staying, nervous about intruding. The house was everything I’d ever dreamed of—at least when I used to dream of such a life. There was a pile of construction lumber in the front yard, and the porch was covered in beer cans and Goodwill furniture and well-thumbed paperbacks, some of them as warped as giant clams.”
Uncatchable
Forty years after hijacking a plane and then disappearing, George Wright is found:
“On the afternoon of August 19, 1970, a couple of men approached Wright. Their names were Jimmy and Jumbo. Wright was working in the prison laundry at the time. The men said they’d had enough of prison and wanted to do something about it. ‘They asked me,’ says Wright, ‘if I was interested.’
“‘You guys kidding me?’ said Wright.
“‘No,’ they said.
“‘Yeah,’ said Wright. ‘I’m interested.’ They talked about it. ‘I ain’t going nowhere walking,’ Wright added.
“‘We’re going to get transportation,’ they said. Jimmy mentioned that he was a skilled mechanic, expert at hot-wiring cars.
“Wright figured that if he did get out, he’d need cash to restart his life. There are always wheeler-dealers in prison who have money, and Wright knew one of them, a man named George Brown, who was serving three to five years for armed robbery. Brown promptly joined the team. They agreed that they were going all the way: Either they’d escape or they’d be shot. Freedom or death.”