Search Results for: New York Magazine

[Not single-page] Goucher, a small liberal-arts college, hired a French professor from Rwanda named Leopold Munyakazi through The Scholar Rescue Fund, an organization devoted to providing asylum to intellectuals whose lives and work are threatened in their home countries. Sanford J. Ungar, the president of the college, is contacted by investigative reporters at NBC, and Goucher is subsequently accused of harboring a war criminal:

The details of the accusations were horrifying, and I sat reading the documents while my visitors watched. Between April and July 1994, Leopold had been part of a ‘joint criminal enterprise,’ the indictment alleged, and had ‘trained, indoctrinated, encouraged, provided criminal intelligence to, transported and distributed arms to members’ of the armed forces and civilian militias, who in turn ‘murdered, caused seriously [sic] bodily and mental harm, raped and pillaged Tutsi group members.’ It said he had attended meetings of Hutu in the Kayenzi commune, where he and others allegedly complained that the killing was ‘lagging behind.’ Possibly he had planned or even chaired those meetings. At one such gathering at the Kirwa primary school, Munyakazi ‘took the floor to address more than 2,000 residents,’ it claimed, ‘and publicly incited the masses to commit genocide.’ He had, according to the indictment, personally turned over to the militia a woman who had taken refuge at his home, so that she could be killed.

I was incredulous, filled with a mixture of anger and self-doubt. As their Rwandan companion nodded quietly in agreement, the producers from NBC demanded to know how Goucher could have sheltered such an evil man. They wanted to film me reacting to the indictment, but I refused. I hid behind the Scholar Rescue Fund, protesting that Leopold had been screened and certified, and that was all we knew. Later, in a New Republic story that was part of the flurry of early, short-lived interest in Leopold’s case, the producers were even quoted as describing my attitude as ‘flippant.’

“Leopold’s Ghost.” — Sanford J. Ungar, New York magazine

More Ungar

[Not single-page] Does having more money make a person have less empathy?

Earlier this year, Piff, who is 30, published a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that made him semi-famous. Titled ‘Higher Social Class Predicts Increased Unethical Behavior,’ it showed through quizzes, online games, questionnaires, in-lab manipulations, and field studies that living high on the socioeconomic ladder can, colloquially speaking, dehumanize people. It can make them less ethical, more selfish, more insular, and less compassionate than other people. It can make them more likely, as Piff demonstrated in one of his experiments, to take candy from a bowl of sweets designated for children. ‘While having money doesn’t necessarily make anybody anything,’ Piff says, ‘the rich are way more likely to prioritize their own self-interests above the interests of other people. It makes them more likely to exhibit characteristics that we would stereotypically associate with, say, assholes.’

“The Money-Empathy Gap.” — Lisa Miller, New York magazine

More from Miller

Nora Ephron on her uncle Hal, an inheritance, and working on a famous screenplay:

My husband and I had recently bought a house in East Hampton, and the renovation had cost much more than we’d ever dreamed. There was nothing left for landscaping. I went outside and walked around the house. I mentally planted several trees. I ripped out the scraggly lawn and imagined the huge trucks of sod I would now be able to pay for. I considered a trip to the nursery to look at hydrangeas. My heart was racing. I pulled my husband away from his work, and we had a conversation about what kind of trees we wanted. A dogwood, definitely. A great big dogwood. It would cost a small fortune, and now we were about to have one.

I went upstairs and looked at the script I’d been writing. I would never have to work on it again. I was just doing it for the money and, face it, it was never going to get made, and, besides, it was really hard. I switched off the computer. I lay down on the bed to think about other ways to spend Uncle Hal’s money. It crossed my mind that we needed a new headboard.

Thus, in fifteen minutes, did I pass through the first two stages of inherited wealth: Glee and Sloth.

“My Life as an Heiress.” — Nora Ephron, The New Yorker (Oct. 2010)

See also: “My First New York.” New York magazine (March. 2010)

Top 5 #Longreads of the Week: New York Magazine, Ploughshares, The Atlantic, The New York Times Magazine, Mother Jones, #fiction from The New York Review of Books, plus a guest pick from Eva Holland.

A lost weekend, or several weeks, with Fiona Apple:

A week later, my phone beeped. It was a heavily pixelated video. She was wearing glasses, looking straight at me:

‘Hi, Dan. It’s Fiona. [She moves the camera to her dog.] This is Janet. [She moves it back.] Um, are you coming out here tomorrow? Um, I, I, I don’t know—I’m baffled at this thing that I just got, this e-mail shit, I don’t know what these people—are they trying to antagonize me so that I do shit like this, so that I start fights with them? I don’t understand why there are pictures of models on a page about me. Who the fuck are they? What? What?’

The text attached read: ‘And are you western-bound? And hi there! F’

I had no idea what she was talking about. Two days later, I landed at LAX.

“‘I Just Want to Feel Everything’: Hiding Out with Fiona Apple, Musical Hermit.” — Dan P. Lee, New York magazine

More from Lee

Why was New York Times CEO Janet Robinson fired? A look inside the political battles and financial troubles that led Arthur ­Sulzberger to let Robinson go (with a $24 million exit package):

Interviews with more than 30 people who are intimately familiar with different aspects of the Times’ business (none but a spokesperson would speak for attribution—this is the paper of record, after all) have made it clear that Gonzalez’s rise and Robinson’s fall, and the ensuing leadership vacuum inside the paper, were symptomatic of larger forces at work. Even as a new pay wall was erected on the Times’ website last spring to charge customers for access, the company’s performance, including an alarming dive in print advertising when other media companies were beginning to recover, was faltering, and Sulzberger was under pressure both financial and familial to throw Robinson overboard. “As the paper’s stock price has declined in recent years, there has been increasing unease among the Ochs-Sulzberger clan, who control the paper through a special class of shares. Three years ago, facing huge debt problems, the company suspended the lucrative stock dividend that once flowed quarterly to the family’s 40-plus members, intensifying the need to solve the intractable advertising problems of the newspaper in the digital age and figure out a way to turn the family’s cash spigot back on. Janet Robinson, the company’s advertising brains, found herself caught between her increasingly remote boss and a frustrated family worried over the future of its 116-year-old fortune.

“A New York Times Whodunit.” — Joe Hagan, New York magazine

More #longreasds from Joe Hagan

Top 5 #Longreads of the Week: The New Yorker, This Land Press, The New York Times, GQ, New York Magazine, a fiction pick from Five Chapters, plus a guest pick from Ester Bloom.

A reflection on a mother’s life, and how advancements in medicine have extended our life expectancy, and have made it more difficult for us to die:

ME: ‘Maybe you could outline the steps you think we might take.’

DOCTOR: ‘Wait and see.’

NEUROLOGIST: ‘Monitor.’

DOCTOR: ‘Change the drugs we’re using.’

MY SISTER: ‘Can we at least try to get a physical therapist, someone who can work her legs, at least. I mean … if she does improve, she’s left without being able to walk.’

NEUROLOGIST: ‘They’ll have to see if she’s a candidate.’

ME: ‘So … okay … where can you reasonably see this ending up?’

NEUROLOGIST: ‘We can help you look at the options.’

ME: ‘The options?’

SOCIAL WORKER (to my sister): ‘Where she might live. We can go over several possibilities.’

ME: ‘Live?’

“A Life Worth Ending.” — Michael Wolff, New York magazine

More from Wolff

[Not single-page] The case against Rudy Kurniawan, who arrived on the wine scene less than a decade ago and now stands accused of selling millions of dollars in fake wines:

Among a privileged set, though, Kurniawan’s quirks and résumé gaps were of much less interest than his generosity. After one tasting, Wasserman hailed him for having ‘poured the sickest lineup of wines I have ever had in one evening’ and told him that ‘the scepter, the crown, the ermine cape is yours.’ Meadows, too, became a beneficiary of Kurniawan’s largesse, through which he tasted wines even he had never encountered. Grateful, he took pains to field Kurniawan’s often arcane queries about labeling and capsule nomenclature. ‘I thought at the time, “Jesus Christ, he must take these bottles to bed,” ’ Meadows says. Soon, he was publishing tasting notes based on Kurniawan bottles, lending his blue-chip imprimatur to the young man and his wines. Robert Parker, the world’s most powerful wine critic, also drank them and pronounced Kurniawan ‘a very sweet and generous man.’

“Château Sucker.” — Benjamin Wallace, New York magazine

More #longreads from Benjamin Wallace

Top 5 #Longreads of the Week: The New York Times Magazine, New York Magazine, Los Angeles Times, Washington Monthly, #fiction from The New Yorker, plus a guest pick from Amy Whipple.