How to Bully Children

A writer visits a fifth grade classroom at a northern California elementary school, where she observes the class’s anti-bullying curriculum:

“‘Stop it, you are bullying me,’ he says. Then he lets his body go slack. He bows, then sits down.

“‘You labeled it, you said “stop,” you stood up straight,’ Linda says, ‘Good job.’

“‘Very good,’ Efrain asks. ‘Any questions?’

“‘Yeah,’ someone shouts. ‘What do you do if someone calls you a hobo?’

“‘Is that a serious question?’

“‘Yes, I want to know what to do if someone calls me a hobo.’ A pause as Efrain looks very mildly annoyed. ‘Okay. It’s not a serious question.’

“‘Hobo,’ someone shouts.”

Source: The Awl
Published: Mar 13, 2012
Length: 16 minutes (4,247 words)

Romance Novels, The Last Great Bastion Of Underground Writing

The art of writing romance novels:

“The romance heroine, though possessed of heart, intelligence and beauty, is at the mercy of her own self-criticism most of the time. As the story begins, she is scared and isolated, poor, or abandoned, or lonely. Not infrequently, the book opens with her having just suffered some terrible loss; her husband has just died in a plane crash, or her parents or beloved guardians have died, and now she is forced to work as a paid companion to a rich and disagreeable widow, maybe, or she’s just come to Australia from England to live with her grandfather, who is mean as a snake. Then she runs into an unusual and interesting man who openly demonstrates his dislike for her, or else pretty much ignores her entirely.

“Difficulties will multiply. And almost always, as the tension builds, the heroine is beset with doubts about her own competence, attractiveness and worth.

“That’s just how I feel! the reader cries inwardly.”

Source: The Awl
Published: Feb 15, 2012
Length: 16 minutes (4,043 words)

The Architect, The ‘It’ Girl And The Toy Pistol That Wasn’t

Stanford White and Harry Thaw’s battle for the heart of model and chorus girl Evelyn Nesbit in 1906:

“One warm June night in 1906, Albert Payson Terhune could be found engaged in battle for a telephone booth in the old Madison Square Garden while wearing a tuxedo. He had forcibly removed a man mid-conversation, and now, as he shouted into the phone, he kicked out a leg and swung his free arm to fend off the displaced caller and another man wielding a chair. Moments before and one floor above, Terhune, filling in as a drama critic for the New York Evening World, had been a witness to the crime of the century, and he was calling in the scoop.

“The movie version of his half of the conversation would go something like this: ‘Right, yes, that Stanford White. It’s about Evelyn Nesbit!'”

Source: The Awl
Published: Jan 18, 2012
Length: 6 minutes (1,701 words)

The Struggle For The Occupy Wall Street Archives

Bold said he had this sense early on in his involvement in OWS. And inspired by a presentation he’d seen at NYU about the collection of artifacts after the September 11th attacks, he decided to get serious about collecting immediately. He told people he knew in the movement to save their writings and signs. He began carrying stuff home himself.

But—and this he says he took from Derrida too, who wrote a book called Archive Fever—he thought it was essential, if the movement wanted to have some degree of control over how it was recorded and interpreted by historians, to collect their own documents. “So I was like, we have to have our own house, and if we’re going to talk about creating our own history, doing all this stuff ourselves, we have to have our own archives. So I was like, all right, let’s do it.”

Source: The Awl
Published: Dec 22, 2011
Length: 18 minutes (4,706 words)

Exquisite Corpse

[Fiction] He told her that she was moving too much, that she had to stay stiller, the camera was finicky, the exposures depended on no motion, like just stop breathing, he said looking at the playback, just stop breathing, okay. Lindsay thought it was a joke and laughed but he said it was serious, this was going to be on the app, super HD so the viewer could fingerzoom into her 1,000% without the quality falling off at all. She said okay and tilted her head back to the left the way he told her, like in the second bed picture, number 18, and he leaned in to move the curl in front of her eye to match the reference, holding his phone up against the light to check.

Source: The Awl
Published: Dec 2, 2011
Length: 6 minutes (1,693 words)

A Conspiracy of Hogs: The McRib as Arbitrage

Arbitrage is a risk-free way of making money by exploiting the difference between the price of a given good on two different markets—it’s the proverbial free lunch you were told doesn’t exist. In this equation, the undervalued good in question is hog meat, and McDonald’s exploits the value differential between pork’s cash price on the commodities market and in the Quick-Service Restaurant market. If you ignore the fact that this is, by definition, not arbitrage because the McRib is a value-added product, and that there is risk all over the place, this can lead to some interesting conclusions. (If you don’t want to do something so reckless, then stop here.)

Source: The Awl
Published: Nov 8, 2011
Length: 12 minutes (3,028 words)

Why Should We Demonstrate? A Conversation

LOGAN: So it’s not necessarily the idea that media coverage of this event will make anyone that has any power change anything, but that it will inspire us to change stuff ourselves?

SAM: I mean, partially. Anything like this always has 500 million different goals and other things that it’s going to accomplish without even intending to accomplish them. So for example, one thing that I thought when I saw a reporter ask the President a question about Occupy Wall Street, and he used it as a chance to try to, he tried to say he agreed with the protesters, even though the reporter had framed the question as like, clearly they think you haven’t done enough and are part of the problem, like, just the fact that that interchange took place! Before Occupy Wall Street, the Tea Party were the loud people who were in the street doing things and making noise, which set a tone so that when reporters asked the President a question, they would say, “It seems like a lot of people out there think that government is too big and is spending a lot of money and that taxes are too high, what are you going to do about that?” Right? And now the question was from the opposite direction. And so simply having that be a thing that happens is important.

Source: The Awl
Published: Oct 12, 2011
Length: 18 minutes (4,586 words)

Dressing Up My Boyfriend As Marc Anthony In His Terrible Kohl’s Clothes

“When I read last fall that Marc and J.Lo were designing clothing line at Kohl’s, I thought, well, now they can’t break up. Who else besides each other could they really expect to weather the shame? I mean, J.Lo is an international superstar. Marc Anthony is a gross international superstar. Kohl’s is the place that everyone thinks is Mervyns and already closed.”

Source: The Awl
Published: Sep 13, 2011
Length: 6 minutes (1,500 words)

Was Aaron Swartz Stealing?

Since the July 19th indictment of Aaron Swartz for surreptitiously whooshing nearly five million JSTOR documents onto a laptop concealed in an MIT network closet, there’s been a lot of codswallop written about JSTOR, about Aaron Swartz and about the public’s right to access documents in the public domain. A 24-year-old computer prodigy and political activist, Swartz has been caricatured as either a hero or a villain; likewise JSTOR. The U.S. Attorney for Massachusetts, Carmen M. Ortiz, who brought the charges against Swartz: she might be a bit of a villain, okay. Information wants to be free, it’s been said. But whether this means free of charge or merely liberated from its confines is a distinction most often left unmade.

Source: The Awl
Published: Aug 3, 2011
Length: 17 minutes (4,334 words)

I Love You Christopher Hitchens, You Irritating Bastard

But Christopher Hitchens! Ach, Christopher Hitchens. How I have loved him, despite the ordeals he has put me through. He’ll go and be a fearful crank about atheism or “Islamofascism” for ages and I get all mad, and then he writes this freaking brilliant column about the Murdoch scandals and I’m crazy about him again. Old loves are like that.

Source: The Awl
Published: Jul 20, 2011
Length: 21 minutes (5,447 words)