Honor Betrayed
A two-part series on sexual abuse and homelessness among female veterans in the U.S.:
“In response to the growing outcry over sexual violence, the Pentagon last year ordered that charging decisions in sexual assault cases be determined by more senior commanders than in the past, but the directive stopped short of taking the decision out of the chain of command. Some other nations, including Britain, have taken steps to create a more independent military judicial system, but experts on military justice said that the United States has been unwilling to do so.
“‘The military justice system is not only to judge innocence or guilt, but is also designed to help a commander ensure good order and discipline,’ said Dwight Sullivan, an appellate defense counsel for the Air Force. ‘Those things sometimes come into conflict.'”
The Extraordinary Science of Addictive Junk Food
How snack-food company executives help perfect our addiction to junk food—and whether Americans can reverse course on a dangerous diet of salt, sugar and fat:
“The food technicians stopped worrying about inventing new products and instead embraced the industry’s most reliable method for getting consumers to buy more: the line extension. The classic Lay’s potato chips were joined by Salt & Vinegar, Salt & Pepper and Cheddar & Sour Cream. They put out Chili-Cheese-flavored Fritos, and Cheetos were transformed into 21 varieties. Frito-Lay had a formidable research complex near Dallas, where nearly 500 chemists, psychologists and technicians conducted research that cost up to $30 million a year, and the science corps focused intense amounts of resources on questions of crunch, mouth feel and aroma for each of these items. Their tools included a $40,000 device that simulated a chewing mouth to test and perfect the chips, discovering things like the perfect break point: people like a chip that snaps with about four pounds of pressure per square inch.”
The Spy Novelist Who Knows Too Much
On the work of Gérard de Villiers, an 83-year-old French writer whose pulpy S.A.S. books have turned out to be eerily accurate:
“The books are strange hybrids: top-selling pulp-fiction vehicles that also serve as intelligence drop boxes for spy agencies around the world. De Villiers has spent most of his life cultivating spies and diplomats, who seem to enjoy seeing themselves and their secrets transfigured into pop fiction (with their own names carefully disguised), and his books regularly contain information about terror plots, espionage and wars that has never appeared elsewhere. Other pop novelists, like John le Carré and Tom Clancy, may flavor their work with a few real-world scenarios and some spy lingo, but de Villiers’s books are ahead of the news and sometimes even ahead of events themselves. Nearly a year ago he published a novel about the threat of Islamist groups in post-revolutionary Libya that focused on jihadis in Benghazi and on the role of the C.I.A. in fighting them. The novel, ‘Les Fous de Benghazi,’ came out six months before the death of the American ambassador, J. Christopher Stevens, and included descriptions of the C.I.A. command center in Benghazi (a closely held secret at that time), which was to become central in the controversy over Stevens’s death. Other de Villiers books have included even more striking auguries. In 1980, he wrote a novel in which militant Islamists murder the Egyptian president, Anwar Sadat, a year before the actual assassination took place. When I asked him about it, de Villiers responded with a Gallic shrug. ‘The Israelis knew it was going to happen,’ he said, ‘and did nothing.'”
The Price of a Stolen Childhood
Victims of child pornography seek restitution, sometimes from hundreds of separate cases:
“Marsh researched legal remedies for Amy. Combing through his casebooks, he found a provision in the Violence Against Women Act that he had never heard of before: it gave the victims of sex crimes, including child pornography, the right to restitution or compensation for the “full amount” of their losses. Enumerating what those losses could be, Congress listed psychiatric care, lost income and legal costs and concluded, ‘The issuance of a restitution order under this section is mandatory.’
“The provision for restitution, enacted in 1994, had yet to be invoked in a case of child-pornography possession. The basis for such a claim wasn’t necessarily self-evident: how could Amy prove that her ongoing trauma was the fault of any one man who looked at her pictures, instead of her uncle, who abused her and made the pornography?”
President Obama’s Second Inaugural Address
“We, the people, declare today that the most evident of truths – that all of us are created equal – is the star that guides us still; just as it guided our forebears through Seneca Falls, and Selma, and Stonewall; just as it guided all those men and women, sung and unsung, who left footprints along this great Mall, to hear a preacher say that we cannot walk alone; to hear a King proclaim that our individual freedom is inextricably bound to the freedom of every soul on Earth.
“It is now our generation’s task to carry on what those pioneers began. For our journey is not complete until our wives, our mothers, and daughters can earn a living equal to their efforts. Our journey is not complete until our gay brothers and sisters are treated like anyone else under the law – for if we are truly created equal, then surely the love we commit to one another must be equal as well. Our journey is not complete until no citizen is forced to wait for hours to exercise the right to vote. Our journey is not complete until we find a better way to welcome the striving, hopeful immigrants who still see America as a land of opportunity; until bright young students and engineers are enlisted in our workforce rather than expelled from our country. Our journey is not complete until all our children, from the streets of Detroit to the hills of Appalachia to the quiet lanes of Newtown, know that they are cared for, and cherished, and always safe from harm.”
How Good Does Karaoke Have to Be to Qualify as Art?
A writer goes to Portland, Ore. where the karaoke scene is vibrant and taken seriously:
“‘Karaoke in Portland is just different from other places,’ said his friend Bruce Morrison. ‘There’s a lot of showmanship.’
“Mulkern swept his long hair over his shoulders and put his top hat back on. ‘People in Portland,’ he declared, ‘are sillier than in other places.’
“In the corner of the booth, a woman with dark-rimmed eyes and black lipstick leaned forward suddenly and took my pen from my hand. She wrote a phone number in my notepad. ‘Do you know,’ she asked, staring intently into my eyes, ‘about puppet karaoke?'”
Two Men, One Sky: A Flight to the Finish
Two 32-year-old men attempt to break the record for the farthest anyone has ever flown in a hang glider:
“Strong thermals, which are sought and feared, are capable of lifting a hang glider thousands of feet in minutes. Lighter thermals, the ones Martin was hunting, require precise flying to find and then ascend. In most other places, pilots would simply wait until the day had warmed sufficiently before starting their flights. But for this record chase, every extra minute of daylight mattered.
“So Martin traveled cautiously, watching for soaring birds and developing clouds to detect areas with lift, while eyeing the ground to make sure he had a backup plan if he kept descending.
“Pilots hated this early stretch of the trip. Air conditions often force them to fly so low that they have to be ready to land at any time. But there was nowhere to land, except the clearings around the occasional oil pump, that did not risk shredding them and tearing up their gliders with thorns up to three inches long.”
Here Is What Happens When You Cast Lindsay Lohan in Your Movie
Director Paul Schrader and writer Bret Easton Ellis attempt to make a film with Lindsay Lohan and porn star James Deen—with a budget of $250,000:
“Lohan sits down, smiles and skips the small talk.
“‘Hi, how are you? I won’t play Cynthia. I want to play Tara, the lead.’ Braxton Pope and Paul Schrader nod happily. They’d been tipped off by her agent that this was how it was going to go. They tell her that sounds like a great idea.
“Schrader thinks she’s perfect for the role. Not everyone agrees. Schrader wrote ‘Raging Bull’ and ‘Taxi Driver’ and has directed 17 films. Still, some fear Lohan will end him. There have been house arrests, car crashes and ingested white powders. His own daughter begs him not to use her. A casting-director friend stops their conversation whenever he mentions her name. And then there’s the film’s explicit subject matter. Full nudity and lots of sex. Definitely NC-17. His wife, the actress Mary Beth Hurt, didn’t even finish the script, dismissing it as pornography after 50 pages. She couldn’t understand why he wanted it so badly.
“But Schrader was running out of chances.”
George Saunders Has Written the Best Book You’ll Read This Year
On the “writer’s writer,” George Saunders:
“We talked for a while about his relationship to Wallace. For all the ways in which their fiction might seem to be working similar themes, they were, Saunders said, ‘like two teams of miners, digging at the same spot but from different directions.’ He described making trips to New York in the early days and having ‘three or four really intense afternoons and evenings’ with, on separate occasions, Wallace and Franzen and Ben Marcus, talking to each of them about what ‘the ultimate aspiration for fiction was.’ Saunders added: ‘The thing on the table was emotional fiction. How do we make it? How do we get there? Is there something yet to be discovered? These were about the possibly contrasting desire to: (1) write stories that had some sort of moral heft and/or were not just technical exercises or cerebral games; while (2) not being cheesy or sentimental or reactionary.'”
Snow Fall: The Avalanche at Tunnel Creek
The story of 16 world-class skiers and snowboarders who decided to go skiing together in Washington’s Cascades in February 2012, and what happened to them when an avalanche hit. This six-part series uses interviews, photos, videos and simulations to reconstruct the day:
“‘Just as I had the thought about what I’m going to do, wondering if it was going to bury me, that’s right when I could feel it,’ Castillo said. ‘It was like a wave. Like when you’re in the ocean and the tide moves away from you. You’re getting thrashed and you feel it pull out and you’re like, O.K., I can stand up now.’
“Castillo saw daylight again. His camera captured snow sliding past his legs for another 13 seconds. The forest sounded as if it were full of sickly frogs. It was the trees, scrubbed of their fresh snow, still swaying and creaking around him.
“Castillo turned to look back up the hill.
“‘Where there were three people, there was nobody,’ Castillo said.”