Two Space Shuttle Veterans Describe Takeoff and Landing

“You wake up around five hours prior to going out to the vehicle. It reminds me of Christmas morning, the level of excitement as you get up and have that last meal, get into your orange launch-and-entry suits in the white room and then get on the bus that takes you out to the pad. There’s a background level of anticipation, looking forward to the event. You get out to the pad about three hours prior to the launch. The commander gets in first and is strapped in. The vehicle is on the pad pointed upwards, so everything has been tilted 90 degrees and it is like getting into a different vehicle than the one you trained in. It takes a little effort to get all strapped in, but finally I’m in and the rest of the crew comes in after me. Everything starts to look like the simulators we’ve spent thousands of hours in. The rhythm feels like the simulators. You forget this is actually launch day and not just another simulation.”

Author: Ian Sample
Source: The Guardian
Published: Jul 6, 2011
Length: 12 minutes (3,237 words)

The 1847 Lecture that Predicted Human-Induced Climate Change

When we think of the birth of the conservation movement in the 19th century, the names that usually spring to mind are the likes of John Muir and Henry David Thoreau, men who wrote about the need to protect wilderness areas in an age when the notion of mankind’s “manifest destiny” was all the rage. But a far less remembered American—a contemporary of Muir and Thoreau—can claim to be the person who first publicised the now largely unchallenged idea that humans can negatively influence the environment that supports them.

Source: The Guardian
Published: Jun 20, 2011
Length: 7 minutes (1,886 words)

How Corporate Branding Has Taken Over America

Clearly the techniques of branding have both thrived and adapted since I published No Logo. But in the past 10 years I have written very little about developments like these. I realised why while reading William Gibson’s 2003 novel Pattern Recognition. The book’s protagonist, Cayce Pollard, is allergic to brands, particularly Tommy Hilfiger and the Michelin man. So strong is this “morbid and sometimes violent reactivity to the semiotics of the marketplace” that she has the buttons on her Levi’s jeans ground smooth so that there are no corporate markings. When I read those words, I immediately realised that I had a similar affliction.

Source: The Guardian
Published: Jan 16, 2010
Length: 18 minutes (4,693 words)

How to Spot a Psychopath

It was the French psychiatrist Philippe Pinel who first suggested, early in the 19th century, that there was a madness that didn’t involve mania or depression or psychosis. He called it “manie sans délire” – insanity without delusions. He said sufferers appeared normal on the surface, but they lacked impulse controls and were prone to outbursts of violence. It wasn’t until 1891, when the German doctor JLA Koch published his book Die Psychopathischen Minderwertigkeiten, that it got its name: psychopathy.

Author: Jon Ronson
Source: The Guardian
Published: May 21, 2011
Length: 17 minutes (4,421 words)

The Slap that Sparked a Revolution

It is a phrase I will hear again and again, in varying forms across Tunisia. Some will call Mohamed Bouazizi “the drop that tipped over the vase”; others will insist that his death “lit the touchpaper” for the Arab spring revolts. But listen closely and there is also a growing murmur of dissent among those who believe that Mohamed was not a political hero but a media creation, manufactured by a myth-making machine that swung into action in the immediate aftermath of his death.

Source: The Guardian
Published: May 15, 2011
Length: 13 minutes (3,257 words)

Elif Batuman: Life After a Bestseller

“Things started out innocuously enough. ‘I’m a huge fan!’ I exclaimed. ‘Right back at you,’ Franzen replied, explaining that he had bought my book as a Christmas present for multiple people, though he hadn’t yet read it himself. ‘But I’ve read parts of it!’ I told him that I had loved Freedom, which is true and would have been a great ending point for our exchange. So it’s difficult to articulate what possessed me, at a later, boozier point in the dinner, to ask Franzen whether he had any weed.”

Source: The Guardian
Published: Apr 21, 2011
Length: 12 minutes (3,211 words)

The Forgiveness Machine

For a long while after David Foster Wallace’s death, his widow Karen Green couldn’t make any art at all, wondered if she ever would again, but eventually, tentatively, she developed the idea for her conciliatory Heath-Robinson. “The forgiveness machine was seven-feet long,” she says, “with lots of weird plastic bits and pieces. Heavy as hell.” The idea was that you wrote down the thing that you wanted to forgive, or to be forgiven for, and a vacuum sucked your piece of paper in one end. At the other it was shredded, and hey presto.

Author: Tim Adams
Source: The Guardian
Published: Apr 10, 2011
Length: 18 minutes (4,645 words)

How a Big U.S. Bank Laundered Billions from Mexico’s Murderous Drug Gangs

Martin Woods was set apart by his modus operandi. His speciality, he explains, was his application of a “know your client”, or KYC, policing strategy to identifying dirty money. “KYC is a fundamental approach to anti-money laundering, going after tax evasion or counter-terrorist financing. Who are your clients? Is the documentation right? Good, responsible banking involved always knowing your customer and it still does.” When he looked at Wachovia, the first thing Woods noticed was a deficiency in KYC information.

Source: The Guardian
Published: Apr 3, 2011
Length: 16 minutes (4,224 words)

Video Games: The Addiction

Tom Bissell was an acclaimed, prize-winning young writer. Then he started playing the video game Grand Theft Auto. For three years he has been cocaine addicted, sleep deprived and barely able to write a word. “There are times when I think GTA IV is the most colossal creative achievement of the last 25 years, times when I think of it as an unsurpassable example of what games can do, and times when I think of it as misguided and a failure. No matter what I think about GTA IV, or however I am currently regarding it, my throat gets a little drier, my head a little heavier, and I know I am also thinking about cocaine.”

Source: The Guardian
Published: Mar 21, 2010
Length: 18 minutes (4,749 words)

The Splintering of the Fourth Estate

It’s developing so fast, we forget how new it all is. It’s totally understandable that those of us with at least one leg in traditional media should be impatient to understand the business model that will enable us magically to transform ourselves into digital businesses and continue to earn the revenues we enjoyed before the invention of the web, never mind the bewildering disruption of web 2.0.

Source: The Guardian
Published: Nov 19, 2010
Length: 23 minutes (5,782 words)