All the Angry People

Why is the protest happening now? Why not in 2008, when Wall Street nearly collapsed, or 2009, when unemployment and foreclosures soared? For Ben-Moshe, Obama’s election seemed like the end of the battle, not the beginning, and it took her three years to return to the field. Garofalo thought that his generation needed to be inspired and then let down by Obama in order to realize that they had always expected someone else to do the heavy lifting. Michelle Brotherton didn’t understand the precise reasons for the financial crisis in 2008, but in the following years she saw two concrete results: ongoing distress for the majority of Americans, a quick rebound for the rich. In living rooms and in bars, she and her friends grumbled about the injustice of it all, until their cynicism made the topic moot.

Source: New Yorker
Published: Nov 28, 2011
Length: 22 minutes (5,741 words)

Companion

[Fiction] Since she’d arrived in America and got divorced, Ilona Siegal had been set up three times. The first man was not an ordinary man but a Ph.D. from Moscow, the friend who’d arranged the date said. When Ilona opened her door, she’d found the Ph.D. standing on her front steps in a pair of paper-sheer yellow jogging shorts. He was thin, in the famished way of grazing animals and endurance athletes, with folds of skin around his kneecaps and wiry rabbit muscles braiding into his inner thighs. Under his arm he held what, in a moment of brief confusion, Ilona took for a wine bottle. But when he stepped inside she saw that it was only a litre of water he’d brought along for himself. Their plan had been to take a walk around a nearby park and then go out to lunch. But the Ph.D. had already been to the park. It wasn’t anything special, he said. He’d just gone jogging there. He didn’t like to miss his jogs, and since he’d driven an hour and a half out of his way to meet her he’d got in a run first. Ilona poured him a glass of grapefruit juice and listened to him talk about his work at Bell Labs. He reclined in his chair, his knees apart, unaware that one of his testicles was inching out of the inner lining of his shorts. Ilona stared at his face, trying not to look down.

Source: New Yorker
Published: Oct 3, 2005
Length: 30 minutes (7,651 words)

King of Kings

Photographs from the nineteen-sixties, when Muammar Qaddafi was a uniformed officer in his twenties, show a slim young man with a proud, erect carriage. (His nickname then was Al Jamil—the handsome one. By the time of his death, it had changed to Abu Shafshufa, or Old Frizzhead.)

Source: New Yorker
Published: Nov 7, 2011
Length: 42 minutes (10,517 words)

Tenth of December

[Fiction] The pale boy with unfortunate Prince Valiant bangs and cublike mannerisms hulked to the mudroom closet and requisitioned Dad’s white coat. Then requisitioned the boots he’d spray-painted white. Painting the pellet gun white had been a no. That was a gift from Aunt Chloe. Every time she came over he had to haul it out so she could make a big stink about the woodgrain.

Source: New Yorker
Published: Oct 31, 2011
Length: 35 minutes (8,872 words)

What She Said

From the moment Kael began as a film critic at The New Yorker, at the start of 1968, she presided over the movies in the manner of Béla Károlyi watching a gymnast on the balance beam—shouting directives, excoriating every flub, and cheering uncontrollably when a filmmaker stuck his landing. She spent much of her career chastening Hollywood’s excesses while brushing off complaints about immoderation on her own part. She did not regard this as a hypocritical endeavor. Kael wrote quickly and at length, regularly pulling all-nighters into her Tuesday deadlines with the help of cigarettes and bourbon (till she gave up both). Her kinetic passion, her chatty-seatmate prose, and her detail-heckling made her a pop-culture oracle in an era that desperately needed one.

Source: New Yorker
Published: Oct 24, 2011
Length: 20 minutes (5,221 words)

Changing Times

Profile of new New York Times executive editor Jill Abramson. “Abramson put her purse down on a white Formica desk that she occupies in the middle of the third-floor newsroom. Someone had left her a sealed envelope with ‘Congratulations’ written on the front. It contained a cover note from a female editor at the paper along with a laminated letter passed down from that editor’s father. The letter was from a nine-year-old girl named Alexandra Early, who wrote that she got mad when she watched television: ‘That’s because I’m a girl and there aren’t enough girl superheroes on TV.’ The cover note to Abramson said, ‘Wherever Alexandra Early ended up, I hope that she heard about your new job.'”

Source: New Yorker
Published: Oct 17, 2011
Length: 43 minutes (10,777 words)

Passion

[Fiction] When Grace goes looking for the Traverses’ summer house, in the Ottawa Valley, it has been many years since she was in that part of the country. And, of course, things have changed. Highway 7 now avoids towns that it used to go right through, and it goes straight in places where, as she remembers, there used to be curves. This part of the Canadian Shield has many small lakes, which most maps have no room to identify. Even when she locates Sabot Lake, or thinks she has, there seem to be too many roads leading into it from the county road, and then, when she chooses one, too many paved roads crossing it, all with names that she does not recall. In fact, there were no street names when she was here, more than forty years ago. There was no pavement, either—just one dirt road running toward the lake, then another running rather haphazardly along the lake’s edge.

Source: New Yorker
Published: Mar 22, 2004
Length: 46 minutes (11,526 words)

The Perceptionist

“Everything at Apple is as much about perception as about reality,” the company’s former C.E.O. John Sculley said to me a few days after his old partner and rival, Steve Jobs, unveiled the alliance he had engineered with Microsoft. Since Sculley was deposed, in 1993, after running Apple for ten years, he has rarely spoken about the firm or about Jobs, and his tone was one of cynicism tinged with grudging respect. “The deal is good for Apple,” he said. “But it has nothing to do with technology or business and everything to do with what Steve is a master of—perception.

Source: New Yorker
Published: Sep 8, 1997
Length: 20 minutes (5,075 words)

Flick Chicks

The junior executives’ office at Thinkscope Visioncloud was nicer than any room within a fifty-mile radius of the “Office” studio. After I finished pitching one of my ideas for a low-budget romantic comedy, I was met with silence. One of the execs sheepishly looked at the other execs. He finally said, “Yeah, but we’re really trying to focus on movies about board games. People really seem to respond to those.”

Source: New Yorker
Published: Oct 3, 2011
Length: 6 minutes (1,535 words)

The Uprooted

Chronicling the Great Migration.

Source: New Yorker
Published: Sep 6, 2010
Length: 14 minutes (3,565 words)