In the Valley of the Shadow of Death: Guyana After the Jonestown Massacre

While I was raging through the Miami airport, Tim Chapman, a husky twenty-eight-year-old photographer for the Miami Herald, was doing some of the best work of his life. In Georgetown, the capital of Guyana, he had talked his way onto a flight to Jonestown, where the bodies still lay, three days after the massacre that culminated in the death of more than 900 members of the Reverend Jim Jones’ Peoples Temple.

From the helicopter it looked as if there were a lot of brightly colored specks around the main building. At 300 feet the smell hit. The chopper landed on a rise, out of sight of the bodies. Other reporters tied handkerchiefs over their faces. Chapman didn’t have one, so he used a chamois rag. It turned out to be a good idea.

Author: Tim Cahill
Source: Rolling Stone
Published: Jan 25, 1979
Length: 42 minutes (10,628 words)

Eddie Murphy: The Rolling Stone Interview

What ever happened to your signature laugh, by the way?

I don’t laugh like that anymore, somehow it doesn’t come out. It’s weird to change something that’s as natural as that. But it started out as a real laugh, then it turned into people laughing because they thought my laugh was funny, and then there were a couple of times where I laughed because I knew it would make people laugh. Then it got weird. People came up to me and said, “Do that laugh,” or if you laugh, someone turns around and goes, “Eddie?” I just stopped doing it.

Source: Rolling Stone
Published: Nov 10, 2011
Length: 27 minutes (6,767 words)

Inside Obama’s War Room

The president answered these arguments himself. According to one participant’s summary, Obama said: Look, the question of who rules Libya is probably not a vital interest to the United States. The atrocities threatened don’t compare to atrocities in other parts of the world, I hear that. But there’s a big “but” here. First of all, acting would be the right thing to do, because we have an opportunity to prevent a massacre, and we’ve been asked to do it by the people of Libya, their Arab neighbors and the United Nations. And second, the president said, failing to intervene would be a “psychological pendulum, in terms of the Arab Spring, in favor of repression.” He concluded: “Just signing on to a no-fly zone so that we have political cover isn’t going to cut it. That’s not how America leads.” Nor, he added, is it the “image of America I believe in.”

Source: Rolling Stone
Published: Oct 27, 2011
Length: 29 minutes (7,431 words)

R.E.M. in the Real World

After the show, Buck grabs a six-pack from the tour bus and heads toward his room. Like the other members of the band, he isn’t sure that when it comes to venues, bigger is better. He for one isn’t interested in having R.E.M. become an arena band. “People have been trying to convince me for a long time that we could play bigger places and enjoy it,” says the lanky, fidgety, garrulous Buck. “And tonight proved, if nothing else, that there’s no fucking way I can. If we ever did a stadium tour, I would imagine it would be about the last thing we’d ever do together.” Some long time fans have already accused R.E.M. of selling out, of courting mainstream success. The band doesn’t agree. “If you look at the album charts, the only thing up there on the charts that’s weirder than we are is Prince,” says Buck. “I mean, this record seems to me to be pretty uncommercial.”

Author: Steve Pond
Source: Rolling Stone
Published: Dec 3, 1987
Length: 21 minutes (5,411 words)

An American Drug Lord in Acapulco

On a warm morning in May a few years ago, Edgar Valdez, a drug lord who goes by the nickname La Barbie, woke up in one of the houses he owned in the resort city of Acapulco. In the 1950s, this beautiful beach town was the premier haunt of American celebrities: Frank Sinatra used to prowl the hotel lounges, Elizabeth Taylor had her third of eight weddings here, and John F. Kennedy honeymooned on the coast with Jacqueline. The glamour started to fade in the 1980s, but the city remained a popular vacation destination until a few years ago, when the Mexican cartels transformed Acapulco from a seaside paradise into one of the most violent flash points of the drug war. As chief enforcer for the town’s most powerful cartel, Barbie drove the celebrities away for good and made tourists nervous about straying too far into Acapulco when their cruise ships pulled into port. He felt bad about it, a little, but that is the way of the world, he thought – eat or be eaten.

Source: Rolling Stone
Published: Aug 26, 2011
Length: 26 minutes (6,507 words)

How the World Failed Haiti

In the aftermath of the move, no one in the State Department or the Haitian government seemed willing to take responsibility for the relocation — or even for the rationale behind it. “I’ve yet to see any evidence that proves that anyone was in more danger on the golf course than they would have been anywhere else — though everybody in Haiti thinks they were,” says a senior U.N. official who asked not to be identified. “What the move proved was that it’s possible to ‘save’ 5,000 people if you say they’re in a dangerous situation and put them in what you call a safe situation. It was the most grotesque act of cynicism that I’ve seen for some time.”

Source: Rolling Stone
Published: Aug 18, 2011
Length: 47 minutes (11,877 words)

The Diva and Her Demons: Rolling Stone’s 2007 Amy Winehouse Cover Story

Alongside the world’s tallest free-standing tower, one of the world’s tiniest pop stars is crouched next to a garbage pail, collecting a pile of eyeliner pencils and mascara tubes between her hands. While Amy Winehouse wanders the courtyard of Toronto’s 1,815-foot CN Tower in search of a plastic bag to hold her cosmetics, the man who was her fiancé on that May but who would be her husband five days later smokes a cigarette from my pack and looks bored. Blake Fielder-Civil — or “Baby,” as Winehouse calls him, in an array of inflections that strains imagination — gestures toward the trash can. Her soda spilled inside her fake Louis, he says, pointing at the beaten-up mock Lois Vuitton purse atop the rubbish. “She had that bag for ages.”

Source: Rolling Stone
Published: Jun 14, 2007
Length: 14 minutes (3,725 words)

Tania’s World: An Insider’s Account of Patty Hearst on the Run (1975)

Patty Hearst and Emily Harris waited on a grimy Los Angeles street, fighting their emotions as they listened to a radio rebroadcasting the sounds of their friends dying. On a nearby corner Bill Harris dickered over the price of a battered old car. Only blocks away, rifle cartridges were exploding in the dying flames of a charred bungalow. The ashes were still too hot to retrieve the bodies of the six S.L.A. members who had died hours before on the afternoon of May 17th, 1974.

Source: Rolling Stone
Published: Oct 23, 1975
Length: 46 minutes (11,541 words)

The Neverending Nightmare of Amanda Knox

When an attractive young woman from a privileged British family is murdered in Italy, you’ve got a popular crime story. When the person suspected of killing her is an attractive young woman from a privileged American family, you have tabloid gold. When the prosecutor hypothesizes that the victim was slaughtered during a satanic ritual orgy, you’ve got the crime story of a decade. When a sitting U.S. senator declares that the case “raises serious questions about the Italian justice system” and asks if “anti-Americanism” is to blame, and when 11 Italian lawmakers in Silvio Berlusconi’s coalition request a probe of the prosecutor’s office — well, at that point, you have an international crisis.

Source: Rolling Stone
Published: Jun 28, 2011
Length: 29 minutes (7,382 words)

Climate of Denial

“President Obama has thus far failed to use the bully pulpit to make the case for bold action on climate change. After successfully passing his green stimulus package, he did nothing to defend it when Congress decimated its funding. After the House passed cap and trade, he did little to make passage in the Senate a priority. Senate advocates — including one Republican — felt abandoned when the president made concessions to oil and coal companies without asking for anything in return. He has also called for a massive expansion of oil drilling in the United States, apparently in an effort to defuse criticism from those who argue speciously that ‘drill, baby, drill’ is the answer to our growing dependence on foreign oil.”

Author: Al Gore
Source: Rolling Stone
Published: Jun 22, 2011
Length: 28 minutes (7,058 words)