How David Beats Goliath
When underdogs break the rules.
The Humbug
Edgar Allan Poe and the economy of horror.
Brain Gain
The underground world of “neuroenhancing” drugs.
Orchid Fever
At an orchid show in New York last year, I heard the same story over and over—how one orchid in the kitchen led to a dozen, and then to a back-yard greenhouse, and then, in some cases, to multiple greenhouses and collecting trips to Asia and Africa and an ever-expanding budget to service this desire. I walked around the show with a collector from Guatemala. He said, “The bug hits you. You can join A.A. to quit drinking, but once you get into orchids you can’t do anything to kick.”
The Contenders: Is Egypt’s Presidential Race Becoming a Real Contest?
Mubarak has suggested that he will never willingly step down. In 2006, he told Egypt’s Parliament that he would continue to serve “as long as there is in my chest a heart that beats and I draw breath.” … One part of the system that has sustained Mubarak in power is Egypt’s Emergency Law, which has been in effect since 1981, the year he became President. The law has been used to jail thousands of people without charges. Public gatherings of more than five people without prior official permission are illegal.
The Hunted: Did American Conservationists In Africa Go Too Far?
Then comes an arresting sequence, one seldom seen on national television: the killing of a human. Vieira introduces the scene: “We were allowed to accompany patrols in Zambia after we agreed not to identify those involved, should a shooting occur. On this mission, we would witness the ultimate price paid by a suspected poacher.” A game scout in a green uniform walks in what appears to be a recently abandoned campsite. A pouch on the ground contains shotgun shells, and the scout removes a few of them to show the camera.
One Angry Man
Keith Olbermann’s success, like Bill O’Reilly’s, is evidence of viewer cocooning—the inclination to seek out programming that reinforces one’s own firmly held political views. “People want to identify,” MSNBC’s Phil Griffin says. “They want the shortcut. ‘Wow, that guy’s smart. I get him.’ In this crazy world of so much information, you look for places where you identify, or you see where you fit into the spectrum, because you get all this information all day long.”
Jumpers: The Fatal Grandeur of the Golden Gate Bridge
Every two weeks, on average, someone jumps off the Golden Gate Bridge. It is the world’s leading suicide location. In the eighties, workers at a local lumberyard formed “the Golden Gate Leapers Association”—a sports pool in which bets were placed on which day of the week someone would jump. At least twelve hundred people have been seen jumping or have been found in the water since the bridge opened, in 1937, including Roy Raymond, the founder of Victoria’s Secret, in 1993, and Duane Garrett, a Democratic fund-raiser and a friend of Al Gore’s, in 1995.
The Oracle: The Many Lives of Arianna Huffington
Dish is her capital—the means by which she makes connections and maintains them. Because she defines the agenda for the Huffington Post, which defines the agenda for so many readers, passing a tidbit her way is, in a sense, an investment. Proprietary hints are the dividend. “She knows the best of everything, from the best person to do yoga with to the best person to do your facials,” Laurie David, the environmental activist, said recently. “If you need anything, you ask Arianna.”