How Chris McCandless Died
Jon Krakauer updates the story that became Into the Wild—and the question of how Chris McCandless died in the Alaskan wilderness:
“The debate over why McCandless perished, and the related question of whether he is worthy of admiration, has been smoldering, and occasionally flaring, for more than two decades now. But last December, a writer named Ronald Hamilton posted a paper on the Internet that brings fascinating new facts to the discussion. Hamilton, it turns out, has discovered hitherto unknown evidence that appears to close the book on the cause of McCandless’s death.”
The Summer of Love and Newsweek
The New Yorker’s Hendrik Hertzberg reflects on his early career working as a correspondent for Newsweek in San Francisco, covering Jefferson Airplane, Ronald Reagan and hippies:
“If the S.F. music scene (I quickly learned that ‘Frisco’ was a no-no) was scarcely known outside the Bay Area, and neither was the larger cultural phenomenon it drew strength from. The word ‘hippie’—derived from ‘hipster,’ the nineteen-forties bebop sobriquet revived sixty years later in Brooklyn, Portland, and food co-ops in between—had been coined only a few months earlier, by Herb Caen, the Chronicle’s inimitable gossip columnist. (At the time, as often as not, people spelled it ‘hippy.’) Ralph J. Gleason, the Chron’s jazz critic, was the scene’s Dr. Johnson. (Pushing fifty, he was too old to be its Boswell.) Gleason’s protégé was the pop-music critic for the U.C. Berkeley’s student paper, the Daily Californian, Jann Wenner. But the national press had not taken much notice, if any. So getting something into Newsweek was a coup.”
Anatomy of a Publisher
The work and sex lives of book publishers. Gottlieb, the former editor of The New Yorker, writes about Boris Kachka’s history of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Hothouse:
“Gossip about Roger Straus’s sexual life (and everyone else’s) is a dominant feature of ‘Hothouse’—yes, FSG was hot in this way, too. Not only was Roger the Emperor of Frankfurt, but in New York, in the office, he was the Sun King—complete with deer park. The chief doe, Peggy Miller, arrived in his life around the same time Sontag did. She was an experienced executive secretary who went to work for Roger in that capacity and stayed on until the end, a major force at FSG. (‘I’m . . . grateful to Peggy Miller,’ Kachka writes, ‘the living soul of independent FSG, for giving me so much of her time.’)”
Taken: The Use and Abuse of Civil Forfeiture
Now happening in America: Police are using civil forfeiture laws to take money and property from people who haven’t been charged with a crime—and police even allegedly threatened to take their children away if they didn’t comply. In the Texas town of Tenaha, police pulled over drivers and used the roadside seizures to fund an assortment of unrelated items:
“More revelatory was a nine-page spreadsheet listing items funded by Tenaha’s roadside seizures. Among them were Halloween costumes, Doo Dah Parade decorations, ‘Have a Nice Day’ banners, credit-card late fees, poultry-festival supplies, a popcorn machine, and a thousand-dollar donation to a Baptist congregation that was said to be important to Lynda Russell’s reëlection. Barry Washington, as deputy city marshal, received a ten-thousand-dollar personal bonus from the fund. (His base salary was about thirty thousand dollars; Garrigan later confirmed reports that Washington had received a total of forty thousand dollars in bonuses.)”
The Golden Bough
The story of a beautiful rare tree—and the man who took a chainsaw to it. This 2002 New Yorker story by John Vaillant was later expanded into a book, The Golden Spruce:
“There was only one giant golden spruce in the world, and, until a man named Grant Hadwin took a chainsaw to it, in 1997, it had stood for more than three hundred years in a steadily shrinking patch of old-growth forest in Port Clements, on the banks of the Yakoun River, in the Queen Charlotte Islands. The Queen Charlottes, a blade-shaped archipelago that lies sixty miles off the northern coast of British Columbia and thirty miles south of the Alaskan coast, are one of a decreasing number of places in the Pacific Northwest where large stands of virgin coastal forest can still be found. Ecotourism is a growth industry here, and the golden spruce was a popular stop on visitors’ itineraries. The tree was also sacred to the Haida Indians, two thousand of whom still live on the islands.”
Desert Bus: The Worst Video Game Ever Created
In the early 1990s, magician duo Penn & Teller decided to create “Desert Bus,” a satirical video game for the Sega CD game console that required players to spend hours driving a bus through Arizona and Nevada:
“Penn, Teller, and the game’s publisher, Absolute Entertainment, planned a lavish prize for any player that scored a hundred points, a feat that would require eight hundred continuous hours of play: a real-life trip from Tucson to Las Vegas on a desert bus carrying showgirls and a live band.
“‘But by the time the game was finished, the format was dead,’ said Teller. ‘We were unable to find anybody interested in acquiring the game.’ Imagineering went out of business, and Penn & Teller’s Smoke and Mirrors was never released. The only record of the game’s existence was a handful of review copies that had been sent out to journalists in the weeks before the publisher went bust, in 1995.”
The Lyme Wars
Infection rates for Lyme disease are growing, and there’s still debate on how exactly to treat it:
“Nearly everything else about Lyme disease—the symptoms, the diagnosis, the prevalence, the behavior of the borrelia spirochete after it infects the body, and the correct approach to treatment—is contested bitterly and publicly. Even the definition of Lyme disease, and the terminology used to describe it, has fuelled years of acrimonious debate. The conventional medical assessment is straightforward: in most cases, the tick bite causes a skin rash, called erythema migrans, which is easily identified by its bull’s-eye. If left untreated, the bacteria can spread to muscles, joints, the heart, and even the brain. Public-health officials say that a few weeks of antibiotic treatment will almost always wipe out the infection, and that relapses are rare. In this view, put forth in guidelines issued by the Infectious Diseases Society of America, Lyme is normally easy to treat and easy to cure.”
The Prism
Our expectations with regard to privacy and secrecy. In 1844, the British government was accused of opening people’s mail. Lepore compares the case to the NSA’s alleged digging into our digital lives:
“The particular technology matters little; the axiom holds. It’s only a feature, though, of a centuries-long historical transformation: the secularization of mystery. A mystery, in Christian theology, is what God knows and man cannot, and must instead believe. Immortality, in this sense, is a mystery. So is the beginning of life, which is a good illustration of how much that was once mysterious became secret and then became private. Anciently invoked as one of God’s mysteries, the beginning of life was studied, by anatomists, as the ‘secret of generation.’ Finally, citizens, using the language of a constitutional ‘right to privacy,’ defended it against intrusion. Theologically, the beginning of life, the ensoulment of new flesh, remains a mystery. Empirically, uncovering the secret of generation required tools—microscopes, lenses, cameras—that made the creation of life both visible and knowable. Only after it was no longer a mystery, and no longer a secret, only after it was no longer invisible, did it become private. By then, it was too late: contraception was already in the hands of the state.”
Brotherly Love
[Fiction] Two brothers begin to drift apart in India during the late ’60s after one decides to study in the U.S. and the other becomes a Naxalite:
“Richard asked Subhash about India, about its caste system, its poverty. Who was to blame?
“I don’t know. These days everyone just blames everyone else.
“But is there a solution? Where does the government stand?
“Subhash didn’t know how to describe India’s fractious politics, its complicated society, to an American. He said it was an ancient place that was also young, still struggling to know itself. You should be talking to my brother, he said.”
In the Crosshairs
The story of Chris Kyle, a decorated sniper who wrote a best-selling memoir about his life as a SEAL. Kyle’s attempt to help a troubled veteran ended in tragedy:
“After Routh arrived at the Dallas V.A., Jodi and Jen visited him in the evenings. A week later, he did not seem much better. He was taking several medications, and Jodi felt that he could hardly carry on a conversation. She urged the doctors to keep him hospitalized, at least until he was stable.
“Ignoring Jodi’s request, the V.A. discharged Routh the next day; according to Jodi, the doctors shared this news over the phone, saying that Routh was an adult and wanted to leave. When she drove to the V.A. to pick up her son, he was already out, sitting in the lobby. She brought him home and told him about Chris Kyle, whom she had just met. ‘I said, ‘This guy has a big reputation. He’s a really good man and he really wants to help you.’ And then he’s like, “Mom, that is so awesome,” ‘ Jodi recalled. ‘Eddie was happy. He could feel that somebody wanted to help him, somebody that understood better than me.'”