Search Results for: NPR

9/11: The Winners

Longreads Pick

The September 11, 2001 attacks have been a symbol of many things and many causes, but like the lavish, flag-draped rebuilding of the site, it has also been a vehicle for enrichment. From corporations to politicians to government officials to nonprofits to the security industry to publishers to the health industry (not to mention the incidents of outright fraud over the years), many people have found ways to profit from one of the nation’s biggest disasters. 9/11 has created an economy all its own. “The intersection of 9/11 and money is a busy intersection,” says retired New York City firefighter Kenny Specht. Glenn Corbett, a professor of fire science at John Jay College, active in a range of 9/11 issues, puts it this way: “Lots of people have got their hand in the till. A lot of people and a lot of companies have made a lot of money off of 9/11.” Is it sacrilege to point this out? #Sept11

Source: Village Voice
Published: Aug 31, 2011
Length: 25 minutes (6,311 words)

Better, Faster, Stronger

Longreads Pick

Every generation gets the self-help guru that it deserves. In 1937, at the height of the Depression, Napoleon Hill wrote “Think and Grow Rich,” which claimed to distill the principles that had made Andrew Carnegie so wealthy. “The Power of Positive Thinking,” by Norman Vincent Peale, which was published in 1952, advised readers that techniques such as “a mind-emptying at least twice a day” would lead to success. By the seventies, Werner Erhard and est promised material wealth through spiritual enlightenment. The eighties and nineties saw management-consultancy maxims married with New Age thinking, with books such as Stephen Covey’s “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People.” In the past decade or so, there has been a rise in books such as “Who Moved My Cheese?,” by Spencer Johnson, which promise to help readers maximize their professional potential in an era of unpredictable workplaces. Timothy Ferriss’s books appeal to those for whom cheese, per se, has ceased to have any allure.

Source: The New Yorker
Published: Sep 5, 2011
Length: 18 minutes (4,604 words)

The Assassin in the Vineyard

Longreads Pick

Who would poison the vines of La Romanée-Conti, the tiny, centuries-old vineyard that produces what most agree is Burgundy’s ?nest, rarest, and most expensive wine? When Aubert de Villaine received an anonymous note, in January 2010, threatening the destruction of his priceless heritage unless he paid a one-million-euro ransom, he thought it was a sick joke. But, as Maximillian Potter reveals, the attack on Romanée-Conti was only too real: an unprecedented and decidedly un-French crime.

Source: Vanity Fair
Published: Apr 1, 2011
Length: 24 minutes (6,052 words)

Unfinished Business

Longreads Pick

If “The Pale King” isn’t a finished work, it is, at the very least, a remarkable document, by no means a stunt or an attempt to cash in on David Foster Wallace’s posthumous fame. Despite its shattered state and its unpromising subject matter, or possibly because of them, “The Pale King” represents Wallace’s finest work as a novelist.

Source: Time
Published: Mar 31, 2011
Length: 12 minutes (3,139 words)

The Truth About Sex Addiction

The Truth About Sex Addiction

The Truth About Sex Addiction

Longreads Pick

Within a half-hour of my first meeting Neil Melinkovich, a 59-year-old life coach, sometime writer and former model who has been in Sex Addicts Anonymous for more than 20 years, he told me about the time in 1987 that he made a quick detour from picking up his girlfriend at the Los Angeles airport so he could purchase a service from a prostitute. Afterward, he noticed what he thought was red lipstick on himself. It turned out to be blood from the woman’s mouth. He washed in a gas-station bathroom, met his girlfriend at the airport and then, in the grip of his insatiability, had unprotected sex with her as soon as they got home–in the same bed he said he had used to entertain three other women in the days before.

Author: John Cloud
Source: Time
Published: Feb 19, 2011
Length: 12 minutes (3,072 words)

The Fresh Air Interview: Church of Scientology, Fact-Checked

The Fresh Air Interview: Church of Scientology, Fact-Checked

Travis the Menace

Travis the Menace

A Solitary Jailhouse Lawyer Argues His Way Out of Prison

A Solitary Jailhouse Lawyer Argues His Way Out of Prison

A Solitary Jailhouse Lawyer Argues His Way Out of Prison

Longreads Pick

There was no crusading journalist, no nonprofit group taking up his cause, just Inmate 95A2646, a high-school dropout from Brooklyn, alone in a computerless prison law library. Jabbar Collins pried documents from wary prosecutors, tracked down reluctant witnesses and persuaded them, at least once through trickery, to reveal what allegedly went on before and at the trial where he was convicted of the high-profile 1994 murder of Rabbi Abraham Pollack.

Published: Dec 24, 2010
Length: 11 minutes (2,762 words)