The Information: How the Internet Gets Inside Us

Call them the Never-Betters, the Better-Nevers, and the Ever-Wasers. The Never-Betters believe that we’re on the brink of a new utopia, where information will be free and democratic, news will be made from the bottom up, love will reign, and cookies will bake themselves. The Better-Nevers think that we would have been better off if the whole thing had never happened … The Ever-Wasers insist that at any moment in modernity something like this is going on, and that a new way of organizing data and connecting users is always thrilling to some and chilling to others—that something like this is going on is exactly what makes it a modern moment.

Source: The New Yorker
Published: Feb 7, 2011
Length: 18 minutes (4,734 words)

The Apostate: Paul Haggis vs. the Church of Scientology

The writer-director forwarded his resignation to more than twenty Scientologist friends, including Anne Archer, John Travolta, and Sky Dayton, the founder of EarthLink. “I felt if I sent it to my friends they’d be as horrified as I was, and they’d ask questions as well,” he says. “That turned out to be largely not the case. They were horrified that I’d send a letter like that.”

Source: The New Yorker
Published: Feb 7, 2011
Length: 99 minutes (24,922 words)

The Great Afghan Bank Heist

The troubles at Kabul Bank stand as a parable for the sometimes malign effect that the influx of billions of foreign dollars has had on this impoverished country since 2001. While the Western money spent has done a great deal to create a modern economy, much of it has been captured by a tiny minority of well-connected Afghan businessmen and politicians, and much of it illegitimately. The loss of seven hundred million dollars or more at Kabul Bank represents a significant percentage of Afghanistan’s gross domestic product, which stands at only about twelve billion dollars.

Source: The New Yorker
Published: Jan 31, 2011
Length: 25 minutes (6,370 words)

Show the Monster: Guillermo del Toro’s Quest To Get Amazing Creatures Onscreen

The size of the collection was disconcerting; it was as if the 40-Year-Old Virgin had been handed a three-million-dollar decorating budget. Del Toro owned more than five thousand comic books and several puppets of Nosferatu. On a shelf, a posed plastic figurine of Leatherface, from “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre,” battled Edward Scissorhands. A life-size statue of Boris Karloff, in the guise of Frankenstein’s Creature, lurked in a corner of the dining room. At one point, del Toro issued the apt warning, “This is the room where I keep most of my aliens.”

Source: The New Yorker
Published: Jan 31, 2011
Length: 48 minutes (12,168 words)

From 2004: In Mubarak’s Egypt, Democracy Is an Idea Whose Time Has Not Yet Come

“Mubarak fears that if he widens the margins of democracy things will happen,” Essam al-Eryam, one of the Muslim Brotherhood’s most prominent middle-aged leaders, told me at the Brotherhood’s headquarters. “There will be democracy here, sooner or later. It requires patience, and we are more patient because we are, as an organization, seventy-six years old. You have already seen some countries—Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, Sudan, Iran—describe themselves as Islamic regimes. There’s a diversity of models, even among the Sunni and the Shia. Egypt can present a model that is more just and tolerant.”

Source: The New Yorker
Published: Jul 12, 2004
Length: 31 minutes (7,786 words)

The Hot Spotters

Can we lower medical costs by giving the neediest patients better care? “The program, Fernandopulle told me, is still discovering new tricks. His team just recently figured out, for instance, that one reason some patients call 911 for problems the clinic would handle better is that they don’t have the clinic’s twenty-four-hour call number at hand when they need it. The health coaches told the patients to program it into their cell-phone speed dial, but many didn’t know how to do that. So the health coaches began doing it for them, and the number of 911 calls fell. High-cost habits are sticky; staff members are still learning the subtleties of unsticking them.”

Source: The New Yorker
Published: Jan 24, 2011
Length: 36 minutes (9,005 words)

Does Football Have a Future? The NFL and the Concussion Crisis

“In the past, it was a style of ball that was three yards and a cloud of dust, so you didn’t see too many of these big hits, because there wasn’t so much space between players,” the Steelers’ Troy Polamalu said. “I mean, with the passing game now, you get four-wide-receiver sets, sometimes five-wide-receiver sets. You get guys coming across the middle, you get zone coverages. You know, there’s more space between these big hits, so there’s more opportunity for these big hits.”

Source: The New Yorker
Published: Jan 24, 2011
Length: 38 minutes (9,502 words)

The Search Party

On Google, its co-founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, and CEO Eric Schmidt. “I learned that Google had an interesting management structure,” Philippe Dauman, the C.E.O. of Viacom, says, describing the negotiations that preceded the YouTube lawsuit. “Every time we thought we came down to a certain point, the Google people changed their minds. And they changed the people in the negotiations.” He explains, “I talked to their C.E.O., and then when Eric went down a certain path he had to have a discussion back in Mountain View with his two associates. Often, there would be a total change in direction.”

Source: The New Yorker
Published: Jan 14, 2008
Length: 24 minutes (6,123 words)

Don’t Look Back

Many politicians have committed indiscretions in earlier years: maybe they had an affair or hired an illegal immigrant as a nanny. Republican Congressman Darrell Issa, it turned out, had, among other things, been indicted for stealing a car, arrested for carrying a concealed weapon, and accused by former associates of burning down a building.

Author: Ryan Lizza
Source: The New Yorker
Published: Jan 17, 2011
Length: 31 minutes (7,968 words)

The Commandments: The Constitution and Its Worshippers

Crying constitution is a minor American art form. “This is my copy of the Constitution,” John Boehner, the Speaker of the House, said at a Tea Party rally in Ohio last year, holding up a pocket-size pamphlet. “And I’m going to stand here with the Founding Fathers, who wrote in the preamble, ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights including life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.’ ” Not to nitpick, but this is not the preamble to the Constitution. It is the second sentence of the Declaration of Independence.

Source: The New Yorker
Published: Jan 10, 2011
Length: 23 minutes (5,921 words)