One Very, Very Indie Band

Given its outsize musical ambitions and unabashed theatricality, the Arcade Fire could have filled a three-ring recording studio. The place it ultimately found to record “Neon Bible,” the band’s follow-up to its successful and surprisingly poised 2004 debut album, “Funeral,” was a 19th-century redbrick church in a small farm town an hour outside of Montreal. The church already had a stage in front, a hundred-foot ceiling that returned rich, live-sounding reverberations and a rear balcony that could be turned into a glassed-in sound booth.

Author: Darcy Frey
Published: Mar 4, 2007
Length: 19 minutes (4,980 words)

The Dirty Little Secrets of Search

Does the collective wisdom of the Web really say that J.C. Penney has the most essential site when it comes to dresses? And bedding? And area rugs? And dozens of other words and phrases? The New York Times asked an expert in online search, Doug Pierce of Blue Fountain Media in New York, to study this question, as well as Penney’s astoundingly strong search-term performance in recent months. What he found suggests that the digital age’s most mundane act, the Google search, often represents layer upon layer of intrigue. And the intrigue starts in the sprawling, subterranean world of “black hat” optimization, the dark art of raising the profile of a Web site with methods that Google considers tantamount to cheating.

Published: Feb 13, 2011
Length: 15 minutes (3,880 words)

Mayor of Rust

Thrust into the national spotlight, Braddock, Pennsylvania, Mayor John Fetterman has become something of a folk hero, a Paul Bunyan of hipster urban revival, with his own Shepard Fairey block print — the Fetterman mien with the word “mayor” underneath. This, the poster suggests, is what a mayor should be.

Published: Feb 11, 2011
Length: 17 minutes (4,359 words)

The Irish Affliction

Of the various crises the Catholic Church is facing around the world, the central one — wave after wave of accounts of systemic sexual abuse of children by priests and other church figures — has affected Ireland more strikingly than anywhere else. And no place has reacted so aggressively.

Published: Feb 10, 2011
Length: 19 minutes (4,765 words)

Best Seats in the House

“Hey, boobie, talk to me,” the Ticket Man said. The Ticket Man, whose name is Richard Ebers, was on the phone. He is always on the phone. The best way to speak to the Ticket Man is to call him, even if you’re standing next to him. His wife has trouble getting a word. Often, he is juggling three calls. “Allman Brothers? What’s the date?” “Robbie? Hi, boob. Tell me what you want.” “Yeah, babe, what do you need?” The Ticket Man’s business is the resale of premium tickets to sporting events and concerts. By premium ticket, he means “the best in the house.”

Published: Feb 6, 2011
Length: 10 minutes (2,518 words)

How Hef Got His Groove Back

All along, Hugh Hefner’s position has been that Playboy’s stock is undervalued, and David Bank, a media analyst at RBC Capital Markets, tends to agree. “I think Hefner is incredibly shrewd,” he told me. “But when I take off my analyst’s hat and put on my psychologist’s hat, it’s something of an enigma to me. I don’t know that many 84-year-olds who are reducing their liquidity.”

Published: Feb 5, 2011
Length: 18 minutes (4,686 words)

Shaken-Baby Syndrome Faces New Questions in Court

This is how science progresses: One researcher comes up with a hypothesis, which others question and test. But shaken-baby cases are haunted by the enormous repercussions of getting it wrong — the conviction of innocent adults, on the one hand, and on the other, the danger to children of missing serious abuse. In one study, researchers looked into the deaths of five children who had head injuries that initially were misjudged to be accidents and found that four of them could have been prevented if an earlier pattern of abuse had been detected.

Published: Feb 2, 2011
Length: 32 minutes (8,175 words)

Dealing with Julian Assange and the Secrets He Spilled

Criminalizing the publication of such secrets by someone who has no official obligation seems to me to run up against the First Amendment and the best traditions of this country. As one of my colleagues asks: If Assange were an understated professorial type rather than a character from a missing Stieg Larsson novel, and if WikiLeaks were not suffused with such glib antipathy toward the United States, would the reaction to the leaks be quite so ferocious? And would more Americans be speaking up against the threat of reprisals?

Published: Jan 26, 2011
Length: 32 minutes (8,020 words)

The White House Looks for Work

The path from crisis to anemic recovery was marked by turmoil inside the White House. The economic team fractured repeatedly over philosophy (should jobs or deficits take priority?) and personality (who got to attend which meetings?), resulting in feuds that ultimately helped break it apart. The word commonly used by those involved is “dysfunctional,” and in recent months, most of the initial team has left or made plans to leave, including Larry Summers, Christina Romer, Peter Orszag, Rahm Emanuel and Paul Volcker.

Published: Jan 19, 2011
Length: 26 minutes (6,547 words)

Europe’s Odd Couple

While the agonies of the European Union — sovereign defaults, deficits and bubbles — unfold like a great wonk drama, at their core is something more intimate: the fractured tale of Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy. They have been photographed across Europe giving the appearance of happy partnership. They are the best hope Europe has for continued unity. But they do not like each other at all.

Published: Jan 13, 2011
Length: 12 minutes (3,154 words)