How Slavery Really Ended in America

Butler was no abolitionist, but the three slaves presented a problem. True, the laws of the United States were clear: all fugitives must be returned to their masters. The founding fathers enshrined this in the Constitution; Congress reinforced it in 1850 with the Fugitive Slave Act; and it was still the law of the land — including, as far as the federal government was concerned, within the so-called Confederate states. The war had done nothing to change it.

Published: Apr 1, 2011
Length: 17 minutes (4,486 words)

On Libya’s Revolutionary Road

For the next two hours, Qaddafi lectured the men. He warned them not to encourage the kinds of protests that had overthrown one dictator in Tunisia and would soon topple another, Hosni Mubarak, in Egypt. “Take down your Facebook pages, your demands will be met,” Qaddafi said. At times, he muttered to himself at length, leaving the lawyers baffled and embarrassed. As he listened, Saih felt his fear giving way to a deep and unexpected reassurance. It was not Qaddafi’s drugged, monotone voice that soothed him. Nor was it the Leader’s seeming desperation or his promises of reform, which Saih did not believe. Instead, it was the mere sight of him up close, an old man with a wrinkled, sagging face.

Published: Mar 30, 2011
Length: 26 minutes (6,572 words)

Online Poker’s Big Winner

The vast sums of money shuttled among the accounts of these young professionals — and the shocking aggressiveness and recklessness with which they played — deepened the divide between the young online players and the older guard who earned their millions when poker was still a game played by men sitting around a table. Since the rise of online poker in the early 2000s, every principle of the game, every lesson learned over hundreds of thousands of hours of play, every simple credo uttered in some old Western gambling movie — all those tersely stated, manly things that made up the legend of poker — has been picked apart and, for the most part, discarded.

Published: Mar 25, 2011
Length: 12 minutes (3,214 words)

Why Yasir Qadhi Wants to Talk About Jihad

Beyond the gothic confines of Yale, he was becoming one of the most influential conservative clerics in American Islam, drawing a tide of followers in the fundamentalist movement known as Salafiya. To many young Muslims wrestling with conflicts between faith and country, Qadhi was a rock star. To law-enforcement agents, he was also a figure of interest, given his prominence in a community considered vulnerable to radicalization. Some officials, noting his message of nonviolence, saw him as an ally. Others were wary, recalling a time when Qadhi spouted a much harder, less tolerant line. On this night, however, it was Qadhi’s closest followers who were questioning him.

Published: Mar 18, 2011
Length: 34 minutes (8,615 words)

The Suburbanization of Mike Tyson

Kiki, who is 34, is a well-spoken, down-to-earth woman who seems pleasantly oblivious to her own exotically good looks and celebrity status by virtue of being Mike Tyson’s wife. Making a viable life with the complicated, demon-haunted man she has married requires patience. “It’s a struggle,” she says, speaking about his relapses post-rehab. “You’re always an addict and have to work at it. It’s easy for him to fall back in his own life. He surrounds himself with people who are sober and doesn’t go out to clubs. If his pattern shifts, you know something’s wrong.”

Published: Mar 16, 2011
Length: 19 minutes (4,996 words)

Is it Dunk and Done for Perry Jones?

You might assume that if Jones left Baylor after just one season for the N.B.A., it would be a terrible disappointment to the coaches who recruited him when he was in his early teens — then had to keep in constant contact to make sure no one poached him. (Such vigilance is known as baby-sitting.) But that is not the case. If Jones leaves, it will further validate Baylor’s program and show everyone — the media, potential recruits, influential summer-league coaches who control players and sometimes broker them to colleges — that Baylor is a place that attracts top talent and produces N.B.A. millionaires. It will make it easier for coach Scott Drew to recruit more players like Jones, who then, of course, also might also leave after one season.

Published: Mar 9, 2011
Length: 27 minutes (6,801 words)

The Billionaire Who Is Planning His 125th Birthday

There are health nuts, and then there is David Murdock: health paragon, patron and proselytizer, with a biography as colorful as that mural, a determination to write a few more chapters of it still and a paradox of sorts at the center of it all. What set him on this quest was a loss that no amplitude of wellness can restore, and even if he teased out his days into eternity, he would be hard pressed to fill them with the contentment they once had.

Published: Mar 6, 2011
Length: 19 minutes (4,925 words)

The Liberation of Lori Berenson: Life After 15 Years in a Peruvian Prison

Such an outpouring of rage at a 40-year-old woman, mother to a toddler, who was convicted in her mid-20s of abetting a terrorist plot that never took place, is a measure of the degree to which Peruvians are still traumatized by the violence that convulsed their country during the years when the Shining Path warred with the military and nearly 70,000 Peruvians were killed. It also underscores the fact that terrorism, all but defunct in Peru for more than a decade, is still a hot political issue.

Published: Mar 2, 2011
Length: 34 minutes (8,601 words)

The One-Man Political Machine

On a brutally cold morning in mid-December, Rahm Emanuel, hatless and wearing a glove on only his left hand, stood for an hour in front of the turnstiles at the Paulina el station, which sits in his old Congressional district on Chicago’s North Side. As the trains slammed and screeched overhead, he offered his hand to the mostly young and professional commuters heading downtown. Emanuel’s manner seemed more studied than spontaneous. He employed standard lines — “nice hat,” “good book” — and relied on the logos on riders’ head wear and jackets for conversation starters. He addressed both sexes as “man,” and when a woman asked about his plans for the Chicago Transit Authority, he was characteristically a trifle abrupt — “Here’s the deal,” he said to start — and egocentric.

Published: Feb 17, 2011
Length: 11 minutes (2,963 words)

How Egypt’s Leaders Found the ‘Off’ Switch for the Internet

Epitaphs for the Mubarak government all note that the mobilizing power of the Internet was one of the Egyptian opposition’s most potent weapons. But quickly lost in the swirl of revolution was the government’s ferocious counterattack, a dark achievement that many had thought impossible in the age of global connectedness. In a span of minutes just after midnight on Jan. 28, a technologically advanced, densely wired country with more than 20 million people online was essentially severed from the global Internet.

Published: Feb 16, 2011
Length: 9 minutes (2,372 words)