Search Results for: New Yorker

On the death of Tyler Clementi, a gay Rutgers student, and the charges against his roommate, Dharun Ravi, who used a webcam to spy on him. Clementi took his own life shortly after the incident:

An online video chat, using an application like iChat or Skype, starts like a phone call: one person requests a conversation, and the recipient must accept the request. But Ravi had tweaked his iChat settings so that the program could automatically accept incoming calls. According to Ravi, he had made this his computer’s usual setting. Whatever the case, that evening the program was set to auto-accept; he also turned off his monitor, or darkened it to black. At 9:13 P.M., he was beside Wei at her computer. He opened iChat, and clicked his name on her chat list. A few feet away, his computer accepted his request, and Ravi and Wei saw a live video image of Room 30.

“The Story of a Suicide.” — Ian Parker, The New Yorker

See also: “Want to Prevent Gay Teen Suicide? Legalize Marriage Equality.” — Steve Silberman, PLos, Sept. 30, 2010

Top 5 #Longreads of the Week: Featuring The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Rumpus, Wired, a #fiction pick, plus two guest picks from Jalees Rehman, Associate Professor of Medicine and Pharmacology at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Photo: Yutaka Tsutano/Flickr

Personal recollection of a life about to be transformed, from one day to the next:

In the porch light the trees shiver, the squirrels turn over in their sleep. The Milky Way is a long smear on the sky, like something erased on a blackboard. Over the neighbor’s house, Mars flashes white, then red, then white again. Jupiter is hidden among the anonymous blinks and glitterings. It has a moon with sulfur-spewing volcanoes and a beautiful name: Io. I learned it at work, from the group of men who surround me there. Space physicists, guys who spend days on end with their heads poked through the fabric of the sky, listening to the sounds of the universe. Guys whose own lives are ticking like alarm clocks getting ready to go off, although none of us are aware of it yet.

“The Fourth State of Matter.” — Jo Ann Beard, The New Yorker, June 24, 1996

See also: “Chicago Christmas, 1984.” — George Saunders, The New Yorker, Dec. 22, 2003

Our growing prison population, and whether there’s a link to the dropping crime rate:

The accelerating rate of incarceration over the past few decades is just as startling as the number of people jailed: in 1980, there were about two hundred and twenty people incarcerated for every hundred thousand Americans; by 2010, the number had more than tripled, to seven hundred and thirty-one. No other country even approaches that. In the past two decades, the money that states spend on prisons has risen at six times the rate of spending on higher education. Ours is, bottom to top, a ‘carceral state,’ in the flat verdict of Conrad Black, the former conservative press lord and newly minted reformer, who right now finds himself imprisoned in Florida, thereby adding a new twist to an old joke: A conservative is a liberal who’s been mugged; a liberal is a conservative who’s been indicted; and a passionate prison reformer is a conservative who’s in one.

“The Caging of America.” — Adam Gopnik, New Yorker

See also: “A Boom Behind Bars: Private Jail Operators Profit from Illegal Immigrant Crackdown.” — Graeme Wood, Bloomber Businessweek, March 19, 2011

[Not single-page] The Google engineer who became a symbol of the Egyptian revolution grapples with what’s next for the country: 

“A little more than two weeks ago, Ghonim settled into his regular three-hour flight from Dubai to Cairo. His seatmate, an older Egyptian executive type, recognized him immediately and started right in. ‘Isn’t enough enough?’ the man asked. ‘What are you doing to this country?’ The executive turned out to be an engineering consultant whom Ghonim pegged at around 50; he might have been Ghonim himself born twenty years earlier. Ghonim is both an interested listener and not great at getting out of conversations, and so he spent the flight absorbing his seatmate’s story: The older man had supported the protests at Tahrir Square and experienced ‘the epitome of happiness’ when Mubarak had been forced down on February 11. But as the revolution had barreled on, some of its demands seemingly extreme, and the country continued to falter, the consultant had come to resent all of it.

“The Lonely Battle of Wael Ghonim.” — Benjamin Wallace-Wells, New York magazine

See also: “On the Square: Were the Egyptian Protesters Right to Trust the Military?” — Wendell Steavenson, New Yorker, Feb. 21, 2011

A look at hundreds of pages of internal White House documents, and what they reveal about the president’s decision-making process:

One Cabinet official made it clear that she did not share the President’s growing commitment to coupon-clipping: Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. She rejected the White House’s budget for her department, and wrote the President a six-page letter detailing her complaints. Some in the White House saw the long letter as a weapon, something that could be leaked if Clinton didn’t get her way. ‘At the proposed funding levels,’ Clinton wrote, ‘we will not have the capacity to deliver either the full level of civilian staffing or the foreign assistance programs that underlie the civilian-military strategy you outlined for Afghanistan; nor the transition from U.S. Military to civilian programming in Iraq; nor the expanded assistance that is central to our Pakistan strategy.’

“The Obama Memos.” — Ryan Lizza, New Yorker

More Lizza: “Inside the Crisis.” New Yorker, Oct. 12, 2009

Featured Longreader: Writer Jess Weiss. See her story picks from Wired, The Atlantic, The New Yorker and more on her #longreads page.

Featured Longreader: Lexi Mainland, social media editor for The New York Times. See her story picks from Vanity Fair, New Yorker, The Atlantic and more on her #longreads page.

[Fiction] A young boy plays with the truth as he skips school one day:

Your stepfather walks toward you. He takes your chin in his thumb and forefinger, and turns your face back and forth, as though it were a piece of merchandise he was thinking about buying.

“You must have fallen pretty easy,” he says. “When you faint, you go down hard. You don’t have any cuts.”

“Leopard.” — Wells Tower, New Yorker (2008)

See more #fiction #longreads

Three siblings—the two brothers, carpenters, and the sister, a stripper—rob a bank and lead police on a 15-state chase. But what motivated them to do it?

PASCO SIBLINGS SOUGHT IN SHOOTING ALSO WANTED IN GEORGIA BANK HEIST. By the evening of August 4, the FBI had issued a press release stating that the three Georgia bank robbers and the three Zephyrhills shooters were one and the same. The image of a gun-toting, bank-robbing trio of siblings hit reporters like a shot of Jack Daniel’s; it was exhilarating; it was old-school. DOUGHERTY GANG ON THE LAM! Lee-Grace made the biggest splash. ‘A gun-toting stripper—what’s not to like?’ asked one commenter. A series of X-rated photographs she had taken for some guys who ran an illegitimate poker club where she gave lap dances later found their way into the public domain, most likely with a price tag.

“The Whole True Story of the Dougherty Gang.” — Kathy Dobie, GQ

See also: ”The Perfect Mark.” — Mitchell Zuckoff, New Yorker, May 15, 2006