An Abduction

[Fiction] A young girl encounters an older group of students:

“The morning of the abduction, Mrs. Allsop—dishevelled in a limp linen shirtdress—was wielding her secateurs up a ladder, pruning the climbing roses. She was immensely capable; tall and big-boned with a pink, pleasant face and dry yellow hair chopped sensibly short. Jane admired her mother greatly, especially when she transformed herself at night, for a concert in London or a Rotary Club dinner, with clip-on pearl earrings and lipstick and scent, a frilled taupe satin stole. Jane coveted this stole and tried it on when her mother was at the shops, making sultry faces at herself in the mirror—although sultry was the last thing her mother was, and everyone told Jane that she looked just like her. She certainly seemed to have her mother’s figure, with not much bust, no waist to speak of, and a broad flat behind.

“‘Why don’t you call up some of your old friends?’ Mrs. Allsop suggested from the ladder top. ‘Invite them round to play Ping-Pong.'”

Source: The New Yorker
Published: Jul 7, 2012
Length: 31 minutes (7,823 words)

Seeing Nora Everywhere

The Girls creator remembers her friendship with Nora Ephron:

“Her advice was unparalleled. At one of our lunches this past January, I was sheepishly describing a male companion’s lack of support for my professional endeavors. She nodded in a very ‘don’t be stupid’ way, as if I already knew what I had to do: ‘You can’t possibly meet someone right now. When I met Nick, I was already totally notorious’—note: Nora was the only person who could make that word sound neither braggy nor sinister—’and he understood exactly what he was getting into. You can’t meet someone until you’ve become what you’re becoming.’ Panicked, I asked, ‘How long will that take?’

“Nora considered a moment. ‘Give it six months.'”

Source: The New Yorker
Published: Jun 28, 2012
Length: 7 minutes (1,914 words)

Wasps

[Fiction] A family prepares for their father’s business trip:

“Their Da was going away again, that’s all it was. Both boys had said nothing about it, but were awake at five and thumping downstairs and straight out to the garden, Jimbo still wearing pajamas and Shawn in yesterday’s clothes, probably no underpants—some objection he had at the moment to them, as if they were practically nappies and grownups never wore them. The first fight began as soon as they left the house: she has a memory of dozing through whole cycles of shouts and squealing and that odd, flat roar Shawn has started to produce whenever he truly loses himself and just rages. No tantrums for Shawn, not anymore. He is seven now. He has the real thing. He has rage.”

Source: The New Yorker
Published: Jul 30, 2007
Length: 12 minutes (3,055 words)

Bully Pulpit

How rhetoric from an evangelist talk-show host led to the resignation Mitt Romney’s openly gay national-security spokesman:

“Fischer’s attack against Grenell started on Friday, April 20th, with a post on Twitter. ‘Romney picks out & loud gay as a spokesman,’ he tweeted, soon after learning of the hire. ‘If personnel is policy, his message to the pro-family community: drop dead.’ The next Monday, Fischer opened his show—which is broadcast, he likes to say, on ‘the most feared radio network in America!’—by telling his listeners that he had ‘kicked up a dust storm in the Twitterverse.'”

Author: Jane Mayer
Source: The New Yorker
Published: Jun 14, 2012
Length: 32 minutes (8,052 words)

Naima

[Fiction, 2012 Pen/O. Henry Winner] A son recalls an exiled life with his father, mother, and a maid:

“At the Magda Marina, he spent his time sunbathing and reading fat books: one on the Suez Crisis, one a biography of our late king, with his portrait on the cover. Whenever Father acquired a new book on our country—the country my parents had fled, the country I had never seen, yet continued to think of as my own—he would immediately finger the index pages.

“‘Baba, who are you looking for?’ I once asked.

“He shook his head and said, ‘No one.’

“But later I, too, searched the indexes. It felt like pure imitation. It was not until I encountered my father’s name—Kamal Pasha el-Alfi—that I realized what I was looking for.”

Source: The New Yorker
Published: Jan 4, 2011
Length: 30 minutes (7,646 words)

The Yankee Comandante

A story of love and revolution in Cuba. William Morgan was a free-spirited American drawn to Cuba to help Castro fight, only to grow disenchanted with his embrace of communism:

“One day in the spring of 1958, while Morgan was visiting a guerrilla camp for a meeting of the Second Front’s chiefs of staff, he encountered a rebel he had never seen before: small and slender, with a face shielded by a cap. Only up close was it evident that the rebel was a woman. She was in her early twenties, with dark eyes and tawny skin, and, to conceal her identity, she had cut her curly light-brown hair short and dyed it black. Though she had a delicate beauty, she locked and loaded a gun with the ease of a bank robber. Morgan later said of a pistol that she carried, “She knows how to use it.”

“Her name was Olga Rodríguez.”

Source: The New Yorker
Published: May 21, 2012
Length: 88 minutes (22,146 words)

Money Unlimited

How the Supreme Court dismantled campaign-finance reform—and how government missteps in the Citizens United case inadvertently aided in its undoing:

“Alito wanted to push Stewart down a slippery slope. Since McCain-Feingold forbade the broadcast of ‘electronic communications’ shortly before elections, this was a case about movies and television commercials. What else might the law regulate? ‘Do you think the Constitution required Congress to draw the line where it did, limiting this to broadcast and cable and so forth?’ Alito said. Could the law limit a corporation from ‘providing the same thing in a book? Would the Constitution permit the restriction of all those as well?’

“Yes, Stewart said: ‘Those could have been applied to additional media as well.’

“The Justices leaned forward.”

Source: The New Yorker
Published: May 14, 2012
Length: 39 minutes (9,780 words)

The Dinner Party

[Fiction] A couple prepares for another predictable evening with old friends:

“Later, he came out of the bathroom just as the toilet was completing its roar. She was no longer in the kitchen. He took another cheese and cracker. He walked past the dressed table to the living room. She sat on the sofa reading the same magazine he had been reading. He stood in the middle of the room and raised his hands. ‘Where are they?’

“‘If there’s one thing that’s predictable,’ she said.

“‘But it’s almost forty-five minutes.’

“‘They’ll be eating some very cold appetizers.'”

Source: The New Yorker
Published: Aug 11, 2008
Length: 20 minutes (5,210 words)

The Climate Fixers

Meet the researchers who are developing new methods for countering global warming using geoengineering. Some solutions come with great risks:

“While such tactics could clearly fail, perhaps the greater concern is what might happen if they succeeded in ways nobody had envisioned. Injecting sulfur dioxide, or particles that perform a similar function, would rapidly lower the temperature of the earth, at relatively little expense—most estimates put the cost at less than ten billion dollars a year. But it would do nothing to halt ocean acidification, which threatens to destroy coral reefs and wipe out an enormous number of aquatic species. The risks of reducing the amount of sunlight that reaches the atmosphere on that scale would be as obvious—and immediate—as the benefits. If such a program were suddenly to fall apart, the earth would be subjected to extremely rapid warming, with nothing to stop it. And while such an effort would cool the globe, it might do so in ways that disrupt the behavior of the Asian and African monsoons, which provide the water that billions of people need to drink and to grow their food.”

Source: The New Yorker
Published: May 7, 2012
Length: 25 minutes (6,341 words)

Machine Politics

How George Hotz, a teenager from New Jersey, kicked off a hacker war that pitted Sony against Anonymous and the group LulzSec:

“That year, someone mailed Hotz a PlayStation 3 video-game system, challenging him to be the first in the world to crack it. Hotz posted his announcement online and once again set about finding the part of the system that he could manipulate into doing what he wanted. Hotz focussed on the ‘hypervisor,’ powerful software that controls what programs run on the machine.

“To reach the hypervisor, he had to get past two chips called the Cell and the Cell Memory. He knew how he was going to scramble them: by connecting a wire to the memory and shooting it with pulses of voltage, just as he had when he hacked his iPhone.”

Source: The New Yorker
Published: Apr 30, 2012
Length: 23 minutes (5,890 words)