Heeeere’s . . . Conan!!!

On a chilly Thursday night in late January, four weeks from his last show as host of “Late Night,” Conan O’Brien was strumming a guitar behind his beat-up desk in his cluttered office at Rockefeller Center, figuring out how to say goodbye. After 16 years and 2,725 shows, O’Brien would be moving, along with almost all his staff, to Universal City in California to take over “The Tonight Show.”

Published: May 20, 2009
Length: 28 minutes (7,110 words)

In German Suburb, Life Goes On Without Cars

Residents of this upscale community are suburban pioneers, going where few soccer moms or commuting executives have ever gone before: they have given up their cars.

Published: May 11, 2009
Length: 5 minutes (1,338 words)

The American Press on Suicide Watch

If you wanted to pick the moment when the American news business went on suicide watch, it was almost exactly three years ago. That’s when Stephen Colbert, appearing at the annual White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, delivered a monologue accusing his hosts of being stenographers who had, in essence, let the Bush White House get away with murder (or at least the war in Iraq).

Author: Frank Rich
Published: May 9, 2009
Length: 6 minutes (1,559 words)

How We Tested the Big Banks

This afternoon, Treasury, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and the Federal Reserve will announce the results of an unprecedented review of the capital position of the nation’s largest banks. This will be an important step forward in President Obama’s program to help repair the financial system, restore the flow of credit and put our nation on the path to economic recovery.

Published: May 6, 2009
Length: 4 minutes (1,087 words)

After the Great Recession: Interview with President Obama

This was our third interview about the economy, the first two occurring during last year’s campaign. And while the setting was decidedly more formal this time — the Oval Office — the interview felt as conversational as those earlier ones. We sat at the far end of the office from his desk and spoke for 50 minutes.

Published: Apr 28, 2009
Length: 24 minutes (6,190 words)

Growing Up Buckley

The nurse buzzed me into the Critical Care Unit. The chic and stunning Mrs. William F. Buckley — the society columnists used to call her that — lay on her bed, shrunken, open-eyed, unseeing, a thick plastic respirator tube protruding from her mouth, making a loud, rhythmic bellows noise as it pumped and withdrew air from her lungs. I’d driven eight hours through a storm to get here and knew pretty much what to expect, but I lost it and began to sob. The nurse kindly left.

Published: Apr 22, 2009
Length: 31 minutes (7,914 words)

Helen Gurley Brown: The Original Carrie Bradshaw

Helen Gurley Brown, the author of “Sex and the Single Girl” (1962) and for three decades the editor of Cosmopolitan, was born in Green Forest, Ark., a tiny town in the Ozark Mountains. Her father died when she was 10; her sister had polio; her family was “hillbilly,” she wrote, and poor. Once she got out, she looked back only by force of will. She liked to quote a line from Carson McCullers: “I must go home periodically to renew my sense of horror.”

Published: Apr 21, 2009
Length: 4 minutes (1,125 words)

Picking Letters, 10 a Day, That Reach Obama

Tens of thousands of letters, e-mail messages and faxes arrive at the White House every day. A few hundred are culled and end up each weekday afternoon on a round wooden table in the office of Mr. Kelleher, the director of the White House Office of Correspondence.

Published: Apr 19, 2009
Length: 4 minutes (1,020 words)

Batteries Not Included

Shai Agassi stood in a warehouse on the outskirts of Tel Aviv one afternoon last month and watched his battery-swapping robot go to work. He was conducting a demonstration of the curious machine that is central to his two-year-old clean-energy company, which is called Better Place.

Published: Apr 16, 2009
Length: 17 minutes (4,457 words)

Federer as Religious Experience

This present article is more about a spectator’s experience of Federer, and its context. The specific thesis here is that if you’ve never seen the young man play live, and then do, in person, on the sacred grass of Wimbledon, through the literally withering heat and then wind and rain of the ’06 fortnight, then you are apt to have what one of the tournament’s press bus drivers describes as a “bloody near-religious experience.” It may be tempting, at first, to hear a phrase like this as just one more of the overheated tropes that people resort to to describe the feeling of Federer Moments. But the driver’s phrase turns out to be true — literally, for an instant ecstatically — though it takes some time and serious watching to see this truth emerge.

Published: Aug 20, 2006
Length: 26 minutes (6,728 words)