The Death Dealer

Self-help guru James Arthur Ray became famous after Oprah featured him on her show. He later led three people to their deaths in a sweat lodge while trying to help them reach “a higher level of consciousness.” After less than two years of jail time, he’s back:

One longtime Ray follower received severe burns after falling into the rocks used to heat the lodge. Another began screaming repeatedly, “I don’t want to die! I don’t want to die!” and calling out the names of his two children. Ray seated by the exit closest to the only source of oxygen, remained calm. One witness heard him mutter, “Buddy, you need to pull it together,” before jubilantly saying “It’s a good day to die!” — apparently referencing his claim that followers would be “reborn” during the event. One participant testified that even as she passed out, her thoughts echoed James Arthur Ray: “It’s a good day to die.”

Source: The Verge
Published: Dec 4, 2013
Length: 25 minutes (6,307 words)

Everpix Was Great. This Is How It Died.

When the math and business model don’t quite work out for a tech startup, even if the product is beloved:

While its talented team obsessed over the look and features of its product, user growth failed to keep pace. Starting in June, Latour tried to raise $5 million to give Everpix more time to become profitable. When those efforts faltered, he began pursuing an acquisition. Everpix had tentatively agreed last month to be acquired by Path, according to a source close to the social network. But Path’s executive team killed the deal at the last minute, leaving Everpix adrift.

Source: The Verge
Published: Nov 5, 2013
Length: 11 minutes (2,861 words)

Beyond Recognition: The Incredible Story of a Face Transplant

A disfigured woman is given a face transplant, which currently remains an experimental procedure:

“In the US, there are five institutions — Brigham and Women’s Hospital, the Cleveland Clinic, UCLA, the University of Maryland, and Johns Hopkins University — that are now either performing face transplants or actively recruiting their first patient. And for the surgeons leading these charges, the process has long been an all-consuming one. ‘If you only knew how much work goes into every single one of these,’ says Dr. Kodi Azari, chief of reconstructive transplantation at UCLA. ‘You can’t even imagine.'”

Source: The Verge
Published: Jun 4, 2013
Length: 16 minutes (4,035 words)

Greed is Groupon: Can Anyone Save the Company from Itself?

Groupon’s quick rise has been overshadowed poor management and shady accounting. Can the company repair its reputation?

“Everyone The Verge spoke with who has worked directly with Mason says he’s not the clown that became his persona in the media. ‘He was an incredibly focused and hard-working guy,’ says Sennett. But in crafting his image as a goofball, Mason painted himself into a corner. ‘I don’t think Eric used Andrew, or that Andrew didn’t go in with his eyes wide open. But yes, the cynical interpretation is that Eric saw how useful Andrew could be, first as the charming, boyish entrepreneur, then as the fall guy for Groupon’s public plunge.'”

Author: Ben Popper
Source: The Verge
Published: Mar 13, 2013
Length: 14 minutes (3,561 words)

Memory to Myth: Tracing Aaron Swartz Through the 21st Century

Remembering Aaron Swartz, the programmer and Internet activist who took his own life earlier this year, and what he was fighting for:

“Aaron didn’t play that game. After he sold Reddit, he couldn’t be bought. In fact, he was spending his own money, and his valuable time, on campaigns for the public good, and helping others to do the same. He was a realist about the government, media companies, and Silicon Valley. His experience with all of them made him grow up too soon. But he also never stopped being that not-even-teenager who believed in the utopian possibilities latent in the World Wide Web. He never stopped believing in the power of small groups of people who were willing to devote their attention to small problems and nagging details in order to create the greatest good for the greatest number. Aaron played in that space without resolving its tensions.

“It’s that collapsing telescope between the many and the few, the rational and the altruistic, the minute and the world-historical, the irreducibility of life as it is lived and the universality of the ideals that life should serve.”

Source: The Verge
Published: Jan 22, 2013
Length: 26 minutes (6,506 words)

The Dream and the Myth of the Paperless City

The city of Chicago is looking to go paperless, but digitizing won’t be easy:

“‘You can’t move forward with technology in government if you’re redundantly moving around multiple copies of pieces of paper,’ he says. ‘To me, it’s shocking that we’re still talking about forms.’

“But Hillman also acknowledges that there are major roadblocks. Cost is less an issue, he surmises, than overcoming the governmental status quo.

“To make a paperless government work, ‘you would need a paradigm shift,’ Hillman says. ‘You have entire departments — the fire department, the Department of Revenue — that run with their paper. This is how they do things. So when you shift to a paperless government, you have major staffing changes. You have people saying, ‘Well this is not how we do this.’ So that’s going to be the biggest hangup.’

“But it may be more than a mere hangup.”

Source: The Verge
Published: Dec 6, 2012
Length: 16 minutes (4,041 words)

Cyborg America: Inside the Strange New World of Basement Body Hackers

A writer meets with “grinders”—people who are obsessed with human enhancement through the manipulation of their body with technology—and then decides to implant a magnet in his finger:

“I chatted with Warwick from his office at The University of Reading, stacked floor to ceiling with books and papers. He has light brown hair that falls over his forehead and an easy laugh. With his long sleeve shirt on, you would never know that his arm is full of complex machinery. The unit allows Warwick to manipulate a robot hand, a mirror of his own fingers and flesh. What’s more, the impulse could flow both ways. Warwick’s wife, Irena, had a simpler cybernetic implant done on herself. When someone grasped her hand, Prof. Warwick was able to experience the same sensation in his hand, from across the Atlantic. It was, Warwick writes, a sort of cybernetic telepathy, or empathy, in which his nerves were made to feel what she felt, via bits of data travelling over the internet.”

Author: Ben Popper
Source: The Verge
Published: Aug 8, 2012
Length: 20 minutes (5,016 words)