The Letter

S.I. Newhouse’s contentious appointment of Robert Gottlieb as the editor of The New Yorker in 1987, and what Gottlieb did to bring the magazine into a new era:

“Orlean was an early Gottlieb-era hire. ‘She came in off the street,’ said McGrath, her Talk of the Town editor (though, she noted, Gottlieb was often her second reader). ‘She came into my office and, in the space of a twenty-minute conversation, she had about a hundred ideas for stories, and about eighty of them were good.’

“Orlean laughed about this. ‘By the standards of The New Yorker I was being brought in off the street. I had a book contract; I was writing for Rolling Stone and The Boston Globe, so that’s hilarious. That’s so classic of The New Yorker to feel that if you weren’t at The New Yorker you were essentially homeless and living hand-to-mouth on crap.’

“‘When I got there the mood was not very nice,’ she said. Orlean was unusual among New Yorker writers, most of whom, she said, had spent their careers at the magazine and hadn’t written for other publications. ‘It’s a little bit like, I wasn’t a virgin, and more typically people came to The New Yorker as virgins. They came into their adulthood there.’ The place was cliquey, she said, but that has since dissipated, in no small part because Gottlieb brought in so many writers who ‘weren’t born in the manger.’ At this point, ‘that aristocratic, inbred feel—that if you weren’t there from birth you didn’t deserve to be there—has really dissolved.'”

Author: Elon Green
Source: The Awl
Published: Jul 3, 2013
Length: 17 minutes (4,379 words)

Venture Capital’s Massive, Terrible Idea For The Future Of College

Massively Open Online Courses, or MOOCs are currently being heralded as the future of affordable education. But what kind of education will it actually provide?

“Everybody loves the idea of lowering the barriers of entry to education; it’s the easiest sell in the world, and Khan Academy, a nonprofit, pushes all the right buttons. Khan’s success thus paved the way for MOOC providers to employ a rhetoric of inclusiveness, simplicity, low cost, and metrics, metrics, metrics: the same reasoning that today drives everything from ‘philanthrocapitalist’ foundation spending to high-stakes standardized testing.

“But the shortcomings of the Khan approach will be evident to anyone who cares to have a go at ‘US History Overview 1: Jamestown to the Civil War,’ the 18:28 minute video-with-voiceover class I chose at random from the Khan website. Within the first two minutes Khan has disposed of over a century, blowing past Jamestown (‘a kind of commercial settlement’) and Plymouth Rock (‘we always learned this in school, you know, the Pilgrims on the Mayflower sailing the oceans blue and all the rest’) and ‘fast-forwarding’ to 1754. It’s not even a flashcard approach; it’s a series of lacunae, startlingly free of insight or context, mentioning not one single book or author, and only one political or religious figure (George Washington) in the nine minutes I watched. I’ve seen more informative cereal boxes.”

Source: The Awl
Published: Jan 31, 2013
Length: 18 minutes (4,608 words)

We Must Build An Enormous McWorld In Times Square, A Xanadu Representing A McDonald’s From Every Nation

What if there were a flagship McDonald’s store that served all the variations of country-specific fast food items found in chains from around the world?

“Everyone talks about how globalization ‘McDonalds-izes’ the world, but the funny thing about a place like New York is that you can get basically every kind of food *except* whatever they serve at the foreign outposts of our proud American chains. I would say I know more people who have had a lamb face salad from the Xi’an Famous Foods in the Golden Mall in Flushing than have had the poutine from the Montreal McDonalds, never mind something you really have to travel for, like a Chicken Maharaja Mac. Frequently, when I travel outside of the USA, my trips to the local McDonald’s are the most genuinely foreign-feeling and disorienting part of the trip. I went to Paris last year. There are probably ten restaurants within walking distance of my old Williamsburg apartment that are varyingly obsessive imitations of Parisian bistros, Parisian bars, Parisian brasseries. If they were hung in museums, the wall texts next to them would say ‘School of Keith McNally.’ But there is not a single place in New York that serves a Croque McDo.”

Source: The Awl
Published: Jan 23, 2013
Length: 9 minutes (2,406 words)

Tupac Lane Welcomes You: The Street Names Of Las Vegas

How an era of rampant expansion—and sloppy spelling—led to the creation of strange or questionable street names in Las Vegas:

“With all this rapid expansion came strange civic issues. As Rothman notes in his book, police officers were given new maps of the city every week. Some of the streets on the map, he points out, had been misspelled—not on the map, but on the street sign itself. As a particular instance of this, he cites Jane Austin Avenue, in North Las Vegas—like the snout-nosed McMansions that call it home, Jane Austin Avenue is an ugly and misguided gesture at Old World luster. If you take a closer look at this particular subdivision, which has streets named for dead Europeans and luxury automobiles, you’ll notice Jane Austin isn’t the only spelling error around. We also have Alfa Romero [sic] Ave and De [sic] Vinci Ct. The developer’s carelessness is stunning. They’re not alone.”

Source: The Awl
Published: Jan 16, 2013
Length: 11 minutes (2,975 words)

Brad And Angie Go To Meet The African Pee Generator Girls

[Fiction] A celebrity couple’s ill-fated trip to Lagos:

“She put her pen down and thoughtfully chewed the silky inside of her left cheek. She stared hard at the photo on her iPod of those beautiful, strong young African women who had just invented this amazing generator that made electricity out of human urine. She shook her head. It was amazing the things that people did in the face of adversity. She continued shaking her head, trying to comprehend the humanity of humanity.

“‘Be careful shaking your head,’ said her son Maddox, who was sitting on the other side of the enormous bed, watching ‘Homeland’ on his iPad. ‘A shard of your beauty just hit me in the face.’ She barely heard him. She let her eye cast around the room for a moment. All her children were here, Maddox, Zahara, Shiloh, Pax, each with his or her iPad. Maddox was next to her on the bed, Zahara was stretched out along the foot. Pax was on one corner of a pink velvet couch, Shiloh on the other. All four were staring at their iPads. In the bedroom foyer, Knox and Vivienne were making a cat out of wooden blocks.”

Source: The Awl
Published: Nov 17, 2012
Length: 8 minutes (2,100 words)

‘Silly, Funny Stories About Really Serious Things’: A Chat With Writer Jon Ronson

An interview with the journalist (see his recent stories) about what makes a good story:

“I spent three months and I just couldn’t do it. And the reason was because I kept on meeting people who worked in the credit industry and they were really boring. I couldn’t make them light up the page. And, as I said in The Psychopath Test, if you want to get away with wielding true malevolent power, be boring. Journalists hate writing about boring people, because we want to look good, you know? So that was the most depressing one. To the extent that I would like get up in the morning—I’ve never really told this to anyone, but I’d get up in the morning, I’d go downstairs to breakfast and I’d, like, look at my cereal and burst into tears. And then I’d think, it’s only like nine hours until I can sit down and watch TV. After three months of that, I was thinking, I’m actually getting depressed here. So I abandoned it. My editor in New York keeps reminding me that, if I’d carried on with the credit-card book, it would have come out exactly when the banks collapsed and everyone would have turned to me. But I just couldn’t do it.”

Source: The Awl
Published: Nov 12, 2012
Length: 10 minutes (2,654 words)

The Murders And The Journalists

More than 40 years after the “Fatal Vision” murders, Errol Morris’s new book re-investigates a case once covered by the likes of Janet Malcolm and Joe McGinniss:

“In February 1970, at Fort Bragg in Fayetteville, North Carolina, a pregnant woman named Colette MacDonald and her two children, Kimberley, 5, and Kristen, 2, were slaughtered in their home. Colette’s husband, Jeffrey MacDonald, a 26-year-old doctor and Green Beret at the time of the crime, was convicted of the murders in 1979. MacDonald faces the next of countless court dates on September 17, still seeking exoneration. The MacDonald case has been an object of obsession and controversy for more than four decades and the subject of high-visibility journalistic debate. But respectable opinion has always vastly favored the jury verdict of guilt. Errol Morris is trying to change that.

“In one highlight of his career as a documentary filmmaker, Morris’ 1988 investigative documentaryThe Thin Blue Line led to the release of Randall Dale Adams, who had been serving a life sentence in the killing of a Dallas policeman. After many years of reporting, Morris has written a new book, A Wilderness of Error, that argues that Jeffrey MacDonald, too, was wrongly convicted. Morris directly challenges prior accounts by Joe McGinniss and the much-revered Janet Malcolm. Morris’ book, published yesterday, infected me with the virus of his fascination with the case and sent me to consult other sources. Can Morris be right? Is a man who tried and failed to prevent his family from being killed now serving three consecutive life terms for the crime?”

Source: The Awl
Published: Sep 5, 2012
Length: 22 minutes (5,670 words)

Our Billionaire Philanthropists

Bill Gates and George Soros are handing out billions, but there are downsides to foundation giving:

“The new focus on metrics has brought with it a new breed of nonprofit and for-profit partnerships. Foundations such as the Omidyar Network, established in 2004 by eBay’s founder, Pierre Omidyar, provide both investments in for-profit companies and charitable grants.

“This approach is called by various names such as ‘social entrepreneurship,’ ‘venture philanthropy,’ and ‘philanthrocapitalism,’ but it all amounts to rather the same thing: controlling charitable giving in order to produce measurable, ‘sustaining’ and/or profitable results.

“‘Philanthrocapitalism’ is an especially curious coinage, giving rise to a hitherto unarticulated contrast—namely, with the kind of capitalism that is not-philanthro-. “

Source: The Awl
Published: Jun 13, 2012
Length: 24 minutes (6,100 words)

The Inconvenient Astrologer Of MI5

The story of an astrologer who claimed in a 1941 keynote address that the stars indicated Hitler would invade the United States from Brazil and eventually be defeated. The astrologer, Louis de Wohl, was actually an agent for the British government:

“What no one realized was that de Wohl’s lecture was pure propaganda from the British government, which was attempting to drag the Roosevelt administration into WWII by any means necessary. De Wohl, who was employed by SOE (Special Operations Executive, the wartime sabotage unit), had been dispatched with instructions to present himself as a renowned astrologer with no connections to Britain, and to undermine America’s belief in the invincibility of Hitler. As the spy novelist William Boyd put it in a 2008 radio interview: ‘At the time, there was a perception of American people, in the minds of the British Security Services, that they were more gullible than us Brits.'”

Source: The Awl
Published: Apr 11, 2012
Length: 8 minutes (2,102 words)

How to Write the Great American Novel

Helpful tips from a poet who lives in Brooklyn:

1. MOVE OUT OF BROOKLYN

“I know not every novelist in America lives in Brooklyn, it just seems that way. There are a million stories on the L Train, and they’re all basically about dorky people doing dorky things. Which is fine. The best novel to come out of Williamsburg was obviously A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. That was The Pre-ironic Brooklyn Age. And while Brooklyn might be a great place for other artists, poets and painters to live and interact and steal from each other, all your sad little Brooklyn novels end up sounding about the same. Novelists in packs are like Smurfs, except drunk and bitter.”

Author: Jim Behrle
Source: The Awl
Published: Apr 5, 2012
Length: 18 minutes (4,722 words)