Search Results for: TV

How Russia Began Using Poison in Assassinations

“The idea of poisoning — radioactive or otherwise — is not new to Russian intelligence. According to former Russian intelligence officer Boris Volodarsky, now a historian and one-time associate of Litvinenko, the Russians have a history of substance assassination going back nearly a century. It was Lenin who ordered the establishment of their first laboratory, known simply as the ‘Special Room’, for developing new lethal toxins.

“‘There is also a long succession of poisonings by Russian intelligence services in different countries, starting in the early 1920s,’ he says.

“At its height, says Volodarsky, the Soviet Union had the largest biological warfare program in the world. Sources have claimed there were 40,000 individuals, including 9,000 scientists, working at 47 different facilities. More than 1,000 of these experts specialized in the development and application of deadly compounds. They used lethal gasses, skin contact poisons that were smeared on door handles and nerve toxins said to be untraceable. The idea, at all times, was to make death seem natural — or, at the very least, to confuse doctors and investigators. ‘It’s never designed to demonstrate anything, only to kill the victim, quietly and unobtrusively,’ Volodarsky writes in ‘The KGB’s Poison Factory’. ‘This was an unbreakable principle.'”

At Matter, Will Storr tells the story of a Russian dissident who was murdered with radioactive poison. Read more about poison.

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Pictured: The grave of Russian dissident Alexander Litvinenko

Photo: Wikmedia Commons

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What Would Jesus Film?

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How North Texas became the production hub for Christian entertainment:

And as North Texas grew, the region—with its affordable acreage to site large-scale production facilities and its mostly conservative and religious-minded population—proved attractive to faith-based entrepreneurs. It helped, too, that in the 1980s, a film- and television-production tradition was established here, with secular fare like JFK, RoboCop, and Walker, Texas Ranger.

The early ’90s also saw a flurry of production activity in Dallas. In 1988, the family-friendly, Allen-based Lyrick Studios (originally known as Lyons Group) was born and began turning out the TV series Barney and Wishbone, and distributing the Christian-themed cartoon VeggieTales. Five years later, Trinity Broadcasting Network, which later became the first major network to air T.D. Jakes’ sermons, bought a 50,000-square-foot studio in Irving. Then competing Christian-based Daystar Television Network was founded in Dallas by Joni and Marcus Lamb.

Put all of these elements together—a filmmaking infrastructure; oil, gas, and real estate wealth; religiosity; the eternal, irresistible allure of the silver screen—and you can see how Dallas wound up at the center of the modern faith-based entertainment market.

Source: D Magazine
Published: Dec 1, 2013
Length: 14 minutes (3,730 words)

Bad Blood

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A Russian dissident is murdered with radioactive poison:

The doctors treated Litvinenko with a heavy dose of antibiotics. And yet his body continued to break down. Three days after admission, he was being fed through a tube. His hair was falling out, and Marina gathered it in little bundles from his pillow and pajamas. As the medics tested Litvinenko for AIDS and hepatitis, he kept telling them: I’ve been poisoned. On November 11th, ten days after he fell ill, he gave an interview to the BBC Russian Service saying he’d suffered “a serious poisoning”, and implying that it had been carried out by an Italian associate, Mario Scaramella, his lunch companion at the sushi bar that Wednesday.

The next morning, further medical reports arrived. The doctors had run an array of tests. One was for radiation exposure: it came back negative. Instead they found something more complex — and more surprising. Some kind of exotic chemistry, some strange poison, was in his blood. Immediate attempts to identify it left them baffled.

Author: Will Storr
Source: Matter
Published: Nov 28, 2013
Length: 36 minutes (9,072 words)

What Happened to Tech Jobs in Silicon Valley

“Google is visually impressive, but this frenzy of energy and hipness hasn’t generated large numbers of jobs, much less what we think of as middle-class jobs, the kinds of unglamorous but solid employment that generates annual household incomes between $44,000 and $155,000. The state of California (according to a 2011 study by the Public Policy Institute of California) could boast in 1980 that some 60 percent of its families were middle-income as measured in today’s dollars, but by 2010 only 48 percent of California families fell into that category, and the income gap between the state’s highest and lowest earners had doubled. In Silicon Valley there has actually been a net job loss in tech-related industries over the past decade. According to figures collected by Joel Kotkin, the dotcom crash wiped out 70,000 jobs in the valley in a little over a single year, and since then the tech industry has added only 30,000 new ones, leaving the bay region with a net 40,000 fewer jobs than existed in 2001.”

Charlotte Allen, in the Weekly Standard, on income inequality in the Bay Area, and signs of what’s happening to the middle class in the United States. Read more on tech in the Longreads Archive.

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Photo: ucdaviscoe, Flickr

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Stories that Magazine Editors Are Afraid Of

“It’s probably worth saying that there are editors at all sorts of magazines (myself included) who know they should never assign a story on a certain kind of subject—a Phish tour, say, or Mitt Romney, or what’s up with Cuba?—and yet they do so despite their better judgment. A writer tells you he or she is interested, you convince yourself that it’s all going to work out despite the pre-digested conclusions or the limited access or the fact that what you’re talking about is a generality rather than a specific idea. And it never, ever does, unless something remarkable and unexpected happens in the reporting or the writer brings some stunning originality to it. And these things work in a kind of horrible tandem—the lack of interesting subject matter inspiring the writer to scat out thicker and thicker layers of word jazz—resulting in so many bad magazine stories.”

Joel Lovell (formerly GQ, now The New York Times Magazine), in conversation with John Jeremiah Sullivan on how they worked together—specifically on this story. Read more from GQ in the Longreads Archive.

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Photo: thomasleuthard, Flickr

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How Scientists Are Using Fruit Flies to Find Alternative Cancer Treatments

“His name was Ross Cagan. He did not work for Schadt; he worked as a professor at Sinai. But they met every week, and after Schadt called on October 1 to tell Cagan about Stephanie Lee, he listened to Cagan’s idea for her. A month earlier, Cagan had started doing something that he said ‘had never been done before.’ He started creating ‘personalized flies’ for cancer patients. He took the mutations that scientists like Schadt had revealed and loaded them into flies, essentially giving the flies the same cancer that the patient had. Then he treated them. ‘Why a fly? You can do this in a fly. You can capture the complexities of the tumor.’

“A day after Cagan spoke with Schadt, Stephanie became the fifth person in the world to have a fly built in her image—or, rather, in the image of her cancer. In an ideal world, Cagan would have created as complex a creature as possible, burdening the fly with at least ten mutations. He gave Stephanie’s fly three, because ‘Stephanie is on the shorter course. We’re making the fly as complex as possible given her time.’ By October 11, however, Cagan already had ‘one possible drug suggestion for her’—or one possible combination of drugs, since he always tests at least two at a time. ‘In this center, the FDA will not allow us to put a novel drug in patient. To get a novel drug into a patient, we have to do a novel combination of [known] drugs. We have to use novel drug combinations that people have never seen before'”

– In Esquire, Mark Warren and Tom Junod tell the story of an Iraq War widow named Stephanie Lee who was diagnosed with terminal colon cancer, and how scientists at Mount Sinai are using her genetic data to find personalized treatments for her. Read more stories about fighting cancer.

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Photo: John Tann

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A 1,000-Year History of Laughing Games

“Laughter games, though seemingly unconventional, are not new. The Canadian Inuit have been practicing them for thousands of years. Their version is called Iglagunerk and consists of two individuals facing each other, grasping hands, and—at an agreed upon signal—beginning to laugh. The one who laughs the hardest and longest is declared the winner. Nerenberg says this, and an observation that mixed martial arts fighters often laugh during their pre-fight stare down, formed the genesis of competitive laughter. But there’s also some science behind it.”

– At Pacific Standard, Sam Riches goes to the Canadian competitive laughing championship in Toronto, where “laughletes” compete in laughter challenges like “the Diabolical Laugh” and “the Alabama Knee-Slapper” to win a title and trophy. Read more about competitions.

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Photo: Stewart Black

One Thing We'll Miss About Blockbuster

“The death of Blockbuster is the death of the employee favorite shelf. With Netflix and Hulu and Amazon having rightfully eclipsed video rental stores, the recommendation is now largely accomplished by algorithm. If you didn’t agree with my taste in movies, there was definitely another employee you would agree with. There was someone for every customer to talk about movies with working at every video store in the country. Now we have Neflix’s ‘Top Picks for Erik,’ nearly always insultingly off-base. There’s some human involvement behind the scenes for these streaming services—at Netflix, 40 freelancers tag metadata, making associations between movies and TV shows that no computer can yet make on its own—but that person is so buried behind the work of 800 engineers that he or she doesn’t exist for modern consumers in any meaningful sense.”

Erik Bryan, in the Awl, on his early years working for Blockbuster and the death of the video-store chain (via Maria Bustillos). Read more from The Awl.

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Photo: dno1967b, Flickr

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The Secret to a Successful Career, According to Cyndi Lauper's Makeup Artist

“It was for a new singer and it was for an Italian TV show called Popcorn, which was a music show. So they rented a flat and I walk in the next morning, and there’s this huge king-sized bed. And there’s Lou Albano and these other wrestlers and Cyndi and her mom. And I’m like, ‘Ugh, Jesus, what am I doing here? Who are these people?’ And then they start playing the song, ‘Girls Just Wanna Have Fun,’ and I’m like, ‘Ohhh, that’s… it.’ I just knew it was gonna be a hit. So I made myself indispensable. I mean, doting, putting her shoes on, everything. I really laid it on thick because I really wanted it. Two months before that, while I was still in school, I was watching MTV one night — which was just a few years old — and I thought that’s what I really want to do. I was telling people — trying to get the word out, put out some feelers — and they were like ‘That’s impossible, it takes years.’ And I wouldn’t hear it. People that I knew knew other artists who were just getting labels or trying to get labels, so I just thought I’d start there. But then I got the call from Cyndi.”

Patrick Lucas, on recognizing an opportunity and hanging onto it, in a conversation with Jane Marie in The Hairpin. Read more on music from the Longreads Archive.

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The Winners and Losers in the Book Business

“It begins to dawn on me that if a company publishes a hundred original hardcover books a year, it publishes about two per week, on average. And given the limitations on budgets, personnel, and time, many of those books will receive a kind of ‘basic’ publication. Every list—spring, summer, and fall—has its lead titles. Then there are three or four hopefuls trailing along just behind the books that the publisher is investing most heavily in. Then comes a field of also-rans, hoping for the surge of energy provided by an ecstatic front-page review in The New York Times Book Review or by being selected for Oprah’s Book Club. Approximately four out of every five books published lose money. Or five out of six, or six out of seven. Estimates vary, depending on how gloomy the CFO is the day you ask him and what kinds of shell games are being played in Accounting.”

Daniel Menaker, in a New York magazine excerpt from his memoir, My Mistake, on life in publishing.

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Photo: gpoo, Flickr