Behind the Hunt for Bin Laden

Back in Washington, Mr. Panetta met with Mr. Obama and his most senior national security aides, including Mr. Biden, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates. The meeting was considered so secret that White House officials didn’t even list the topic in their alerts to each other. That day, Mr. Panetta spoke at length about Bin Laden and his presumed hiding place. “It was electric,” an administration official who attended the meeting said. “For so long, we’d been trying to get a handle on this guy. And all of a sudden, it was like, wow, there he is.”

Published: May 3, 2011
Length: 12 minutes (3,060 words)

Obit: Osama bin Laden—The Most Wanted Face of Terrorism

With the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001, Bin Laden was elevated to the realm of evil in the American imagination once reserved for dictators like Hitler and Stalin. He was a new national enemy, his face on wanted posters, gloating on videotape, taunting the united states and western civilization. #Sept11

Published: May 2, 2011
Length: 20 minutes (5,169 words)

Before Manny Became Manny

Hero. Cheat. Prodigy. Ingrate. Free spirit. Knucklehead. Hall of Famer. Pariah. Enigma. Manny Ramirez, one of the great right-handed hitters of his generation, who retired from baseball this month after once again testing positive for performance-enhancing drugs, was many things to many people — fans and family and teammates from Santo Domingo to Washington Heights to Cleveland to Boston. Sara Rimer, then a reporter for The New York Times, met Ramirez in 1991 at George Washington High School in Manhattan. Over two decades, she enjoyed a memorable and mystifying acquaintanceship with Ramirez.

Author: Sara Rimer
Published: Apr 26, 2011
Length: 12 minutes (3,181 words)

Obama’s Young Mother Abroad

She carried her chin a few degrees higher than most. His right hand rested on her shoulder, lightly. The photograph, taken on a Manhattan rooftop in August 1987 and e-mailed to me 20 years later, was a revelation and a puzzle. The man was Barack Obama at 26, the community organizer from Chicago on a visit to New York. The woman was Stanley Ann Dunham, his mother. It was impossible not to be struck by the similarities, and the dissimilarities, between them. It was impossible not to question the stereotype to which she had been expediently reduced: the white woman from Kansas.

Published: Apr 20, 2011
Length: 24 minutes (6,215 words)

Do Cellphones Cause Brain Cancer?

On Jan. 21, 1993, the television talk-show host Larry King featured an unexpected guest on his program. It was the evening after Inauguration Day in Washington, and the television audience tuned in expecting political commentary. But King turned, instead, to a young man from Florida, David Reynard, who had filed a tort claim against the cellphone manufacturer NEC and the carrier GTE Mobilnet, claiming that radiation from their phones caused or accelerated the growth of a brain tumor in his wife.

Published: Apr 15, 2011
Length: 20 minutes (5,182 words)

Woody & Mia: A New York Story

“It’s no accomplishment to have or raise kids,” Woody Allen often used to say. “Any fool can do it.” Then in the fall of 1979 he met Mia Farrow, who had seven children. Mia, he now says, “introduced me to a whole other world. Yet the two of us have so little in common that it always amazes us. We’re always marveling on why we threw in our lot together and stayed together as long as we have.”

Author: Eric Lax
Published: Feb 24, 1991
Length: 18 minutes (4,538 words)

As the Mountaintops Fall, a Coal Town Vanishes

A couple of years ago, a subsidiary of Massey Energy, which owns a sprawling mine operation behind and above the Richmond home, bought up Lindytown. Many of its residents signed Massey-proffered documents in which they also agreed not to sue, testify against, seek inspection of or “make adverse comment” about coal-mining operations in the vicinity. You might say that both parties were motivated. Massey preferred not to have people living so close to its mountaintop mining operations. And the residents, some with area roots deep into the 19th century, preferred not to live amid a dusty industrial operation that was altering the natural world about them.

Author: Dan Barry
Published: Apr 12, 2011
Length: 11 minutes (2,774 words)

Is Sugar Toxic?

In animals, or at least in laboratory rats and mice, it’s clear that if the fructose hits the liver in sufficient quantity and with sufficient speed, the liver will convert much of it to fat. This apparently induces a condition known as insulin resistance, which is now considered the fundamental problem in obesity, and the underlying defect in heart disease and in the type of diabetes, type 2, that is common to obese and overweight individuals. It might also be the underlying defect in many cancers. If what happens in laboratory rodents also happens in humans, and if we are eating enough sugar to make it happen, then we are in trouble.

Published: Apr 13, 2011
Length: 25 minutes (6,474 words)

Suzanne Collins’s War Stories for Kids

In “The Hunger Games” Collins embraces her father’s impulse to educate young people about the realities of war. “If we wait too long, what kind of expectation can we have?” she said. “We think we’re sheltering them, but what we’re doing is putting them at a disadvantage.” But her medicine goes down easily, thanks to cliffhangers, star-crossed lovers and the kinds of details that create a fully formed universe. Collins labored for days over the construction of the arenas in “The Hunger Games,” analyzing “Rambo” clips to help her visualize the use of weaponry like crossbows.

Published: Apr 10, 2011
Length: 11 minutes (2,918 words)

The Fragile Success of School Reform in the Bronx

Success stories like this in high-poverty neighborhoods are becoming more common in the era of charter schools, but 223 is no charter. There is no clamoring of parents trying to game a spot for their kids in a lottery, no screening of applicants, no visits from educators hoping to learn the secret of the school’s success, no shadow philanthropist supplying Kindles to all of its students. M.S. 223 is just a regular public school. González isn’t even allowed to see the files of incoming students before they arrive. “You know what you have to do to come to school here?” González told me. “Walk through that door.”

Published: Apr 6, 2011
Length: 37 minutes (9,401 words)