Regulators Failed to Address Risks in Oil Rig Fail-Safe Device

Published: Jun 20, 2010
Length: 25 minutes (6,481 words)

Democrat in Chief?

“The fact is,” Nancy Pelosi said, addressing herself to David Axelrod, “that the longer you say Washington is broken, and you’ve been saying that for 18 months, the more that becomes the story.”

Author: Matt Bai
Published: Jun 8, 2010
Length: 32 minutes (8,078 words)

The Rumpled Anarchy of Bill Murray

A picture of genial abandon in rumpled khakis, football jersey and sneakers, Murray was urging Dan Aykroyd, Laraine Newman and Chevy Chase to drop their ”reserves of cool” on the dance floor and ”get down!” Murray’s warmth is disarming.

Published: Nov 20, 1988
Length: 16 minutes (4,080 words)

Attached to Technology and Paying a Price

Mr. Campbell continues to struggle with the effects of the deluge of data. Even after he unplugs, he craves the stimulation he gets from his electronic gadgets. He forgets things like dinner plans, and he has trouble focusing on his family.

Published: Jun 6, 2010
Length: 14 minutes (3,614 words)

How a Soccer Star Is Made

Like other professional clubs in Europe and around the world, Ajax operates something similar to a big-league baseball team’s minor-league system — but one that reaches into early childhood.

Published: Jun 6, 2010
Length: 31 minutes (7,990 words)

What Happened to Valor?

Peralta was summoned to the Marine Corps Air Station Miramar in San Diego, where Lieut. Gen. Richard F. Natonski informed her of the Pentagon’s decision: Rafael Peralta would not be awarded the Medal of Honor after all. Instead he would receive the Navy Cross, the second-highest American military decoration that can be awarded to a Marine.

Published: May 27, 2010
Length: 11 minutes (2,774 words)

M.I.A.’s Agitprop Pop

“I kind of want to be an outsider,” she said, eating a truffle-flavored French fry. “I don’t want to make the same music, sing about the same stuff, talk about the same things. If that makes me a terrorist, then I’m a terrorist.”

Published: May 25, 2010
Length: 32 minutes (8,135 words)

The Afterlife of Stieg Larsson

In Sweden the books and their author — who died in an untimely fashion that some conspiracy theorists persist in calling an assassination — have lately become the center of another sort of story, the kind of thing August Strindberg might have written, full of intense, opinionated Swedish characters entwined in a saga involving envy, resentment, a contested legacy and a mysterious manuscript. At least one skeptic has even questioned how Larsson, a middle-aged man with no history of writing crime fiction, and seemingly no flair for it, could have written the Millennium books in the first place.

Published: May 20, 2010
Length: 24 minutes (6,063 words)

The Teachers’ Unions’ Last Stand

Race to the Top has turned a relatively modest federal program (the $4.3 billion budget represents less than 1 percent of all federal, state and local education spending) into high-yield leverage that could end up overshadowing health care reform in its impact and that is already upending traditional Democratic Party politics.

Published: May 17, 2010
Length: 32 minutes (8,095 words)

Cass Sunstein Wants to Nudge Us

In “Nudge,” a popular book that he wrote with the influential behavioral economist Richard Thaler, Sunstein elaborated a philosophy called “libertarian paternalism.” Conservative economists have long stressed that because people are rational, the best way for government to serve the public is to guarantee a fair market and to otherwise get out of the way. But in the real world, Sunstein and Thaler argue, people are subject to all sorts of biases and quirks.

Published: May 13, 2010
Length: 17 minutes (4,419 words)