A Pickpocket’s Tale

On Apollo Robbins, a pickpocket legend, who wows even the world’s greatest magicians:

“‘The coin’s not in my hand—it couldn’t be. You know why? It’s on your left shoulder.’

“Josh grew increasingly befuddled, as Robbins continued to make the coin vanish and reappear—on his shoulder, in his pocket, under his watchband. In the middle of this, Robbins started stealing Josh’s stuff. Josh’s watch seemed to melt off his wrist, and Robbins held it up behind his back for everyone to see. Then he took Josh’s wallet, his sunglasses, and his phone. Robbins dances around his victims, gently guiding them into place, floating in and out of their personal space. By the time they comprehend what has happened, Robbins is waiting with a look that says, ‘I understand what you must be feeling.’ Robbins’s simplest improvisations have the dreamlike quality of a casual encounter gone subtly awry. He struck up a conversation with a young man, who told him, ‘We’re going to Penn and Teller after this.’

“‘Oh, then you’ll probably want these,’ Robbins said, handing over a pair of tickets that had recently been in the young man’s wallet.”

Author: Adam Green
Source: The New Yorker
Published: Dec 31, 2012
Length: 33 minutes (8,436 words)

Utopian for Beginners

A former DMV employee from Sacramento invents a new language—and a mysterious group of Ukrainians take an interest in what he’s created:

“Soon after the publication of the Russian article, Quijada began to receive a steady stream of letters from e-mail addresses ending in .ru, peppering him with arcane questions and requesting changes to the language to make its words easier to pronounce. Alexey Samons, a Russian software engineer based in Vladivostok, took on the monumental task of translating the Ithkuil Web site into Russian, and before long three Russian Web forums had sprung up to debate the merits and uses of Ithkuil.

“At first, Quijada was bewildered by the interest emanating from Russia. ‘I was a third humbled, a third flattered, and a third intrigued,’ he told me. ‘Beyond that, I just wanted to know: who are these people?'”

Source: The New Yorker
Published: Dec 17, 2012
Length: 36 minutes (9,063 words)

Operation Delirium

Colonel James S. Ketchum oversaw years of research into new methods of chemical warfare—which included testing on U.S. soldiers:

“Today, Ketchum is eighty-one years old, and the facility where he worked, Edgewood Arsenal, is a crumbling assemblage of buildings attached to a military proving ground on the Chesapeake Bay. The arsenal’s records are boxed and dusting over in the National Archives. Military doctors who helped conduct the experiments have long since moved on, or passed away, and the soldiers who served as their test subjects—in all, nearly five thousand of them—are scattered throughout the country, if they are still alive. Within the Army, and in the world of medical research, the secret clinical trials are a faint memory. But for some of the surviving test subjects, and for the doctors who tested them, what happened at Edgewood remains deeply unresolved. Were the human experiments there a Dachau-like horror, or were they sound and necessary science? As veterans of the tests have come forward, their unanswered questions have slowly gathered into a kind of historical undertow, and Ketchum, more than anyone else, has been caught in its pull. In 2006, he self-published a memoir, ‘Chemical Warfare: Secrets Almost Forgotten,’ which defended the research. Next year, a class-action lawsuit brought against the federal government by former test subjects will go to trial, and Ketchum is expected to be the star witness.

“The lawsuit’s argument is in line with broader criticisms of Edgewood: that, whether out of military urgency or scientific dabbling, the Army recklessly endangered the lives of its soldiers—naïve men, mostly, who were deceived or pressured into submitting to the risky experiments. The drugs under review ranged from tear gas and LSD to highly lethal nerve agents, like VX, a substance developed at Edgewood and, later, sought by Saddam Hussein. Ketchum’s specialty was a family of molecules that block a key neurotransmitter, causing delirium. The drugs were known mainly by Army codes, with their true formulas classified. The soldiers were never told what they were given, or what the specific effects might be, and the Army made no effort to track how they did afterward. Edgewood’s most extreme critics raise the spectre of mass injury—a hidden American tragedy.”

Source: The New Yorker
Published: Dec 11, 2012
Length: 57 minutes (14,350 words)

Literally

[Fiction] Two young boys temporarily go missing:

“‘You want to play hooky with Isaac?’ Richard asked Danny. Isaac smiled shyly from the doorway, his silver front tooth catching the light. Whenever Richard spotted that tooth, he had the same thought: if his wife had still been alive when the tooth was knocked out, she’d have seen to an ivory replacement.

“‘This morning, but not this afternoon,’ Danny said. ‘Can you go this afternoon?’ he asked Isaac. ‘It’s pizza-party day, remember?'”

Source: The New Yorker
Published: Dec 3, 2012
Length: 20 minutes (5,030 words)

Foster

[Fiction] A young Irish girl goes to live with her aunt and uncle:

“Early on a Sunday, after first Mass in Clonegal, my father, instead of taking me home, drives deep into Wexford toward the coast, where my mother’s people came from. It is a hot August day, bright, with patches of shade and greenish sudden light along the road. We pass through the village of Shillelagh, where my father lost our red shorthorn in a game of forty-five, and on past the mart in Carnew, where the man who won her sold her not long afterward. My father throws his hat on the passenger seat, winds down the window, and smokes. I shake the plaits out of my hair and lie flat on the back seat, looking up through the rear window. I wonder what it will be like, this place belonging to the Kinsellas. I see a tall woman standing over me, making me drink milk still hot from the cow. I see another, less likely version of her, in an apron, pouring pancake batter into a frying pan, asking would I like another, the way my mother sometimes does when she is in good humor. The man will be her size. He will take me to town on the tractor and buy me red lemonade and crisps. Or he’ll make me clean out sheds and pick stones and pull ragweed and docks out of the fields. I wonder if they live in an old farmhouse or a new bungalow, whether they will have an outhouse or an indoor bathroom, with a toilet and running water.”

Source: The New Yorker
Published: Feb 15, 2010
Length: 41 minutes (10,462 words)

Deadhead

A history of the Grateful Dead, as told through its concert recordings:

“After Garcia died, Lesh was briefly involved in vetting the live releases from the vault. He also spent a great deal of time listening to the output of the final years, hoping to find material worth releasing, but came across little that made the grade. ‘It’s tremendously time-consuming, and often really boring, to listen back to what you did years ago,’ he said. ‘What bores me the most is listening to show after show, and it’s just average. You’re just going through the motions. Everything seemed better at the time than it turns out to be on tape.’ When he listens to music today, it tends to be Bach. ‘I also listen to a lot of country music, you know, like the new country music. Brad Paisley.’

“When I asked him about last year’s giant Europe ’72 release, he said, ‘I have to admit, I have not listened to it.’ It should surprise no one that Lesh can recall little or nothing of many Heads’ cherished nights. ‘Sometimes I remember what they looked like, what they felt like,’ he said. I ran a few dates by Lesh, mentioning the venue, the context, the set list, the high points—such as a certain transition in Scar->Fire. ‘Scar-Fire?’ he repeated, unfamiliar with the shorthand. I may as well have been a Ukrainian Trekkie accosting Leonard Nimoy on the street. ‘The Fox in Atlanta? I don’t remember,’ Lesh said, with a look that seemed to combine apology and condescension. The eighties dates in particular provoked a curdled look. ‘I may have consciously blocked out some of this stuff,’ he said. ‘It was very distressing to see Jerry fall apart. It seemed like the negation of everything we’d ever worked for. It wasn’t a tribe or a cult or a boys’ club, or anything like that. It was a living organism of several people. It was Homo gestalt. Did you ever read Theodore Sturgeon? “More Than Human.” Check it out. That’s the conceptual matrix.’

Source: The New Yorker
Published: Nov 19, 2012
Length: 49 minutes (12,404 words)

Love on the March

A brief history of the LGBT movement:

“I am forty-four years old, and I have lived through a startling transformation in the status of gay men and women in the United States. Around the time I was born, homosexual acts were illegal in every state but Illinois. Lesbians and gays were barred from serving in the federal government. There were no openly gay politicians. A few closeted homosexuals occupied positions of power, but they tended to make things more miserable for their kind. Even in the liberal press, homosexuality drew scorn: in The New York Review of Books, Philip Roth denounced the “ghastly pansy rhetoric” of Edward Albee, and a Time cover story dismissed the gay world as a ‘pathetic little second-rate substitute for reality, a pitiable flight from life.’ David Reuben’s 1969 best-seller, ‘Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex (But Were Afraid to Ask)’—a book I remember perusing shakily at the library—advised that ‘if a homosexual who wants to renounce homosexuality finds a psychiatrist who knows how to cure homosexuality, he has every chance of becoming a happy, well-adjusted heterosexual.'”

Author: Alex Ross
Source: The New Yorker
Published: Nov 5, 2012
Length: 30 minutes (7,526 words)

The Dead Are Real

Inside the imagination of Hilary Mantel, now two-time Booker Prize-winning author of historical fiction including Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies:

“When she wakes in the morning, she likes to start writing right away, before she speaks, because whatever remnants sleep has left are the gift her brain has given her for the day. Her dream life is important to the balance of her mind: it’s the place where she experiences disorder. Her dreams are archetypal, mythological, enormous, full of pageantry—there are knights and monsters. She has been to the crusades in her dreams more than once.

“When she’s starting a new book, she needs to feel her way inside the characters, to know what it’s like to be them. There is a trick she uses sometimes, which another writer taught her. Sit quietly and withdraw your attention from the room you’re in until you’re focussed inside your mind. Imagine a chair and invite your character to come and sit in it; once he is comfortable, you may ask him questions. She tried this for the first time when she was writing The Giant, O’Brien: the giant came in, but, before sitting down in the chair, he bent down and tested it, to see if it would take his weight. On that occasion, she never got any further, because she was so excited that she punched the air and shouted ‘Yes!’ But from then on she could imagine herself in the giant’s body.”

Source: The New Yorker
Published: Oct 15, 2012
Length: 40 minutes (10,098 words)

Boss Rail

A high-speed train crash in China unravels years of corruption in the building of the world’s most expensive public-works project:

“Prime Minister Wen Jiabao had no choice but to visit the crash site and vow to investigate. ‘If corruption was found behind this, we must handle it according to law, and we will not be lenient,’ he said. ‘Only in this way can we be fair to those who have died.’ People didn’t forget Wen’s pledge as the first deadline for the investigation came and went, and they continued to demand a fuller accounting. At last, in December, authorities released an unprecedented, detailed report. It acknowledged ‘serious design flaws,’ a ‘neglect of safety management,’ and problems in bidding and testing. It also blamed fifty-four people in government and industry, beginning with Great Leap Liu. The Minister’s name became a byword for ‘a broken system,’ as the muckraking magazine Caixin called the Railway Ministry, a testament to the political reality that, as Caixin put it, ‘since absolute power corrupts absolutely, the key to curbing graft is limiting power.’ When I spoke to an engineer who worked on the railway’s construction, he told me, ‘I can’t pinpoint which step was neglected or what didn’t get enough time, because the whole process was compressed, from beginning to end.’ He added, ‘There is an expression in Chinese: when you take too great a leap, you can tear your balls.'”

Author: Evan Osnos
Source: The New Yorker
Published: Oct 15, 2012
Length: 32 minutes (8,124 words)

The Semplica-Girl Diaries

[Fiction] A father uses his lottery winnings for an extravagant birthday party for his teenage daughter:

“September 3rd: Having just turned forty, have resolved to embark on grand project of writing every day in this new black book just got at OfficeMax. Exciting to think how in one year, at rate of one page/day, will have written three hundred and sixty-five pages, and what a picture of life and times then available for kids & grandkids, even greatgrandkids, whoever, all are welcome (!) to see how life really was/is now. Because what do we know of other times really? How clothes smelled and carriages sounded? Will future people know, for example, about sound of airplanes going over at night, since airplanes by that time passé? Will future people know sometimes cats fought in night? Because by that time some chemical invented to make cats not fight? Last night dreamed of two demons having sex and found it was only two cats fighting outside window. Will future people be aware of concept of ‘demons’? Will they find our belief in ‘demons’ quaint? Will ‘windows’ even exist? Interesting to future generations that even sophisticated college grad like me sometimes woke in cold sweat, thinking of demons, believing one possibly under bed? Anyway, what the heck, am not planning on writing encyclopedia, if any future person is reading this, if you want to know what a ‘demon’ was, go look it up, in something called an encyclopedia, if you even still have those!

“Am getting off track, due to tired, due to those fighting cats.”

Source: The New Yorker
Published: Oct 8, 2012
Length: 35 minutes (8,979 words)