Stash Pad

How New York real estate became the new Swiss bank account, drawing in wealthy investors from foreign countries.

Published: Jun 29, 2014
Length: 27 minutes (6,750 words)

Woo Cho Bang Bang

In Brownsville, Brooklyn kids are joining gangs whose territories are based on the housing projects where they grew up. The warring gangs have helped made Brownsville the “murder capital of New York”:

Prosecutors and detectives still don’t know when the battle of Brownsville started or what it was over. Some think it grew out of a perceived slight at a dance-hall party in one of the warring projects, whose turf is separated by about ten blocks. But the authorities did establish a connection to the current group of principals by the summer of 2010, when a series of shootings, allegedly by Hoodstarz members, wounded two associates of the Brownsville Fly Guys (a gang aligned with the Wave Gang). In October, one of them died from the injuries.

Two days later, in what was likely B.F.G. retaliation, the purported Hoodstarz leader, 16-year-old Hakeem (“OCC”) Gravenhise, was ambushed in front of his apartment building with a fatal barrage of gunfire. His mother witnessed the shooting. There have been no arrests in his murder.

Published: Jun 19, 2014
Length: 20 minutes (5,179 words)

Life, After

TV reporter Miles O’Brien’s first-person account of what it’s like to lose your arm:

I’d always heard amputees talk about the stares and the acute awareness of being viewed as different. During my first shoot for the NewsHour with one arm, I was wearing a blazer when I met a researcher I was to interview. She left the lab, and I took my jacket off. When she returned, it was a good thing she wasn’t sipping her coffee, because she would have offered up an amazing spit take. As we both looked at my stump, I shrugged and said, “It happens.” She smiled and nodded and then we pressed on. It didn’t really bother me for some reason—perhaps because of the honesty of her reaction. What makes me more uncomfortable is when I notice people consciously looking away. Is that pity? Revulsion? On the sidewalks, I look straight at people looking at me, and lots of times, they smile. Maybe I am still attractive. Or maybe I’m a freak.

Published: Jun 12, 2014
Length: 10 minutes (2,680 words)

How Much Does It Hurt?

A new FDA-approved painkiller has some doctors worried about its abuse potential:

On October 25, 2013, the FDA announced it had approved the drug. The agency gave its rationale later in a statement: “In the case of Zohydro ER [extended release], we determined that the benefits of the product outweigh its risks.” (The FDA has taken a public beating ever since; every time the FDA defends its decision, the makers of Zohydro post it on the company website like an endorsement.)

Before the sun came up the day after Zohydro’s approval, an opiophile had posted this reaction online: “When a 50 mg Zorro hits the block, it’s gonna fetch a big ol’ price, I betcha. And it’s anti-abuse-proof. Hell, yeah, I can see the Tweens lining up at my klinik already.”

Published: Jun 8, 2014
Length: 18 minutes (4,685 words)

‘Let’s, Like, Demolish Laundry.’

A look at the highly competitive world of laundry startups:

In early October, Washio opened up shop in San Francisco. Not surprisingly, the area around Silicon Valley was already awash in laundry disrupters. In addition to Prim, there was Laundry Locker, along with three other locker-technology-enabled businesses: Sudzee, Drop Locker, and ­Bizzie Box. There was Sfwash, which offered ecofriendly cleaning on top of pickup and delivery. There was even, briefly, a service called Your Hero Delivery, whose driver-founders dressed like superheroes. (“At the end of the day, did we really want to spend our whole lives schlepping dirty laundry?” one of them told PandoDaily of their decision to fold. “No.”) Another upstart was about to launch: Rinse, whose founders described their business to a Dartmouth alumni newsletter as “an ‘Uber’ for dry cleaning and laundry.”

Metzner knew someone in common with the founders of Rinse, so he decided to give its CEO, Ajay Prakash, a call. Just to let him know his company was coming to San Francisco. And so forth. “It was, you know, a perfectly civil conversation,” says Prakash, which may have been what Alan Arkin termed a “business lie.”

Published: May 21, 2014
Length: 22 minutes (5,545 words)

The Day I Started Lying to Ruth

A cancer doctor on losing his wife to cancer:

One day she stumbled on the stairs and told me it was nothing. Then she stumbled the next day and dismissed my concerns when I gasped. “I’m totally fine, I just wasn’t paying attention.” Then the whites of her eyes, the sclera, turned yellow. I didn’t manage it well.

We were sitting at a coffee shop when the light caught her just right and I saw it. I tried for a few moments to keep talking about whatever topic we had landed on, but I discreetly texted a friend of mine from college, also a doctor, in medicalspeak to share the terrible news—“scleral icterus.”

I couldn’t hold it in anyway. “Your eyes are yellow,” I blurted out.

Published: May 6, 2014
Length: 24 minutes (6,012 words)

Lessons of Immortality and Mortality From My Father, Carl Sagan

Sasha Sagan on the life lessons given to her by her father, astronomer and author Carl Sagan:

After days at elementary school, I came home to immersive tutorials on skeptical thought and secular history lessons of the universe, one dinner table conversation at a time. My parents would patiently entertain an endless series of “why?” questions, never meeting a single one with a “because I said so” or “that’s just how it is.” Each query was met with a thoughtful, and honest, response — even the ones for which there are no answers.

Published: Apr 15, 2014
Length: 5 minutes (1,475 words)

The Color of His Presidency

On race and Obama’s presidency:

This has been Obama’s M.O.: focus on “the more important things.” He’s had to deal explicitly with race in a few excruciating instances, like the 2009 “beer summit” with the black Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, a friend of Obama’s, and James Crowley, the police sergeant responsible for Gates’s controversial arrest. (Obama’s response to the incident was telling: He positioned himself not as an ally of Gates but as a mediator between the two, as equally capable of relating to the white man’s perspective as the black man’s.) After the Zimmerman shooting, he observed that if he had had a son, he would look like Trayvon Martin. In almost every instance when his blackness has come to the center of public events, however, he has refused to impute racism to his critics.

This has not made an impression upon the critics. In fact, many conservatives believe he accuses them of racism all the time, even when he is doing the opposite. When asked recently if racism explained his sagging approval ratings, Obama replied, “There’s no doubt that there’s some folks who just really dislike me because they don’t like the idea of a black president. Now, the flip side of it is there are some black folks and maybe some white folks who really like me and give me the benefit of the doubt precisely because I’m a black president.” Conservatives exploded in indignation, quoting the first sentence without mentioning the second. Here was yet another case of Obama playing the race card, his most cruel and most unanswerable weapon.

Published: Apr 6, 2014
Length: 23 minutes (5,946 words)

The Boy Who Ran: The Life and Death of Avonte Oquendo

Last October a 14-year-old autistic boy went missing after running out of his school and disappearing. His body was found months later:

NBC and ABC sent reporters right away. They searched the neighborhood all night, along the waterfront, in garbage cans, in parks, under cars, and found nothing. The family kept searching. Avonte’s father came up from Florida to help, bringing Avonte’s half-brother, Daniel Oquendo Jr., with him. Good Samaritans set up tents outside the school to serve as the command station for a search. They handed out leaflets and organized volunteers. When it got colder, a New Jersey man donated a trailer that was kept parked nearby. Donations raised the award for Avonte’s discovery to $89,500. A growing number of volunteers offered to help. The police kept them at a distance, especially when some of their theories on the case started trickling into the news coverage.

Published: Mar 30, 2014
Length: 17 minutes (4,399 words)

The Life and Career of Nile Rodgers, In His Own Words

Nile Rodgers reflects on how he ended up in the music business, producing hits for his own band Chic and artists including David Bowie and Daft Punk:

We took Chubby Checker’s “The Twist” and Joey D and the Starliters’ “ Peppermint Twist” and made it be about the “Freak.” To make it sound like it was ours, we called it “Le Freak.” But we didn’t tell people how to do the dance because we didn’t really know how to do it. It became better to speak of it in this euphoric way, and talk about the experience of doing it. We say, “Have you heard about the new dance craze.” We assume you haven’t. “We’ll show you the way.” But we don’t! The dance never became “the Twist” or even “the Hustle.” But the song is a triple-platinum single. And when we were on American Bandstand, Dick Clark introduced us in a really wonderful way. He said, “This is the biggest song by a band nobody knows about a dance that nobody knows how to do. Ladies and gentlemen, Chic! ‘Le Freak’!” It was so right on the money.

Published: Mar 30, 2014
Length: 7 minutes (1,930 words)