The Welfare Queen

A deep dive into the life of Linda Taylor, a con artist who was villainized in the 1970s by Ronald Reagan as being a “welfare queen.” Her crimes were much worse than that:

In another Tribune story, Bliss and Griffin noted that Linda Taylor had been arrested twice in the 1960s for absconding with children, though she wasn’t convicted in either case because the little ones were returned. The reporters also laid out a possible motive. “Chicago’s welfare queen,” they wrote, “has been linked by Chicago police to a scheme to defraud the public aid department during the mid-1960s by buying newborn infants to substantiate welfare claims.”

This theory is a little hard to believe. Given Taylor’s ability to fabricate paperwork, acquiring flesh-and-blood children seems like an unnecessary risk if all you’re looking to do is pad a welfare application. Her son Johnnie believes his mother saw children as commodities, something to be acquired and sold. He remembers a little black girl—he doesn’t know her name—who stayed with them for a few months in the early 1960s, “and then she just disappeared one day.”

Author: Josh Levin
Source: Slate
Published: Dec 19, 2013
Length: 68 minutes (17,038 words)

The Nazi Anatomists

On “the long-buried history of Nazi-era anatomy” which used corpses of political dissidents and euthanasia victims, and how the work haunts modern science:

Unlike the research of Nazi scientists who became obsessed with racial typing and Aryan superiority, Stieve’s work didn’t end up in the dustbin of history. The tainted origins of this research—along with other studies and education that capitalized on the Nazi supply of human body parts—continue to haunt German and Austrian science, which is only now fully grappling with the implications. Some of the facts, amazingly, are still coming to light. And some German, Austrian, and Polish universities have yet to face up to the likely presence of the remains of Hitler’s victims—their cell and bone and tissue—in university collections that still exist today.

This history matters for its own sake. It also matters for debates that remain unresolved—about how anatomists get bodies and what to do with research that is scientifically valuable but morally disturbing.

Source: Slate
Published: Nov 6, 2013
Length: 33 minutes (8,426 words)

The Mystery of the Missing Hotel Toothpaste

Hotels provide guests with luxurious soaps and shampoos, but generally leave toothpaste out of their bundle of complimentary toiletries. An investigation into why:

“The first and most popular explanation for the missing toothpaste posits the existence of a giant vat—or several giant vats, really—located in the basement of each hotel. These are filled with shampoo, conditioner, and other cosmetic fluids. When the staff needs more toiletries, they tap their kegs to refill the bottles. So why is there no toothpaste in hotel rooms? Because you can’t refill a collapsible tube. One can poke a bunch of holes in this theory of the giant vat, but really one will do: There are no vats of lotion; the hotels buy their toiletries prepackaged, several hundred units to a case.”

Source: Slate
Published: Jul 3, 2013
Length: 12 minutes (3,014 words)

The Guantánamo Memoirs of Mohamedou Ould Slahi

[Three-part series] The firsthand account of a prisoner detained in Guantánamo:

“Suddenly a commando team of three soldiers and a German shepherd broke into our interrogation room. [ ] punched me violently, which made me fall face down on the floor, and the second guy kept punching me everywhere, mainly on my face and my ribs. Both were masked from head to toe.”

“‘Motherfucker, I told you, you’re gone!’ said [ ]. His partner kept punching me without saying a word; he didn’t want to be recognized. The third man was not masked, he stayed at the door holding the dog collar, ready to release it on me.

“‘Who told you to do that? You’re hurting the detainee,’ screamed [ ], who was no less terrified than I was.”

Source: Slate
Published: Apr 30, 2013
Length: 63 minutes (15,890 words)

Regrettable

What happened when the author re-reported Bob Woodward’s book on John Belushi:

“Of all the people I interviewed, SNL writer and current Sen. Al Franken, referencing his late comedy partner Tom Davis, offered the most apt description of Woodward’s one-sided approach to the drug use in Belushi’s story: ‘Tom Davis said the best thing about Wired,’ Franken told me. ‘He said it’s as if someone wrote a book about your college years and called it Puked. And all it was about was who puked, when they puked, what they ate before they puked and what they puked up. No one read Dostoevsky, no one studied math, no one fell in love, and nothing happened but people puking.'”

Source: Slate
Published: Mar 12, 2013
Length: 13 minutes (3,279 words)

Coming Home

A political journalist comes home from the campaign trail and reacquaints himself with his children:

“During my absence, I left express instructions that my son was not to approach puberty, but as I tie his tie I am met by his deodorant. He’s wearing something called Axe. They use it to repel rioting crowds, I believe. Once this gets up your nose, it’s like having a Billy Joel song stuck in your head. You can’t get it out. Working too hard can give you a heart-attack-ack-ack-ack.

“My son also now has a ‘walk,’ the careful way the preadolescent boy carries himself to look like he doesn’t give a damn. His variation is somewhere between shuffling to arraignment and the bob you see from middle-aged men grooving to Billy Joel while stopped at a traffic light.”

Source: Slate
Published: Jan 14, 2013
Length: 10 minutes (2,566 words)

Author-Editor Interview: George Saunders and Andy Ward

How an editor and writer work together:

Ward: A lot of people say to me, ‘God, it must be so fun to work with George Saunders. Do you even have to edit him at all?’ And they say it like they assume you shun all editing, or don’t allow editing, which is always really funny to me, because you are a person who craves feedback, who wants to be pushed and challenged and sent off in new directions. This all sounds self-serving, I realize, so I should add: Of course, at this stage, you don’t need an editor. But you want an editor. Why?

Saunders: No, I definitely need and enjoy having an editor, and for the exact reasons you state. There’s a really nice moment in the life of a piece of writing where the writer starts to get a feeling of it outgrowing him—or he starts to see it having a life of its own that doesn’t have anything to do with his ego or his desire to ‘be a good writer.’ It’s almost like an animal starts to appear in the stone and then it starts to move, and you, the writer, are rooting for it so hard—but may not be able to see everything clearly after working on that stone for so long.”

Source: Slate
Published: Jan 9, 2013
Length: 11 minutes (2,939 words)

The Kickers

A writer digs through his personal library of quitting-smoking books as he attempts to quit smoking:

Step 3: Go to the Strand. Buy a book you already own—Richard Klein’s Cigarettes Are Sublime. (Your old copy—a gift from one of the girls next door senior year, the same ‘friend’ who another time gave you a carton of duty-free Dunhill Reds—has been in storage recently because your den has become a nursery.) It was published in 1993 by, very perfectly, the university press at Duke: A school endowed by tobacco fortune sponsored an excellent silk-cut riff on the cultural logic of coffin nails. Its title toys with Kant’s idea of ‘negative pleasure’: ‘Cigarettes are bad. That is why they are good—not good, not beautiful, but sublime.’

“Klein, a scholar of French by trade, sinuously riffs on Sartre and Baudelaire, on Bizet’s Carmen andRick’s Café, by way of delivering a cultural critique with a practical purpose: ‘Writing this book in praise of cigarettes was the strategy I devised for stopping smoking, which I have—definitively; it is therefore both an ode and an elegy to cigarettes.’

“Linger for a while over the idea of the elegy. Where a conventional smoking-cessation preacher tells the reader he has nothing to lose but his chains, Klein acknowledges that to quit is to experience a loss, and takes his time mourning a dying idea of fun.”

Source: Slate
Published: Aug 3, 2012
Length: 12 minutes (3,066 words)

The Wedding

The story of Will and Erwynn, the first gay couple to marry on a military base:

“At church, Will and Erwynn lead me to a windowless back-room chapel that has been converted from a gym. This is the Sojourn service, a more informal worship than the one taking place in the main hall. They worry that other members of the church might not be comfortable with their presence in the regular service. The morning begins with a band playing Christian soft rock. There are no Bibles here, only thin handouts. Pastor Rick Court’s sermon, leavened with jokes and audience interaction, focuses on loving God and loving your neighbor as the most important lessons of Christianity. ‘You can see why we like this place,’ Erwynn whispers to me. ‘This is exactly what we are trying to teach our kids.’ But when I tell them I’d like to interview Pastor Rick, they pause. ‘Well,’ says Will, ‘I guess that means we’ll have to come out to him.’

“The day before the wedding, I meet up with Pastor Rick at the Red Lion Diner in South Jersey. He was ordained by the conservative Evangelical Church Alliance. He has lived in this area all of his life. Will and Erwynn are the first congregants he’s had whom he knew were gay, but he has heard that there are others at Hope. ‘I sensed that they were a gay couple right away,’ he chuckles, ‘although they think that they hide it pretty well.'”

Source: Slate
Published: Jul 17, 2012
Length: 23 minutes (5,784 words)

The Chickens and the Bulls

How authorities broke up an extortion ring in the 1960s that targeted gay men:

“Impersonating corrupt vice-squad detectives, members of this ring, known in police parlance as bulls, had used young, often underage men known as chickens to successfully blackmail closeted pillars of the establishment, among them a navy admiral, two generals, a U.S. congressman, a prominent surgeon, an Ivy League professor, a prep school headmaster, and several well-known actors, singers, and television personalities. The ring had operated for almost a decade, had victimized thousands, and had taken in at least $2 million. When he announced in 1966 that the ring had been broken up, Manhattan DA Frank Hogan said the victims had all been shaken down ‘on the threat that their homosexual proclivities would be exposed unless they paid for silence.’

“Though now almost forgotten, the case of ‘the Chickens and the Bulls’ as the NYPD called it (or ‘Operation Homex,’ to the FBI), still stands as the most far-flung, most organized, and most brazen example of homosexual extortion in the nation’s history. And while the Stonewall riot in June 1969 is considered by many to be the pivotal moment in gay civil rights, this case represents an important crux too, marking the first time that the law enforcement establishment actually worked on behalf of victimized gay men, instead of locking them up or shrugging.”

Source: Slate
Published: Jul 11, 2012
Length: 27 minutes (6,955 words)