Kei Igawa: The Lost Yankee

Plucked from a Japanese baseball all-star team roster in 2007 and introduced at a lavish news conference, Igawa was expected to be a staple in the Yankees’ starting rotation. He lasted 16 games, most of them regrettable outings that were sometimes spectacularly inept. Booed off the field, he was called one of the worst free-agent signings in Yankees history. After his last, losing appearance for the Yankees in early 2008, he was banished to the farm system and he has not come back.

Published: Jul 23, 2011
Length: 14 minutes (3,520 words)

In the East Village, Waiting for the Wrecking Ball

It was 1976. Ms. Stewart could never have forecast the waves of change that would first lap at the East Village and then overwhelm it, a steady march of restaurants and fancy apartment buildings that would come to colonize the neighborhood. Now, the buildings are in their last days, set to be torn down in August and replaced by the sort of glossy glass tower that has been sprouting up in the city in recent years. With the buildings dies another piece of an older, messier New York, one made remarkable by the fact that it has existed for so long.

Published: Jul 15, 2011
Length: 10 minutes (2,615 words)

Sheila Bair’s Bank Shot

‘They should have let Bear Stearns fail,” Sheila Bair said. It was midmorning on a crisp June day, and Bair, the 57-year-old outgoing chairwoman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation — the federal agency that insures bank deposits and winds down failing banks — was sitting on a couch, sipping a Starbucks latte. We were in the first hour of several lengthy on-the-record interviews. She seemed ever-so-slightly nervous.

Author: Joe Nocera
Published: Jul 9, 2011
Length: 24 minutes (6,172 words)

A-R-E-T-H-A

The organizers of the Grammy Awards quickly put together a tribute for her, and the sudden and shocking weight loss displayed in a taped thank-you played during the ceremony in February only kept advance-obituary writers scrambling for whatever superlatives were left to describe a career that has included 18 Grammys, upward of 75 million records sold, being the first woman inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and a Presidential Medal of Freedom. But now there she sat at a front table, in a flowing cream-­colored silk Naeem Khan gown, with the kind of resurrection glow you see on stained-glass windows in churches.

Published: Jul 8, 2011
Length: 11 minutes (2,819 words)

Young Gay Rites (2008)

“Ever since I was 19 or 20, I knew that I would want to give myself over to one person in a formal way,” said Brandon A., who had been in two previous gay relationships lasting more than a year before meeting Brandon L. “And it didn’t even really matter to me if the politics of the world were going to bend in my favor so that my marriage was considered legal. Legal or not, I was going to have a commitment ceremony in front of the people who matter to me. I’ve always been oddly traditional about that.”

Published: Apr 27, 2008
Length: 32 minutes (8,196 words)

My Life as an Undocumented Immigrant

Last year I read about four students who walked from Miami to Washington to lobby for the Dream Act, a nearly decade-old immigration bill that would provide a path to legal permanent residency for young people who have been educated in this country. At the risk of deportation — the Obama administration has deported almost 800,000 people in the last two years — they are speaking out. Their courage has inspired me.

Published: Jun 22, 2011
Length: 18 minutes (4,604 words)

Did My Brother Invent E-Mail With Tom Van Vleck?

“In 1965, at the beginning of the year, there was a bunch of stuff going on with the time-sharing system that Noel and I were users of. We were working for the political science department. And the system programmers wrote a programming staff note memo that proposed the creation of a mail command. But people proposed things in programming staff notes that never got implemented. And well, we thought the idea of electronic mail was a great idea. We said, ‘Where’s electronic mail? That would be so cool.’ And they said, ‘Oh, there’s no time to write that. It’s not important.’ And we said, ‘Well, can we write it?’ And we did. And then it became part of the system.”

Published: Jun 19, 2011
Length: 24 minutes (6,093 words)

My Ex-Gay Friend

He was walking toward the cafe, holding something that I couldn’t make out. I stepped out of my car and waved to him. He looked the same as I remembered — tall, lean, blond, boyish and handsome in a Nordic ski instructor kind of way. I was nervous, but as he approached I decided to lean in for a hug. Michael, though, pre-emptively stuck out his right hand. “Hello, Benoit,” he said, standing stiff and upright, clutching what I could now see was a Bible.

Published: Jun 16, 2011
Length: 14 minutes (3,585 words)

The Getaway Car

For a long time now, I’ve been looking forward to this year with apprehension: 2011 is when my daughter, Julia, now 18, will undertake that very American rite of passage and “go away to college” — a phrase whose operative word is “away.” We live in Seattle, and in the Pacific Northwest, “collegeland,” as my daughter calls it, is centered in New England and New York, where most of her immediate friends will be going in September.

Published: Jun 10, 2011
Length: 20 minutes (5,082 words)

Something’s Wrong But You’ll Never Know What It Is

Dunning and Kruger argued in their paper, “When people are incompetent in the strategies they adopt to achieve success and satisfaction, they suffer a dual burden: Not only do they reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the ability to realize it. Instead, like Mr. Wheeler, they are left with the erroneous impression they are doing just fine.” It became known as the Dunning-Kruger Effect — our incompetence masks our ability to recognize our incompetence. But just how prevalent is this effect?

Published: Jun 20, 2010
Length: 13 minutes (3,434 words)