The reverend has a new primetime show, but remains a polarizing figure:
Sharpton has a long record of involvement in civil rights cases, but there are still those who want to remember him as the guy who defended Tawana Brawley, the teenage girl who claimed to be gang raped by a group of white men before a grand jury dismissed her claims as bogus and Sharpton was successfully sued for defamation. They want to remember him as the guy who said inflammatory things—the man who railed against ‘diamond merchants’ and an ‘apartheid ambulance’—during the Crown Heights riots. Last year, he penned an apology in The New York Daily News for his language during the riots, and for failing to pay more tribute to Yankel Rosenbaum, an Australian graduate student who was killed in what some Jews remember as the worst episode of anti-Semitic violence in American history. ‘I said things growing up. I used to use the ‘N’ word. I used to talk street language about a lot of things that you just can’t do,’ he says. ‘And they’ll bring it back to haunt you.’
‘The other thing I’ve learned, when I’ve had to deal with things I’ve said 20 years ago, 30 years ago, the first thing you should say is, “I shouldn’t have said it,”’ he says. ‘You don’t justify something. If you said something that’s wrong or that was stated wrongly, say that. The public can accept a mistake. What they can’t accept is you digging in and it’s an obvious mistake.’
“Al Sharpton’s Got a Brand New Bag.” — Marin Cogan, GQ
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[Not single-page] More men are getting diagnosed with eating disorders, but are struggling to receive help:
As recently as a decade ago, clinicians believed that only 5 percent of anorexics were male. Current estimates suggest it’s closer to 20 percent and rising fast: More men are getting ill, and more are being diagnosed. (One well-regarded Canadian study puts the number at 30 percent.) It’s unclear why, but certainly twenty years of lean, muscular male physiques in advertising, movies, sports, and of course, magazines like GQ—from Marky Mark to Brad Pitt to David Beckham—have changed the way both men and women regard the male body. And thanks to the web, those images are easy to seek out and collect. For American men, the chiseled six-pack has become the fetishized equivalent of bigger breasts. Like all fetish objects, it stands for something deeply desired: social acceptance, the love of a parent or partner, happiness.
But many afflicted men feel too stigmatized to go to a doctor—and many doctors don’t recognize the early, ambiguous symptoms. ‘It is not what a primary-care physician will consider at first glance,’ says Mark Warren, founder of the Cleveland Center for Eating Disorders. ‘Often it won’t be what they consider at fourth or fifth glance.’
Diagnosis is hard. Finding treatment is even harder. Many residential centers don’t admit men, out of a belief that treatment should be sex-specific.
“20% of Anorexics Are Men.” — Nathaniel Penn, GQ
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[Not single-page] More men are getting diagnosed with eating disorders, but are struggling to receive help:
“As recently as a decade ago, clinicians believed that only 5 percent of anorexics were male. Current estimates suggest it’s closer to 20 percent and rising fast: More men are getting ill, and more are being diagnosed. (One well-regarded Canadian study puts the number at 30 percent.) It’s unclear why, but certainly twenty years of lean, muscular male physiques in advertising, movies, sports, and of course, magazines like GQ—from Marky Mark to Brad Pitt to David Beckham—have changed the way both men and women regard the male body. And thanks to the web, those images are easy to seek out and collect. For American men, the chiseled six-pack has become the fetishized equivalent of bigger breasts. Like all fetish objects, it stands for something deeply desired: social acceptance, the love of a parent or partner, happiness.
“But many afflicted men feel too stigmatized to go to a doctor—and many doctors don’t recognize the early, ambiguous symptoms. ‘It is not what a primary-care physician will consider at first glance,’ says Mark Warren, founder of the Cleveland Center for Eating Disorders. ‘Often it won’t be what they consider at fourth or fifth glance.’
“Diagnosis is hard. Finding treatment is even harder. Many residential centers don’t admit men, out of a belief that treatment should be sex-specific.”
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Published: Sep 13, 2012
Length: 24 minutes (6,008 words)
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[Not single-page] What is Mitt Romney’s true personality? And can joining the press on his campaign bus for five months shed any light on it?
When the speech winds down, I talk with a woman named Pam DeLong, who is a Tea Partier here in Laurens. She is for Newt because he’s for real, he’s a smarty, and because of stuff like the Jordan Cash moment. ‘When that little boy came over, he stopped and talked to him, and he was so natural, and then he just went back into his speech without missing a beat. Romney couldn’t do that. Newt knows what he’s talking about. He doesn’t let things fluster him, which is why I think he’d be the best guy to take on Obama.’
In other words, Newt is an ideal candidate because when an infant pestered him, he hacked it, took it like a man, a pro. If it were Romney? And an infant started fucking with him? You know it would be bad, some pediatric version of the time he sang ‘Who Let the Dogs Out’ to black teens in Florida. ‘Hello, little organism different from myself. I will now make noises that I believe are comprehensible to your kind.’
“Desperately Seeking Mitt.” — Wells Tower, GQ
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The rise and fall of one of China’s most powerful politicians:
At the opening of the annual Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference on March 2, Bo showed up and put on a brave face for the 3,000 assembled delegates and journalists. But in internal government meetings, Bo was livid, haranguing Chongqing officials and telling them that Wang’s flight and the rumours swirling around him were all part of a ‘plot instigated by foreign reactionary forces’. Over the next two weeks, Bo appeared in public nearly a dozen times. In a typical final bout of showmanship, he even held a two-hour press conference on the sidelines of the National People’s Congress.
Appearing relaxed, Bo said that unspecified enemies had ‘formed criminal blocs with wide social ties and the ability to shape opinion’ and were ‘pouring filth’ on him and his family. He also dismissed suggestions he was being investigated or in any political trouble. Four days later, on March 14, Bo attended the closing ceremony of the National People’s Congress and sat alongside his politburo colleagues on the stage in the Great Hall of the People. Looking tired and distracted, at one point he stared up at the cavernous ceiling of the Great Hall as if saying a silent prayer. As the ceremony ended and China’s most senior leaders got up to leave, Bo rose quickly and strode off the stage. Waiting in the wings were officers of the elite Central Guard Unit charged with protecting China’s top leaders, who led him away, according to two people with knowledge of the matter. Gu and more than a dozen of Bo’s close associates were detained at the same time and are currently being held in undisclosed locations around China.
“Bo Xilai: Power, Death and Politics.” — Jamil Anderlini, FT Magazine
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The rise and fall of one of China’s most powerful politicians:
“At the opening of the annual Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference on March 2, Bo showed up and put on a brave face for the 3,000 assembled delegates and journalists. But in internal government meetings, Bo was livid, haranguing Chongqing officials and telling them that Wang’s flight and the rumours swirling around him were all part of a ‘plot instigated by foreign reactionary forces’. Over the next two weeks, Bo appeared in public nearly a dozen times. In a typical final bout of showmanship, he even held a two-hour press conference on the sidelines of the National People’s Congress.
“Appearing relaxed, Bo said that unspecified enemies had “formed criminal blocs with wide social ties and the ability to shape opinion” and were ‘pouring filth’ on him and his family. He also dismissed suggestions he was being investigated or in any political trouble. Four days later, on March 14, Bo attended the closing ceremony of the National People’s Congress and sat alongside his politburo colleagues on the stage in the Great Hall of the People. Looking tired and distracted, at one point he stared up at the cavernous ceiling of the Great Hall as if saying a silent prayer. As the ceremony ended and China’s most senior leaders got up to leave, Bo rose quickly and strode off the stage. Waiting in the wings were officers of the elite Central Guard Unit charged with protecting China’s top leaders, who led him away, according to two people with knowledge of the matter. Gu and more than a dozen of Bo’s close associates were detained at the same time and are currently being held in undisclosed locations around China.”
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Published: Jul 20, 2012
Length: 22 minutes (5,621 words)
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One year later, the survivors of the 2011 massacre in Norway recount what happened:
At a pub across the street from the courthouse, he is seated at a sidewalk table with Anita, drinking beer and hand-rolling cigarettes. He has sad eyes and stubble and a gold hoop in his ear. On his right wrist is a black rubber bracelet embossed in white letters with a thought that a young woman active in the AUF named Helle Gannestad tweeted eight hours after Breivik’s arrest. ‘If one man can cause so much pain,’ it reads, ‘imagine how much love we can create together.’ It’s become sort of a national sentiment.
Freddy also has a copy of Dagbladet, which in that day’s edition has a story about Elisabeth and Cathrine, and there is a large photograph of both girls spread across a page, their heads tilted together, both of them smiling. Elisabeth’s family didn’t want her to be remembered as victim number nineteen on the seventh page of an indictment.
‘Elisabeth,’ Freddy says, ‘she was the perfect one. She was pretty, she had a lot of friends. If one of her friends had a problem, they came to her.’
And Cathrine? She still gets winded climbing stairs, but Freddy says she’s doing better, physically. ‘Cathrine, she says, “Why me? Elisabeth was the pretty one. She had all the friends. Why did she die? Why not me?” ’ Freddy looks away for a moment, then turns back. ‘What do you say to that? Speechless.’
‘Is he coming? Is he? Oh God, I think he is.’ — Sean Flynn, GQ
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A writer goes through “the most invasive process in politics”—being vetted as a running mate by the same person who vetted Sarah Palin in 2008:
It starts unobtrusively enough. ‘So you’re the vice president, and the president is visiting Seoul,’ Frank begins, unspooling an elaborate scenario in which the president’s hotel gets decimated by a car bomb, 200,000 North Korean troops cross the DMZ, and the Joint Chiefs urge me to take out Pyongyang with a tactical nuclear weapon. ‘Do you authorize the strike?’ he asks, trying to get a sense of my political judgment (as much a part of the vet now as excavating secrets). I wonder if the question is also a reaction to Frank’s Palin experience, recalling the scene in <i>Game Change</i> in which Palin reveals that she doesn’t even know that there are two Koreas. But I push those thoughts aside and dodge the question by asking for more military options, trying to cover my fecklessness by name-dropping Seal Team Six. Next, Frank hits me with an easier hypothetical, about a deadlocked Senate and a Supreme Court nominee who appears to be against gay marriage. ‘Do you support the president and cast the tiebreaker in favor of the president’s nominee?’ he asks. Of course I do, I respond. I‘m a team player. The president can always count on me.
“Wanna Be Veep? Okay, but This is Going to Hurt.” — Jason Zengerle, GQ
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