How the College Board revolutionized the most controversial exam in America: When the Scholastic Aptitude Test was created in 1926, it was promoted as a tool to create a classless, Jeffersonian-style meritocracy. The exam, which purported to measure innate intelligence, was originally adapted from the World War I Army I.Q. test and served as a […]
Search results
Posted inBooks, Nonfiction
Interview with a Torturer
Documentary filmmaker and Khmer Rouge survivor Rithy Panh spent hundreds of hours interviewing Duch, the commandant of the Cambodia “killing fields” and one of the most notorious torturers of the 20th century. This is his haunting memoir of those interviews.
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
Why Good Health Care Depends on Nurses
Arnold Relman, a physician with more than six decades of experience, broke his neck and discovered what it’s like to be critically ill and cared for under today’s health care system.
Posted inEditor's Pick
An American Seduction: Portrait of a Prison Town
The High Desert State Prison was supposed to save Susanville, CA, bringing jobs and money to the ailing town. And it did. But the costs were devastating. It is March 1999. I’ve come home because the new High Desert State Prison needs teachers, and I need a job. At 8 a.m., I stop at the […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
Why Abercrombie Is Losing Its Shirt
In the early ’90s, Mike Jeffries gave struggling retailer Abercrombie and Fitch new life by selling a specific kind of lifestyle to teenage shoppers who “wanted to belong.” Times have changed, and the retailer needs to as well: Until relatively recently, Abercrombie’s numerous press scandals followed a predictable pattern: a flood of petitions and angry […]
Posted inBooks, Nonfiction
‘A Taste of Power’: The Woman Who Led the Black Panther Party
Elaine Brown was the first and only woman to lead the male-dominated Black Panther Party. She looks back on Jean Seberg, COINTELPRO, and internal divisions within the organization.
Posted inBooks, Nonfiction, Story
‘A Taste of Power’: The Woman Who Led the Black Panther Party
Elaine Brown was the first and only woman to lead the male-dominated Black Panther Party. She looks back on Jean Seberg, COINTELPRO, and internal divisions within the organization.
Posted inMember Pick, Nonfiction, Story
Budd & Leni
The story of Hollywood screenwriter Budd Schulberg’s unlikely collaboration with Nazi propagandist Leni Riefenstahl.
Posted inEditor's Pick
This Is Danny Pearl’s Final Story
Asra Nomani, a close friend and colleague of Daniel Pearl — who was murdered in 2002 by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, an architect of the 9/11 attacks — discusses how she grappled with Pearl’s death years later while investigating his murder: One of the first people I come across while waiting for the courtroom doors to […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
Inside Monopoly’s Secret War Against the Third Reich
How a popular board game helped flood escape tools into POW camps around Europe during World War II: “The Deluxe set looks very much like the set you would have found in stores maybe ten years ago,” Orbanes tells me. “The box would have been the same size as the game board. The board fit […]
