Search Results for: GQ

American Airlines once sold a lifetime pass for unlimited first-class travel. They soon regretted it:

In September 2007, a pricing analyst reviewing international routes focused the airline’s attention on how much the AAirpass program was costing, company emails show.

‘We pay the taxes,’ a revenue management executive wrote in a subsequent email. ‘We award AAdvantage miles, and we lose the seat every time they fly.’

Cade was assigned to find out whether any AAirpass holders were violating the rules, starting with those who flew the most.

She pulled years of flight records for Rothstein and Vroom and calculated that each was costing American more than $1 million a year.

“The Frequent Fliers Who Flew Too Much.” — Ken Bensinger, Los Angeles Times

More #longreads from the Los Angeles Times

Top 5 #Longreads of the Week: GQ, The New Yorker, Inc. Magazine, The Classical, New York Magazine, #fiction from Guernica, plus a guest pick from Largehearted Boy’s David Gutowski.

Forty years after hijacking a plane and then disappearing, George Wright is found:

On the afternoon of August 19, 1970, a couple of men approached Wright. Their names were Jimmy and Jumbo. Wright was working in the prison laundry at the time. The men said they’d had enough of prison and wanted to do something about it. ‘They asked me,’ says Wright, ‘if I was interested.’

‘You guys kidding me?’ said Wright.

‘No,’ they said.

‘Yeah,’ said Wright. ‘I’m interested.’ They talked about it. ‘I ain’t going nowhere walking,’ Wright added.

‘We’re going to get transportation,’ they said. Jimmy mentioned that he was a skilled mechanic, expert at hot-wiring cars.

Wright figured that if he did get out, he’d need cash to restart his life. There are always wheeler-dealers in prison who have money, and Wright knew one of them, a man named George Brown, who was serving three to five years for armed robbery. Brown promptly joined the team. They agreed that they were going all the way: Either they’d escape or they’d be shot. Freedom or death.

“Uncatchable.” — Michael Finkel, GQ

See more #longreads by Finkel

“If Karl Rove was Bush’s brain, then [Eric] Fehrnstrom is Romney’s balls.” Meet the former Boston Herald reporter-turned-consigliere to the presidential candidate: 

It was January of 2008, the last time Romney ran for president, and Fehrnstrom was getting in the face of an Associated Press reporter in a Staples store in South Carolina. The reporter, Glen Johnson, had just challenged Romney during a press conference, interrupting him in the middle of a claim that he didn’t have lobbyists working on his campaign—Mitt definitely did—and when the press conference was over, Romney rushed after Johnson to press his case. ‘Listen to my words, all right? Listen to my words,’ Romney sputtered, smiling through gritted teeth. That’s when Fehrnstrom stepped in and cornered Johnson in front of a Post-it notes display. ‘You should act a little bit more professionally instead of being argumentative with the candidate,’ he hissed at Johnson. ‘It’s out of line. You’re out of line.’

“Mitt Romney’s Dark Knight.” — Jason Zengerle, GQ

See more from Zengerle

Top 5 #Longreads of the Week: Orion Magazine, O: The Oprah Magazine, GQ, Foreign Policy Magazine, The Oregonian, fiction from Granta, plus a guest pick from Declan Fay.

Chris Chaney was a 33-year-old loner in Florida who decided to shake up his boredom by breaking into celebrities’ email accounts. Soon he discovered nude photos of Scarlett Johansson and other stars, and then the FBI came calling:

While perusing the e-mail of celebrity stylist Simone Harouche in early November 2010, he stumbled across photos of her client Christina Aguilera trying on outfits in a dressing room, wearing little more than silver pasties. Chaney found a random guy on a celebrity message board and sent him an e-mail telling him he knew ‘someone’ who had hacked pictures of Aguilera. Did he want to check them out?

Chaney freaked the moment he sent it. What the hell am I doing? he thought. He was using a phony e-mail address, but he didn’t know how to effectively cover his tracks. On December 8, a headline appeared on TMZ: ‘Christina Aguilera: My Private Sexy Pics Were Hacked.’ Aguilera’s rep told TMZ they were ‘attempting to determine the identity of the hackers and will pursue them aggressively.’

“The Man Who Hacked Hollywood.” — David Kushner, GQ

More Kushner: “The Hacker is Watching.” Jan. 15, 2012, GQ

The writer confronts her inability to have children and explores how humans’ behavior with reproduction compares with other animals:

Like ours, the animal world is full of paradoxical examples of gentleness, brutality, and suffering, often performed in the service of reproduction. Female black widow spiders sometimes devour their partners after a complex and delicate mating dance. Bald eagle parents, who mate for life and share the responsibility of rearing young, will sometimes look on impassively as the stronger eaglet kills its sibling. At the end of their life cycle, after swimming thousands of miles in salt water, Pacific salmon swim up their natal, freshwater streams to spawn, while the fresh water decays their flesh. Animals will do whatever it takes to ensure reproductive success.

“The Art of Waiting.” — Belle Boggs, Orion Magazine

See also: “The Good Seed.” — Dan P. Lee, GQ

A New Yorker with limited French skills gets dropped into an advertising agency in Paris: 

In French class, I did well in spoken tests, but my written French was appalling. The conditional tense confused me, and the French loved the conditional tense, French conversation practically being founded on relativity—perhaps, maybe, I don’t know. In kissing, some people were ripe, others were not. Whole groups could be off-limits.

It definitely wasn’t appropriate to kiss your boss, except when it was, though it was correct to kiss your underlings, except when it wasn’t. Young men generally didn’t kiss other young men, unless they were friends outside work. But older men did, sometimes. You never knew. Also, these kisses were intended not to touch the cheek but to glance it. People kept their eyes locked on the middle distance and seemed, while kissing or being kissed, very bored.

“An American (Working) in Paris.” — Rosecrans Baldwin, GQ

More Baldwin: “Writing Is My Peppermint-Flavored Heroin.” The Millions, March 12, 2010

Featured Longreader: Hugh Lilly, film critic and blogger. See his story picks from the New Yorker, Triple Canopy, GQ, plus more on his #longreads page.

[Not single-page] John Friend created a yoga empire with Anusara, which grew to 600,000 students and made him one of the most popular yoga teachers in the United States. It all unraveled following a scandal involving sex with students and financial mismanagement: 

Sex with employees and marijuana in the mail is garden-variety stuff, hardly scandalous in many contexts—but the site brought to light other, more outlandish features of Friend’s secret world. Specifically, it said that he had established a Wiccan coven with six women, some of whom were Anusara teachers and a few of whom were married, as a way to raise ‘sexual/sensual energy in a positive and sacred way.’ As proof, there was a letter that Friend had written to the coven, in which he apologized for attracting a former member ‘into my life, into our lives, by vibrating in my mind-body with a frequency of deception and lack of integrity.’ This woman hadn’t left quietly, Friend wrote: Her ‘vampire novel imagination conjured JF … as the next Aleister Crowley or Pierre Arnold Bernard! The Texas Tantric guru is the Big Bad Wolf in magick cloaks taking innocent girls from their faithful husbands and wrecking families to drink the juice of innocent Little Red Ridinghoods—Wow!’

“Karma Crash.” — Vanessa Grigoriadis, New York magazine

See also: “Blindsided: The Jerry Joseph High School Basketball Scandal.” — Michael J. Mooney, GQ, June 30, 2011