Modern Warfare

Inside the breakup of Activision Blizzard and its star game developers, Vincent Zampella and Jason West, who created the multi-billion-dollar franchise “Call of Duty”:

“During an hour-long interview in the summer of 2011, [CEO Robert] Kotick, sporting a sweater vest over a white T-shirt, waxed nostalgic about his past and emphasized that he’d negotiated in good faith. But he refused to respond to West and Zampella’s most explosive allegation: that Activision began trying to fire them only months after the 2008 contract had been signed. Court filings reveal that in an e-mail exchange between two executives charged with overseeing West and Zampella in January 2009, one warned that the risks of firing the pair would be great. ‘Is everyone ready for the big, negative PR story this is going to turn into if we kick them out?’ he asked. ‘Freaking me out a little.'”

“The apparent effort to find a pretext to replace West and Zampella became known within Activision’s top ranks as ‘Project Icebreaker’—the code name seemingly straight out of a video-game villain’s playbook. It was undertaken in part by a former I.T. director, Thomas Fenady, who in a deposition claimed he was ordered by Activision’s former chief legal officer, George Rose, to ‘dig up dirt on Jason and Vince.'”

Source: Vanity Fair
Published: Jun 12, 2013
Length: 19 minutes (4,807 words)

The Body in Room 348

The dead body of 55-year-old Greg Fleniken is found in a hotel room, and with no clear motive, detectives are left trying to answer the all-important question: Why?

“There are not that many murders in Beaumont. Greg’s was one of 10 that year, which was about average. Most are not mysterious. Detective work was usually a matter of doing the obvious—interviewing the drunk boyfriend with gunpowder on his hands, or finding the neighborhood drug dealer who was owed money. A case like this was a once-in-a-career event. If you enjoy working a stubborn whodunit, which Apple does, then this one was an exciting challenge. But the problem with the hard cases is that they are indeed hard. Over the next weeks and months Apple chased down every angle he could imagine to explain the death of Greg Fleniken. But about six months into it, he was stuck.”

Source: Vanity Fair
Published: Apr 11, 2013
Length: 32 minutes (8,189 words)

The Hostage

War correspondent Richard Engel on his kidnapping in Syria last December:

“Abu Jaafar said, ‘Get the gasoline.’

“They drenched Abdelrazaq with liquid from a bottle.

“‘No, no!’ Abdelrazaq begged.

“‘Burn him,’ Abu Jaafar said.

“They splashed Abdelrazaq with more liquid.

“It was water.

“They wanted to break us and terrorize us and make us docile. They were having fun doing it. Abu Jaafar was laughing most of the time. In the coming days we would become familiar with his short, repetitive, girlish laugh: Heh, heh, heh, heh, heh.

Source: Vanity Fair
Published: Mar 20, 2013
Length: 25 minutes (6,323 words)

The Big Short War

A look at the billionaire hedge fund managers battling over the future of a global nutrition supplement company:

“In a recent interview on CNBC, the blunt-talking and cagey Icahn hinted there would be a concerted effort to take Ackman down a peg or two in the Herbalife battle, which ‘could be the mother of all the short ­squeezes,’ he said, referring to a technique that can be used by a group of traders who band together to try to clobber a short-seller.

“Chapman agrees. ‘This is like Wall Street’s version of the movie Kill Bill,’ he says. ‘Bill Ackman has been so arrogant and disrespectful to so many people, presumably on the theory that he would never be in a position where these subjects of his disrespect could actually act on their deserved hatred for him But now, with JCPenney [which is down 20 percent from Ackman’s 2010 investment] and Herbalife going against Ackman, his ‘stock’ has moved down, allowing once again, a decade later, for those holding their Kill Bill puts [i.e., options they have been waiting to cash in] to exercise them against him.'”

Source: Vanity Fair
Published: Mar 7, 2013
Length: 30 minutes (7,676 words)

Cinema Tarantino: The Making of Pulp Fiction

How Quentin Tarantino created the film that launched his career and redefined movies in the 1990s:

“Just seven years earlier, in 1986, Tarantino was a 23-year-old part-time actor and high-school dropout, broke, without an apartment of his own, showering rarely. With no agent, he sent out scripts that never got past low-level readers. ‘Too vile, too vulgar, too violent’ was the usual reaction, he later said. According to Quentin Tarantino, by Wensley Clarkson, his constant use of the f-word in his script True Romance caused one studio rep to write to Cathryn Jaymes, his early manager:

“Dear Fucking Cathryn,

“How dare you send me this fucking piece of shit. You must be out of your fucking mind. You want to know how I feel about it? Here’s your fucking piece of shit back. Fuck you.”

Author: Mark Seal
Source: Vanity Fair
Published: Feb 13, 2013
Length: 35 minutes (8,936 words)

Look Out—He’s Got a Phone!

Medical devices, cars, and home utilities can all be controlled using a smartphone—which means security flaws in our devices could have deadly consequences:

“I asked Jack if he thought anyone would actually use smartphones to try to fiddle with other people’s pacemakers, or change the dosage of their medications, or compromise their eyesight, or take control of their prosthetic limbs, or raise the volume of their hearing aids to a paralyzing shriek. Will this become a tempting new way to settle a score or hurry up an inheritance? He said, ‘Has there ever been a box connected to the Internet that people haven’t tried to break into?’ He had a point: a few years ago, anonymous vandals inserted flashing animated images into an Epilepsy Foundation online forum, triggering migraines and seizure-like reactions in some unfortunate people who came across them. (The vandals were never found.) Jack was reluctant to go into detail about what he thinks the future may hold. ‘I’m not comfortable trying to predict exact scenarios,’ he said. But then he added, calm as a State Department spokesman, ‘I can say that I wouldn’t want to discover a virus in my insulin pump.'”

Source: Vanity Fair
Published: Dec 19, 2012
Length: 15 minutes (3,764 words)

2 Good 2 Be 4Gotten: An Oral History of Freaks and Geeks

An oral history of Freaks and Geeks, which received a huge cult following after its cancellation, and launched the careers of actors like Seth Rogen, Jason Segel and James Franco:

PAUL FEIG: We did our infamous two weeks with the writers locking ourselves in a room and telling personal stories. I wrote a list of questions for everybody to answer: ‘What was the best thing that happened to you in high school? What was the worst thing that happened to you in high school? Who were you in love with and why?’

JUDD APATOW: ‘What was your worst drug experience? Who was your first girlfriend? What’s the first sexual thing you ever did? What’s the most humiliating thing that ever happened to you during high school?’

PAUL FEIG: That’s where most of our stories came from. Weirder stuff happens to people in real life than it does on TV. It was a personal show for me and I wanted it to be personal for everybody else.

GABE SACHS (writer, ‘I’m with the Band,’ ‘The Garage Door’): We thought the questionnaires were a private thing between us and Judd and Paul, so we wrote really honest. And the next day at work we get them all bound together. We’re laughing with everyone but going, ‘Oh, man!'”

Source: Vanity Fair
Published: Dec 6, 2012
Length: 34 minutes (8,608 words)

The Long Good-Bye

On the 1962-1963 printers strike in New York City that effectively shut down the seven biggest newspapers in the city, killed four of them, and made names for writers like Gay Talese, Tom Wolfe and Nora Ephron:

“A city without The New York Times inspired rage and scorn, ambivalence and relief. A ‘Talk of the Town’ item in The New Yorker lamented a weekend without the ‘fragrant, steamy deep-dish apple pie of the Sunday Times.’ James Reston—pillar of the Establishment, Washington bureau chief and columnist for the Times, and intimate of the Sulzberger family, to whom he directed a controversial entreaty to use non-union shops—was allowed to read his column on New York’s Channel 4 in early January 1963: ‘Striking the Times is like striking an old lady and deprives the community of all kinds of essential information. If some beautiful girl gets married this week, the television may let us see her gliding radiantly from the church. But what about all those ugly girls who get married every Sunday in the Times?’

“A city without newspapers was a city in which civic activity was impeded, as two out-of-work Times reporters hired by the Columbia Journalism Review soon documented. Without the daily papers, the Health Department’s campaign against venereal disease was ‘seriously impaired.’ So was the fight against slumlords: ‘There’s a distinct difference,’ the city’s building commissioner said, ‘between a $500 fine and a $500 fine plus a story in the Times.’ The New York chapter of the Congress on Racial Equality discovered that, without newspaper attention, its boycott of the Sealtest Milk Company was considerably undermined. The newspaper strike, the C.J.R. study concluded, had ‘deprived the public of its watchdog.”

Source: Vanity Fair
Published: Nov 30, 2012
Length: 22 minutes (5,728 words)

The Hunt For ‘Geronimo’

An adaptation of Mark Bowden’s new book on the hunt for Osama bin Laden:

“Everyone else favored sending in the SEALs. Clinton, who had faulted Obama during the primary campaign for asserting that he would send forces to Pakistan unilaterally if there was a good chance of getting bin Laden, now said that she favored the raid. She delivered this opinion after a typically lengthy review of the pros and cons. She noted that the raid would pose a diplomatic nightmare for the State Department. But because the U.S.-Pakistani relationship was built more on mutual dependence than friendship and trust, it would likely survive the crisis. Admiral Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, gave a detailed PowerPoint presentation before delivering his endorsement. Mullen had witnessed McRaven’s rehearsals at Fort Bragg and in Nevada. He had high confidence in the SEAL team.

“Brennan, Donilon, Clapper, Panetta, and Morell all agreed. The C.I.A. director felt strongly about it, which was not surprising. This had been his project all along, and the analysts who worked for him would have felt betrayed if their boss had changed his mind. Panetta told Obama that he ought to ask himself this question: ‘What would the average American say if he knew we had the best chance of getting bin Laden since Tora Bora and we didn’t take a shot?'”

Source: Vanity Fair
Published: Oct 13, 2012
Length: 39 minutes (9,960 words)

A Home at the End of Google Earth

An illiterate child from a small town in India falls asleep on a train and ends up lost in Calcutta, unable to find his way back home. Twenty-five years later, while living with his adoptive family in Australia, he locates his lost hometown using memories and Google Earth:

“This was it, the name of the station where he was separated from his brother that day, a couple hours from his home. Saroo scrolled up the train track looking for the next station. He flew over trees and rooftops, buildings and fields, until he came to the next depot, and his eyes fell on a river beside it—a river that flowed over a dam like a waterfall.

“Saroo felt dizzy, but he wasn’t finished yet. He needed to prove to himself that this was really it, that he had found his home. So, he put himself back into the body of the barefoot five-year-old boy under the waterfall: ‘I said to myself, Well, if you think this is the place, then I want you to prove to yourself that you can make your way back from where the dam is to the city center.’

“Saroo moved his cursor over the streets on-screen: a left here, a right there, until he arrived at the heart of the town—and the satellite image of a fountain, the same fountain where he had scarred his leg climbing over the fence 25 years before.”

Source: Vanity Fair
Published: Oct 8, 2012
Length: 20 minutes (5,109 words)